There was a little lane, turning off to the left a few yards away. She had never seen him in his clerical dress, so she could not have recognised him yet. She would only take him for one of the clergy at the Retreat, he had only to turn down the lane--
But no, his old manhood rose in revolt at the idea. That would be a flight, a mean, unworthy flight, unworthy alike of himself and the high resolves that he had taken. It was hard, almost impossible even to think of _her_ as a temptation, as an enemy to his soul, and yet, even if she were, as the leaping blood in his veins told him she might be, was it for him, the young soldier of the Cross, just buckling on his armour, to turn his back upon the first foe he met, even though that foe had once been his best beloved? He set his teeth and clenched his hands, and walked on past the entrance to the lane.
A minute or two later their eyes met. A look of astonished recognition instantly leapt into hers. She shifted the silver handled walking stick into her left hand, and held out the other, daintily gauntleted in tan.
"Why Vane!" she exclaimed, in a voice which was still as sweet and soft as ever, but which seemed to him to have a strange and somewhat discordant note in it, "you don"t mean to say that it"s you. I suppose, as a matter of fact, I ought to say Mr. Maxwell now--I mean now that you"re a clergyman--but after all, those little things don"t matter between such very old friends as we are, and I"m sure Reggie won"t mind, in fact, I shan"t let him if he does. Just fancy meeting you here! I suppose you"re one of the Fathers--is that it?--at the little monastery up there. I"ve only been home a week, and last night I heard about this place, so I drove over to see it. But you haven"t told me how you are yet, and how you like your--your new life."
As a matter of fact, she had rattled all this off so quickly that Vane had not had time to reply to her greeting. He had taken her hand and, somewhat tremblingly, returned the frank, firm pressure. While she was speaking, he looked into her face and saw that she had already a.s.sumed the invisible but impenetrable mask in which the society woman plays her part in the tragic comedy of Vanity Fair. It was the same face and yet not the same, the same voice and yet a different one, and the sight and sound acted upon him like a powerful tonic. This was not the Enid he had loved, after all, at least, so it seemed to him. He had forgotten, or had never known that every woman is a born actress, and that even the brief training which Enid had already had was quite enough to enable her to say one thing, while thinking and feeling something entirely different.
He smiled for the first time as their hands parted, and said, in a voice whose calm frankness surprised himself:
"Good morning, Mrs. Garthorne!"--he absolutely couldn"t trust himself to p.r.o.nounce the word "Enid"--"Thanks, I"m very well, and, as you have guessed, I am located for the present up in the Retreat yonder. I confess I was a little startled to see you coming up the road, although I saw from the _Times_ the other day that you had come back from the Continent and were coming down here to the Abbey. Of course, you would hear of the Retreat sooner or later, and as it"s a bit of a show place in its humble way, I had an idea that you would come over some time to see it."
"Oh, but I suppose you don"t allow anything so unholy as a woman to enter the sacred precincts, do you?"
The artificial flippancy of her tone annoyed him perhaps even more than it shocked him. There was a sort of scoff in it which rightly or wrongly he took to himself. It seemed to say "You, of course, have done with women now and for ever; henceforth, you must only look upon us as temptations to sin, and so I can say what I like to you."
"On the contrary," he replied, forcing a smile, "the Retreat is as open for visiting purposes to women as it is to men. It is nothing at all like a monastery, you know, although report says it is. It is simply a place where clergymen who have need of it can go and rest and think and pray in peace, and act as curates to the Superior who is also vicar of the parish. In fact, it has been known for mothers and sisters of the men to take rooms in the villages, and they are even invited to lunch."
"Dear me," she said, "how very charming! Of course, you will come over to the Abbey and have dinner some evening, and sleep, and the next morning I shall expect you to let me drive you over here and invite me to lunch."
"Of course, I shall be delighted," he said, purposely using the most conventional terms, "but I ought to tell you that there is a condition attached to our hospitality."
"Oh, indeed, and what is that?" she said, glancing up at him with one of her old saucy looks. "I hope it isn"t very stringent. Won"t you turn and walk a little way with me and tell me all about it? There is my pony carriage coming up the hill after me. It will overtake us soon, and then I won"t take up your time any longer, for I daresay you are going on some good work."
Again the half-veiled flippancy of her tone jarred upon him and made him clench his teeth for an instant.
"With the greatest pleasure," he replied, turning and walking with long, slow strides beside her. His blood was quite cool now, and a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
"It is this way," he went on, speaking as calmly as though he were addressing an utter stranger. "You know, or perhaps you do not know yet, that, beautiful and almost arcadian as this place is, there is, I regret to say, a great deal of poverty and sorrow, and, I am afraid, sin too, and it is part of our duty at the Retreat to seek this out and do what we can to relieve it; but there is much of that kind of work which women can do infinitely better than men, and therefore, when a woman enters our gates as our guest, we ask her to do what she can to help us."
"I see," she said, more softly and more naturally than she had spoken before. "It is a very just and a very good condition, and I shall do my best to fulfil it; indeed, as I suppose I shall some day be Lady of the Manor here, it will be my duty to do it."
"I am very glad to hear you say so," he said, with a touch of warmth in his tone, "very glad. And if you like you can begin at once. You see that little farmhouse up the road yonder. Well, there is not only sorrow, but sin and shame as well in that house. The old people are most respectable, and they were once fairly comfortably off before the agricultural depression ruined them. They are wretchedly poor now, but they struggle on somehow. About eighteen months ago their daughter went off to Kidderminster to work in the mills. She said she would get good wages and send some of them home every week. For some months she did send them a few shillings, and then what is unfortunately only too common about here happened. For a long time they lost sight of her, and last night she came back, starving, with a baby and no husband."
He said this in a perfectly pa.s.sionless and impersonal tone, just as a doctor might describe the symptoms of a disease. "If you care to, you can do a great deal of good there," he went on. "I have just been there.
If you like I will take you in and introduce you."
She stopped and hesitated for a moment. It struck her as such an utter reversal of their former relationships, that it seemed almost to obliterate the line which lies between the sublime and the ridiculous.
Then she moved forward again, saying, in her own old natural voice:
"Thank you, Vane. I have often wondered since what sort of circ.u.mstances we should meet under again, but I never thought of anything like this.
Yes, I will come, and if there is anything I can do I will do it."
"I thought you would," he said quietly, as he strode along beside her towards the farmhouse.
CHAPTER XIII.
After introducing Enid to the sorrow-stricken family, Vane took his leave of her to go about his work. He met the pony-cart coming up the hill, and told the footman to wait for his mistress outside the farmhouse. Then he went on to the other hamlet, doing his work just as well and conscientiously as ever, and yet all the while thinking many thoughts which had very little connection with it.
He got back to the Retreat just in time for supper, and when the meal was over he asked Father Philip for the favour of half an hour"s conversation. The request was, of course, immediately granted, and as soon as he was alone with the old man, who was wise alike in the things of the world and in those of the spirit, he told him, not as penitent to confessor, but rather as pupil to teacher, the whole story of his meeting and conversation with Enid, not omitting the slightest detail that his memory held, from the first thrill of emotion that he had experienced on seeing her to the last word he had spoken to her on leaving the farmhouse.
Father Philip was silent for some time after he had finished his story, then, leaning back in his deep armchair, he looked at Vane, who was still walking slowly up and down the little room, and said in a quiet, matter-of-fact voice:
"I"m very glad, Maxwell, that you"ve told me this. As I have told you before, I have listened to a good many life-histories in this room, but I must admit that yours is one of the strangest and most difficult of them. The fact of Miss Raleigh having married the son of the lord of the manor here, and having come down while you are here, naturally makes it more difficult still. But then, you know, my dear fellow, the greater the difficulty and the danger of the strife the greater the honour and the reward of victory.
"For my own part I think that your meeting with her in the road down yonder, if not ordered by Providence, may, with all reverence, be called providential. Those emotions which you experienced on first seeing her, and for which you were inclined to reproach yourself, were after all perfectly human, and therefore natural and pardonable. I needn"t tell you now that I entirely disagree with those who consider that a man should cease to be a man when he becomes a clergyman. You are young, and you are made of flesh and blood. You were once very much in love with this young lady"--there was a slight, almost imperceptible emphasis upon the "once" which somehow made Vane wince--"you might have married her, but you forewent that happiness in obedience to a conviction which would have done honour to the best of us. You would have been either more or less than human if your heart had not beaten a little harder and your blood had not flowed a little faster when you met her unexpectedly like that in a country road.
"But," he went on, sitting up in his chair and speaking with a little more emphasis, "the very fact that you so quickly discovered such a decided change in her, and that that change, moreover, struck you as being one for the worse, is to my mind a distinct proof that your paths in life have already diverged very widely."
"And yet, Father Philip," said Vane, as the old man paused and looked up at him, "you can hardly say, surely, that it was a good thing for me to discover that change. I can tell you honestly that it was a very sad one for me."
"Possibly," said Father Philip, "and, without intending the slightest disrespect to Mrs. Garthorne, I still say that it was a good thing for you to discover it."
"But why, Father Philip? How can it be a good thing for a man to discover a change for the worse in a woman whom he has grown up with from boy and girl, whom he has loved, and who has been to him the ideal of all that was good and lovable on earth?"
"My dear Maxwell, what you have just said convinces me that you have learnt or are in course of learning one of the most valuable lessons that experience can teach you. Remember that a man can only see with his own eyes, that he can only judge from his own perceptions. I do not agree with you in thinking that the Mrs. Garthorne of the present differs so greatly from the Miss Raleigh of the past. Different in a certain degree, of course, she must be. She was a girl then, living under the protection of her father"s roof. She is a wife now, with a home of her own, with new cares, new responsibilities, new prospects. In fact, the whole world has changed for her, and therefore it would be very strange if she had not changed too. But that was not the change you saw. I would rather believe that that was in yourself, that you are a different man, not that she is a different woman."
"I think I see what you mean," said Vane, seating himself on the edge of an old oak table in the middle of the room. "You mean that while she has remained the same or nearly so my point of view has altered. I see her in a different perspective, and through a different atmosphere."
"Exactly," replied Father Philip. "It is both more reasonable and more charitable to believe that you have changed for the better, and not she for the worse."
"G.o.d grant that it may be so," said Vane, slipping off the table and beginning his walk again. "If it is so, then at least my work has not been without some result, and some of my prayers have been granted. But now, Father Philip, I want your advice. What shall I do? Shall I stay here and meet her just as an old friend? Shall I accept her invitation over to the Abbey? Shall I bring her here and introduce her to you, so that you may tell her what she can do for our people? Shall I trust myself to this sort of intercourse with her, or, as my time here is nearly up, shall I go away?"
"As for trusting yourself, Maxwell," said Father Philip slowly, "that is a question I cannot answer. You must ask that of your own soul, and I will pray and you must pray that it shall answer you with an honest "Yes." I don"t believe that the answer will be anything else. But if it is, then by all means go, go to the first work that your hand finds to do. Go and join your friend Ernshaw in his mission under Southey. But if it is "Yes," as I hope and believe it will be, then stop until it is time for you to take your priest"s orders. Visit the Abbey, bring Mrs.
Garthorne here, interest her in the good work that you have already, I hope, made her begin by taking her to the Clellens. Prove to her and her husband, and, most important of all, to yourself, that you did not take that resolve of yours lightly or in vain, that, in short, you are one of those who can, as Tennyson says, "rise on stepping-stones of their dead selves to higher things."
"That, Maxwell, is the best advice I can give you. When you go to your room you will, of course, ask for guidance from the Source which cannot err, and I will add my prayers to yours that it may be given you."
The next day a mounted footman brought a note from Garthorne to Vane saying that his wife had told him of her meeting with him, and also expressing his pleasure at finding that he was in the neighbourhood, and asking him to come over to dine and sleep at the Abbey the next evening.
If that evening would suit him he had only to tell the messenger, and a dog-cart would be sent for him, as the distance by road over the Bewdley Bridge was considerably over seven miles.
He had been awake nearly all night. In fact, he had spent the greater part of it on his knees questioning his own soul and seeking that advice which Father Philip had advised him to seek, and when the early morning service in the little chapel was over he honestly believed that he had found it. He went back into his room, after telling the man to put his horse in the stable, and go to what was stilled called the b.u.t.tery and get a gla.s.s of beer, and wrote a note thanking Garthorne for his invitation, and accepting it for the following night.
If Vane had been told a couple of years before that he would visit Enid and her husband as an ordinary guest, that he would sit opposite to her at table and hear her address another man as "dear" in the commonplace of marital conversation, that he would see her exchange with another man those little half-endearments which are not the least of the charms of the first few married years, and that he would be able to look upon all this at least with grave eyes and unmoved features, he would simply have laughed at the idea as something too ridiculous ever to come within the bounds of possibility.
Yet, to the outward view, that was exactly what happened during his stay at Garthorne Abbey. He seemed to see Enid through some impalpable and yet impenetrable medium. He could see her as he always had seen her; but to touch her, to put his hand upon her, even to dream of one of those caresses which such a short time ago had been as common as hand-shakes between them, was every whit as impossible as the present condition of things would have seemed to him then.
There were a few other people to dinner. None of them knew anything of his previous relationship to Enid, and their presence naturally, and perhaps fortunately, kept the conversation away from the things of the past; but the Fates had put him in full view of Enid at the table, and, do what he would, he could not keep his eyes from straying back again and again to that perfect and once well-beloved face, any more than he could keep his ears from listening to that voice which had once been the sweetest of music for him, rather than to the general conversation in which it was his social duty to take a part.
It was a sore trial to the fort.i.tude and self-control of a man who had loved as long and as dearly as he had done, but the strength which his long vigils away among the hills had given him did not desert him, and he came through it outwardly calm and triumphant, however deeply the iron was entering into his soul the while. It was one of those occasions on which such a man as he would take refuge from spiritual torment in intellectual activity, and neither Enid nor her husband had ever heard him talk so brilliantly and withal so lightly and good-humouredly as he did that night.
One of the guests was the vicar of Bedminster; and a Canon of Worcester, an old friend of Sir Reginald"s, happened to be staying in the house.
They were both High Churchmen, the Canon perhaps a trifle "higher" than the Vicar, and they were both delighted with him. The Canon remembered his ordination at Worcester, and during the conversation, which had now turned upon the relationship between the Church and the People, he said: