Know? Of course he knows! All the village knows. All the country knows. You can never hide things of that kind. He knows, and he is deliberately working against me.
“It would be nice if he could get a place as a clerk,” suggested Mr. Quincunx’s relative, pensively. “It certainly does not seem fair that you, who work so hard for the money you make, should support him in complete idleness.”
Mr. Romer looked at her thoughtfully, knocking the ashes from his cigar. “I believe you have hit it there, my dear,” he said. Then he smiled in a manner peculiarly malignant. “Yes, it would be very nice if he could get a place as a clerk — a place where he would have plenty of simple office work — a place where he would be kept to his desk, and not allowed to roam the country corrupting honest workmen. Yes, you are quite right, Susan; a clerk’s place is what this Quincunx wants. And, by Heaven, what he shall have! I’ll bring the affair to a head at once. I’ll put it to him that your aunt’s money is at an end, and that I have already paid him back in full all that he lent me. I’ll put it to him that he is now in my debt. In fact, that he is now entirely dependent on me to the tune of a hundred a year. And I’ll explain to him that he must either go out into the world and shift for himself, as better men than he have had to do, or enter Lickwit’s office, either in Yeoborough or on the Hill.”
“He will enter the office, Mortimer,” murmured the lady; “he will enter the office. Maurice is not the man to emigrate, or do anything of that kind. Besides he has a reason”—here her voice became so extremely mellifluous that it might almost be said to have liquefied—“to stay in Nevilton.”
“What’s this?” cried Romer, getting up and throwing his cigar out of the window. “You don’t mean to tell me — eh? — that this scarecrow is in love with Gladys?”
The lady purred softly and replaced her spectacles. “Oh dear no! What an idea! Oh certainly, certainly not! But Gladys, you know, is not the only girl in Nevilton.”
“Who the devil is it then? Not Vennie Seldom, surely?”
“Look nearer, Mortimer, look nearer”; murmured the lady with sibilant sweetness.
“Not Lacrima! You don’t mean to say—”
“Why, dear, you needn’t be so surprised. You look more angry than if it had been Gladys herself. Yes, of course it is Lacrima. Hadn’t you observed it? But you dear men are so stupid, aren’t you, in these things?”
Mrs. Romer rubbed one white hand over the other; and beamed upon her husband through her spectacles.
Mr. Romer frowned. “But the Traffio girl is so, so — you know what I mean.”
“So quiet and unimpressionable. Ah! my dear, it is just these quiet girls who are the very ones to be enjoying themselves on the sly.”
“How far has this thing gone, Susan?”
“Oh you needn’t get excited, Mortimer. It has not really ‘gone’ anywhere. It has hardly begun. In fact I have not the least authority for saying that she cares for him at all. I think she does a little, though. I think she does. But one never can tell. I can, however, give you my word that he cares for her. And that is what we were talking about, weren’t we?”
“I shall pack him off to my office in London,” said Mr. Romer.
“He wouldn’t go, my dear. I tell you he wouldn’t go.”
“But he can’t live on nothing.”
“He can. He will. Sooner than leave Nevilton Maurice would eat grass. He would become lay-reader or something. He would sponge on Mrs. Seldom.”
“Well, then he shall walk to Yeoborough and back every day. That will cool his blood for him.”
“That will do him a great deal of good, dear; a great deal of good. Auntie always used to say that Maurice ought to take more exercise.”
“Lickwit will exercise him! Make no mistake about that.”
“How you do look round you, dear, in all these things! How impossible it is for anyone to fool you, Mortimer!”
As Mrs. Romer uttered these words she glanced up at the Reynolds portrait above their heads, as if half-suspecting that such fawning flattery would bring down the mockery of the little Lady-in-Waiting.
“I can’t help thinking Lacrima would make a very good wife to some hard-working sensible man,” Mr. Romer remarked.
His lady looked a little puzzled. “It would be difficult to find so suitable a companion for Gladys,” she said.
“Oh, of course I don’t mean till Gladys is married,” said the quarry-owner quickly. “By the way, when is she going to accept that young fool of an Ilminster?”
“All in good time, my dear, all in good time,” purred his wife. “He has not proposed to her yet.”
“It’s very curious,” remarked Mr. Romer pensively, “that a young man of such high connections should wish to marry our daughter.”
“What things you say, Mortimer! Isn’t Gladys going to inherit all this property? Don’t you suppose that a younger son of Lord Tintinhull would jump at the idea of being master of this house?”
“He won’t be master of it while I live,” said Mr. Romer grimly.
“In my opinion he never will be”; added the lady. “I don’t think Gladys really intends to accept him.”
“She’ll marry somebody, I hope?” said the master sharply.
“O yes she’ll marry, soon enough. Only it’ll be a cleverer man, and a richer man, than young Ilminster.”
“Have you any other pleasant little romance to fling at me?”
“O no. But I know what our dear Gladys is. I know what she is looking out for.”
“When she does marry,” said Mr. Romer, “we shall have to think seriously what is to become of Lacrima. Look here, my dear,”—it was wonderful, the pleasant ejaculatory manner in which this flash of inspiration was thrown out, — “why not marry her to John? She would be just the person for a farmer’s wife.”
Mrs. Romer, to do her justice, showed signs of being a little shocked at this proposal.
“But John,”—she stammered;—“John — is not — exactly — a marrying person, is he?”
“He is — what I wish him to be”; was her husband’s haughty answer.
“Oh well, of course, dear, it’s as you think best. Certainly”—the good woman could not resist this little thrust—“its John’s only chance of marrying a lady. For Lacrima is that—with all her faults.”
“I shall talk to John about it”; said the Promoter of Companies. Feline thing though she was, Susan Homer could not refrain from certain inward qualms when she thought of the fragile hyper-sensitive Italian in the embraces of John Goring. What on earth set her husband dreaming of such a thing? But he was subject to strange caprices now and then; and it was more dangerous to balk him in these things than in his most elaborate financial plots. She had found that out already. So, on the present occasion, she made no further remark, than a reiterated—“How you do look all round you, Mortimer! It is not easy for anyone to fool you.”
She rose from her seat and collected her knitting. “I must go and see where Gladys is,” she said.
Mr. Romer followed her to the door, and went out again upon the terrace. The little nun-like Lady-in-Waiting looked steadily out across the room, her pinched attenuated features expressing nothing but patient weariness of all the ways of this mortal world.
CHAPTER IV REPRISALS FROM BELOW
IT was approaching the moment consecrated to the close of the day’s labour in the stone-works by Nevilton railway-station. The sky was cloudless; the air windless. It was one of those magical arrests of the gliding feet of time, which afternoons in June sometimes bring with them, holding back, as it were, all living processes of life, in sweet and lingering suspense. The steel tracks of the railway-line glittered in the sun. In the fields, that sloped away beyond them, the browsing cattle wore that unruffled air of abysmal indifference, which seems to make one day in their sight to be as a thousand years. To these placid earth-children, drawing the centuries together in solemn continuity, the tribes of men and their turbulent drama were but as vapours that came and went. The high elms in the hedges had already assumed that dark monotonous foliage which gives to their patient stillness on such a day an atmosphere of monumental expectancy. A flock of newly-sheared sheep, clean and shining in the hot sun, drifted in crowded procession down the narrow road, leaving a cloud of white dust behind them that remained stationary in the air long after they had passed. In the open stone-yard close to the road the brothers Andersen were working together, chipping and hammering with bare arms at an enormous Leonian slab, carving its edges into delicate mouldings. The younger of the two wore no hat, and his closely clipped fair curls and loose shirt open at the throat, lent him, as he moved about his work with easy gestures, a grace and charm well adapted to that auspicious hour.