Wood and Stone (54 page)

On the side of Claudy's Leap, opposite from Cæsar's Quarry, was a second pit, of even deeper descent than the other, but of much smaller expanse. This second quarry, also disused for several generations, remained so far nameless, destiny having, it might seem,
withheld
the baptismal honour, until the place had earned a right to it by becoming the scene of some tragic, or otherwise noteworthy, event.

Gladys and Lacrima approached Cæsar's Quarry
from the western side, from whose slope a little winding path—the only entrance or exit attainable—led down into its shadowy depths. The Italian glanced with a certain degree of apprehension into the gulf beneath her, but Gladys seemed to take the thing so much for granted, and appeared so perfectly at her ease, that she was ashamed to confess her tremors. The elder girl, indeed, continued chatting cheerfully to her companion about indifferent matters, and as she clambered down the little path in front of her, she turned once or twice, in her fluent
discourse
, to make sure that Lacrima was following. The two cousins stood for awhile in silence, side by side, when they reached the bottom.

“How nice and cool it is!” cried Gladys, after a pause. “I was getting scorched up there! Let's sit down a little, shall we,—before we start back? I love these old quarries.”

They sat down, accordingly, upon a heap of stones, and Gladys serenely continued her chatter, glancing up, however, now and again, to the frowning ridges of the precipices above them.

They had not waited long in this way, when the quarry-owner's daughter gave a perceptible start, and raised her hand quickly to her lips.

Her observant eye had caught sight of the figure of Mr. John Goring peering down upon them from the opposite ridge. Had Lacrima observed this movement and lifted her eyes too, she would have received a most invaluable warning, but the Powers whoever they may have been, who governed the sequence of events upon Leo's Hill, impelled her to keep her head lowered, and her interest concentrated
upon a tuft of curiously feathered moss. Gladys remained motionless for several moments, while the figure on the opposite side vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Then she slowly rose.

“Oh, how silly I am,” she cried; “I've dropped that bunch of marjoram. Stop a minute, dear. Don't move! I'll just run up and get it. It was in the path. I know exactly where!”

“I'll come with you if you like,” said Lacrima listlessly, “then you won't have to come back. Or why not leave it for a moment?”

“It's on the path, I tell you!” cried her cousin, already some way up the slope; “I'm scared of
someone
taking it. Marjoram isn't common about here. Oh no! Stay where you are. I'll be back in a second.”

The Italian relapsed into her former dreamy
unconcern
. She listlessly began stripping the leaves from a spray of wormwood which grew by her side. The place where she sat was in deep shadow, though upon the summit of the opposite ridge the sun lay hot. Her thoughts hovered about her friend in Dead Man's Lane. She had vaguely hoped to get a glimpse of him this afternoon, but the absence of Dangelis had interfered with this.

She began building fantastic castles in the air, trying to call up the image of a rejuvenated Mr. Quincunx, freed from all cares and worries, living the placid epicurean life his heart craved. Would he, she wondered, recognize then, what her sacrifice meant? Or would he remain still obsessed by this or the other cynical fantasy, as far from the real truth of things as a madman's dream? She smiled
gently to herself as she thought of her friend's peculiarities. Her love for him, as she felt it now, across a quivering gulf of misty space, was a thing as humorously tolerant and tender as it might have been had they been man and wife of many years' standing. In these things Lacrima's Latin blood gave her a certain maturity of feeling, and emphasized the maternal element in her attachment.

She contemplated dreamily the smooth bare walls of the cavernous arena in which she sat. Their coolness and dampness was not unpleasant after the heat of the upper air, but there was something sepulchral about them, something that gave the girl the queer impression of a colossal tomb—a tomb whose scattered bones might even now be lying, washed by centuries of rain, under the rank weeds of these heaps of rubble.

She heard the sound of someone descending the path behind her but, taking for granted that it was her cousin, she did not turn her head. It was only when the steps were quite close that she recognized that they were too heavy to be those of a girl.

Then she leapt to her feet, and swung round,—to find herself confronted by the sturdy figure of Mr. John Goring. She gave a wild cry of panic and fled blindly across the smooth floor of the great quarry. Mr. Goring followed her at his leisure.

The girl's terror was so great, that, hardly conscious of what she did, she ran desperately towards the
remotest
corner of the excavation, where some ancient blasting-process had torn a narrow crevice out of the solid rock. This direction of her flight made the farmer's pursuit of her a fatally easy undertaking,
for the great smooth walls closed in, at a sharp angle, at that point, and the crevice, where the two walls met, only sank a few feet into the rock.

Mr. Goring, observing the complete hopelessness of the girl's mad attempt to escape him, proceeded to advance towards her as calmly and leisurely as if she had been some hare or rabbit he had just shot. The fact that Lacrima had chosen this particular cul-de-sac, on the eastern side of the quarry, was a most felicitous accident for Gladys, for it enabled her to watch the event with as much ease as if she had been a Drusilla or a Livia, seated in the Roman amphitheatre. The fair-haired girl crept to the extreme brink of the steep descent and there, lying prone on the thyme-scented grass, her chin propped upon her hands, she followed with absorbed interest the farmer's movements as he approached his
recalcitrant
fiancée.

The terrified girl soon found out the treachery of the panic-instinct which had led her into this trap. Had she remained in the open, it is quite possible that by a little manœuvring she could have escaped; but now her only exit was blocked by her advancing pursuer.

Turning to face him, and leaning back against the massive wall of stone, she stretched out her arms on either side of her, seizing convulsively in her fingers some tufts of knot-grass which grew on the surface of the rock. Here, with panting bosom and pallid cheeks, she awaited his approach. Her tense figure and terror-stricken gaze only needed the imprisoning fetters to have made of her an exact modern image of the unfortunate Andromeda. She neither moved
nor uttered the least cry, as Mr. Goring drew near her.

At that moment a wild and unearthly shout
reverberated
through the quarry. The sound of it—caught up by repeated echoes—went rolling away across Leo's Hill, frightening the sheep and startling the
cider-drinkers
in the lonely inn. Gladys leapt to her feet, ran round to where the path descended, and began hastily scrambling down. Mr. Goring retreated
hurriedly
into the centre of the arena, and with his hand shading his eyes gazed up at the intruder.

It was no light-footed Perseus, who on behalf of this forlorn child of classic shores, appeared as if from the sky. It was, indeed, only the excited figure of James Andersen that Mr. Goring's gaze, and Lacrima's bewildered glance, encountered simultaneously. The stone-carver seemed to be possessed by a legion of devils. His first thundering shout was followed by several others, each more terrifying than the last, and Gladys, rushing past the astonished farmer, seized Lacrima by the arm.

“Come!” she cried. “Uncle was a brute to frighten you. But, for heaven's sake, let's get out of this, before that madman collects a crowd! They'll all be down here from the inn in another moment. Quick, dear, quick! Our only chance is to get away now.”

Lacrima permitted her cousin to hurry her across the quarry and up the path. As they neared the summit of the slope the Italian turned and looked back. Mr. Goring was still standing where they had left him, gazing with petrified interest at the wild gestures of the man above him.

Andersen seemed beside himself. He kept
frantically
waving his arms, and seemed engaged in some incoherent defiance of the invisible Powers of the air. Lacrima, as she looked at him, became convinced that he was out of his mind. She could not even be quite clear if he recognized her. She was certain that it was not against her assailant that his wild cries and defiances-were hurled. It did not appear that he was even aware of the presence of the farmer. Whether or not he had seen her and known her when he uttered his first cry, she could not tell. It was certainly against no earthly enemies that the man was struggling now.

Vennie Seldom might have hazarded the
superstitious
suggestion that his fit was not madness at all but a sudden illumination, vouchsafed to his long silence, of the real conditions of the airy warfare that is being constantly waged around us. At that
moment
, Vennie might have said, James Andersen was the only perfectly sane person among them, for to his eyes alone, the real nature of that heathen place and its dark hosts was laid manifestly bare. The man, according to this strange view, was wrestling to the death, in his supreme hour, against the Forces that had not only darkened his own days and those of Lacrima, but had made the end of his mother's life so tragic and miserable.

Gladys dragged Lacrima away as soon as they reached the top of the ascent but the Pariah had time to mark the last desperate gesture of her
deliverer
before he vanished from her sight over the ridge.

Mr. Goring overtook them before they had gone
far, and walked on with them, talking to Gladys about Andersen's evident insanity.

“It's no good my trying to do anything,” he
remarked
. “But I'll send Bert round for Luke as soon as I get home. Luke'll bring him to his senses. They say he's been taken like this before, and has come round. He hears voices, you know, and fancies things.”

They walked in silence along the high upland road that leads from the principal quarries of the Hill to the Wild Pine hamlet and Nevil's Gully. When they reached the latter place, the two girls went on, down Root-Thatch Lane, and Mr, Goring took the
fieldpath
to the Priory.

Before they separated, the farmer turned to his future bride, who had been careful to keep Gladys between herself and him, and addressed her in the most gentle voice he knew how to assume.

“Don't be angry with me, lass,” he said. “I was only teasing, just now. 'Twas a poor jest maybe, and ye've cause to look glowering. But when we two be man and wife ye'll find I'm a sight better to live with than many a fair-spoken one. These be queer times, and like enough I seem a queer
fellow
, but things'll settle themselves. You take my word for it!”

Lacrima could only murmur a faint assent in reply to these words, but as she entered with Gladys the shadow of the tunnel-like lane, she could not help thinking that her repulsion to this man, dreadful though it was, was nothing in comparison with the fear and loathing with which she regarded Mr. Romer. Contrasted with his sinister relative, Mr.
John Goring was, after all, no more than a rough simpleton.

Meanwhile, on Leo's Hill, an event of tragic
significance
had occurred. It will be remembered that the last Lacrima had seen of James Andersen was the wild final gesticulation he made,—a sort of mad appeal to the Heavens against the assault of invisible enemies,—before he vanished from sight on the further side of Claudy's Leap. This vanishing just, at that point, meant no more to Lacrima than that he had probably taken a lower path, but had Gladys or Mr. Goring witnessed it,—or any other person who knew the topography of the place,—a much more startling conclusion would have been inevitable. Nor would such a conclusion have been incorrect.

The unfortunate man, forgetting, in his excitement, the existence of the other quarry, the nameless one; forgetting in fact that Claudy's Leap was a razor's edge between two precipices, had stepped heedlessly backwards, after his final appeal to Heaven, and fallen, without a cry, straight into the gulf.

The height of his fall would, in any case, have probably killed him, but as it was “he dashed his head,” in the language of the Bible, “against a stone”; and in less than a second after his last cry, his soul, to use the expression of a more pagan scripture, “was driven, murmuring, into the Shades.”

It fell to the lot, therefore, not of Luke, who did not return from Weymouth till late that evening, but of a motley band of holiday-makers from the hill-top Inn, to discover the madman's fate.
Arriving
at the spot almost immediately after the girls' departure, these honest revellers—strangers to the
locality—had quickly found the explanation of the unearthly cries they had heard.

The eve of the baptism of Mr. Romer's daughter was celebrated, therefore, by the baptism of the nameless quarry. Henceforth, in the neighbourhood of Nevilton, the place was never known by any other appellation than that of “Jimmy's Drop”; and by that name any future visitors, curious to observe the site of so singular an occurrence, will have to enquire for it, as they drink their pint of cider in the Half-Moon Tavern.

L
UKE ANDERSEN’S trip to Weymouth proved most charming and eventful. He had
scarcely-emerged
from the crowded station, with its row of antique omnibuses and its lethargic phalanx of expectant out-porters and bath-chair men,—each one of whom was a crusted epitome of ingrained quaintness,—when he caught sight of Phyllis Santon and Annie Bristow strolling laughingly towards the sea-front. They must have walked to Yeoborough and entered the train there, for he had seen nothing of them at Nevilton Station.

The vivacious Polly, a lively little curly-haired child, of some seventeen summers, was far too happy and thrilled by the adventure of the excursion and the holiday air of the sea-side, to indulge in any
jealous
fits. She was the first of the two, indeed, to greet the elder girls, both of them quite well known to her, running rapidly after them, in her white
stiffly-starched
print frock, and hailing them with a shout of joyous recognition.

The girls turned quickly and they all three awaited, in perfect good temper, the stone-carver’s deliberate approach. Never had the spirits of this latter been higher, or his surroundings more congenial to his mood.

Anxious not to lose any single one of the exquisite sounds, sights, smells, and intimations, which came
pouring in upon him, as he leisurely drifted out upon the sunny street, he let his little companion run after is two friends as fast as she wished, and watched with serene satisfaction the airy flight of her light figure, with the deep blue patch of sea-line at the end of the street as its welcome background.

The smell of sea-weed, the sound of the waves on the beach, the cries of the fish-mongers, and the coming and going of the whole heterogeneous crowd, filled Luke’s senses with the same familiar thrill of indescribable pleasure as he had known, on such an occasion, from his earliest childhood. The gayly piled fruit heaped up on the open stalls, the little tobacco-shops with their windows full of half-
sentimental
half-vulgar picture-cards, the weather-worn fronts of the numerous public-houses, the
wood-work
of whose hospitable doors always seemed to him endowed with a peculiar mellowness of their own,—all these things, as they struck his attentive senses, revived the most deeply-felt stirrings of old
associations
.

Especially did he love the sun-bathed atmosphere, so languid with holiday ease, which seemed to float in and out of the open lodging-house entrances, where hung those sun-dried sea-weeds and wooden spades and buckets, which ever-fresh installments of bare-legged children carried off and replaced. Luke always maintained that of all mortal odours he loved best the indescribable smell of the hall-way of a
sea-side
lodging-house, where the very oil-cloth on the floor, and the dead bull-rushes in the corner, seemed impregnanted with long seasons of salt-burdened
sun-filled
air.

The fish-shops, the green-grocer’s shops, the
secondhand
book-shops, and most of all, those delicious repositories of sea-treasures—foreign importations all glittering with mother-of-pearl, dried sea-horses,
sea-sponges
, sea-coral, and wonderful little boxes all pasted over with shimmering shells—filled him with a delight as vivid and new as when he had first encountered them in remote infancy.

This first drifting down to the sea’s edge, after emerging from the train, always seemed to Luke the very supremacy of human happiness. The bare legs of the children, little and big, who ran laughing or crying past him and the tangled curls of the elder damsels, tossed so coquettishly back from their sun-burnt faces, the general feeling of irresponsibility in the air, the tang of adventure in it all, of the
unexpected
, the chance-born, always wrapped him about in an epicurean dream of pleasure.

That monotonous splash of the waves against the pebbles,—how he associated it with endless exquisite flirtations,—flirtations conducted with adorable
shamelessness
between the blue sky and the blue sea! The memory of these, the vague memory of enchanting forms prone or supine upon the glittering sands, with the passing and re-passing of the same plump
bathing
-woman,—he had known her since his
childhood
!—and the same donkeys with their laughing burdens, and the same sweet-sellers with their trays, almost made him cry aloud with delight, as emerging at length upon the Front, and overtaking his friends at the Jubilee Clock-Tower, he saw the curved expanse of the bay lying magically spread out before him. How well he knew it all, and how inexpressibly he loved it!

The tide was on its outward ebb when the four happy companions jumped down, hand in hand, from the esplanade to the shingle. The long dark windrow of broken shells and seaweed drew a pleasant dividing line between the dry and the wet sand. Luke always associated the stranded star-fish and jelly-fish and bits of scattered drift-wood which that windrow offered, with those other casually tossed-up treasures with which an apparently pagan-minded providence had bestrewn his way!

Once well out upon the sands, and while the girls, with little shrieks and bursts of merriment, were pushing one another into the reach of the tide, Luke turned to survey with a deep sigh of satisfaction, the general appearance of the animated scene.

The incomparable watering-place,—with its
charming
“after-glow,” as Mr. Hardy so beautifully puts it, “of Georgian gaiety,”—had never looked so fascinating as it looked this August afternoon.

The queer old-fashioned bathing-machines, one of them still actually carrying the Lion and Unicorn upon its pointed roof, glittered in the sunshine with an air of welcoming encouragement. The noble sweep of the houses behind the crescent-shaped esplanade, with the names of their terraces—Brunswick, Regent, Gloucester, Adelaide—so suggestive of the same historic epoch, gleamed with reciprocal
hospitality
; nor did the tall spire of St. John’s Church, a landmark for miles round, detract from the harmony of the picture.

On Luke’s left, as he turned once more and faced the sea, the vibrating summer air, free at present from any trace of mist, permitted a wide and lovely
view of the distant cliffs enclosing the bay. The great White Horse, traced upon the chalk hills, seemed within an hour’s walk of where he stood, and the majestic promontory of the White Nore drew the eye onward to where, at the end of the visible
coast-line
, St. Alban’s Head sank into the sea.

On Luke’s right the immediate horizon was blocked by the grassy eminence known to dwellers in
Weymouth
as “the Nothe”; but beyond this, and beyond the break-water which formed an extension of it, the huge bulk of Portland—Mr. Hardy’s Isle of the Slingers—rose massive and shadowy against the west.

As he gazed with familiar pleasure at this
unequalled
view, Luke could not help thinking to
himself
how strangely the pervading charm of scenes of this kind is enhanced by personal and literary
association
. He recalled the opening chapters of “The Well-Beloved,” that curiously characteristic
fantasy-sketch
of the great Wessex novelist; and he also recalled those amazing descriptions in Victor Hugo’s “L’Homme qui Rit,” which deal with these same localities.

Shouts of girlish laughter distracted him at last from his exquisite reverie, and flinging himself down on the hot sand he gave himself up to enjoyment.
Holding
her tight by either hand, the two elder girls, their skirts already drenched with salt-water, were dragging their struggling companion across the foamy
sea-verge
. The white surf flowed beneath their feet and their screams and laughter rang out across the bay.

Luke called to them that he was going to paddle, and implored them to do the same. He preferred
to entice them thus into the deeper water, rather than to anticipate for them a return home with ruined petticoats and wet sand-filled shoes. Seeing him leisurely engaged in removing his boots and socks and turning up his trousers, the three exuberant young people hurried back to his side and proceeded with their own preparations.

Soon, all four of them, laughing and splashing one another with water, were blissfully wading along the shore, interspersing their playful teasing with
alternate
complimentary and disparaging remarks, relative to the various bathers whose isolation they
invaded
.

Luke’s spirits rose higher and higher. No
youthful
Triton, with his attendant Nereids, could have expressed more vividly in his radiant aplomb, the elemental energy of air and sea. His ecstatic delight seemed to reach its culmination as a group of
extraordinarily
beautiful children came wading towards them, their sunny hair and pearl-bright limbs
gleaming
against the blue water.

At the supreme moment of this ecstasy, however, came a sudden pang of contrary emotion,—of dark fear and gloomy foreboding. For a sudden passing second, there rose before him,—it was now about half-past four in the afternoon,—the image of his brother, melancholy and taciturn, his heart broken by Lacrima’s trouble. And then, like a full dark tide rolling in upon him, came that ominous reaction, spoken of by the old pagan writers, and regarded by them as the shadow of the jealousy of the Immortal Gods, envious of human pleasure—the reaction to the fare of the Eumenides.

His companions remained as gay and charming as ever. Nothing could have been prettier than to watch the mixture of audacity and coyness with which they twisted their frocks round them, nothing more amusing than to note the differences of character between the three, as they betrayed their naive souls in their childish abandonment to the joy of the hour.

Both Phyllis and Annie were tall and slender and dark. But there the likeness between them ceased. Annie had red pouting lips, the lower one of which protruded a little beyond its fellow, giving her face in repose a quite deceptive look of sullenness and
petulance
. Her features were irregular and a little heavy, the beauty of her countenance residing in the shadowy coils of dusky hair which surmounted it, and in the velvet softness of her large dark eyes. For all the heaviness of her face, Annie’s expression was one of childlike innocence and purity; and when she flirted or made love, she did so with a clinging
affectionateness
and serious gravity which had much of the charm of extreme youth.

Phyllis, on the contrary, had softly outlined features of the most delicate regularity, while from her hazel eyes and laughing parted lips perpetual defiant
provocations
of alluring mischief challenged everyone she approached. Annie was the more loving of the two, Phyllis the more lively and amorous. Both of them made constant fun of their little curly-headed companion, whose direct boyish ways and whimsical speeches kept them in continual peals of merriment.

Tired at last of paddling, they all waded to the shore, and crossing the warm powdery sand, which is one of the chief attractions of the place, they sat
down on the edge of the shingle and dried their feet in the sun.

Reassuming their shoes and stockings, and
demurely
shaking down their skirts, the three girls followed the now rather silent Luke to the little
tea-house
opposite the Clock-Tower, in an upper room of which, looking out on the sea, were several pleasant window-seats furnished with convenient tables.

The fragrant tea, the daintiness of its accessories, the fresh taste of the bread and butter, not to speak of the inexhaustible spirits of his companions, soon succeeded in dispelling the stone-carver’s momentary depression.

When the meal was over, as their train was not due to leave till nearly seven, and it was now hardly five, Luke decided to convey his little party across the harbour-ferry. They strolled out of the shop into the sunshine, not before the stone-carver had bestowed so lavish a tip upon the little waitress that his companions exchanged glances of feminine dismay.

They took the road through the old town to reach the ferry, following the southern of the two parallel streets that debouch from the Front at the point where stands the old-fashioned equestrian statue of George the Third. Luke nourished in his heart a sentimental tenderness for this simple monarch, vaguely and quite erroneously associating the royal interest in the place with his own dreamy attachment to it.

When they reached the harbour they found it in a stir of excitement owing to the arrival of the
passenger
-boat from the Channel Islands, one of the red-funneled modern successors to those antique
paddle-steamers whose first excursions must have been witnessed from his Guernsey refuge by the author of the “Toilers of the Deep.” Side by side with the smartly painted ship, were numerous schooners and brigs, hailing from more northern regions, whose cargoes were being unloaded by a motley crowd of clamorous dock-hands.

Luke and his three companions turned to the left when they reached the water’s edge and strolled along between the warehouses and the wharves until they arrived at the massive bridge which crosses the harbour. Leaning upon the parapet, whose
whitish-grey
fabric indicated that the dominion of Leo’s Hill gave place here to the noble Portland Stone, they surveyed with absorbed interest the busy scene beneath them.

The dark greenish-colored water swirled rapidly seaward in the increasing ebb of the tide.
White-winged
sea-gulls kept swooping down to its surface and rising again in swift air-cutting curves, balancing their glittering bodies against the slanting sunlight. Every now and then a boat-load of excursionists would shoot out from beneath the shadow of the wharves and shipping, and cross obliquely the
swift-flowing
tide to the landing steps on the further shore.

The four friends moved to the northern parapet of the bridge, and the girls gave little cries of delight, to see, at no great distance, where the broad expanse of the back-water began to widen, a group of stately swans, rocking serenely on the shining waves. They remained for some while, trying to attract these birds by flinging into the water bits of broken cake, saved by the economic-minded Annie from the recent
repast. But these offerings only added new spoil to the plunder of the greedy sea-gulls, from whose rapid movements the more aristocratic inland
creatures
kept haughtily aloof.