passing in, made his way up the leaf-strewn avenue. Arrived at the
house, he nodded in a friendly manner at the servant who opened the
door, and asked to be taken to Mrs. Renshaw’s room. The man obeyed him
respectfully, and went before him up the staircase and down the long
echoing passage.
He found Mrs. Renshaw sewing at the half-open window. She put down her
work when he entered and greeted him with one of those _illumined_
smiles of hers, which Fingal Raughty was accustomed to say made him
believe in the supernatural.
“Thank you for coming to see me,” she said, as he seated himself at her
side, spreading around him an atmosphere of delicate odours. “Thank
you, Baltazar, so much for coming.”
“Why do you always say that, Aunt Helen?” he murmured, almost crossly.
It was one of the little long-established conventions between them that
he should address his father’s wife in this way.
There came once more that indescribable spiritual light into her faded
eyes. “Well,” she said gaily, “_isn’t_ it kind of a young man, who has
so many interests, to give up his time to an old woman like me?”
“Nonsense, nonsense, Aunt Helen!” he cried, with a rich caressing
intonation, laying one of his slender hands tenderly upon hers. “It
makes me absolutely angry with you when you talk like that!”
“But isn’t it true, Tassar?” she answered. “Isn’t this world meant for
the young and happy?”
“As if I cared what the world was _meant_ for!” he exclaimed. “It’s
meant for nothing at all, I fancy. And the sooner it reaches what it
was meant for and collapses altogether, the better for all of us!”
A look of distress that was painful to witness came into Mrs. Renshaw’s
face. Her fingers tightened upon his hand and she leant forward towards
him. “Tassar, Tassar, dear!” she said very gravely, “when you talk like
that you make me feel as if I were absolutely alone in the world.”
“What do you mean, Aunt Helen?” murmured the young man in a low voice.
“You make me feel as if it were wrong of me to love you so much,” she
went on, bending her head and looking down at his feet.
As he saw her now, with the fading afternoon light falling on her
parted hair, still wavy and beautiful even in its grey shadows, and on
her broad pale forehead, he realized once more what he alone perhaps,
of all who ever had known her realized, the unusual and almost
terrifying power of her personality. She forced him to think of some
of the profound portraits of the sixteenth century, revealing with an
insight and a passion, long since lost to art, the tragic possibilities
of human souls.
He laughed gently. “Dear, dear Aunt Helen!” he cried, “forget my
foolishness. I was only jesting. I don’t give a fig for any of my
opinions on these things. To the deuce with them all, dear! To free
you from one single moment of annoyance, I’d believe every word in the
Church Catechism from ‘What is your name?’ down to ‘without doubt are
lost eternally’!”
She looked up at this, and made a most heart-breaking effort not to
smile. Her abnormally sensitive mouth--the mouth, as Baltazar always
maintained, of a great tragic actress--quivered at the corners.
“If _I_ had taught you your catechism,” she said, “you would remember
it better than that!”
Baltazar’s eyes softened as he watched her, and a strange look, full of
a pity that was as impersonal as the sea itself, rose to their surface.
He lifted her hand to his lips.
“Don’t do that! You mustn’t do that!” she murmured, and then with
another flicker of a smile, “you must keep those pretty manners,
Tassar, for all your admiring young women!”
“Confound my young women!” cried the young man. “You’re far more
beautiful, Aunt Helen, than all of them put together!”
“You make me think of that passage in ‘Hamlet,’” she rejoined, leaning
back in her chair and resuming her work. “How does it go? ‘Man
delights me not nor woman either--though by your smiling you seem to
say so!’”
“Aunt Helen!” he cried earnestly, “I have something important to say
to you. I want you to understand this. It’s sweet of you not to speak
of Adriano’s illness. Any one but you would have condoled with me most
horribly already!”
She raised her eyes from her sewing. “We must pray for him,” she said.
“I have been praying for him all day--and all last night, too,” she
added with a faint smile. “I let Philippa think I didn’t know what had
happened. But I knew.” She shuddered a little. “I knew. I heard him in
the ‘work-shop.’”
“What I wanted to say, Aunt Helen,” he went on, “was this. I want you
to remember--whatever happens to either of us--that I love you more
than any one in the world. Yes--yes,” he continued, not allowing her to
interrupt, “better even than Adriano!”
A look resembling the effect of some actual physical pain came into her
face. “You mustn’t say that, my dear,” she murmured. “You must keep
your love for your wife when you marry. I don’t like to hear you say
things like that--to an old woman.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds
like flattery, Tassar,” she added.
“But it’s true, Aunt Helen!” he repeated with almost passionate
emphasis. “You’re by far the most beautiful and by far the most
interesting woman I’ve ever met.”
Mrs. Renshaw drew her hand across her face. Then she laughed gaily like
a young girl. “What would Philippa say,” she said, “if she heard you
say that?”
Baltazar’s face clouded. He looked at her long and closely.
“Philippa is interesting and deep,” he said with a grave emphasis, “but
she doesn’t understand me. _You_ understand me, though you think it
right to hide your knowledge even from yourself.”
Mrs. Renshaw’s face changed in a moment. It became haggard and
obstinate. “We mustn’t talk any more about understanding and about
love,” she said. “God’s will is that we should all of us only
completely love and understand the person He leads us, in His wisdom,
to marry.”
Baltazar burst into a fit of heathen laughter. “I thought you were
going to end quite differently, Aunt Helen,” he said. “I thought the
only person we were to love was going to be God. But it seems that it
is man--or woman,” he added bitterly.
Mrs. Renshaw bent low over her work and the shadow grew still deeper
upon her face. Seeing that he had really hurt her, Baltazar changed his
tone.
“Dear Aunt Helen!” he whispered gently, “how many happy hours, how
many, how many!--have we spent together reading in this room!”
She looked up quickly at this, with the old bright look. “Yes, it’s
been a happy thing for me, Tassar, having you so near us. Do you
remember how, last winter, we got through the whole of Sir Walter
Scott? There’s no one nowadays like _him_--is there? Though Philippa
tells me that Mr. Hardy is a great writer.”
“Mr. Hardy!” exclaimed her interlocutor whimsically. “I believe you
_would_ have come to him at last--perhaps you _will_, dear, some day.
Let’s hope so! But I’m afraid I shall not be here then.”
“Don’t talk like that, Tassar,” she said without looking up from her
work. “It will not be _you_ who will leave _me_.”
There was a pause between them then, and Baltazar’s eyes wandered out
into the hushed misty garden.
“Mr. Hardy does not believe in God,” he remarked.
“Tassar!” she cried reproachfully. “You know what you promised just
now. You mustn’t tease me. No one deep down in his heart disbelieves in
God. How can we? He makes His power felt among us every day.”
There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of
the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.
Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you remember,” she said very
solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or
Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you
thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed
in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”
A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned
forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me
feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our
lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines--you know the
one I mean?--the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad
mood, by saying it always made me think of old women in a work-house!
You know the one, don’t you?”
The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed
itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same
moment a supernatural light came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and
without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of embarrassment,
she began to sing, in a low plaintive melodious voice, the following
well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and
there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild,
primordial religion, as different from paganism as it was different
from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and
priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist
and the falling leaves.
“Rest comes at length, though life be long and weary,
The day must dawn and darksome night be past;
Faith’s journey ends in welcome to the weary,
And heaven, the heart’s true home, will come at last.”
When it was finished there was a strange silence in the room, and
Baltazar rose to his feet. His face was pale. He moved to her side
and, for the first and last time in their curious relations, he kissed
her--a long kiss upon the forehead.
With a heightened colour in her cheeks and a nervous deprecatory smile
on her lips, she went with him to the door. “Listen, dear,” she said,
as she took his hand, “I want you to think of that poem of Cowper’s
written when he was most despairing--the one that begins ‘God moves
in a mysterious way.’ I want you to remember that though what he lays
upon us seems _crushing_, there is always something behind it--infinite
mercy behind infinite mystery.”
Baltazar looked her straight in the face. “I wonder,” he said,
“whether it is I or you who is the most unhappy person in Rodmoor!”
She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like
the weight of some great iron engine with jagged raw edges--like a
battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings backwards
and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”
“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.
She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If
behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another
moment?”
They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to
say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his
heart suggested.
“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.
“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see
me.”
He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a
deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already
fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly
invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the full-brimmed
current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the
high mud-banks.
The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and asserting its identity with
an exultant joy. It seemed almost to _purr_, with a kind of feline
satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward
towards the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it
drew from it some sort of half-human sound--some whisper or murmur or
protest of querulous complaining.
The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories
moaned; and all the while, with gurglings and suckings and lappings and
deep-drawn, inward, self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the
slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.
On that night, of all nights, the Loon seemed to have reached that
kind of emphasis of personality which things are permitted to
attain--animate as well as inanimate--when their functional activity is
at its highest and fullest.
And on that night, carefully divesting himself of his elegant clothes,
and laying his hat and stick on the ground beside them, Baltazar Stork,
without haste or violence, and with his brain supernaturally clear,
drowned himself in the Loon.
XXVI
NOVEMBER MIST
Baltazar’s death, under circumstances which could leave no doubt as
to the unhappy man’s intention to destroy himself, coming, as it did,
immediately after his friend’s removal to the Asylum, stirred the
scandalous gossip of Rodmoor to its very dregs.
The suicide’s body--and even the indurated hearts of the
weather-battered bargemen who discovered it, washed down by the tide as
far as the New Bridge, were touched by its beauty--was buried, after a
little private extemporary service, just at the debatable margin where
the consecrated churchyard lost itself in the priest’s flower-beds.
Himself the only person in the place exactly aware of the precise
limits of the sacred enclosure--the enclosure which had never been
enclosed--Mr. Traherne was able to follow the most rigid stipulations
of his ecclesiastical conscience without either hurting the feelings of
the living or offering any insult to the dead. When it actually came
to the point he was, as it turned out, able to remove from his own
over-scrupulous heart the least occasion for future remorse.
The Rodmoor sexton--the usual digger of graves--happened to be at that
particular time in the throes, or rather in the after-effects, of one
of his periodic outbursts of inebriation. So it happened that the
curate-in-charge had with his own hands to dig the grave of the one
among all his parishioners who had remained most distant to him and had
permitted him the least familiarity.
Mr. Traherne remained awake in his study half the night, turning over
the pages of ancient scholastic authorities and comparing one doctrinal
opinion with another on the question of the burial of suicides.
In the end, what he did, with a whimsical prayer to Providence
to forgive him, was to _begin_ digging the hole just outside the
consecrated area, but by means of a slight northward _excavatio_, when
he got a few feet down, to arrange the completed orifice in such a way
that, while Baltazar’s body remained in common earth, his head was
lodged safe and secure, under soil blessed by Holy Church.
One of the most pious and authoritative of the early divines,
Mr. Traherne found out, maintained, as no fantastic or heretical
speculation but as a reasonable and reverent conclusion, the idea that
the surviving portion of a man--his “psyche” or living soul--had, as
its mortal tabernacle, the posterior lobes of the human skull, and that
it was from the _head_ rather than from the _body_ that the shadowy
companion of our earthly days--that “animula blandula” of the heathen
emperor--melted by degrees into the surrounding air and passed to “its
own place.”
The Renshaws themselves showed, none of them, the slightest wish to
interfere with his arrangements, nor did Hamish Traherne ever succeed
in learning whether the hollow-eyed lady of Oakguard knew or did not
know that the clay mound over which every evening without fail, after
the day of the unceremonious interment, she knelt in silent prayer,
was outside the circle of the _covenanted_ mercies of the Power to
which she prayed.
The “last will and testament” of the deceased--written with the most
exquisite care--was of so strange a character, taking indeed the shape
of something like a defiant and shameless “confession,” that Brand and
Dr. Raughty, who were the appointed executors, hurriedly hid it out
of sight. Everything Mr. Stork possessed was left to Mrs. Renshaw,
except the picture of Eugenio Flambard. This, by a fantastic codicil,
which was so extraordinary that when Brand and Dr. Raughty read it they
could do nothing but stare at one another in silent amazement, was
bequeathed, at the end of an astonishing panegyric, “to our unknown
Hippolytus, Mr. Baptiste Sorio, of New York City.”
Baltazar had been buried on the first of November, and as the following
days of this dark month dragged by, under unbroken mists and rain,
Nance lived from hour to hour in a state of trembling expectancy. Would
Baptiste’s ship bring him safely to England? Would he, when he came,
and discovered what her relations with his father were, be kind to her
and sympathetic, or angry and hurt? She could not tell. She could make
no guess. She did not even know whether Adrian had really done what he
promised and written to his son about her at all.
The figure of the boy--on his way across the Atlantic--took a fantastic
hold upon her disturbed imagination. As day followed day and the
time of his arrival drew near, she found it hard to concentrate her
mind even sufficiently to fulfil her easy labours with the little
dressmaker. Miss Pontifex gently remonstrated with her.
“I know you’re in trouble, Miss Herrick, and have a great deal on your
mind, but it does no good worrying, and the girls get restless--you see
how it is!--when you can’t give them your full attention.”
Thus rebuked, Nance would smile submissively and turn her eyes away
from the misty window.
But every night before she slept, she would see through her closed
eyelids that longed-for boy, standing--that was how she always
conceived him--at the bows of the ship, standing tall and fair like a
young god; borne forwards over the starlit ocean to bring help to them
all.
In her dreams, night after night, the boy came to her, and she
found him then of an unearthly beauty and endowed with a mysterious
supernatural power. In her dreams, the wild impossible hope, that
somehow, somewhere, he would be the one to save Linda from the ruin of
her youthful life, took to itself sweet immediate fulfilment.
Every little event that happened to her during those days of tension
assumed the shape of something pregnant and symbolic. Her mind made
auguries of the movements of the clouds, and found significant omens,
propitious or menacing, from every turn of the wind and every coming
and going of the rain. The smallest and simplest encounter took upon
itself at that time a curious and mystic value.
In after days, she remembered with sad and woeful clearness how persons
and things impressed her then, as, in their chance-brought groupings
and gestures, they lent themselves to her strained expectant mood.
For instance, she never could forget the way she waited, on the night
of the third of November, along with Linda and Dr. Raughty, for the
arrival of the last train from Mundham, bringing Mr. Traherne back from
a visit to the Asylum with news of Adrian.
The news the priest brought was unexpectedly favourable. Adrian, it
seemed, had taken a rapid turn for the better, and the doctors declared
that any day now it might become possible for Nance to see him.
As they stood talking on the almost deserted platform, Nance’s mind
visualized with passionate intensity the moment when she herself would
take Baptiste to see his father and perhaps together--why not?--bring
him back in triumph to Rodmoor.
Her happy reverie on this particular occasion was interrupted by a
fantastic incident, which, trifling enough in itself, left a queer and
significant impression behind it. This was nothing less than the sudden
escape from Mr. Traherne’s pocket of his beloved Ricoletto.
In the excitement of their pleasure over the news brought by the
priest, the rat took the opportunity of slipping from the recesses of
his master’s coat; and jumping down on the platform, he leapt, quick
as a flash, upon the railway track below. Mr. Traherne, with a cry
of consternation, scrambled down after him, and throwing aside his
ulster which impeded his progress, began desperately pursuing him.
The engine of the train by which the clergyman had arrived was now
resting motionless, separate from the line of carriages, deserted by
its drivers. Straight beneath the wheels of this inert monster darted
the escaped rat. The agitated priest, with husky perturbed cries, ran
backwards and forwards along the side of the engine, every now and
then stooping down and frantically endeavouring to peer beneath it.
It was so queer a sight to see this ungainly figure, dressed as always
in his ecclesiastical cassock, rushing madly round the dark form of
the engine and at intervals falling on his knees beside it, that Linda
could not restrain an almost hysterical fit of laughter.
Dr. Raughty looked whimsically at Nance.
“He might be a priest of Science, worshipping the god of machines,” he
remarked, assuming as he spoke a sitting posture, the better to slide
down, himself, from the platform to the track.
The station-master now approached, anxious to close his office for the
night and go home. The porter, a peculiarly unsympathetic figure, took
not the least notice of the event, but coolly proceeded to extinguish
the lights, one by one.
The ostler from the Admiral’s Head, who had come to meet some expected
visitor who never arrived, leaned forward with drowsy interest from his
seat on his cab and surveyed the scene with grim detachment, promising
himself that on the following night at his familiar bar table, he would
be the center of public interest as he satisfied legitimate local
curiosity with regard to this unwonted occurrence.
Nance could not help smiling as she saw the excellent Fingal, his long
overcoat flapping about his legs, bending forward between the buffers
of the engine and peering into its metallic belly. She noticed that
he was tapping with his knuckles on the polished breast-plate of the
monster and uttering a clucking noise with his tongue, as if calling
for a recalcitrant chicken.
It was not long before Mr. Traherne, growing desperate as the oblivious
porter approached the last of the station lamps, fell flat on his face
and proceeded to shove himself clean under the engine. The vision of
his long retreating form, wrapped in his cassock, thus worming himself
slowly out of sight, drew from Nance a burst of laughter, and as for
Linda, she clapped her hands together like a child.
He soon reappeared, to the relief of all of them, with his recaptured
pet in his hand, and scrambled back upon the platform, just as the last
of the lamps went out, leaving the place in utter darkness.
Nance, her laughter gone then, had a queer sensation as they moved
away, that the ludicrous scene she had just witnessed was part of some
fantastic unreal dream, and that she herself, with the whole tragedy
of her life, was just such a dream, the dream perhaps of some dark
driverless cosmic engine--of some remote Great Eastern Railway of the
Universe!
The morning of the fourth of November dawned far more auspiciously
than any day which Rodmoor had known for many weeks. It was one of
those patient, hushed, indescribable days--calm and tender and full of
whispered intimations of hidden reassurance--which rarely reach us in
any country but England or in any district but East Anglia. The great
powers of sea and air and sky seemed to draw close to one another
and close to humanity; as if with some large and gracious gesture of
benediction they would fain lay to rest, under a solemn and elemental
requiem, the body of the dead season’s life.
Nance escaped before noon from Miss Pontifex’s work-room. She and
Linda had been invited by Dr. Raughty to lunch with him and Hamish at
the pastry-cook’s in the High Street. It was to be a sort of modest
celebration, this little feast, to do honour to the good news which Mr.
Traherne had brought them the night before and which was corroborated
by a letter to Nance herself from the head doctor, with regard to
Adrian’s astonishing improvement.
Nance felt possessed by a deep and tumultuous excitement. Baptiste
surely must be near England now! Any day--almost any hour--she might
hear of his arrival. She strolled out across the Loon to meet Linda,
who had gone that morning to practise on the organ for the following
Sunday’s services.