Wood and Stone Page 15

  All this while his lips went on repeating their liturgical formula. “We must learn to look upon the Redemption, as a natural, not a supernatural fact. We must learn to see in it the motive-force of the whole stream of evolution. We must remember that things are what they have it in them to become. It is the purpose, the end, which is the true truth—not the process or the method. Christ is the end of all things. He is therefore the beginning of all things. All things find their meaning, their place, their explanation, only in relation to Him. He is the reality of the illusion which we call Nature, and of the illusion which we call Life. In Him the universe becomes real and living—which else were a mere engine of destruction.” How much longer he would have continued in this strain—conquered yet still resisting—it were impossible to say. All these noble words, into the rhythm of which so much passionate modern thought had been poured, fell from his lips like sand out of a sieve.

  The girl herself interrupted him. With a quick movement she suddenly jerked herself from her recumbent position; jumped, without his help, lightly down upon the floor, and resumed her former place at the table. The explanation of this virtuous retreat soon made itself known in the person of a visitor advancing up the garden. Clavering, who had stumbled foolishly aside as she changed her place, now opened the door and went to meet the new-comer.

  It was Romer’s manager, Mr. Thomas Lickwit, discreet, obsequious, fawning, as ever,—but with a covert malignity in his hurried words. disturb you, sir. I see it is Miss Gladys’ lesson. I hope the young lady is getting on nicely, sir. I won’t detain you for more than a moment. I have just a little matter that couldn’t wait. Business is business, you know.

  Clavering felt as though he had heard this last observation repeated “ad nauseam” by all the disgusting sycophants in all the sensational novels he had ever read. It occurred to him how closely Mr. Lickwit really did resemble all these monotonously unpleasant people.

  “Yes,” went on the amiable man, “business is business—even with reverend gentlemen like yourself who have better things to attend to.” Clavering forced himself to smile in genial appreciation of this airy wit, and beckoned the manager into his study. He then returned to the front room. “I am afraid our lesson must end for to-night, Miss Romer,” he said. “You know enough of this lieutenant of your father’s to guess that he will not be easy to get rid of. The worst of a parson’s life are these interruptions.”

  There was no smile upon his face as he said this, but the girl laughed merrily. She adjusted her hat with a deliciously coquettish glance at him through the permissible medium of the gilt-framed mirror. Then she turned and held out her hand. “Till next week, then, Mr. Clavering. And I will read all those books you sent up for me—even the great big black one!”

  He gravely opened the door for her, and with a sigh from a heart “sorely charged,” returned to face Mr. Lickwit.

  He found that gentleman comfortably ensconced in the only arm-chair. “It is like this, sir,” said the man, when Clavering had taken a seat opposite him. “Mr. Romer thinks it would be a good thing if this Social Meeting were put a stop to. There has been talk, sir. I will not conceal it from you. There has been talk. The people say that you have allied yourself with that troublesome agitator. You know the man I refer to, sir, that wretched Wone.

  “Mr. Romer doesn’t approve of what he hears of these meetings. He doesn’t see as how they serve any good purpose. He thinks they promote discord in the place, and set one class against another. He does not like the way, neither, that Mr. Quincunx has been going on down there; nor to say the truth, sir, do I like that gentleman’s doings very well. He speaks too free, does Mr. Quincunx, much too free, considering how he is situated as you might say.”

  Clavering leapt to his feet, trembling with anger. “I cannot understand this,” he said, “Someone has been misleading Mr. Romer. The Social Meeting is an old institution of this village; and though it is not exactly a church affair, I believe it is almost entirely frequented by church-goers. I have always felt that it served an invaluable purpose in this place. It is indeed the only occasion when priest and people can meet on equal terms and discuss these great questions man to man. No—no, Lickwit, I cannot for a moment consent to the closing of the Social Meeting. It would undo the work of years. It would be utterly unwise. In fact it would be wrong. I cannot think how you can come to me with such a proposal.”

  Mr. Lickwit made no movement beyond causing his hat to twirl round on the top of the stick he held between his knees.

  “You will think better of it, sir. You will think better of it,” he said. “The election is coming on, and Mr. Romer expects all supporters of Church and State to help him in his campaign. You have heard he is standing, sir, I suppose?”

  Mr. Lickwit uttered the word “standing” in a tone which suggested to Clavering’s mind a grotesque image of the British Constitution resting like an enormous cornucopia on the head of the owner of Leo’s Hill. He nodded and resumed his seat. The manager continued. “That old Methodist chapel where those meetings are held, belongs, as you know, to Mr. Romer. He is thinking of having it pulled down—not only because of Wone’s and Quincunx’s goings on there, but because he wants the ground. He’s thinking of building an estate-office on that corner. We are pressed for room, up at the Hill, sir.”

  Once more Clavering rose to his feet. “This is too much!” he cried. “I wonder you have the impertinence to come here and tell me such things. I am not to be bullied, Lickwit. Understand that! I am not to be bullied.”

  “Then I may tell the master,” said the man sneeringly, rising in his turn and making for the door, “that Mr. Parson won’t have nothing to do with our little plan?”

  “You may tell him what you please, Lickwit. I shall go over myself at once to the House and see Mr. Romer.” He glanced at his watch. “It is not seven yet, and I know he does not dine till eight.”

  “By all means, sir, by all means! He’ll be extremely glad to see you. You couldn’t do better, sir. You’ll excuse me if I don’t walk up with you. I have to run across and speak to Mr. Goring.”

  He bowed himself out and hurried off. Clavering seized his hat and followed him, turning, however, when once in the street, in the direction of the south drive. It took him scarcely a couple of minutes to reach the village square where the drive emerged. In the centre of the square stood a solid erection of Leonian stone adapted to the double purpose of a horse-trough and a drinking fountain. Here the girls came to draw water, and here the lads came to chat and flirt with the girls. Mr. Clavering could not help pausing in his determined march to watch a group of young people engaged in animated and laughing frivolity at this spot. It was a man and two girls. He recognized the man at once by his slight figure and lively gestures. It was Luke Andersen. “That fellow has a bad influence in this place,” he said to himself. “He takes advantage of his superior education to unsettle these children’s minds. I must stop this.” He moved slowly towards the fountain. Luke Andersen looked indeed as reckless and engaging as a young faun out of a heathen story. He was making a cup of his two hands and whimsically holding up the water to the lips of the younger of his companions, while the other one giggled and fluttered round them. Had the priest been in a poetic humour at that moment, he might have been reminded of those queer mediæval legends of the wanderings of the old dispossessed divinities. The young stone-carver, with his classic profile and fair curly hair, might have passed for a disguised Dionysus seducing to his perilous service the women of some rustic Thessalian hamlet. No pleasing image of this kind crossed Hugh Clavering’s vision. All he saw, as he approached the fountain, was another youthful incarnation of the dangerous Power he had been wrestling with all the afternoon. He advanced towards the engaging Luke, much as Christian might have advanced towards Apollyon. “Good evening, Andersen,” he said, with a certain professional severity. “Using the fountain, I see? We must be careful, though, not to waste the water this hot summer.”

  The g
irl who was drinking rose up with a little start, and stood blushing and embarrassed. Luke appeared entirely at his ease. He leant negligently against the edge of the stone trough, and pushed his hat to the back of his head. In this particular pose he resembled to an extraordinary degree the famous Capitolian statue.

  “It is hardly wasting the water, Mr. Clavering,” he said with a smile, “offering it to a beautiful mouth. Why don’t you curtsey to Mr. Clavering, Annie? I thought all you girls curtsied when clergymen spoke to you.”

  The priest frowned. The audacious aplomb of the young man unnerved and disconcerted him.

  “Water in a stone fountain like this,” went on the shameless youth, “has a peculiar charm these hot evenings. It makes you almost fancy you are in Seville. Seville is a place in Spain, Annie. Mr. Clavering will tell you all about it.”

  “I think Annie had better run in to her mother now,” said the priest severely.

  “Oh, that’s all right,” replied the youth with unruffled urbanity. “Her mother has gone shopping in Yeoborough and I have to see that Annie behaves properly till she comes back.”

  Clavering looked reproachfully at the girl. Something about him—his very inability perhaps to cope with this seductive Dionysus—struck her simple intelligence as pathetic. She made a movement as if to join her companion, who remained roguishly giggling a few paces off. But Luke boldly restrained her. Putting his hand on her shoulder he said laughingly to the priest “She will be a heart-breaker one of these days, Mr. Clavering, will our Annie here! You wouldn’t think she was eighteen, would you, sir?’

  Under other circumstances the young clergyman would have unhesitatingly commanded the girl to go home. But his recent experiences had loosened the fibre of his moral courage. Besides, what was there to prevent this incorrigible young man from walking off after her? One could hardly—at least in Protestant England—make one’s flock moral by sheer force.

  “Well—good-night to you all,” he said, and moved away, thinking to himself that at any rate there was safety in publicity. “But what a dangerous person that Andersen is! One never knows how to deal with these half-and-half people. If he were a village-boy it would be different. And it would be different if he were a gentleman. But he is neither one thing or the other. Seville! Who would have thought to have heard Seville referred to, in the middle of Nevilton Square?”

  He reached the carved entrance of the House with its deeply-cut armorial bearings—the Seldom falcon with the arrow in its beak. “No more will that bird fly,” he thought, as he waited for the door to open.

  He was ushered into the spacious entrance hall, the usual place of reception for Mr. Romer’s less favoured guests. The quarry-owner was alone. He shook hands affably with his visitor and motioned him to a seat.

  “I have come about that question of the Social Meeting—” he began.

  Mr. Romer cut him short. “It is no longer a question,” he said. “It is a ‘fait accompli.’ I have given orders to have the place pulled down next week. I want the space for building purposes.”

  Clavering turned white with anger. “We shall have to find another room then,” he said. “I cannot have those meetings dropping out from our village life. They keep the thoughtful people together as nothing else can.”

  Mr. Romer smiled grimly. “You will find it difficult to discover another place,” he remarked.

  “Then I shall have them in my own house,” said the vicar of Nevilton.

  Mr. Romer crossed his hands and threw back his head; looking, with the air of one who watches the development of precisely foreseen events, straight into the sad eyes of the little Royal Servant on the wall.

  “Pardon such a question, my friend,” said he, “but may I ask you what your personal income is, at this moment?”

  “You know that well enough,” returned the other. “I have nothing beyond the hundred and fifty pounds I receive as vicar of this place.”

  “And what,” pursued the Quarry-owner, “may your expenditure amount to?”

  “That, also, you know well,” replied Clavering. “I give away about eighty pounds, every year, to the poor of this village.”

  “And where does this eighty pounds come from?” went on the Squire. The priest was silent.

  “I will tell you where it comes from,” pronounced the other. “It comes from me. It is my contribution, out of the tithes which I receive as lay-rector. And it is the larger part of them.”

  The priest was still silent.

  “When I first came here,” his interlocutor continued, “I gave up these tithes as an offering to our village necessities; and I have not yet withdrawn them. If this Social Meeting, Mr. Clavering, is not brought to an end, I shall withdraw them. And no one will be able to blame me.”

  Hugh jumped up on his feet with a gesture of fury. “I call this,” he shouted, “nothing short of sacrilege! Yes, sacrilege and tyranny! I shall proclaim it abroad. I shall write to the papers. I shall appeal to the bishop—to the country!”

  “As you please,” said Mr. Romer quietly, “as you please. I should only like to point out that any action of this kind will tie up my purse-strings forever. You will not be popular with your flock, my friend. I know something of our dear Nevilton people; and I shall have only to make it plain to them that it is their vicar who has reduced this charity; and you will not find yourself greatly loved!”

  Clavering fell back into his chair with a groan. He knew too well the truth of the man’s words. He knew also the straits into which this lack of money would plunge half his benevolent activities in the parish. He hung his head gloomily and stared at the floor. What would he not have given, at that moment, to have been able to meet this despot, man to man, unencumbered by his duty to his people!

  “Let me assure you, my dear sir,” said Mr. Romer quietly, “that you are not by any means fighting the cause of your church, in supporting this wretched Meeting. If I were bidding you interrupt your services or your sacraments, it would be another matter. This Social Meeting has strong anti-clerical prejudices. You know that, as well as I. It is conducted entirely on noncomformist lines. I happen to be aware,” he added, “since you talk of appealing to the bishop, that the good man has already, on more than one occasion, protested vigorously against the association of his clergy with this kind of organization. I do not know whether you ever glance at that excellent paper the Guardian; but if so you will find, in this last week’s issue, a very interesting case, quite parallel to ours, in which the bishop’s sympathies were by no means on the side you are advocating.”

  The young priest rose and bowed. “There is, at any rate, no necessity for me to trouble you any further,” he said. “So I will bid you good-night.”

  He left the hall hastily, picked up his hat, and let himself out, before his host had time to reply. All the way down the drive his thoughts reverted to the seductive wiles of this despot’s daughter. “The saints are deserting me,” he thought, “by reason of my sin.”

  He was not, even then, destined to escape his temptress. Gladys, who doubtless had been expecting this sudden retreat, emerged from the shadow of the trees and intercepted him. “I will walk to the gate with you,” she said. The power of feminine attraction is never more insidious than at the moment of bitter remorse. The mind reverts so easily, so willingly, then, back to the dangerous way. The mere fact of its having lost its pride of resistance, its vanity of virtue, makes it yield to a new assault with terrible facility. She drew him into the dusky twilight of the scented exotic cedars which bordered the way, on the excuse of inhaling their fragrance more closely.

  She made him pull down a great perfumed cypress-bough, of some unusual species, so that they might press their faces against it. They stood so closely together that she could feel through her thin evening-gown the furious trembling that seized him. She knew that he had completely lost his self-control, and was quite at her mercy. But Gladys had not the least intention of yielding herself to the emotion she had excited. What she inte
nded was that he should desire her to desperation, not that, by the least touch, his desire should be gratified. In another half-second, as she well knew, the poor priest would have seized her in his arms. In place of permitting this, what she did was to imprint a fleeting kiss with her warm lips upon the back of his hand, and then to leap out of danger with a ringing laugh. “Good-bye!” she called back at him, as she ran off. “I’ll come in good time next week.”

  It may be imagined in what a turbulence of miserable feelings Hugh Clavering repassed the village square. He glanced quickly at the fountain. Yes! Luke Andersen was still loitering in the same place, and the little bursts of suppressed screams and laughter, and the little fluttering struggles, of the group around him, indicated that he was still, in his manner, corrupting the maidens of Nevilton. The priest longed to put his hands to his ears and run down the street, even as Christian ran from the city of Destruction. What was this power—this invincible, all-pervasive power—against which he had committed himself to contend? He felt as though he were trying, with his poor human strength, to hold back the sea-tide, so that it should not cover the sands.

  Could it be that, after all, the whole theory of the church was wrong, and that the great Life-Force was against her, and punishing her, for seeking, with her vain superstitions, to alter the stars in their courses?

  Could it be that this fierce pleasure-lust, which he felt so fatally in Gladys, and saw in Luke, and was seduced by in his own veins, was after all the true secret of Nature, and, to contend against it, madness and impossible folly? Was he, and not they, the really morbid and infatuated one—morbid with the arbitrary pride of a desperate tradition of perverted heroic souls? He moved along the pavement under the church wall and looked up at its grand immovable tower. “Are you, too,” he thought, “but the symbol of an insane caprice in the mad human race, seeking, in fond recklessness, to alter the basic laws of the great World?”