"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 s.p.a.ce, 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 impa.s.sive, 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 gla.s.s, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 circ.u.mstance--circ.u.mstance 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 invest.i.ture 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 gra.s.s, 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 pa.s.sed, 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, pa.s.sionate devotions, pa.s.sionate revolts, had gone to generate his own const.i.tution, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sing. 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 mult.i.tude, 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 pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sed 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 gra.s.s was long, starred with tall-growing b.u.t.tercups, 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 c.o.c.k, answered in gallant challenge from cottage and from farmyard--growing faint in the far distance, ringing out again close at hand, l.u.s.ty 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sed, 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. .h.i.therto 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, G.o.d.
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 G.o.d. 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 s.p.a.ce. Now he beheld this consummation as already accomplished, immediately present, constant, here, now, permanent. All that it needed was just an att.i.tude 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 att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s and cla.s.s. 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 fort.i.tude, 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 gra.s.s.
"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, G.o.d 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.
THE END
_By the same author_
THE WAGES OF SIN THE CARISSIMA MRS. LORIMER A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION COLONEL ENDERBY"S WIFE LITTLE PETER