Wood and Stone (29 page)

This new element in his attitude towards her did not, however, issue in any excess of physical jealousy. What it did lead to, unluckily for Lacrima, was a certain queer diminution of his ideal respect for her personality. In place of focussing his attention upon the sublime sacrifice she contemplated for his sake, the events she narrated concentrated his mind upon the mere brutal and accidental fact that Mr. Goring had so desperately desired her. The mere fact of her having been so desired by such a man, changed her in his eyes. His cynical distrust of all women led him to conceive the monstrous and grotesque idea that she must in her heart be gratified by having
aroused this passion in the farmer. It did not carry him quite so far as to make him believe that she had consciously excited such emotion; but it led him to the very brink of that outrageous fantasy. Had Lacrima come to him with a shame-faced confession that she had let herself be seduced by the
Priory-tenant
he could hardly have gazed at her with more changed and troubled eyes. He felt the same curious mixture of sorrowful pity and remote unlawful
attraction
to the object of his pity, that he would have felt in a casual conversation with some luckless child of the streets. By being the occasion of Mr. Goring’s passion, she became for him no less than such an unfortunate; the purer sentiment he had hitherto cherished changing into quite a different mood.

He lifted her up by the wrists and pressed her closely to him, kissing her again and again. The girl’s heart went on anxiously beating. She could hardly restrain her impatience for him to speak. Why did he not speak?

Disentangling herself from his embrace with a quick feminine instinct that something was wrong, she pulled him down upon the bench by her side and taking his hand in hers looked with pitiful
bewilderment
into his face.

“So when this thing happens,” she said, “all your troubles will be over. You will be free forever from that horrid office.”

“And you,” said Mr. Quincunx—his mood
changing
again, and his goblin-like smile twitching his nostrils,—“You will be the mistress of the Priory. Well! I suppose you will not desert me altogether when that happens!”

So that was the tone he adopted! He could afford to turn the thing into a jest—into God knows what! She let his hand drop and stared into empty space, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, understanding nothing.

This time Maurice realized that he had disappointed her; that his cynicism had carried him too far.
Unfortunately
the same instinct that told him he had made a fool of himself pushed him on to seek. an issue from the situation by wading still further into it.

“Come—come,” he said. “You and I must face this matter like people who are really free spirits, and not slaves to any ridiculous superstition. It is noble, it is sweet of you to think of marrying that brute so as to set me free. Of course if I
was
free, and you were up at the Priory, we should see a great deal more of each other than we do now. I could take one of those vacant cottages close to the church.

“Don’t think—Lacrima dear,” he went on,
possessing
himself of one of her cold hands and trying to recall her attention, “don’t think that I don’t realize what it is to you to have to submit to such a
frightful
thing. Of course we know how outrageous it is that such a marriage should be forced on you. But, after all, you and I are above these absurd popular superstitions about all these things. Every girl sooner or later hates the man she marries. It is human nature to hate the people we have to live with; and when it comes down to actual reality, all human beings are much the same. If you were forced to marry me, you would probably hate me just as much as you’ll hate this poor devil. After all, what is this business of being married to people and bearing them children? It doesn’t touch your
mind. It doesn’t affect your soul. As old Marcus Aurelius says, our bodies are nothing! They are wretched corpses, anyway, dragged hither and thither by our imprisoned souls. It is these damned
clergymen
, with their lies about ‘sin’ and so forth, that upset women’s minds. For you to be married to a man you hate, would only be like my having to go to this Yeoborough office with people I hate. You will always have, as that honest fellow Epictetus says, your own soul to retire into,
whatever
happens. Heavens! it strikes me as a bit of humorous revenge,”—here his nostrils twitched again and the hobgoblin look reappeared— “this thought of you and me living peacefully at our ease, so near one another, and at these confounded rascals’ expense!”

Lacrima staggered to her feet. “Let me go,” she said. “I want to go back—away—anywhere.”

Her look, her gesture, her broken words gave Mr. Quincunx a poignant shock. In one sudden
illuminating
flash he saw himself as he was, and his recent remarks in their true light. We all have sometimes these psychic search-light flashes of introspection; but the more healthy-minded and well-balanced among us know how to keep them in their place and how to expel them promptly and effectively.

Mr. Quincunx was not healthy-minded. He had the morbid sensitive mind of a neurotic Pariah. Hence, in place of suppressing this spiritual
illumination
, he allowed it to irradiate the gloomiest caverns of his being. He rose with a look of abject and miserable concern.

“Stop,” he cried huskily.

She looked at him wondering, the blood returning a little to her cheeks.

“It is the Devil!” he exclaimed. “I must have the Devil in me, to say such things and to treat you like this. You are the bravest, sweetest girl in the world, and I am a brutal idiot—worse than Mr. Romer!”

He struck himself several blows upon the forehead, knocking off his hat. Lacrima could not help noticing that in place of the usual protection, some small rhubarb-leaves ornamented the interior of this appendage.

She smiled at him, through a rain of happy tears,—the first smile that day had seen upon her face.

“We are both of us absurd people, I suppose,” she said, laying her hands upon his shoulders. “We ought to have some friend with a clear solid head to keep us straight.”

Mr. Quincunx kissed her on the forehead and stooped down for his hat.

“Yes,” he said. “We are a queer pair. I suppose we are really both a little mad. I wish there was someone we could go to.”

“Couldn’t you—perhaps—” said Lacrima, “say something to Mrs. Seldom? And yet I would much rather she didn’t know. I would much rather no one knew!”

“I might,” murmured Maurice thoughtfully; “I might tell her. But the unlucky thing is, she is so narrow-minded that she can’t separate you in her thoughts from those frightful people.”

“Shall I try Vennie?” whispered the girl, “or shall we—” here she looked him boldly in the face with
eager, brightening eyes—“shall we run away to London, and be married, and risk the future?”

Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater tactical blunder than when she uttered these words. Maurice Quincunx’s mystic illumination had made it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It could not put into his nature an energy he had not been born with. His countenance clouded.

“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he
remarked
. “You don’t know what a sour-tempered devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl who lives with me miserable. You would hate me in a month more than you hate Mr. Romer, and in a year I should have either worried you into your grave or you would have run away from me. No—no—no! I should be a criminal fool to let you subject yourself to such a risk as that.”

“But,” pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, “we should be sure to find something! I could teach Italian,—and you could—oh, I am sure there are endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice dear, let us go. Anything is better than this misery. I have got quite enough money for the journey. Look!”

She pulled out from beneath her dress a little chain purse, that hung, by a small silver chain, round her slender neck. She opened it and shook three sovereigns into the palm of her hand. “Enough for the journey,” she said, “and enough to keep us for a week if we are economical. We should be sure to find something by that time.”

Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical piece of psychic malice that the very illumination
which had made him remorseful and sympathetic should have also reduced to the old level of tender sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It was the absence in him of this sensual impulse which made the scheme she proposed seem so impossible. Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she possessed the power of arousing his senses to a more violent craving, instead of brooding, as he did, upon the mere material difficulties of such a plan, he would have plunged desperately into it and carried her off without further argument. The very purity of his temperament was her worst enemy.

Poor Lacrima! Her hands dropped once more helplessly to her side, and the old hopeless depression began to invade her heart. It seemed impossible to make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer and things went on as before, her position in Mr. Romer’s establishment would become more impossible than ever. What—for instance—would become of her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with young Ilminster took place? Could she conceive herself going on living under that roof, with Mr. Romer continually harassing her, and his
brother-in
-law haunting every field she wandered into?

“It was noble of you,” began her bearded friend again, resuming his work at the weeds, while she, as on a former occasion, leant against his wheel-
barrow
, “to think of enduring this wretched marriage for my sake. But I cannot let you do it. I should not be happy in letting you do it. I have some conscience—though you may not think so—and it would worry me to feel you were putting up with that fool’s companionship just to make me
comfortable
.
It would spoil my enjoyment of my
freedom
, to know that you were not equally free. Of course it would be paradise to me to have the money you speak of. I should be able to live exactly as I like, and these damned villagers would treat me with proper respect then. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take my pleasure at the expense of such a strain on you. It would spoil everything!

“I don’t deny, however,” he went on, evidently deriving more and more virtuous satisfaction from his somewhat indecisive rejection of her sacrifice, “that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. All I said about getting on with those people was damned bluff. I loathe them and they loathe me. It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that place. Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. I can’t help feeling rather like that poor brother of the girl in ‘Measure for Measure’ when she comes to say that she could save his life by the loss of her virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject of death. She put him down fiercely enough, poor dog! She evidently thought her virtue was much more important than his life. I am glad you are just the opposite of that puritanical young woman. I shouldn’t like you very much if you took her line!

“But just because you don’t do that, my dear,” Mr. Quincunx went on, tugging at the obstinate roots of a great dock, “I couldn’t think of letting you sacrifice yourself. If you
were
like that woman in the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about your confounded virtue, I should be inclined to wish that Mr. Goring had got his hands upon you. Women
who think as much of themselves as that,
ought
to be given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It’s the sort of punishment they deserve for their superstitious selfishness. For it’s all selfishness, of course. We know that well enough!”

He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his barrow that some of the earth from its roots was sprinkled into Lacrima’s lap. He came to help her brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her again,—this time a shade more amorously.

“All this business of ‘love,’” he went on, returning to his potatoes, “is nothing but the old eternal wickedness of man’s nature. The only kind of love which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of sex altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and distant—like the love of a planetary spirit. Apart from this love, which is not like human love at all, everything in us is selfish. Even a mother’s care for its child is selfish.”

“I shall never have a child,” said Lacrima in a low voice.

“I wonder what your friend James Andersen would say to all this,” continued Mr. Quincunx. “Why, by the way, don’t you get
him
to marry you? He would do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little encouragement; and then make you work all day in his kitchen, as his father made his mother, so they say.”

Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at the watch upon her wrist. She began to feel dizzy and sick for want of food. She had had nothing since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to grow long.

“I know what Luke Andersen would say if we asked him,” added Mr. Quincunx. “He would advise you to marry this damned farmer, wheedle his money out of him, and then sheer off with some fine youth and never see Nevilton again! Luke Andersen’s the fellow for giving a person advice in these little matters. He has a head upon his shoulders, that boy! I tell you what it is, my dear, your precious Miss Gladys had better be careful! She’ll be getting herself into trouble with that honest youth if she doesn’t look out. I know him. He cares for no
mortal
soul in the world, or above the world. He’s a master in the art of life! We are all infants compared with him. If you do need anyone to help you, or to help me either, I tell you Luke Andersen’s the one to go to. He has more influence in this village than any living person except Romer himself, and I should be sorry for Romer if his selfishness clashed with the selfishness of that young Machiavel!”

“Do you mind,” said Lacrima suddenly, “if I go into your kitchen and make myself a cup of tea? I feel rather exhausted. I expect it is the heat.”