The Saturday following this eventful colloquy between the cousins was a day of concentrated gloom. There was thunder in the vicinity and, although no rain had actually fallen in Nevilton, there was a brooding presence of it in the heavy atmosphere.
The night seemed to descend that evening more quickly than usual. By eight o’clock a strange unnatural twilight spread itself over the landscape. The trees in the park submitted forlornly to a burden of sultry indistinction and seemed, in their pregnant stillness, to be trying in vain to make mysterious signals to one another.
Dinner in the gracious Elizabethan dining-room was an oppressive and discomfortable meal to all concerned. Mrs. Romer was full of tremours and apprehensions over the idea of a possible thunderstorm.
The quarry-owner was silent and preoccupied, his mind reviewing all the complicated issues of a new financial scheme. Dangelis kept looking at his watch. He had promised to be at Dead Man’s Lane by nine o’clock, and the meal seemed to drag itself out longer than he had anticipated.
He was a little apprehensive, too, as to what reception he would receive when he did arrive at Mr. Quincunx’s threshold.
Their last encounter had been so extremely controversial, that he feared lest the sensitive recluse might be harbouring one of his obstinate psychic reactions at his expense.
He was very unwilling to risk the loss of Mr. Quincunx’s society. There was no one in Nevilton to whom he could discourse quite as freely and philosophically as he could to the conscripted office-clerk, and his American interest in a “representative type” found inexhaustible satisfaction in listening to the cynical murmurings of this eccentric being.
Lacrima was calm and self-contained, but she ate hardly anything; and the hand with which she raised her glass to her lips trembled in spite of all her efforts.
Gladys herself was exuberant with suppressed excitement. Every now and then she glanced furtively at the window, and at other times, when there was no reason for such an outburst, she gave vent to a low feline laugh. She was of the type of animal that the approach of thunder, and the presence of electricity in the air, fills with magnetic nervous exaltation.
The meal was over at last, and the various persons of the group hastened to separate, each of them weighed upon, as if by an atmospheric hand, with the burden of their own purposes and apprehensions.
The two girls retired to their rooms. Mrs. Romer retreated to her favourite corner in the entrance hall, and then, uneasy even here, took refuge in the assuaging society of her friend the housekeeper.
Romer himself marched away gloomily to his study; and Dangelis, snatching up his coat and hat, made off across the south garden.
It did not take the American long to reach the low hedge which separated Mr. Quincunx’s garden from the lane. The recluse was awaiting him, and joined him at once at the gate, giving him no invitation to enter, and taking for granted that their conversation was to be a pedestrian one.
Mr. Quincunx experienced a curious reluctance to allow any of his friends to cross his threshold. The only one completely privileged in this matter was young Luke Andersen, whose gay urbanity was so insidious that it would have overcome the resistance of a Trappist monk.
“Well, where are you proposing to take me tonight?” enquired Dangelis, when they had advanced in silence some distance up the hill.
“To a place that will interest you, if your damned artistic tastes haven’t quite spoiled your pleasure in little things!”
“Not to the Seven Ashes again?” protested the American. “I know this lane leads up there.”
“You wait a little. We shall turn off presently,” muttered his companion. “The truth is I am taking you on a sort of scouting expedition tonight.”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“Well — if you must know, you shall know! I saw Miss Traffio yesterday and she asked me to keep an eye on Auber Lake tonight.”
“What? That place they were talking of? Where the wild-geese are?”
Mr. Quincunx nodded. “It may, for all I know, be a wild-goose chase. But I find your friend Gladys is up to her little tricks again — frightening people and upsetting their minds. And I promised Lacrima that you and I would stroll round that way — just to see that the girls don’t come to any harm. Only we mustn’t let them know we’re there. Lacrima would never forgive me if Gladys saw us.”
“Do you mean to say that those two children are going to wander about these confounded damp woods of yours alone?” cried the American.
“Look here, Mr. Dangelis, please understand this quite clearly. If you ever say a word to your precious Miss Gladys about this little scouting expedition, that’s an end of our talks, forever and a day!”
The citizen of Ohio bowed with a mock heroic gesture, removing his hat as he did so.
“I submit to your conditions, Don Quixote. I am entirely at your service. Is it the idea that we should track our friends on hands and knees? I am quite ready even for that, but I know what these woods of yours are like.”
Mr. Quincunx vouchsafed no reply to this ill-timed jocosity. He was anxiously surveying the tall hedge upon their right hand. “Here’s the way,” he suddenly exclaimed. “Here’s the path. We can hit a short-cut here that brings us straight through Camel’s Cover, up to Wild Pine. Then we can slip down into Badger’s Bottom and so into the Auber Woods.”
“But I thought the Auber Woods were much nearer than that. You told me the other day that you could get into the heart of them, in a quarter of an hour from your own, garden!”
“And so I can, my friend,” replied Mr. Quincunx, scrambling up the bank into the field, and turning to offer his hand to his companion. “But it happens that this is the way those girls are coming. At any rate that is what she said. They were going to avoid my lane but they were going to enter the woods from the Seven Ashes side, just because it is so much nearer.”
“I submit, I submit,” muttered the artist blandly. “I only hope this scouting business needn’t commence till we have got well through Camel’s Cover and Badger’s Bottom! I must confess I am not altogether in love with the sound of those places, though no doubt they are harmless enough. But you people do certainly select the most extraordinary names for your localities. Our own little lapses in these things are classical compared with your Badgers and Camels and Ashes and Dead Men!”
Mr. Quincunx did not condescend to reply to this. He continued to plough his way across the field, every now and then glancing nervously at the sky, which grew more and more threatening. Walking behind him and a little on one side, the American was singularly impressed by the appearance he presented, especially when the faint light of the pallid and cloud-flecked moon fell on his uplifted profile. With his corrugated brow and his pointed beard, Mr. Quincunx was a noticeable figure at any time, but under the present atmospheric conditions his lean form and striking head made a picture of forlorn desolation worthy of the sombre genius of a Bewick.
Dangelis conceived the idea of a picture, which he himself might be capable of evoking, with this melancholy, solitary figure as its protagonist.
He wondered vaguely what background he would select as worthy of the resolute hopelessness in Mr. Quincunx’s forlorn mien.
It was only after they had traversed the sloping recesses of Camel’s Cover, and had arrived at the crest of the Wild Pine ridge, that he was able to answer this question. Then he knew at once. The true pictorial background for his eccentric companion could be nothing less than that line of wind-shaken, rain-washed Scotch firs, which, visible from all portions of Nevilton, had gathered to themselves the very essence of its historic tragedy.