Lacrima let her hands fall helplessly to her side, against the grey bark of the apple-tree. “Why do you hate Mr. Quincunx so?” she asked, looking gravely into her friend’s face.
“Why do I hate him?” said Gladys. “Oh, I really don’t know! I didn’t know I did. If I do, it’s because he’s such a weak wretched creature. He has no more spirit than a sick dog. He talks such nonsense too! I am glad he has to walk to Yeoborough every day and do a little work. You ought to be glad too! He could never marry if he didn’t make some money.”
“He doesn’t want to marry,” murmured Lacrima. “He only wants to be left alone.”
“A nice friend he seems to be,” cried the other, “for a girl like you! I suppose he kisses you and that sort of thing, doesn’t he? I shouldn’t like to be kissed by a silly old man like that, with a great stupid beard.”
“You mustn’t say these things to me, Gladys, you mustn’t! I won’t hear them. Mr. Quincunx isn’t an old man! He is younger than James Andersen. He is not forty yet.”
“He looks fifty, if he looks a day,” said Gladys, “and the colour of his beard is disgusting! It’s like dirty water. Fancy having a horrid thing like that pressed against your face! And I suppose he cries and slobbers over you, doesn’t he? I have seen him cry. I hate a man who cries. He cried the other night,—father told me so—when he found he had spent all his money.”
Lacrima got up and walked a few paces away. She loathed this placid golden-haired creature, at that moment, so intensely, that it was all she could do to refrain from leaping upon her and burying her teeth in her soft neck. She leant against one of the trees and pressed her head upon its grey lichen. Gladys slipped down into a more luxurious position. She looked complacently around her. No spot could have been better adapted for a romantic encounter.
The gnarled and time-worn trunks of the old apple-trees, each looking as if it had lingered there, full of remote memories, from an age coeval with the age of those very druids whose sacred mistletoe still clung in patches to their boughs, formed a strange fantastic array of twisted and distorted natural pillars, upon which the foliage, meeting everywhere above their heads, leaned in shadowy security, like the roof of a heathen temple. The buttercups and cuckoo-flowers, which, here and there, sprinkled the heavy grass, were different from those in the open meadows. The golden hue of the one, and the lavender tint of the other, took on, in this diurnal gloom, a chilly and tender pallour, both colours approximating to white. The grey lichen hung down in loose festoons from the higher portions of the knotted trunks, and crept, thick and close, round the moss at their roots. There could hardly be conceived a spot more suggestive of absolute and eternal security than this Hesperidean enclosure.
The very fact of the remote but constant presence of humanity there, as a vague dreamy background of immemorial tending, increased this sense. One felt that the easy invasions of grafting-time and gathering-time, returning perennially in their seasons, only intensified the long delicious solitudes of the intervals between, when, in rich, hushed languor, the blossoms bud and bloom and fall; and the fruit ripens and sweetens; and the leaves flutter down. That exquisite seductive charm, the charm of places full of quietness, yet bordering on the edge of the days’ labour, hung like a heavy atmosphere of contentment over the shadowy aisles of this temple of peace. The wood-pigeons keep up a perpetual murmur, all the summer long, in these untrodden spots. No eyes see them. It is as though they never saw one another. But their drowsy liturgical repetitions answer and answer again, as if from the unfathomable depths of some dim green underworld, worshipping the gods of silence with sounds that give silence itself a richer, a fuller weight.