Wood and Stone Read Online Free Page B

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’ livesthere 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
    T HE 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 with predatory projects. The last of the independent quarries on the Hill had just fallen into his hands after a legal process of more than usual chicanery, conducted in person by the invaluable Mr. Lickwit.
    He was now occupied in pushing through Parliament a bill for the reduction of railway freight charges, so that the expense of carrying his stone to its various destinations might be materially reduced. But it was not only of financial power that he thought as the smell of the roses from the sun-baked walls floated in upon him across the garden.
    The man’s commercial preoccupations had not by any means, as so often happens, led to the atrophy of his more personal instincts.
    His erotic appetite, for instance, remained as insatiable as ever. Age did not dull, nor finance wither, that primordial craving. The aphrodisiac instincts in Mortimer Romer were, however, much less simple than might be supposed.
    In this hyper-sensual region he had more claim to artistic subtlety than his enemies realized. He rarely allowed himself the direct expansion of frankand downright lasciviousness. His little pleasures were indirect, elaborate, far-fetched.
    He afforded really the interesting spectacle of one whose mind was normal, energetic, dynamic; but whose senses were slow, complicated, fastidious. He was a formidable forward-marching machine, with a heart of elaborate perversity. He was a thick-skinned philistine with the sensuality of a sybarite.
    I do not mean to imply that there was any lack of rapacity in the senses of Mr. Romer. His senses were indeed unfathomable in their devouring depths. But they were liable to fantastic caprices. They were not the simple animal senses of a Gothic barbarian . They assumed imperial contortions.
    The main eccentricity of the erotic tendencies of this remarkable man lay in the elaborate pleasure he derived from his sense of power. The actual lure of the flesh had little attraction for him. What pleased him was a slow tightening of his grip upon people—upon their wills, their freedom, their personality.
    Any impression a person might make upon Mr. Romer’s senses was at once transformed into a desire to have that person absolutely at his mercy. The thought that he held such a one reduced to complete spiritual helplessness alone satisfied him.
    The first time he had