“How dreadful!” she whispered, “but he seemed to me perfectly natural just now.”
“That was Lacrima’s doing,” said Luke. “Lacrima is at the bottom of it all. I wish, oh, I wish, she was going to marry James, instead of that uncle of yours.”
“Father would never allow that,” said Gladys, raising her head. “He is set upon making her take uncle John. It has become a kind of passion with him. Father is funny in these things.”
“Still — it might be managed,” muttered Luke thoughtfully, “if we carried it through with a high hand. We might arrange it; the world is malleable, after all. If you and I, my dear, put our heads together, Mr. John Goring might whistle for his bride.”
“I hate Lacrima!” cried Gladys, with a sudden access of her normal spirit.
“I don’t care two pence about Lacrima,” returned Luke. “It is of James I am thinking.”
“But she would be happy with James, and I don’t want her to be happy.”
“What a little devil you are!” exclaimed the stone-carver, slipping his arm round her waist.
“Yes, I know I am,” she answered shamelessly. “I suppose I inherit it from father. He hates people just like that. But I am not a devil with you, Luke, am I? I wish I were!” she added, after a little pause.
“We must think over this business from every point of view,” said Luke solemnly. “I cannot help thinking that if you and I resolve to do it, we can twist the fates round, somehow or another. I am sure Lacrima could save James if she liked. If you could only have seen the difference between what he was when I was called back to him just now, and what he became as soon as he set eyes upon her, you would know what I mean. He is mad about her, and if he doesn’t get her, he’ll go really mad. He was a madman just now. He nearly frightened that fool Titley into a fit.”
“I don’t want Lacrima to marry James,” burst out Gladys. Luke in a moment drew his arm away, and quickened his pace.
“As you please,” he said. “But I can promise you this, my friend, that if anything does happen to my brother, it’ll be the end of everything between us.”
“Why — what — how can you say such dreadful things?” stammered the girl.
Luke airily swung his stick. “It all rests with you, child. Though we can’t marry, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t go on seeing each other, as we do now, forever and ever, — as long as you help me in this affair. But if you’re going to sulk and talk this nonsense about ‘hating’—it is probable that it will be a case of good-bye!”
The fair girl’s face was distorted by a spasmodic convulsion of conflicting emotions. She bit her lip and hung her head. Presently she looked up again and flung her arms round his neck. “I’ll do anything you ask me, Luke, anything, as long as you don’t turn against me.”
They walked along for some time in silence, hand in hand, taking care not to lose sight of their two companions who seemed as engrossed as themselves in one another’s society. James Andersen was showing sufficient discretion in avoiding the more frequented foot-paths.
“Luke”, began the girl at last, “did you really give my ring to Annie Santon?”
“Luke’s brow clouded in a moment.” Damn your ring!” he cried harshly.” I’ve got other things to think about now than your confounded rings. When people give me presents of that kind,” he added “I take for granted I can do what I like with them.”
Gladys trembled and looked pitfully into his face.
“But that girl said,” she murmured—“that factory girl, I mean — that it had been lost in some way; hidden, she said, in some hole in a stone. I can’t believe that you would let me be made a laughing-stock of, Luke dear?”
“Oh, don’t worry me about that,” replied the stone-carver. “Maybe it is so, maybe it isn’t so; anyway it doesn’t matter a hang.”
“She said too,” pleaded Gladys in a hesitating voice, “that you and Annie were going to be married.”
“Ho! ho!” laughed Luke, fumbling with some tightly tied hurdles that barred their way; “so she said that, did she? She must have had her knife into you, our little Phyllis. Well, and what’s to stop me if I did decide to marry Annie?”
Gladys gasped and looked at him with a drawn and haggard face. Her beauty was of the kind that required the flush of buoyant spirits to illuminate it. The more her heart ached, the less attractive she became. She was anything but beautiful now; and, as he looked at her, Luke noticed for the first time, how low her hair grew upon her forehead.
“You wouldn’t think of doing that?” she whispered, in a tone of supplication. He laughed lightly and lifting up her chin made as though he were going to kiss her, but drew back without doing so.
“Are you going to be good,” he said, “and help me to get Lacrima for James?”
She threw her arms round him. “I’ll do anything you like — anything,” she repeated, “if you’ll only let me love you!”
While this conversation was proceeding between these two, a not less interesting clash of divergent emotions was occurring between their friends. The Italian may easily be pardoned if she never for one second dreamed of the agitation in her companion’s mind that had so frightened Luke. James’ manner was in no way different from usual, and though he expressed his feelings in a more unreserved fashion than he had ever done before, Lacrima had been for many weeks expecting some such outbreak.
“Don’t be angry with me,” he was saying, as he strode by her side. “I had meant never to have told you of this. I had meant to let it die with me, without your ever knowing, but somehow — today — I could not help it.”
He had confessed to her point blank, and in simple, unbroken words, the secret of his heart, and Lacrima had for some moments walked along with head averted making no response.
It would not be true to say that this revelation surprised her. It would be completely untrue to say it offended her. It did not even enter her mind that it might have been kinder to have been less friendly, less responsive, than she had been, to this queer taciturn admirer. But circumstances had really given her very little choice in the matter. She had been, as it were, flung perforce upon his society, and she had accepted, as a providential qualification of her loneliness, the fact that he was attracted towards her rather than repelled by her.
It is quite possible that had he remained untouched by the evasive appeal of her timid grace; had he, for instance, remained a provocative and impenetrable mystery at her side, she might have been led to share his feelings. But, unluckily for poor Andersen, the very fact that his feelings had been disclosed only too clearly, militated hopelessly against such an event. He was no remote, shadowy, romantic possibility to her — a closed casket of wonders, difficult and dangerous to open. He was simply a passionate and assiduous lover. The fact that he could love her, lowered him a little in Lacrima’s esteem. True to her Pariah instincts she felt that such passion was a sign of weakness in him; and if she did not actually despise him for it, it materially lessened the interest she took in the workings of his mind. Maurice Quincunx drew her to him for the very reason that he was so sexless, so cold, so wayward, so full of whimsical caprices. Maurice, a Pariah himself, excited at the same time her maternal tenderness and her imaginative affection. If she did not feel the passion for him that she might have felt for Andersen, had Andersen remained inacessible; that was only because there was something in Maurice’s peculiar egoism which chilled such feelings at their root.
Another almost equally effective cause of her lack of response to the stone-carver’s emotion was the cynical and world-deep weariness that had fallen upon her, since this dreadful marriage with Goring had become a settled event. Face to face with this, she felt as though nothing mattered very much, and as though any feeling she herself might excite in another person must needs be like the passing of a shadow across a mirror — something vague, unreal, insubstantial — something removed to a remote distance, like the voice of a person at the end of a long tunnel, or as the dream of someone who is himself a figure in a dream. If anyone, she felt, broke into the enchanted circle that surrounded her, it was as if they sought to make overtures to a person dead and buried.