Wood and Stone (57 page)

“I pray Heaven I shan’t have any visitors today,” remarked Luke, sipping his tea and stretching out his feet to the friendly blaze.

“That ye’ll be sure to have!” answered the woman; “and the sooner ye puts on a decent black coat, and washes and brushes up a bit, the better ’twill be for all concerned. I always tells my old man that when he do fall stiff, like what your brother be, I shall put on my black silk gown and sit in the front parlour with a bottle of elder wine, ready for all sorts and conditions.”

Luke rose, with a piece of bread-and-butter in his hand, and surveyed himself in the mirror.

“Yes, I do need a bit of tidying,” he said. “
Perhaps
you wouldn’t mind my shaving down here?”

Even as he spoke the young stone-carver could not help recalling those sinister stories of dead men whose beards have grown in their coffins. The landlady nodded.

“I’ll make ’ee up a bed for these ’ere days,” she said, “in Betty’s room. As for shaving and such like, please yourself, Master Luke. This house be thy house with him lying up there.”

Between nine and ten o’clock Luke’s first visitor made his appearance. This was Mr. Clavering, who showed himself neither surprised nor greatly pleased to find the bereft brother romping with the children under the station-master’s apple-trees.

“I cannot express to you the sympathy I feel,” said the clergyman, “with your grief under this great blow. Words on these occasions are of little avail. But I trust you know where to turn for true consolation.”

“Thank you, sir,” replied Luke, who, though
carefully
shaved and washed, still wore the light grey flannel suit of his Saturday’s excursion.

“Give Mr. Clavering an apple, Lizzie!” he added.

“I wouldn’t for a moment,” continued the Reverend Hugh, “intrude upon you with any impertinent questions. But I could not help wondering as I walked through the village how this tragedy would affect you. I prayed it might,”—here he laid a grave and pastoral hand on the young man’s arm,—“I prayed it might give you a different attitude to those high matters which we have at various times discussed together. Am I right in my hope, Luke?”

Never had the superb tactlessness of Nevilton’s vicar betrayed him more deplorably.

“Death is death, Mr. Clavering,” replied the stone-carver, lifting up the youngest of the children and placing her astride on an apple-branch. “It’s about the worst blow fate’s ever dealt me. But when
it comes to any change in my ideas,—no! I can’t say that I’ve altered.”

“I understand you weren’t with him when this terrible thing happened,” said the clergyman. “They tell me he was picked up by strangers. There’ll be no need, I trust, for an inquest, or anything of that kind?”

Luke shook his head. “The doctor was up here last night. The thing’s clear enough. His mind must have given way again. He’s had those curst quarries on his nerves for a long while past. I wish to the devil—I beg your pardon, sir!—I wish I’d taken him to Weymouth with me. I was a fool not to insist on that.”

“Yes, I heard you were away,” remarked Hugh, with a certain caustic significance in his tone. “One or two of our young friends were with you, I believe?”

Luke did not fail to miss the implication, and he hit back vindictively.

“I understand you’ve had an interesting little
service
this morning, sir, or perhaps it’s yet to come off? I can’t help being a bit amused when I think of it!”

An electric shock of anger thrilled through
Clavering’s
frame. Controlling himself with a heroic effort, he repelled the malignant taunt.

“I didn’t know you concerned yourself with these observances, Andersen,” he remarked. “But you’re quite right. I’ve just this minute come from receiving Miss Romer into our church. Miss Traffio was with her. Both young ladies were greatly agitated over this unhappy occurrence. In fact it cast quite a gloom over what otherwise is one of the most
beautiful
incidents of all, in our ancient ritual.”

Luke swung the little girl on the bough backwards and forwards. The other children, retired to a discreet distance, stared at the colloquy with
wide-open
eyes.

“This baptizing of adults,” continued Luke,—“you call ’em adults, don’t you, on these occasions?—is really a little funny, isn’t it?”

“Funny!” roared the angry priest. “No, sir, it isn’t funny! The saving of an immortal soul by God’s most sacred sacrament may not appeal to you infidels as an essential ceremony,—but only a
thoroughly
vulgar and philistine mind could call it funny!”

“I’m afraid we shall never agree on these topics, Mr. Clavering,” replied Luke calmly. “But it was most kind of you to come up and see me. I really appreciate it. Would it be possible,”—his voice took a lower and graver tone,—“for my brother’s funeral to be performed on Wednesday? I should be very grateful to you, sir, if that could be arranged.”

The young vicar frowned and looked slightly disconcerted. “What time would you wish it to be, Andersen?” he enquired. “I ask you this, because Wednesday is—er—unfortunately—the date fixed for another of these ceremonies that you scoff at. The Lord Bishop comes to Nevilton then. It is his own wish. I should myself have preferred a later date.”

“Ha! the confirmation!” ejaculated Luke, with a bitter little laugh. “You’re certainly bent on striking while the iron’s hot, Mr. Clavering. May I ask what hour has been fixed for
this
beautiful ceremony?”

“Eleven o’clock in the morning,” replied the priest,
ignoring with a dignified wave of his hand the
stone-carver’s
jeering taunt.

“Well then—if that suits you—and does not interfere with the Lord Bishop—” said Luke, “I should be most grateful if you could make the hour for James’ funeral, ten o’clock in the morning?
That
service I happen to be more familiar with than the others,—and I know it doesn’t take very long.”

Mr. Clavering bent his head in assent.

“It shall certainly be as you wish,” he said. “If unforeseen difficulties arise, I will let you know. But I have no doubt it can be managed.

“I am right in assuming,” he added, a little
uneasily
, “that your brother was a baptized member of our church?”

Luke lifted the child from the bough and made her run off to play with the others. The glance he then turned upon the vicar of Nevilton was not one of admiration.

“James was the noblest spirit I’ve ever known,” he said sternly. “If there is such a thing as another world, he is certain to reach it—church or no church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You’ll find his name in the register—and mine too!” he added with a laugh.

Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the gate. Luke followed him, and at the gate they shook hands. Perhaps the same thought passed through the minds of both of them, as they went through this ceremony; for a very queer look, almost identical in its expression on either face, was exchanged between them.

Before the morning was over Luke had a second visit of condolence. This was from Mr. Quincunx, and never had the quaint recluse been more warmly received. Luke was conscious at once that here was a man who could enter into every one of his feelings, and be neither horrified nor scandalized by the most fantastic inconsistency.

The two friends walked up and down the sunny field in front of the house, Luke pouring into the solitary’s attentive ears every one of his recent
impressions
and sensations.

Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by James’ death. He refused Luke’s offer to let him visit the room upstairs, but his refusal was expressed in such a natural and characteristic manner that the stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part.

After a while they sat down together under the shady hedge at the top of the meadow. Here they discoursed and philosophized at large, listening to the sound of the church-bells and watching the
slow-moving
cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday mornings, when, in such places as this, the drowsiness of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses seems endowed with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of the horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the languor of the heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, and the stiff sabbatical dresses of the men and women who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a patient liturgical observance.

Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The recluse was indeed precisely in his element. Living habitually himself in thoughts of death, pleased—in that incomparable sunshine—to find himself still
alive, cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet humorous, he exactly supplied what the wounded heart of the pagan mourner required for its comfort.

“Idiots! asses! fools!” the stone-carver ejaculated, apostrophizing in his inmost spirit the various persons, clever or otherwise, to whom this nervous and
eccentric
creature was a mere type of failure and
superannuation
. None of these others,—not one of them,—not Homer nor Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater—could for a moment have entered into the peculiar feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or Phyllis or Annie or Polly,—he would have as soon thought of relating his emotions to a row of swallows upon a telegraph-wire as to any of those dainty epitomes of life’s evasiveness!

A man’s brain, a man’s imagination, a man’s scepticism, was what he wanted; but he wanted it touched with just that flavour of fanciful sentiment of which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred quaint little episodes, the import of which none but Mr. Quincunx could have appreciated, were evoked by the stone-carver. Nothing was too blasphemous, nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the solitary’s taste. On the other hand, he entered with tender and perfect clairvoyance into the sick misery of loss which remained the background of all Luke’s sensations.

The younger man’s impetuous confidences ebbed and dwindled at last; and with the silence of the church-bells and the receding to the opposite corner of the field of the browsing cattle, a deep and
melancholy
hush settled upon them both.

Then it was that Mr. Quincunx began speaking of
himself and his own anxieties. In the tension of the moment he even went so far as to disclose to Luke, under a promise of absolute secrecy, the sinister story of that contract into which Lacrima had entered with their employer.

Luke was all attention at once. This was indeed a piece of astounding news! He couldn’t have said whether he wondered more at the quixotic devotion of Lacrima for this quaint person, or at the solitary’s unprecedented candour in putting him “en rapport” with such an amazing situation.

“Of course we know,” murmured Mr. Quincunx, in his deep subterranean voice, “that she wouldn’t have promised such a thing, unless in her heart she had been keen, at all costs, to escape from those people. It isn’t human nature to give up everything for nothing. Probably, as a matter of fact, she rather likes the idea of having a house of her own. I expect she thinks she could twist that fool Goring round her finger; and I daresay she could! But the thing is, what do you advise
me
to do? Of course I’m glad enough to agree to anything that saves me from this damnable office. But what worries me about it is that devil Homer put it into her head. I don’t trust him, Luke; I don’t trust him!”

“I should think you don’t!” exclaimed his
companion
, looking with astonishment and wonder into the solemn grey eyes fixed sorrowfully and intently upon his own. What a strange thing, he thought to himself, that this subtle-minded intelligence should be so hopelessly devoid of the least push of practical impetus.

“Of course,” Mr. Quincunx continued, “neither
you nor I would fuss ourselves much over the idea of a girl being married to a fool like this, if there weren’t something different from the rest about her. This nonsense about their having to ‘love,’ as the little simpletons call it, the man they agree to live with, is of course all tommy-rot. No one ‘loves’ the person they live with. She wouldn’t love me,—she’d probably hate me like poison,—after the first week or so! The romantic idiots who make so much of ‘love,’ and are so horrified when these little creatures are married without it, don’t understand what this planet is made of. They don’t understand the
feelings
of the girls either.

“I tell you a girl
likes
being made a victim of in this particular kind of way. They’re much less fastidious, when it comes to the point, than we are. As a matter of fact what does trouble them is being married to a man they really have a passion for. Then, jealousy bites through their soft flesh like Cleopatra’s serpent, and all sorts of wild ideas get into their heads. It’s not natural, Luke, it’s not natural, for girls to marry persons they love! That’s why we country dogs treat the whole thing as a lewd jest.

“Do you think these honest couples who stand giggling and smirking before our dear clergyman every quarter, don’t hate one another in their hearts? Of course they do; it wouldn’t be nature if they didn’t! But that doesn’t say they don’t get their pleasure out of it. And Lacrima’ll get her pleasure, in some mad roundabout fashion, from marrying Goring,—you may take my word for that!”

“It seems to me,” remarked Luke slowly, “that you’re trying all this time to quiet your conscience.
I believe you’ve really got far more conscience, Maurice, than I have. It’s your conscience that makes you speak so loud, at this very moment!”

Mr. Quincunx got up on his feet and stroked his beard. “I’m afraid I’ve annoyed you somehow,” he remarked. “No person ever speaks of another
person’s
conscience unless he’s in a rage with him.”

The stone-carver stretched out his legs and lit a cigarette. “Sit down again, you old fool,” he said, “and let’s talk this business over sensibly.”

The recluse sighed deeply, and, subsiding into his former position, fixed a look of hopeless melancholy upon the sunlit landscape.

“The point is this, Maurice,” began the young man. “The first thing in these complicated situations is to be absolutely certain what one wants oneself. It seems to me that a good deal of your agitation comes from the fact that you haven’t made up your mind what you want. You asked my advice, you know, so you won’t be angry if I’m quite plain with you?”