Wood and Stone (62 page)

There must have been some instantaneous
reciprocity
in the eccentric man’s grey eyes, for the young girl turned back after they had passed, and throwing the shawl away from her head, fixed upon him what seemed a deliberate and beseeching look of
appeal
.

Mr. Quincunx was so completely carried out of his normal self by this imploring look that he went so far as to answer its inarticulate prayer by a wave of his hand, and by a sign that indicated,—whether she understood it or not,—that he intended to render her assistance.

In his relations with Lacrima Mr. Quincunx was always remotely conscious that the girl’s character was stronger than his own, and—Pariah-like—this had the effect of lessening the emotion he felt towards her.

But now—in the look of the little Dolores—there was an appeal from a weakness and helplessness much more desperate than his own,—an appeal to him from the deepest gulfs of human dependence. The glance she had given him burned in his brain like a coal of white fire. It seemed to cry out to him from all the flotsam and jetsam, all the drift and wreckage of everything that had ever been drowned, submerged, and stranded, by the pitilessness of Life, since the foundation of the world.

The child’s look had indeed the same effect upon Mr. Quincunx that the look of his Master had upon
the fear-stricken Apostle, in the hall of Caiaphas the high priest. In one heart-piercing stab it brought to his overpowered consciousness a vision of all the victims of cruelty who had ever cried aloud for help since the generations of men began their tragic journey.

Perhaps to all extremely sensitive natures of Mr. Quincunx’s type, a type of morbidly self-conscious weakness as well as sensitiveness, the electric stir produced by beauty and sex can only reach a
culmination
when the medium of its appearance approximates to the extreme limit of fragility and
helplessness
.

Hell itself, so to speak, had to display to him its span-long babes, before he could be aroused to
descend
and “harrow” it! But once roused in him, this latent spirit of the pitiful Son of Man became
formidable
, reckless, irresistible. The very absence in him of the usual weight of human solidity and “character” made him the more porous to this divine mood.

Anyone who watched him returning hastily to his cottage from the garden-gate would have been amazed by the change in his countenance. He looked and moved like a man under a blinding illumination. So must the citizen of Tarsus have looked, when he staggered into the streets of Damascus.

He literally ran into his kitchen, snatched up his hat and stick, poured a glass of milk down his throat, put a couple of biscuits into his pocket, and re-issued, ready for his strange pursuit. He hurried up the lane to the first gate that offered itself, and passing: into the field continued the chase on the further side of the hedge.

The old man evidently found the hill something of an effort, for it was not long before Mr. Quincunx overtook them.

He passed them by unremarked, and continued his advance along the hedgerow till he reached the summit of the ridge between Wild Pine and Seven Ashes. Here, concealed behind a clump of larches, he awaited their approach. To his surprise, they entered one of the fields on the opposite side of the road, and began walking across it.

Mr. Quincunx watched them. In a corner of the field they were crossing lay a spacious hollow,—once the bed of a pond,—but now quite dry and
overgrown
with moss and clover.

Old Flick’s instinct led him to this spot, as one well adapted to the purpose he had in mind, both by reason of its absolute seclusion and by reason of its smooth turf-floor.

Mr. Quincunx waited, till their two figures vanished into this declivity, and then he himself crossed the field in their track.

Having reached the mossy level of the vanished pond,—a place which seemed as though Nature
herself
had designed it with a view to his present
intention
,—Old Flick assumed a less friendly air towards his captive. A psychologist interested in searching out the obscure workings of derelict and submerged souls, would have come to the speedy conclusion as he watched the old man’s cadaverous face that the spirit which at present animated his corpse-like body was one that had little commiseration or compunction in it.

The young Dolores had not, it seemed, to deal at
this moment with an ordinary human scoundrel, but with a faded image of humanity galvanized into life by some conscienceless Larva.

In proportion as this unearthly obsession grew upon Old Flick, his natural countenance grew more and more dilapidated and withered. Innumerable years seemed suddenly added to the burden he already carried. The lines of his face assumed a hideous and Egyptian immobility; only his eyes, as he turned them upon his companion, were no longer colourless.

“Doll,” said he, “now thee must try thee’s steps, or ’twill be the worse for thee!”

The girl only answered by flinging herself down on her knees before him, and pouring forth unintelligible supplications.

“No more o’ this,” cried the old man; “no more o’ this! I’ve got to learn ’ee to dance,—and learn ’ee to dance I will. Ye’ll have to go on them boards come noon, whether ’ee will or no!”

The child only clasped her hands more tightly together, and renewed her pleading.

It would have needed the genius of some supreme painter, and of such a painter in an hour of sheer insanity, to have done justice to the extraordinary expression that crossed the countenance of Old Flick at that moment. The outlines of his face seemed to waver and decompose. None but an artist who had, like the insatiable Leonardo, followed the very dead into their forlorn dissolution, could have indicated the setting of his eyes; and his eyes themselves, madness alone could have depicted.

With a sudden vicious jerk the old man snatched the shawl from the girl’s shoulders, flung it on the
ground, and seizing her by the wrists pulled her up upon her feet.

“Dance, ye baggage!” he cried hoarsely;—“dance, I tell ee!”

It was plain that the luckless waif understood clearly enough now what was required of her, and it was also plain that she recognized that the moment for supplication had gone by. She stepped back a pace or two upon the smooth turf, and slipping off her unlaced shoes,—shoes far too large for her small feet,—she passed the back of her hand quickly across her eyes, shook her hair away from her
forehead
, and began a slow, pathetic little dance.

“Higher!” cried Old Flick in an excited voice, beating the air with his hand and humming a strange snatch of a tune that might have inspired the dances of Polynesian cannibals. “Higher, I tell ’ee.”

The girl felt compelled to obey; and putting one hand on her hip and lifting up her skirt with the other, she proceeded, shyly and in forlorn silence, to dance an old Neapolitan folk-dance, such as might be witnessed, on any summer evening, by the shores of Amalfi or Sorrento.

It was at this moment that Mr. Quincunx made his appearance against the sky-line above them. He looked for one brief second at the girl’s bare arms, waving curls, and light-swinging body, and then leapt down between them.

All nervousness, all timidity, seemed to have fallen away from him like a snake’s winter-skin under the spring sun. He seized the child’s hand with an air of indescribable gentleness and authority, and made so menacing and threatening a gesture that Old
Flick, staggering backwards, nearly fell to the ground.

“Whose child is this?” he demanded sternly, soothing the frightened little dancer with one hand, while with the other he shook his cane in the direction of the gasping and protesting old man.

“Whose child is this? You’ve stolen her, you old rascal! You’re no Italian,—anyone can see that! You’re a damned old tramp, and if you weren’t so old and ugly I’d beat you to death; do you hear?—to death, you villain! Whose child is she? Can’t you speak? Take care; I’m badly tempted to make you taste this,—to make
you
skip and dance a little!

“What do you say? Job Love’s circus? Well,—he’s not an Italian either, is he? So if you haven’t stolen her, he has.”

He turned to the child, stooping over her with infinite tenderness, and folding the shawl of which she had again possessed herself, with hands as gentle as a mother’s, about her shoulders and head.

“Where are your parents, my darling?” he asked, adding with a flash of amazing presence of mind,—“your ‘padre’ and ‘madre’?”

The girl seemed to get the drift of the question, and with a pitiful little smile pointed earth-ward, and made a sweeping gesture with both her hands, as if to indicate the passing of death’s wings.

“Dead?—both dead, eh?” muttered Mr.
Quincunx
. “And these rascals who’ve got hold of you are villains and rogues? Damned rogues! Damned villains!”

He paused and muttered to himself. “What the devil’s the Italian for a god-forsaken rascal? —
‘Cattivo!’ ‘Tutto cattivo!’—the whole lot of them a set of confounded scamps!”

The child nodded her head vigorously.

“You see,” he cried, turning to Old Flick, “she disowns you all. This is clearly a most knavish piece of work! What were you doing to the child? eh? eh? eh?” Mr. Quincunx accompanied these final syllables with renewed flourishes of his stick in the air.

Old Flick retreated still further away, his legs shaking under him. “Here,—you can clear out of this! Do you understand? You can clear out of this; and go back to your damned master, and tell him I’m going to send the police after him!

“As for this girl, I’m going to take her home with me. So off you go,—you old reprobate; and
thankful
you may be that I haven’t broken every bone in your body! I’ve a great mind to do it now. Upon my soul I’ve a great mind to do it!

“Shall I beat him into a jelly for you,—my darling? Shall I make him skip and dance for you?”

The child seemed to understand his gestures, if not his words; for she clung passionately to his hands, and pressing them to her lips, covered them with kisses; shaking her head at the same time, as much as to say, “Old Flick is nothing. Let Old Flick go to the devil, as long as I can stay with you!” In some such manner as this, at any rate, Mr. Quincunx interpreted her words.

“Sheer off, then, you old scoundrel! Shog off back to your confounded circus! And when you’ve got there, tell your friends,—Job Love and his gang,—that if they want this little one they’d better come and fetch her!

“Dead Man’s Lane,—that’s where I live. It’s easily enough found; and so is the police-station in Yeoborough,—as you and your damned kidnappers shall discover before you’ve done with me!”

Uttering these words in a voice so menacing that the old man shook like an aspen-leaf, Mr. Quincunx took the girl by the hand, and, ascending the grassy slope, walked off with her across the field.

Old Flick seemed reduced to a condition
bordering
upon imbecility. He staggered up out of that unpropitious hollow, and stood stock-still, like one petrified, until they were out of sight. Then, very slowly and mumbling incoherently to himself, he made his way back towards the village.

He did not even turn his head as he passed Mr. Quincunx’s cottage. Indeed, it is extremely doubtful how far he had recognized him as the person they encountered on their way, and still more doubtful how far he had heard or understood, when the tenant of Dead Man’s Lane indicated the place of his abode.

The sudden transformation of the timid recluse into a formidable man of action did not end with his triumphant retirement to his familiar domain. Some mysterious fibre in his complicated temperament had been struck, and continued to be struck, by the little Dolores, which not only rendered him indifferent to personal danger, but willing and happy to
encounter
it.

The event only added one more proof to the sage dictum of the Chinese philosopher,—that you can never tell of what a man is capable until he is
stone-dead
.

D
URING the hours when Mr. Quincunx was undergoing this strange experience, several other human brains under the roofs of
Nevilton
were feeling the pressure of extreme perturbation.

Gladys, after a gloomy breakfast, which was rendered more uncomfortable, not only by her father’s chaffing references to the approaching ceremony, but by a letter from Dangelis, had escaped to her room to be assisted by Lacrima in dressing for the confirmation.

In his letter the artist declared his intention of spending that night at the Gloucester Hotel in
Weymouth
, and begged his betrothed to forgive this delay in his return to her side.

This communication caused Gladys many tremors of disquietude. Could it be possible that the
American
had found out something and that he had gone to Weymouth to meditate at leisure upon his course of action?

In any case this intimation of a delay in his return irritated the girl. It struck her in her tenderest spot. It was a direct flouting of her magnetic power. It was an insult to her sex-vanity.

She had seen nothing of Luke since their Sunday’s excursion; and as Lacrima, with cold submissive fingers, helped her to arrange her white dress and
virginal veil, she could hear the sound of the bell tolling for James Andersen’s funeral.

Mingled curiously enough with this melancholy vibration falling at protracted intervals upon the air, like the stroke of some reiterated hammer of doom, came another sound, a sound of a completely
opposite
character,—the preluding strains, namely, of the steam roundabouts of Porter’s Universal Show.

It was as though on one side of the village the angel of death were striking an iron-threatening gong, while, on the other side, the demons of life were howling a brazen defiance.

The association of the two sounds as they reached her at this critical hour brought the figure of Luke vividly and obsessingly into her mind. How well she knew the sort of comment he would make upon the bizarre combination! Beneath the muslin frills of her virginal dress,—a dress that made her look fairer and younger than usual,—her heart ached with sick longing for her evasive lover.

The wheel had indeed come full circle for the
fair-haired
girl. She could not help the thought recurring again and again, as Lacrima’s light fingers adjusted her veil, that the next time she dressed in this manner it would be for her wedding-day. Her one profound consolation lay in the knowledge that her cousin, eyen more deeply than herself, dreaded the approach of that fatal Thursday.

Her hatred for the pale-cheeked Italian
re-accumulated
every drop of its former venom, as with an air of affectionate gratitude she accepted her assistance.

It is a psychological peculiarity of certain human beings that the more they hate, the more they crave,
with a curious perverted instinct, some sort of physical contact with the object of their hatred.

Every touch of Lacrima’s hand increased the intensity of Gladys’ loathing; and yet, so powerful is the instinct to which I refer, she lost no opportunity of accentuating the contact between them, letting their fingers meet again and again, and even their breath, and throwing back her rounded chin to make it easier for those hated wrists to busy themselves about her throat. Her general air was an air of playful passivity; but at one moment, imprinting a kiss on the girl’s arm as, in the process of arranging her veil, it brushed across her cheek, she seemed almost anxious to convey to Lacrima the full implication of her real feeling.

Never has a human caress been so electric with the vibrations of antipathy, as was that kiss. She
followed
up this signal of animosity by a series of feline taunts relative to John Goring, one of which, from its illuminated insight into the complex strata of the girl’s soul, delighted her by its effect.

Lacrima winced under it, as if under the sting of a lash, and a burning flood of scarlet suffused her cheeks. She dropped her hands and stepped back, uttering a fierce vow that nothing—nothing on earth—would induce her to accompany a girl who could say such things, to such a ceremony!

“No, I wouldn’t,—I wouldn’t!” cried Gladys mockingly. “I wouldn’t dream of coming with me! Tomorrow week, anyway, we’re bound to go to church side by side. Father wanted to drive with me then, you know, and to let mother go with you,—but I wouldn’t hear of it! I said they must go in one
carriage, and you and I in another, so that our last drive together we should be quite by ourselves. You’ll like that, won’t you, darling?”

Lacrima’s only answer to this was to turn her back to her cousin, and begin putting on her hat and gloves.

“I know where you’re going,” said Gladys. “You’re going to see your dear Maurice. Give him my love! I should be ashamed to let such a wretched coward come near me.

“James—poor boy!—was a fellow of a different metal. He’d some spirit in him. Listen! When that bell stops tolling they’ll be carrying him into the church. I expect you’re thinking now, darling, that it would have been better” if you’d treated him differently. Of course you know it’s you that killed him? Oh, nobody else! Just little Lacrima and her coy, demure ways!

“
I’ve
never killed a man. I can say that, at all events.

“That’s right! Run off to her dear Maurice,—her dear brave Maurice! Perhaps he’ll take her on his knees again, and she’ll play the sweet little
innocent
,—like that day when I peeped through the window!”

This final dart had hardly reached its objective before Lacrima without attempting any retort rushed from the room.

“I
will
go and see Maurice. I will! I will!” she murmured to herself as she ran down the broad oak stair-case, and slipped out by the East door.

Simultaneously with these events, a scene of equal dramatic intensity, though of a very different
character
,
was being enacted in the vicarage drawing-room.

Vennie, as we have noted, had resolved to postpone for the present her reception into the Catholic Church. She had also resolved that nothing on earth should induce her to reveal to her mother her change of creed until the thing was an accomplished fact. The worst, however, of the kind of mental suppression in which she had been living of late, is that it tends to produce a volcanic excitement of the nerves, liable at any moment to ungovernable upheavals. Quite little things—mere straws and bagatelles—are enough to set this eruption beginning; and when once it begins, the accumulated passion of the long days of
fermentation
gives the explosion a horrible force.

One perpetual annoyance to Vennie was her mother’s persistent fondness for family prayers. It seemed to the girl as though Valentia insisted on this performance, not so much out of a desire to serve God, as out of a sense of what was due to herself as the mistress of a well-conducted establishment.

Vennie always fancied she discerned a peculiar tone of self-satisfaction in her mother’s voice, as, rather loudly, and extremely clearly, she read her liturgical selections to the assembled servants.

On this particular morning the girl had avoided the performance of this rite, by leaving her room earlier than usual and taking refuge in the furthest of the vicarage orchards. Backwards and forwards she walked, in that secluded place, with her hands behind her and her head bent, heedless of the
drenching
dew which covered every grass-blade and of the heavy white mists that still hung about the
tree-trunks
. She was obliged to return to her room and
change her shoes and stockings before joining her mother at breakfast, but not before she had prayed a desperate prayer, down there among the misty trees, for the eternal rest of James Andersen’s soul.

This little incident of her absence from prayers was the direct cause of the unfortunate scene that followed.

Valentia hardly spoke to her daughter while the meal proceeded, and when at last it was over, she retired to the drawing-room and began writing letters.

This was an extremely ill-omened sign to anyone who knew Mrs. Seldom’s habits. Under normal conditions, her first proceeding after breakfast was to move to the kitchen, where she engaged in a long culinary debate with both cook and gardener; a course of action which was extremely essential, as without it,—so bitter was the feud between these two worthies,—it is unlikely that there would have been any
vegetables
at all, either for lunch or dinner. When anything occurred to throw her into a mood of especially good spirits, she would pass straight out of the French window on to the front lawn, and armed with a pair of formidable garden-scissors would make a selection of flowers and leaves appropriate to a festival temper.

But this adjournment at so early an hour to the task of letter-writing indicated that Valentia was in a condition of mind, which in anyone but a lady of her distinction and breeding could have been called
nothing
less than a furious rage. For of all things in the world, Mrs. Seldom most detested this business of writing letters; and therefore,—with that perverse self-punishing instinct, which is one of the most artful weapons of offence given to refined
gentle-women
,
—she took grim satisfaction in setting herself down to write; thus producing chaos in the kitchen, where the gardener refused to obey the cook, and miserable remorse in the heart of Vennie, who
wandered
up and down the lawn meditating a penitential apology.

Satisfied in her heart that she was causing universal annoyance and embarrassment by her proceeding, and yet quite confident that there was nothing but what was proper and natural in her writing letters at nine o’clock in the morning, Valentia began, by gentle degrees, to recover her lost temper.

The only real sedative to thoroughly aggravated nerves, is the infliction of similar aggravation upon the nerves of others. This process is like the laying on of healing ointment; and the more extended the disturbance which we have the good fortune to create, the sooner we ourselves recover our equanimity.

Valentia had already cast several longing glances through the window at the heavy sunshine falling mistily on the asters and petunias, and in another moment she would probably have left her letter and joined her daughter in the garden, had not Vennie anticipated any such movement by entering the room herself.

“I ought to make you understand, mother,” the girl began as soon as she stepped in, speaking in that curious strained voice which people assume when they have worked themselves up to a pitch of nervous excitement, “that when I don’t appear at prayers, it isn’t because I’m in a sulky temper, or in any mad haste to get out of doors. It’s—it’s for a different reason.”

Valentia gazed at her in astonishment. The tone in which Vennie spoke was so tense, her eyes shone with such a strange brilliance, and her look was
altogether
so abnormal, that Mrs. Seldom completely forget her injured priestess-vanity, and waited in sheer maternal alarm for the completion of the girl’s announcement.

“Its because I’ve made up my mind to become a Catholic, and Catholics aren’t allowed to attend any other kind of service than their own.”

Valentia rose to her feet and looked at her daughter in blank dismay. Her first feeling was one of
overpowering
indignation against Mr. Taxater, to whose treacherous influence she felt certain this madness was mainly due.

There was a terrible pause during which Vennie, leaning against the back of a chair, was conscious that both herself and her mother were trembling from head to foot. The soft murmur of wood-pigeons wafted in from the window, was now blended with two other sounds, the sound of the tolling of the church-bell and the sound of the music of Mr. Love’s circus, testing the efficiency of its
roundabouts
.

“So this is what it has come to, is it?” said the old lady at last. “And I suppose the next thing you’ll tell me, in this unkind, inconsiderate way, is that you’ve decided to become a nun!”

Vennie made a little movement with her head.

“You have?” cried Valentia, pale with anger. “You have made up your mind to do that? Well—I wouldn’t have believed it of you, Vennie! In spite of everything I’ve done for you; in spite of everything 
I’ve taught you; in spite of everything I’ve prayed for;—you can go and do this! Oh, you’re an unkind, ungrateful girl! But I know that look on your face. I’ve known it from your childhood. When you look like that there’s no hope of moving you. Go on, then! Do as you wish to do. Leave your mother in her old age, and destroy the last hope of our family. I won’t speak another word. I know nothing I can say will change you. “She sank down upon the chintz-covered sofa and covered her face with her hands.

Vennie cursed herself for her miserable want of tact. What demon was it that had tempted her to break her resolution? Then, suddenly, as she looked at her mother swaying to and fro on the couch, a strange impulse of hard inflexible obstinacy rose up in her.

These wretched human affections,—so unbalanced and selfish,—what a relief to escape from them altogether! Like the passing on its way, across a temperate ocean, of some polar iceberg, there drove, at that moment, through Vennie’s consciousness, a wedge of frozen, adamantine contempt for all these human, too-human clingings and clutchings which would fain imprison the spirit and hold it down with soft-strangling hands.

In her deepest heart she turned almost savagely away from this grey-haired woman, sitting there so hurt in her earthly affections and ambitions. She uttered a fierce mental invocation to that other Mother,—her whose heart, pierced by seven swords, had submitted to God’s will without a groan!

Valentia, who, it must be remembered, had not
only married a Seldom, but was herself one of that breed, felt at that moment as though this girl of hers were reverting to some mad strain of Pre-
Elizabethan
fanaticism. There was something mediæval about Vennie’s obstinacy, as there was something mediæval about the lines of her face. Valentia recalled a portrait she had once seen of an ancestor of theirs in the days before the Reformation. He, the great Catholic Baron, had possessed the same thin profile and the same pinched lips. It was a curious revenge, the poor lady thought, for those evicted Cistercians, out of whose plundered house the
Nevilton
mansion had been built, that this fate, of all fates, should befall the last of the Seldoms!