Wood and Stone: A Romance

by John Cowper Powys

The nature of this intermittent gleam, its deep mysterious strength drawn from spiritual sources, helped to throw a certain sad and pallid twilight over her ordained sacrifice. This also she felt was undertaken, like her visit to Auber Lake, for the sake of an imprisoned and fettered spirit. If by means of such self-immolation her friend of Dead Man’s Lane would be liberated from his servitude and set permanently upon his feet, her submission would not be in vain.

She had come once more to feel as though the impending event were, as far as she was concerned, a sort of final death-sentence. The passing fantasy, that in a momentary distortion of her mind had swept over her of the new life it might mean to have children of her own, even though born of this unnatural union, had not approached again the troubled margin of her spirit.

Even the idea of escaping the Romers was only vaguely present. She would escape more than the Romers; she would escape the whole miserable coil of this wretched existence, if the death she anticipated fell upon her; for death, and nothing less than death, seemed the inevitable circumference of the iron circle that was narrowing in upon her.

Had those two strange phantoms that we have seen hovering over Nevilton churchyard, representing in their opposite ways the spiritual powers of the place, been able to survey—as who could deny they might be able?—the fatal stream which was now bearing the Pariah forward to the precipice, they would have been, in their divers tempers, struck with delight and consternation at the spectacle presented to them. There was more in this spectacle, it must be admitted, to bring joy into the heart of a goblin than into that of an angel. Coincidence, casualty, destiny—all seemed working together to effect the unfortunate girl’s destruction.

The fact that, by the recovery of his brother, the astute Luke Andersen, the only one of all the Nevilton circle capable of striking an effective blow in her defence, had been deprived of all but a very shadowy interest in what befell, seemed an especially sinister accident. Equally unfortunate was the luckless chance that at this critical moment had led the diplomatic Mr. Taxater to see fit to prolong his stay in London. Mr. Quincunx was characteristically helpless. James Andersen seemed, since the recovery of his normal mind, to have subsided like a person under some restraining vow. Lacrima was a little surprised that he made no attempt to see her or to communicate with her. She could only suppose she had indelibly hurt him, by her rejection of his quixotic offers, on their way back from Hullaway.

Thus to any ordinary glance, cast upon the field of events as they were now arranging themselves, it would have looked as though the Italian’s escape from the fate hanging over her were as improbable as it would be for a miracle to intervene to save her.

In spite of the wild threat flung out by Mr. Clavering in his sudden anger as he waited with Luke in the Yeoborough street, the vicar of Nevilton made no attempt to interfere. Whether he really managed to persuade his conscience that all was well, or whether he came to the conclusion that without some initiative from the Italian it would be useless to meddle, not the most subtle psychologist could say. The fact remained that the only step he took in the matter was to assure himself that the girl’s nominal Catholicism had so far lapsed into indifference, that she was likely to raise no objection to a ceremony according to Anglican ritual.

The whole pitiful situation, indeed, offered only one more terrible and branding indictment, against the supine passivity of average human nature in the presence of unspeakable wrongs. The power and authority of the domestic system, according to which the real battle-field of wills takes place out of sight of the public eye, renders it possible for this inertia of the ordinary human crowd to cloak itself under a moral dread of scandal, and under the fear of any drastic breach of the uniformity of social usage.

A visitor from Mars or Saturn might have supposed, that in circumstances of this kind, every decent-thinking person in the village would have rushed headlong to the episcopal throne, and called loudly for spiritual mandates to stop the outrage. Where was the delegated Power of God—so the forlorn shadows of the long-evicted Cistercians might be imagined crying—whose absolute authority could be appealed to in face of every worldly force? What was the tender-souled St. Catharine doing, in her Paradisiac rest, that she could remain so passively indifferent to such monstrous and sacrilegious use of her sacred building? Was it that such transactions as this, should be carried through, under its very shelter, that the gentle spirits who guarded the Holy Rood had made of Nevilton Mount their sacred resting-place? Must the whole fair tradition of the spot remain dull, dormant, dumb, while the devotees of tyranny worked their arbitrary will—“and nothing said”?