Part 15

Maitland looked, so Mark reflected, as if he had gone afoot down many paths. Failure was branded upon his pale, too narrow face, his stooping shoulders, his large, clumsy hands: all thumbs, and crudely fashioned at that! But Ross, who was no longer at Crask, had told Mark that Maitland filled a very large place in his huge Manchester parish.

"What made you go into the Church?" Mark asked abruptly.

"I had to earn my bread and--scrape; but afterwards----"

"Yes?"

Maitland's dull, sallow complexion seemed to be suffused with a glow. It struck Mark that between his face as he was accustomed to see it and as he saw it now lay the difference between a stage-scene lighted and unlighted.

"Afterwards," said Maitland, "I knew that the choice of my profession had been determined by a Power infinitely greater than my own will. I became a parson from ignoble motives. I was soured, bitter, sick in mind and body, unfit for the duties I undertook. And then suddenly--one hardly likes to talk about it--my eyes were opened. I came into contact with hundreds worse off than myself. Some of them bore their burdens with a patience, a serenity, an unselfishness that were a revelation--to me. And then I realised that no life is a failure which brightens however faintly the lives of others. Napoleon is the colossal failure of history, because he darkened a continent. I would sooner be a beggar sharing a crust with a child than such as he."

"If you were offered preferment----?"

"I hope to live and die in Manchester."

"You nearly did die. Suppose you were not strong enough to go back? You wince, Maitland. That would try your faith. You have been frank with me; I shall be frank with you. I have always wanted one thing, and because I wanted it so much, I tried to bargain with Heaven. I said, 'You shall do what you like with me, only give me, give me the woman I love!' Well, Heaven seemed to take up the challenge. You know my story. I was defeated again and again. And I said to myself I'll grin and bear it, because she is mine. Ah, if you could see her, Maitland, as I see her, if you knew what I have f-f-felt, when I saw her image f-f-fa--fading----" He paused, overcome by his stammer, controlled it, and continued quietly, "I was told that I must die. Ross found me in despair. I--I do not know, but the river was close at hand, and--perhaps--at any rate he rescued me, brought me here, and now, now, I am beginning to live again. I see God in His Heaven. And I see my angel in mine."

He was so excited that Maitland entreated him to be calm, introducing, as an anticlimax, the cabbages to be cut and carried in.

Shortly after this Stride allowed him to begin his novel. After the first distress of beginning it became plain that this work agreed with him. Weight and appetite increased as the manuscript grew fat. He was out all weathers, and his face became tanned like that of a North Sea fisherman. Stride rubbed his hands chuckling, whenever he saw him.

During these months Mark told himself that it was impossible for Betty to write to him till he broke the silence which he had imposed. Meanwhile, he heard that Archibald had accepted a London living: St. Anne's in Sloane Street. Mrs. Samphire sent Mark a long cutting from the _Slowshire Chronicle_, a synopsis of his brother's labours in and about Westchester. As secretary, and member of many committees, as a lecturer on Temperance, as a pillar of the Charity Organisation Society, as the first tenor of the Westchester Choral Association, Archibald Samphire had honestly earned the gratitude of the community and the very handsome salver, which embalmed that gratitude in a Latin sentence composed by the Dean. Archibald had been asked to preach four Advent sermons in Westminster Cathedral. Mark suggested a theme, revised the sermons, interpolated a hundred passages, cut and slashed his brother's beautiful MSS., and when the sermons were preached and attracted the attention of London, wrote a letter of warm congratulation to his "dearest old fellow." He had taken greater pains with these sermons than with his own novel, because--as he put it to himself--he had grudged his brother a triumph which Betty Kirtling had witnessed.

One week after the New Year, he was writing the last lines of his book, when Stride came into the room and flung down a letter in Archibald's handwriting. Mark glanced at it, and at the pile of MS. beside it.

"Is the _magnum opus_ done?" said Stride.

"Very nearly," Mark replied.

"Are you going to take Conquest's advice and--burn it?"

"I shall let Conquest see it first," said Mark. He rose from his chair, crossed the room to where Stride was warming his hands at the fire, and laid his hand upon his friend's shoulder. "It's not bad," he said slowly; "I know it's not bad; and I owe it all to you, Stride."

"What is it about?" said Stride, repudiating the debt with a shake of his head. Mark had not shown him any portion of the MS., nor discussed the theme.

"It's the story of a faith that was lost and found," said Mark. "I can say to you that it is part of my own life, red-hot from my heart, the sort of story that is written once, you understand, and I have the feeling that it could have been written only here, in these solitudes."

"I hope it ends happily," said Stride.

"It ends happily," said Mark, staring at his MS.

Stride filled his pipe and then moved to the door.

"It's going to snow," he said. "We shall have a heavy fall, unless I'm mistaken. It was just such a night as this, last year, when we lost our shepherd on Ben Caryll."

He went out, whistling. The door slammed behind him, and the draught from it fluttered the pages of foolscap lying loose on the table. Mark stared at them, smiling, with such a look on his face as a mother bestows on her first-born, when she is alone with him. Then, still smiling, he picked up his brother's letter and broke the seal, the seal of many quarterings, which Archibald habitually used.

"My dear Mark" (he wrote): "I am the happiest as well as the luckiest of men. Betty Kirtling has promised to become my wife. We shall be married as soon as possible, before I settle down to my new work in London...."

The letter fell from Mark's hands. He bent down, trembling, picked it up, and reread its message. Then, crushing the letter into a ball, he flung it into the fire, and watched it crumble and dissolve into ashes. As the flame licked the white paper, the face that stared into the fire shrivelled into a caricature of what it had been a few moments before. The lips were drawn back from the teeth in a snarling grin; colour left the cheeks and flared in purple patches upon the brow. The slender limbs shook as with a palsy....

Suddenly, the silence was broken by a laugh: the derisive laugh of the man who knows that his heavens have fallen. The sound of his own laughter seemed to move Mark to action. He seized the manuscript, and thrust it into the flames. When it was destroyed, he laughed again, crossed to the door, opened it, and passed out--still laughing--into the driving wind and rain.

*CHAPTER XXII*

*ON BEN CARYLL*

Mark stood still for a moment, as the wind whipped his face. Then he strode towards the burn which runs into the loch at the foot of Ben Caryll. He was meeting a north-easter, which drove the rain, now turning into sleet, with stinging violence against his face. When he reached the burn he saw that it was beginning to rise. It would be in spate in an hour or two if the storm continued. The big stepping-stones, shining through the mists, were almost covered by the peat-stained, swirling waters, as Mark sprang from one boulder to the other. Having reached the other side, he paused and looked at the burn. Above it widened into a broad, deep pool, with flecks and clots of white spume lying like cream upon its chocolate-coloured surface. Below, it narrowed, running foaming through steep rocky banks, and falling some twenty feet into a bigger pool. Standing where he stood the roar of the fall drowned all sounds. His blood was cooler now; he was able to think. He stared at the stepping-stones. Had his foot slipped, the raging torrent would have whirled him over the falls. If he returned an hour later the ford would be impassable. He would have to go round by the bridge some two miles higher up. With this thought lurking in but not occupying his mind he breasted the heather hill immediately to the right, fighting his way against the wind. He plunged on until he reached some peat hags, when he paused to recover breath. The blood was racing through his veins. Never had he felt so alive, so strong; and yet poison was consuming him. What poison? An answer came on the roaring blast. _Hate_! Hatred of his brother. He threw out his arms towards the darkening skies.

"Curse him!" he cried. "Curse him! Curse him!"

Then he crossed the hags, and gained a small turf-covered plateau, whence Ben Caryll rose steeply and stonily. This part of the mountain was known as Eagle Rocks, because for many seasons a pair of golden eagles had nested on one of the crags. On a calm day it was no easy feat to scale these rocks. Tourists, for instance, always went round by a deer path, which the gillies used also. Mark laughed. He felt strong, a man: here was an opportunity to test his strength. He grasped a tuft of heather and swung himself to the top of the first rock, but when he tried to stand upright the wind wrestled with him and prevailed. He was constrained to crouch and crawl, clinging to every stick and stone which hands or feet could find. But the spirit within would not allow him to turn back. Foot by foot he ascended the face of the precipice, knowing that if a stone turned, or a tuft gave way, he must fall on the sharp rocks below--knowing and not caring. When he reached the top he was perspiring, breathless, bleeding and spent. He lay still, letting the sleet lash his face. When he felt able to move he sat up and looked across the corrie which lay to the left of the Eagle Rocks. Beyond this stretched a gigantic spur of the mountain; and immediately below lay the strath, with the Crask burn curling down the middle of it. As he looked a veil of mist and scud swept over the mountain. When it seemed thickest, the wind took it and tore it asunder. Glimpses of objects familiar to him during the past five months succeeded each other in procession, filing by to the roar of the wind and the voices of the mountain. In like manner glimpses of his past life presented themselves for an instant, only to be wiped from memory and obliterated as swiftly. Out of the mirk soared the spire of Harrow Church. In the Yard below the boys were cheering a school-fellow, who ran bare-headed down the steps and into the street. It was Archibald, newly elected a member of the school eleven. He saw him again, as he stood in the pulpit in Westchester Cathedral. Again and again, in the arms of Betty!

Suddenly he became aware that the wind had moderated somewhat in violence and that snow was falling. He recalled what Stride had said, as he rose, stretched his stiffening limbs, and turned to the huge spur which led to the bridge across the Crask burn. The snow fell in larger flakes. The wind moaned like a woman who has no strength left to scream.

After stumbling on for a mile or so amongst the rough heather, Mark was obliged to sit down in the lee of a "knobbie." With the waning light of a Highland winter's afternoon, the air had turned cold; and it seemed to have thickened, so that Mark breathed as a man breathes in a close and stifling room. This rapid fall of temperature and wind produced weird effects. The voices of the mountain changed their note. Defiance died away in a diminuendo. Mountain rills, trickling from a thousand springs to join the burn below, purred beneath the touch of the snow. The roar of the falls came faintly to the ear. After strife and confusion, Nature was crooning a lullaby.

Exhausted by what mind and body had endured, Mark fell asleep. The snow fluttered down, thickly, silently, as the minutes passed. The cold grew more intense. Night came on. Mark stirred in his sleep; he uttered inarticulate words; he frowned; he smiled. And then, as if touched by some warning hand, he woke. He stared round him, seeking some familiar face. When the snow fell into his eyes he rubbed them, and stared harder than before, trying to pierce the shadows. Then he cried in a troubled voice:

"Who touched me?"

No answer came out of the white silence.

"Who touched me?" he cried again.

His ears caught the purr of the rivulets and the muffled roar of the burn in spate. He knew where he was. And then, for a moment, he hesitated. A pleasant languor was stealing over him. Let him sink back upon his feathery bed--and sleep. No--no! He had waked to live.

The instinct of life began to throb when he realised the imminence of death. Fatigue left him as he strode forward, quickening his pace, where the ground permitted, to a run. It was difficult to see, but salvation lay down hill. He staggered on, peering to left and right, as the faint light that remained slowly failed. Before he reached the burn it had failed entirely. He was now in a sore predicament, for the ground no longer descended sharply, but sloped in undulations. He began to grope his way like a blind man, walking in circles. The roar of the falls far away to his right could no longer be heard.

He was lost!

He stood compassless in a desert. No friendly ray from a lantern could pierce this white horror. If his friends discovered his absence, which was unlikely till too late, what could they do? Search Sutherland in a snowstorm for one man?

Staggering on through drifts and hags, he realised that the time was fast approaching when his muscles would fail.

Did he pray for deliverance? No. If at that moment one thought dominated another, it was the conviction that God, if a God existed, had forsaken him. The struggle for life involved a paradox with which his brain could not grapple. Life had become sweet because it seemed inevitable that he must die.

Stumbling over a tuft of heather, a cock grouse rose, cackled, and whirled away. The vigour of the flight, the vitality of that defiant note, stimulated the jaded man. He chose at random a direction, and began to run, stopping now and again, straining his ears to catch the sound of the burn.

Presently he stopped altogether, sinking inert, hopeless, spent, upon the soft snow which received him wantonly, touching him with a caress, winding itself round him. He lay still, submitting to Nature, stronger than he, confessing himself vanquished, and asking that the end might be speedy. With death impending, he turned his thoughts towards the woman he loved--the woman about to marry his brother. He would die, as he wished to die, gazing into her face, feeling the cool touch of her fingers, hearing her voice with its tender inflections and modulations. And her image came obedient to his call. Her eyes, with their beguiling interrogation, showing the full orb of the irid between the thin black lines of the lashes, looked into his. For the last time he marked the pathetic droop of the finely curved lips, coral against the ivory of cheek and chin, lips revealing the teeth which were such an admirable finish to the face. Her dark hair, with the dull red glow upon it, curving deliciously from the forehead, was held together at the top by a white niphetos rose he had given her. She was like the rose, he reflected, a blossom of the earth, sweet, lovely, ephemeral. He could not conceive her old, faded, crushed beneath the relentless touch of time.

The fancy possessed him that she was his, to be taken whithersoever he might go. He stretched out his hands, trembling with passion, and the vision melted. He grasped the cold snow, not the warm flesh.

At this moment, out of the suffocating silence an attenuated vibration of sound thrilled his senses. Instantly he was awake, alert--conscious that help was coming; how and whence he knew not. The sound permeated every fibre, but, numbed by exposure and fatigue, he was unable to interpret its message. Such as it was, it possessed rhythm--a systole and diastole, like the laboured beating of his heart. Was it merely the heart, recording with solemn knell the passing of a soul? No--no! He sprang to his feet, aflame once more with the lust of life. The sound he heard was no delusion of a fanciful brain, no fluttering of a moribund heart, but a clarion note from without, steadily increasing in volume, forcing a passage through the blinding snows--the Crask bell!

But at first he was unable to localise the sound: plunging madly this way and that, settling down at length to his true course, which brought him within half an hour to the bridge across the burn. Even then he strayed again and again from the road, led back to it as often by the voice of the bell, growing clearer and louder with every step he took. Presently he heard voices, hoarse shouts, which he answered in feeble whispers; then a yellow light swinging to and fro shone through the darkness. He staggered on to meet it, falling fainting into the arms of Stride.

* * * * *

Stride asked no questions. Mark was put to bed, and lay still for some four hours: then he began to grind his teeth, to clench his fists. Stride sat beside him watching his friend and patient, with eyes half shut, like a purring cat's, the pupils narrowed to a black slit. Presently he went to the window. The wind had ceased. Outside, in silence, the snow kept on falling, spreading its pall upon the world, while the cold grew more and more intense. The crystals were forming upon the pane, and despite the big peat fire, the temperature in the room fell point after point. Staring through the pane, Stride could see nothing save the piled-up snow on the sill, and the myriad fluttering flakes beyond: each, as he knew, a crystal of surpassing symmetry and loveliness, each fashioned by the Master in His sky and despatched to earth, there to be destroyed, trodden, maybe, into mire and filth, and, rising again, seeking the skies anew, to be transformed by the same Hand into rain, or dew, or sleet, or snow, ordained to fall as before, and as before to rise, the eternal symbol of the soul which descends into the clay, softens it, is tainted and discoloured by it, and then, in glorious resurrection, ascends to be purged and purified in the place whence it came.

*CHAPTER XXIII*

*HYMENEAL*

Upon the morning of his wedding-day, Archibald Samphire went into the church of King's Charteris and prayed before the altar. While he was praying, Jim Corrance pushed aside the heavy curtain of the west door and peered in. A whim had seized him. He, the freethinker, the agnostic, had said to himself that he would like to spend a few minutes alone in the church where he had been baptised and confirmed. Rank sentiment! But Jim at heart was a man of sentiment, although he took particular pains to prove to the world that he was nothing of the sort.

When Jim saw Archibald's fine figure he frowned, thrusting forward his square chin, and the short hair on the top of his head bristled with exasperation. Upon each side of the kneeling man were ferns and palms, whose fronds touched overhead. The priests' stalls were ablaze with daffodils and primroses picked by the school-children in the water meadows and woods near Pitt Hall. Through the east window a May sun streamed in full flood of prismatic colour. The pure rays of the sun passing through the gorgeous glass absorbed its tints and flung them lavishly here and there, staining with crimson, or blue, or yellow, the white lilies which stood upon the altar. Jim smiled derisively. The fancy struck him that Archie's prayers would absorb, so to speak, the colours of his mind. The words of the General Thanksgiving occurred to Jim.

"And we beseech Thee, give us that due sense of all Thy mercies, that our hearts may be unfeignedly thankful, and that we shew forth Thy praise, not only with our lips, but in our lives; by giving up ourselves to Thy service, and by walking before Thee in holiness and righteousness all our days."

Surely this set--so Jim reflected--forth Archibald Samphire's pious ambition. Doubtless he did aspire to give himself to God's service, particularly that form of it which is held in cathedrals; and he intended, honestly enough, to walk before Him (and before the world) in holiness and righteousness all his days (which he had reason to believe would be long and fruitful).

Archibald rose and walked down the aisle. Jim hid himself behind the tall font, but he stared curiously at his old school-fellow. Archibald's face had lost its normal expression of a satisfaction too smug to please such a critical gentleman as Mr. James Corrance. His massive features were troubled. He looked humble! Why? Surely the crimson carpet beneath his feet, bordered with flowers, over-shadowed by exquisite ferns and rare shrubs, indicated the procession of a successful life: a majestic march through the hallowed places of Earth to the Heaven of All Saints beyond!

Had Jim been able to peer within that mighty body, he might have seen a self-confidence strangely deflated, a conscience quickened by pangs. The colossus, whose physical prowess had become a glorious tradition at Harrow and Cambridge, knew himself to be a moral coward, inasmuch as he had withheld a vital truth from the woman he loved. Fear of losing, first, her good opinion of him, then the greater fear of losing the woman altogether, had withered again and again the impulse to say frankly: "Mark wrote the two sermons which have made me what I am." Unable to say this, realising that the many opportunities for speech had passed, he had just vowed solemnly that his transgression should be expiated by hard work in his new parish. Truly--as Lady Randolph had said--was Archibald Samphire an unconscious humourist! And before we leave him to return to Jim, let it be added that the big fellow did not know (and being the man he was could not possibly have known) that he had wooed Betty with Mark's words, that he would have wooed in vain with his own. Not unreasonably, he was absolutely convinced that the qualities which had won success in everything undertaken by him had assured this also, the greatest prize of all, a tender, loving wife.

Jim waited till five minutes had passed, then he strolled back to his mother's house, telling himself that he was a brute, a dog in the manger, because he had misjudged a God-fearing fellow-creature, immeasurably his superior, who had won in fair competition a prize beyond his (Jim's) deserts.

When he returned to his mother's house a trim parlourmaid handed him a note. She told him at the same time that Mrs. Corrance was taking breakfast in her own room. Jim nodded, and broke the seal: a lilac wafer with Betty Kirtling's initials entwined in a cypher.

"Dear old Jim" (Betty wrote): "please come up after breakfast and take me for a walk.

"Your affectionate Betty."

Betty was installed in The Whim for her wedding; and the Randolphs and Harry Kirtling--not to mention other relations--were keeping her company. Since her engagement had been announced, Jim had scarcely seen her. He had taken the news hard. His clerks, and the jobbers with whom he dealt found him difficult to please, argumentative, contemptuous, and a glutton for work throughout that Lenten season.

As Jim approached The Whim, Betty joined him on the drive. He saw that she was very pale.

"How good of you to come," she exclaimed.

"Good!" growled Jim. "As if I wouldn't cross the Atlantic or the Styx to walk with you. Where shall we go?"