He did not need these things, he said--certainly not now--nor those labels and signposts to a doubtful, unimaginable land. He needed Amy herself, or, at least, some hint or sound or glimpse to show him that she indeed was as she had always been; whether in earth or heaven, he did not care; that there was somewhere something that was herself, some definite personal being of a continuous consciousness with that which he had known, characterized still by those graces which he thought he had recognized and certainly loved. Ah! he did not ask much. It would be so easy to G.o.d! Here out in this lonely lane where he rode beneath the branches, his reins loose on his horse"s neck, his eyes, unseeing, roving over copse and meadow across to the eternal hills--a face, seen for an instant, smiling and gone again; a whisper in his ear, with that dear stammer of shyness; a touch on his knee of those rippling fingers that he had watched in the moonlight playing gently on the sluice-gate above the moonlit stream.... He would tell no one if G.o.d wished it to be a secret; he would keep it wholly to himself. He did not ask now to possess her; only to be certain that she lived, and that death was not what it seemed to be.
"Is Father Mahon at home?" he asked, as he halted a mile from his own house in the village, where stood the little tin church, not a hundred yards from its elder alienated sister, to which he and Maggie went on Sundays.
The housekeeper turned from her vegetable-gathering beyond the fence, and told him yes. He dismounted, hitched the reins round the gatepost, and went in.
Ah! what an antipathetic little room this was in which he waited while the priest was being fetched from upstairs!
Over the mantelpiece hung a large oleograph of Leo XIII, in cope and tiara, blessing with upraised hand and that eternal, wide-lipped smile; a couple of jars stood beneath filled with dyed gra.s.ses; a briar pipe, redolent and foul, lay between them. The rest of the room was in the same key: a bright Brussels carpet, pale and worn by the door, covered the floor; cheap lace curtains were pinned across the windows; and over the littered table a painted deal bookshelf held a dozen volumes, devotional, moral, and dogmatic theology; and by the side of that an illuminated address framed in gilt, and so on.
Laurie looked at it all in dumb dismay. He had seen it before, again and again, but had never realized its horror as he realized it now from the depths of his own misery. Was it really true that his religion could emit such results?
There was a step on the stairs--a very heavy one--and Father Mahon came in, a large, crimson-faced man, who seemed to fill the room with a completely unethereal presence, and held out his hand with a certain gravity. Laurie took it and dropped it.
"Sit down, my dear boy," said the priest, and he impelled him gently to a horsehair-covered arm-chair.
Laurie stiffened.
"Thank you, father; but I mustn"t stay."
He fumbled in his pocket, and fetched out a little paper-covered packet.
"Will you say Ma.s.s for my intention, please?" And he laid the packet on the mantelshelf.
The priest took up the coins and slipped them into his waistcoat pocket.
"Certainly," he said. "I think I know--"
Laurie turned away with a little jerk.
"I must be going," he said. "I only looked in--"
"Mr. Baxter," said the other, "I hope you will allow me to say how much--"
Laurie drew his breath swiftly, with a hiss as of pain, and glanced at the priest.
"You understand, then, what my intention is?"
"Why, surely. It is for her soul, is it not?"
"I suppose so," said the boy, and went out.
_Chapter II_
I
"I have told him," said Mrs. Baxter, as the two women walked beneath the yews that morning after breakfast. "He said he didn"t mind."
Maggie did not speak. She had come out just as she was, hatless, but had caught up a spud that stood in the hall, and at that instant had stopped to destroy a youthful plantain that had established himself with infinite pains on the slope of the path. She attacked for a few seconds, extricated what was possible of the root with her strong fingers, tossed the corpse among the ivy, and then moved on.
"I don"t know whether to say anything to Mrs. Stapleton or not,"
pursued the old lady.
"I think I shouldn"t, auntie," said the girl slowly.
They spoke of it for a minute or two as they pa.s.sed up and down, but Maggie only attended with one superficies of her mind.
She had gone up as usual to Ma.s.s that morning, and had been astonished to find Laurie already in church; they had walked back together, and, to her surprise, he had told her that the Ma.s.s had been for his own intention.
She had answered as well as she could; but a sentence or two of his as they came near home had vaguely troubled her.
It was not that he had said anything he ought not, as a Catholic, to have said; yet her instinct told her that something was wrong. It was his manner, his air, that troubled her. What strange people these converts were! There was so much ardor at one time, so much chilliness at another; there was so little of that steady workaday acceptance of religious facts that marked the born Catholic.
"Mrs. Stapleton is a New Thought kind of person," she said presently.
"So I understand," said the old lady, with a touch of peevishness. "A vegetarian last year. And I believe she was a sort of Buddhist five or six years ago. And then she nearly became a Christian Scientist a little while ago."
Maggie smiled.
"I wonder what she"ll talk about," she said.
"I hope she won"t be very advanced," went on the old lady. "And you think I"d better not tell her about Laurie?"
"I"m sure it"s best not," said the girl, "or she"ll tell him about Deep Breathing, or saying Om, or something. No; I should let Laurie alone."
It was a little before one o"clock that the motor arrived, and that there descended from it at the iron gate a tall, slender woman, hooded and veiled, who walked up the little path, observed by Maggie from her bedroom, with a kind of whisking step. The motor moved on, wheeled in through the gates at the left, and sank into silence in the stable-yard.
"It"s too charming of you, dear Mrs. Baxter," Maggie heard as she came into the drawing-room a minute or two later, "to let me come over like this. I"ve heard so much about this house. Lady Laura was telling me how very psychical it all was."
"My adopted daughter, Miss Deronnais," observed the old lady.
Maggie saw a rather pretty, pa.s.se face, triangular in shape, with small red lips, looking at her, as she made her greetings.
"Ah! how perfect all this is," went on the guest presently, looking about her, "how suggestive, how full of meaning!"
She threw back her cloak presently, and Maggie observed that she was busy with various very beautiful little emblems--a scarab, a snake swallowing its tail, and so forth--all exquisitely made, and hung upon a slender chain of some green enamel-like material. Certainly she was true to type. As the full light fell upon her it became plain that this other-worldly soul did not disdain to use certain toilet requisites upon her face; and a curious Eastern odor exhaled from her dress.
Fortunately, Maggie had a very deep sense of humor, and she hardly resented all this at all, nor even the tactful hints dropped from time to time, after the conventional part of the conversation was over, to the effect that Christianity was, of course, played out, and that a Higher Light had dawned. Mrs. Stapleton did not quite say this outright, but it amounted to as much. Even before Laurie came downstairs it appeared that the lady did not go to church, yet that, such was her broad-mindedness, she did not at all object to do so. It was all one, it seemed, in the Deeper Unity. Nothing particular was true; but all was very suggestive and significant and symbolical of something else to which Mrs. Stapleton and a few friends had the key.
Mrs. Baxter made more than one attempt to get back to more mundane subjects, but it was useless. When even the weather serves as a symbol, the plain man is done for.
Then Laurie came in.