The Gateless Barrier Part 11

"And its mode of expression, its mode of self-revelation?" the other inquired drily.

Laurence straightened himself up, laughing a little.

"One way, the old why--childish, perhaps, yet really rather charming. In and by love, sir--only so, by love."

Tremulously Mr. Rivers drew the rich, sable cape closer about him, though the heat of the room was intense.

"I become very abject," he said at last. "I procrastinate and risk letting slip the opportunity still permitted me. For in my abjection, I own I clutch at straws, miserably anxious for support. I am ashamed that any other human being should witness the mental prostration to which physical illness has reduced me. But time presses, and compels me to delay no longer in confessing my object in calling you to me to-night.

Tell me, Laurence, have you investigated those abnormal phenomena of which we spoke, and have your investigations yielded any result?"

The question took the listener somewhat by surprise, and he hesitated before replying. The whole matter had become of such vital importance to him, personal, intimate, among the dearest and most reverently-held secrets of his heart. So he shrank, as before an act of profanation, from submitting the history of his fairy-lady and of his strange relation to her to the criticism of this cold-blooded, sceptical intelligence. Yet he was bound by his promise to report, if called on to do so--bound, too, in mere humanity towards one lying at the point of death, and to whom that history might, conceivably, bring solace and enlightenment.

"Yes, I have investigated the phenomena in part," he answered.

"And the result?"

"Briefly, I think, that which I ventured to state to you just now--that love is the language of the spirit, the only medium through which spirit can declare itself and be apprehended, the one element of our poor human const.i.tution which promises to continue and to preserve to us a measure of coherence and individuality even after death."

The young man leaned forward again, and laid his hand on the warm haunches of the ebony sphinx with a movement of slight defiance.

"Listen," he said, "please, sir, and I'll do my best to tell you exactly what has happened since we spoke of this subject last."

He steadied himself to his task, trying to keep his narrative circ.u.mstantial and restrained, to offer nothing more than a bald statement of fact. But the charm of it, once he had started, was a little too much for him. His speech grew lyrical against his will. And Mr. Rivers listened, his eyes closed, his brow drawn into hard lines by the effort of attention. Once he held up his hand.

"Did you question this appearance?" he asked.

"It was useless," Laurence answered, with a queer break in his voice.

"She never spoke--that is in words. She was dumb."

"That is unfortunate," Mr. Rivers said coldly. "Well, pray, go on."

And Laurence obeyed; recounting, with but slight reservation, all, even to the events of the last few hours, when he and his sweet companion had vainly sought to reach each other in defiance of some mighty, opposing force, and how, at the crucial moment of the struggle, Mr. Rivers's summons had come.

"There, sir," said he finally--"now you have it all as far as I can give it you. I don't attempt to explain, though I may have my own ideas on the subject. I've tried to put it quite honestly before you, and must leave you to thrash the meaning out of it for yourself."

For some little s.p.a.ce the sick man remained silent; then he raised both hands and let them sink back upon the coverlet with the gesture of one who bids farewell to hope.

"Fables!" he said bitterly; "fables! I ask bread of you and you give me a stone. I offer you an unprecedented opportunity of psychological study, and you approach it in the spirit of a ballad-monger or a mountebank! I require from you close observation, scientific ac.u.men, an unrelenting pursuit of truth; and you put me off with some old wives'

tale of lost letters, the ravings of an hysterical girl, of re-incarnation, multiple ident.i.ty, and I know not what farrago of sickly sentiment and outworn superst.i.tion! You trouble me with rubbish, which it would be an impertinence to offer as material for serious consideration to a peasant's child, of ordinary mental capacity, in a modern board-school. Nor can I, my dear Laurence, acquit you of insincerity, since you trick out this unworthy stuff in the extravagant language of an erotic poem, while claiming for yourself an att.i.tude wholly platonic and superior to animal pa.s.sion."

"You are harsh, sir," Laurence was permitted to remark.

Mr. Rivers turned his head on the pillow. His expression was distinctly malevolent.

"I begin to gauge the average man," he replied calmly. "I begin to recognise that he is a willing, probably wilful, self-deceiver--that he is incapable of mental advance, that he will never expunge the mythological element from his religious outlook, or learn to discriminate between emotion, the product of the senses, and accurate knowledge, the product of laborious enquiry and elevated thought."

"Perhaps he is wiser so," Laurence said. "Perhaps--I speak subject to correction, sir--but perhaps he gets into touch, that way, with things not altogether unimportant in the long history of the human race."

"Here, within measurable distance of dissolution, I grow somewhat weary of _perhaps_. Yet I deserve that you should answer me this, since I have shown myself very weak. I had not courage to embrace the remarkable opportunity of investigating the phenomena of which we have spoken when it was offered me in my prime. Now, in my decadence, surrept.i.tiously and at second hand, I try to acquire the knowledge I then repudiated. I clutch at straws, and the straws sink with me. It is just. For the second time I am untrue to my principles. I accept the rebuke."

During the last half hour there had been a lull in the storm; but now the wind, shifting to a point north of west, hurled itself against the house-front with renewed fury, and screamed against the shuddering cas.e.m.e.nts as though determined to gain entrance. The effect was that of personal violence intended, and, with difficulty, repulsed. To Laurence an inrush of the tempest would have been hardly unwelcome, for the heat of the atmosphere oppressed him to the point of distress. Nor was this all. Once more he became aware, so it seemed to him, of the tremendous, unseen presence with which he had struggled earlier this same evening in the yellow drawing-room below. He was aware that it stood on the far side of the great, ebony bed, waiting, and the young man's heart stood still. He saw Mr. Rivers gather the sable cape more closely about him, as he lay staring out into the austere yet luxurious room; and he recognised that for all his mortal weakness there was a certain magnificence in the dying man's aspect.

"And beyond the superb, and always unredeemed, promise of human life, a blank," Mr. Rivers said at last, his voice hollow, and, though so small, a.s.serting itself strangely against the tumult of the storm.

"Reason, learning, the senses, carry us thus far, only to project us against a gateless barrier at the last!"

But Laurence's whole nature arose in fierce revolt. Again he renewed that awful struggle, but this time in articulate speech.

"No, no, sir," he cried sharply, authoritatively, "the barrier is not gateless--that is, to any one of us who has ever, even dimly and pa.s.singly, known true-love, and that of which true-love is the everlasting exponent and blessed symbol, namely, Almighty G.o.d."

"And I have known neither," Mr. Rivers answered. "Love I have never felt. G.o.d I have never needed, either as an object of worship, or as incentive to prayer. Therefore, for me, on your own showing, the barrier needs must remain gateless."

He bowed his head slightly, smiling upon the young man with a fine, ironical courtesy.

"I will ask your pardon for any weariness I may have caused you, Laurence," he added. "And now I think we have nothing further to say to one another. I have no quarrel with your fulfilment of your part of the contract. It has been only--possibly--too complete. So I will detain you no longer. You can leave me. I bid you good-night."

The young man would have answered with some kindly words of farewell; but as the other ceased speaking, he became aware that, under the glistening, outstretched arms of the caryatides, that tremendous unseen presence bent downwards, extending itself sensibly over the bed.

Suddenly, and with a surprising effect of strength, Mr. Rivers started into a sitting position.

"Lowndes," he called imperatively, and reached out for the handle of the silver bell.

But before Laurence could render him any help he sunk down sideways--as though under the weight of a heavy blow--the upper part of his body hanging over the edge of the bed, and his thin, reed-like hands, with their ancient and mysterious rings, dragging upon the carpet--dead.

XVII

The afternoon was fair and mild, a pensive charm upon it of misty sunshine and light fugitive shadows--one of those tender, silvery afternoons very characteristic of an English spring. It was as though nature, repentant of the violence of the past night, would disarm resentment by softness of mood, pretty invitations, and all manner of insinuating caresses. Thrushes piped among the high branches, and on the house-roofs starlings whistled and chattered, their crops filled with succulent comfort of worms and slugs. Upon the wide lawns two pairs of grey wag-tails scampered, with interludes of love-making and rapid upward flutterings after young gnats and flies--born out of due time and paying speedy and final penalty of too precocious an advent. The year had fairly turned its back on winter at last, and a promise of genial days, warm, lingering twilights, and tranquil nights was in the air.

Yet the late storm had not departed altogether without witness. For Laurence, pacing the broad walk from the last steps of the Italian garden to the confines of the lime-grove, could hear the hushing of birch-brooms and the ring of an axe. One of the tall cypresses had fallen right across the central alley, and gardeners were still busy chopping it up, carting away blocks of red wood and barrow-loads of scented branches, and obliterating the traces of its downfall.

Laurence paced the walk in a state of dreamy abstraction. The influences of the hour and the place were soothing to him. Their last interview and the final scene in his uncle's bed-chamber had affected him deeply.

To-day had been full of detail. He had spent great part of the morning at the little, grey, Norman church, in company with Armstrong, Mr. Beal, and the estate mason, superintending the opening of the Rivers's vault, and such alteration of the position of the coffins it contained as to render possible the addition of another to their number. Upon the coffin-plates he read the names of many members of his family--of Dudley Rivers and others; and that of his own father, Denbigh Rivers, who had died on foreign service in Malta, when he--Laurence--was a child, and whose body had been sent home, not without cost and difficulty, to lie among his kindred in this quiet place. Of Agnes Rivers's coffin--though he closely examined all such as were still intact--he discovered no trace.

"There won't be room for me or mine down there, Armstrong," he said to the agent, as the two stood in the sunny churchyard, flicking the clinging cobwebs of the vault from off their clothes. "Not that I'm particularly sorry for that. Look here, you see the vacant s.p.a.ce there by the chancel wall? Just try if you can arrange to have it staked out and reserved, without encroaching on the rights or hurting the feelings of any of the parishioners. I rather fancy lying there--unless I'm lucky enough to die at sea, and be dropped over the ship's side into the clear, blue water, with a shot at my feet."

"Every man to his humour, no doubt, Mr. Rivers," the other answered, in his slow sing-song. "Though I could find it in my heart to wish you a less uneasy resting-place than the swaying deeps of the ocean. Yet I suppose it was just there, and in the manner you have indicated, that your namesake and great-uncle, Laurence Rivers, found burial after the glorious battle of Trafalgar."

Laurence had stopped beating the clinging cobwebs from his sleeve, and turned to the speaker with a look of quick intelligence.

"Why, of course it was," he said, presently adding--"Upon my word, I wonder--will history repeat itself in that particular also!"

Subsequently, there had been letters to write, telegrams to despatch, the disorganised household gently, but firmly, to lay hold on. And now he paced the broad walk in an interval of leisure, listening till the grinding of carriage-wheels upon the gravel of the chestnut avenue should advise him that Mr. Wormald, his uncle's lawyer--whom he had summoned from town--had arrived at Stoke Rivers Road, and completed the transit from that station. And as he thus paced, while the silvery sunshine and shadow gently followed one another across the face of the fair, woodland landscape, a little of the pride of possession awoke in the young man. He had hardly had time to think of that before; nor did it seem quite fitting or seemly to do so when the breath had but so lately left the body lying in that stately room upstairs. Yet it was indisputable, this was precisely the event which, consciously or unconsciously, he had waited for ever since his boyhood. The prospect of one day succeeding to this property had handicapped him; he felt that.

It had placed him in a position, socially, slightly beyond his means. It had taken from him the incentive and inclination to carve out an independent career. So far it had been the reverse of an advantage, from the more serious standpoint. But now all that was changed. He had a very definite "name and local habitation." He was absolutely his own master--no longer heir-apparent, but recognised owner and ruler of a by no means contemptible territory. This was as the step from boyhood to manhood--from the last of a public school to the freedom and personal responsibility of youth no longer subject to tutelage. Laurence smiled to himself. It occurred to him he had really got to grow up at last.

Well--he had been a precious long time about it! And then, somehow, it occurred to him that this change in his fortunes altered and modified his relation to Virginia. He had lived in Virginia's country, and among her friends, almost exclusively, since his marriage. He had, he was aware, ranked somewhat as Virginia's husband. Now the state of affairs was reversed. He was in a position to claim full masculine prerogatives--those of an old country, of a ripe and finished civilisation, well understood. In future Virginia--she was very charming, very, he'd no quarrel with her of course--only, in future, Virginia would have to rank as his wife.

And, thereupon, involuntarily his eyes sought the bay-window of the yellow drawing-room. At the foot of the semicircular stone steps, on to which that window opened, the gardeners still moved to and fro--slow, brown-clad figures--collecting and wheeling away the _debris_ of the fallen cypress. Laurence refused to formulate further the thoughts that arose in his mind. Only one thing was clear to him--clear as the songs and whistlings of the birds, clear as the tinkle and plash of the fountains, the spray of which glittered so brightly silver in the silvery light--Virginia could not come to Stoke Rivers just yet. It was better--better in every way--that her coming should be postponed for a while--till the period of mourning for his uncle was over--till he, Laurence, had mastered all the business, and organised the existent masculine household upon a new basis--till he had thoroughly acquainted himself not only with the working of this, but of the Scotch estate--till he and Virginia were free to keep open house--till--till--