Wood and Stone (55 page)

Preferring to use the ferry for their crossing rather than the bridge, Luke led his friends back, along the wharves, till they reached the line of slippery steps about which loitered the lethargic owners of the
ferry-boats
. With engaging alarm, and pretty gasps and murmurs of half-simulated panic, the three young damsels were helped down into one of these rough receptacles, and the bare-necked, affable oarsman
proceeded
, with ponderous leisureliness, to row them across.

As the heavy oars rattled in their rowlocks, and the swirling tide gurgled about the keels, Luke, seated in the stern, between Annie and Phyllis, felt once more a thrilling sense of his former emotion. With one hand round Phyllis’ waist, and the other
caressing
Annie’s gloveless fingers, he permitted his gaze to wander first up, then down, the flowing tide.

Par out to sea, he perceived a large war-ship, like a great drowsy sea-monster, lying motionless
between
sky and wave; and sweeping in, round the little pier’s point, came a light full-sailed skiff, with the water foaming across its bows.

With the same engaging trepidation in his
country-bred
comrades, they clambered up the landing-steps, the lower ones of which were covered with green sea-weed, and the upper ones worn smooth as marble by long use, and thence emerged upon the little narrow jetty, bordering upon the harbour’s edge.

Here were a row of the most enchanting eighteenth century lodging-houses, interspersed, at incredibly
frequent spaces, by small antique inns, bearing quaint names drawn from British naval history.

Skirting the grassy slopes of the Nothe, with its old-fashioned fort, they rounded the small
promontory
and climbed down among the rocks and
rock-pools
which lay at its feet. It was pretty to observe the various flutterings and agitations, and to hear the shouts of laughter and delight with which the young girls followed Luke over these perilous and romantic obstacles, and finally paused at his side upon a great sun-scorched shell-covered rock,
surrounded
by foamy water.

The wind was cool in this exposed spot, and
holding
their hats in their hands the little party gave themselves up to the freedom and freshness of air and sea.

But the wandering interest of high-spirited youth is as restless as the waves. Very soon Phyllis and Polly had drifted away from the others, and were climbing along the base of the cliff above, filling their hands with sea-pinks and sea-lavender, which attracted them by their glaucous foliage.

Left to themselves, Luke removed his shoes and stockings, and dangled his feet over the rock’s edge, while Annie, prone upon her face, the sunshine caressing her white neck and luxuriant hair, stretched her long bare arms into the cool water.

Leaning across the prostrate form of his companion, and gazing down into the deep recesses of the tidal pool which separated the rock they reclined on from the one behind it, the stone-carver was able to make out the ineffably coloured tendrils and soft translucent shapes of several large sea-anemones, submerged
beneath the greenish water. He pointed these out to his companion, who moving round a little, and tucking up her sleeves still higher, endeavoured to reach them with her hand. In this she was defeated, for the deceptive water was much deeper than either of them supposed.

“What are those darling little shells, down there at the bottom, Luke?” she whispered. Luke, with his arm round her neck, and his head close to hers, peered down into the shadowy depths.

“They’re some kind of cowries,” he said at last, “shells that in Africa, I believe, they use as money.”

“I wish they were money here,” murmured the girl, “I’d buy mother one of those silver brushes we saw in the shop.”

“Listen!” cried Luke, and taking a penny from his pocket he let it fall into the water. They both fancied they heard a little metallic sound when it struck the bottom.

Suddenly Annie gave a queer excited laugh, shook herself free from her companion’s arm, and scrambled up on her knees. Luke lay back on the rock and gazed in wonder at her flushed cheeks and flashing eyes.

“What’s the matter, child?” he enquired.

She fumbled at her bosom, and Luke noticed for the first time that she was wearing round her neck a little thin metal chain. At last with an impatient movement of her fingers she snapped the resisting cord and flung it into the tide. Then she held out to Luke a small golden object, which glittered in the palm of her hand. It was a weather-stained ring, twisted and bent out of all shape.

“It’s
her
ring!” she cried exultantly. “Crazy Bert got it out of that hole, with a bit of bent wire, and Phyllis squirmed it away from him by letting him give her a lift in the wagon. He squeezed her
dreadful
hard, she do say, and tickled her awful with straws and things, but before evening she had the ring away from him. You can bet I kissed her and thanked her, when I got it! Us two be real friends, as you might call it! Phyllis, cried, in the night, dreaming the idiot was pinching her, and she not able to slap ’im back. But I got the ring, and there ’t be, Luke, glittering-gold as ever, though ’tis sad bended and battered.”

Luke made a movement to take the object, but the girl closed her fingers tightly upon it and held it high above his head. With her arm thus raised and the glitter of sea and sun upon her form, she
resembled
some sweetly-carved figure-head on the bows of a ship. The wind fanned her hot cheeks and caressed, with cool touch, her splendid coils of hair. Luke was quite overcome by her beauty, and could only stare at her in dazed amazement, while she repeated, in clear ringing tones, the words of the old country game.

The song’s refrain died away over the waves, and was answered by the scream of an astonished
cormorant
, and by a mocking shout from a group of idle soldiers on the grassy terrace above the cliff.

“Shall us throw her ring out to sea?” cried Annie.
“They say a ring lost so, means sorrow for her that owns it. Say ‘yes,’ and it’s gone, Luke!”

While the girl’s arm swung backwards and forwards above him, the stone-carver’s thoughts whirled even more rapidly through his brain. A drastic and bold idea, that had often before crossed the threshold of his consciousness, now assumed a most dominant shape. Why not ask Annie to marry him?

He was growing a little weary of his bachelor-life, The wayward track of his days had more than once, of late, seemed to have reached a sort of climax. Why not, at one reckless stroke, end this epoch of his history, and launch out upon another? His close association with James had hitherto stood in the way of any such step, but his brother had fallen recently into such fits of gloomy reticence, that he had found himself wondering more than once whether such a drastic troubling of the waters, as the introduction of a girl into their ménage, would not ease the
situation
a little. It was not for a moment to be
supposed
that he and James could separate. If Annie did marry him, she must do so on the understanding of his brother’s living with them.

Luke began to review in his mind the various
cottages
in Nevilton which might prove available for this adventure. It tickled his fancy a great deal, the thought of having a house and garden of his own, and he was shrewd enough to surmise that of all his feminine friends, Annie was by far the best fitted to perform the functions of the good-tempered companion of a philosophical sentimentalist. The gentle creature had troubled him so little by jealous fits in her rôle of sweetheart, that it did not present itself as
probable that she would prove a shrewish wife. Glancing across the blue water to the great
Rock-Island
opposite them, Luke came rapidly to the
conclusion
that he would take the risk and make the eventful plunge. He knew enough of himself to have full confidence in his power of dealing with the
delicate
art of matrimony, and the very difficulties of the situation, implied in the number of his contemporary amours, only added a tang and piquancy to the enterprise.

“Well,” cried Annie. “Shall us throw the pretty lady’s ring into the deep sea? It’ll mean trouble for her, trouble and tears, Luke! Be ’ee of a mind to do it, or be ’ee not? ’Tis your hand must fling it, and with the flinging of it, her heart ’ll drop, splash—splash—into deep sorrow. She’ll cry her eyes out, for this ’ere job, and that’s the truth of it, Luke darling. Be ’ee ready to fling it, or be ’ee not ready? There’ll be no getting it back, once us have thro wed it in.”

She held out her arm towards him as she spoke, and with her other hand pushed back her hair from her forehead. For so soft and tender a creature as the girl was, it was strange, the wild Maenad-like look, which she wore at that moment. She might have been an incarnation of the avenging deities of sea and air, threatening disaster to some unwitting Olympian.

Luke scrambled to his feet, and seizing her wrist with both his hands, forced her fingers apart, and possessed himself of the equivocal trinket.

“If I throw it,” he cried, in an excited tone, “will you be my wife, Annie?”

At this unexpected word a complete collapse
overtook
the girl. All trace of colour left her cheeks and a sudden trembling passed through her limbs. She staggered, and would have fallen, if Luke had not seized her in his arms.

In the shock of saving her, the stone-carver’s hand involuntarily unclosed, and the piece of gold, slipping from his fingers, fell down upon the slope of the rock, and sliding over its edge, sank into the deep water.

“Annie! Annie! What is it, dear?” murmured Luke, making the trembling girl sit down by his side, and supporting her tenderly.

For her only answer she flung her arms round his neck and kissed him passionately again and again. It was not only of kisses that Luke became conscious, for, as she pressed him to her, her breast heaved pitifully under her print frock, and when she let him go, the taste of her tears was in his mouth. For the first time in his life the queer wish entered the
stonecarver’s
mind that he had not, in his day, made love quite so often.

There was something so pure, so confiding, and yet so passionately tender, about little Annie’s abandonment, that it produced, in the epicurean youth’s soul, a most quaint sense of shame and
embarrassment
. It was deliciously sweet to him, all the same, to find how, beyond expectation, he had made so shrewd a choice. But he wished some humorous demon at the back of his mind wouldn’t call up before him at that moment the memory of other clinging arms and lips.

With an inward grin of sardonic commentary upon his melting mood, the cynical thought passed through
his mind, how strange it was, in this mortal world, that human kisses should all so lamentably resemble one another, and that human tears should all leave behind them the same salt taste! Life was indeed a matter of “eternal recurrence,” and whether with Portland and its war-ships as the background, or with Nevilton Mount and its shady woods, the same emotions and the same reactions must needs come and go, with the same inexorable monotony!

He glanced down furtively into the foam-flecked water, but there was no sign of the lost ring. The tide seemed to have turned now, and the sea appeared less calm. Little flukes of white spray surged up intermittently on the in-rolling waves, and a strong breath of wind, rising with the sinking of the sun, blew cool and fresh upon their foreheads.

“Her ring’s gone,” whispered Annie, pulling down her sleeves over her soft arms, and holding out her wrists, for him to fasten the bands, “and you do belong to none but I now, Luke. When shall us be married, dear?” she added, pressing her cool cheek against his, and running her fingers through his hair.

The words, as well as the gesture that accompanied them, jarred upon Luke’s susceptibilities.

“Why is it,” he thought, “that girls are so
extraordinarily
stupid in these things? Why do they always seem only waiting for an opportunity to drop their piquancy and provocation, and become confident, assured, possessive, complacent? Have I,” he said to himself, “made a horrible blunder? Shall I regret this day forever, and be ready to give anything for those fatal words not to have been uttered?”

He glanced down once more upon the brimming,
in-rushing tide that covered Gladys’ ring. Then with a jerk he pulled out his watch.

“Go and call the others,” he commanded, “I’m going to have a dip before we start.”

Annie glanced quickly into his face, but reassured by his friendly smile, proceeded to obey him, with only the least little sigh.

“Don’t drown yourself, dear,” she called back to him, as she made her way cautiously across the rocks.

Luke hurriedly undressed, and standing for a
moment
, a slim golden figure, in the horizontal sunlight, swung himself lightly down over the rock’s edge and struck out boldly for the open sea.

With vigorous strokes he wrestled with the
inflowing
tide. Wave after wave splashed against his face. Pieces of floating sea-weed and wisps of surf clung to his arms and hair. But he held resolutely on, breathing deep breaths of liberty and exultation, and drinking in, as if from a vast wide-brimmed cup, the thrilling spaciousness of air and sky.

Girls, love-making, marriage,—the whole
complication
of the cloying erotic world,—fell away from him, like the too-soft petals of some great stifling velvet-bosomed flower; and naked of desire, as he was naked of human clothes, he gave himself up to the free, pure elements. In later hours, when once more the old reiterated tune was beating time in his brain, he recalled with regret the large emancipation of that moment.

As he splashed and spluttered, and turned over deliciously in the water, like some exultant
human-limbed
merman, returning, after a long inland exile, to his natural home, he found his thoughts
fantastically
reverting to those queer, mad ideas, about the evil power of the stone they both worked upon, to which James Andersen had given expression when his wits were astray. Here at any rate, in the solid earth’s eternal antagonist, was a power capable of destroying every sinister spell.