Vennie thought it was extremely singular, and she also thought that she had never heard the word “enquiries” pronounced in just that way.
“It leaves quite early, at nine in the morning. And it’s some boat, — I can tell you that!”
“Well,” continued Vennie, recovering by degrees that sense of concentrated power which had accompanied her all day, “what now? Are you still going to sail by it?”
“That’s — a—large — proposition,” answered her interlocutor slowly. “I–I rather think I am!”
One effect of his escape from his Nevilton enchantress seemed to be an irrepressible tendency to relapse into the American vernacular.
They continued advancing along the edge of the ditch, side by side.
Vennie plunged into the matter of Lacrima and Mr. Quincunx.
She narrated all she knew of this squalid and sinister story. She enlarged upon the two friends’ long devotion to one another. She pictured the wickedness and shame of the projected marriage with John Goring. Finally she explained how it had come about that both Mr. Romer’s slaves, and with them the little circus-waif, were at that moment in Weymouth.
“And so you’ve carried them off?” cried the Artist in high glee. “Bless my soul, but I admire you for it! And what are you going to do with them now?”
Vennie looked straight into his eyes. “That is where I want your help, Mr. Dangelis!”
It was late in the evening before the citizen of Toledo, Ohio, and the would-be Postulant of the Sacred Heart parted from one another opposite the Jubilee Clock.
A reassuring telegram had been sent to Mrs. Seldom announcing Vennie’s return in the course of the following day.
As for the rest, all had been satisfactorily arranged. The American had displayed overpowering generosity. He seemed anxious to do penance for his obsession by the daughter, by lavishing benefactions upon the victims of the father. Perhaps it seemed to him that this was the best manner of paying back the debt, which his aesthetic imagination owed to the suggestive charms of the Nevilton landscape.
He made himself, in a word, completely responsible for the three wanderers. He would carry them off with him to the Channel Isles, and either settle them down there, or make it possible for them to cross thence to France, and from France, if so they pleased, on to Lacrima’s home in Italy. He would come to an arrangement with his bankers to have handed over definitely to Mr. Quincunx a sum that would once and for all put him into a position of financial security.
“I’d have paid a hundred times as much as that,” he laughingly assured Vennie, “to have got clear of my mix-up with that girl.”
Thus it came about that at nine o’clock on the day which followed the burial of James Andersen, Vennie, standing on the edge of the narrow wharf, between railway-trucks and hawsers, watched the ship with the red funnels carry off the persons who — under Heaven — were the chief cause of the stone-carver’s death.
As the four figures, waving to her over the ship’s side grew less and less distinct, Vennie felt an extraordinary and unaccountable desire to burst into a fit of passionate weeping. She could not have told why she wept, nor could she have told whether her tears were tears of relief or of desolation, but something in the passing of that brightly-painted ship round the corner of the little break-water, gave her a different emotion from any she had ever known in her life.
When at last she turned her back to the harbour, she asked the way to the nearest Catholic Church, but in place of following the directions given her, she found herself seated on the shingles below Brunswick Terrace, watching the in-drawing and out-flowing waves.
How strange this human existence was! Long after the last block of Leonian stone had been removed from its place — long after the stately pinnacles of Nevilton House had crumbled into shapeless ruins, — long after the memory of all these people’s troubles had been erased and forgotten, — this same tide would fling itself upon this same beach, and its voice then would be as its voice now, restless, unsatisfied, unappeased.
CHAPTER XXIX THE GOAT AND BOY
IT was the middle of October. Francis Taxater and Luke Andersen sat opposite one another over a beer-stained table in the parlour of the Goat and Boy. The afternoon was drawing to its close and the fire in the little grate threw a warm ruddy light through the darkening room.
Outside the rain was falling, heavily, persistently, — the sort of rain that by long-continued importunity finds its way through every sort of obstacle. For nearly a month this rain had lasted. It had come in with the equinox, and Heaven knew how long it was going to stay. It had so thoroughly drenched all the fields, woods, lanes, gardens and orchards of Nevilton, that a palpable atmosphere of charnel-house chilliness pervaded everything. Into this atmosphere the light sank at night like a thing drowned in deep water, and into this atmosphere the light rose at dawn like something rising from beneath the sea.
The sun itself, as a definite presence, had entirely disappeared. It might have fallen into fathomless space, for all the visible signs it gave of its existence. The daylight seemed a pallid entity, diffused through the lower regions of the air, unconnected with any visible fount of life or warmth.
The rain seemed to draw forth from the earth all the accumulated moisture of centuries of damp autumns, while between the water below the firmament and the water above the firmament, — between the persistent deluge from the sky and the dampness exuded from the earth, — the death-stricken multitudinous leaves of Nevilton drifted to their morgue in the cart-ruts and ditches.
The only object in the vicinity whose appearance seemed to suffer no change from this incursion of many waters was Leo’s Hill. Leo’s Hill looked as if it loved the rain, and the rain looked as if it loved Leo’s Hill. In no kind of manner were its familiar outlines affected, except perhaps in winning a certain added weight, by reason of the fact that its rival Mount had been stripped of its luxuriant foliage.
“So our dear Mr. Romer has got his Freight Bill through,” said Luke, sipping his glass of whiskey and smiling at Mr. Taxater. “He at any rate then won’t be worried by this rain.”
“I’m to dine with him tomorrow,” answered the papal champion, “so I shall have an opportunity of discovering what he’s actually gained by this.”
“I wish I’d had James cremated,” muttered Luke, staring at the fire-place, into which the rain fell down the narrow chimney.
Mr. Taxater crossed himself.
“What do you really feel,” enquired the younger man abruptly, “about the chances in favour of a life after death?”
“The Church,” answered Mr. Taxater, stirring his rum and sugar with a spoon, “could hardly be expected to formulate a dogma denying such a hope. The true spirit of her attitude towards it may perhaps be best understood in the repetition of her requiem prayer, ‘Save us from eternal death!’ We none of us want eternal death, my friend, though many of us are very weary of this particular life. I do not know that I am myself, however. But that may be due to the fact that I am a real sceptic. To love life, Andersen, one cannot be too sceptical.”
“Upon my soul I believe you!” answered the stone-carver, “but I cannot quite see how you can make claim to that title.”
“You’re not a philosopher my friend,” said Mr. Taxater, leaning his elbows on the table and fixing a dark but luminous eye upon his interlocutor.
“If you were a philosopher you would know that to be a true sceptic it is necessary to be a Catholic. You, for instance, aren’t a sceptic, and never can be. You’re a dogmatic materialist. You doubt everything in the world except doubt. I doubt doubt.”