The winter and the spring had passed, and the house was complete. It
was a fine morning in the early part of June, and Barnet, though not in
the habit of rising early, had taken a long walk before breakfast;
returning by way of the new building. A sufficiently exciting cause of
his restlessness to-day might have been the intelligence which had
reached him the night before, that Lucy Savile was going to India after
all, and notwithstanding the representations of her friends that such a
journey was unadvisable in many ways for an unpractised girl, unless
some more definite advantage lay at the end of it than she could show
to be the case. Barnet’s walk up the slope to the building betrayed
that he was in a dissatisfied mood. He hardly saw that the dewy time of
day lent an unusual freshness to the bushes and trees which had so
recently put on their summer habit of heavy leafage, and made his
newly-laid lawn look as well established as an old manorial meadow. The
house had been so adroitly placed between six tall elms which were
growing on the site beforehand, that they seemed like real ancestral
trees; and the rooks, young and old, cawed melodiously to their
visitor.
The door was not locked, and he entered. No workmen appeared to be
present, and he walked from sunny window to sunny window of the empty
rooms, with a sense of seclusion which might have been very pleasant
but for the antecedent knowledge that his almost paternal care of Lucy
Savile was to be thrown away by her wilfulness. Footsteps echoed
through an adjoining room; and bending his eyes in that direction, he
perceived Mr. Jones, the architect. He had come to look over the
building before giving the contractor his final certificate. They
walked over the house together. Everything was finished except the
papering: there were the latest improvements of the period in
bell-hanging, ventilating, smoke-jacks, fire-grates, and French
windows. The business was soon ended, and Jones, having directed
Barnet’s attention to a roll of wall-paper patterns which lay on a
bench for his choice, was leaving to keep another engagement, when
Barnet said, ‘Is the tomb finished yet for Mrs. Downe?’
‘Well—yes: it is at last,’ said the architect, coming back and speaking
as if he were in a mood to make a confidence. ‘I have had no end of
trouble in the matter, and, to tell the truth, I am heartily glad it is
over.’
Barnet expressed his surprise. ‘I thought poor Downe had given up those
extravagant notions of his? then he has gone back to the altar and
canopy after all? Well, he is to be excused, poor fellow!’
‘O no—he has not at all gone back to them—quite the reverse,’ Jones
hastened to say. ‘He has so reduced design after design, that the whole
thing has been nothing but waste labour for me; till in the end it has
become a common headstone, which a mason put up in half a day.’
‘A common headstone?’ said Barnet.
‘Yes. I held out for some time for the addition of a footstone at
least. But he said, “O no—he couldn’t afford it.”’
‘Ah, well—his family is growing up, poor fellow, and his expenses are
getting serious.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ said Jones, as if the subject were none of his. And
again directing Barnet’s attention to the wall-papers, the bustling
architect left him to keep some other engagement.
‘A common headstone,’ murmured Barnet, left again to himself. He mused
a minute or two, and next began looking over and selecting from the
patterns; but had not long been engaged in the work when he heard
another footstep on the gravel without, and somebody enter the open
porch.
Barnet went to the door—it was his manservant in search of him.
‘I have been trying for some time to find you, sir,’ he said. ‘This
letter has come by the post, and it is marked immediate. And there’s
this one from Mr. Downe, who called just now wanting to see you.’ He
searched his pocket for the second.
Barnet took the first letter—it had a black border, and bore the London
postmark. It was not in his wife’s handwriting, or in that of any
person he knew; but conjecture soon ceased as he read the page, wherein
he was briefly informed that Mrs. Barnet had died suddenly on the
previous day, at the furnished villa she had occupied near London.
Barnet looked vaguely round the empty hall, at the blank walls, out of
the doorway. Drawing a long palpitating breath, and with eyes downcast,
he turned and climbed the stairs slowly, like a man who doubted their
stability. The fact of his wife having, as it were, died once already,
and lived on again, had entirely dislodged the possibility of her
actual death from his conjecture. He went to the landing, leant over
the balusters, and after a reverie, of whose duration he had but the
faintest notion, turned to the window and stretched his gaze to the
cottage further down the road, which was visible from his landing, and
from which Lucy still walked to the solicitor’s house by a cross path.
The faint words that came from his moving lips were simply, ‘At last!’
Then, almost involuntarily, Barnet fell down on his knees and murmured
some incoherent words of thanksgiving. Surely his virtue in restoring
his wife to life had been rewarded! But, as if the impulse struck
uneasily on his conscience, he quickly rose, brushed the dust from his
trousers and set himself to think of his next movements. He could not
start for London for some hours; and as he had no preparations to make
that could not be made in half-an-hour, he mechanically descended and
resumed his occupation of turning over the wall-papers. They had all
got brighter for him, those papers. It was all changed—who would sit in
the rooms that they were to line? He went on to muse upon Lucy’s
conduct in so frequently coming to the house with the children; her
occasional blush in speaking to him; her evident interest in him. What
woman can in the long run avoid being interested in a man whom she
knows to be devoted to her? If human solicitation could ever effect
anything, there should be no going to India for Lucy now. All the
papers previously chosen seemed wrong in their shades, and he began
from the beginning to choose again.
While entering on the task he heard a forced ‘Ahem!’ from without the
porch, evidently uttered to attract his attention, and footsteps again
advancing to the door. His man, whom he had quite forgotten in his
mental turmoil, was still waiting there.
‘I beg your pardon, sir,’ the man said from round the doorway; ‘but
here’s the note from Mr. Downe that you didn’t take. He called just
after you went out, and as he couldn’t wait, he wrote this on your
study-table.’
He handed in the letter—no black-bordered one now, but a
practical-looking note in the well-known writing of the solicitor.
‘DEAR BARNET’—it ran—‘Perhaps you will be prepared for the information
I am about to give—that Lucy Savile and myself are going to be married
this morning. I have hitherto said nothing as to my intention to any of
my friends, for reasons which I am sure you will fully appreciate. The
crisis has been brought about by her expressing her intention to join
her brother in India. I then discovered that I could not do without
her.
‘It is to be quite a private wedding; but it is my particular wish that
you come down here quietly at ten, and go to church with us; it will
add greatly to the pleasure I shall experience in the ceremony, and, I
believe, to Lucy’s also. I have called on you very early to make the
request, in the belief that I should find you at home; but you are
beforehand with me in your early rising.—Yours sincerely, C. Downe.’
‘Need I wait, sir?’ said the servant after a dead silence.
‘That will do, William. No answer,’ said Barnet calmly.
When the man had gone Barnet re-read the letter. Turning eventually to
the wall-papers, which he had been at such pains to select, he
deliberately tore them into halves and quarters, and threw them into
the empty fireplace. Then he went out of the house; locked the door,
and stood in the front awhile. Instead of returning into the town, he
went down the harbour-road and thoughtfully lingered about by the sea,
near the spot where the body of Downe’s late wife had been found and
brought ashore.
Barnet was a man with a rich capacity for misery, and there is no doubt
that he exercised it to its fullest extent now. The events that had, as
it were, dashed themselves together into one half-hour of this day
showed that curious refinement of cruelty in their arrangement which
often proceeds from the bosom of the whimsical god at other times known
as blind Circumstance. That his few minutes of hope, between the
reading of the first and second letters, had carried him to
extraordinary heights of rapture was proved by the immensity of his
suffering now. The sun blazing into his face would have shown a close
watcher that a horizontal line, which he had never noticed before, but
which was never to be gone thereafter, was somehow gradually forming
itself in the smooth of his forehead. His eyes, of a light hazel, had a
curious look which can only be described by the word bruised; the
sorrow that looked from them being largely mixed with the surprise of a
man taken unawares.
The secondary particulars of his present position, too, were odd
enough, though for some time they appeared to engage little of his
attention. Not a soul in the town knew, as yet, of his wife’s death;
and he almost owed Downe the kindness of not publishing it till the day
was over: the conjuncture, taken with that which had accompanied the
death of Mrs. Downe, being so singular as to be quite sufficient to
darken the pleasure of the impressionable solicitor to a cruel extent,
if made known to him. But as Barnet could not set out on his journey to
London, where his wife lay, for some hours (there being at this date no
railway within a distance of many miles), no great reason existed why
he should leave the town.
Impulse in all its forms characterized Barnet, and when he heard the
distant clock strike the hour of ten his feet began to carry him up the
harbour-road with the manner of a man who must do something to bring
himself to life. He passed Lucy Savile’s old house, his own new one,
and came in view of the church. Now he gave a perceptible start, and
his mechanical condition went away. Before the church-gate were a
couple of carriages, and Barnet then could perceive that the marriage
between Downe and Lucy was at that moment being solemnized within. A
feeling of sudden, proud self-confidence, an indocile wish to walk
unmoved in spite of grim environments, plainly possessed him, and when
he reached the wicket-gate he turned in without apparent effort. Pacing
up the paved footway he entered the church and stood for a while in the
nave passage. A group of people was standing round the vestry door;
Barnet advanced through these and stepped into the vestry.
There they were, busily signing their names. Seeing Downe about to look
round, Barnet averted his somewhat disturbed face for a second or two;
when he turned again front to front he was calm and quite smiling; it
was a creditable triumph over himself, and deserved to be remembered in
his native town. He greeted Downe heartily, offering his
congratulations.
It seemed as if Barnet expected a half-guilty look upon Lucy’s face;
but no, save the natural flush and flurry engendered by the service
just performed, there was nothing whatever in her bearing which showed
a disturbed mind: her gray-brown eyes carried in them now as at other
times the well-known expression of common-sensed rectitude which never
went so far as to touch on hardness. She shook hands with him, and
Downe said warmly, ‘I wish you could have come sooner: I called on
purpose to ask you. You’ll drive back with us now?’
‘No, no,’ said Barnet; ‘I am not at all prepared; but I thought I would
look in upon you for a moment, even though I had not time to go home
and dress. I’ll stand back and see you pass out, and observe the effect
of the spectacle upon myself as one of the public.’
Then Lucy and her husband laughed, and Barnet laughed and retired; and
the quiet little party went gliding down the nave and towards the
porch, Lucy’s new silk dress sweeping with a smart rustle round the
base-mouldings of the ancient font, and Downe’s little daughters
following in a state of round-eyed interest in their position, and that
of Lucy, their teacher and friend.
So Downe was comforted after his Emily’s death, which had taken place
twelve months, two weeks, and three days before that time.
When the two flys had driven off and the spectators had vanished,
Barnet followed to the door, and went out into the sun. He took no more
trouble to preserve a spruce exterior; his step was unequal,
hesitating, almost convulsive; and the slight changes of colour which
went on in his face seemed refracted from some inward flame. In the
churchyard he became pale as a summer cloud, and finding it not easy to
proceed he sat down on one of the tombstones and supported his head
with his hand.
Hard by was a sexton filling up a grave which he had not found time to
finish on the previous evening. Observing Barnet, he went up to him,
and recognizing him, said, ‘Shall I help you home, sir?’
‘O no, thank you,’ said Barnet, rousing himself and standing up. The
sexton returned to his grave, followed by Barnet, who, after watching
him awhile, stepped into the grave, now nearly filled, and helped to
tread in the earth.
The sexton apparently thought his conduct a little singular, but he
made no observation, and when the grave was full, Barnet suddenly
stopped, looked far away, and with a decided step proceeded to the gate
and vanished. The sexton rested on his shovel and looked after him for
a few moments, and then began banking up the mound.
In those short minutes of treading in the dead man Barnet had formed a
design, but what it was the inhabitants of that town did not for some
long time imagine. He went home, wrote several letters of business,
called on his lawyer, an old man of the same place who had been the
legal adviser of Barnet’s father before him, and during the evening
overhauled a large quantity of letters and other documents in his
possession. By eleven o’clock the heap of papers in and before Barnet’s
grate had reached formidable dimensions, and he began to burn them.
This, owing to their quantity, it was not so easy to do as he had
expected, and he sat long into the night to complete the task.
The next morning Barnet departed for London, leaving a note for Downe
to inform him of Mrs. Barnet’s sudden death, and that he was gone to
bury her; but when a thrice-sufficient time for that purpose had
elapsed, he was not seen again in his accustomed walks, or in his new
house, or in his old one. He was gone for good, nobody knew whither. It
was soon discovered that he had empowered his lawyer to dispose of all
his property, real and personal, in the borough, and pay in the
proceeds to the account of an unknown person at one of the large London
banks. The person was by some supposed to be himself under an assumed
name; but few, if any, had certain knowledge of that fact.
The elegant new residence was sold with the rest of his possessions;
and its purchaser was no other than Downe, now a thriving man in the
borough, and one whose growing family and new wife required more roomy
accommodation than was afforded by the little house up the narrow side
street. Barnet’s old habitation was bought by the trustees of the
Congregational Baptist body in that town, who pulled down the
time-honoured dwelling and built a new chapel on its site. By the time
the last hour of that, to Barnet, eventful year had chimed, every
vestige of him had disappeared from the precincts of his native place,
and the name became extinct in the borough of Port-Bredy, after having
been a living force therein for more than two hundred years.