“It’s not that I’m begging you to marry me,” she wailed, “it’s only that I love you, love you and want you so frightfully, my darling!
“I wouldn’t worry you, Luke,” she added, in a low, pitiful little voice, that seemed to emerge rather from the general shadowiness of the place than from a human being’s lips, “I wouldn’t tease you, or scold you when you enjoyed yourself! It’s only that I want to be with you, that I want to be near you. I never thought it would come to this. I thought —” Her voice died away again into the darkness.
Luke began pacing up and down the floor of the barn.
Once more she spoke. “I’d be faithful to you, Luke, married or unmmarried, — and I’d work, though I know you won’t believe that. But I can do quite hard work, when I like!”
By some malignity of chance, or perhaps by a natural reaction from her pleading words, Luke’s mind reverted to her tone and temper on that June morning when she insulted him by a present of money.
“No, Gladys,” he said. “It won’t do. You and I weren’t made for each other. There are certain things — many things — in me that you’ll never understand, and I daresay there are things in you that I never shall. We’re not made for one another, child, I tell you. We shouldn’t be happy for a week. I know myself, and I know you, and I’m sure it wouldn’t do.
“Don’t you fret yourself about Dangelis. If he finds out, he finds out — and that’s the end of it. But I swear to you that I know him well enough to know that you’ve nothing to be afraid of — even if he does find out. He’s not the kind of man to make a fuss. I can see exactly the way he’d take it. He’d be sorry for you and laugh at himself, and plunge desperately into his painting.
“I like Dangelis, I tell you frankly. I think he’s a thoroughly generous and large-minded fellow. Of course I’ve hardly seen him to speak to, but you can’t be mistaken about a man like that. At least I can’t! I seem to know him in and out, up hill and down dale.
“Make a fuss? Not he! He’ll make this country ring and ting with the fame of his pictures. That’s what he’ll do! And as for being horrid to you — not he! I know him better than that. He’ll be too much in love with you, too, — you little demon! That’s another point to bear in mind.
“Oh, you’ll have the whip-hand of him, never fear, — and our son, — I hope it is a son my dear! — will be treated as if it were his own.
“I know him, I tell you! He’s a thoroughly decent fellow, though a bit of a fool, no doubt. But we’re all that!
“Don’t you be a little goose, Gladys, and get fussed up and worried over nothing. After all, what does it matter? Life’s such a mad affair anyway! All we can do is to map things to the best of our ability, and then chance it.
“We’re all on the verge of a precipice. Do you think I don’t realize that? But that’s no reason why we should rush blindly up to the thing, and throw ourselves over. And it would be nothing else than that, nothing else than sheer madness, for you and I to go off together.
“Do you think your father would give us a penny? Not he! I detect in your father, Gladys, an extraordinary vein of obstinacy. You haven’t clashed up against it yet, but try and play any of these games on him, and you’ll see!
“No; one thing you may be perfectly sure of, and that is, that whatever he finds out, Dangelis will never breathe a word to your father. He’s madly in love with you, girl, I tell you; and if I’m out of the way, you’ll be able to do just what you like with him!”
It was completely dark now, and when Luke’s oration came to an end there was no sound in the barn except a low sobbing.
“Come on, child; we must be getting home, or you’ll be frightfully late. Here! give me your hand. Where are you?”
He groped about in the darkness until his sleeve brushed against her shoulder. It was trembling under her efforts to suppress her sobs.
He got hold of her wrists and pulled her to her feet. “Come on, my dear,” he repeated, “we must get out of this-now. Give me one nice kiss before we go.”
She permitted herself to be caressed — passive and unresisting in his arms.
In the darkness they touched the outer edge of Mr. Clavering’s hiding-place, and the girl, swaying a little backwards under Luke’s endearments, felt the pressure of the hay-wall behind her. She did not, however, feel the impassioned touch of the choking kiss which the poor imprisoned priest desperately imprinted on a loose tress of her hair.
It was one of those pitiful and grotesque situations which seem sometimes to arise, — as our fantastic planet turns on its orbit, — for no other purpose than that of gratifying some malign vein of goblin-like irony in the system of things.
That at the moment when Luke, under the spell of the shadowy fragrance of the place, and the pliant submissiveness of the girl’s form, threw something of his old ardour into his kiss, her other, more desperate love should have dared such an approach, was a coincidence apparently of the very kind to appeal to the perverse taste of this planetary humour.
The actual result of such a strange consentaneousness of rival emotion was that the three human heads remained for a brief dramatic moment in close juxtaposition, — the two fair ones and the dark one so near one another, that it might have seemed almost inevitable that their thoughts should interact in that fatal proximity.
The pitiful pathos of the whole human comedy might well have been brought home to any curious observer able to pierce that twilight! Such an observer would have felt towards those three poor obsessed craniums the same sort of tenderness that they themselves would have been conscious of, had they suddenly come across a sleeping person or a dead body.
Strange, that the ultimate pity in these things, — in this blind antagonistic striving of human desires under such gracious flesh and blood — should only arouse these tolerant emotions when they are no longer of any avail! Had some impossible bolt from heaven stricken these three impassioned ones in their tragic approximation, how, — long afterwards, — the discoverer of the three skeletons would have moralized upon their fate! As it was, there was nothing but the irony of the gods to read what the irony of the gods was writing upon that moment’s drowning sands.
When Luke and Gladys left the barn, and hurriedly, under the rising moon, retook their way towards Nevilton, Clavering emerged from his concealment dazed and stupefied. He threw himself down in the darkness on the heap of oats and strove to give form and coherence to the wild flood of thoughts which swept through him.
So this was what he had come out to learn! This was the knowledge that his mad jealousy had driven him to snatch!
He thought of the exquisite sacredness — for him — of that morning’s ritual in the church, and of how easily he had persuaded himself to read into the girl’s preoccupied look something more than natural sadness over Andersen’s death. He had indeed, — only those short hours ago, — allowed himself the sweet illusion that this religious initiation really meant, for his pagan love, some kind of Vita Nuova.
The fates had rattled their dice, however, to a different tune. The unfortunate girl was indeed entering upon a Vita Nuova, but how hideously different a one from that which had been his hope!
On Wednesday came the confirmation service. How could he, — with any respect for his conscience as a guardian of these sacred rites, — permit Gladys to be confirmed now? Yet what ought he to do? Drops of cold sweat stood upon his forehead as he wondered whether it was incumbent upon him to take the first train the following morning for the bishop’s palace and to demand an interview.