Wood and Stone (3 page)

Mr. Taxater was a Catholic and also a philosopher; these two peculiarities affording the solution to what otherwise would have been an insoluble psychic riddle. Even as it was, Mr. Taxater’s mind was of so subtle and complicated an order, that he was at once the attraction and the despair of all the
religious
thinkers of that epoch. For it must be understood that though quietly resident under the shadow of Nevilton Mount, the least essay from Mr. Taxater’s pen was eagerly perused by persons
interested
in religious controversy in all the countries of Europe.

He wrote for philosophical journals in London, Paris, Rome and New York; and there often
appeared
at The Gables most surprising visitors from Germany and Italy and Spain.

He had a powerful following among the more subtle-minded of the Catholics of England; and was highly respected by important personages in the social, as well as the literary circles, of Catholic society.

The profundity of his mind may be gauged from the fact that he was able to steer his way
successfully
through the perilous reefs of “modernistic” discussion, without either committing himself to
heretical
doctrine or being accused of reactionary
ultramontanism
.

Mr. Taxater’s written works were, however, but a trifling portion of his personality. His intellectual
interests were as rich and varied as those of some great humanist of the Italian Renaissance, and his personal habits were as involved and original as his thoughts were complicated and deep.

He was perpetually engaged in converting the philosopher in him to Catholicism, and the Catholic in him to philosophy—yet he never permitted either of these obsessions to interfere with his enjoyment of life.

Luke Andersen, who was perhaps of all the
inhabitants
of Nevilton most conscious of the drama played around him, used to maintain that it was impossible to tell in the last resort whether Mr. Taxater’s place was with the adherents of Christ or with the adherents of Anti-Christ. Like his
prototype
, the evasive Erasmus, he seemed able to be on both sides at the same time.

Perhaps it was a secret consciousness of the
singular
position of Nevilton, planted, as it were, between two streams of opposing legend, that originally led Mr. Taxater to take up his abode in so secluded a spot.

It is impossible to tell. In this as in all other transactions of his life he combined an unworldly simplicity with a Machiavellian astuteness. If the Day of Judgment revealed him as being on the side of the angels, it might also reveal him as having exercised, in the microcosmic Nevilton drama, as well as in his wider sphere, one of the most subtle influences against the Powers of Darkness that those Powers ever encountered in their invisible activity.

At the moment when the present narrative takes up the woven threads of these various persons’ lives
there seemed every prospect that in external nature at least there was going to be an auspicious and halcyon season. June had opened with abnormal pleasantness. Exquisite odours were in the air, wafted from woods and fields and gardens. White dust, alternating with tender spots of coolness where the shadows of trees fell, lent the roads in the vicinity that leisured gala-day expectancy which one notes in the roads of France and Spain, but which is so rare in England.

It seemed almost as though the damp sub-soil of the place had relaxed its malign influence; as though the yellow clay in the churchyard had ceased its calling for victims; and as though the brooding monster in the sunset, from which every day half the men of the village returned with their spades and picks, had put aside, as irrelevant to a new and kindlier epoch, its ancient hostility to the Christian dwellers in that quiet valley.

T
HE depths of Mr. Romer’s mind, as he paced up and down the Leonian pavement under the east front of his house on one of the early days of this propitious June, were seething with predatory projects. The last of the independent quarries on the Hill had just fallen into his hands after a legal process of more than usual chicanery, conducted in person by the invaluable Mr. Lickwit.

He was now occupied in pushing through
Parliament
a bill for the reduction of railway freight charges, so that the expense of carrying his stone to its various destinations might be materially reduced. But it was not only of financial power that he thought as the smell of the roses from the sun-baked walls floated in upon him across the garden.

The man’s commercial preoccupations had not by any means, as so often happens, led to the atrophy of his more personal instincts.

His erotic appetite, for instance, remained as insatiable as ever. Age did not dull, nor finance wither, that primordial craving. The aphrodisiac
instincts
in Mortimer Romer were, however, much less simple than might be supposed.

In this hyper-sensual region he had more claim to artistic subtlety than his enemies realized. He rarely allowed himself the direct expansion of frank
and downright lasciviousness. His little pleasures were indirect, elaborate, far-fetched.

He afforded really the interesting spectacle of one whose mind was normal, energetic, dynamic; but whose senses were slow, complicated, fastidious. He was a formidable forward-marching machine, with a heart of elaborate perversity. He was a
thick-skinned
philistine with the sensuality of a sybarite.

I do not mean to imply that there was any lack of rapacity in the senses of Mr. Romer. His senses were indeed unfathomable in their devouring depths. But they were liable to fantastic caprices. They were not the simple animal senses of a Gothic
barbarian
. They assumed imperial contortions.

The main eccentricity of the erotic tendencies of this remarkable man lay in the elaborate pleasure he derived from his sense of power. The actual lure of the flesh had little attraction for him. What pleased him was a slow tightening of his grip upon people—upon their wills, their freedom, their personality.

Any impression a person might make upon Mr. Romer’s senses was at once transformed into a desire to have that person absolutely at his mercy. The thought that he held such a one reduced to complete spiritual helplessness alone satisfied him.

The first time he had encountered Lacrima Traffio he had been struck by her appealing eyes, her fragile figure, her frightened gestures. Deep in his perverted heart he had desired her; but his desire, under the psychic law I have endeavoured to explain, quickly resolved itself into a resolution to take possession of her, not as his mistress, but as his slave.

Nor did the subtle elaboration of his perversity
stop there. It were easy and superficial to dominate in his own person so helpless a dependent. What was less easy was to reduce her to submission to the despotic caprices of his daughter, a girl only a few years older than Lacrima herself.

The enjoyment of a sense of vicarious power was a satisfaction curiously provocative to his predatory craving. Nor did subtlety of the situation stop at that point. It was not only necessary that the girl who attracted him should be at his daughter’s mercy; it was necessary that his daughter should not be unconscious of the role she herself played. It was necessary that they should be in a sense confederates in this game of cat-and-mouse.

As Mr. Homer paced the terrace of his imposing mansion a yet profounder triumph presented itself in the recesses of his imperial nature.

He had lately introduced into his “entourage” a certain brother-in-law of his, the widower of his sister, a man named John Goring. This individual was of a much simpler, grosser type than the
recondite
quarry-owner. He was, indeed, no more than a narrow-minded, insolent, avaricious animal. He lacked even the superficial gentility of his formidable relation. Nor had his concentrated but unintelligent avarice brought him, so far, any great wealth. He still remained, in spite of Romer’s help, what he had been born, an English farmer of unpropitiating manners and supernal greed.

The Promoter of Companies was, however, not unaware, any more than was Augustus Caesar, of the advantage accruing to a despot from the
possession
of devoted, if unattractive, tools; and
contemptuously 
risking the shock to his social prestige of such an apparition in the neighborhood, he had secured Mr. Goring as a permanent tenant of the largest farm on his estate. This was no other than the Priory Farm, with its gentle monastic memories. What the last Prior of Nevilton would have thought could he have left his grave under St. Catherine’s altar and reappeared among his dovecotes it is distressing to surmise. He would doubtless have drawn from the sight of John Goring a profoundly edifying moral as to the results of royal
interference
with Christ’s Holy Church. Nor is it likely that an encounter with Mr. Romer himself would have caused less astonishment to his mediæval spirit. He would, indeed, have recognized that what is now called Progress is no mere scientific phrase; but a most devastating reality. He would have found that Nevilton had “progressed” very far. He would have believed that the queer stone-devils that his monks had carved, half emerging from the eaves of the church-roof, had got quite loose and gone abroad among men. Had he probed, in the manner of clairvoyant saints, the troubled recesses of Mr. Romer’s mind as that gentleman inhaled the sweet noon air, he would have cried aloud his indignation and made the sign of the cross as if over a mortuary of spiritual decomposition.

For as the mid-day sun of that hot June morning culminated, and the clear hard shadows fell, sharp and thin, upon the orange-tinted pavement, it
entered
Mr. Romer’s head that he might make a more personal use of his farmer-brother than had until now been possible.

With this idea in his brain he entered the house and sought his wife in her accustomed place at the corner of the large reception-hall. He sat down forthright by the side of her mahogany table and lit a cigar. As Mr. Romer was the species of male animal that might be written down in the
guidebook
of some Martian visitor as “the cigar-smoking variety” his wife would have taken her place among “the sedentary knitting ones.”

She was a large, fair, plump, woman, as smooth and pallid as her husband was grizzled and ruddy. Her obsequious deference to her lord’s views was only surpassed by her lethargic animal indolence. She was like a great, tame, overgrown, white-skinned Puma. Her eyes had the greenish tint of feline eyes, and something of their daylight contraction. Her use of spectacles did not modify this tendency, but rather increased it; for the effect of the round glass orbs pushed up upon her forehead was to enhance the malicious gleam of the little narrow-lidded slits that peered out beneath them.

It may be imagined with what weary and ironical detachment the solemn historic portraits of the ancient Seldoms—for the pictures and furniture had been sold with the house—looked out from their gilded frames upon these ambiguous intruders. But neither husband nor wife felt the least touch of “compunctious visiting” as they made themselves at ease under that immense contempt.

“I have been thinking,” said Mr. Romer, puffing a thick cloud of defiant smoke into the air, so that it went sailing up to the very feet of a delicate Reynolds portrait; “I have been thinking that I am
really quite unjustified in going on with that
allowance
to Quincunx. He ought to realize that he has completely exhausted the money your aunt left him. He ought to face the situation, instead of quietly accepting our gift as if it were his right. And they tell me he does not even keep a civil tongue in his head. Lickwit was only complaining the other day about his tampering with our workmen. He has been going about for some time with those damned Andersen fellows, and no doubt encouraging them in their confounded impertinence.

I don’t like the man, my dear;—that is the plain truth. I have never liked him; and he has certainly never even attempted to conceal his dislike of me.

“He is very polite to your face, Mortimer,”
murmured
the lady.

“Exactly,” Mr. Romer rejoined, “to my face he is more than polite. He is obsequious; he is cringing. But behind my back—damn him!—the rascal is a rattlesnake.”

“Well, dear, no doubt it has all worked out for the best,”; purred the plump woman, softly counting the threads of her knitting. “You were in need of Aunt’s money at the time—in great need of it.”

“I know I was,” replied the Promoter of
Companies
, “I know I was; and he knows I was. That is why I have been giving him six per cent on what he lent me. But the fellow has had more than that. He has had more by this time than the whole original sum; and I tell you, Susan, it’s got to end;—its got to end here, now, and forever!”

Mr. Romer’s cigar-smoke had now floated up above the feet of the Reynolds Portrait and was invading
its gentle and melancholy face. It was a portrait of a young girl in the court-dress of the time, but with such pathetic nun-like features that it was clear that little Vennie was not the only one of her race to have grown weary of this rough world.

“It is a providential thing, dear,” whispered the knitting female, “that there were no horrid
documents
drawn up about that money. Maurice cannot impose upon us in that way.”

“He is doing worse,” answered her husband. “He is imposing upon us on the strength of a disgusting sort of sickly sentiment. He has had all his money back and more; and he knows he has. But he wants to go on living on my money while he abuses me on every occasion. Do you know, he even preaches in that confounded social meeting? I shall have that affair put a stop to, one of these days. It is only an excuse for spreading dissatisfaction in the village. Lickwit has complained to me about it more than once. He says that Socialistic scoundrel Wone is simply using the meeting to canvass for his election. You know he is going to stand, in place of Sir Herbert Ratcliffe? What the Liberal Party is doing I cannot conceive—pandering to these slimy
windbags
! And your blessed relation backs him up. The thing is monstrous, outrageous! Here am I, allowing this fellow a hundred a year to live in idleness; and he is plotting against me at my very doorstep.”

“Perhaps he does not know that the Conservative member is going to retire in your favour,” insinuated the lady.

Know? Of course he knows! All the village knows. All the country knows. You can never hide
things of that kind. He knows, and he is
deliberately
working against me.

“It would be nice if he could get a place as a clerk,” suggested Mr. Quincunx’s relative, pensively. “It certainly does not seem fair that you, who work so hard for the money you make, should support him in complete idleness.”

Mr. Romer looked at her thoughtfully, knocking the ashes from his cigar. “I believe you have hit it there, my dear,” he said. Then he smiled in a manner peculiarly malignant. “Yes, it would be very nice if he could get a place as a clerk—a place where he would have plenty of simple office work—a place where he would be kept to his desk, and not allowed to roam the country corrupting honest
workmen
. Yes, you are quite right, Susan; a clerk’s place is what this Quincunx wants. And, by Heaven, what he shall have! I’ll bring the affair to a head at once. I’ll put it to him that your aunt’s money is at an end, and that I have already paid him back in full all that he lent me. I’ll put it to him that he is now in my debt. In fact, that he is now entirely dependent on me to the tune of a hundred a year. And I’ll explain to him that he must either go out into the world and shift for himself, as better men than he have had to do, or enter Lickwit’s office, either in Yeoborough or on the Hill.”

“He will enter the office, Mortimer,” murmured the lady; “he will enter the office. Maurice is not the man to emigrate, or do anything of that kind. Besides he has a reason”—here her voice became so extremely mellifluous that it might almost be said to have liquefied—“to stay in Nevilton.”

“What’s this?” cried Romer, getting up and
throwing
his cigar out of the window. “You don’t mean to tell me—eh?—that this scarecrow is in love with Gladys?”

The lady purred softly and replaced her spectacles. “Oh dear no! What an idea! Oh certainly, certainly not! But Gladys, you know, is not the only girl in Nevilton.”

“Who the devil is it then? Not Vennie Seldom, surely?”

“Look nearer, Mortimer, look nearer”; murmured the lady with sibilant sweetness.

“Not Lacrima! You don’t mean to say—”

“Why, dear, you needn’t be so surprised. You look more angry than if it had been Gladys herself. Yes, of course it is Lacrima. Hadn’t you observed it? But you dear men are so stupid, aren’t you, in these things?”

Mrs. Romer rubbed one white hand over the other; and beamed upon her husband through her spectacles.

Mr. Romer frowned. “But the Traffio girl is so, so—you know what I mean.”

“So quiet and unimpressionable. Ah! my dear, it is just these quiet girls who are the very ones to be enjoying themselves on the sly.”

“How far has this thing gone, Susan?”

“Oh you needn’t get excited, Mortimer. It has not really ‘gone’ anywhere. It has hardly begun. In fact I have not the least authority for saying that she cares for him at all. I think she does a little, though. I
think
she does. But one never can tell. I can, however, give you my word that he cares for
her. And that is what we were talking about, weren’t we?”

“I shall pack him off to my office in London,” said Mr. Romer.

“He wouldn’t go, my dear. I tell you he wouldn’t go.”

“But he can’t live on nothing.”

“He can. He will. Sooner than leave Nevilton Maurice would eat grass. He would become
lay-reader
or something. He would sponge on Mrs. Seldom.”