Read Ebook: Wood and Stone: A Romance by Powys John Cowper

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Ebook has 3326 lines and 191265 words, and 67 pages

Her wistful spirit, shrinking into itself like the leaves of a sensitive plant at the least approach of a rough hand, responded only to one passionate impulse, the impulse of religion.

She grew indeed so estranged from the normal world, that it was not only Valentia who concealed the thought that when she left the earth the ancient race of Seldoms would leave it with her.

Nor was it only in regard to her child's religious obsession that the lady suffered. She had flatly refused to let her enter into anything but the coldest relations with "those dreadful people at the House"; and it was with a peculiar shock of dismay that she found that the girl was not literally obeying her. It was not, however, to the Romers themselves that Vennie made her shy overtures, but to a luckless little relative of that family now domiciled with them as companion to Gladys Romer.

This young dependent, reputed in the village to be of Italian origin, struck the gentle heart of the last of the Seldoms with indescribable pity. She could not altogether define the impression the girl produced upon her, but it was a singularly oppressive one, and it vexed and troubled her.

The situation was wretchedly complicated. It was extremely difficult to get a word with the little companion without encountering Gladys; and any approach to intimacy with "the Romer girl" would have meant an impossible scene with Mrs. Seldom. Nor was it a light undertaking, in such hurried interviews as she did manage to secure, to induce the child to drop her reserve. She would fix her great brown foreign eyes--her name was Lacrima Traffio--on Vennie's face, and make curious little helpless gestures with her hands when questions were asked her; but speak of herself she would not.

It was clear she was absolutely dependent on her cousins. Vennie gathered as much as that, as she once talked with her under the church wall, when Gladys was chatting with the vicar. A reference to her own people had nearly resulted in an outburst of tears. Vennie had had to be content with a broken whisper: "We come from Rapallo--they are all dead." There was nothing, it appeared, that could be added to this.

It was perhaps a little inconsistent in the old lady to be so resolute against her daughter's overtures to Lacrima, as she herself had no hesitation in making a sort of prot?g? of another of Mr. Romer's tribe.

This was an eccentric middle-aged bachelor who had drifted into the place soon after the new-comer's arrival and had established himself in a dilapidated cottage on the outskirts of the Auber woods.

Remotely related to Mrs. Romer, he had in some way become dependent on her husband, whose financial advantage over him was not, it seemed, as time went on, exerted in a very considerate manner.

Maurice Quincunx, for such was his unusual name, was an illegitimate descendant of one of the most historic houses in the neighborhood, but both his poverty and his opinions caused him to live what was practically the life of a hermit, and made him shrink away, even more nervously than little Vennie Seldom, from any intercourse with his equals.

The present possessors of his queer ancient name were now the Lords of Glastonbury, and had probably never so much as heard of Maurice's existence.

He would come by stealth to pay Valentia visits, preferring the evening hours when in the summer she used to sit with her work, on a terrace overlooking a sloping orchard, and watch Vennie water her roses.

The vicarage terrace was a place of extraordinary quiet and peace, eminently adapted to the low-voiced, nervous ramblings of a recluse of Maurice Quincunx's timidity.

The old lady by degrees quite won this eccentric's heart; and the queerly assorted friends would pace up and down for hours in the cool of the evening talking of things in no way connected either with Mr. Romer or the Church--the two subjects about which Mr. Quincunx held dangerously strong views.

Apart from this quaint outcast and the youthful parson, Mrs. Seldom's only other intimate in the place was a certain John Francis Taxater, a gentleman of independent means, living by himself with an old housekeeper in a cottage called The Gables, situated about half-way between the vicarage and the village.

Mr. Taxater was a Catholic and also a philosopher; these two peculiarities affording the solution to what otherwise would have been an insoluble psychic riddle. Even as it was, Mr. Taxater's mind was of so subtle and complicated an order, that he was at once the attraction and the despair of all the religious thinkers of that epoch. For it must be understood that though quietly resident under the shadow of Nevilton Mount, the least essay from Mr. Taxater's pen was eagerly perused by persons interested in religious controversy in all the countries of Europe.

He wrote for philosophical journals in London, Paris, Rome and New York; and there often appeared at The Gables most surprising visitors from Germany and Italy and Spain.

He had a powerful following among the more subtle-minded of the Catholics of England; and was highly respected by important personages in the social, as well as the literary circles, of Catholic society.

The profundity of his mind may be gauged from the fact that he was able to steer his way successfully through the perilous reefs of "modernistic" discussion, without either committing himself to heretical doctrine or being accused of reactionary ultramontanism.

Mr. Taxater's written works were, however, but a trifling portion of his personality. His intellectual interests were as rich and varied as those of some great humanist of the Italian Renaissance, and his personal habits were as involved and original as his thoughts were complicated and deep.

He was perpetually engaged in converting the philosopher in him to Catholicism, and the Catholic in him to philosophy--yet he never permitted either of these obsessions to interfere with his enjoyment of life.

Luke Andersen, who was perhaps of all the inhabitants of Nevilton most conscious of the drama played around him, used to maintain that it was impossible to tell in the last resort whether Mr. Taxater's place was with the adherents of Christ or with the adherents of Anti-Christ. Like his prototype, the evasive Erasmus, he seemed able to be on both sides at the same time.

Perhaps it was a secret consciousness of the singular position of Nevilton, planted, as it were, between two streams of opposing legend, that originally led Mr. Taxater to take up his abode in so secluded a spot.

It is impossible to tell. In this as in all other transactions of his life he combined an unworldly simplicity with a Machiavellian astuteness. If the Day of Judgment revealed him as being on the side of the angels, it might also reveal him as having exercised, in the microcosmic Nevilton drama, as well as in his wider sphere, one of the most subtle influences against the Powers of Darkness that those Powers ever encountered in their invisible activity.

At the moment when the present narrative takes up the woven threads of these various persons' lives there seemed every prospect that in external nature at least there was going to be an auspicious and halcyon season. June had opened with abnormal pleasantness. Exquisite odours were in the air, wafted from woods and fields and gardens. White dust, alternating with tender spots of coolness where the shadows of trees fell, lent the roads in the vicinity that leisured gala-day expectancy which one notes in the roads of France and Spain, but which is so rare in England.

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.

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 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 r?le she herself played. It was necessary that they should be in a sense confederates in this game of cat-and-mouse.

As Mr. Romer 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. Catharine's altar and reappeared among his dove-cotes 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 mediaeval 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 "compunctuous 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 tampering 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."

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