Wood and Stone (58 page)

“Go on,” said Mr. Quincunx, a remote flicker of his goblin-smile twitching his nostrils, “I see I’m in for a few little hits.”

Luke waved his hand. “No hits, my friend, no hits. All I want to do, is to find out from you what you really feel. One philosophizes, naturally, about girls marrying, and so on; but the point is,—do you want this particular young lady for yourself, or don’t you?”

Mr. Quincunx stroked his beard. “Well,”—he said meditatively, “if it comes to that, I suppose I do want her. We’re all fools in some way or other, I
fancy. Yes, I do want her, Luke, and that’s the honest truth. But I don’t want to have to work twice as hard as I’m doing now, and under still more unpleasant conditions, to keep her!”

Luke emitted a puff of smoke and knocked the ashes from his cigarette upon the purple head of a tall knapweed.

“Ah!” he ejaculated. “Now we’ve got something to go upon.”

Mr. Quincunx surveyed the faun-like profile of his friend with some apprehension. He mentally resolved that nothing,—nothing in heaven nor earth,—should put him to the agitation of making any drastic change in his life.

“We get back then,” continued Luke, “to the point we reached on our walk to Seven Ashes.”

As he said the words “Seven Ashes” the ice-cold finger of memory pierced him with that sudden stab which is like a physical blow. What did it matter, after all, he thought, what happened to any of these people, now Daddy James was dead?

“You remember,” he went on, while the sorrowful grey eyes of his companion regarded him with wistful anxiety, “you told me, in that walk, that if some imaginary person were to leave you money enough to live comfortably, you would marry Lacrima
without
any hesitation?”

Mr. Quincunx nodded.

“Well,”—Luke continued—“in return for your confession about that contract, I’ll confess to you that Mr. Taxater and I formed a plan together, when my brother first got ill, to secure you this money.”

Mr. Quincunx made a grimace of astonishment.

“The plan has lapsed now,” went on Luke, “owing to Mr. Taxater’s being away; but I can’t help feeling that something of that kind might be done. I feel in a queer sort of fashion,” he added, “though I can’t quite tell you why, that, after all, things’ all so work themselves out, that you
will
get both the girl and the money!”

Mr. Quincunx burst into a fit of hilarious
merriment
, and rubbed his hands together. But a moment later his face clouded.

“It’s impossible,” he murmured with a deep sigh; “it’s impossible, Luke. Girls and gold go together like butterflies and sunshine. I’m as far from either, as the sea-weed under the arch of Weymouth Bridge.”

Luke pondered for a moment in silence.

“It’s an absurd superstition,” he finally remarked, “but I can’t help a sort of feeling that James’ spirit is actively exerting itself on your side. He was a romantic old truepenny, and his last thoughts were all fixed—of that I’m sure—upon Lacrima’s escaping this marriage with Goring.”

Mr. Quincunx sighed. He had vaguely imagined the possibility of some grand diplomatic stroke on his behalf, from the astute Luke; and this relapse into mysticism, on the part of that sworn materialist, did not strike him as reassuring.

The silence that fell between them was broken by the sudden appearance of a figure familiar to them both, crossing the field towards them. It was
Witch-Bessie
, who, in a bright new shawl, and with a
mysterious
packet clutched in her hand, was beckoning to attract their attention. The men rose and advanced to meet her.

“I’ll sit down a bit with ’ee,” cried the old woman, waving to them to return to their former
position
.

When they were seated once more beneath the bank,—the old lady, like some strange Peruvian idol, resting cross-legged at their feet,—she began, without further delay, to explain the cause of her visit.

“I know’d how ’twould be with ’ee,” she said, addressing Luke, but turning a not unfriendly eye upon his companion. “I did know well how ’twould be. I hear’d tell of brother’s being laid out, from Bert Leerd, as I traipsed through Wild Pine this morning.

“Ninsy Lintot was a-cryin’ enough to break her poor heart. I hear’d ’un as I doddered down yon lane. She were all lonesome-like, under them girt trees, shakin’ and sobbin’ terrible. She took on so, when I arst what ailed ’un, that I dursn’t lay finger on the lass.

“She did right down scare I, Master Luke, and that’s God’s holy truth!’ Let me bide, Bessie,’ says she, ‘let me bide.’ I telled her ’twas a sin to He she loved best, to carry on so hopeless; and with that she up and says,—‘I be the cause of it all, Bessie,’ says she, ‘I be the cause he throw’d ’isself away.’ And with that she set herself cryin’ again, like as ’twas pitiful to hear. ‘My darlin’, my darlin’,’ she kept callin’ out. ‘I love no soul ‘cept thee—no soul ‘cept thee!’

“’Twas then I recollected wot my old Mother used to say,’ bout maids who be cryin’ like pantin’ hares. ‘Listen to me, Ninsy Lintot,’ I says, solemn and slow,
like as us were in church. ‘One above’s been
talking
wi’ I, this blessed morn, and He do say as Master James be in Abram’s Bosom, with them shining ones, and it be shame and sin for mortals like we to wish ’un back.’

“That quieted the lass a bit, and I did tell she then, wot be God’s truth, that ’tweren’t her at all turned brother’s head, but the pleasure of the Almighty.” Tis for folks like us,’ I says to her, ‘to take wot His will do send, and bide quiet and still, same as cows, drove to barton.’

“’Twere a blessing of providence I’d met crazy Bert afore I seed the lass, else I’d a been struck
dazed-like
by wot she did tell. But as ’twas, thanks be to recollectin’ mother’s trick wi’ such wendy maids, I dried her poor eyes and got her back home along. And she gave I summat to put in brother’s coffin afore they do nail ’un down.”

Before either Luke or Mr. Quincunx had time to utter any comment upon this narration, Witch-Bessie unfastened the packet she was carrying, and
produced
from a cardboard box a large roughly-moulded bracelet, or bangle, of heavy silver, such as may be bought in the bazaars of Tunis or Algiers.

“There,” cried the old woman, holding the thing up, and flashing it in the sun, “that’s wot she gave I, to bury long wi’ brother! Be pretty enough, baint ’un? Though, may-be, not fittin’ for a quiet home-keeping lass like she. She had ’un off some Gipoo, she said; and to my thinkin’ it be a kind of heathen ornimint, same as folks do buy at Rogertown Fair. But such as ’tis, that be wot ’tis bestowed for, to put i’ the earth long wi’ brother. Seems
somethin ‘of a pity, maybe, but maid’s whimsies be maids’ whimsies, and God Almighty’ll plague the hard-hearted folk as won’t perform wot they do cry out for.”

Luke took the bangle from the old woman’s hand.

“Of course I’ll do what she wants, Bessie,” he said. “Poor little Ninsy, I never knew how much she cared.”

He permitted Mr. Quincunx to handle the
silver
object, and then carefully placed it in his pocket.

“Hullo!” he cried, “what else have you got, Bessie?” This exclamation was caused by the fact that Witch-Bessie, after fumbling in her shawl had produced a second mysterious packet, smaller than the first and tightly tied round with the stalks of some sort of hedge-weed.

“Cards, by Heaven!” exclaimed Luke. “Oh Bessie, Bessie,” he added, “why didn’t you bring these round here twenty-four hours ago? You might have made me take him with me to Weymouth!”

Untying the packet, which contained as the
stone-carver
had anticipated, a pack of incredibly dirty cards, the old woman without a word to either of them, shuffled and sifted them, according to some secret rule, and laid aside all but nine. These,
almost
, but not entirely, consisting of court cards, she spread out in a carefully concerted manner on the grass at her feet.

Muttering over them some extraordinary gibberish, out of which the two men could only catch the following words,

Witch-Bessie picked up these nine cards, and shuffled them long and fast.

She then handed them to Luke, face-downward, and bade him draw seven out of the nine. These she once more arranged, according to some occult plan, upon the grass, and pondered over them with wrinkled brow.

“’Tis as ’twould be! “she muttered at last.” Cards be wonderful crafty, though toads and efties, to my thinkin’, be better, and a viper’s ’innards be God’s very truth.”

Making, to Luke’s great disappointment, no further allusion to the result of her investigations, the old woman picked up the cards and went through the whole process again, in honour of Mr. Quincunx.

This time, after bending for several minutes over the solitary’s choice, she became more voluble.

“Thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie,” she said. “But there be thwartings and blastings. Three tears—three kisses—and a terrible journey. Us shan’t have ’ee long wi’ we, in these ’ere parts. Thee be marked and signed, master, by fallin’ stars and flyin’ birds. There’s good sound wood gone to ship’s keel wot’ll carry thee fast and far. Blastings and thwartings! But thy heart’s wish be thine, dearie.”

The humourous nostrils of Mr. Quincunx and the expressive curves of his bearded chin had twitched and quivered as this sorcery began, but the old
woman’s reference to a “terrible journey” clouded his countenance with blank dismay.

Luke pressed the sybil to be equally communicative with regard to his own fate, but the old woman
gathered
up her cards, twisted the same faded stalks round the packet, and returned it to the folds of her shawl. Then she struggled up upon her feet.

“Don’t leave us yet, Bessie,” said Luke. “I’ll bring you out something to eat presently.”

Witch-Bessie’s only reply to this hospitable
invitation
was confounding in its irrelevance. She picked up her draggled skirt with her two hands,
displaying
her unlaced boots and rumpled stockings, and then, throwing back her wizened head, with its rusty weather-bleached bonnet, and emitting a pallid laugh from her toothless gums, she proceeded to tread a sort of jerky measure, moving her old feet to the tune of a shrill ditty.

“Ye’ll both see I again, present,” she panted, when this performance was over, “but bide where ’ee be, bide where ’ee be now. Old Bessie’s said her say, and she be due long of Hullaway Cross, come noon.”

As she hobbled off to the neighbouring stile, Luke saw her kiss the tips of her fingers in the direction of the station-master’s house.

“She’s bidding Daddy James good-bye,” he thought. “What a world! ‘Looby, looby, looby!’ A proper Dance of Death for a son of my mother!”

L
UKE persuaded Mr. Quincunx to stay with him for the station-master’s Sunday dinner, and to stroll with him down to the churchyard in the afternoon to decide, in consultation with the sexton, upon the most suitable spot for his brother’s interment. The stone-carver was resolved that this spot should be removed as far as possible from the grave of their parents, and the impiety of this
resolution
was justified by the fact that Gideon’s tomb was crowded on both sides by less aggressive sleepers.

They finally selected a remote place under the southern wall, at the point where the long shadow of the tower, in the late afternoon, flung its
clear-outlined
battlements on the waving grass.

Luke continued to be entirely pleased with Mr. Quincunx’s tact and sympathy. He felt he could not have secured a better companion for this task of selecting the final resting-place of the brother of his soul. “Curse these fools,” he thought, “who rail against this excellent man!” What mattered it, after all, that the fellow hated what the world calls “work,” and loved a peaceful life removed from distraction?

The noble attributes of humour, of imagination, of intelligence,—how much more important they were, and conducive to the general human happiness, than
the mere power of making money! Compared with the delicious twists and diverting convolutions in Mr. Quincunx’s extraordinary brain, how dull, how insipid, seemed such worldly cleverness!

The death of his brother had had the effect of throwing these things into a new perspective. The Machiavellian astuteness, which, in himself, in Romer, in Mr. Taxater, and in many others, he had, until now, regarded as of supreme, value in the conduct of life, seemed to him, as he regretfully bade the recluse farewell and retraced his steps, far less,
essential
, far less important, than this imaginative
sensitiveness
to the astounding spectacle of the world.

He fancied he discerned in front of him, as he left the churchyard, the well-known figure of his newly affianced Annie, and he made a detour through the lane, to avoid her. He felt at that moment as though nothing in the universe were interesting or important except the sympathetic conversation of the friends of one’s natural choice—persons of that small, that fatally small circle, from which just now the centre seemed to have dropped out!

Girls were a distraction, a pastime, a lure, an intoxication; but a shock like this, casting one back upon life’s essential verities, threw even lust itself into the limbo of irrelevant things. All his recent preoccupation with the love of women seemed to him now, as though, in place of dreaming over the mystery of the great tide of life, hand in hand with initiated comrades, he were called upon to go
launching
little paper-boats on its surface, full of fretful anxiety as to whether they sank or floated.

Weighed down by the hopeless misery of his loss,
he made his way slowly back to the station-master’s house, too absorbed in his grief to speak to
anyone
.

After tea he became so wretched and lonely, that he decided to walk over to Hullaway on the chance of getting another glimpse of Witch-Bessie. Even the sympathy of the station-master’s wife got on his nerves and the romping of the children fretted and chafed him.

He walked fast, swinging his stick and keeping his eyes on the ground, his heart empty and desolate. He followed the very path by which Gladys and he, some few short weeks before, had returned in the track of their two friends, from the Hullaway stocks.

Arriving at the village green, with its pond, its elms, its raised pavement, and its groups of Sunday loiterers, he turned into the churchyard. As we have noted many times ere now, the appealing silence of these places of the dead had an invincible charm for him. It was perhaps a morbid tendency inherited from his mother, or, on the other hand, it may have been a pure aesthetic whim of his own, that led him, with so magnetic an attraction, towards these oases of mute patience, in the midst of the diurnal
activities
; but whatever the spell was, Luke had never found more relief in obeying it than he did at this present hour.

He sat down in their favourite corner and looked with interest at the various newly-blown wild-flowers, which a few weeks’ lapse had brought to light. How well he loved the pungent stringy stalks, the grey leaves, the flat sturdy flowers of the “achillea” or “yarrow”! Perhaps, above all the late summer blooms,
he preferred these—finding, in their very coarseness of texture and toughness of stem, something that reassured and fortified. They were so bitter in their herbal fragrance, so astringent in the tang of their pungent taste, that they suggested to him the kind of tonic cynicism, the sort of humorous courage and gay disdain, with which it was his constant hope to come at last to accept life.

It pleased him, above all when he found these plants tinged with a delicious pink, as though the juice of raspberries had been squeezed over them, and it was precisely this tint he noticed now in a large clump of them, growing on the sun-warmed grave of a certain Hugh and Constance Foley, former occupants of the old Manor House behind him.

He wondered if this long-buried Hugh—a
mysterious
and shadowy figure, about whom James and he had often woven fantastic histories—had felt as forlorn as he felt now, when he lost his Constance. Could a Constance, or an Annie, or a Phyllis, ever leave quite the void behind them such as now ached and throbbed within him? Yes, he supposed so. Men planted their heart’s loves in many various soils, and when the hand of fate tugged them away, it mattered little whether it was chalk, or sand, or loam, that clung about the roots!

He looked long and long at the sunlit mounds, over which the tombstones leaned at every conceivable angle and upon which some had actually fallen
prostrate
. These neglected monuments, and these tall uncut grasses and flowers, had always seemed to him preferable to the trim neatness of an enclosure
like that of Athelston, which resembled the lawn of a gentleman’s house.

James had often disputed with him on this point, arguing, in a spirit of surly contradiction, in favour of the wondrous effect of those red Athelston roses hanging over clear-mown turf. The diverse
suggestiveness
of graveyards was one of the brother’s
best-loved
topics, and innumerable cigarettes had they both consumed, weighing this subject, on this very spot.

Once more the hideous finality of the thing pierced the heart of Luke with a devastating pang. On
Wednesday
next,—that is, after the lapse of two brief days,—he would bid farewell, for ever and ever and ever, to the human companion with whom he had shared all he cared for in life!

He remembered a little quarrel he once had with James, long ago, in this very place, and how it had been the elder and not the younger who had made the first overtures of reconciliation, and how James had given him an old pair of silver links,—he was wearing them at that moment!—as a kind of
peace-offering
. He recollected what a happy evening they had spent together after that event, and how they had read “Thus spake Zarathustra” in the old
formidable
English translation—the mere largeness of the volume answering to the largeness of the philosopher’s thought.

Never again would they two “take on them,” in the sweet Shakespearean phrase, “the mystery of things, as though they were God’s spies.”

Luke set himself to recall, one by one, innumerable little incidents of their life together. He remembered
various occasions in which, partly out of pure
contrariness
, but partly also out of a certain instinctive bias in his blood, he had defended their father against his brother’s attacks. He recalled one strange
conversation
they had had, under the withy-stumps of Badger’s Bottom, as they returned through the dusk of a November day, from a long walk over the southern hills. It had to do with the appearance of a cloud-swept crescent moon above the Auber woods.

James had maintained that were he a pagan of the extinct polytheistic faith, he would have
worshipped
the moon, and willingly offered her, night by night,—he used the pious syllables of the great hedonist,—her glittering wax tapers upon the sacred wheaten cake. Luke, on the contrary, had sworn that the sun, and no lesser power, was the god of his idolatry, and he imagined himself in place of his brother’s wax candles, pouring forth, morning by morning, a rich libation of gold wine to that bright lord of life.

This instinctive division of taste between the two, had led, over and over again, to all manner of friendly dissension.

Luke recalled how often he had rallied James upon his habit of drifting into what the younger brother pertinently described as a “translunar mood.” He was “translunar” enough now, at any rate; but now it was in honour of that other “lady of the night,” of that dreadful “double” of his moon-goddess—the dark pomegranate-bearer—that the candles must be lit!

Luke revived in his mind, as he watched the
slow-shifting
shadows move from grave to grave, all those
indescribable “little things” of their every-day life together, the loss of which seemed perhaps worst of all. He recalled how on gusty December evenings they would plod homeward from some Saturday afternoon’s excursion to Yeoborough, and how the cheerful firelight from the station-master’s house would greet them as they crossed the railway.

So closely had their thoughts and sensations grown together, that there were many little poignant
memories
, out of the woven texture of which he found himself quite unable to disentangle the imaginative threads that were due to his brother, from such as were the evocation of his own temperament.

One such concentrated moment, of exquisite
memory
, he associated with an old farm-house on the edge of the road leading from Hullaway to
Rogerstown
. This road,—a forlorn enough highway of Roman origin, dividing a level plain of desolate
rain-flooded
meadows,—was one of their favourite haunts. “Halfway House,” as the farm-dwelling was called, especially appealed to them, because of its romantic and melancholy isolation.

Luke remembered how he had paused with his brother one clear frosty afternoon when the puddles by the road-side were criss-crossed by little broken stars of fresh-formed ice, and had imagined how they would feel if such a place belonged to them by
hereditary
birthright, what they would feel were they even now returning there, between the tall evergreens at the gate, to spend a long evening over a log fire, with mulled claret on the hob, and cards and books on the table, and a great white Persian cat,—this was James’ interpolation!—purring softly, and
rubbing 
its silky sides against Chinese vases full of rose-leaves.

Strange journeys his mind took, that long
unforgettable
afternoon,—the first of his life spent
without
his brother! He saw before him, at one moment, a little desolate wooden pier, broken by waves and weather, somewhere on the Weymouth coast. The
indescribable
pathos of things outworn and done with, of things abandoned by man and ill-used by nature, had given to this derelict pile of drift-wood a curious prominence in his House of Memory. He remembered the look with which James had regarded it, and how the wind had whistled through it and how they had tried in vain to light their cigarettes under its shelter.

At another moment his mind swung back to the daily routine in their pleasant lodging. He recalled certain spring mornings when they had risen together at dawn and had crept stealthily out, for fear of waking their landlady. He vividly remembered the peculiar smell of moss and primroses with which the air seemed full on one of these occasions.

The place Luke had chosen for summoning up all these ghosts of the past held him with such a spell that he permitted the church-bells to ring and the little congregation to assemble for the evening service without moving or stirring. “Hugh and Constance Foley” he kept repeating to himself, as the priest’s voice, within the sacred building, intoned the prayers. The sentiment of the plaintive hymn with which the service closed,—he hardly moved or stirred for the brief hour of the liturgy’s progress,—brought tears, the first he had shed since his brother’s death,
to this wanton faun’s eyes. What is there, he thought, in these wistful tunes, and impossible, too-sweet words, that must needs hit the most cynical of sceptics?

He let the people shuffle out and drift away, and the grey-haired parson and his silk-gowned wife
follow
them and vanish, and still he did not stir. For some half-an-hour longer he remained in the same position, his chin upon his knees, staring gloomily in front of him. He was still seated so, when, to the eyes of an observer posted on the top of the tower, two persons, the first a woman and the
second
a man, would have been observed approaching, by a rarely-traversed field-path, the side of the
enclosure
most remote from Hullaway Green.

The path upon which these figures advanced was interrupted at certain intervals by tall elm-trees, and it would have been clear to our imaginary watcher upon the tower that the second of the two was glad enough of the shelter of these trees, of which it was evident he intended to make use, did the first figure turn and glance backward.

Had such a sentinel been possessed of local
knowledge
he would have had no difficulty in recognizing the first of these persons as Gladys Romer and the second as Mr. Clavering.

Gladys had, in fact, gone alone to the evening service, on the ground of celebrating the close of her baptismal day. Immediately after the service she had slipped off down the street leading to the
railroad
, directing her steps towards Hullaway, whither a sure instinct told her Luke had wandered.