XV

For some minutes Laurence remained in the same position before the

library fireplace, while the rush and wail of the storm without offered

marked contrast to the silence and close warmth reigning within. He knew

all the facts of the case now, as far as they were attainable by

tradition. They proved to be very simple; but, as he reflected, the

simplicity of the symbol by no means invalidates the profound character

of the mystery of which it may be the outward and visible sign. Nay, the

very simplicity, the tender, human pathos, of this story of love and

sorrow, only engaged his heart and provoked his enterprise the more.

Counsels of self-saving moderation he waved aside with a smile. Of

danger, material, moral, or spiritual, he was defiant. With the Veil of

Isis there, visibly confronting him and inviting--in gentlest, most

confiding fashion--his hand to lift it, would it not be unpardonably

poor-spirited, callous, and unfaithful to draw back?

But Virginia? Laurence moved impatiently from his place. He wished to

goodness Armstrong had not referred to Virginia, or rather to that

circumscription of his personal liberty which Virginia presented--to his

marriage, in short! He was very fond of her. Of course, he was very fond

of her--not for a moment did he doubt that. But must it be a matter of

primary duty and honour that he should relinquish the part of hero in

this piece--this noble and enthralling piece, which made vibrant his

whole being, and stirred the finest of him into activity--simply because

Virginia's name did not happen to be in the bill? Marriage came

perilously near a disaster if it clipped your wings as much as all that!

And he would, indeed, be a bigoted moralist who should maintain that no

circumstances can be so extraordinary, no opportunities of knowledge or

spiritual advancement so rare, that they justify a neglect of

conventional rules of conduct, or permit the relegation of ordinary

obligations--for a time at least--to the second place!

Thus did the young man argue--ambition, chivalry, and those hereditary

tendencies towards a rather violent reduction of theory to practice

against which he had so lately been warned, all conspiring to one

result. And so, at last, his head erect, and--though he knew it

not--that air of assured conquest about him which had sat so charmingly

upon his namesake--perhaps his rival--the Laurence Rivers of the Cosway

miniature, he swung down the still, crimson-carpeted corridor, pulled

the stiff tapestry curtain forward, passed behind it, and entered the

room beyond. He laughed a little to himself, he was all of a white heat,

he would be as the Gods, working miracles, righting wrong, conquering

death.

Sharp disappointment awaited him. The yellow drawing-room was

brilliantly lighted. The atmosphere of it was fresh, almost to the point

of chill. The miniatures lay side by side upon the escritoire, where he

had placed them some four or five hours earlier; but his sweet

fairy-lady was not there to receive him. The room was vacant of all

human, all visible, presence save his own.

The hours which followed were among the most poignant that Laurence had

ever experienced. He had made so certain that he needed but to open that

door to regain the unreal world, yet world--as he believed--of

profoundest reality, which enchanted, while it baffled and perplexed

him. He found himself compelled to admit, moreover, not without a sense

of humiliation, that his attitude was not exclusively pathological or

scientific. A good deal of the natural man, and the natural man's

affections and vanities, entered into it. He craved once again to see

that slender, flitting figure, to feel the vibration of that otherwise

impalpable hand, to read the trust and exquisite sympathy of those

lovely eyes; he craved again to be aware of the fervour of his own

eloquence, the rush and spring of his own thought. Moreover, he felt

jealous, absurdly but increasingly jealous, of that other Laurence

Rivers, of whom, for all his vitality and immediate consciousness of

living energy and active will, he seemed to be but a second edition. The

man had forestalled him in face and semblance, forestalled him too in

the heart of the woman it would be--it was, he feared--only too easy for

him to love.

And so he wandered aimlessly, restlessly about the bright, empty room,

almost as his sweet rose-clad lady had wandered on the night he first

met her, searching, searching for some lost good; while, as time

lengthened and his nerves grew strained by impatient waiting and want of

sleep, fears that by his own action he had procured this disappointment

began to assail him. He was always over-confident, blundering from too

great self-belief. For might it not be that in opening her little

treasure-chest, in touching those objects so dear to her dead fingers

and dead eyes, in reading her letters--nay, in striving to approach her

and establish relations with her at all--he had outraged her delicacy,

had, in a sense, assaulted her soul, had been guilty of spiritual

insult, as in grosser, material existence a man might assault or insult

a woman's person? Had he, unwittingly, transgressed some law obtaining

in the world of spirits, in the state of being which lies outside and

beyond the Gates of Death, and of which human beings, bound by the

conditions of their earthly environment, have as yet no

cognisance?--Why should not the mind and heart be sublimated to as

exquisite a fineness of texture, in her case, as the body had been? This

idea of possible outrage, of unwitting grossness towards her, was

horrible to Laurence. It stabbed him with shame, and provoked in him a

passionate desire for absolution. If she would only come--only come,

that he might implore her pardon, gain forgiveness, or--still

better--receive comfortable assurance that he had not sinned!

His restless wanderings brought him at length to the bay-window, and he

looked out into the night. The storm had not abated. Dimly he could

perceive, in the light streaming outward from the window, the

rain-washed steps, the pale balustrades and statues of the garden; the

near cypresses, too, bowed and straining in the gale which shrieked

across the open lawns and bellowed hoarsely in the woodland like some

fierce beast let loose. And Laurence, viewing this tumult and listening

to it, suffered further humiliation. He became but a small thing in his

own estimation, weak, futile, incapable. For to what, after all, did his

force of will and power of compelling events amount? He thought of

Armstrong, the level-headed and circumspect Scotch agent; of his uncle,

dignified, and even in mortal illness faithful to the clear purposes of

his long life. He thought of Virginia, strong in virtue of her very

limitations, glittering as a well-cut jewel, concrete, complete. All

these persons occupied a definite place, served, in their degree, a

definite end. Whereas, for himself, was he not the veriest sport of

nature and of circumstance, endowed with just sufficient wit, sufficient

talent, to court failure in any and every direction? His initiative,

that had lately showed god-like, now shrivelled to microscopic

proportions; while a further unwelcome question presented itself. For

had the gracious spectre--he no longer quarrelled with that

definition--lived, as he had fondly supposed, through his life, regained

reason and glad, human sympathy through the influence of his will, or

had the case, in very truth, been precisely the reverse? Had not she

been the active, he the merely passive principle? Had he not reached a

higher development, and gloried--for a little space--in conscious

possession of genius, had he not lived, in short, through her--and this

not by exercise of direct intention on her part, but merely in obedience

to the might of her love for another man--a man long dead, but whose

name he chanced to bear, and whose appearance he chanced to resemble?

And thereupon a hideous persuasion of his own nullity and emptiness took

hold of Laurence. Individuality fled away, disintegrated, dissolved, and

was not. The component parts of his physical being returned to their

original elements--flesh to earth, gases to air, heat to fire, blood to

water. While all the qualities of his mind, his tastes and affections,

suffered like dispersal, being claimed and absorbed by the members of

those many generations, whose earthly existence had contributed to the

eventual production of his own. And the terror of this was augmented, in

that, although every atom of his being was thus scattered and

appropriated, every smallest fraction of that which had gone to compose

his personality was dispersed, yet annihilation of thought did not

follow. He was reduced to absolute nothingness; but knowledge of

disintegration, knowledge of loss, knowledge--rebellious and

despairing--of that same nothingness remained.

Appalled, with the instinct of flight upon him as from some menacing and

immeasurable danger, Laurence turned and groped his way back--as a blind

man gropes--into the centre of the brightly lighted room. The

persuasion of his own nothingness seemed to extend itself to his

surroundings. All partook of the nature of illusion, from which sense of

sight and touch alike seemed powerless to redeem them. And this begot in

the young man an immense desolation and a corresponding need of comfort

and of quick human sympathy. Involuntarily, in his extremity, his

thought fixed itself, stayed itself, upon Agnes Rivers. Ah! if she would

but show herself--she, his well-beloved fairy-lady--he was convinced

peace and clear-seeing would follow in her train, that this terror of

nothingness would depart, and that sanely, calmly, he should enter into

possession of himself once more!

And then, presently, as he moved to and fro in restless search for her,

it appeared to him that a rose-red gleam of silk, a just perceptible

whiteness of muslin and lace, the faintest vision of a vision of her

sweet and lovely face, moved beside him as he moved. It was as though an

indefinable tenderness yearned towards him from out some impassable

distance, striving to declare itself, to make itself seen and felt, yet

without force to master some opposing influence and accomplish its

object. And this awoke in Laurence not only an answering tenderness, but

an answering struggle. He stood quite still, yet with every nerve, every

faculty strained to attain and overcome. He felt braced by a sudden

exhilaration of battle. Silently, fiercely, he fought with some awful,

unseen enemy,--with dimly apprehended powers of time and place, of

death, of things spiritual and things material, which intervened between

him and the love which sought to reach him. Never had he desired

anything as he desired this love. His individuality was actual enough

now; and his whole body ached with the effort to penetrate that

resistant medium, to be face to face with that love, and look on it, and

so doing to read the riddle both of his future and his past.

But when the warfare was at its height, and the unseen enemy seemed to

yield a little, while the slender form of his rose-clad lady grew more

distinct to Laurence's eyes, unaccustomed noise and confusion arose

within the dead-quiet house. Doors opened and slammed, as with the

hurry of panic. Men's footsteps echoed imperatively down the corridors

and upon the stairs.--Another moment and he would overcome all

resistance, and his dear companion would stand before him, smiling,

gracious, full of consolation and of help; but just then voices were

raised in quick discussion without. Suddenly the door was thrown open.

Upon the threshold was Renshaw the butler, bereft of his usual

correctness of demeanour, his eyes starting, his skin mottled with

purple stains. Behind him stood Watkins holding back the leather-lined

curtain to the utmost of its length, thereby disclosing a triangular

vista of dark-panelled passage and the proud heads and arrogant,

impassive faces of the rulers of Imperial Rome.

Evidently both men dreaded to venture one step further into the room.

"Will you please to come at once, sir," Renshaw called hoarsely. "Excuse

me, sir, you are wanted. Mr. Rivers is very ill. He has asked for you.

Mr. Lowndes fears he is dying."