Luke turned and glanced at his brother. He could distinguish his motionless form, lying as still as ever, beyond the dark shape of his father’s formidable tombstone. There was no need to disturb him yet. The morrow was Sunday, and they could therefore be as late as they pleased.
He called softly to the patient watcher. She started violently at hearing his voice, and turning round, peered into the darkness. By degrees she made out his form, and waved her hand to him.
He beckoned her to approach. She shook her head, and indicated by a gesture that she was expecting the appearance of her father. Once more he called her, making what seemed to her, in the obscurity, a sign that he had something important to communicate. Curiosity overcame piety in the heart of the daughter of Bill Santon and she ran across the road.
“Why, you silly thing!” whispered the crafty Luke, “your father’s been gone this half hour! He went a bit of the way home with Sam Lintot. Old Sam will find a nice little surprise waiting for him when he gets back. I reckon he’ll send your father home-along sharp enough.”
It was Luke’s habit, in conversation with the villagers, to drop lightly into many of their provincial phrases, though both he and his brother used, thanks to their mother’s training, as good English as any of the gentlefolk of Nevilton.
The influence of association in the matter of language might have afforded endless interesting matter to the student of words, supposing such a one had been able to overhear the conversations of these brothers with their various acquaintances. Poor Ninsy, for instance, fell naturally into the local dialect when she talked to James in her own house; and assumed, with equal facility, her loved one’s more colourless manner of speech, when addressing him on ground less familiar to her.
As a matter of fact the universal spread of board-school education in that corner of the country had begun to sap the foundations of the old local peculiarities. Where these survived, in the younger generation, they survived side by side with the newer tricks of speech. The Andersens’ girl-friends were, all of them, in reality, expert bilinguists. They spoke the King’s English, and they spoke the Nevilton English, with equal ease, if with unequal expressiveness.
The shrewd fillip to her curiosity, which Luke’s reference to Lintot’s home-coming had given, allured Phyllis into accepting without protest his audacious invention about her father. The probability of such an occurrence seemed sealed with certainty, when turning, at a sign from her friend, she saw, against the lighted window the burly form of the landlord engaged in closing his shutters. It was not the custom, as Phyllis well knew, of this methodical dispenser of Dionysian joys to “shutter up house,” as he called it, until every guest had departed. How could she guess—little deluded maid!—that, stretched upon the floor in the front parlor, stared at by the landlord’s three small sons, was the comatose body of her worthy parent breathing like one of Mr. Goring’s pigs?
“Tain’t no good my waiting here then,” she whispered. “What do ’ee mean by Sam Lintot’s being surprised-like? Be Ninsy taken with her heart again?”
“Let me help you over here,” answered the stone-carver, “that Priory wench was talking, just now, just across yon wall. She’ll be hearing what we say if we don’t move on a bit.”
“Us don’t mind what a maid like her do hear, do us, Luke dear?” whispered the girl in answer. “Give me a kiss, sonny, and let me be getting home-along!”
She stood on tiptoe and raised her hands over the top of the wall. Luke seized her wrists, and retained them in a vicious clutch.
“Put your foot into one of those holes,” he said, “and we’ll soon have you across.”
Unwilling to risk a struggle in such a spot, and not really at all disinclined for an adventure, the girl obeyed him, and after being hoisted up on the wall, was lifted quickly down on the other side, and enclosed in Luke’s gratified arms. The amorous stone-carver remembered long afterwards the peculiar thrill of almost chaste pleasure which the first touch of her cold cheeks gave him, as she yielded to his embrace.
“Is Nin Lintot bad again?” she enquired, drawing herself away at last.
Luke nodded. “You won’t see her about, this week—or next week—or the week after,” he said. “She’s pretty far gone, this time, I’m afraid.”
Phyllis rendered to her acquaintance’s misfortune the tribute of a conventional murmur.
“Oh, let’s go and look at where they be burying Jimmy Pringle!” she suddenly whispered, in an awestruck, excited tone.
“What!” cried Luke, “you don’t mean to say he’s dead,—the old man?”
“Where’s ’t been to, then, these last days?” she enquired. “He died yesterday morning and they be going to bury him on Monday. ’Twill be a monstrous large funeral. Can’t be but you’ve heard tell of Jimmy’s being done for.” She added, in an amazed and bewildered tone.
“I’ve been very busy this last week,” said Luke.
“You didn’t seem very busy this afternoon, when you were with Annie and me up at station-field,” she exclaimed, with a mischievous little laugh. Then in a changed voice,” Let’s go and see where they’re going to put him. It’s somewhere over there, under South Wall.”
They moved cautiously hand in hand between the dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their shoes.
Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through her. “There it is. Look!” she whispered.
They advanced a step or two, and found themselves confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an ugly heap of ejected earth.
“Oh, how awful it do look, doesn’t it, Luke darling?” she murmured, clinging closely to him.
He put his arm round the girl’s waist, and together, under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the resting-place of the generations.
“Its queer to think,” remarked Luke pensively, “that just as we stand looking on this, so, when we’re dead, other people will stand over our graves, and we know nothing and care nothing!”
“They dug this out this morning,” said Phyllis, more concerned with the immediate drama than with general meditations of mortality. “Old Ben Fursling’s son did it, and my father helped him in his dinner-hour. They said another hot day like this would make the earth too hard.”
Luke moved forward, stepping cautiously over the dark upturned soil. He paused at the extreme edge of the gaping recess.
“What’ll you give me,” he remarked turning to his companion, “if I climb down into it?”
“Don’t talk like that, Luke,” protested the girl. “’Tisn’t lucky to say them things. I wouldn’t give you nothing. I’d run straight away and leave you.”
The young man knelt down at the edge of the hole, and with the elegant cane he had carried in his hand all that afternoon, fumbled profanely in its dusky depths. Suddenly, to the girl’s absolute horror, he scrambled round, and deliberately let himself down into the pit. She breathed a sigh of unutterable relief, when she observed his head and shoulders still above the level of the ground.
“It’s all right,” he whispered, “they’ve left it half-finished. I suppose they’ll do the rest on Monday.”
“Please get out of it, Luke,” the girl pleaded. “I don’t like to see you there. It make me think you’re standing on Jimmy Pringle.”
Luke obeyed her and emerged from the earth almost as rapidly as he had descended.
When he was once more by her side, Phyllis gave a little half-deliberate shudder of exquisite terror. “Fancy,” she whispered, clinging tightly to him, “if you was to drag me to that hole, and put me down there! I think I should die of fright.”
This conscious playing with her own girlish fears was a very interesting characteristic in Phyllis Santon. Luke had recognized something of the sort in her before, and now he wondered vaguely, as he glanced from the obscurity of Nevilton Churchyard to the brilliant galaxy of luminous splendour surrounding the constellation Pegasu
s, whether she really wanted him to take her at her word.
His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices at the inn-door. They both held their breath, listening intently.
“There’s father!” murmured the girl. “He must have come back from Lintot’s and be trying to get into the public again! Come and help me over the wall, Luke darling. Only don’t let anybody see us.”
As they hurried across the enclosure, Phyllis whispered in his ears a remark that seemed to him either curiously irrelevant, or inspired in an occult manner by psychic telepathy. She had lately refrained from any reference to Lacrima. The Italian’s friendliness to her under the Hullaway elms had made her reticent upon this subject. On this occasion, however, though quite ignorant of James’ presence in the churchyard, she suddenly felt compelled to say to Luke, in an intensely serious voice:
“If some of you clever ones don’t stop that marriage of Master Goring, there’ll be some more holes dug in this place! There be some things what them above never will allow.”
He helped her over the wall, and watched her overtake her staggering parent, who had already reeled some distance down the road. Then he returned to his brother and roused him from his sleep. James was sulky and irritable at being so brusquely restored to consciousness, but the temperature of his mind appeared as normal and natural as ever.
They quitted the place without further conversation, and strode off in silence up the village street. The perpendicular slabs of the crowded head stones, and the yet more numerous mounds that had neither name nor memory, resumed their taciturn and lonely watch.
To no human eyes could be made visible the poor thin shade that was once Jimmy Pringle, as it swept, bat-like, backwards and forwards, across the dew-drenched grass. But the shade itself, endowed with more perception than had been permitted to it while imprisoned in the “muddy vesture” of our flesh and blood, became aware, in its troubled flight, of a singular spiritual occurrence.
Rising from the base of that skull-crowned monument, two strange and mournful phantoms flitted waveringly, like huge ghost-moths, along the protruding edge of the church-roof. Two desolate and querulous voices, like the voices of conflicting winds through the reeds of some forlorn salt-marsh, quivered across the listening fields.
“It is strong and unconquered—the great heart of my Hill,” one voice wailed out. “It draws them. It drives them. The earth is with it; the planets are for it, and all their enchantments cannot prevail against it!”
“The leaves may fall and the trees decay,” moaned the second voice, “but where the sap has once flowed, Love must triumph.”
The fluttering shadow of Jimmy Pringle fled in terror from these strange sounds, and took refuge among the owls in the great sycamore of the Priory meadow. A falling meteorite swept downwards from the upper spaces of the sky and lost itself behind the Wild Pine ridge.
“Strength and cunning,” the first voice wailed forth again, “alone possess their heart’s desire. All else is vain and empty.”
“Love and Sacrifice,” retorted the other, “outlast all victories. Beyond the circle of life they rule the darkness, and death is dust beneath their feet.”
Crouched on a branch of his protecting sycamore, the thin wraith of Jimmy Pringle trembled and shook like an aspen-leaf. A dumb surprise possessed the poor transmuted thing to find itself even less assured of palpable and familiar salvation, than when, after drinking cider at the Boar’s Head in Athelston, he had dreamed dreams at Captain Whiffley’s gate.
“The Sun is lord and god of the earth,” wailed the first voice once more. “The Sun alone is master in the end. Lust and Power go forth with him, and all flesh obeys his command.”
“The Moon draws more than the tides,” answered the second voice. “In the places of silence where Love waits, only the Moon can pass; and only the Moon can hear the voice of the watchers.”
From the red planet, high up against the church-tower, to the silver planet low down among the shadowy trees, the starlit spaces listened mutely to these antiphonal invocations. Only the distant expanse of the Milky Way, too remote in its translunar gulfs to heed these planetary conflicts, shimmered haughtily down upon the Wood and Stone of Nevilton—impassive, indifferent, unconcerned.
CHAPTER XX
VOX POPULI
JAMES ANDERSEN’S mental state did not fall away from the restored equilibrium into which the unexpected intervention of Ninsy Lintot had magnetized and medicined him. He went about his work as usual, gloomier and more taciturn, perhaps, than before, but otherwise with no deviation from his normal condition.
Luke noticed that he avoided all mention of Lacrima, and, as far as the younger brother knew, made no effort to see her. Luke himself received, two days after the incident in the Methodist cemetery, a somewhat enigmatic letter from Mr. Taxater. This letter bore a London post-mark and informed the stone-carver that after a careful consideration of the whole matter, and an interview with Lacrima, the writer had come to the conclusion that no good purpose would be served by carrying their plan into execution. Mr. Taxater had, accordingly, so the missive declared, destroyed the incriminating document which he had induced Luke to sign, and had relinquished all thought of an interview with Mr. Dangelis.
The letter concluded by congratulating Luke on his brother’s recovery—of which, it appeared, the diplomatist had been informed by the omniscient Mrs. Watnot—and assuring him that if ever, in any way, he, the writer, could be of service to either of the two brothers, they could count on his unfailing regard. An obscure post-script, added in pencil in a very minute and delicate hand, indicated that the interview with Lacrima, referred to above, had confirmed the theologian in a suspicion that hitherto he had scrupulously concealed, namely, that their concern with regard to the Italian’s position was less called for than appearances had led them to suppose.
After reading and weighing this last intimation, before he tore up the letter into small fragments, the cynical Luke came to the conclusion that the devoted champion of the papacy had found out that his co-religionist had fallen from grace; in other words, that Lacrima Traffio was no longer a Catholic. It could hardly be expected, the astute youth argued, that Mr. Taxater should throw himself into a difficult and troublesome intrigue in order that an apostate from the inviolable Faith, once for all delivered to the Saints, should escape what might reasonably be regarded as a punishment for her apostacy.
The theologian’s post-script appeared to hint that the girl was not, after all, so very unwilling, in this matter of her approaching marriage. Luke, in so far as he gave such an aspect of the affair any particular thought, discounted this plausible suggestion as a mere conscience-quieting salve, introduced by the writer to smooth over the true cause of his reaction.
For his own part it had been always of James and not of Lacrima he had thought, and since James had now been restored to his normal state, the question of the Italian’s moods and feelings affected him very little. He was still prepared to discuss with his brother any new chance of intervention that might offer itself at the last moment. He desired James’ peace of mind before everything else, but in his heart of hearts he had considerable doubt whether the mood of self-effacing magnanimity which had led his brother to contemplate Lacrima’s elopement with Mr. Quincunx, would long survive the return of his more normal temper. Were he in James’ position, he told himself grimly, he should have much preferred that the girl should marry a man she hated rather than one she loved, as in such a case the field would be left more open for any future “rapprochement.”
Thus it came about that the luckless Pariah, by the simple accident of her inability to hold fast to her religion, lost at the critical moment in her life the support of the one friendly power, that seemed capable, in that confusion of opposed forces, of bringing to her aid temporal as well as spiritual, pressure. She was indeed a prisoner by the waters of Babylon, but her forgetfulness of Sion had cut her off from the assistance of the armies of the Lord.
The days passed on rapidly now, over the heads of the various persons involved in our narrative. For James and Lacrima, and in a measure for Mr. Quincunx, too,—since it must be confessed that the shock of Ninsy’s collapse had not resulted in any permanent tightening of the recluse’s moral fibre,—they passed with that treacherous and oblivious smoothness which dangerous waters are only too apt to wear, when on the very verge of the cataract.
In the stir and excitement of the great political struggle which now swept furiously from one end of the country to the other, the personal fortunes of a group of tragically involved individuals, in a small Somersetshire village, seemed to lose, for all except those most immediately concerned, every sort of emphasis and interest.
The polling day at last arrived, and a considerable proportion of the inhabitants of Nevilton, both men and women, found themselves, as the end of the fatal hours approached, wedged and hustled, in a state of distressing and exhausted suspense, in the densely crowded High Street in front of the Yeoborough Town Hall.
Mr. Clavering himself was there, and in no very amiable temper. Perverse destiny had caused him to be helplessly surrounded by a noisy high-spirited crew of Yeoborough factory-girls, to whom the event in progress was chiefly interesting, in so far as it afforded them an opportunity to indulge in uproarious chaff and to throw insulting or amorous challenges to various dandified youths of their acquaintance, whom they caught sight of in the confusion. Mr. Clavering’s ill-temper reached its climax when he became aware that a good deal of the free and indiscreet badinage of his companions was addressed to none other than his troublesome parishioner, Luke Andersen, whose curly head, surmounted by an aggressively new straw hat, made itself visible not far off.
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