“I didn’t expect you,” he said, when they were seated. “I never do expect you. People like me who have only Saturday afternoons to enjoy themselves in don’t expect visitors. They count the hours which are left to them before the night comes.”
“But you have Sunday, my friend,” she said, laying her hand upon his.
“Sunday!” Mr. Quincunx muttered. “Do you call Sunday a day? I regard Sunday as a sort of prison-exercise, when all the convicts go walking up and down and showing off their best clothes. I can neither work nor read nor think on Sunday. I have to put on my best clothes like the rest, and stand at my gate, staring at the weather and wondering what the hay-crop will be. The only interesting moments I have on Sunday are when that silly-faced Wone, or one of the Andersens, drifts this way, and we lean over my wall and abuse the gentry.”
“Poor dear!” said the girl pityingly. “I expect the real truth is that you are so tired with your work all the week, that you are glad enough to rest and do nothing.”
Mr. Quincunx’s nostrils dilated, and his drooping moustache quivered. A smile of delicious and sardonic humour wavered over the lower portion of his face, while his grey eyes lost their sadness and gleamed with a goblin-like merriment.
“I am getting quite popular at the office,” he said. “I have learnt the secret of it now.”
“And what is the secret?” asked Lacrima, suppressing a queer little gasp in her throat.
“Sucking up,” Mr. Quincunx answered, his face flickering with subterranean amusement, “sucking up to everyone in the place, from the manager to the office boy.”
Lacrima returned to him a very wan little smile.
“I suppose you mean ingratiating yourself,” she said; “you English have such funny expressions.”
“Yes, ingratiating myself, pandering to them, flattering them, agreeing with them, anticipating their wishes, doing their work for them, telling lies for them, abusing God to make them laugh, introducing them to Guy de Maupassant, and even making a few light references, now and again, to what Shakespeare calls ‘country-matters.’”
“I don’t believe a word you say,” protested Lacrima in rather a quavering voice. “I believe you hate them all and that they are all unkind to you. But I can quite imagine you have to do more work than your own.”
Mr. Quincunx’s countenance lost its merriment instantaneously.
“I believe you are as annoyed as Mr. Romer,” he said, “that I should get on in the office. But I am past being affected by that. I know what human nature is! We are all really pleased when other people get on badly, and are sorry when they do well.”
Lacrima felt as though the trees in the field opposite had suddenly reversed themselves and were waving their roots in the air.
She gave a little shiver and pressed her hand to her side.
Mr. Quincunx continued.
“Of course you don’t like it when I tell you the truth. Nobody likes to hear the truth. Human beings lap up lies as pigs lap up milk. And women are worst of all in that! No woman really can love a person — not, at any rate, for long — who tells her the truth! That is why women love clergymen, because clergymen are brought up to lie. I saw you laughing and amusing yourself the other evening with Mr. Clavering — you and your friend Gladys. I went the other way, so as not to interrupt such a merry conversation.”
Lacrima turned upon him at this.
“I cannot understand how you can say such things of me!” she cried. “It is too much. I won’t — I won’t listen to it!”
Her over-strained nerves broke down at last, and covering her face with her hands, she burst into a fit of convulsive sobs.
Mr. Quincunx rose and stood gazing at her, gloomily plucking at his beard.
“And such are women!” he thought to himself. “One can never tell them the least truth but they burst into tears.”
He waited thus in silence for one or two moments, and then an expression of exquisite tenderness and sympathy came into his face. His patient grey eyes looked at her bowed head with the look of a sorrowful god. Gently he sat down beside her and laid his hand on her shoulder.
“Lacrima — dear — I am sorry — I oughtn’t to have said that. I didn’t mean it. On my solemn oath I didn’t mean it! Lacrima, please don’t cry. I can’t bear it when you cry. It was all absolute nonsense what I said just now. It is the devil that gets into me and makes me say those things! Lacrima — darling Lacrima — we won’t tease one another any more.”
Her sobs diminished under the obvious sincerity of his words. She lifted up a tear-stained face and threw her arms passionately round his neck.
“I’ve no one but you,” she cried, “no one, no one!”
For several minutes they embraced each other in silence — the girl’s breast quivering with the after-sighs of her emotion and their tears mingling together and falling on Mr. Quincunx’s beard. Had Gladys Homer beheld them at that moment she would certainly have been strengthened in her healthy-minded mocking contempt for sentimental “slobbering.”
When they had resumed a more normal mood their conversation continued gently and quietly.
“Of course you are right,” said Mr. Quincunx. “I am not really happy at the office. Who could be happy in a place of that kind? But it is my life — and one has to do what one can with one’s life! I have to pretend to myself that they like me there, and that I am making myself useful — otherwise I simply could not go on. I have to pretend. That’s what it is! It is my pet illusion, my little fairy-story. It was that that made me get angry with you — that and the devil. One doesn’t like to have one’s fairy-stories broken into by the brutal truth.”
“Poor dear!” said Lacrima softly, stroking his hand with a gesture of maternal tenderness.
“If there was any hope of this wretched business coming to an end,” Maurice went on, “it would be different. Then I would curse all these people to hell and have done with it. But what can I do? I am already past middle age. I shouldn’t be able to get anything else if I gave it up. And I don’t want to leave Nevilton while you are here.”
The girl looked intently at him. Then she folded her hands on her lap and began gravely.
“I have something to tell you, Maurice dear. Something very important. What would you say if I told you that it was in my power to set you free from all this and make you happy and comfortable for the rest of your life?”
An invisible watcher from some more clairvoyant planet than ours would have been interested at that moment in reading the double weakness of two poor Pariah hearts. Lacrima, brought back from the half-insane attitudes of her heroic resolution by the intermission of natural human emotion, found herself on the brink of half-hoping that her friend would completely and indignantly refuse this shameful sacrifice.
“Surely,” her heart whispered, “some other path of escape must offer itself for them both. Perhaps, after all, Vennie Seldom might discover some way.”
Mr. Quincunx, on the other hand, was most thoroughly alarmed by her opening words. He feared that she was going to propose some desperate scheme by which, fleeing from Nevilton together, she was to help him earn money enough for their mutual support.
“What should I say?” he answered aloud, to the girl’s question. “It would depend upon the manner in which you worked this wonderful miracle. But I warn you I am not hopeful. Things might be worse. After all I have a house to return to. I have food. I have my books. I have you to come and pay me visits. I have my garden. In this world, when a person has a roof over his head, and someone to talk to every other day, he had better remain still and not attract the attention of the gods.”