It was all very much in keeping with his mood--the reposeful landscape,
heavy with the solid green of the August foliage, the sweep of the low,
grey sky, the warm, still rain which drew forth an indefinable fragrance
from the pastures and hedgerows, the wayside flowers, and the underwood.
Already the evenings had begun to shorten. The rambling village-street
and its inevitable commotion of boys and dogs left behind, Laurence
looked away, with a stirring of the heart, over this goodly land of
which he was owner, as the brown thorough-bred breasted the hilly road
leading up from the station to Stoke Rivers house. The prospect at once
soothed and stimulated him. Emotion had been conspicuous principally by
its absence lately; it was pleasant to feel again.
At the hall-door the two men-servants met him; and Renshaw's large,
egg-shaped countenance bore an expression almost paternal.
"Excuse me, sir," he said, his complexion ripening to mulberry with the
effort of speech--"I do not wish to put myself forward, or go beyond my
place, but I must express the pleasure we take in welcoming you home,
sir. I speak not only for myself, but for Mr. Lowndes and Mr. Watkins,
and all the other servants--both upper and under, sir."
Lowndes, the grey-haired, long-armed valet, subsequently gave vent to
even more cordial sentiments.
"Excepting for the fire, we have been very dull during your absence,
sir," he said, as he laid out the young man's dress clothes, with a
critical eye to their packing which did not evidently quite commend
itself to his taste. "Living in this house has been like living inside a
run-down clock. I hope you have returned to make some stay, sir. We want
a head; we have forgotten how to take a holiday and amuse ourselves. Our
habits have been so very regular for so many years, you see, sir, we
feel lost without our accustomed duties."
This too was pleasant. To be precious in the sight of those who serve
you lends a singular graciousness to the conduct of daily life. Laurence
felt at harmony with himself and his surroundings, and with that sense
of harmony arose certain stirrings of hope. During the days and nights
of the past week, while the great ship ploughed her way eastward across
the mighty ridge and furrow of the Atlantic, he had not been wholly
unconscious of that hope--the hope that even now all might not be over,
and that he might once again be blessed by the vision, for however brief
a space, of his dear fairy-lady. Yet he had kept that hope under with a
stern hand. It was present, but at the postern gate, so to speak, of the
castle of his reason and his will. He kept it there, doing his heart
much violence by refusing it admittance and entertainment, since he knew
that, once admitted, it would have proved so dangerously absorbing and
alluring a guest. He tried to deny it admittance still; yet he shuffled
a little with his own conscience, permitting himself a renewing of the
routine which had marked his former sojourn at Stoke Rivers. He dressed,
dined, and waited until the twilight had very sensibly closed in before
visiting that which might remain of the room of mysterious and enchanted
meetings.
The near end of the corridor offered no noticeable signs of disturbance
or injury. Still it appeared to Laurence that, as on a former occasion,
a spirit of disorder, the winnowing wings of a profound and elemental
fear, had but lately swept through it. He could have imagined the
sightless, marble faces of the Roman emperors less impassive, less
wholly scornful, their heads carried with something less of arrogant and
invincible pride. An acrid odour of burned stuffs, burned woodwork,
pervaded the place. He had cabled instructions that nothing might be
removed, nothing renovated before his arrival. The tapestry curtain
still hung in its accustomed position; but it was blackened and
shrivelled to the obliteration of the figures wrought upon it. The satyr
no longer leered, from his monticule, upon the naked and reluctant woman
hurried towards him by the company of naughty loves. Tongues of fire had
licked away that pictured wantonness and purged its offence.
Behind the wreck of the _portiere_, the door--its panels split and
tormented by flame--stood wide open, as on the night when, straining
every muscle to carry that apparently so light and fragile burden,
Laurence had lifted Agnes Rivers across the threshold. Once within the
yellow drawing-room the desolation of that heretofore gracious and
friendly apartment touched hard on tragedy, seen, as now, in the
furtive, evening light. The rain had ceased, and through the remaining
sheets of glass, in the partially boarded and barricaded bay-window, the
flower-beds of the Italian garden showed in rich variety of leaf and
blossom. The statues gleamed calm and graceful from their white
pedestals. The spires of the cypresses rose with a certain velvet
softness of density towards the pensive and slowly clearing sky. But the
room itself was ruined in most unsightly fashion, stained by smoke,
rendered clammy and dank in places by water. Wreckage of the pretty,
costly furniture lay scattered in formless heaps upon the blackened
floor--with here and there a shred of fine porcelain, the gilt handle of
a drawer, the pages of a book reduced to tinder, or the unlovely remnant
of carpet or hanging. It was as a place that has suffered siege, and
which relentless foemen have sacked and trodden underfoot. So that it
came to Laurence, very surely, that not here would he find his sweet
fairy-lady, were he indeed destined, in this life, ever to find her
again. Her gentle spirit could never be subjected to the indignity of
dwelling amid this scene of destruction. Some incongruities are
inadmissible to the imagination. They are too violent, too gross.
Therefore the days of his beloved companion's pilgrimage were ended--it
could not be otherwise--in respect of this once so comely place.
But though convinced that here it was useless to await her presence,
there remained somewhat for Laurence in all tenderness and reverence to
see. Since the electric light was now unavailable, he had ordered
candles to be placed upon the chimney-piece, which, though yellow and
disfigured, still remained practically intact. He moved across from the
neighbourhood of the doorway--sad, little clouds of corpse-coloured
ashes arising about his feet as he stepped--and put a match to the
candles. Then, as the light of them strengthened and steadied, he
looked, shading his eyes with his hand, towards that portion of the wall
at right angles to which the painted, satin-wood escritoire, with all
its pathetic store of cherished love-tokens, had formerly stood. The
high wainscot and brocade-covered panels masking this space had been
entirely burned away, disclosing a low, vaulted chamber hollowed out of
the thickness of the outer wall. This chamber had been roughly and
somewhat clumsily ceiled. The whole construction showed unmistakeable
traces of hasty and unskilled labour.
Yet Laurence looked at this rough-hewn place of sepulture with an
infinite tenderness, a chastened reverence, while a very vital emotion
clutched at his throat, and far-reaching questions of life past, life
future, and the august purposes of being through the abysm of the ages
and on to the ultimate goal of things, held and sifted his intelligence
and his heart. For it was here, upon the morning following the fire,
that Agnes Rivers's coffin had been found. And it was from here, from
this hard and narrow bed--by what alchemy and agency he knew not--it
transcended his powers to conceive--that her sweet ghost had come forth
nightly, through all those long and dreary years of which it sickened
him to think, flitting impalpable, in vain endeavour to find the key to
her little treasure chest, that was also the key to the love she had so
pathetically lost. And it was here also, to this same hard and narrow
bed, that she had returned with quick and innocently gladsome farewells
in the first flush of returning day, when that love, by unprecedented
circumstance--circumstance trenching on actual miracle--had been
restored to her.
Viewing that harsh and meagre resting-place which for the better part of
a century had held all that remained of her dear body, Laurence felt
himself strangely reconciled to actual happenings. For it was better,
ten thousand times better, that all now subsisting of her mortal
investiture should rest in Mother Earth's lap--blessed and set apart by
the faith and piety of ages as was that pleasant plot of sun-visited
grass, where the little shadows danced and beckoned, in the age-old
quiet of Stoke Rivers's churchyard. There he would go and watch for her
possible coming, and pay her the homage of his devotion, when the small
hours drew on towards to-morrow's dawn.
Meanwhile there was time to be passed, and he did not care to leave this
spot, though its present desolation tore at his very vitals, with
memories of incalculable promise, and of unconsummated delight. As,
awakening from his dream of satisfied love long ago, during that strange
former existence, in the summer noon under the light, sibilant shelter
of the lime grove, so now he hungered for completeness of possession,
for the crowning of desire. Yet he kept himself in hand, even as he had
kept the young, brown, thorough-bred horse in hand, when, finding the
level, would have broken its pace and run riot more than once on the
road up from the station. He moved away and sat down on the defaced and
ragged sill of the bay-window. The moon had risen, but its mild light
was often obscured by softly-moving floats of thin, opalescent vapour.
These crossed its face in apparently endless procession, herded up from
southward and the narrow Channel sea. Laurence watched them, at first
almost unconsciously, his mind occupied with other, and, to himself,
more immediate and vital interests. But at length their slow and stately
progress began to work upon his imagination, and insinuate itself into
the very substance and foundation of his thought. He began to see in
them a procession of the souls of all those generations of men and
women, whose efforts and emotions, power of intellect, fiercely pursued
ambitions, passionate devotions, passionate revolts, had gone to
generate his own constitution, mental and physical, and determine his
ultimate fate. And so he came to regard them with a sustained and
deepening attention, since their aspect seemed pregnant with suggestion
of admonition, of encouragement, of warning, or restraint. Once again he
decided to keep vigil in this house, to watch with the unnumbered and
unrecorded dead whose offspring and inheritor he was. Not until all of
them should have passed by, and the moon ride solitary in the heavens,
would he go across the valley--himself now somewhat bitterly
solitary--and visit Agnes Rivers's grave.
But that procession of low-floating vapours proved long in passing. More
than once a break came in it, making the young man suppose that the
whole of them was gone by. And then again, out of the south, now one
alone, now in close ranged companies, strangely shaped, as though draped
in dragging shrouds, that interminable procession crossed the vault of
the sky. A terror of incalculable number, of unthinkable multitude,
began to lay hold on him, as still they came, and came. Was it
conceivable that each human life had this almost appalling vista of
human lives behind it, of which it was the outcome and result, and in
which it had, consciously or unconsciously, taken part? There was a
certain splendour in the thought, though it left but little room for
personal vanity. Yet even while watching, and pondering of all this, the
personal note remained--for he pondered also, not without profound
discouragement, of his great adventure which just now appeared so
signally to have failed. At the half hours and hours the striking clocks
warned him that the night was far spent, but still that endless and
mystic procession passed before his watching eyes. As once before, in
this same room, his individuality seemed to sink away from him, while a
horrible sense of his own nullity and nothingness prevailed. But at
last, at last, when the first chill grey of the dawn began just
perceptibly to lighten the horizon behind the lime grove, the last of
these trailing vapours arose, passed over and disappeared. The moon
declined towards her setting, yet, though she hung low, the whole field
of heaven was at length her own.
Then Laurence rose, and went away across the quiet park and up the deep,
tree-shadowed lane to the churchyard, on the hillside across the valley,
sheltered by the bank of high-lying woods. The grass was long, starred
with tall-growing buttercups, blue speedwell, and ox-eye daisies, heavy
and hanging with wet. Only the plot beneath the grey wall of the little
chancel was neatly mown, while, on the near side of it, conspicuous from
the smooth surface of the turf rising immediately surrounding it, was a
new-made grave. The sods covering it were kept in place by a cage of
osier rods. Some one--and Laurence found it in his heart to bless that
unknown ministrant--had laid a spray of pink wild-rose upon the head of
the grave, twisted into a little crown, at once of blossom and of
thorns.
Laurence stood at the foot of the long, narrow mound, and again he kept
vigil--hearing the breathing of the moist earth, the quick sounds of the
woodland, and that strange, indeterminate, stirring of awakening
life--beast, bird, insect, herb, and tree--which immediately precedes
the birth of day. More than once his heart thumped against his ribs, and
the love-light sprang into his eyes, for, deceived by the growing colour
of the east, he fancied for an instant he again beheld the dear rose-red
of his fairy-lady's clinging, old-world, silken gown. But that fond
delusion was soon dissipated. Wherever her light footsteps might now
tread, they would never, in visible fashion, tend earthwards again.
Then on a sudden, from the stables up at the house, came the crowing of
a cock, answered in gallant challenge from cottage and from
farmyard--growing faint in the far distance, ringing out again close at
hand, lusty and vigorous, full of the joy of living. Stung by the merry
sound, Laurence straightened himself up, looked away from the
osier-bound, rose-crowned grave, over the fertile, peaceful landscape.
The hops hung heavy upon the poles. The corn warmed to ruddy yellow. The
grass and hedgerows, as the sun's rays touched them, glittered with a
thousand diamond points, even as his lost love's little, embroidered
slippers had glittered when he first led her forth along the alleys of
the Italian garden. A glad wind swept up landward, from that great
thoroughfare of the nations, that highway of stately ships, the narrow
Channel sea. It raced through the woodland, swayed the sombre,
plume-like branches of the ancient yew-trees, and passed, exultant, to
fulfil its cleanly, life-giving mission elsewhere. Laurence took a long
breath, filling his lungs with it. It was good to taste, sane and
wholesome. And then, somehow, those divine words came to him, spoken in
the far Syrian country nearly two thousand years ago.--"The wind bloweth
where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell
whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of
the Spirit."
Laurence stood erect and very still, his head held high, his face keen,
his lips parted in silent laughter, his whole being vibrant with the
surprise of a great conviction, a great discovery. For at length he too
saw and understood. He perceived that his love far from being lost was
his, close and intimately, as she had never been before, in either this
life, or that other half-remembered life, in both of which he had loved
her so well. He perceived that his amazing and desperate experiment, far
from being a failure, was on a high-road to a success hitherto undreamed
of. He perceived that his splendid adventure, far from being ended, had
but just begun; and that, could he but keep faith with his present
seeing, it would not end until he too had pushed back the heavy curtain,
and finally crossed the threshold of so-called death. Nor would it end
even then, were light lived in the light of this his present seeing. The
future was illimitable, since the goal of it was nothing less than union
with the Divine Principle itself. However innumerable the company of
human lives that had gone to produce his own, his individuality was
secure henceforth, since he had recognised and embraced the life which
alone eternally exists and subsists--the life in, and of, God.
Five months ago, crossing the Atlantic, in the chill of the March night,
while the big ship steamed eastward and the stars danced in the rigging
as she sunk and swung in the trough and then rose--as a horse at a
fence--at the coming wave, he had asked himself the question as to the
profit of gaining the whole world, if in so doing a man should lose his
own soul. All his experience since then had been a setting of that vital
question at rest for ever. For he had found his soul. The matter was
simply to the point of laughter, when once apprehended. In bidding him
farewell, his sweet companion had promised him that she and he would at
last be made one, being one with Almighty God. He had heard that as he
might mere rhetoric, idle though pretty words, placing it in some
unimaginable future, his mind still in bondage to human conception of
time and space. Now he beheld this consummation as already accomplished,
immediately present, constant, here, now, permanent. All that it needed
was just an attitude and habit of mind, and then work. Work, not so much
for any great benefit derivable by others from that work (though the
desire of the welfare of others must be a fundamental element in that
work); but for the maintenance of the said all-important attitude and
habit of mind in himself. Almost any work would do. There was his
property; and, happily, sufficient of the feudal idea still remains in
England to make the possession of a great landed-estate fruitful in
humane relations between class and class. There was the dear earth, too,
to till and sow, and render more fertile, and more useful to man. There
were politics and public affairs. In the light of his present
illumination he dare approach these things, strong to carve out a career
for himself, yet for ever keeping his secret against his heart.
Salvation is for the individual, each individual must find it for him or
herself. Souls cannot be saved in batches. But to each and all it may,
and will, come, if they have courage, and fortitude, and the single eye
which refuses illusion.
"And so farewell, yet never farewell, my first, and last, and only
love," he said, looking at the osier-bound grave, while the shadows of
the feathery yew-trees danced and beckoned upon the churchyard grass.
"There have been partings before, cruel to be born; there may be
partings again, but they will be transitory. I am not afraid that I
shall ever lose you, or you me. I am secure in that. Meanwhile for your
sake, O dear soul of me--for so indeed you are--I will make the best use
of the years I may still have to live here on earth. And since you once
were woman, no woman shall ever suffer at my hands--all womanhood being
sacred thenceforth since you once were woman.--Now the work of the world
calls, and, God helping me, I will help to do it. After all, dear love,
we go forth together,--amen."
* * * * *
There are things Virginia does not quite comprehend in her husband. She
tells the Van Reenan family, that "the English character is very
obscure." But she has had no more dramatic moments in respect of that
character. She pays a long visit yearly to "the other side," and is as
popular as ever. On this side too she has had her social triumphs. The
yellow drawing-room at Stoke Rivers has been rebuilt, but Laurence keeps
it for his own use. He has moved the books into it from the libraries,
thus giving Virginia a large suite of rooms for social entertainments.
Lately, when the red flame of war threatened the integrity of the
British Empire, Laurence went south; and for a time lived that larger
life--in which woman takes her place, perhaps her safest one, as a hope
or a memory merely--the life a man lives among men. Jack Bellingham
volunteered also. He thinks Laurence a better fellow than ever; yet is
perplexed at moments as to whether he has, or has not, developed--like
so many of his family--into a thorough-paced crank.