“It is the Devil!” he exclaimed. “I must have the Devil in me, to say such things and to treat you like this. You are the bravest, sweetest girl in the world, and I am a brutal idiot — worse than Mr. Romer!”
He struck himself several blows upon the forehead, knocking off his hat. Lacrima could not help noticing that in place of the usual protection, some small rhubarb-leaves ornamented the interior of this appendage.
She smiled at him, through a rain of happy tears, — the first smile that day had seen upon her face.
“We are both of us absurd people, I suppose,” she said, laying her hands upon his shoulders. “We ought to have some friend with a clear solid head to keep us straight.”
Mr. Quincunx kissed her on the forehead and stooped down for his hat.
“Yes,” he said. “We are a queer pair. I suppose we are really both a little mad. I wish there was someone we could go to.”
“Couldn’t you — perhaps—” said Lacrima, “say something to Mrs. Seldom? And yet I would much rather she didn’t know. I would much rather no one knew!”
“I might,” murmured Maurice thoughtfully; “I might tell her. But the unlucky thing is, she is so narrow-minded that she can’t separate you in her thoughts from those frightful people.”
“Shall I try Vennie?” whispered the girl, “or shall we—” here she looked him boldly in the face with eager, brightening eyes—“shall we run away to London, and be married, and risk the future?”
Poor little Italian! She had never made a greater tactical blunder than when she uttered these words. Maurice Quincunx’s mystic illumination had made it possible for him to exorcise his evil spirit. It could not put into his nature an energy he had not been born with. His countenance clouded.
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” he remarked. “You don’t know what a sour-tempered devil I am, and how I am sure to make any girl who lives with me miserable. You would hate me in a month more than you hate Mr. Romer, and in a year I should have either worried you into your grave or you would have run away from me. No — no — no! I should be a criminal fool to let you subject yourself to such a risk as that.”
“But,” pleaded the girl, with flushed cheeks, “we should be sure to find something! I could teach Italian, — and you could — oh, I am sure there are endless things you could do! Please, please, Maurice dear, let us go. Anything is better than this misery. I have got quite enough money for the journey. Look!”
She pulled out from beneath her dress a little chain purse, that hung, by a small silver chain, round her slender neck. She opened it and shook three sovereigns into the palm of her hand. “Enough for the journey,” she said, “and enough to keep us for a week if we are economical. We should be sure to find something by that time.”
Mr. Quincunx shook his head. It was an ironical piece of psychic malice that the very illumination which had made him remorseful and sympathetic should have also reduced to the old level of tender sentiment the momentary passion he had felt. It was the absence in him of this sensual impulse which made the scheme she proposed seem so impossible. Had he been of a more animal nature, or had she possessed the power of arousing his senses to a more violent craving, instead of brooding, as he did, upon the mere material difficulties of such a plan, he would have plunged desperately into it and carried her off without further argument. The very purity of his temperament was her worst enemy.
Poor Lacrima! Her hands dropped once more helplessly to her side, and the old hopeless depression began to invade her heart. It seemed impossible to make her friend realize that if she refused the farmer and things went on as before, her position in Mr. Romer’s establishment would become more impossible than ever. What — for instance — would become of her when this long-discussed marriage of Gladys with young Ilminster took place? Could she conceive herself going on living under that roof, with Mr. Romer continually harassing her, and his brother-in-law haunting every field she wandered into?
“It was noble of you,” began her bearded friend again, resuming his work at the weeds, while she, as on a former occasion, leant against his wheel-barrow, “to think of enduring this wretched marriage for my sake. But I cannot let you do it. I should not be happy in letting you do it. I have some conscience — though you may not think so — and it would worry me to feel you were putting up with that fool’s companionship just to make me comfortable. It would spoil my enjoyment of my freedom, to know that you were not equally free. Of course it would be paradise to me to have the money you speak of. I should be able to live exactly as I like, and these damned villagers would treat me with proper respect then. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take my pleasure at the expense of such a strain on you. It would spoil everything!
“I don’t deny, however,” he went on, evidently deriving more and more virtuous satisfaction from his somewhat indecisive rejection of her sacrifice, “that it is a temptation to me. I hate that office so profoundly! You were quite right there, Lacrima. All I said about getting on with those people was damned bluff. I loathe them and they loathe me. It is simply like a kind of death, my life in that place. Yes, what you suggest is a temptation to me. I can’t help feeling rather like that poor brother of the girl in ‘Measure for Measure’ when she comes to say that she could save his life by the loss of her virtue, and he talks about his feelings on the subject of death. She put him down fiercely enough, poor dog! She evidently thought her virtue was much more important than his life. I am glad you are just the opposite of that puritanical young woman. I shouldn’t like you very much if you took her line!
“But just because you don’t do that, my dear,” Mr. Quincunx went on, tugging at the obstinate roots of a great dock, “I couldn’t think of letting you sacrifice yourself. If you were like that woman in the play, and made all that damned silly fuss about your confounded virtue, I should be inclined to wish that Mr. Goring had got his hands upon you. Women who think as much of themselves as that, ought to be given over to honest fellows like Mr. Goring. It’s the sort of punishment they deserve for their superstitious selfishness. For it’s all selfishness, of course. We know that well enough!”
He flung the defeated weed so vindictively upon his barrow that some of the earth from its roots was sprinkled into Lacrima’s lap. He came to help her brush it away, and took the opportunity to kiss her again, — this time a shade more amorously.
“All this business of ‘love,’” he went on, returning to his potatoes, “is nothing but the old eternal wickedness of man’s nature. The only kind of love which is worth anything is the love that gets rid of sex altogether, and becomes calm and quiet and distant — like the love of a planetary spirit. Apart from this love, which is not like human love at all, everything in us is selfish. Even a mother’s care for its child is selfish.”
“I shall never have a child,” said Lacrima in a low voice.
“I wonder what your friend James Andersen would say to all this,” continued Mr. Quincunx. “Why, by the way, don’t you get him to marry you? He would do it, no doubt, like a shot, if you gave him a little encouragement; and then make you work all day in his kitchen, as his father made his mother, so they say.”
Lacrima made a hopeless gesture, and looked at the watch upon her wrist. She began to feel dizzy and sick for want of food. She had had nothing since breakfast, and the shadows were beginning to grow long.
“I know what Luke Andersen would say if we asked him,” added Mr. Quincunx. “He would advise you to marry this damned farmer, wheedle his money out of him, and then sheer off with some fine youth and never see Nevilton again! Luke Andersen’s the fellow for giving a person advice in these little matters. He has a head upon his shoulders, that boy! I tell you what it is, my dear, your precious Miss Gladys had better be careful! She’ll be getting herself into trouble with that honest youth if she doesn’t look out. I know him. He cares for no mortal soul in the world, or above the world. He’s a master in the art of life! We are all infants compared with him. If you do need anyone to help you, or to help me either, I tell you Luke Andersen’s the one to go to. He has more influence in this village than any living person except Romer himself, and I should be sorry for Romer if his selfishness clashed with the selfishness of that young Machiavel!”