Part 29

“You make me think of that passage in ‘Hamlet,’” she rejoined, leaning back in her chair and resuming her work. “How does it go? ‘Man delights me not nor woman either--though by your smiling you seem to say so!’”

“Aunt Helen!” he cried earnestly, “I have something important to say to you. I want you to understand this. It’s sweet of you not to speak of Adriano’s illness. Any one but you would have condoled with me most horribly already!”

She raised her eyes from her sewing. “We must pray for him,” she said. “I have been praying for him all day--and all last night, too,” she added with a faint smile. “I let Philippa think I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew.” She shuddered a little. “I knew. I heard him in the ‘work-shop.’”

“What I wanted to say, Aunt Helen,” he went on, “was this. I want you to remember--whatever happens to either of us--that I love you more than any one in the world. Yes--yes,” he continued, not allowing her to interrupt, “better even than Adriano!”

A look resembling the effect of some actual physical pain came into her face. “You mustn’t say that, my dear,” she murmured. “You must keep your love for your wife when you marry. I don’t like to hear you say things like that--to an old woman.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds like flattery, Tassar,” she added.

“But it’s true, Aunt Helen!” he repeated with almost passionate emphasis. “You’re by far the most beautiful and by far the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”

Mrs. Renshaw drew her hand across her face. Then she laughed gaily like a young girl. “What would Philippa say,” she said, “if she heard you say that?”

Baltazar’s face clouded. He looked at her long and closely.

“Philippa is interesting and deep,” he said with a grave emphasis, “but she doesn’t understand me. _You_ understand me, though you think it right to hide your knowledge even from yourself.”

Mrs. Renshaw’s face changed in a moment. It became haggard and obstinate. “We mustn’t talk any more about understanding and about love,” she said. “God’s will is that we should all of us only completely love and understand the person He leads us, in His wisdom, to marry.”

Baltazar burst into a fit of heathen laughter. “I thought you were going to end quite differently, Aunt Helen,” he said. “I thought the only person we were to love was going to be God. But it seems that it is man--or woman,” he added bitterly.

Mrs. Renshaw bent low over her work and the shadow grew still deeper upon her face. Seeing that he had really hurt her, Baltazar changed his tone.

“Dear Aunt Helen!” he whispered gently, “how many happy hours, how many, how many!--have we spent together reading in this room!”

She looked up quickly at this, with the old bright look. “Yes, it’s been a happy thing for me, Tassar, having you so near us. Do you remember how, last winter, we got through the whole of Sir Walter Scott? There’s no one nowadays like _him_--is there? Though Philippa tells me that Mr. Hardy is a great writer.”

“Mr. Hardy!” exclaimed her interlocutor whimsically. “I believe you _would_ have come to him at last--perhaps you _will_, dear, some day. Let’s hope so! But I’m afraid I shall not be here then.”

“Don’t talk like that, Tassar,” she said without looking up from her work. “It will not be _you_ who will leave _me_.”

There was a pause between them then, and Baltazar’s eyes wandered out into the hushed misty garden.

“Mr. Hardy does not believe in God,” he remarked.

“Tassar!” she cried reproachfully. “You know what you promised just now. You mustn’t tease me. No one deep down in his heart disbelieves in God. How can we? He makes His power felt among us every day.”

There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.

Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you remember,” she said very solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”

A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines--you know the one I mean?--the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad mood, by saying it always made me think of old women in a work-house! You know the one, don’t you?”

The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same moment a supernatural light came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of embarrassment, she began to sing, in a low plaintive melodious voice, the following well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild, primordial religion, as different from paganism as it was different from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist and the falling leaves.

“Rest comes at length, though life be long and weary, The day must dawn and darksome night be past; Faith’s journey ends in welcome to the weary, And heaven, the heart’s true home, will come at last.”

When it was finished there was a strange silence in the room, and Baltazar rose to his feet. His face was pale. He moved to her side and, for the first and last time in their curious relations, he kissed her--a long kiss upon the forehead.

With a heightened colour in her cheeks and a nervous deprecatory smile on her lips, she went with him to the door. “Listen, dear,” she said, as she took his hand, “I want you to think of that poem of Cowper’s written when he was most despairing--the one that begins ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ I want you to remember that though what he lays upon us seems _crushing_, there is always something behind it--infinite mercy behind infinite mystery.”

Baltazar looked her straight in the face. “I wonder,” he said, “whether it is I or you who is the most unhappy person in Rodmoor!”

She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like the weight of some great iron engine with jagged raw edges--like a battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings backwards and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”

“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.

She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another moment?”

They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his heart suggested.

“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.

“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see me.”

He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the full-brimmed current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the high mud-banks.

The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and asserting its identity with an exultant joy. It seemed almost to _purr_, with a kind of feline satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward towards the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it drew from it some sort of half-human sound--some whisper or murmur or protest of querulous complaining.

The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories moaned; and all the while, with gurglings and suckings and lappings and deep-drawn, inward, self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.

On that night, of all nights, the Loon seemed to have reached that kind of emphasis of personality which things are permitted to attain--animate as well as inanimate--when their functional activity is at its highest and fullest.

And on that night, carefully divesting himself of his elegant clothes, and laying his hat and stick on the ground beside them, Baltazar Stork, without haste or violence, and with his brain supernaturally clear, drowned himself in the Loon.

XXVI

NOVEMBER MIST

Baltazar’s death, under circumstances which could leave no doubt as to the unhappy man’s intention to destroy himself, coming, as it did, immediately after his friend’s removal to the Asylum, stirred the scandalous gossip of Rodmoor to its very dregs.

The suicide’s body--and even the indurated hearts of the weather-battered bargemen who discovered it, washed down by the tide as far as the New Bridge, were touched by its beauty--was buried, after a little private extemporary service, just at the debatable margin where the consecrated churchyard lost itself in the priest’s flower-beds. Himself the only person in the place exactly aware of the precise limits of the sacred enclosure--the enclosure which had never been enclosed--Mr. Traherne was able to follow the most rigid stipulations of his ecclesiastical conscience without either hurting the feelings of the living or offering any insult to the dead. When it actually came to the point he was, as it turned out, able to remove from his own over-scrupulous heart the least occasion for future remorse.

The Rodmoor sexton--the usual digger of graves--happened to be at that particular time in the throes, or rather in the after-effects, of one of his periodic outbursts of inebriation. So it happened that the curate-in-charge had with his own hands to dig the grave of the one among all his parishioners who had remained most distant to him and had permitted him the least familiarity.

Mr. Traherne remained awake in his study half the night, turning over the pages of ancient scholastic authorities and comparing one doctrinal opinion with another on the question of the burial of suicides.

In the end, what he did, with a whimsical prayer to Providence to forgive him, was to _begin_ digging the hole just outside the consecrated area, but by means of a slight northward _excavatio_, when he got a few feet down, to arrange the completed orifice in such a way that, while Baltazar’s body remained in common earth, his head was lodged safe and secure, under soil blessed by Holy Church.

One of the most pious and authoritative of the early divines, Mr. Traherne found out, maintained, as no fantastic or heretical speculation but as a reasonable and reverent conclusion, the idea that the surviving portion of a man--his “psyche” or living soul--had, as its mortal tabernacle, the posterior lobes of the human skull, and that it was from the _head_ rather than from the _body_ that the shadowy companion of our earthly days--that “animula blandula” of the heathen emperor--melted by degrees into the surrounding air and passed to “its own place.”

The Renshaws themselves showed, none of them, the slightest wish to interfere with his arrangements, nor did Hamish Traherne ever succeed in learning whether the hollow-eyed lady of Oakguard knew or did not know that the clay mound over which every evening without fail, after the day of the unceremonious interment, she knelt in silent prayer, was outside the circle of the _covenanted_ mercies of the Power to which she prayed.

The “last will and testament” of the deceased--written with the most exquisite care--was of so strange a character, taking indeed the shape of something like a defiant and shameless “confession,” that Brand and Dr. Raughty, who were the appointed executors, hurriedly hid it out of sight. Everything Mr. Stork possessed was left to Mrs. Renshaw, except the picture of Eugenio Flambard. This, by a fantastic codicil, which was so extraordinary that when Brand and Dr. Raughty read it they could do nothing but stare at one another in silent amazement, was bequeathed, at the end of an astonishing panegyric, “to our unknown Hippolytus, Mr. Baptiste Sorio, of New York City.”

Baltazar had been buried on the first of November, and as the following days of this dark month dragged by, under unbroken mists and rain, Nance lived from hour to hour in a state of trembling expectancy. Would Baptiste’s ship bring him safely to England? Would he, when he came, and discovered what her relations with his father were, be kind to her and sympathetic, or angry and hurt? She could not tell. She could make no guess. She did not even know whether Adrian had really done what he promised and written to his son about her at all.

The figure of the boy--on his way across the Atlantic--took a fantastic hold upon her disturbed imagination. As day followed day and the time of his arrival drew near, she found it hard to concentrate her mind even sufficiently to fulfil her easy labours with the little dressmaker. Miss Pontifex gently remonstrated with her.

“I know you’re in trouble, Miss Herrick, and have a great deal on your mind, but it does no good worrying, and the girls get restless--you see how it is!--when you can’t give them your full attention.”

Thus rebuked, Nance would smile submissively and turn her eyes away from the misty window.

But every night before she slept, she would see through her closed eyelids that longed-for boy, standing--that was how she always conceived him--at the bows of the ship, standing tall and fair like a young god; borne forwards over the starlit ocean to bring help to them all.

In her dreams, night after night, the boy came to her, and she found him then of an unearthly beauty and endowed with a mysterious supernatural power. In her dreams, the wild impossible hope, that somehow, somewhere, he would be the one to save Linda from the ruin of her youthful life, took to itself sweet immediate fulfilment.

Every little event that happened to her during those days of tension assumed the shape of something pregnant and symbolic. Her mind made auguries of the movements of the clouds, and found significant omens, propitious or menacing, from every turn of the wind and every coming and going of the rain. The smallest and simplest encounter took upon itself at that time a curious and mystic value.

In after days, she remembered with sad and woeful clearness how persons and things impressed her then, as, in their chance-brought groupings and gestures, they lent themselves to her strained expectant mood.

For instance, she never could forget the way she waited, on the night of the third of November, along with Linda and Dr. Raughty, for the arrival of the last train from Mundham, bringing Mr. Traherne back from a visit to the Asylum with news of Adrian.

The news the priest brought was unexpectedly favourable. Adrian, it seemed, had taken a rapid turn for the better, and the doctors declared that any day now it might become possible for Nance to see him.

As they stood talking on the almost deserted platform, Nance’s mind visualized with passionate intensity the moment when she herself would take Baptiste to see his father and perhaps together--why not?--bring him back in triumph to Rodmoor.

Her happy reverie on this particular occasion was interrupted by a fantastic incident, which, trifling enough in itself, left a queer and significant impression behind it. This was nothing less than the sudden escape from Mr. Traherne’s pocket of his beloved Ricoletto.

In the excitement of their pleasure over the news brought by the priest, the rat took the opportunity of slipping from the recesses of his master’s coat; and jumping down on the platform, he leapt, quick as a flash, upon the railway track below. Mr. Traherne, with a cry of consternation, scrambled down after him, and throwing aside his ulster which impeded his progress, began desperately pursuing him. The engine of the train by which the clergyman had arrived was now resting motionless, separate from the line of carriages, deserted by its drivers. Straight beneath the wheels of this inert monster darted the escaped rat. The agitated priest, with husky perturbed cries, ran backwards and forwards along the side of the engine, every now and then stooping down and frantically endeavouring to peer beneath it.

It was so queer a sight to see this ungainly figure, dressed as always in his ecclesiastical cassock, rushing madly round the dark form of the engine and at intervals falling on his knees beside it, that Linda could not restrain an almost hysterical fit of laughter.

Dr. Raughty looked whimsically at Nance.

“He might be a priest of Science, worshipping the god of machines,” he remarked, assuming as he spoke a sitting posture, the better to slide down, himself, from the platform to the track.

The station-master now approached, anxious to close his office for the night and go home. The porter, a peculiarly unsympathetic figure, took not the least notice of the event, but coolly proceeded to extinguish the lights, one by one.

The ostler from the Admiral’s Head, who had come to meet some expected visitor who never arrived, leaned forward with drowsy interest from his seat on his cab and surveyed the scene with grim detachment, promising himself that on the following night at his familiar bar table, he would be the center of public interest as he satisfied legitimate local curiosity with regard to this unwonted occurrence.

Nance could not help smiling as she saw the excellent Fingal, his long overcoat flapping about his legs, bending forward between the buffers of the engine and peering into its metallic belly. She noticed that he was tapping with his knuckles on the polished breast-plate of the monster and uttering a clucking noise with his tongue, as if calling for a recalcitrant chicken.

It was not long before Mr. Traherne, growing desperate as the oblivious porter approached the last of the station lamps, fell flat on his face and proceeded to shove himself clean under the engine. The vision of his long retreating form, wrapped in his cassock, thus worming himself slowly out of sight, drew from Nance a burst of laughter, and as for Linda, she clapped her hands together like a child.

He soon reappeared, to the relief of all of them, with his recaptured pet in his hand, and scrambled back upon the platform, just as the last of the lamps went out, leaving the place in utter darkness.

Nance, her laughter gone then, had a queer sensation as they moved away, that the ludicrous scene she had just witnessed was part of some fantastic unreal dream, and that she herself, with the whole tragedy of her life, was just such a dream, the dream perhaps of some dark driverless cosmic engine--of some remote Great Eastern Railway of the Universe!

The morning of the fourth of November dawned far more auspiciously than any day which Rodmoor had known for many weeks. It was one of those patient, hushed, indescribable days--calm and tender and full of whispered intimations of hidden reassurance--which rarely reach us in any country but England or in any district but East Anglia. The great powers of sea and air and sky seemed to draw close to one another and close to humanity; as if with some large and gracious gesture of benediction they would fain lay to rest, under a solemn and elemental requiem, the body of the dead season’s life.

Nance escaped before noon from Miss Pontifex’s work-room. She and Linda had been invited by Dr. Raughty to lunch with him and Hamish at the pastry-cook’s in the High Street. It was to be a sort of modest celebration, this little feast, to do honour to the good news which Mr. Traherne had brought them the night before and which was corroborated by a letter to Nance herself from the head doctor, with regard to Adrian’s astonishing improvement.

Nance felt possessed by a deep and tumultuous excitement. Baptiste surely must be near England now! Any day--almost any hour--she might hear of his arrival. She strolled out across the Loon to meet Linda, who had gone that morning to practise on the organ for the following Sunday’s services.

As she crossed the marsh-land between the bridge and the church, she encountered Mrs. Renshaw returning from a visit to Baltazar’s grave. The mistress of Oakguard stopped for a little while to speak to her, and to express, in her own way, her sympathy over Adrian’s recovery. She did this, however, in a manner so characteristic of her that it depressed rather than encouraged the girl. Her attitude seemed to imply that it was better, wiser, more reverent, not to cherish any buoyant hopes, but to assume that the worst that could come to us from the hands of God was what ought to be expected and awaited in humble submissiveness.

She seemed in some strange way to _resent_ any lifting of the heavy folds of the pall of fate and with a kind of obstinate weariness, to lean to the darker and more sombre aspect of every possibility.

She carried in her hands a bunch of faded flowers brought from the grave she had visited and which she seemed reluctant to throw away, and Nance never forgot the appearance of her black-gowned drooping figure and white face, as she stood there, by the edge of the misty, sun-illumined fens, holding those dead stalks and withered leaves.

As they parted, Nance whispered hesitatingly some little word about Baltazar. She half expected her to answer with tears, but in place of that, her eyes seemed to shine with a weird exultant joy.

“When you’re as old as I am, dear,” she said, “and have seen life as I have seen it, you will not be sad to lose what you love best. The better we love them, the happier we must be when they are set free from the evil of the world.”

She looked down on the ground, and when she raised her head, her eyes had an unearthly light in them. “I am closer to him now,” she said, “closer than ever before. And it will not be long before I go to join him.”

She moved slowly away, dragging her limbs heavily.

Nance, as she went on, kept seeing again and again before her that weird unearthly look. It left the impression on her mind that Mrs. Renshaw had actually secured some strange and unnatural link with the dead which made her cold and detached in her attitude towards the living.

Perhaps it had been all the while like this, the girl thought. Perhaps it was just this habitual intercourse with the Invisible which rendered her so entirely a votary of moonlight and of shadows, and so unsympathetic towards the sunshine and towards all genial normal expressions of natural humanity.

Nance had the sensation--when at last, with Linda at her side, she returned dreamily to the village--of having encountered some creature from a world different from ours, a world of grey vapours and shadowy margins, a world where the wraiths of the unborn meet the ghosts of the dead, a world where the “might-have-been” and the “never-to-be-again” weep together by the shores of Lethe.

The little party which assembled presently round a table in the bow-window of the Rodmoor confectioner’s proved a cheerful and happy one. The day was Saturday, so that the street was full of a quiet stir of people preparing to leave their shops and begin the weekly holiday. There was a vague feeling of delicate sadness, dreamy yet not unhappy, in the air, as though the year itself were pausing for a moment in its onward march towards the frosts of winter and gathering for the last time all its children, all its fading leaves and piled-up fruits and drooping flowers, into a hushed maternal embrace, an embrace of silent and everlasting farewell.

The sun shone gently and tenderly from a sky of a faint, sad, far-off blue--the sort of blue which, in the earlier and more reserved of Florentine painters, may be seen in the robes of Our Lady caught up to heaven out of a grave of lilies.