“James was the noblest spirit I’ve ever known,” he said sternly. “If there is such a thing as another world, he is certain to reach it—church or no church. As a matter of fact, if it is at all important to you, he was baptized in Nevilton. You’ll find his name in the register—and mine too!” he added with a laugh.
Mr. Clavering kept silence, and moved towards the gate. Luke followed him, and at the gate they shook hands. Perhaps the same thought passed through the minds of both of them, as they went through this ceremony; for a very queer look, almost identical in its expression on either face, was exchanged between them.
Before the morning was over Luke had a second visit of condolence. This was from Mr. Quincunx, and never had the quaint recluse been more warmly received. Luke was conscious at once that here was a man who could enter into every one of his feelings, and be neither horrified nor scandalized by the most fantastic inconsistency.
The two friends walked up and down the sunny field in front of the house, Luke pouring into the solitary’s attentive ears every one of his recent impressions and sensations.
Mr. Quincunx was evidently profoundly moved by James’ death. He refused Luke’s offer to let him visit the room upstairs, but his refusal was expressed in such a natural and characteristic manner that the stone-carver accepted it in perfect good part.
After a while they sat down together under the shady hedge at the top of the meadow. Here they discoursed and philosophized at large, listening to the sound of the church-bells and watching the slow-moving cattle. It was one of those unruffled Sunday mornings, when, in such places as this, the drowsiness of the sun-warmed leaves and grasses seems endowed with a kind of consecrated calm, the movements of the horses and oxen grow solemn and ritualistic, the languor of the heavy-winged butterflies appears holy, and the stiff sabbatical dresses of the men and women who shuffle so demurely to and fro, seem part of a patient liturgical observance.
Luke loved Mr. Quincunx that morning. The recluse was indeed precisely in his element. Living habitually himself in thoughts of death, pleased—in that incomparable sunshine—to find himself still alive, cynical and yet considerate, mystical and yet humorous, he exactly supplied what the wounded heart of the pagan mourner required for its comfort.
“Idiots! asses! fools!” the stone-carver ejaculated, apostrophizing in his inmost spirit the various persons, clever or otherwise, to whom this nervous and eccentric creature was a mere type of failure and superannuation. None of these others,—not one of them,—not Romer nor Dangelis nor Clavering nor Taxater—could for a moment have entered into the peculiar feelings which oppressed him. As for Gladys or Phyllis or Annie or Polly,—he would have as soon thought of relating his emotions to a row of swallows upon a telegraph-wire as to any of those dainty epitomes of life’s evasiveness!
A man’s brain, a man’s imagination, a man’s scepticism, was what he wanted; but he wanted it touched with just that flavour of fanciful sentiment of which the Nevilton hermit was a master. A hundred quaint little episodes, the import of which none but Mr. Quincunx could have appreciated, were evoked by the stone-carver. Nothing was too blasphemous, nothing too outrageous, nothing too bizarre, for the solitary’s taste. On the other hand, he entered with tender and perfect clairvoyance into the sick misery of loss which remained the background of all Luke’s sensations.