Wood and Stone (49 page)

Luke hesitated and pondered, the tall dark tower of St. Catharine’s Church affording him but scant inspiration, as it rose above them into the starlit sky. Should he tell him or should he keep the matter to himself, and enter into some new pretended scheme with his brother, to occupy his mind and distract it, for the time being?

So long did he remain silent, pondering this
question
, that James, observing his absorbed state and concluding that his subtle intelligence was occupied in devising some way out of their imbroglio, gave up all thought of receiving an answer, and moving to a less dew-drenched resting-place, leaned his head against an upright monument and closed his eyes. The feeling that his admired brother was taking Lacrima’s plight so seriously in hand filled him with a reassuring calm, and he had not long remained in his new position before his exhausted senses found relief in sleep.

Left to himself, Luke weighed in his mind every conceivable aspect of the question at stake. Less grave and assured than the metaphysical Mr. Taxater in this matter of striking at evil persons with evil weapons, Luke was not a whit less unscrupulous.

No Quincunx-like visitings of compunction had
followed
, with him, their rescue of Ninsy. If the scene
at Seven Ashes had printed any impression at all upon his volatile mind, it was merely a vague and agreeable sense of how beautiful the girl’s
dead-white
skin had looked, contrasted with the disturbed masses of her dusky hair. Beyond this, except for a pleasant memory of how. lightly and softly she had lain upon his arm, as he helped to carry her across the Wild Pine barton, the occurrence had left him unaffected.

His conscience did not trouble him in the smallest degree with regard to Gladys. According to Luke’s philosophy of life, things in this world resolved themselves into a reckless hand-to-hand struggle
between
opposing personalities, every one of them
seeking
, with all the faculties at his disposal, to get the better of the others. It was absurd to stop and consider such illusive impediments as sentiment or honour, when the great, casual, indifferent universe which surrounds us knows nothing of these things!

Out of the depths of this chaotic universe he, Luke Andersen, had been flung. It must be his first
concern
to sweep aside, as irrelevant and meaningless, any mere human fancies, ill-based and adventitious, upon which his free foot might stumble. To strike craftily and boldly in defence of the person he loved best in the world seemed to him not only natural but commendable. How should he be content to indulge in vague sentimental shilly-shallying, when the whole happiness of his beloved Daddy James was at stake?

The difference between Luke’s attitude to their mutual conspiracy, and that of Mr. Taxater, lay in the fact that to the latter the whole event was merely part of an elaborate, deeply-involved
campaign
,
whose ramifications extended indefinitely on every side; while to the former the affair was only one of those innumerable chaotic struggles that a
whimsical
world delighted to evoke.

An inquisitive observer might have wondered what purpose Mr. Taxater had in mixing himself up in the affair at all. This question of his fellow-
conspirator’s
motive crossed, as a matter of fact, Luke’s own mind, as his gaze wandered negligently from the Greater to the Lesser Bear, and from Orion to the Pleiades. He came to the characteristic conclusion that it was no quixotic impulse that had impelled this excellent man, but a completely conscious and definite desire—the desire to add yet one more
wanderer
to his list of converts to the Faith.

Lacrima was an Italian and a Catholic. United to Mr. Quincunx, might she not easily win over that dreamy infidel to the religion of her fathers? Luke smiled to himself as he thought how little the papal champion could have known the real character of the solitary of Dead Man’s Lane. Sooner might the sea at Weymouth flow inland, and wash with its waves the foot of Leo’s Hill, than this ingrained mystic bow his head under the yoke of dogmatic truth!

After long cogitation with himself, Luke came to the conclusion that it would be wiser, on the whole, to say nothing to his brother of his plan to work out Lacrima’s release by means of her cousin’s betrayal. Having arrived at this conclusion he rose and stretched himself, and glanced at the sleeping James.

The night was warm and windless, but Luke began to feel anxious lest the cold touch of the stone, upon
which his brother rested, should strike a chill into his blood. At the same time he was extremely loth to disturb so placid and wholesome a slumber. He laid his hand upon the portentous symbol of
mortality
which crowned so aggressively his parents’ monument, and looked round him. His vigil had already been interrupted more than once by the voices of late revellers leaving the Goat and Boy. Such voices still recurred, at intermittent moments, followed by stumbling drunken footsteps, but in the intervals the silence only fell the deeper.

Suddenly he observed, or fancied he observed, the aspect of a figure extremely familiar to him, standing patiently outside the inn door. He hurried across the churchyard and looked over the wall. No, he had not been mistaken. There, running her hands idly through the leaves of the great wistaria which clung to the side of the house, stood his little friend Phyllis. She had evidently been sent by her mother,—as younger maids than she were often sent—to assist, upon their homeward journey, the unsteady steps of Bill Santon the carter.

Luke turned and glanced at his brother. He could distinguish his motionless form, lying as still as ever, beyond the dark shape of his father’s formidable tombstone. There was no need to disturb him yet. The morrow was Sunday, and they could therefore be as late as they pleased.

He called softly to the patient watcher. She started violently at hearing his voice, and turning round, peered into the darkness. By degrees she made out his form, and waved her hand to him.

He beckoned her to approach. She shook her head,
and indicated by a gesture that she was expecting the appearance of her father. Once more he called her, making what seemed to her, in the obscurity, a sign that he had something important to
communicate
. Curiosity overcame piety in the heart of the daughter of Bill Santon and she ran across the road.

“Why, you silly thing!” whispered the crafty Luke, “your father’s been gone this half hour! He went a bit of the way home with Sam Lintot. Old Sam will find a nice little surprise waiting for him when he gets back. I reckon he’ll send your father home-along sharp enough.”

It was Luke’s habit, in conversation with the
villagers
, to drop lightly into many of their provincial phrases, though both he and his brother used, thanks to their mother’s training, as good English as any of the gentlefolk of Nevilton.

The influence of association in the matter of language might have afforded endless interesting matter to the student of words, supposing such a one had been able to overhear the conversations of these brothers with their various acquaintances. Poor Ninsy, for instance, fell naturally into the local dialect when she talked to James in her own house; and
assumed
, with equal facility, her loved one’s more colourless manner of speech, when addressing him on ground less familiar to her.

As a matter of fact the universal spread of
board-school
education in that corner of the country had begun to sap the foundations of the old local
peculiarities
. Where these survived, in the younger
generation
, they survived side by side with the newer tricks of speech. The Andersens’ girl-friends were, all of
them, in reality, expert bilinguists. They spoke the King’s English, and they spoke the Nevilton English, with equal ease, if with unequal
expressiveness
.

The shrewd fillip to her curiosity, which Luke’s reference to Lintot’s home-coming had given, allured Phyllis into accepting without protest his audacious invention about her father. The probability of such an occurrence seemed sealed with certainty, when turning, at a sign from her friend, she saw, against the lighted window the burly form of the landlord engaged in closing his shutters. It was not the custom, as Phyllis well knew, of this methodical dispenser of Dionysian joys to “shutter up house,” as he called it, until every guest had departed. How could she guess—little deluded maid!—that, stretched upon the floor in the front parlor, stared at by the
landlord’s
three small sons, was the comatose body of her worthy parent breathing like one of Mr. Goring’s pigs?

“Tain’t no good my waiting here then,” she
whispered
. “What do ’ee mean by Sam Lintot’s being surprised-like? Be Ninsy taken with her heart again?”

“Let me help you over here,” answered the
stone-carver
, “that Priory wench was talking, just now, just across yon wall. She’ll be hearing what we say if we don’t move on a bit.”

“Us don’t mind what a maid like her do hear, do us, Luke dear?” whispered the girl in answer. “Give me a kiss, sonny, and let me be getting
home-along
!”

She stood on tiptoe and raised her hands over the
top of the wall. Luke seized her wrists, and retained them in a vicious clutch.

“Put your foot into one of those holes,” he said, “and we’ll soon have you across.”

Unwilling to risk a struggle in such a spot, and not really at all disinclined for an adventure, the girl obeyed him, and after being hoisted up on the wall, was lifted quickly down on the other side, and enclosed in Luke’s gratified arms. The amorous stone-carver remembered long afterwards the peculiar thrill of almost chaste pleasure which the first touch of her cold cheeks gave him, as she yielded to his embrace.

“
Is
Nin Lintot bad again?” she enquired, drawing herself away at last.

Luke nodded. “You won’t see her about, this week—or next week—or the week after,” he said. “She’s pretty far gone, this time, I’m afraid.”

Phyllis rendered to her acquaintance’s misfortune the tribute of a conventional murmur.

“Oh, let’s go and look at where they be burying Jimmy Pringle!” she suddenly whispered, in an
awestruck
, excited tone.

“What!” cried Luke, “you don’t mean to say he’s dead,—the old man?”

“Where’s ’t been to, then, these last days?” she enquired. “He died yesterday morning and they be going to bury him on Monday. ’Twill be a
monstrous
large funeral. Can’t be but you’ve heard tell of Jimmy’s being done for.” She added, in an amazed and bewildered tone.

“I’ve been very busy this last week,” said Luke.

“You didn’t seem very busy this afternoon, when
you were with Annie and me up at station-field,” she exclaimed, with a mischievous little laugh. Then in a changed voice,” Let’s go and see where they’re going to put him. It’s somewhere over there, under South Wall.”

They moved cautiously hand in hand between the dark grassy mounds, the heavy dew soaking their shoes.

Suddenly Phyllis stopped, her fingers tightening, and a delicious thrill of excitement quivering through her. “There it is. Look!” she whispered.

They advanced a step or two, and found
themselves
confronted by a gloomy oblong hole, and an ugly heap of ejected earth.

“Oh, how awful it do look, doesn’t it, Luke darling?” she murmured, clinging closely to him.

He put his arm round the girl’s waist, and together, under the vast dome of the starlit sky, the two warm-blooded youthful creatures contemplated the resting-place of the generations.

“Its queer to think,” remarked Luke pensively, “that just as we stand looking on this, so, when we’re dead, other people will stand over our graves, and we know nothing and care nothing!”

“They dug this out this morning,” said Phyllis, more concerned with the immediate drama than with general meditations of mortality. “Old Ben Fursling’s son did it, and my father helped him in his
dinner-hour
. They said another hot day like this would make the earth too hard.”

Luke moved forward, stepping cautiously over the dark upturned soil. He paused at the extreme edge of the gaping recess.

“What’ll you give me,” he remarked turning to his companion, “if I climb down into it?”

“Don’t talk like that, Luke,” protested the girl. “’Tisn’t lucky to say them things. I wouldn’t give you nothing. I’d run straight away and leave you.”

The young man knelt down at the edge of the hole, and with the elegant cane he had carried in his hand all that afternoon, fumbled profanely in its dusky depths. Suddenly, to the girl’s absolute horror, he scrambled round, and deliberately let himself down into the pit. She breathed a sigh of
unutterable
relief, when she observed his head and shoulders still above the level of the ground.

“It’s all right,” he whispered, “they’ve left it half-finished. I suppose they’ll do the rest on Monday.”

“Please get out of it, Luke,” the girl pleaded. “I don’t like to see you there. It make me think you’re standing on Jimmy Pringle.”

Luke obeyed her and emerged from the earth almost as rapidly as he had descended.

When he was once more by her side, Phyllis gave a little half-deliberate shudder of exquisite terror. “Fancy,” she whispered, clinging tightly to him, “if you was to drag me to that hole, and put me down there! I think I should die of fright.”

This conscious playing with her own girlish fears was a very interesting characteristic in Phyllis Santon. Luke had recognized something of the sort in her before, and now he wondered vaguely, as he glanced from the obscurity of Nevilton Churchyard to the brilliant galaxy of luminous splendour
surrounding
the constellation Pegasus, whether she really wanted him to take her at her word.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of voices at the inn-door. They both held their breath, listening intently.

“There’s father!” murmured the girl. “He must have come back from Lintot’s and be trying to get into the public again! Come and help me over the wall, Luke darling. Only don’t let anybody see us.”