Every natural locality has its hour of special self-assertion; its hour, when the peculiar qualities and characteristics which belong to it emphasize themselves, and attain a sort of temporary apogee or culmination. It is then that such localities—be they forests or moors, hill-sides or valleys—seem to gather themselves together and bring themselves into focus, waiting expectantly, it might almost seem, for some answering dramatic crisis in human affairs which should find in them an inevitable background.

One of the chief features of our English climate is that no two successive days, even in a spell of the warmest weather, are exactly alike. What one might call the culminant day of that summer, for the orchards of Nevilton, arrived shortly after Mr. Clavering’s unfortunate defeat. Every hour of this day seemed to add something more and more expressive to their hushed and expectant solitudes.

Though the hay had been cut, or was being cut, in the open fields, in these shadowy recesses the grass was permitted to grow lush and long, at its own unimpeded will.

Between the ancient trunks of the moss-grown apple-trees hung a soft blue vapour; and the flickering sunlight that pierced the denser foliage, threw shadows upon the heavy grass that were as deeply purple as the waves of the mid-atlantic. There was indeed something so remote from the ordinary movements of the day about this underworld of dim, rich seclusion, that the image of a sleepy wave-lulled land, long sunken out of reach of human invasion, under the ebbing and flowing tide, seemed borne in naturally upon the imagination.

It was towards the close of the afternoon of this particular segment of time that the drowsy languor of these orchards reached its richest and most luxurious moment. Grass, moss, lichen, mistletoe, gnarled trunks, and knotted roots, all seemed to cry aloud, at this privileged hour, for some human recognition of their unique quality; some human event which should give that quality its dramatic value, its planetary proportion. Not since the Hesperidean Dragon guarded its sacred charge, in the classic story, has a more responsive background offered itself to what Catullus calls the “furtive loves” of mortal men.

About six o’clock, on this day of the apogee of the orchards, Mr. Romer, seated on the north terrace of his house, caught sight of his daughter and her companion crossing the near corner of the park. He got up at once, and walked across the garden to intercept them. The sight of the Italian’s slender drooping figure, as she lingered a little behind her cousin, roused into vivid consciousness all manner of subterranean emotions in the quarry-owner’s mind. He felt as an oriental pasha might feel, when under the stress of some political or monetary transaction, he is compelled to hand over his favorite girl-slave to an obsequious dependent. The worst of it was that he could not be absolutely sure of Mr. Goring’s continued adherence. It was within the bounds of possibility that once in possession of Lacrima, the farmer might breathe against him gross Thersites-like defiance, and carry off his captive to another county. He experienced, at that moment, a sharp pang of inverted remorse at the thought of having to relinquish his prey.

As he strode along by the edge of the herbaceous borders, where the blue spikes of the delphiniums were already in bud, his mind swung rapidly from point to point in the confused arena of his various contests and struggles.

Mixed strangely enough with his direct Napoleonic pursuit of wealth and power, there was latent in Mr. Romer, as we have already hinted, a certain dark and perverse sensuality, which was capable of betraying and distorting, in very curious ways, the massive force of his intelligence.

At this particular moment, as he emerged into the park, he found himself beginning to regret his conversation with his brother-in-law. But, after all, he thought, when Gladys married, it would be difficult to find any reason for keeping Lacrima at his side. His feelings towards the girl were a curious mixture of attraction and hatred. And what could better gratify this mixed emotion than a plan which would keep her within his reach and at the same time humiliate and degrade her? To do the master of Nevilton justice, he was not, at that moment, as he passed under a group of Spanish chestnuts and observed the object of his conspiracy rendered gentler and more fragile than ever by the loveliness of her surroundings, altogether devoid of a certain remote feeling of compunction. He crushed it down, however, by his usual thought of the brevity and futility of all these things, and the folly of yielding to weak commiseration, when, in so short a time, nothing, one way or the other, would matter in the least! He had long ago trained himself to make use of these materialistic reasonings to suppress any irrelevant prickings of conscience which might interfere with the bias of his will. The whole world, looked at with the bold cynical eye of one who was not afraid to face the truth, was, after all, a mad, wild, unmeaning struggle; and, in the confused arena of this struggle, one could be sure of nothing but the pleasure one derived from the sensation of one’s own power. He tried, as he walked towards the girls, to imagine to himself what his feelings would be, supposing he yielded to these remote scruples, and let Lacrima go, giving her money, for instance, to enable her to live independently in her own country, or to marry whom she pleased. She would no doubt marry that damned fool Quincunx! Lack of money was, assuredly, all that stood in the way. And how could he contemplate an idea of that kind with any pleasure? He wondered, in a grim humourous manner, what sort of compensation these self-sacrificing ones really got? What satisfaction would he get, for instance, in the consciousness that he had thrown a girl who attracted him, into the arms of an idiot who excited his hate?

He looked long at Lacrima, as she stood with Gladys, under a sycamore, waiting his approach. It was curious, he said to himself,—very curious,—the sort of feelings she excited in him. It was not that he wished to possess her. He was scornfully cynical of that sort of gratification. He wished to do more than possess her. He wished to humiliate her, to degrade her, to put her to shame in her inmost spirit. He wished her to know that he knew that she was suffering this shame, and that he was the cause of it. He wished her to feel herself absolutely in his power, not bodily—that was nothing!—but morally, and spiritually.

The owner of Leo’s Hill had the faculty of detaching himself from his own darkest thoughts, and of observing them with a humourous and cynical eye. It struck him as not a little grotesque, that he, the manipulater of far-flung financial intrigues, the ambitious politician, the formidable captain of industry, should be thus scheming and plotting to satisfy the caprice of a mere whim, upon the destiny of a penniless dependent. It was grotesque—grotesque and ridiculous. Let it be! The whole business of living was grotesque and ridiculous. One snatched fiercely at this thing or the other, as the world moved round; and one was not bound always to present oneself in a dignified mask before one’s own tribunal. It was enough that this or that fantasy of the dominant power-instinct demanded a certain course of action. Let it be as grotesque as it might! He, and none other, was the judge of his pleasure, of what he pleased to do, or to refrain from doing. It was his humour;—and that ended it! He lived to fulfil his humour. There was nothing else to live for, in this fantastic chaotic world! Meditating in this manner he approached the girls.

“It occurred to me,” he said, breathing a little hard, and addressing his daughter, “that you might be seeing Mr. Clavering again tonight. If so, perhaps you would give him a message from me, or rather,—how shall I put it?—a suggestion, a gentle hint.”

“What are you driving at, father?” asked Gladys, pouting her lips and swinging her parasol.

“It is a message best delivered by mouth,” Mr. Romer went on, “and by your mouth.”

Then as if to turn this last remark into a delicate compliment, he playfully lifted up the girl’s chin with his finger and made as if to kiss her. Gladys, however, lightly evaded him, and tossing her head mischievously, burst out laughing. “I know you, father, I know you,” she cried. “You want me to do some intriguing for you. You never kiss me like that, unless you do!”

Lacrima glanced apprehensively at the two of them. Standing there, in the midst of that charming English scene, they represented to her mind all that was remorseless, pitiless and implacable in this island of her enforced adoption. Swiftly, from those ruddy pinnacles of the great house behind them, her mind reverted to the little white huts in a certain Apennine valley and the tinkling bells of the goats led back from pasture. Oh how she hated all this heavy foliage and these eternally murmuring doves!

“Well,” said Mr. Romer, as Gladys waited mockingly, “I do want you to do something. I want you to hint to our dear clergyman that this ceremony of your reception into his church is dependent upon his good behaviour. Not your good behavior,” he repeated smiling, “but his. The truth is, dear child, if I may speak quite plainly, I know the persuasive power of your pretty face over all these young men; and I want you to make it plain to this worthy priest that if you are to continue being nice to him, he must be very nice to me. Do you catch my meaning, my plump little bird?” As he spoke he encircled her waist with his arm. Lacrima, watching them, thought how singularly alike father and daughter were, and was conscious of an instinctive desire to run and warn this new victim of conspiracy.

“Why, what has he been doing, father?” asked the fair girl, shaking herself free, and opening her parasol.

“He has been supporting that fellow Wone. And he has been talking nonsense about Quincunx,—yes, about your friend Quincunx,” he added, nodding ironically towards Lacrima.

“And I am to punish him, am I?” laughed Gladys. “That is lovely! I love punishing people, especially people like Mr. Clavering who think they are so wonderfully good!”

Mr. Romer smiled. “Not exactly punish him, dear, but lead him gently into the right path. Lead him, in fact, to see that the party to belong to in this village is the party of capacity—not the party of chatter.”

Gladys looked at her father seriously. “You don’t mean that you are actually afraid of losing this election?” she said. Mr. Romer stretched out his arm and rested himself against the umbrageous sycamore, pressing his large firm hand upon its trunk.

“Losing it, child? No, I shan’t lose it. But these idiots do really annoy me. They are all such cowards and such sentimental babies. It is people like these who have to be ruled with a firm hand. They cringe and whimper when you talk to them; and then the moment your back is turned they grow voluble and impertinent. My workmen are no better. They owe everything to me. If it wasn’t for me, half those quarries would be shut down tomorrow and they’d be out of a job. But do you think they are grateful? Not a bit of it!” His tone grew more angry. He felt a need of venting the suppressed rage of many months. “Yes, you needn’t put on that unconscious look, Lacrima. I know well enough where your sympathies lie. The fact is, in these rotten days, it is the incapable and miserable who give the tone to everyone! No one thinks for himself. No one goes to the bottom of things. It is all talk—talk—talk; talk about equality, about liberty, about kindness to the weak. I hate the weak; and I refuse to let them interfere with me! Look at the faces of these people. Well,—you know, Gladys, what they are like. They are all feeble, bloodless, sneaking, fawning idiots! I hate the faces of these Nevilton fools. They are always making me think of slugs and worms. This Wone is typical. His disgusting complexion and flabby mouth is characteristic of them all. No one of them has the spirit to hit one properly back, face to face. And their odious, sentimental religion!—This Clavering of yours ought to know better. He is not quite devoid of intelligence. He showed some spirit when I talked with him. But he is besotted, too, with this silly nonsense about humouring the people, and considering the people, and treating the people in a Christian spirit! As though you could treat worms and slugs in any other spirit than the spirit of trampling upon them. They are born to be trampled upon—born for it—I tell you! You have only to look at them!” He glared forth over the soft rich fields; and continued, still more bitterly:

“It’s no good your pretending not to hear me, Lacrima! I can read your thoughts like an open book. You are quoting to yourself, no doubt, at this very moment, some of the pretty speeches of your friend Quincunx. A nice fellow, he is, for a girl’s teacher! A fellow with no idea of his own in his head! A fellow afraid to raise his eyes above one’s boot-laces! Why the other day, when I was out shooting and met him in the lane, he turned straight round, and walked back on his tracks—simply from fear of passing me. I hate these sneaking cowards! I hate their cunning, miserable, little ways! I should like to trample them all out of existence! That is the worst of being strong in this world. One is worried to death by a lot of fools who are not worth the effort spent on them.”

Lacrima uttered no word, but looked sadly away, over the fair landscape. In her heart, in spite of her detestation of the man, she felt a strange fantastic sympathy with a good deal of what he said. Women, especially women of Latin races, have no great respect for democratic sentiments when they do not issue in definite deeds. Her private idea of a revolutionary leader was something very far removed from the voluble local candidate, and she had suffered too much herself from the frail petulance of Maurice Quincunx not to feel a secret longing that somewhere, somehow, this aggressive tyrant should be faced by a strength as firm, as capable, as fearless, as his own.

Mr. Romer, with his swarthy imperial face and powerful figure, seemed to her, as he leant against the tree, so to impress himself upon that yielding landscape, that there appeared reason enough for his complaint that he could find no antagonist worthy of his steel. In the true manner of a Pariah, who turns, with swift contempt, upon her own class, the girl was conscious of a rising tide of revolt in her heart against the incompetent weakness of her friend. What would she not give to be able, even once, to see this man outfaced and outwitted! She was impressed too, poor girl, as she shrank silently aside from his sarcasm, by the horrible indifference of these charming sunlit fields to the brutality of the man’s challenge. They cared nothing—nothing! It was impossible to make them care. Hundreds of years ago they had slumbered, just as dreamily, just as indifferently, as they did now. If even at this moment she were to plunge a knife into the man’s heart, so that he fell a mass of senseless clay at her feet, that impervious wood-pigeon would go on murmuring its monotonous ditty, just as peacefully, just as serenely! There was something really terrifying to her in this callous indifference of Nature. It was like living perpetually in close contact with a person who was deaf and dumb and blind; and who, while the most tragic events were being transacted, went on cheerfully and imperturbably humming some merry tune. It would be almost better, thought the girl, if that tree-trunk against which the quarry-owner pressed his heavy hand were really in league with him. Anything were better than this smiling indifference which seemed to keep on repeating in a voice as monotonous as the pigeon’s—“Everything is permitted. Nothing is forbidden. Nothing is forbidden. Everything is permitted.” like the silly reiterated whirring of some monstrous placid shuttle. It was strange, the rebellious inconsistent thoughts, which passed through her mind! She wondered why Hugh Clavering was thus to be waylaid and persuaded. Had he dared to rise in genuine opposition? No, she did not believe it. He had probably talked religion, just as Maurice talked anarchy and Wone talked socialism. It was all talk! Romer was quite right. They had no spirit in them, these English people. She thought of the fierce atheistic rebels of her own country. They, at any rate, understood that evil had to be resisted by action, and not by vague protestations of unctuous sentiment!

When Mr. Romer left them and returned to his seat on the terrace, the girls did not at once proceed on their way, but waited, hesitating; and amused themselves by pulling down the lower branches of a lime and trying to anticipate the sweetness of its yet unbudded fragrance.

“Let’s stroll down the drive first,” said Gladys presently, “till we are out of sight, and then we can cross the mill mead and get into the orchard that way.” They followed this design with elaborate caution, and only when quite concealed from the windows of the house, turned quickly northward and left the park for the orchards. Between the wall, of the north garden and the railway, lay some of the oldest and least frequented of these shadowy places, completely out of the ordinary paths of traffic, and only accessible by field-ways. Into the smallest and most secluded of all these the girls wandered, gliding noiselessly between the thick hedges and heavy grass, like two frail phantoms of the upper world visiting some Elysian solitude.

Gladys laid her hand on her companion’s arm. “We had better wait here,” she said, “where we can see the whole orchard. They ought to know, by now, where to come.”

They seated themselves on the bowed trunk of an ancient apple-tree that by long decline had at last reached a horizontal position. The flowering season was practically over, though here and there a late cider-tree, growing more in shadow than the rest, still carried its delicate burden of clustered blossoms.

“How many times is it that we have met them here?” whispered the fair girl, snatching off her hat and tossing it on the grass. “This is the fifth time, isn’t it? What dear things they are! I think it’s much more exciting, this sort of thing,—don’t you?—than dull tennis parties with silly idiots like young Ilminster.”

The Italian nodded. “It is a good thing that James and I get on so well,” she said. “It would be awkward if we were as afraid of one another as when we first met.”

Gladys put her hand caressingly on her companion’s knee and looked into her face with a slow seductive smile.

“You are forgetting your Mr. Quincunx a little, just a little, these days, aren’t you, darling? Don’t be shy, now—or look cross. You know you are! You can’t deny it. Your boy is almost as nice as mine. He doesn’t like me, though. I can see that! But I like him. I like him awfully! You’d better take care, child. If ever I get tired of my Luke—”

“James isn’t a boy,” protested Lacrima.

“Silly!” cried Gladys. “Of course he is. Who cares about age? They are all the same. I always call them boys when they attract me. I like the word. I like to say it. It makes me feel as if I were one of those girls in London. You know what I mean!”

Lacrima looked at her gravely. “I always feel as if James Andersen were much older than I,” she said.

“But your Mr. Quincunx,” repeated the fair creature, slipping her soft fingers into her friend’s hand, “your Mr. Quincunx is not quite what he was to you, before we began these adventures?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that, Gladys!” rejoined the Italian, freeing her hands and clasping them passionately together. “It is wicked of you to say that! You know I only talk to James so that you can do what you like. I shall always be Maurice’s friend. I shall be his friend to the last!”

Gladys laughed merrily. “That is what I wanted,” she retorted. “I wanted to make you burst out. When people burst out, they are always doubtful in their hearts. Ah, little puritan! so we are already in the position of having two sweethearts, are we?—and not knowing which of the two we really like best? That is a very pretty situation to be in. It is where we all are! I hope you enjoy it!”

Lacrima let her hands fall helplessly to her side, against the grey bark of the apple-tree. “Why do you hate Mr. Quincunx so?” she asked, looking gravely into her friend’s face.

“Why do I hate him?” said Gladys. “Oh, I really don’t know! I didn’t know I did. If I do, it’s because he’s such a weak wretched creature. He has no more spirit than a sick dog. He talks such nonsense too! I am glad he has to walk to Yeoborough every day and do a little work. You ought to be glad too! He could never marry if he didn’t make some money.”

“He doesn’t want to marry,” murmured Lacrima. “He only wants to be left alone.”

“A nice friend he seems to be,” cried the other, “for a girl like you! I suppose he kisses you and that sort of thing, doesn’t he? I shouldn’t like to be kissed by a silly old man like that, with a great stupid beard.”

“You mustn’t say these things to me, Gladys, you mustn’t! I won’t hear them. Mr. Quincunx isn’t an old man! He is younger than James Andersen. He is not forty yet.”

“He looks fifty, if he looks a day,” said Gladys, “and the colour of his beard is disgusting! It’s like dirty water. Fancy having a horrid thing like that pressed against your face! And I suppose he cries and slobbers over you, doesn’t he? I have seen him cry. I hate a man who cries. He cried the other night,—father told me so—when he found he had spent all his money.”

Lacrima got up and walked a few paces away. She loathed this placid golden-haired creature, at that moment, so intensely, that it was all she could do to refrain from leaping upon her and burying her teeth in her soft neck. She leant against one of the trees and pressed her head upon its grey lichen. Gladys slipped down into a more luxurious position. She looked complacently around her. No spot could have been better adapted for a romantic encounter.

The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old apple-trees, each looking as if it had lingered there, full of remote memories, from an age coeval with the age of those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still clung in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic array of twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon which the foliage, meeting everywhere above their heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof of a heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, which, here and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, were different from those in the open meadows. The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of the other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and tender pallour, both colours approximating to white. The grey lichen hung down in loose festoons from the higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept, thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There could hardly be conceived a spot more suggestive of absolute and eternal security than this Hesperidean enclosure.

The very fact of the remote but constant presence of humanity there, as a vague dreamy background of immemorial tending, increased this sense. One felt that the easy invasions of grafting-time and gathering-time, returning perennially in their seasons, only intensified the long delicious solitudes of the intervals between, when, in rich, hushed languor, the blossoms bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That exquisite seductive charm, the charm of places full of quietness, yet bordering on the edge of the days’ labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment over the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller weight.

“There they are!” cried Gladys suddenly, as the figures of the Andersen brothers made themselves visible on the further side of the orchard.

The girls advanced to meet them through the thick grass, swinging their summer-hats in their hands and bending their heads, now and then, to avoid the overhanging boughs. The meeting between these four persons would have made a pleasant and appropriate subject for one of those richly-coloured old-fashioned prints which one sometimes observes in early Victorian parlours. Gladys grew quite pale with excitement, and her voice assumed a vibrant tenderness when she accosted Luke, which made Lacrima give a little start of surprise, as she shook hands with the elder brother. Had her persecutor then, got, after all, some living tissue in the place where the heart beat?

Luke’s manner had materially altered since he had submitted so urbanely to the fair girl’s insulting airs at the close of their first encounter. His way of treating her now was casual, flippant, abrupt—almost indifferent. Instead of following the pathetic pressure of her arm and hand, which at once bade him hasten the separation of the group, he deliberately lingered, chatting amicably with Lacrima and asking her questions about Italy. It seemed that the plausible Luke knew quite as much about Genoa and Florence and Venice as his more taciturn brother, and all he knew he was well able to turn into effective use. He was indeed a most engaging and irresistible conversationalist; and Gladys grew paler and paler, as she watched the animation of his face and listened to his pleasant and modulated voice.

It caused sheer suffering to her fiercely impetuous nature, this long-drawn out delay. Every moment that passed diminished the time they would have together. Her nerves ached for the touch of his arms about her, and a savage desire to press her mouth to his, and satiate herself with kisses, throbbed in her every vein. Why would he not stop this irrelevant stream of talk? What did she care about the narrow streets of Genoa,—or the encrusted faÇade of San Marco? It had been their custom to separate immediately on meeting, and for Luke to carry her off to a charming hiding-place they had discovered. With the fierce pantherish craving of a love-scorched animal her soul cried out to be clasped close to her friend in this secluded spot, having her will of those maddening youthful lips with their proud Grecian curve! Still he must go on talking!

James and Lacrima, lending themselves, naturally and easily, to the mood of the moment, were already seated at the foot of a twisted and ancestral apple-tree. Soon Luke, still absorbed in his conversation with the Italian, shook off Gladys’ arm and settled himself beside them, plucking a handful of grass, as he did so, and inhaling its fragrance with sybarite pleasure.

“St. Mark’s is the only church in the world for me,” Luke was saying. “I have pictures of it from every conceivable angle. It is quite a mania with me collecting such things. I have dozens of them; haven’t I, James?”

“Do you mean those post-cards father sent home when he went over there to work?” answered the elder brother, one of whose special peculiarities was a curious pleasure in emphasizing, in the presence of the “upper classes,” the humility of his origin.

Luke laughed. “Well—yes—those—and others,” he said. “You haven’t the least idea what I keep in my drawer of secret treasures; you know you haven’t! I’ve got some lovely letters there among other things. Letters that I wouldn’t let anyone see for the world!” He glanced smilingly at Gladys, who was pacing up and down in front of them, like a beautiful tigress.

“Look here, my friends,” she said. “The time is slipping away frightfully. We are not going to sit here all the while, are we, talking nonsense, like people at a garden party?”

“It’s so lovely here,” said Luke with a slow smile. “I really don’t think that your favourite corner is so much nicer. I am in no hurry to move. Are you, Miss Traffio?”

Lacrima saw a look upon her cousin’s face that boded ill for their future relations if she did not make some kind of effort. She rose to her feet.

“Come, Mr. Andersen,” she said, giving James a wistful look. “Let us take a little stroll, and then return again to these young people.”

James rose obediently, and they walked off together. They passed from the orchards belonging to Mr. Romer’s tenant, and entered those immediately at the foot of the vicarage garden. Here, through a gap in the hedge they were attracted by the sight of a queer bed of weeds growing at the edge of a potato-patch. They were very curious weeds, rather resembling sea-plants than land-plants; in colour of a dull glaucous green, and in shape grotesquely elongated.

“What are those things?” said Lacrima. “I think I have never seen such evil-looking plants. Why do they let them grow there?”

James surveyed the objects. “They certainly have a queer look,” he said, “but you know, in old days, there was a grave-yard here, of a peculiar kind. It is only in the last fifty years that they have dug it up and included it in this garden.”

Lacrima shuddered. “I would not eat those potatoes for anything! You know I think I come to dislike more and more the look of your English vegetable gardens, with their horrid, heavy leaves, so damp and oozy and disgusting!”

“I agree with you there,” returned the wood-carver. “I have always hated Nevilton, and every aspect of it; but I think I hate these overgrown gardens most of all.”

“They look as if they were fed from churchyards, don’t they?” went on the girl. “Look at those heavy laurel bushes over there, and those dreadful fir-trees! I should cut them all down if this place belonged to me. Oh, how I long for olives and vine-yards! These orchards are all very well, but they seem to me as if they were made to keep out the sun and the wholesome air.”

James Andersen smiled grimly. “Orchards and potato gardens!” he muttered. “Yes, these are typical of this country of clay. And these Vicarage shrubberies! I think a shrubbery is the last limit of depression and desolation. I am sure all the murders committed in this country are planned in shrubberies, and under the shade of damp laurel-bushes.”

“In our country we grow corn between the fruit-trees,” said Lacrima.

“Yes, corn—” returned Andersen, “corn and wine and oil! Those are the natural, the beautiful, products of the earth. Things that are fed upon sun and air—not upon the bones of the dead! All these Nevilton places, however luxuriant, seem to me to smell of death.”

“But was this corner really a churchyard?” asked the Italian. “I hope Mrs. Seldom won’t stroll down this way and see us!”

“Mrs. Seldom is well suited to the place she lives in,” returned the other. “She lives upon the Past, just as her garden does—just as her potatoes do! These English vicarages are dreadful places. They have all the melancholy of age without its historic glamour. And how morbid they are! Any of your cheerful Latin curÉs would die in them, simply of damp and despair.”

“But do tell me about this spot,” repeated Lacrima, with a little shiver. “Why did you say it was a peculiar churchyard?”

“It was the place where they buried unbaptized children,” answered Andersen, and added, in a lower tone, “how cold it is getting! It must be the shadow we are in.”

“But you haven’t yet,” murmured Lacrima, “you haven’t yet told me, what those weeds are.”

“Well—we call them ‘mares’-tails’ about here,” answered the stone-carver, “I don’t know their proper name.”

“But why don’t they dig them up? Look! They are growing all among the potatoes.”

“They can’t dig them up,” returned the man. “They can’t get at their roots. They are the worst and most obstinate weed there is. They grow in all the Nevilton gardens. They are the typical Nevilton flora. They must have grown here in the days of the druids.”

“But how absurd!” cried Lacrima. “I feel as if I could pull them up with my hands. The earth looks so soft.”

“The earth is soft enough,” replied Andersen, “but the roots of these weeds adhere fast to the rock underneath. The rock, you know, the sandstone rock, lies only a short distance beneath our feet.”

“The same stone as Nevilton house is built of?”

“Certainly the same. Our stone, Mr. Romer’s stone, the stone upon which we all live here—except those who till the fields.”

“I hate the thing!” cried Lacrima, in curious agitation.

“You do? Well—to tell you the honest truth, so do I. I associate it with my father.”

“I associate it with Gladys,” whispered Lacrima.

“I can believe it. We both associate it with houses of tyranny, of wretched persecution. Perhaps I have never told you that my father was directly the cause of my mother’s death?”

“You have hinted it,” murmured the girl. “I suspected it. But Luke loves the stone, doesn’t he? He always speaks as if the mere handling of it, in his work-shop, gave him exquisite pleasure.”

“A great many things give Luke exquisite pleasure,” returned the other grimly. “Luke lives for exquisite pleasure.”

A quick step on the grass behind them made them swing suddenly round. It was Vennie Seldom, who, unobserved, had been watching them from the vicarage terrace. A few paces behind her came Mr. Taxater, walking cautiously and deliberately, with the air of a Lord Chesterfield returning from an audience at St. James’. Mr. Taxater had already met the Italian on one or two occasions. He had sat next to her once, when dining at Nevilton House, and he was considerably interested in her.

“What a lovely evening, Miss Traffio,” said Vennie shyly, but without embarrassment. Vennie was always shy, but nothing ever interfered with her self-possession.

“I am glad you are showing Mr. Andersen these orchards of ours. I always think they are the most secluded place in the whole village.”

“Ha!” said Mr. Taxater, when he had greeted them with elaborate and friendly courtesy, “I thought you two were bound to make friends sooner or later! I call you my two companions in exile, among our dear Anglo-Saxons. Miss Traffio I know is Latin, and you, sir, must have some kind of foreign blood. I am right, am I not, Mr. Andersen?”

James looked at him humorously, though a little grimly. He was always pleased to be addressed by Mr. Taxater, as indeed was everybody who knew him. The great scholar’s detached intellectualism gave him an air of complete aloofness from all social distinctions.

“Perhaps I may have,” he answered. “My mother used to hint at something of the kind. She was always very fond of foreign books. I rather fancy that I once heard her say something about a strain of Spanish blood.”

“I thought so! I thought so!” cried Mr. Taxater, pulling his hat over his eyes and protruding his chin and under-lip, in the manner peculiar to him when especially pleased.

“I thought there was something Spanish in you. How extraordinarily interesting! Spain,—there is no country like it in the world! You must go to Spain, Mr. Andersen. You would go there in a different spirit from these wretched sight-seers who carry their own vulgarity with them. You would go with that feeling of reverence for the great things of civilization, which is inseparable from the least drop of Latin blood.”

“Would you like to see Spain, Miss Traffio?” enquired Vennie. “Mr. Taxater, I notice, always leaves out us women, when he makes his attractive proposals. I think he thinks that we have no capacity for understanding this civilization he talks of.”

“I think you understand everything, better than any man could,” murmured Lacrima, conscious of an extraordinary depth of sympathy emanating from this frail figure.

“Miss Seldom has been trying to make me appreciate the beauty of these orchards,” went on Mr. Taxater, addressing James. “But I am afraid I am not very easily converted. I have a prejudice against orchards. For some reason or other, I associate them with dragons and serpents.”

“Miss Seldom has every reason to love the beautiful aspects of our Nevilton scenery,” said the stone-carver. “Her ancestors possessed all these fields and orchards so long, that it would be strange if their descendant did not have an instinctive passion for them.” He uttered these words with that curious undertone of bitterness which marked all his references to aristocratic pretension.

Little Vennie brushed the sarcasm gently aside, as if it had been a fluttering moth.

“Yes, I do love them in a sense,” she said, “but you must remember that I, too, was educated in a Latin country. So, you see, we four are all outsiders and heretics! I fancy your brother, Mr. Andersen, is an ingrained Neviltonian.”

James smiled in a kindly, almost paternal manner, at the little descendant of the Tudor courtiers. Her sweetness and artless goodness made him feel ashamed of his furtive truculence.

“I wish you would come in and see my mother and me, one of these evenings,” said Vennie, looking rather wistfully at Lacrima and putting a more tender solicitation into her tone than the mere words implied.

Lacrima hesitated. “I am afraid I cannot promise,” she said nervously. “My cousin generally wants me in the evening.”

“Perhaps,” put in Mr. Taxater, with his most Talleyrand-like air, “a similar occasion to the present one may arise again, when with Mr. Andersen’s permission, we may all adjourn to the vicarage garden.”

Lacrima, rather uncomfortably, looked down at the grass.

“We four, being, as we have admitted, all outsiders here,” went on the diplomatist, “ought to have no secrets from one another. I think”—he looked at Vennie—“we may just as well confess to our friends that we quite realize the little—charming—‘friendship,’ shall I say?—that has sprung up between this gentleman’s brother and Miss Romer.”

“I think,” said James Andersen hurriedly, in order to relieve Lacrima’s embarrassment, “I think the real bond between Luke and Miss Gladys is their mutual pleasure in all this luxuriant scenery. Somehow I feel as if you, Sir, and Miss Seldom, were quite separate from it and outside it.”

“Yes,” cried Vennie eagerly, “and Lacrima is outside it, because she is half-Italian, and you are outside it because you are half-Spanish.”

“It is clear, then,” said Mr. Taxater, “that we four must form a sort of secret alliance, an alliance based upon the fact that even Miss Seldom’s lovely orchards do not altogether make us forget what civilization means!”

Neither of the two girls seemed quite to understand what the theologian implied, but Andersen shot at him a gleam of appreciative gratitude.

“I was telling Miss Traffio,” he said, “that under this grass, not very many feet down, a remarkable layer of sandstone obtrudes itself.”

“An orchard based on rock,” murmured Mr. Taxater, “that, I think, is an admirable symbol of what this place represents. Clay at the top and sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is better, in this world, to be clay or stone? We four poor foreigners have, I suspect, a preference for a material very different from both of these. Our element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble that can resist all these corrupting natural forces and throw them back, and hold them down. I always think that marble is the appropriate medium of civilization’s retort to instinct and savagery. The Latin races have always built in marble. It was certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when he used his celebrated metaphor about the founding of the Church.”

The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed a quick supplicating glance from Lacrima’s dark eyes.

“Well,”—he said, “I think I must be looking for my brother, and I expect our young lady is waiting for Miss Traffio.”

They bade their friends good-night and moved off.

“I am always at your service,” were Mr. Taxater’s last words, “if ever either of you care to appeal to the free-masonry of the children of marble against the children of clay.”

As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to his companion how curious it was, that neither Vennie nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least aware of anything extraordinary or unconventional in this surreptitious friendship between the girls from the House and their father’s workmen.

“Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of us,” rejoined Lacrima, “but she probably thinks Gladys is capable of anything and that I am as bad as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe she is a real saint. She gives me such a queer feeling of being different from everyone.”

“Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of her,” said the stone-carver. “And I have a suspicion that he hopes to convert Gladys too, probably through your influence.”

“I don’t like to think that of him,” replied the girl. “He seems to me to admire Vennie for herself and to be kind to us for ourselves. I think he is a thoroughly good man.”

“Possibly—possibly,” muttered James, “but I don’t trust him. I never have trusted him.”

They said no more, and threaded their way slowly through the orchard to the place where they had left the others. The wind had dropped and there was a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.

In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions!

She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to him, but he did not need her as Maurice needed her!

“I see them!” she cried suddenly. “But how odd they look! They’re not speaking a word. Have they quarrelled, I wonder?”

The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed extremely gloomy and melancholy, as they sat, with a little space between them, on the fallen tree. They rose with an air of relief at the others’ approach.

“I thought you were never coming,” said Gladys. “How long you have been! We have been waiting for hours. Come along. We must go straight back and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time for good-byes! Au revoir, you two! Come along, girl, quick! We’d better run.”

She seized her cousin’s hand and dragged her off and they were quickly out of sight.

The two brothers watched them disappear and then turned and walked away together. “Don’t let’s go home yet,” said Luke. “Let’s go to the churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won’t be dark for a long time. And I love the churchyard in the twilight.”

James nodded. “It is our garden, isn’t it,—and our orchard? It is the only spot in Nevilton where no one can interfere with us.”

“That, and the Seldom Arms,” added the younger brother.

They paced side by side in silence till they reached the road. The orchards, left to themselves, relapsed into their accustomed reserve. Whatever secrets they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion.