“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.”
As they hurried across the enclosure, Phyllis whispered in his ears a remark that seemed to him either curiously irrelevant, or inspired in an occult manner by psychic telepathy. She had lately refrained from any reference to Lacrima. The Italian’s friendliness to her under the Hullaway elms had made her reticent upon this subject. On this occasion, however, though quite ignorant of James’ presence in the churchyard, she suddenly felt compelled to say to Luke, in an intensely serious voice:
“If some of you clever ones don’t stop that marriage of Master Goring, there’ll be some more holes dug in this place! There be some things what them above never will allow.”
He helped her over the wall, and watched her overtake her staggering parent, who had already reeled some distance down the road. Then he returned to his brother and roused him from his sleep. James was sulky and irritable at being so brusquely restored to consciousness, but the temperature of his mind appeared as normal and natural as ever.
They quitted the place without further conversation, and strode off in silence up the village street. The perpendicular slabs of the crowded head stones, and the yet more numerous mounds that had neither name nor memory, resumed their taciturn and lonely watch.
To no human eyes could be made visible the poor thin shade that was once Jimmy Pringle, as it swept, bat-like, backwards and forwards, across the dew-drenched grass. But the shade itself, endowed with more perception than had been permitted to it while imprisoned in the “muddy vesture” of our flesh and blood, became aware, in its troubled flight, of a singular spiritual occurrence.
Rising from the base of that skull-crowned monument, two strange and mournful phantoms flitted waveringly, like huge ghost-moths, along the protruding edge of the church-roof. Two desolate and querulous voices, like the voices of conflicting winds through the reeds of some forlorn salt-marsh, quivered across the listening fields.
“It is strong and unconquered — the great heart of my Hill,” one voice wailed out. “It draws them. It drives them. The earth is with it; the planets are for it, and all their enchantments cannot prevail against it!”
“The leaves may fall and the trees decay,” moaned the second voice, “but where the sap has once flowed, Love must triumph.”
The fluttering shadow of Jimmy Pringle fled in terror from these strange sounds, and took refuge among the owls in the great sycamore of the Priory meadow. A falling meteorite swept downwards from the upper spaces of the sky and lost itself behind the Wild Pine ridge.
“Strength and cunning,” the first voice wailed forth again, “alone possess their heart’s desire. All else is vain and empty.”
“Love and Sacrifice,” retorted the other, “outlast all victories. Beyond the circle of life they rule the darkness, and death is dust beneath their feet.”
Crouched on a branch of his protecting sycamore, the thin wraith of Jimmy Pringle trembled and shook like an aspen-leaf. A dumb surprise possessed the poor transmuted thing to find itself even less assured of palpable and familiar salvation, than when, after drinking cider at the Boar’s Head in Athelston, he had dreamed dreams at Captain Whiffley’s gate.
“The Sun is lord and god of the earth,” wailed the first voice once more. “The Sun alone is master in the end. Lust and Power go forth with him, and all flesh obeys his command.”