Wood and Stone (18 page)

Mr. Romer, with his swarthy imperial face and powerful figure, seemed to her, as he leant against the tree, so to impress himself upon that yielding landscape, that there appeared reason enough for his complaint that he could find no antagonist worthy of his steel. In the true manner of a Pariah, who turns, with swift contempt, upon her own class, the girl was conscious of a rising tide of revolt in her heart against the incompetent weakness of her friend. What would she not give to be able, even once, to see this man outfaced and outwitted! She was
impressed
too, poor girl, as she shrank silently aside from his sarcasm, by the horrible indifference of these charming sunlit fields to the brutality of the man’s challenge. They cared nothing—nothing! It was impossible to make them care. Hundreds of years ago they had slumbered, just as dreamily, just as indifferently, as they did now. If even at this moment she were to plunge a knife into the man’s heart, so that he fell a mass of senseless clay at her feet, that impervious wood-pigeon would go on
murmuring
its monotonous ditty, just as peacefully, just as serenely! There was something really terrifying to her in this callous indifference of Nature. It was like living perpetually in close contact with a person who was deaf and dumb and blind; and who, while the most tragic events were being transacted, went on cheerfully and imperturbably humming some merry tune. It would be almost better, thought the girl, if that tree-trunk against which the quarry-owner pressed his heavy hand were really in league with him. Anything were better than this smiling
indifference
which seemed to keep on repeating in a voice
as monotonous as the pigeon’s—“Everything is permitted. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is
forbidden
. Everything is permitted.” like the silly reiterated whirring of some monstrous placid shuttle. It was strange, the rebellious inconsistent thoughts, which passed through her mind! She wondered why Hugh Clavering was thus to be waylaid and
persuaded
. Had he dared to rise in genuine opposition? No, she did not believe it. He had probably talked religion, just as Maurice talked anarchy and Wone talked socialism. It was all talk! Romer was quite right. They had no spirit in them, these English people. She thought of the fierce atheistic rebels of her own country.
They
, at any rate, understood that evil had to be resisted by action, and not by vague protestations of unctuous sentiment!

When Mr. Romer left them and returned to his seat on the terrace, the girls did not at once proceed on their way, but waited, hesitating; and amused themselves by pulling down the lower branches of a lime and trying to anticipate the sweetness of its yet unbudded fragrance.

“Let’s stroll down the drive first,” said Gladys presently, “till we are out of sight, and then we can cross the mill mead and get into the orchard that way.” They followed this design with elaborate caution, and only when quite concealed from the windows of the house, turned quickly northward and left the park for the orchards. Between the wall, of the north garden and the railway, lay some of the oldest and least frequented of these shadowy places, completely out of the ordinary paths of traffic, and only accessible by field-ways. Into the smallest and
most secluded of all these the girls wandered, gliding noiselessly between the thick hedges and heavy grass, like two frail phantoms of the upper world visiting some Elysian solitude.

Gladys laid her hand on her companion’s arm. “We had better wait here,” she said, “where we can see the whole orchard. They ought to know, by now, where to come.”

They seated themselves on the bowed trunk of an ancient apple-tree that by long decline had at last reached a horizontal position. The flowering season was practically over, though here and there a late cider-tree, growing more in shadow than the rest, still carried its delicate burden of clustered blossoms.

“How many times is it that we have met them here?” whispered the fair girl, snatching off her hat and tossing it on the grass. “This is the fifth time, isn’t it? What dear things they are! I think its much more exciting, this sort of thing,—don’t you?—than dull tennis parties with silly idiots like young Ilminster.”

The Italian nodded. “It is a good thing that James and I get on so well,” she said. “It would be awkward if we were as afraid of one another as when we first met.”

Gladys put her hand caressingly on her companion’s knee and looked into her face with a slow seductive smile.

“You are forgetting your Mr. Quincunx a little, just a little, these days, aren’t you, darling? Don’t be shy, now—or look cross. You know you are! You can’t deny it. Your boy is almost as nice as mine. He doesn’t like me, though. I can see that!
But I like
him
. I like him awfully! You’d better take care, child. If ever I get tired of my Luke—”

“James isn’t a boy,” protested Lacrima.

“Silly!” cried Gladys. “Of course he is. Who cares about age? They are all the same. I always call them boys when they attract me. I like the word. I like to say it. It makes me feel as if I were one of those girls in London. You know what I mean!”

Lacrima looked at her gravely. “I always feel as if James Andersen were much older than I,” she said.

“But your Mr. Quincunx,” repeated the fair creature, slipping her soft fingers into her friend’s hand, “your Mr. Quincunx is not quite what he was to you, before we began these adventures?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Gladys!” rejoined the Italian, freeing her hands and clasping them passionately together. “It is wicked of you to say that! You know I only talk to James so that you can do what you like. I shall always be Maurice’s friend. I shall be his friend to the last!”

Gladys laughed merrily. “That is what I wanted,” she retorted. “I wanted to make you burst out. When people burst out, they are always doubtful in their hearts. Ah, little puritan! so we are already in the position of having two sweethearts, are we?—and not knowing which of the two we really like best? That is a very pretty situation to be in. It is where we all are! I hope you enjoy it!”

Lacrima let her hands fall helplessly to her side, against the grey bark of the apple-tree. “Why do you hate Mr. Quincunx so?” she asked, looking gravely into her friend’s face.

“Why do I hate him?” said Gladys. “Oh, I really don’t know! I didn’t know I did. If I do, it’s because he’s such a weak wretched creature. He has no more spirit than a sick dog. He talks such
nonsense
too! I am glad he has to walk to Yeoborough every day and do a little work. You ought to be glad too! He could never marry if he didn’t make some money.”

“He doesn’t want to marry,” murmured Lacrima. “He only wants to be left alone.”

“A nice friend he seems to be,” cried the other, “for a girl like you! I suppose he kisses you and that sort of thing, doesn’t he? I shouldn’t like to be kissed by a silly old man like that, with a great stupid beard.”

“You mustn’t say these things to me, Gladys, you mustn’t! I won’t hear them. Mr. Quincunx isn’t an old man! He is younger than James Andersen. He is not forty yet.”

“He looks fifty, if he looks a day,” said Gladys, “and the colour of his beard is disgusting! It’s like dirty water. Fancy having a horrid thing like that pressed against your face! And I suppose he cries and slobbers over you, doesn’t he? I have seen him cry. I hate a man who cries. He cried the other night,—father told me so—when he found he had spent all his money.”

Lacrima got up and walked a few paces away. She loathed this placid golden-haired creature, at that moment, so intensely, that it was all she could do to refrain from leaping upon her and burying her teeth in her soft neck. She leant against one of the trees and pressed her head upon its grey lichen. Gladys
slipped down into a more luxurious position. She looked complacently around her. No spot could have been better adapted for a romantic encounter.

The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old
apple-trees
, each looking as if it had lingered there, full of remote memories, from an age coeval with the age of those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still clung in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic array of twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon which the foliage, meeting everywhere above their heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof of a heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, which, here and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, were different from those in the open meadows. The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of the other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and tender pallour, both colours approximating to white. The grey lichen hung down in loose festoons from the higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept, thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There could hardly be conceived a spot more suggestive of absolute and eternal security than this Hesperidean enclosure.

The very fact of the remote but constant presence of humanity there, as a vague dreamy background of immemorial tending, increased this sense. One felt that the easy invasions of grafting-time and
gathering-time
, returning perennially in their seasons, only intensified the long delicious solitudes of the intervals between, when, in rich, hushed languor, the blossoms bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That
exquisite
seductive charm, the charm of places full of
quietness, yet bordering on the edge of the days’ labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment over the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller weight.

“There they are!” cried Gladys suddenly, as the figures of the Andersen brothers made themselves visible on the further side of the orchard.

The girls advanced to meet them through the thick grass, swinging their summer-hats in their hands and bending their heads, now and then, to avoid the over-hanging boughs. The meeting between these four persons would have made a pleasant and
appropriate
subject for one of those richly-coloured
old-fashioned
prints which one sometimes observes in early Victorian parlours. Gladys grew quite pale with excitement, and her voice assumed a vibrant
tenderness
when she accosted Luke, which made Lacrima give a little start of surprise, as she shook hands with the elder brother. Had her persecutor then, got, after all, some living tissue in the place where the heart beat?

Luke’s manner had materially altered since he had submitted so urbanely to the fair girl’s insulting airs at the close of their first encounter. His way of treating her now was casual, flippant, abrupt—almost indifferent. Instead of following the pathetic
pressure of her arm and hand, which at once bade him hasten the separation of the group, he deliberately lingered, chatting amicably with Lacrima and asking her questions about Italy. It seemed that the
plausible
Luke knew quite as much about Genoa and Florence and Venice as his more taciturn brother, and all he knew he was well able to turn into effective use. He was indeed a most engaging and irresistible conversationalist; and Gladys grew paler and paler, as she watched the animation of his face and listened to his pleasant and modulated voice.

It caused sheer suffering to her fiercely impetuous nature, this long-drawn out delay. Every moment that passed diminished the time they would have together. Her nerves ached for the touch of his arms about her, and a savage desire to press her mouth to his, and satiate herself with kisses, throbbed in her every vein. Why would he not stop this irrelevant stream of talk? What did she care about the narrow streets of Genoa,—or the encrusted façade of San Marco? It had been their custom to separate immediately on meeting, and for Luke to carry her off to a charming hiding-place they had discovered. With the fierce pantherish craving of a love-scorched animal her soul cried out to be clasped close to her friend in this secluded spot, having her will of those maddening youthful lips with their proud Grecian curve! Still he must go on talking!

James and Lacrima, lending themselves, naturally and easily, to the mood of the moment, were already seated at the foot of a twisted and ancestral
apple-tree
. Soon Luke, still absorbed in his conversation with the Italian, shook off Gladys’ arm and settled
himself beside them, plucking a handful of grass, as he did so, and inhaling its fragrance with sybarite pleasure.

“St. Mark’s is the only church in the world for me,” Luke was saying. “I have pictures of it from every conceivable angle. It is quite a mania with me collecting such things. I have dozens of them; haven’t I, James?”

“Do you mean those postcards father sent home when he went over there to work?” answered the elder brother, one of whose special peculiarities was a curious pleasure in emphasizing, in the presence of the “upper classes,” the humility of his origin.

Luke laughed. “Well—yes—those—and others,” he said. “
You
haven’t the least idea what I keep in my drawer of secret treasures; you know you haven’t! I’ve got some lovely letters there among other things. Letters that I wouldn’t let anyone see for the world!” He glanced smilingly at Gladys, who was pacing up and down in front of them, like a beautiful tigress.

“Look here, my friends,” she said. “The time is slipping away frightfully. We are not going to sit here all the while, are we, talking nonsense, like people at a garden party?”

“It’s so lovely here,” said Luke with a slow smile. “I really don’t think that your favourite corner is so much nicer. I am in no hurry to move. Are you, Miss Traffio?”

Lacrima saw a look upon her cousin’s face that boded ill for their future relations if she did not make some kind of effort. She rose to her feet.

“Come, Mr. Andersen,” she said, giving James a
wistful look. “Let us take a little stroll, and then return again to these young people.”