Wood and Stone (47 page)

Andersen’s words were eager and hurried, and when he had finished speaking, he surveyed Mr. Quincunx with wild and feverish eyes. It was now borne in for the first time upon that worthy philosopher, that he was engaged in conversation with one whose wits were turned, and a great terror took possession of him. If the cunning of madmen is deep and subtle, it is sometimes surpassed by the cunning of those who are afraid of madmen.

“The most evil heap of stones I know in Nevilton,” remarked Mr. Quincunx, moving towards his gate, and making a slight dismissing gesture with his hand, “is the heap in the Methodist cemetery. You know the one I mean, Andersen? The one up by Seven Ashes, where the four roads meet. It is just inside the entrance, on the left hand. They throw upon it all the larger stones they find when they dig the graves. I have often picked up bits of bones there, and pieces of skulls. It is an interesting place, a very curious place, and quite easy to find. There
haven’t been many burials there lately, because most of the Methodists nowadays prefer the churchyard. But there was one last spring. That was the burial of Glory Lintot. I was there myself, and saw her put in. It’s an extraordinary place. Anyone who likes to look at what people can write on tombstones would be delighted with it.”

By this time, by means of a series of vague ushering movements, such as he might have used to get rid of an admirable but dangerous dog, Mr. Quincunx had got his visitor as far as the gate. This he opened, with as easy and natural an air as he could assume, and stood ostentatiously aside, to let the unfortunate man pass out.

James Andersen moved slowly into the road. “Remember!” he said. “You will avoid everything you hate! There’s more in the west-wind than you imagine, these strange days. That’s why the rooks are calling. Listen to them!”

He waved his hand and strode rapidly up the lane.

Mr. Quincunx gazed after the retreating figure till it disappeared, and then returned wearily to his work. He picked up his hoe and leaned heavily upon it, buried in thought. Thus he remained for the space of several minutes.

“He is right,” he muttered, raising his head at last. “The rooks are beginning to gather. That means another summer is over,—and a good thing, too! I suppose I ought to have taken him back to Nevilton. But he is right about the rooks.”

T
HE long summer afternoon was nearly over by the time James Andersen reached the Seven Ashes. The declining sun had sunk so low that it was invisible from the spot where he stood, but its last horizontal rays cast a warm ruddy light over the tree-tops in the valley. The high and exposed intersection of sandy lanes, which for time immemorial had borne this title, was, at the epoch which concerns us, no longer faithful to its name.

The ash-trees which Andersen now surveyed, with the feverish glance of mental obsession, were not seven in number. They were indeed only three; and, of these three, one was no more than a time-worn stump, and the others but newly-planted saplings. Such as they were, however, they served well enough to continue the tradition of the place, and their presence enhanced with a note of added melancholy the gloomy character of the scene.

Seven Ashes, with its cross-roads, formed indeed the extreme northern angle of the high winding ridge which terminated at Wild Pine. Approached from the road leading to this latter spot,—a road darkened on either hand by wind-swept Scotch-firs—it was the sort of place where, in less civilized times, one might have expected to encounter a threatening highwayman, or at least to have stumbled upon
some sinister witch-figure stooping over an unholy task or groping among the weeds. Even in modern times and in bright sunshine the spot was not one where a traveller was induced to linger upon his way or to rest himself. When overcast, as it was at the moment of Andersen’s approach, by the coming on of twilight, it was a place from which a normal-minded person would naturally be in haste to turn There was something ominous in its bleak exposure to the four quarters of the sky, and something full of ghostly suggestiveness in the gaping mouths of the narrow lanes that led away from it.

There was, however, another and a much more definite justification for the quickening, at this point, of any wayfarer’s steps who knew the locality. A stranger to the place, glancing across an empty field, would have observed with no particular interest the presence of a moderately high stone wall protecting a small square enclosure. Were such a one acquainted with the survivals of old usage in English villages, he might have supposed these walls to shut in the now unused space of what was formerly the local “pound,” or repository for stray animals. Such travellers as were familiar with Nevilton knew, however, that sequestered within this citadel of desolation were no living horses nor cattle, but very different and much quieter prisoners. The Methodist cemetery there, dates back, it is said, to the days of religious
persecution
, to the days of Whitfield and Wesley, if not even further.

Our fugitive from the society of those who regard their minds as normally constituted, cast an excited and recognizant eye upon this forlorn enclosure.
Plucking a handful of leaves from one of the
ash-trees
and thrusting them into his pocket, some queer legend—half-remembered in his agitated state—
impelling
him to this quaint action, he left the
roadway
, crossed the field, and pushing open the rusty iron gate of the little burying-ground, burst hurriedly in among its weather-stained memorials of the dead.

Though not of any great height, the enclosing walls of the place were sufficient to intensify by several degrees the gathering shadows. Outside, in the open field, one would have anticipated a clear hour of twilight before the darkness fell; but here, among the graves of these humble recalcitrants against spiritual authority, it seemed as though the plunge of the planet into its diurnal obscuring was likely to be retarded for only a few brief moments.

James Andersen sat down upon a nameless mound, and fixed his gaze upon the heap of stones referred to by Mr. Quincunx. The evening was warm and still, and though the sky yet retained much of its lightness of colour, the invading darkness—like a beast on padded feet—was felt as a palpable presence moving slowly among the tombs.

The stone-carver began muttering in a low voice scattered and incoherent repetitions of his
conversation
with the potato-digger. But his voice suddenly died away under a startling interruption. He
became
aware that the heavy cemetery gate was being pushed open from outside.

Such is the curious law regulating the action of human nerves, and making them dependent upon the mood of the mind to which they are attached,
that an event which to a normal consciousness is fraught with ghostly terror, to a consciousness already strained beyond the breaking point, appears as
something
natural and ordinary. It is one of the
privileges
of mania, that those thus afflicted should be freed from the normal oppression of human terror. A madman would take a ghost into his arms.

On this occasion, however, the most normal nerves would have suffered no shock from the figure that presented itself in the entrance when the door was fully opened. A young girl, pale and breathless, rushed impulsively into the cemetery, and catching sight of Andersen at once, hastened straight to him across the grave-mounds.

“I was coming back from the village,” she gasped, preventing him with a trembling pressure of her hand from rising from his seat, and casting herself down beside him, “and I met Mr. Clavering. He told me you had gone off somewhere and I guessed at once it was to Dead Man’s Lane. I said nothing to him, but as soon as he had left me, I ran nearly all the way to the cottage. The gentleman there told me to follow you. He said it was on his conscience that he had advised you to come up here. He said he was just making up his mind to come on after you, but he thought it was better for me to come. So here I am! James—dear James—you are not really ill are you? They frightened me, those two, by what they said. They seemed to be afraid that you would hurt yourself if you went off alone. But you wouldn’t James dear, would you? You would think of me a little?”

She knelt at his side and tenderly pushed back the
hair from his brow. “Oh I love you so!” she
murmured
, “I love you so! It would kill me if anything dreadful happened to you.” She pressed his head passionately against her breast, hardly conscious in her emotion of the burning heat of his forehead as it touched her skin.

“You will think of me a little!” she pleaded, “you will take care of yourself for my sake, Jim?”

She held him thus, pressed tightly against her, for several seconds, while her bosom rose and fell in quick spasms of convulsive pity. She had torn off her hat in her agitation, and flung it heedlessly down at her feet, and a heavy tress of her thick auburn hair—colourless now as the night itself—fell loosely upon her bowed neck. The fading light from the sky above them seemed to concentrate itself upon the ivory pallor of her clasped fingers and the
dead-white
glimmer of her impassioned face. She might have risen out of one of the graves that surrounded them, so ghostly in the gloom did her figure look.

The stone-carver freed himself at length, and took her hands in his own. The shock of the girl’s
emotion
had quieted his own fever. From the touch of her flesh he seemed to have derived a new and rational calm.

“Little Ninsy!” he whispered. “Little Ninsy! It is not I, but you, who are ill. Have you been up, and about, many days? I didn’t know it! I’ve had troubles of my own.” He passed his hand across his forehead. “I’ve had dreams, dreams and fancies! I’m afraid I’ve made a fool of myself, and
frightened
all sorts of people. I think I must have been saying a lot of silly things today. My head feels
still queer. It’s hurt me so much lately, my head! And I’ve heard voices, voices that wouldn’t stop.”

“Oh James, my darling, my darling!” cried the girl, in a great passion of relief. “I knew what they said wasn’t true. I knew you would speak gently to me, and be your old self. Love me, James! Love me as you used to in the old days.”

She rose to her feet and pulled him up upon his. Then with a passionate abandonment she flung her arms round him and pressed him to her, clinging to him with all her force and trembling as she clung.

James yielded to her emotion more spontaneously than he had ever done in his life. Their lips met in a long indrawing kiss which seemed to merge their separate identities, and blend them indissolubly together. She clung to him as a bind-weed, with its frail white flowers, might cling to a stalk of swaying corn, and not unlike such an entwined stalk, he swayed to and fro under the clinging of her limbs. The passion which possessed her communicated itself to him, and in a strange ecstasy of oblivion he embraced her as desperately as her wild love could wish.

From sheer exhaustion their lips parted at last, and they sank down, side by side, upon the
dew-drenched
grass, making the grave-mount their
pillow
. Obscurely, through the clouded chamber of his brain, passed the image of her poppy-scarlet mouth burning against the whiteness of her skin. All that he could now actually see of her face, in the darkness, was its glimmering pallor, but the feeling of her kiss remained and merged itself in this
impression
. He lay on his back with closed eyes, and
she bent over him as he lay, and began kissing him again, as if her soul would never be satisfied. In the intervals of her kisses, she pressed her fingers against his forehead, and uttered incoherent and tender whispers. It seemed to her as though, by the very magnetism of her devotion, she
must
be able to restore his shattered wits.

Nor did her efforts seem in vain. After a while the stone-carver lifted himself up and looked round him. He smiled affectionately at Ninsy and patted her, almost playfully, upon the knee.

“You have done me good, child,” he said. “You have done me more good than you know. I don’t think I shall say any more silly things tonight.”

He stood up on his feet, heaved a deep, natural sigh, and stretched himself, as one roused from a long sleep.

“What have you managed to do to me, Ninsy?” he asked. “I feel completely different. Those voices in my head have stopped.”. He turned
tenderly
towards her. “I believe you’ve driven the evil spirit out of me, child,” he said.

She flung her arms round him with a gasping cry. “You do like me a little, Jim? Oh my darling, I love you so much! I love you! I love you!” She clung to him with frenzied passion, her breast convulsed with sobs, and the salt tears mingling with her kisses.

Suddenly, as he held her body in his arms, he felt a shuddering tremor run through her, from head to foot. Her head fell back, helpless and heavy, and her whole frame hung limp and passive upon his arm. It almost seemed as though, in exorcising, by
the magnetic power of her love, the demon that possessed him, she had broken her own heart.

Andersen was overwhelmed with alarm and remorse. He laid her gently upon the ground, and chafed the palms of her hands whispering her name and uttering savage appeals to Providence. His appeals, however, remained unanswered, and she lay deadly still, her coils of dusky hair spread loose over the wet grass.

He rose in mute dismay, and stared angrily round the cemetery, as if demanding assistance from its silent population. Then with a glance at her
motionless
form, he ran quickly to the open gate and shouted loudly for help. His voice echoed hollowly through the walled enclosure, and a startled flutter of wings rose from the distant fir-trees. Somewhere down in the valley, a dog began to bark, but no other answer to his repeated cry reached his ears. He returned to the girl’s side.

Frantically he rent open her dress at the throat and tore with trembling fingers at the laces of her bodice. He pressed his hand against her heart. A faint, scarcely discernible tremor under her soft breast reassured him. She was not dead, then! He had not killed her with his madness.

He bent down and made an effort to lift her in his arms, but his limbs trembled beneath him and his muscles collapsed helplessly. The reaction from the tempest in his brain had left him weak as an infant. In this wretched inability to do anything to restore her he burst into a fit of piteous tears, and struck his forehead with his clenched hand.

Once more he tried desperately to lift her, and
once more, fragile as she was, the effort proved hopelessly beyond his strength. Suddenly, out of the darkness beyond the cemetery gate, he heard the sound of voices.

He shouted as loudly as he could and then listened intently, with beating heart. An answering shout responded, in Luke’s well-known voice. A moment or two later, and Luke himself, followed by Mr. Quincunx, hurried into the cemetery.

Immediately after Ninsy’s departure the recluse had been seized with uncontrollable remorse. Mixed with his remorse was the disturbing consciousness that since Ninsy knew he had advised Andersen to make his way to Seven Ashes, the knowledge was ultimately sure to reach the younger brother’s ears. Luke was one of the few intimates Mr. Quincunx possessed in Nevilton. The recluse held him in curious respect as a formidable and effective man of the world. He had an exaggerated notion of his power. He had grown accustomed to his evening visits. He was fond of him and a little afraid of him.

It was therefore an extremely disagreeable thought to his mind, to conceive of Luke as turning upon him with contempt and indignation. Thus impelled, the perturbed solitary had summoned up all his courage and gone boldly down into the village to find the younger Andersen. He had met him at the gate of Mr. Taxater’s house.

Left behind in the station field by James and his pursuers, Luke had reverted for a while with the conscious purpose of distracting his mind, to his old preoccupation, and had spent the afternoon in a manner eminently congenial, making love to two
damsels at the same time, and parrying with evasive urbanity their combined recriminations.

At the close of the afternoon, having chatted for an hour with the station-master’s wife, and shared their family tea, he had made his way according to his promise, into Mr. Taxater’s book-lined study, and there, closely closeted with the papal champion, had smoothed out the final threads of the conspiracy that was to betray Gladys, and liberate Lacrima.