THE SACRIFICE
1
At half-past eight on the fateful morning, Mrs. Holmroyd left her home
with Oswald for the last time. She dared not trust herself to take a
farewell look at it, lest the action might deliver her to her weakness,
or betray the nature of this leave-taking to unseen eyes; for though
Elizabeth was sworn to secrecy, and had pledged her sacred word to keep
the kitchen until Mrs. Holmroyd and her son should be far remote from
curious sight, the discretion of old age is frail, and Mrs. Holmroyd
hastened to put herself beyond its reach. A pale sun began to part the
curtains of a mild October sky, and the morning air partook of both the
freshness and languor of autumn, impregnated with the faint melancholy
of dead leaves. Here and there a milkcart drawled its course, and the
flash and rattle of its cans, and the milkman’s whistle, accosted Mrs.
Holmroyd’s senses with a curious distinctness and novelty--as if they
were familiar things noted for the first time after sickness or
bereavement, recharged with that significance of which health and daily
habit tend to rob them. At the corner of the street she turned to give
one hasty glance behind. Already a group of figures gathered round about
her door, recruited by the forsworn Elizabeth, who raised dramatic hands
to heaven from a circle of rapt faces. But their curiosity fell without
harm upon her at this distance, like feeble rays of sunlight, and in a
moment she had turned the corner into the broad Horse Green. Her
thoughts were busy and her heart was full, and she and her son walked in
a silence unbroken on either side. From time to time Oswald raised
curious eyes to his mother’s face, as if to seek the necessary guidance
from it for his own demeanour. He would have welcomed sanction to
display his self-importance to the world at large, and to
reveal--through suitable deportment--the full consequence of this early
morning expedition on which they were engaged. But his mother’s face
encouraged no expansion of the pride, and so he did his best to pitch
his feelings in her key and find his satisfaction in a prodigious
solemnity. To which end he tried to walk, and look, as much like
Councillor Burford as was possible, absorbed in matters of municipal
concern, carrying in his right hand the spray of white chrysanthemums
for Beryl’s grave with the gravity of a mace-bearer. As they traversed
the Horse Green and came within sight of High Gate, Mrs. Holmroyd
suddenly addressed her son, albeit without turning her head or gaze
towards him.
“Oswald.”
“Yes, mother.”
“Just look round, dear. Do you see anybody?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Who?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Whereabouts is she?”
“Just at the end of Spring Bank Gardens. She has seen me, mother. Now
she has stopped.”
“That will do, dear. Don’t look round again.
The spirit of Elizabeth, indeed, roused to a terrible pitch of
excitement, had been able to bear no longer the cruel inhibition laid
upon it. That she should keep house whilst Mrs. Holmroyd married at St.
Saviour’s the son of him whose widow--but for providence and her own
folly--she might this day have been, transcended human power. This was
no time to hold by oaths or honour pledges. And so well had she
bestirred the feelings of her auditors outside Mrs. Holmroyd’s doorstep
that forthwith, intoxicated with her own excitement, she hastened in the
wake of Oswald and his mother, consumed by one desire--to reach the
church before the ceremony should have started. And so did her anxieties
play tricks with time and delude her tortured senses, that every second
seemed an hour, and the wedding ceremony had taken place a dozen times
before her stumbling feet reached the Horse Green. The sight of Oswald
and his mother threw all her fears into disorder. “They’re there!” she
cried, staggering in her black shawl. “He’s looked round. He’s seed me!
He’s told her. And I promised faithful.... She’ll never forgive me now!
I’ve lost my charring.”
Aghast, with one hand pressing the tight-clasped housekey beneath her
palpitating heart, and the other nipping the two edges of the prolific
shawl about her stricken person, she retreated into Spring Bank Gardens,
where, out of sight behind the corner, she leaned against the wall and
wept foreboding tears into her shawl. But tears were impotent to quench
the raging fire in her bosom. She had seen Joe Burford’s father buried.
Should she fail to be witness of his son’s marriage to her old mistress?
Nay, not her. Let them do what they liked at her after, she should not
falter at this moment, when so much depended. And like a bird of dark
omen she hovered the trail of Mrs. Holmroyd and her son, trying to
conceal herself from sight with the ludicrous deception of old age that
deceives only the deceiver.
2
The spectre of Elizabeth, casting its fitful shadow over an event that
should have been serene and open, and not (as now) furtive and
perplexed, served to deepen for Mrs. Holmroyd the atmosphere of
subterfuge and shame in which she moved. Her heart contained no anger
against the frail delinquent who thus broke faith and followed. In a
world of Mrs. Holmroyd’s choosing none would have been more welcome at
her marriage than this old creature in the black shawl. And even now she
said: “Poor thing!” and grudged Elizabeth nothing of her pilfered
satisfaction. But such a wedding as this ... before such a witness as
that that followed.... Oh! it seemed a shabby, sordid, loveless,
hopeless thing. All these weeks she had been trying hard to learn a
liking for this man who was so soon to be her husband; to learn it off
by rote, as if it had been a lesson, and say it over to herself until by
repetition it became a part of her, and conscience could forget how
painfully the task had been acquired. And she believed she had succeeded
... till now. At the narrow junction of the Horse Green with High Gate
she trembled under a sudden fear that from their big bowed window the
Rencils might catch sight of her upon her ignominious journey, and she
walked more quickly, with averted head. The thought of Joseph Burford
awaiting her arrival at St. Saviour’s Church, in a posture of complacent
confidence, sure of himself and her; undoubting, imperturbable, filled
her conscience with dismay. It came to this: in her own small house, in
the seclusion of her own small world, before no witnesses, her
acceptance of him had seemed natural and possible. But here ... beneath
the open sky, before the eyes of the world, she was ashamed of her
choice of him; of her husband to be. That was the sordid truth of all
her shrinking. If this husband had been some other than he was ... some
other such as she might love and honour; some other, say, like Arthur
Rencil, smiling at her with his eyes of winsome sadness through their
liquefying glasses....
Nay! At that, shocked into sudden horror and detestation of herself, she
turned upon these thoughts and trod their sinful smoulder underfoot. Had
she no higher sense of reverence and gratitude towards one whose timely
worship saved her, and hers, from dire extremity? Had she no finer sense
of duty, faith, and honour, than to accept so much from him to whom her
love could give so little in exchange? Within the churchyard, stooping
to adjust the spray of white chrysanthemums on the green mound that
marked where Beryl lay, she offered up a heart-felt prayer to heaven
that she might be assisted in her loyal effort to make herself a true
wife to him whom, so shortly at God’s altar, she would take for better
or for worse. Perhaps her prayer, though it could have gained no added
fervour, might have been lengthened; but the ominous shadow of
Elizabeth, perceptible beyond the railings, drove her inside the dreaded
church.
3
Of all that marked the features of this marriage she was acutely,
poignantly aware. Her senses sank on a sudden to a state of penitential
calm, like some boisterous wind that drops at sundown and leaves a world
that listens only to its own silence. The spacious dimness of the
church, though offering refuge to her more external self, lent no
comfort to the inner; it only served to emphasize her littleness. Here
and there, in the central gloom that brooded between walls pierced with
the violence of stained glass, she saw sparse heads above the woodwork
of the pews; hats of women--though whether there for worship or from
curiosity she knew not. They moved as she entered, and the rustle of
the baize door multiplied itself throughout the empty church in
whispers. A certain mild expectancy mingled with the torpid atmosphere
of unpreparedness. The sabbath sanctity seemed gone; put off like a
vestment. Only the outward features of solemnity remained, animated by
no conscious spirit of reverence or worship. Pulpit and lectern dozed in
their coverlets of calico, with the figures of last Sunday’s hymns
staring apathetically from their oaken board. It was a house of worship
in undress.
From somewhere out of the obscurity of the aisle the person of the
verger detached itself, approaching Mrs. Holmroyd with the swiftness and
directness of purpose. He shed something impalpable from his finger-ends
in coming, with an airy, almost graceful gesture, as though he scattered
benedictions, and his floating robes diffused odours of rappee and
alcohol. Impeccable though his manner was, Mrs. Holmroyd’s sharpened
consciousness detected accents of a certain secularity. He bade her
“good morning” in the voice of almost conversational brightness, and
imparted the information that “Councillor Burford’s sat waiting of you
in the chancel. I’ve put him in Mrs. Bankett’s pew. I’m not sure whether
Mr. Todd’s come yet, but I’ll let you know. He won’t be late, I feel
confident, for him and me has to take an interment at the Cimitery this
morning.” With these words and a tribute to the favourable character of
the weather, he led Mrs. Holmroyd up the church at a pace smarter than
the one reserved for Services and Sundays. If she had been some client
paying a visit to her lawyer’s office (it seemed to her) she could not
have been more sensible of the purely business air investing the
procedure. The curious calm and clarity of her state of mind magnified,
no doubt, the slightest impressions made upon it, and showed trifles
more momentous than they were. For it is sure that the verger only
sought to set her at her ease, and to impress his personality upon the
bridal consciousness in its brightest and most helpful light, but Mrs.
Holmroyd felt aware of a subtle absence of solemnity in her
surroundings, as if a semi-surreptitious function such as this could not
in reason hope for the full sanctification and blessing of the church.
In one of the chancel pews the Councillor awaited her, seated beside a
large, inverted silk hat. He half rose to make way for Mrs. Holmroyd,
shook her hand briefly as she passed him, saying: “Good morning, ma’am,”
in a voice depressed to the tone of the edifice they sat in. But neither
he nor she had any word to say to one another; The strangeness of their
conjunction in these surroundings made them seem strange to one another.
To Oswald the Councillor gave no sign of recognition, but re-seating
himself broadly at the pew-mouth after Mrs. Holmroyd’s admission,
blocked all further entry, and Oswald--after a moment of
irresolution--took refuge in the pew behind. In this atmosphere of
speculation and constraint he found himself all at once bereft of the
self-importance that had filled his bosom up to the present, and he
became once more but a little boy, waiting curiously and anxiously upon
events, with no very clear perception of the duties incumbent on or
expected of him, nor of what would be his fate. It seemed evident to him
that a ceremony which imposed such deadly silence upon all participants,
and transformed so utterly his mother and the Councillor, must possess
elements of gravity for which he had not sufficiently allowed. His
ignorance had always associated weddings with bells and cakes and great
rejoicings, and he found it hard to reconcile what he had previously
believed about such things with this dread silence of reality. Not less
than her son was Mrs. Holmroyd sensible of the oppressive silence of
the church, as though it had no comfort to impart nor consolation to
breathe over them. And though she knew that one note of music would have
dissolved all the resolute compression of her courage into tears, she
could not help longing for the voice of the organ to awake the sanctity
that was asleep, and lift her heart from its bed of clay to some place
nearer heaven.
An unimaginable time they seemed to sit there, oppressed beneath the
weight of silence, during which she strove in vain to pray coherently,
and the Councillor drew out his watch, and made the circumference of his
silk hat with a coat-sleeve. The frigid aloofness of this uncongenial
place of worship, so different from the half secular and reassuring air
of nonconformity, made him ill at ease. And the business man’s respect
of punctuality chafed against the least liberties with time. And then
again, this feeling of impotent attendance on the convenience of a
curate rubbed dignity on the raw. He was disposed to reproach himself
with having consented to come here at all; he owned no sympathy with
church ways; he would have done better to insist on the Register Office.
From this point of view his reproach shifted to lay the blame upon a
false desire for privacy.
“If Annie’d been what a man’s daughter should have been by rights,” he
reflected irately, “there’d have been no occasion for me to come to
church in a hole and corner way like this. This is no sort of wedding
for a Town Councillor. It’s neither one thing nor another. We ought to
have done the whole affair on proper, business lines whilst we was about
it. We might have had the Mayor and half the Corporation present, and
who’s to say under them conditions we couldn’t have arranged for Canon
Quexley to conduct the proceedings respectable.” For a few moments out
of humour with himself, the world, and his surroundings, he was even
conscious of a certain resentment towards the woman by his side; but
this he promptly quelled. “It’s no use blaming her,” he told himself
emphatically. “It’s not her fault. She’s not to blame any more than me.
But it’s unfortunate for us both, as things has turned out. Very
unfortunate. Are we to be kept sat here all day? If this is how the
church conducts its services, such unbusiness-like ways doesn’t deserve
to get no custom at all. There’ll be our cab waiting of us outside by
this time.”
In point of fact they were kept waiting little beyond their due time.
Almost simultaneously with the snapping of the vestry latch and the
sound of commingled voices, the Curate appeared before the altar,
completing the adjustment of his hood, and the verger, inflated with a
new importance, beckoned to them from the end of the choir-stalls. Even
Canon Quexley’s fleshy forefinger could not have conveyed the intimation
with more episcopal dignity. Oswald, sitting solitary in his pew, beheld
his mother and the Councillor advance and take their places together at
the altar steps, beneath the crude blues and cardinals of the east
window. Now they seemed to be in earnest conversation with the Curate;
now they shook hands with one another; anon they knelt, whilst the
verger, standing in the shadow of the organ, watched the proceedings
with a critical eye. At length the Curate ceased to mumble. Councillor
Burford offered an arm to his mother, and Prestwich stepped alertly
forward, and he and they and the Curate retired to the vestry. Everybody
seemed to have forgotten Oswald, and Oswald remained rivetted to his
seat in the chancel pew, asking himself perplexedly: “Am I supposed to
sit here?... Will they come back to me? What if they’ve forgotten, and
gone out by the vestry door!”
But just as his anxieties were becoming acute, the Councillor and his
mother returned. They moved down the chancel side by side, the
Councillor with chest squared, and right arm protruding awkwardly at an
angle, and the fingers of Oswald’s mother reposing lightly on his coat
sleeve. The Councillor’s air of caged discomfort had given way to a look
of visible relief, almost triumphant, as if the now surmounted worst had
proved less formidable than his fears. Indeed, within the vestry a great
part of this ecclesiastical constraint had been put aside. The Curate
had doffed his ceremonial voice and air, and resumed his suspended
humanity once more, congratulating the newly-wedded couple and offering
his heartfelt wishes for the length and happiness of their married life.
And the Councillor, taking his proffered hand in a broad grip of
friendliness that forgot already the fretful thoughts engendered by
delay, thanked him “on behalf of me and my wife.”
“You’ve conducted the proceedings most satisfactory, sir. I’m not a
churchman myself, as perhaps you’re aware, but I venture to think we
couldn’t have been married more comfortable in any place of worship, and
me and my wife’s extremely obliged to you. I hope it won’t be the last
time I shall attend this church, and I’m sure both me and Mrs. Burford
will be happy to have the pleasure of seeing you at our own house after
we’ve got nicely settled down.” To which the Curate had murmured with a
flush of gratitude, as though the condescension were undeserved:
“How very kind of you!”
“Well! It’s a beginning!” the Councillor said to himself as he left the
vestry. “Since we’ve took the first step, let’s go on with it.... After
all, it will be more gratifying when one looks back, to think we was
married in a church. The church has a dignity and standing--whatever
some folks say. It hasn’t held its head up against all competitors for
nothing.”
At first, so straight did his mother’s gaze stream out before her, as if
she followed the pathway cleared by it, that Oswald feared she would
have passed him by; but as she and her new husband came abreast with the
pew in which he sat, she detached her hand gently from the Councillor’s
coat-sleeve and moved to Oswald with a look that awed him. Her eyes were
gleaming wet; he perceived she had been weeping, but there was a sort of
radiance about them too, as if they were of stained glass like the
windows all around, and an inward light shone through, flowing from some
deep source of splendour. Before that flood of liberated feeling, of
love, of tenderness and strangely stirred compassion, Oswald’s gaze
flinched and fell. His youth lacked the self-possession to meet and to
sustain a look of such intensity. But he felt, as his mother’s arms
encompassed him, and he was sensible of the moisture of her eyes upon
his face, that in some new way she had tremendous need of him; that her
embrace served the purpose of an appeal ... a cry to all that was best
and noblest in her son. And his lips quivered at this testimony of her
faith in him, and at his own uplifting faith in the goodness and
nobility of his nature. There, in the chancel of St. Saviour’s, whelmed
by an emotion that stirred his very bowels, as the deep notes of Mr.
Rencil’s organ sometimes did, he vowed that his mother should never be
deceived in him; that her faith and hope should never be betrayed.
Her embrace was of the briefest. She clasped him but a moment and let
him go, and took her husband’s arm again--with a slight gesture to
Oswald that he must follow. Outside the church, not before the main
gates but by the little iron wicket that Oswald and the choristers made
use of, a one-horse cab was standing. “I’m sorry now it hadn’t been a
pair,” the Councillor reflected to himself, at sight of it. “It would
have been more in keeping. This desire for privacy can be carried too
far. But me and her agreed to keep the whole thing very quiet for both
our sakes, and I can’t be blamed. We said ’a cab’ and a cab’s what we’ve
got. It’s too late to make any changes now.”
By this time the bridal party was close up to the little gate. The
driver clambered on to the box; the verger, bare-headed, held the door
open with an ingratiatory smile. A small knot of onlookers watched the
proceedings with the intent interest always kindled by the spectacle of
other folks’ affairs, and some rice was thrown half-heartedly by
luke-warm fingers, that rattled with the chilliness of hailstones
against the cab-windows and the Councillor’s top hat. The Councillor
handed his new-made wife into the cab; his stooping shoulders and broad
back followed her, and Prestwich was about to close the door when Mrs.
Burford’s hand beyond the window made a faint movement of deterrence. It
was for Oswald. Through the re-opened door he stepped into the cab with
a growing sense of undesiredness and intrusion that caused him to
diminish his small body into its smallest compass on the small front
seat. The Councillor bestowed no glance upon him. From his mother he
obtained the reassurance of a strained smile. Through the window, as the
cab rolled away, he caught sight of the figure of Elizabeth, distracted
between desire to see and horror of being seen, who, wrapping and
re-wrapping her tormented person in the black shawl, followed every
phase of the proceedings with a face of convulsive mobility. Oswald’s
mother remarked the pathetic figure too, and a sudden impulse of
compassion urged her to give one parting sign of recognition--that
should serve Elizabeth both for acknowledgment and pardon. But the
opportunity was lost--she knew not how--and the cab moved lugubriously
on its journey. Its journey was, in the first instance, to the
Councillor’s own house, where a light refection of wine and sandwiches
was laid out upon the table in the dining-room, as a fortification
against the impending journey by rail; the cab-horse meanwhile jingling
its bit before the garden gate, and the driver drawing solace from a
cold pipe. Time, being limited, favoured neither conversation nor
eating, and to Oswald it seemed as if the repast had no sooner begun
than the Councillor rose to his feet, watch in hand, and uttered a
warning: “Well?” He had been cherishing the hope of accompanying his
mother to the station in the cab, and of bidding her a last good-bye at
the railway-carriage window, but the Councillor rudely broke the hope by
saying--“You’ll have to be making your way back now, my lad. Me and your
mother’s driving straight to the station.” The words fell percussively
on Oswald’s hearing, and he lifted a face of instinctive appeal, towards
his mother, but her gaze failed him; his look fell upon lowered eyes.
For Mrs. Burford had cherished, too, the same hope as her son, but she
heard the tone of resolution in the Councillor’s voice ... and this was
no moment to dispute a husband’s will.
“The station is a very busy place, Oswald,” she said, as though
subscribing to her husband’s greater wisdom. But when she kissed him, he
knew that her kiss sought to speak to him, to tell him that his mother’s
heart, at least, took no side with this greater wisdom to which both he
and she must henceforth yield. And all at once, still carrying the
warmth of her caress, and with her final recommendations ringing in his
ears, he was “making his way back, my lad” as the Councillor had bidden
him. He walked with his eyes fixed desperately on the shrinking outline
of the cab from which, at intervals, emerged a microscopic hand, until
both cab and hand were gone from sight, and then his spirit sank into a
sea of utter loneliness, lead-weighted with the feeling of irreparable
loss. Yes. A voice deep within him seemed to whisper that this morning’s
marriage had cost him something very dear. An element of sweetness had
been abstracted from life; elements of darkness and bitterness infused
into it; its composition was changed already; it could never be the same
again. His secret heart began to confess a fear of the future. This new
father, to whose acquisition he had looked forward with such pride--he
was afraid of him. Never once this morning had the Councillor’s eyes
deigned to dwell openly on Oswald’s inconsiderable person; that the boy
noted. They had appeared, rather, to avoid him, as if he were some
displeasing and unwanted object whose too obvious existence they sought
to shirk. It was borne in on Oswald with dismay that his new father did
not care for him; that he had never cared for him; that this big, broad,
burly figure would slowly shoulder him out of the place he held in his
mother’s heart; dispossess him of all that his sonship had enjoyed under
the reign of undivided love. And in this hour of utter loneliness his
heart sickened for the old home, for the old life, for his old self, for
the old familiar mother, attached by her slender fingers to no man’s
arm.
But the old home was on its deathbed, expiring fast. Only just so much
life had been preserved in it as to serve their necessities over this
momentous morning. By nightfall Elizabeth’s fury would have robbed it of
its last breath. Now his comprehension, sharpened by distress, began to
grasp the meaning of his mother’s tears, and he perceived what it was
that she had wept for. Oh, why had she wished to leave this house at
all! Why had she not explained to him what marriage really meant, that
he might have besought her earnestly to dwell with him forever in the
life so dear to both? Immersed in a state of sorrow which to Oswald’s
childish eyes seemed eternal, his feet had brought him to St. Saviour’s
before he was aware. The church divulged no consciousness of all that
had taken place so recently within its walls. Its tall spire, spun into
the pale October sky, seemed to hold intercourse with heaven; the gilt
numerals on the clock dial, gravely indicated by the creeping hands of
gold, caught the sun and gleamed with a steadfast, holy light that made
Oswald’s grief the more discernible. The churchyard was empty, and
actuated by a sort of need to raise again the cup of sorrow to his lips,
and taste such bitter dregs as might be left in it, Oswald entered. Here
was the path they came by, he and his mother. Here was Beryl’s tiny
grave; a mound of green surmounted by the spray of white chrysanthemums
which they had laid upon the turf this morning, and over which his
mother had bowed her head and stood for awhile with closed eyes. Oswald
stood too, staring at the grassy shape through the single pane of
loneliness with which his life seemed lit. Beryl was down there, he
meditated, in the narrow place where they had laid her; deep beneath his
feet, his little sister, whom he had once companioned and kissed, and
played with. And stirred by a sudden impulse to test the silence of her
tomb, and learn if--peradventure--his sister’s spirit of a truth resided
there and hearkened, he said, in a low and urgent voice:
“Beryl!!”
... The sound of her name, uttered thus audibly by his own lips, shocked
and startled him, and he looked sharply and shamefully on all sides to
make sure no ear had overheard. After all, it was but his loneliness
that cried upon her; she seemed nearer to him now, for all the feet of
soil that lay between them, than his own mother. Oh, if his sister had
but been alive to-day, that he might have charge of her and find in her
sorrow assuagement and companionship for his own. From time to time,
from the distant railway station, the sound of whistles reached him in
the churchyard silence, and he said of this, or that, or the other:
“Will that be it?”
Wearing always his new garment of wretchedness, he wandered slowly back
to what--for want of any better name--he still called “home.” Elizabeth
(he reflected) would be there by now; he might obtain some moments of
melancholy satisfaction in her company, helping to destroy the last
remnants of the old life; any food was more welcome to an empty heart
than none. In the High Gate he passed the Organist’s door, and long and
steadfastly he fixed his eyes upon its upper window, and very slowly did
he walk--praying secretly that the Organist might emerge, or that some
responsive face might show itself behind the window, or welcome hand
make signal to his hungering hopes.
But no sign of life caused Oswald’s heart to leap. All that seemed left
to him now out of the wreckage of his once bright world ... was the
Great Ideal. Aye! The Ideal. That was the thing to cling to. Let him
build dreams bright enough to fill his solitude and make him independent
of the illusive pleasures of this outer world. Let him make himself
forthwith resplendent with high resolve and noble aspiration, so that
his mother should marvel at the change in him when next she pressed him
to her bosom. Let the Great Ideal shine from his brow like a light set
in some upper window: a beacon and a pledge.
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
blinked increduously=> blinked incredulously {pg 37}
vermilion poloneys=> vermilion boloneys {pg 38}
twenty years before rose up=> twenty years before she rose up {pg 35}
and and at the plate-glass=> and at the plate-glass {pg 85}
for the imformation=> for the information {pg 230}
conglomoration of cushions=> conglomeration of cushions {pg 236}
whose whimiscality seemed=> whose whimsicality seemed {pg 242}
no hurry extentuated his offence=> no hurry extenuated his offence {pg
295}
is social circle=> his social circle {pg 424}
One couldn’t reasonable expect=> One couldn’t reasonably expect {pg 428}