Other moods arrived when the thought of having children of her own came to her with something more than a mere sense of escape; came to her with the enlargement of an opening horizon. She recalled the many meandering discourses which Mr. Quincunx had addressed to her upon this subject. They had not affected her woman’s instincts; but they had lodged in her mind. A girl’s children, so her friend had often maintained, do not belong to the father at all. The father is nothing — a mere irrelevant incident, a mere chance. The mother alone — the mother always — has the rights and pleasures, as she has the responsibilities and pains of the parental relation. She even recalled one occasion of twilight philosophizing in the potato-bed, when Mr. Quincunx had gone so far as to maintain the unscientific thesis that children, born where there is no love, inherit character, appearance, tastes, everything — from the mother.
Lacrima had a dim suspicion that some of these less pious theories were due to the perverse Luke, who, as the cloudier July days overcast his evening rambles, had acquired the habit of strolling at night-fall into Mr. Quincunx’s kitchen. Once indeed she was certain she discerned the trail of this plausible heathen in her friend’s words. Mr. Quincunx, with one of his peculiarly goblin-like leers, had intimated — in jest indeed, but with a searching look into her face that it would be no very difficult task to deceive, — in shrewd Panurgian roguery, this clumsy clown. His words at the time had hurt and shocked her; and her reaction from them had led to the spoiling of a pleasant conversation; but they invaded afterwards, more deeply than she would have cared to confess, her hours of dreamy solitude.
Her southern imagination, free from both the grossness and the hypocrisy of the Nevilton mind, was much readier to wander upon an antinomian path — at least in its wayward fancies — than it would have been, had circumstances not led her away from her inherited faith.
While the sensuality of Gladys left her absolutely untouched, the anarchistic theories of her friend — especially now they had been fortified and directed by the insidious Luke — gave her intelligence many queer and lawless topics of solitary brooding. Her senses, her instincts, were as pure and unsophisticated as ever; but her conscience was besieged and threatened. It was indeed a queer rôle — this, which fate laid upon Mr. Quincunx — the rôle of undermining the reluctance of his own sweetheart to make a loveless marriage — but it was one for which his curious lack of physical passion singularly fitted him.
Had Vennie Seldom or Hugh Clavering been aware of the condition of affairs they would have condemned Mr. Quincunx in the most wholesale manner. Clavering would probably have been tempted to apply to him some of the most abusive language in the dictionary. But it is extremely questionable whether this judgment of theirs would have been justified.
A more enlightened planetary observer, initiated into the labyrinthine hearts of men, might well have pointed out that Mr. Quincunx’s theories were largely a matter of pure speculation, humorously remote from any contact with reality. He might also have reminded these indignant ones that Mr. Quincunx quite genuinely laboured under the illusion — if it were an illusion — that for his friend to be mistress of the Priory and free of her dependence on the Romers was a thing eminently desirable, and worth the price she paid for it. Such an invisible clairvoyant might even have surmised, what no one in Nevilton who knew of. Mr. Romer’s offer would for one second have believed; namely, that he would have given her the same advice had there been no such offer, simply on the general ground of binding her permanently to the place.
The fact, however, remained, that by adopting this ambiguous and evasive attitude Mr. Quincunx reduced the more heroic and romantic aspect of the girl’s sacrifice to the lowest possible level, and flung her into a mood of reckless and spiritless indifference. She was brought to the point of losing all interest in her own fate and of simply relapsing upon the tide of events.
It was precisely to this condition that Mr. Homer had desired to bring her. When she had first attracted him, and had fallen into his hands, there had been certain psychological contests between them, in which the quarry-owner had by no means emerged victorious. It was the rankling memory of these contests — contests spiritual rather than material — which had issued in his gloomy hatred of her and his longing to corrupt her mind and humiliate her soul. This corruption, this humiliation had been long in coming. It had seemed out of his own power and out of the power of his feline daughter to bring it about; but this felicitous plan of using the girl’s own friend to assist her moral disentegration appeared to have changed the issue very completely.
Mr. Romer, watching her from day to day, became more and more certain that her integral soul, the inmost fortress of her self-respect, was yielding inch by inch. She had flung the rudder down; and was drifting upon the tide.
It might have been a matter of surprise to some ill-judging psychologists that a Napoleonic intriguer, of the quarry-owner’s type, should ever have entered upon a struggle apparently so unequal and unimportant as that for the mere integrity of a solitary girl’s spirit. Such a judgment would display little knowledge of the darker possibilities of human character. Resistance is resistance, from whatever quarter it comes; and the fragile soul of a helpless Pariah may be just as capable of provoking the aggressive instincts of a born master of men as the most obdurate of commercial rivals.
There are certain psychic oppositions to our will, which, when once they have been encountered, remain indelibly in the memory as a challenge and a defiance, until their provocation has been wiped out in their defeat. It matters nothing that such oppositions should spring from weak or trifling quarters. We have been baffled, thwarted, fooled; and we cannot recover the feeling of identity with ourselves, until, like a satisfied tidal wave, our will has drowned completely the barricades that defied it. It matters nothing if at the beginning, what we were thwarted by was a mere trifle, a straw upon the wind, a feather in the breeze. The point is that our will, in flowing outwards, at its capricious pleasure, met with opposition — met with resistance. We do not really recover our self-esteem until every memory of such an event has been obliterated by a complete revenge.
It is useless to object that a powerful ambitious man of the Romer mould, contending Atlas-like under a weight of enormous schemes, was not one to harbour such long-lingering rancour against a mere Pariah. There was more in the thing than appears on the surface. The brains of mortal men are queer crucibles, and the smouldering fires that heat them are driven by capricious and wanton guests. Lacrima’s old defeat of the owner of Leo’s Hill — a defeat into which there is no need to descend now, for its “terrain” was remote from our present stage — had been a defeat upon what might be called a subliminal or interior plane.
It was almost as if he had encountered her and she had encountered him, not only in the past of this particular life, but a remoter past — in a past of some pre-natal incarnation. There are — as is well-known, many instances of this unfathomable conflict between certain human types — types that seem to find one another, that seem to be drawn to one another, by some pre-ordained necessity in the occult influences of mortal fate. It matters nothing in regard to such a conflict, that on one side should be strength, power and position, and on the other weakness and helplessness. The soul is the soul, and has its own laws.
It is a case of what a true initiate into the secrets of our terrestrial drama might entitle Planetary Opposition. By some hidden law of planetary opposition, this frail child of the Apennine ridges was destined to provoke, to an apparently quite unequal struggle, this formidable schemer from the money-markets of London.