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 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.