“An orchard based on rock,” murmured Mr. Taxater, “that, I think, is an admirable symbol of what this place represents. Clay at the top and sandstone at the bottom! I wonder whether it is better, in this world, to be clay or stone? We four poor foreigners have, I suspect, a preference for a material very different from both of these. Our element would be marble. Eh, Andersen? Marble that can resist all these corrupting natural forces and throw them back, and hold them down. I always think that marble is the appropriate medium of civilization’s retort to instinct and savagery. The Latin races have always built in marble. It was certainly of marble that our Lord was thinking when he used his celebrated metaphor about the founding of the Church.”
The stone-carver made no answer. He had noticed a quick supplicating glance from Lacrima’s dark eyes.
“Well,”—he said, “I think I must be looking for my brother, and I expect our young lady is waiting for Miss Traffio.”
They bade their friends good-night and moved off.
“I am always at your service,” were Mr. Taxater’s last words, “if ever either of you care to appeal to the free-masonry of the children of marble against the children of clay.”
As they retraced their steps Andersen remarked to his companion how curious it was, that neither Vennie nor Mr. Taxater seemed in the least aware of anything extraordinary or unconventional in this surreptitious friendship between the girls from the House and their father’s workmen.
“Yes, I wonder what Mrs. Seldom would think of us,” rejoined Lacrima, “but she probably thinks Gladys is capable of anything and that I am as bad as she is. But I do like that little Vennie! I believe she is a real saint. She gives me such a queer feeling of being different from everyone.
“Mr. Taxater no doubt is making a convert of her,” said the stone-carver. “And I have a suspicion that he hopes to convert Gladys too, probably through your influence.”
“I don’t like to think that of him,” replied the girl. “He seems to me to admire Vennie for herself and to be kind to us for ourselves. I think he is a thoroughly good man.”
“Possibly — possibly,” muttered James, “but I don’t trust him. I never have trusted him.”
They said no more, and threaded their way slowly through the orchard to the place where they had left the others. The wind had dropped and there was a dull, obstinate expectancy in the atmosphere. Every leaf and grass blade seemed to be intently alert and listening.
In her heart Lacrima was conscious of an unusual sense of foreboding and apprehension. Surely there could be nothing worse in store for her than what she already suffered. She wondered what Maurice Quincunx was doing at that moment. Was he thinking of her, and were his thoughts the cause of this strange oppression in the air? Poor Maurice! She longed to be free to devote herself to him, to smooth his path, to distract his mind. Would fate ever make such a thing possible? How unfair Gladys was in her suspicions!
She liked James Andersen and was very grateful to him, but he did not need her as Maurice needed her!
“I see them!” she cried suddenly. “But how odd they look! They’re not speaking a word. Have they quarrelled, I wonder?”
The two fair-haired amorists appeared indeed extremely gloomy and melancholy, as they sat, with a little space between them, on the fallen tree. They rose with an air of relief at the others approach.
“I thought you were never coming,” said Gladys. “How long you have been! We have been waiting for hours. Come along. We must go straight back and dress or we shall be late for dinner. No time for good-byes! Au revoir, you two! Come along, girl, quick! We’d better run.”
She seized her cousin’s hand and dragged her off and they were quickly out of sight.
The two brothers watched them disappear and then turned and walked away together. “Don’t let’s go home yet,” said Luke. “Let’s go to the churchyard first. The sun will have set, but it won’t be dark for a long time. And I love the churchyard in the twilight.”
James nodded. “It is our garden, isn’t it, — and our orchard? It is the only spot in Nevilton where no one can interfere with us.”
“That, and the Seldom Arms,” added the younger brother.
They paced side by side in silence till they reached the road. The orchards, left to themselves, relapsed into their accustomed reserve. Whatever secrets they concealed of the confused struggles of ephemeral mortals, they concealed in inviolable discretion.
CHAPTER XI ART AND NATURE
THE early days of June, all of them of the same quality of golden weather, were hardly over, before our wanderer from Ohio found himself on terms of quite pleasant familiarity with the celibate vicar of Nevilton, whose relations with his friend Gladys so immensely interested him.
The conscientious vicar had sought him out, on the very day after his visit to the mill copse, and the artist had found the priest more to his fancy than he had imagined possible.
The American’s painting had begun in serious earnest. A studio had been constructed for him in one of the sheds near the conservatory, a place much more full of light and air and pleasant garden smells, than would have been the lumber-room referred to by Mrs. Romer, adjoining the chaste slumbers of the laborious Lily. Here for several long mornings he had worked at high pressure and in a vein of imaginative expansion.
Something of the seething sap of these incomparable days seemed to pass into his blood. He plunged into a bold and original series of Dionysic “impressions,” seeking to represent, in accordance with his new vision, those legendary episodes in the life of the divine Wanderer which seemed most capable of lending themselves to a half-realistic, half-fantastic transmutation, of the people and places immediately around him. He sought to introduce into these pictures the very impetus and pressure of the exuberant earth-force, as he felt it stirring and fermenting in his own veins, and in those of the persons and animals about him. He strove to clothe the shadowy poetic outline of the classical story with fragments and morsels of actual experience, as one by one his imaginative intellect absorbed them.
Here, too, under the sycamores and elms of Nevilton, the old world-madness followed the alternations of sun and moon, with the same tragic swiftness and the same ambiguous beauty, as when, with tossing arms and bared throats, the virgins of Thessaly flung themselves into the dew-starred thickets.
Dangelis began by making cautious and tentative use of such village children as he found it possible to lay hands upon, as models in his work, but this method did not prove very satisfactory.
The children, when their alarm and inqusitiveness wore off, grew tired and turbulent; and on more than one occasion the artist had to submit to astonishing visits from confused and angry parents who called him a “foreigner” and a “Yankee,” and qualified these appelations with epithets so astoundingly gross, that Dangelis was driven to wonder from what simple city-bred fancy the illusion of rural innocence had first proceeded.
At length, as the days went on, the bold idea came into his head of persuading Gladys herself to act as his model.
His relations with her had firmly established themselves now on the secure ground of playful camaraderie, and he knew enough of her to feel tolerably certain that he had only to broach such a scheme, to have it welcomed with enthusiastic ardour.
He made the suggestion one evening as they walked home together after her spiritual lesson. “I find that last picture of mine extremely difficult to manage,” he said.
“Why! I think its the best of them all!” cried Gladys. “You’ve got a lovely look of longing in the eyes of your queer god; and the sail of Theseus’ ship, as you see it against the blue sea, is wonderful. The little bushes and things, too, you’ve put in; I like them particularly. They remind me of that wood down by the mill, where I caught the thrush. I suppose you’ve forgotten all about that day,” she added, giving him a quick sidelong glance.