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 protégé 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.
CHAPTER III
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