“I’m afraid we shall never agree on these topics, Mr. Clavering,” replied Luke calmly. “But it was most kind of you to come up and see me. I really appreciate it. Would it be possible,”—his voice took a lower and graver tone, — “for my brother’s funeral to be performed on Wednesday? I should be very grateful to you, sir, if that could be arranged.”
The young vicar frowned and looked slightly disconcerted. “What time would you wish it to be, Andersen?” he enquired. “I ask you this, because Wednesday is — er — unfortunately — the date fixed for another of these ceremonies that you scoff at. The Lord Bishop comes to Nevilton then. It is his own wish. I should myself have preferred a later date.”
“Ha! the confirmation!” ejaculated Luke, with a bitter little laugh. “You’re certainly bent on striking while the iron’s hot, Mr. Clavering. May I ask what hour has been fixed for this beautiful ceremony?”
“Eleven o’clock in the morning,” replied the priest, ignoring with a dignified wave of his hand the stone-carver’s jeering taunt.
“Well then — if that suits you — and does not interfere with the Lord Bishop—” said Luke, “I should be most grateful if you could make the hour for James’ funeral, ten o’clock in the morning? That service I happen to be more familiar with than the others, — and I know it doesn’t take very long.”
Mr. Clavering bent his head in assent.
“It shall certainly be as you wish,” he said. “If unforeseen difficulties arise, I will let you know. But I have no doubt it can be managed.
“I am right in assuming,” he added, a little uneasily, “that your brother was a baptized member of our church?”
Luke lifted the child from the bough and made her run off to play with the others. The glance he then turned upon the vicar of Nevilton was not one of admiration.
“James was the noblest spirit I’ve ever known,” he said sternly. “If there is such a thing as another world, he is certain to reach it — church or no church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You’ll find his name in the register — and mine too!” he added with a laugh.
Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the gate. Luke followed him, and at the gate they shook hands. Perhaps the same thought passed through the minds of both of them, as they went through this ceremony; for a very queer look, almost identical in its expression on either face, was exchanged between them.
Before the morning was over Luke had a second visit of condolence. This was from Mr. Quincunx, and never had the quaint recluse been more warmly received. Luke was conscious at once that here was a man who could enter into every one of his feelings, and be neither horrified nor scandalized by the most fantastic inconsistency.
The two friends walked up and down the sunny field in front of the house, Luke pouring into the solitary’s attentive ears every one of his recent impressions and sensations.
Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by James’ death. He refused Luke’s offer to let him visit the room upstairs, but his refusal was expressed in such a natural and characteristic manner that the stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part.
After a while they sat down together under the shady hedge at the top of the meadow. Here they discoursed and philosophized at large, listening to the sound of the church-bells and watching the slow-moving cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday mornings, when, in such places as this, the drowsiness of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses seems endowed with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of the horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the languor of the heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, and the stiff sabbatical dresses of the men and women who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a patient liturgical observance.
Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The recluse was indeed precisely in his element. Living habitually himself in thoughts of death, pleased — in that incomparable sunshine — to find himself still alive, cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet humorous, he exactly supplied what the wounded heart of the pagan mourner required for its comfort.
“Idiots! asses! fools!” the stone-carver ejaculated, apostrophizing in his inmost spirit the various persons, clever or otherwise, to whom this nervous and eccentric creature was a mere type of failure and superannuation. None of these others, — not one of them, — not Homer nor Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater — could for a moment have entered into the peculiar feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or Phyllis or Annie or Polly, — he would have as soon thought of relating his emotions to a row of swallows upon a telegraph-wire as to any of those dainty epitomes of life’s evasiveness!
A man’s brain, a man’s imagination, a man’s scepticism, was what he wanted; but he wanted it touched with just that flavour of fanciful sentiment of which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred quaint little episodes, the import of which none but Mr. Quincunx could have appreciated, were evoked by the stone-carver. Nothing was too blasphemous, nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the solitary’s taste. On the other hand, he entered with tender and perfect clairvoyance into the sick misery of loss which remained the background of all Luke’s sensations.
The younger man’s impetuous confidences ebbed and dwindled at last; and with the silence of the church-bells and the receding to the opposite corner of the field of the browsing cattle, a deep and melancholy hush settled upon them both.
Then it was that Mr. Quincunx began speaking of himself and his own anxieties. In the tension of the moment he even went so far as to disclose to Luke, under a promise of absolute secrecy, the sinister story of that contract into which Lacrima had entered with their employer.
Luke was all attention at once. This was indeed a piece of astounding news! He couldn’t have said whether he wondered more at the quixotic devotion of Lacrima for this quaint person, or at the solitary’s unprecedented candour in putting him “en rapport” with such an amazing situation.
“Of course we know,” murmured Mr. Quincunx, in his deep subterranean voice, “that she wouldn’t have promised such a thing, unless in her heart she had been keen, at all costs, to escape from those people. It isn’t human nature to give up everything for nothing. Probably, as a matter of fact, she rather likes the idea of having a house of her own. I expect she thinks she could twist that fool Goring round her finger; and I daresay she could! But the thing is, what do you advise me to do? Of course I’m glad enough to agree to anything that saves me from this damnable office. But what worries me about it is that devil Homer put it into her head. I don’t trust him, Luke; I don’t trust him!”
“I should think you don’t!” exclaimed his companion, looking with astonishment and wonder into the solemn grey eyes fixed sorrowfully and intently upon his own. What a strange thing, he thought to himself, that this subtle-minded intelligence should be so hopelessly devoid of the least push of practical impetus.
“Of course,” Mr. Quincunx continued, “neither you nor I would fuss ourselves much over the idea of a girl being married to a fool like this, if there weren’t something different from the rest about her. This nonsense about their having to ‘love,’ as the little simpletons call it, the man they agree to live with, is of course all tommy-rot. No one ‘loves’ the person they live with. She wouldn’t love me, — she’d probably hate me like poison, — after the first week or so! The romantic idiots who make so much of ‘love,’ and are so horrified when these little creatures are married without it, don’t understand what this planet is made of. They don’t understand the feelings of the girls either.