Part 3
"You interest me extremely," he said. "I am obliged to you. But I must not presume upon your complaisance. You have supplied me with sufficient subjects of meditation for to-night. I will not detain you further. I thank you, my dear Laurence. Good-night."
"I was a fool to let myself go, and a still bigger one to lose my temper," the young man said to himself as he closed the door and passed out on to the corridor.
Save for a ticking of clocks, silence prevailed throughout the house. The electric light, clear and steady, revealed every object in its completeness. The temperature was some degrees higher than during the day, and airless in proportion to its increased warmth. Half-way down the shining oak staircase, Laurence was saluted by the musky odour of the orchids. Clinging, enfolding, it seemed to meet him more as a presence than a scent. The dining-room door stood wide open. The under-butler came forth and went noiselessly towards the offices. There followed a muffled sound of baize doors swinging to. Then simultaneously, sharply, from all quarters, clocks struck the half hour.
"Only half-past ten!" Laurence exclaimed. "How villainously early! I wish to goodness I had not lost my temper though. It was slightly imbecile. If the poor, old gentleman enjoys being offensive, why shouldn't he be so? He has none too many opportunities of amusement."
He paused, looking down the bright, vacant, silent corridor, past the open doors of all the bright, vacant, silent rooms.
"If it comes to that, nor have I," he added, "when I come to think of it. There's a notable paucity of excitement in this existence, and this beastly hot air makes one too muzzy to read." He yawned.--"What a mercy Virginia didn't come! She would have been most extensively and articulately bored."
He sauntered aimlessly along the passage, past the fine, copper-plate engravings, and the impassive, Roman emperors, and drew up before the great, tapestry curtain. Again he looked curiously at the figures worked so skilfully upon it. The light took the silken surface, bringing the warm flesh-tints into high relief, against the dim, grey-green background of shadowy hill and grove.
"No wonder my uncle blasphemes if that represents his only idea of the relation of the sexes."
He sighed involuntarily.
"Yes, but, thank God, there is more in it all than merely that," he said. Then he repeated:--"It is a mercy Virginia did not come. It would not have suited her from any point of view. She'd have been hideously bored, and she would have been offended and a good deal shocked. It is queer the way the Puritanic element survives over there, notwithstanding their modernity."
Laurence smiled to himself, becoming aware of the slight inconsistency of his own attitude--his late heated championship of the claims of the Eternal Feminine, his self-congratulation at the fact that his own particular investment in the matter of womanhood was, at present, safely away on the other side of the Atlantic.
Then, taken by a sudden impulse--born in part of a desire of escape from the suffocating atmosphere around him--he pulled the edge of the heavy curtain outwards, passed round it, letting it drop into place behind him. He stood a moment in a contracted, blind space. The place seemed possessed of singular influences. Again he grew faint as he groped for the door handle; while a conviction grew upon him that he had stood just here, and so groped an innumerable number of times already, and that he should so stand and grope--either in fact or in imagination, just as long, indeed, as consciousness remained to him--an innumerable number of times again.
At last the handle was found and yielded. Breathing rather quickly, Laurence entered the lofty, fair-coloured room. It too was bright with electric light, but the air of it was sensibly purer than that of the corridor; while, standing before the painted satin-wood escritoire, at the further side of the fireplace, was a slender woman. Her back was towards him. She wore a high-waisted, clinging, rose-pink, silken gown. Her dark hair was gathered up in soft, yet elaborate, bows and curls high on her small head, after the fashion prevalent in the early years of the century. A cape of transparent muslin and lace veiled her bare shoulders.
VI
The young man's astonishment was immense. Recovering from the first shock of it, he was taken with reprehensible irreverence towards the sick man upstairs.
"The old sinner, how he has lied!" he said to himself. "A pretty ass he has made of me with this card up his iniquitous, old sleeve all the while!"
He debated momentarily whether good manners demanded his retirement before his presence was perceived; or whether he was free to go forward and make acquaintance with this unacknowledged member of his uncle's household. Strong curiosity, coupled with a spirit of mischief, provoked him to adopt the latter course. He owed it to himself, surely, not to neglect so handsome an opportunity of turning the tables upon old Mr. Rivers. While, astonishment and levity, notwithstanding, Laurence was aware of a strong attraction drawing him towards the slender, rose-clad figure. He began to question, indeed, whether it, like the room and its furnishings, was not in a degree familiar to him? Whether it was not the embodiment of just all that of which he had been so singularly expectant when visiting the room this same morning?
Meanwhile the young lady's hands moved over the rounded cover of the escritoire as though endeavouring to open it. The lace frills, edging her muslin cape, flew upwards, showing her bare arms. These were thin, but beautifully shaped; while the movement of her hands was singularly graceful and rapid. She touched, yet seemed unable firmly to grasp the gilded handles of the escritoire again and again; clasped her hands, as it appeared to Laurence--for her back was still towards him--with a baffled, despairing gesture, and then moved away across the room. She appeared to flit rather than walk, so light and silent were her steps, bird-like in their swift and dainty grace. Watching her, Laurence was reminded of a certain Spanish _danseuse_, who, during the previous winter, had excited the wild enthusiasm and considerably lightened the pockets of the _jeunesse doree_ of New York. But the charm of the dancer had, for him at least, been spoilt by the somewhat unbridled pride of success perceptible in her bearing. Whereas the flitting figure now before him, notwithstanding the beguiling loveliness of its motions, struck him as penetrated with the sorrow of failure, rather than the arrogance of success.
She wandered to and fro, regardless or unconscious of his presence, searching--searching--as it seemed; passing her hands over the work-table, sweeping them along the surface of the chimney-piece between the ornaments and china, fingering the music upon the piano. He caught sight of a delicate profile, a round and youthful cheek. But her movements were so anxious and rapid that he could get no definite view of her face. Indeed, her action was so quick that it was not without effort Laurence followed it.
At first the young man's attitude had been one of slightly irritated amusement at the concealment practised on him by his host. But as the rose-clad lady's search continued, the sense of amusement was merged in one of sympathy. She was so graceful a creature. She appeared so sadly baffled and perplexed. A subtle anxiety laid hold of him--an apprehension that something momentous and of far-reaching consequence to himself was in act of accomplishment--that he was himself deeply involved, and pledged by a long train of antecedent circumstances to assist those delicately framed and apparently so helpless hands in their unceasing search.
"Pardon me, but what have you lost?" he asked her at last, speaking gently as to a timid and unhappy child. "Tell me, and let me try to help you find it."
At the sound of his voice the flitting figure paused, stood a moment listening, as though striving to collect the purport of his address. Then it turned to him. For the first time Laurence saw his companion's face clearly, and he shrank back, penetrated at once by a great admiration and a vague dread of her. For it was a very lovely face, but shy and wild as no other human face he had ever beheld. The sweet mouth drooped at the corners, as with some haunting, but half-comprehended distress. The eyes were serious; blue-purple--as are deep, high-lying, mountain tarns, set in a soft gloom of pine-trees and of heather. A gentle distraction pervaded the young lady's aspect. And this was the more arresting, that each bow and curl of her pretty hair was in place; every detail of her dress fresh and finished, from the string of pearls about her white throat, to the toes of her rose-pink, satin slippers, sparkling with an embroidery of brilliants, which showed beneath the small flounce edging her rose-pink skirt.
Laurence had lived at least as virtuously as most men of his class; yet it would be idle to declare Virginia his first and only flame. He had married her, which constituted the difference between her and all those other flames--and at times it occurred to him what a prodigiously great difference that was! Since his marriage he had been guiltless of looking to the right hand or to the left even in thought. But, before that event, it must be owned, he had had his due share of affairs of the heart. He was thoroughly conversant with the premonitory symptoms of that fascinating disorder, commonly known as "falling in love." And, to his dismay, as he looked on the sad and lovely person before him, he was conscious that some of those premonitory symptoms were not entirely absent. An immense pity and tenderness took him; a deepening conviction, too, of recollection, as one who after a long lapse of years hears again some almost forgotten melody, or sees again a once well-known and well-beloved landscape. The sad face was new to him, not in itself, but in its sadness only. The corners of the sweet mouth should not droop, but tip upward in soft, discreet laughter. The serious eyes should dance, as the surface of these same mountain tarns in sunlight under a rippling breeze. The face, remembered thus, had indeed never been wholly forgotten--he knew that. It formed part of inherent prenatal impressions, of which, all his life, he had been potentially if not actively aware.
All this flashed through him in the space of a few seconds; while he repeated, somewhat staggered by the fulness of emotion which the tones of his own voice implied--
"Only tell me what you have lost--tell me; and let me help you find it."--Then he added more lightly, smiling at her with his sincere and kindly smile:--"Really, my services are worth enlisting. I've always been a rather famous hand at finding things, you know."
She gazed at the young man for a minute or more, a tremulous wonder in her expression, while she fingered the string of pearls about her rounded throat. Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. Her attitude changed. She stood with her head raised, apparently listening. Then reluctantly, as in obedience to some unwelcome summons, she moved swiftly across the room to the outstanding, painted satin-wood escritoire, passed at the back of it, and the young man found himself alone.
VII
Though usually an excellent sleeper, Laurence passed a restless night. Like most sane persons, he was disposed to resent that which he could not account for; and, with the best will in the world to evolve ingenious hypotheses explanatory of her disappearance, the manner of his sweet companion's going remained a mystery. He had examined the escritoire, and found it locked. He had also examined the wall-space in its vicinity. This was hung, from cornice to wainscot, with pale yellow-and-white brocade, as was all the room. But neither behind the brocade, nor in the wainscot, was any door or sliding panel discoverable. Indeed, when he came to think of it, remembering the structure of the house as he had seen it on his way along the south front to the stables, that side of the room consisted of a blank wall, doorless and windowless. This fact, when he realised it, caused Laurence something of a shock. It was unpleasant to him. And so he took refuge in scepticism. He laughed at himself, declaring that the unwholesome atmosphere of the house, and the lonely, uneventful life he was compelled to lead, were breeding morbid fancies in him. All that talk about woman and the relation of the sexes had stamped itself upon his mind in an exaggerated way, thanks to his surroundings. The musky scent of the orchids had a word to say in the matter too, no doubt. So had his revulsion from the gross suggestions of the scene represented on the tapestry curtain. Heavy sleep, amounting almost to torpor, induced by the heavy atmosphere, had fallen upon him directly after he had entered that strangely engaging and familiar room. And, in that sleep, imagination had created a woman who should embody all that which the room and its furnishings suggested--an ideal woman, far away alike from the brilliant young leader of smart society whom he had married--but on this clause Laurence refused to allow his thoughts to dwell--and from the mere human brood-mare, whom his uncle pronounced to be the only admissible exponent of the Eternal Feminine. He had dreamed a poem--one of those poems he kept at the bottom of his despatch-box, and had never felt any inclination to read aloud to Virginia--had dreamed instead of writing it, that was all.
Laurence got out of bed and threw open the window. Where the eastern angle of the house stood out dark against the sky, he could see the pallor of the dawn warming into rose, while overhead the stars died out one by one as the light broadened.
"Yes, the vision of a dream," he said to himself. "Only another of those thousand exquisite things which belong to the language of symbol, and possess, alas! no tally in reality--reality, that is, as most of us hide-bound victims of conventionality are destined to know it."--He laughed a little grimly.--"Reality, as we know it, being precisely the biggest illusion of all!"
He watched the fading stars, the deepening rose and gold of day, above the woods and lawns, the black cypresses and white statues upon the northern boundary of the Italian garden. Starlings chattered joyously from the gutters under the eaves; and then swept down, with a rush of passing wings, on to the grass. A keeper, gun on shoulder, with a busy, little, black cocking-spaniel, and a long-limbed, red, Irish setter behind him, crossed the rough downward slope of the park; and the wide, blue-grey landscape began to grow definite, to assert itself right away up to the horizon. The earth seemed to awake with a quiet smile from the kindly sleep of night.
Laurence drank in his fill of the moist, sharp air.
"Poor dear Virginia!" he said suddenly. And it was probably the very first time in her whole life that this popular, admirably finished, and much admired young lady had ever excited pity.
After breakfast Laurence set forth to visit his clerical correspondent, and strive to ease the latter's conscience while refusing his request. The rectory, distant about three-quarters of a mile, stood on the rising ground across the valley, backed by a fringe of high-lying woods. The church, a small but very perfect example of Norman architecture, closely adjoined the house. There were good details of carving about the narrow, round-headed windows of the chancel, and the low, heavy arch of the porch--the floor of which was sunk several steps below the level of the churchyard. The tower, square and solid, but little higher than the roof of the nave, was surmounted by a squat, shingled spire. It struck Laurence as a calm, self-contained, little building, on which the centuries had set but slight mark of decay. The churchyard, too--shadowed by a few ancient yew-trees--was singularly peaceful, full for the most part of unnamed, grass-grown graves. Death, seen thus, had nothing awful, nothing repulsive, about it--quiet "rest after toil," it amounted to no more than that.
But then the charm of spring was in the air, and the young man was pleasantly beguiled by it. He sat down on the broad coping of the churchyard wall, lighted a cigarette, and idly watched the rooks streaming out from the rectory elms, and dropping on the fragrant, fresh-turned earth of a plough-field in the valley. He listened idly to the nimble wind that blew up from the ten-mile-distant sea, sang in the woodland above, and whispered through the dark, plume-like branches of the yews here in this sheltered piece of ground. The sky was a thin, bright blue, and across it wandered little clouds, like flocks of white sheep, herded by that same nimble wind up from the Channel.
It seemed to Laurence that here, indeed, would be a pleasant enough place to lie when life was over. But then that time had by no means arrived for him yet. He felt again--as he had felt that night on board ship--that he had never done complete justice to his own capacity. Whether the fault lay in himself or in circumstance, he could not say; but he knew that neither body, nor mind, nor heart, had worked up to their full strength yet. Ambition of some notable and absorbing undertaking stirred in him. He looked out over the goodly land. Would this by no means contemptible inheritance, on the threshold of the possession of which he now stood, afford him his great opportunity? And then his thought harked back to the lovely and pathetic vision which had blessed his sleep--for, of course, he was asleep--last night. A man could find fulness of satisfaction in a great passion for such a woman--if so be she actually existed, instead of being only the ideal vision of an ideal dream. Yes, a man could go very far down that road if--if--And there Laurence, being a decent fellow, laid strong hands on his imagination. To indulge it was just simply not right, since whatever woman's existence might belong to the land of fancy, his wife, Virginia's, belonged, to the land of very positive fact. He got up, shook himself, and walked away to the rectory house, through the sunshine and shadow of the peaceful, country graveyard.
VIII
Mr. Beal received his guest with an agitation in which natural timidity warred with professional pride. He laboured under the conviction that he was called upon at all times and in all places to maintain the dignity of the Anglican Church. He believed she was very much in the midst of foes, Rome and Non-conformity alike perpetually plotting her downfall; while Atheism cruised about in the offing ever ready to seize any who escaped the machinations of these more declared enemies. And, unfortunately, the young man, neither in appearance nor constitution, was a born fighter, or even a born diplomatist. In appearance he was mild, with sandy, down-like hair, a high narrow forehead and freckled skin, pale, anxious eyes behind spectacles, and a moist white hand. He opened the front door to Laurence himself; and it occurred to the latter that his clothes were very black, and that he wore a great many of them.
"Mr. Laurence Rivers, I presume?" he said, looking up nervously into his guest's face.
"Yes; I thought it would be simplest to answer your letter in person," the other replied. He felt a certain kindly pity for the young clergyman, whose existence he divined to be of a somewhat limited and unproductive sort.--"I should have given myself the pleasure of calling on you in any case in a day or two. But your letter seemed to require attention at once. I am sorry you are having any bother about--"
"Will you not come in?" Mr. Beal asked hurriedly. "Our conversation might be overheard and commented upon. This way, please. You will excuse the dining-room? I always occupy this room during the winter months. It is both necessary and right that I should practise economy, and to occupy this room exclusively saves a fire."
In his nervousness Mr. Beal talked continuously.
"Pray take a seat," he said, pushing forward an armchair, the leather cover and springs of which were decidedly tired. "I at once begged you to come in here, because in speaking of personal and parochial matters one cannot, I feel, be too careful. Mr. Wingate--the rector of Stoke Rivers, you know--wished, I am sure, to treat me with generosity when I undertook the duty here. He not only placed the whole of this house at my disposal, but he left two female servants--not on board wages--an elderly woman and a younger person as her assistant. The intention was generous, I feel sure; but I grieve to say they are not such staunch church-women as I could desire, and this has led to difficulties between us. I thought it my duty to admonish them, separately, of course, suiting my remonstrances to their respective ages and dispositions. But they did not receive my admonitions in a submissive spirit. Since then I have found it necessary to exercise great caution. There has been much gossip. Remarks of mine have been repeated, and that not in a manner calculated to improve my position with the parishioners. My actions are spied upon. There is a small, but bigoted, dissenting element in the village, and----"
"Ah! yes, they're a nuisance, I dare say," Laurence put in, smiling. "Still, it's a charming place, all the same. I have just been poking round the church. There are some wonderfully quaint bits about it. And I like the churchyard."
"I could wish to have the graves levelled, and the head and foot stones placed neatly in line on the confines of the enclosure."
"Oh! no, no; that would destroy the character of the place. We can't carry anything away with us--granted--when we go. And so there's a certain subjective comfort in knowing we leave a little mound of earth and turf behind to mark our resting-place. That's hardly ostentatious, considering our pretensions during life--do you think so?"
Mr. Beal shifted the position of his spectacles. He braced himself.
"The churchyard has been levelled at Bishop's Pudbury," he said. "I had the privilege of being assistant priest there for five years. The archdeacon is considered a man of great taste."
"I should have thought the parishioners would have objected now," Laurence remarked.
"So they did," Mr. Beal replied. "I grieve to say some persons displayed a most illiberal spirit. They called meetings, and behaved in a really seditious manner. Many even became guilty of the sin of schism. They ceased to attend the church services, and frequented dissenting places of worship. The archdeacon was pained; but he felt a principle was at stake. He has long contended that the churchyard is legally the rector's freehold. He therefore felt it a duty to the Church to be firm."
Laurence contemplated the young clergyman with a touch of good-natured amusement, wondering if, with that anaemic physique, he was capable of emulating the militant virtues of the archdeacon-rector of Bishop's Pudbury.
"But about this letter of yours, Mr. Beal," he said. "That's what I came to talk to you about."
"I am afraid my conversation has been a little irrelevant. But--but--" the young man sat opposite to Laurence, shifting his spectacles, and washing his hands in an access of nervousness. "I confess I am not quite myself this morning, Mr. Rivers. I was made an object of public ridicule last night."
"I am very sorry to hear it. How was that?"