“You haven’t by any chance seen the elder Andersen, have you?” enquired Clavering.
“Not a bit of it,” replied the recumbent man. “I suppose I cannot offer you a piece of melon, Miss Seldom?”
The two baffled pursuers looked at one another in hopeless disappointment.
“We’ve lost him,” muttered the priest. “He must have gone through your orchard after all.”
Mr. Wone did not miss this remark. “You were looking for our good James? No. We haven’t seen anything of him. No doubt he is with his brother somewhere. I believe they usually spend their Saturdays out at Hullaway.”
“When does the election come off, Mr. Wone?” enquired Vennie, hastily, extremely unwilling that her tactless companion should disclose the purpose of their search.
“In a week’s time from next Monday,” replied the Candidate. “This will be my last free day till then. I have to make thirty speeches during the next seven days. Our cause goes well. I believe, with God’s great help, we are practically certain of victory. It will be a great event, Miss Seldom, a great event.”
Mr. Clavering made a hopeless sign to Vennie, indicative of the uselessness of any further steps to retake the runaway.
“I think your side will win in the country generally,” he remarked. “As to this district, I cannot tell. Mr. Romer has strengthened himself considerably by his action after the strike.”
The candidate placed a carefully selected piece of fruit in his mouth, and called to his little boy, who was scratching his initials with a knife upon the base of the tower.
“He will be beaten all the same,” he said. “He is bound to be beaten. The stars in their courses must fight against a man like that. I feel it in the air; in the earth; in these beautiful trees. I feel it everywhere. He has challenged stronger powers than you or me. He has challenged the majesty of God Himself. I’ll give you the right”—he went on in a voice that mechanically assumed a preacher’s tone—“to call me a liar and a false prophet, if by this time, in ten days, the oppressor of the poor does not find himself crushed and beaten!”
“I am afraid right and wrong are more strangely mixed in this world than all that, Mr. Wone,” Vennie found herself saying, with a little weary glance over the wide sun-bathed valleys extended at their feet.
“Pardon me, pardon me, young lady,” cried the Candidate. “In this great cause there can be no doubt, no question, no ambiguity. The evolution of the human race has reached a point when the will of God must reveal itself in the triumph of love and liberty. Nothing else matters. All turns upon this. That is why I feel that my campaign is more than a political struggle. It is a religious struggle, and on our side are the great moral forces that uphold the world!”
Vennie’s exhausted nerves completely broke down upon this.
“Shall we go?” she said, touching her companion on the sleeve.
Clavering nodded, and bade the melon-eater “good afternoon,” with a brusque gesture.
As they went off, he turned on his heel. “The will of God, Mr. Wone, is only to be found in the obedient reception of His sacraments.”
The Christian candidate opened his mouth with amazement. “Those young people,” he thought to himself, “are up to no good. They’ll end by becoming papists, if they go on like this. Its extraordinary that the human mind should actually prefer slavery to freedom!”
Meanwhile the man whose mysterious evasion of his pursuers had resulted in this disconcerting encounter was already well-advanced on his way towards the Wild Pine ridge. He had, as a matter of fact, crossed the field between the west drive and the Vicarage-garden, and skirting the orchards below Nevilton House, had plunged into the park.
A vague hope of meeting Lacrima — an instinctive rather than a conscious feeling — had led him in this direction. Once in the park, the high opposing ridge, crowned with its sentinel-line of tall Scotch-firs, arrested his attention and drew him towards it. He crossed the Yeoborough road and ascended the incline of Dead Man’s Lane.
As he passed the cottage of his rival, he observed Mr. Quincunx energetically at work in his garden. On this occasion the recluse was digging up, not weeds, but young potatoes. He was in his shirt-sleeves and looked hot and tired.
Andersen leaned upon the little gate and observed him with curious interest. “Why isn’t she here?” he muttered to himself. Then, after a pause: “He is an ash-root. Let him drag that house down! Why doesn’t he drag it down, with all its heavy stones? And the Priory too? And the Church;—yes; and the Church too! He burrows like a root. He looks like a root. I must tell him all these things. I must tell him why he has been chosen, and I have been rejected!” He opened the gate forthwith and advanced towards the potato-digger.
Mr. Quincunx might have struck the imagination of a much less troubled spirit than that of the poor stone-carver as having a resemblance to a root. His form was at once knotted and lean, fibrous and delicate. His face, by reason of his stooping position, was suffused with a rich reddish tint, and his beard was dusty and unkempt. He rose hastily, on observing his visitor.
“People like you and me, James, are best by ourselves at these holiday-times,” was his inhospitable greeting. “You can help me with my potatoes if you like. Or you can tell me your news as I work. Or do you want to ask me any question?”
He uttered these final words in such a tone as the Delphic oracle might have used, when addressing some harassed refugee.
“Has she been up here today?” said the stone-carver.
“I like the way you talk,” replied the other. “Why should we mention their names? When I say people, I mean girls. When I say persons, I mean girls. When I say young ladies, I mean girls. And when you say ‘she’ you mean our girl.”
“Yours!” cried the demented man; “she is yours — not ours. She is weighed down by this evil Stone, — weighed down into the deep clay. What has she to do with me, who have worked at the thing so long?”
Mr. Quincunx leant upon his hoe and surveyed the speaker. It occurred to him at once that something was amiss. “Good Lord!” he thought to himself, “the fellow has been drinking. I must get him out of this garden as quickly as possible.”
“She loves you,” Andersen went on, “because you are like a root. You go deep into the earth and no stone can resist you. You twine and twine and twine, and pull them all down. They are all haunted places, these houses and churches; all haunted and evil! They make a man’s head ache to live in them. They put voices into a man’s ears. They are as full of voices as the sea is full of waves.”
“You are right there, my friend,” replied Mr. Quincunx. “It’s only what I’ve always said. Until people give up building great houses and great churches, no one will ever be happy. We ought to live in bushes and thickets, or in tents. My cottage is no better than a bush. I creep into it at night, and out again in the morning. If its thatch fell on my head I should hardly feel it.”
“You wouldn’t feel it, you wouldn’t!” cried the stone-carver. “And the reason of that is, that you can burrow like a root. I shouldn’t feel it either, but for a different reason.”
“I expect you’d better continue your walk,” remarked Mr. Quincunx. “I never fuss myself about people who come to see me. If they come, they come. And when they go, they go.”
The stone-carver sighed and looked round him. The sun gleamed graciously upon the warm earth, danced and sparkled upon the windows of the cottage, and made the beads of sweat on Mr. Quincunx’s brow shine like diamonds.
“Do you think,” he said, while the potato-digger turned to his occupation, “that happiness or unhappiness predominates in this world?”