It seemed almost as though the damp sub-soil of the place had relaxed its malign influence; as though the yellow clay in the churchyard had ceased its calling for victims; and as though the brooding monster in the sunset, from which every day half the men of the village returned with their spades and picks, had put aside, as irrelevant to a new and kindlier epoch, its ancient hostility to the Christian dwellers in that quiet valley.
CHAPTER III
OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY
THE depths of Mr. Romer’s mind, as he paced up and down the Leonian pavement under the east front of his house on one of the early days of this propitious June, were seething with predatory projects. The last of the independent quarries on the Hill had just fallen into his hands after a legal process of more than usual chicanery, conducted in person by the invaluable Mr. Lickwit.
He was now occupied in pushing through Parliament a bill for the reduction of railway freight charges, so that the expense of carrying his stone to its various destinations might be materially reduced. But it was not only of financial power that he thought as the smell of the roses from the sun-baked walls floated in upon him across the garden.
The man’s commercial preoccupations had not by any means, as so often happens, led to the atrophy of his more personal instincts.
His erotic appetite, for instance, remained as insatiable as ever. Age did not dull, nor finance wither, that primordial craving. The aphrodisiac instincts in Mortimer Romer were, however, much less simple than might be supposed.
In this hyper-sensual region he had more claim to artistic subtlety than his enemies realized. He rarely allowed himself the direct expansion of frank and downright lasciviousness. His little pleasures were indirect, elaborate, far-fetched.
He afforded really the interesting spectacle of one whose mind was normal, energetic, dynamic; but whose senses were slow, complicated, fastidious. He was a formidable forward-marching machine, with a heart of elaborate perversity. He was a thick-skinned philistine with the sensuality of a sybarite.
I do not mean to imply that there was any lack of rapacity in the senses of Mr. Romer. His senses were indeed unfathomable in their devouring depths. But they were liable to fantastic caprices. They were not the simple animal senses of a Gothic barbarian. They assumed imperial contortions.
The main eccentricity of the erotic tendencies of this remarkable man lay in the elaborate pleasure he derived from his sense of power. The actual lure of the flesh had little attraction for him. What pleased him was a slow tightening of his grip upon people—upon their wills, their freedom, their personality.
Any impression a person might make upon Mr. Romer’s senses was at once transformed into a desire to have that person absolutely at his mercy. The thought that he held such a one reduced to complete spiritual helplessness alone satisfied him.
The first time he had encountered Lacrima Traffio he had been struck by her appealing eyes, her fragile figure, her frightened gestures. Deep in his perverted heart he had desired her; but his desire, under the psychic law I have endeavoured to explain, quickly resolved itself into a resolution to take possession of her, not as his mistress, but as his slave.
Nor did the subtle elaboration of his perversity stop there. It were easy and superficial to dominate in his own person so helpless a dependent. What was less easy was to reduce her to submission to the despotic caprices of his daughter, a girl only a few years older than Lacrima herself.
The enjoyment of a sense of vicarious power was a satisfaction curiously provocative to his predatory craving. Nor did subtlety of the situation stop at that point. It was not only necessary that the girl who attracted him should be at his daughter’s mercy; it was necessary that his daughter should not be unconscious of the role she herself played. It was necessary that they should be in a sense confederates in this game of cat-and-mouse.
As Mr. Homer paced the terrace of his imposing mansion a yet profounder triumph presented itself in the recesses of his imperial nature.
He had lately introduced into his “entourage” a certain brother-in-law of his, the widower of his sister, a man named John Goring. This individual was of a much simpler, grosser type than the recondite quarry-owner. He was, indeed, no more than a narrow-minded, insolent, avaricious animal. He lacked even the superficial gentility of his formidable relation. Nor had his concentrated but unintelligent avarice brought him, so far, any great wealth. He still remained, in spite of Romer’s help, what he had been born, an English farmer of unpropitiating manners and supernal greed.
The Promoter of Companies was, however, not unaware, any more than was Augustus Caesar, of the advantage accruing to a despot from the possession of devoted, if unattractive, tools; and contemptuously risking the shock to his social prestige of such an apparition in the neighborhood, he had secured Mr. Goring as a permanent tenant of the largest farm on his estate. This was no other than the Priory Farm, with its gentle monastic memories. What the last Prior of Nevilton would have thought could he have left his grave under St. Catherine’s altar and reappeared among his dovecotes it is distressing to surmise. He would doubtless have drawn from the sight of John Goring a profoundly edifying moral as to the results of royal interference with Christ’s Holy Church. Nor is it likely that an encounter with Mr. Romer himself would have caused less astonishment to his mediæval spirit. He would, indeed, have recognized that what is now called Progress is no mere scientific phrase; but a most devastating reality. He would have found that Nevilton had “progressed” very far. He would have believed that the queer stone-devils that his monks had carved, half emerging from the eaves of the church-roof, had got quite loose and gone abroad among men. Had he probed, in the manner of clairvoyant saints, the troubled recesses of Mr. Romer’s mind as that gentleman inhaled the sweet noon air, he would have cried aloud his indignation and made the sign of the cross as if over a mortuary of spiritual decomposition.
For as the mid-day sun of that hot June morning culminated, and the clear hard shadows fell, sharp and thin, upon the orange-tinted pavement, it entered Mr. Romer’s head that he might make a more personal use of his farmer-brother than had until now been possible.
With this idea in his brain he entered the house and sought his wife in her accustomed place at the corner of the large reception-hall. He sat down forthright by the side of her mahogany table and lit a cigar. As Mr. Romer was the species of male animal that might be written down in the guidebook of some Martian visitor as “the cigar-smoking variety” his wife would have taken her place among “the sedentary knitting ones.”
She was a large, fair, plump, woman, as smooth and pallid as her husband was grizzled and ruddy. Her obsequious deference to her lord’s views was only surpassed by her lethargic animal indolence. She was like a great, tame, overgrown, white-skinned Puma. Her eyes had the greenish tint of feline eyes, and something of their daylight contraction. Her use of spectacles did not modify this tendency, but rather increased it; for the effect of the round glass orbs pushed up upon her forehead was to enhance the malicious gleam of the little narrow-lidded slits that peered out beneath them.
It may be imagined with what weary and ironical detachment the solemn historic portraits of the ancient Seldoms—for the pictures and furniture had been sold with the house—looked out from their gilded frames upon these ambiguous intruders. But neither husband nor wife felt the least touch of “compunctious visiting” as they made themselves at ease under that immense contempt.
“I have been thinking,” said Mr. Romer, puffing a thick cloud of defiant smoke into the air, so that it went sailing up to the very feet of a delicate Reynolds portrait; “I have been thinking that I am really quite unjustified in going on with that allowance to Quincunx. He ought to realize that he has completely exhausted the money your aunt left him. He ought to face the situation, instead of quietly accepting our gift as if it were his right. And they tell me he does not even keep a civil tongue in his head. Lickwit was only complaining the other day about his tampe
ring with our workmen. He has been going about for some time with those damned Andersen fellows, and no doubt encouraging them in their confounded impertinence.
I don’t like the man, my dear;—that is the plain truth. I have never liked him; and he has certainly never even attempted to conceal his dislike of me.
“He is very polite to your face, Mortimer,” murmured the lady.
“Exactly,” Mr. Romer rejoined, “to my face he is more than polite. He is obsequious; he is cringing. But behind my back—damn him!—the rascal is a rattlesnake.”
“Well, dear, no doubt it has all worked out for the best,”; purred the plump woman, softly counting the threads of her knitting. “You were in need of Aunt’s money at the time—in great need of it.”
“I know I was,” replied the Promoter of Companies, “I know I was; and he knows I was. That is why I have been giving him six per cent on what he lent me. But the fellow has had more than that. He has had more by this time than the whole original sum; and I tell you, Susan, it’s got to end;—its got to end here, now, and forever!”
Mr. Romer’s cigar-smoke had now floated up above the feet of the Reynolds Portrait and was invading its gentle and melancholy face. It was a portrait of a young girl in the court-dress of the time, but with such pathetic nun-like features that it was clear that little Vennie was not the only one of her race to have grown weary of this rough world.
“It is a providential thing, dear,” whispered the knitting female, “that there were no horrid documents drawn up about that money. Maurice cannot impose upon us in that way.”
“He is doing worse,” answered her husband. “He is imposing upon us on the strength of a disgusting sort of sickly sentiment. He has had all his money back and more; and he knows he has. But he wants to go on living on my money while he abuses me on every occasion. Do you know, he even preaches in that confounded social meeting? I shall have that affair put a stop to, one of these days. It is only an excuse for spreading dissatisfaction in the village. Lickwit has complained to me about it more than once. He says that Socialistic scoundrel Wone is simply using the meeting to canvass for his election. You know he is going to stand, in place of Sir Herbert Ratcliffe? What the Liberal Party is doing I cannot conceive—pandering to these slimy windbags! And your blessed relation backs him up. The thing is monstrous, outrageous! Here am I, allowing this fellow a hundred a year to live in idleness; and he is plotting against me at my very doorstep.”
“Perhaps he does not know that the Conservative member is going to retire in your favour,” insinuated the lady.
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.
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