The driver twisted about to look at her. "Let a be, she"s feeling it bad," he thought, and was silent for a moment. Then he twisted about for another look.
"I say, missy, got bad eyes?"
"They"re sore, and a little dim," said Mercy.
"Blest if you don"t look the spitting image of a friend of mine--"boutn the eyes, I mean--red and swelled up and such. It was Tom Crow, a partner of mine, in fact. Tom caught cold sleeping out one night as we was ferning down Roger Tichborne"s estates--him as was the claimant for "em, you know, on"y he didn"t get "em. The cold flew to Tom"s eyes straight, and blest if he ain"t gone blind as a mole."
Mercy"s lips quivered. The driver stopped his chatter, conscious that he had gone too far, and then, with somewhat illogical perversity, he proceeded to express his vexation at himself by punishing his horse.
"Get along, you stupid old perwerse old knacker"s crutch!"
The horse set off at a trot. They pa.s.sed through a village, and Mercy read the name "Child"s Hill" printed on the corner of a house.
"Is it London you are going to?" said Mercy, timidly; "Covent Garden--is that London?"
"Eh?" The driver opened his eyes very wide in a blank stare.
Mercy trembled and held down her head. They jogged on awhile in silence, and then the driver, who had cast furtive glances at the girl, drew rein, and said: "I"m wexed as I said Tom Crow was as blind as a mole.
How-and-ever, a mole ain"t blind, and it"s on"y them coster chaps as think so, but I"ve caught a many of "em out ferning. Besides, Tom was a-worrited with his missus, Tom was, and happen that was worse nor his cold.
("Git along, you old perwerse old file!)
"You see, Tom"s missus cut away and left him. As young as you, and maybe as good to look at, but a bad "un; and she broke Tom"s heart, as the saying is. So Tom left the ferning. He hadn"t no heart for it.
Ferning"s a thing as wants heart, it do. He started costering first, and now Tom"s got a "tater-ingine, on"y being as he"s blind he has a boy to wheel it. And that woman, she done it all. "Jim Groundsell," he says to me--that"s my name--"Jim," he says, "don"t fix your heart on nothing,"
he says, "and keep to your sight and the ferning."
("Well, you perwerse old crutch! Get along with you!)
"But I went and done it myself. And now my missus, she"s a invalide, as they say, and she ain"t out o" bed this twelvemonth come Christmas, and she gets lonesome lying all by herself, and frets a bit maybe, and--
("Git along, will you, you wexing old fence!")
There was a long silence this time. They were leaving the green fields behind them, and driving through longer streets than Mercy had ever seen before. Though the sun was shining feebly, the lamps on the pavement were still burning. They pa.s.sed a church, and Mercy saw by the clock that it was hard on eight. They drove briskly through Camden Town into St. Giles"s, and so on to Long Acre.
The streets were thronged by this time. Troops of people were pa.s.sing to and fro. Cabs and omnibuses were rattling hither and thither. At every turn the crowd became denser and the noise louder. Mercy sat in her corner, bewildered. The strange city frightened her. For the time it drove away the memory of her sorrow.
When they reached Covent Garden, Jim, the driver, drew up with a jerk, and nodded to some of the drivers of similar wagons, and hailed others with a l.u.s.ty shout. All was a babel to the girl"s dazed sense: laughter, curses, yelling, whooping, quarreling.
Mercy"s head ached. She got down, hardly knowing what to do next. Where was she to go? In that wilderness of London, more desolate than the trackless desert, what was she?
She stood a moment on the pavement, her little bundle in her hand, and all the bewildering scene went round and round. The tears rose to her eyes, and the glare and noise and the tumult were blotted out.
The next instant she felt herself being lifted back into the wagon, and then she remembered nothing more.
CHAPTER XII.
Two days later Hugh Ritson entered the convent church of St. Margaret.
It was evening service, and the nave was thronged from chancel to porch.
The aisles, which were bare of seats, were filled only half-way down, the rest of the pavement being empty save for a man here and there who leaned lightly against the great columns of the heavy colonnade.
The sermon had already begun. Hugh Ritson walked up the aisle noiselessly until he came close behind the throng of people standing together. Then he stood at the side of a column and looked around on those in the nave.
He was within range of the preacher"s voice, but he hardly listened. His eyes traversed the church until at last they rested on one spot in the south transept, where a company of nuns sat with downcast eyes half closed. The face of one of them was hidden beneath her drooping coif; the rosary held to her breast was gripped with nervous fingers. Near at hand there was another face that riveted Hugh Ritson"s gaze. It was the face of Greta, radiant in its own beauty, and tender with the devotional earnestness of parted lips and of lashes wet with the dew of a bruised spirit.
From these two his eyes never wandered for longer than a minute!
Languidly he listened to the words that floated over the people, and held them mute. The preacher was a slight young man, emaciated, pale, with l.u.s.trous eyes, and a voice that had a thin, meek pipe. But the discourse was in a strain of feverish excitement, a spirit of hard intolerance, a tone of unrelenting judgment, that would have befitted the gigantic figure and thunderous accents of the monk Jerome.
"There is a way that seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof is death." This was the text, twenty times repeated. Men talked of the rights of conscience, as if conscience were G.o.d"s law. They babbled of toleration, as if any heresy were to be endured, if only it were believed. Conscience! It was the slave of Circ.u.mstance. Toleration! It was the watchword at the gate of h.e.l.l.
Hugh Ritson listened with a vague consciousness, his eyes fixed alternately on the nun with the drooping coif and on the fair, upturned face beside her. At last a word struck him, and made his whole soul to vibrate. Men, women, the great mute throng, pillars, arches, windows of figured saints, altar aflame with candles, the surpliced choir, and the pale, thin face with the burning eyes in the pulpit above--all vanished in an instant.
What was true, said the preacher, in the realm of thought, could not be false in the world of life. Men did evil deeds, and justified them to their own enslaved minds. No way so dark but it had appeared to be the path of light; none so far wrong but it had seemed to be right. Let man beware of the lie that he told to his own heart. The end thereof is death.
Staring from a bloodless face, Hugh Ritson reeled a step backward, and then clung with a trembling hand to the pillar against which he had leaned. The harsh sc.r.a.pe of his foot was heard over the hushed church, and here and there a neck was craned in his direction. His emotion was gone in an instant. A light curl of the hard lip told that the angel within him had once again been conquered.
The sermon ended with a rapturous declaration of the immutability of G.o.d"s law, and the eternal destinies of man. The world was full of change, but man, who seemed to change most, changed least. The stars that hung above had seen the beginning and the end of ages. Before man was, they were. The old river that flowed past the old city that night had flowed there centuries ago, and generations of men had lived and died in joy and sorrow, and still the same waters washed the same sh.o.r.e. But the stars that measure time itself, and the sea that recorded it, would vanish away, and man should be when time would be no more.
"They shall perish, but thou shalt endure. They shall wax old as doth a garment.... But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no end."
The preacher finished, and the buzz and rustle of the people shifting in their seats told of the tension that had been broken. Faces that had been distorted with the tremors of fear, or contracted with the quiverings of remorse, or glorified with the lights of ecstasy, resumed their normal expression.
The vesper hymn was sung by the whole congregation, standing. It floated up to the blue roof, where the lights that burned low over the people"s heads left in the gloom the texts written on the open timbers and the imaged Christ hung in the clerestory. There was one voice that did not sing the vesper hymn; and the close-locked lips of Hugh Ritson were but the symbol of the close-locked heart.
He was asking himself, was it true that when the fire of the stars should be burned to ashes, still man would endure? Pshaw! What was man?
These throngs of men, whose great voice swelled like the sea, what were they? In this old church where they sung, other men had sung before them, and where were they now? Who should say they had not perished?
Living, believing, dying, they were gone: gone with their sins and sorrows; gone with their virtues and rewards; gone from all sight and all memory; and no voice came from them, pealing out of the abyss of death to join this song of hope. Hope! It was a dream. A dream that great yearning crowds like these, filling churches and chapels, dreamed age after age. But it was a dream from which there would be no awakening to know that it was not true.
The priest and choir left the church. Then the congregation broke up and separated. Hugh Ritson stood awhile, still leaning against the column of the colonnade. The nuns in the south transept rose last, and went out by a little aperture opening from the south aisle. Hugh watched them pa.s.s at the distance of the width of the nave. Greta walked a few paces behind them. When the people had gone, and she rose from her seat, her eyes fell on Hugh. Then she dropped her head, and walked down the aisle with a hurried step. Hugh saw her out; the church was now empty, and the voluntary was done. He followed her through the door, and entered into the sacristy.
Before him was another door; it led into the convent. The last of the line of nuns was pa.s.sing through it. Greta stood in the sacristy, faint, with a scared face, one hand at her breast, the other on the base of a crucifix that stood by the wall. When she saw that he had followed her, her first impulse was to shrink away; her second was to sink to her knees at his feet. She did neither. Conquering her faintness, but still quivering from head to foot, she turned upon him with a defiant look.
"Why do you come here? I do not wish to speak with you. Let me pa.s.s,"
she said.
Hugh Ritson made no effort to detain her. He stood before her with downcast eyes, his infirm foot bent under him. "I come to bid you farewell," he said, calmly; "I come to say that we meet no more."
"Would that we had parted forever before we met the last time!" said Greta, fervently.
"Would that we had never met!" said Hugh, in a low voice.
"That was a lie with which you parted me from my husband," she said.
"It was--G.o.d forgive me."
"And you knew it was a lie?" said Greta.