Lacrima felt vaguely as though all this were happening to someone else, to someone she had read about in a book, or had known in remote childhood. The over-hanging clouds, the damp grass, the distant ash-tree with the forms of their friends beneath it, all these things seemed to group themselves in her mind, as if answering to some strange dramatic story, which was not the story of her life at all, but of some other harassed and troubled spirit.
In the depths of her mind she shrank away half-frightened and half-indifferent from this man’s impassioned pleading and heroic proposals. The humorously cynical image of the hermit of Dead Man’s Lane crossed her mental vision as a sort of wavering Pharos light in the dreamy twilight of her consciousness. How well she knew with what goblin-like quiver of his nostrils, with what sardonic gleam of his eyes, he would have listened to his rival’s exalted rhetoric.
In some strange way she felt amost angry with this bolder, less cautious lover, for being what her poor nervous Maurice never could be. She caught herself shuddering at the thought of the drastic effort, the stern focussing of will-power which the acceptance of any one of his daring suggestions would imply. Perhaps, who can say, there had come to be a sort of voluptuous pleasure in thus lying back upon her destiny and letting herself be carried forward, at the caprice of other wills than her own.
Mingled with these other complex reactions, there was borne in upon her, as she listened to him, a queer sense of the absolute unimportance of the whole matter. The long strain upon her nerves, of her sojourn in Nevilton House, had left her physically so weary that she lacked the life-energy to supply the life-illusion. The ardour and passion of Andersen’s suggestions seemed, for all their dramatic pathos, to belong to a world she had left — a world from which she had risen or sunk so completely, that all return was impossible. Her nature was so hopelessly the true Pariah-nature, that the idea of the effort implied in any struggle to escape her doom, seemed worse than the doom itself.
This inhibition of any movement of effective resistance in the Pariah-type is the thing that normal temperaments find most difficult of all to understand. It would seem almost incredible to a healthy minded person that Lacrima should deliberately let herself be driven into such a fate without some last desperate struggle. Those who find it so, however, under-estimate that curious passion of submission from which these victims of circumstance suffer, a passion of submission which is. itself, in a profoundly subtle way, a sort of narcotic or drug to the wretchedness they pass through.
“I cannot do it,” she repeated in a low tired voice, “though I think it’s generous, beyond description, what you want to do for me. But I cannot do it. It’s difficult somehow to tell you why, James dear; there are certain things that are hard to say, even to people that we love as much as I love you. For I do love you, in spite of everything. I hope you realize that. And I know that you have a deep noble heart.”
She looked at him with wistful and appealing tenderness, and let her little fingers slip into his feverish hand.
When she said the words, “I do love you,” a shivering ecstasy shot through the stone-carver’s veins, followed by a ghastly chilliness, like the hand of death, as he grasped their complete meaning. The most devastating tone, perhaps, of all, for an impassioned lover to hear, is that particular tone of calm tender affection. It has the power of closing up vistas of hope more effectively than the expression of the most vigorous repulsion. There was a ring of weary finality in her voice that echoed through his mind, like the tread of coffin-bearers through a darkened passage. Things had reached their hopeless point, and the two were standing mute and silent, in the attitude of persons taking a final farewell of one another, when a noisy group of village maids, on their dilatory road to the glove-factory, made their voices audible from the further side of the nearest hedge.
They both turned instantaneously to see how this danger of discovery affected their friends, and neither of them was surprised to note that the younger Andersen had left his companion and was strolling casually in the direction of the voices. As soon as he saw that they had observed this manœuvre he began beckoning to James.
“We’d better separate, my friend,” whispered Lacrima hastily. “I’ll go back to Gladys. She and I must take the lane way and you and Luke the path by the barn. We’ll meet again before — before anything happens.”
They separated accordingly and as the two girls passed through the gate that led into the Nevilton road, they could distinctly hear, across the fields, the ringing laughter of the high-spirited glove-makers as they chaffed and rallied the two stone-carvers through the thick bramble hedge which intervened between them.
CHAPTER XVII SAGITTARIUS
THE summer of the year whose events, in so far as they affected a certain little group of Nevilton people we are attempting to describe, seemed, to all concerned, to pass more and more rapidly, as the days began again to shorten. July gave place to August, and Mr. Goring’s men were already at work upon the wheat-harvest. In the hedges appeared all those peculiar signals of the culmination of the season’s glory, which are, by one of nature’s most emphatic ironies, the signals also of its imminent decline.
Old-man’s-beard, for instance, hung its feathery clusters on every bush; and, in shadier places, white and black briony twined their decorative leaves and delicate flowers. The blossom of the blackberry bushes was already giving place to unripe fruit, and the berries of traveller’s-joy were beginning to turn red. Hips and haws still remained in that vague colourless state which renders them indistinguishable to all eyes save those of the birds, but the juicy clusters of the common night-shade—“green grapes of Proserpine”—greeted the wanderer with their poisonous Circe-like attraction, from their thrones of dog-wood and maple, and whispered of the autumn’s approach. In dry deserted places the scarlet splendour of poppies was rapidly yielding ground to all those queer herbal plants, purplish or whitish in hue — the wild hyssop, or marjoram, being the most noticeable of them — which more than anything else denote the coming on of the equinox. From dusty heaps of rubbish the aromatic daisy-like camomile gave forth its pungent fragrance, and in damper spots the tall purple heads of hemp-agrimony flouted the dying valerian.
An appropriate date at the end of the month had been fixed for the episcopal visit to Nevilton; and the candidates for confirmation were already beginning, according to their various natures and temperaments, to experience that excited anticipation, which, even in the dullest intelligence, such an event arouses.
The interesting ceremony of Gladys Romer’s baptism had been fixed for a week earlier than this, a fanciful sentiment in the agitated mind of Mr. Clavering having led to the selection of this particular day on the strange ground of its exact coincidence with the anniversary of a certain famous saint.
The marriage of Gladys with Dangelis, and of Lacrima with John Goring, was to take place early in September, Mrs. Homer having stipulated for reasons of domestic economy that the two events should be simultaneous.