Though usually an excellent sleeper, Laurence passed a restless night.
Like most sane persons, he was disposed to resent that which he could
not account for; and, with the best will in the world to evolve
ingenious hypotheses explanatory of her disappearance, the manner of his
sweet companion's going remained a mystery. He had examined the
escritoire, and found it locked. He had also examined the wall-space in
its vicinity. This was hung, from cornice to wainscot, with pale
yellow-and-white brocade, as was all the room. But neither behind the
brocade, nor in the wainscot, was any door or sliding panel
discoverable. Indeed, when he came to think of it, remembering the
structure of the house as he had seen it on his way along the south
front to the stables, that side of the room consisted of a blank wall,
doorless and windowless. This fact, when he realised it, caused Laurence
something of a shock. It was unpleasant to him. And so he took refuge in
scepticism. He laughed at himself, declaring that the unwholesome
atmosphere of the house, and the lonely, uneventful life he was
compelled to lead, were breeding morbid fancies in him. All that talk
about woman and the relation of the sexes had stamped itself upon his
mind in an exaggerated way, thanks to his surroundings. The musky scent
of the orchids had a word to say in the matter too, no doubt. So had his
revulsion from the gross suggestions of the scene represented on the
tapestry curtain. Heavy sleep, amounting almost to torpor, induced by
the heavy atmosphere, had fallen upon him directly after he had entered
that strangely engaging and familiar room. And, in that sleep,
imagination had created a woman who should embody all that which the
room and its furnishings suggested--an ideal woman, far away alike from
the brilliant young leader of smart society whom he had married--but on
this clause Laurence refused to allow his thoughts to dwell--and from
the mere human brood-mare, whom his uncle pronounced to be the only
admissible exponent of the Eternal Feminine. He had dreamed a poem--one
of those poems he kept at the bottom of his despatch-box, and had never
felt any inclination to read aloud to Virginia--had dreamed instead of
writing it, that was all.
Laurence got out of bed and threw open the window. Where the eastern
angle of the house stood out dark against the sky, he could see the
pallor of the dawn warming into rose, while overhead the stars died out
one by one as the light broadened.
"Yes, the vision of a dream," he said to himself. "Only another of those
thousand exquisite things which belong to the language of symbol, and
possess, alas! no tally in reality--reality, that is, as most of us
hide-bound victims of conventionality are destined to know it."--He
laughed a little grimly.--"Reality, as we know it, being precisely the
biggest illusion of all!"
He watched the fading stars, the deepening rose and gold of day, above
the woods and lawns, the black cypresses and white statues upon the
northern boundary of the Italian garden. Starlings chattered joyously
from the gutters under the eaves; and then swept down, with a rush of
passing wings, on to the grass. A keeper, gun on shoulder, with a busy,
little, black cocking-spaniel, and a long-limbed, red, Irish setter
behind him, crossed the rough downward slope of the park; and the wide,
blue-grey landscape began to grow definite, to assert itself right away
up to the horizon. The earth seemed to awake with a quiet smile from the
kindly sleep of night.
Laurence drank in his fill of the moist, sharp air.
"Poor dear Virginia!" he said suddenly. And it was probably the very
first time in her whole life that this popular, admirably finished, and
much admired young lady had ever excited pity.
After breakfast Laurence set forth to visit his clerical correspondent,
and strive to ease the latter's conscience while refusing his request.
The rectory, distant about three-quarters of a mile, stood on the rising
ground across the valley, backed by a fringe of high-lying woods. The
church, a small but very perfect example of Norman architecture, closely
adjoined the house. There were good details of carving about the narrow,
round-headed windows of the chancel, and the low, heavy arch of the
porch--the floor of which was sunk several steps below the level of the
churchyard. The tower, square and solid, but little higher than the roof
of the nave, was surmounted by a squat, shingled spire. It struck
Laurence as a calm, self-contained, little building, on which the
centuries had set but slight mark of decay. The churchyard,
too--shadowed by a few ancient yew-trees--was singularly peaceful, full
for the most part of unnamed, grass-grown graves. Death, seen thus, had
nothing awful, nothing repulsive, about it--quiet "rest after toil," it
amounted to no more than that.
But then the charm of spring was in the air, and the young man was
pleasantly beguiled by it. He sat down on the broad coping of the
churchyard wall, lighted a cigarette, and idly watched the rooks
streaming out from the rectory elms, and dropping on the fragrant,
fresh-turned earth of a plough-field in the valley. He listened idly to
the nimble wind that blew up from the ten-mile-distant sea, sang in the
woodland above, and whispered through the dark, plume-like branches of
the yews here in this sheltered piece of ground. The sky was a thin,
bright blue, and across it wandered little clouds, like flocks of white
sheep, herded by that same nimble wind up from the Channel.
It seemed to Laurence that here, indeed, would be a pleasant enough
place to lie when life was over. But then that time had by no means
arrived for him yet. He felt again--as he had felt that night on board
ship--that he had never done complete justice to his own capacity.
Whether the fault lay in himself or in circumstance, he could not say;
but he knew that neither body, nor mind, nor heart, had worked up to
their full strength yet. Ambition of some notable and absorbing
undertaking stirred in him. He looked out over the goodly land. Would
this by no means contemptible inheritance, on the threshold of the
possession of which he now stood, afford him his great opportunity? And
then his thought harked back to the lovely and pathetic vision which had
blessed his sleep--for, of course, he was asleep--last night. A man
could find fulness of satisfaction in a great passion for such a
woman--if so be she actually existed, instead of being only the ideal
vision of an ideal dream. Yes, a man could go very far down that road
if--if--And there Laurence, being a decent fellow, laid strong hands on
his imagination. To indulge it was just simply not right, since whatever
woman's existence might belong to the land of fancy, his wife,
Virginia's, belonged, to the land of very positive fact. He got up,
shook himself, and walked away to the rectory house, through the
sunshine and shadow of the peaceful, country graveyard.