They finally selected a remote place under the southern wall, at the point where the long shadow of the tower, in the late afternoon, flung its clear-outlined battlements on the waving grass.
Luke continued to be entirely pleased with Mr. Quincunx’s tact and sympathy. He felt he could not have secured a better companion for this task of selecting the final resting-place of the brother of his soul. “Curse these fools,” he thought, “who rail against this excellent man!” What mattered it, after all, that the fellow hated what the world calls “work,” and loved a peaceful life removed from distraction?
The noble attributes of humour, of imagination, of intelligence,—how much more important they were, and conducive to the general human happiness, than the mere power of making money! Compared with the delicious twists and diverting convolutions in Mr. Quincunx’s extraordinary brain, how dull, how insipid, seemed such worldly cleverness!
The death of his brother had had the effect of throwing these things into a new perspective. The Machiavellian astuteness, which, in himself, in Romer, in Mr. Taxater, and in many others, he had, until now, regarded as of supreme value in the conduct of life, seemed to him, as he regretfully bade the recluse farewell and retraced his steps, far less essential, far less important, than this imaginative sensitiveness to the astounding spectacle of the world.
He fancied he discerned in front of him, as he left the churchyard, the well-known figure of his newly affianced Annie, and he made a detour through the lane, to avoid her. He felt at that moment as though nothing in the universe were interesting or important except the sympathetic conversation of the friends of one’s natural choice—persons of that small, that fatally small circle, from which just now the centre seemed to have dropped out!
Girls were a distraction, a pastime, a lure, an intoxication; but a shock like this, casting one back upon life’s essential verities, threw even lust itself into the limbo of irrelevant things. All his recent preoccupation with the love of women seemed to him now, as though, in place of dreaming over the mystery of the great tide of life, hand in hand with initiated comrades, he were called upon to go launching little paper-boats on its surface, full of fretful anxiety as to whether they sank or floated.
Weighed down by the hopeless misery of his loss, he made his way slowly back to the station-master’s house, too absorbed in his grief to speak to anyone.
After tea he became so wretched and lonely, that he decided to walk over to Hullaway on the chance of getting another glimpse of Witch-Bessie. Even the sympathy of the station-master’s wife got on his nerves and the romping of the children fretted and chafed him.
He walked fast, swinging his stick and keeping his eyes on the ground, his heart empty and desolate. He followed the very path by which Gladys and he, some few short weeks before, had returned in the track of their two friends, from the Hullaway stocks.
Arriving at the village green, with its pond, its elms, its raised pavement, and its groups of Sunday loiterers, he turned into the churchyard. As we have noted many times ere now, the appealing silence of these places of the dead had an invincible charm for him. It was perhaps a morbid tendency inherited from his mother, or, on the other hand, it may have been a pure æsthetic whim of his own, that led him, with so magnetic an attraction, towards these oases of mute patience, in the midst of the diurnal activities; but whatever the spell was, Luke had never found more relief in obeying it than he did at this present hour.