The Gateless Barrier Part 13

"I think so. Still joy has been too long a stranger, for me wholly to trust it even yet. And I fear there are still lapses and deficiencies in my intelligence. I could fancy--but doubtless these are but silly fancies, born of illness--that I am not as I used to be, and that I feel the miss of much I once had and now have not."

She looked up at him, her eyes troubled once more to their very depths.

"In what am I lacking, Laurence?" she inquired piteously. "I feel that I am lacking, and I tremble lest I should disappoint you. Indeed, I will strive to remedy my fault, whatever it may be, if you will but be patient with me and tell me plainly of it, and give me opportunity to effect a cure."

But he answered her soothingly, stung by the humility and innocence of her att.i.tude.

"You are wanting in nothing that time will not set right. But we must make haste slowly, sweetheart. So put all these sick fancies out of your head. We will worry neither about past or future; but, like true economists, will enjoy the present. Now let us talk of the time before I left you to rejoin my ship. Of that other melancholy time, after I left you and before I came back, and of the changes it has brought along with it, we will talk some other day--I trust there are many days for us ahead."

And so they remained speaking of the incidents of that mysterious former life, of which Laurence's recollection became momentarily more circ.u.mstantial and coherent--speaking of little things, merry and tender, such as lovers love--until, more than once, gusts of gentle laughter swept through the yellow drawing-room, which, for such a length of years, had been empty of all sound of human mirth. And not until the rose-red fingers of the dawn--in colour matching his fairy-lady's rose-red gown--first touched the eastern sky above the dome of the lime grove and the broken outline of the woods, did Laurence and Agnes Rivers cease to talk. Then she got up from her place in pretty haste.

"Ah!" she said, smiling, "I must go. Good Mrs. Lambart will reprove my indiscretion in having remained here so late."

But Laurence was bound to ask her one question, which had been in his mind during the whole course of their interview, yet had not so far dared put to her.

"Tell me," he said, "I waited for you--why did you not meet me here last night?"

"Ah!" she replied, "do not let us closely inquire into that. Something terrible was abroad in the house. I think it was the Shadow of Death. It stood between us--or I dreamed it did so.--But we fought against it. We conquered it--at least I dreamed that we did. And it is gone.--But now, dear love, indeed I too must go. Good-night, or rather good-morrow.

Carry happy thoughts away with you, even as I do, to sweeten rest."

And, without more ado, she flitted across the room, as though her little feet in their diamond-powdered slippers could not go soberly, but must dance for very joy, and, pa.s.sing behind the tall escritoire, Laurence once again was aware that she had disappeared and left no trace.

XIX

The disposition of Montagu Rivers's property proved--as Mr. Wormald had already advised Laurence it would prove--of a simple and straightforward description. All the servants connected with the house and stables would receive a couple of years' wages. Lowndes, the valet, would in addition draw a substantial pension. Outside these provisions, Laurence inherited wholly and solely. A single clause in the brief will revealed somewhat of the eccentric character of its maker. Mr. Rivers directed that within forty-eight hours of his reported death a London surgeon of acknowledged eminence should use means to ascertain, beyond all possibility of doubt, that death had veritably and indeed taken place. He further directed that Armstrong, the agent, and a local pract.i.tioner who had attended him at intervals during his illness, should be present at this rather ghastly demonstration. It was added that the corpse should receive Christian burial not less than twenty-four hours after the autopsy had been carried out. The clause concluded with the following words:--

"I desire these measures to be taken--childish and superst.i.tious though they may appear--as a precaution against that happening, in my own case, which would appear to have happened in the case of a former inhabitant of Stoke Rivers."

The eminent surgeon in question, hastily summoned from amid a press of work, could spare but one evening for his visit. He proved to be a courtly and agreeable person, an amateur of the fine arts, with a turn for copper-plate engravings, a weakness for Italian ivories, and an enthusiasm for antique and renaissance gems. His work in the death-chamber accomplished, he readily turned his attention to more pleasing investigations; and during the hour after dinner, before the coming of the carriage to take him to catch the up-express at Stoke Rivers Road, he examined the contents of certain gla.s.s cases in the library, and looked at the engravings hanging in the lower corridor.

"I little imagined, when I left town this afternoon," he said, addressing Laurence with a peculiarly charming smile, "that such delectable entertainment was in store for me. I am proud of my profession--no man more so; but I am not sorry to put it aside for a time and forget injury and disease, and even successful dealing with them, in favour of art. This collection of your uncle's, though not large, is remarkable. It reflects great credit upon his judgment and taste. It contains absolutely no rubbish, hardly, indeed, a single object which it would be just to qualify as second-rate.--Ah! here is another admirable thing, though less in my line than those delightful gems."

The two men had reached the end of the corridor, and the doctor paused in front of the tapestry curtain.

"This is a very fine example," he continued, "though I could not, off hand, be sure of the date. How broad and yet how harmonious in colouring! Just a trifle broad in subject, too, perhaps; but our forefathers were blessed or cursed--I am often at a loss to decide which--with a more robust taste in sentiment than ourselves. A witty modern writer has spoken of 'the saving grace of coa.r.s.eness.' There have been times when I have been tempted to endorse his phrase."

As he spoke, he laid hold of the edge of the curtain.

"Dear me, how singularly weighty!" He looked at his host quickly, inquiringly, and with heightened interest. "Singularly weighty," he repeated. "This house enjoys a reputation for a certain originality, I understand. Would it be indiscreet to inquire to what this splendid _portiere_ either gives, or denies, access?"

Just for a moment Laurence hesitated, staring his guest very full in the face. So far this new acquaintance had interested him greatly. His conversation had been refreshingly varied; moreover, Laurence, in listening to it, had become increasingly and pleasingly impressed with the value and distinction of his lately acquired possessions. He recognised a steadiness and sanity in the great surgeon's outlook; an appreciation of things rare and beautiful, combined with a wisdom born of wide practical experience; a large compa.s.sion, too, for the foibles, and sufferings, and sins of poor human nature, unembittered by any flavour of contempt. And so it happened that, during that moment of hesitation, Laurence was sorely disposed to lay bare to this man--whom he would in all probability never meet again--the abnormal situation in which he, at the present time, found himself. If any one could grasp that situation, and deal with it at once justly and sympathetically, he thought this man could do so; since he appeared to have pa.s.sed the limits of denial and scepticism, and reached that composure and poise of mind wherein revolt ceases and the capacity of acceptance and belief becomes almost unlimited. But--perhaps unfortunately--Laurence put the inclination towards free speech from him as a temptation. Was he not bound by his promise to the dead? He was bound still more, perhaps, by personal pride. It appeared to him free speech would be a yielding, a weakness; so he answered suavely, yet with a sufficient loftiness to leave no room for further question--

"Behind the curtain is that which, indirectly, has procured me the great pleasure of receiving you here to-day."

As he spoke he turned, and led the way in the direction of the hall again.

"I'm uncommonly glad," he added, "that you have such a high opinion of my uncle's little collection. Perhaps it may induce you to come down here again sometime, from Sat.u.r.day to Monday, and overhaul the contents of these cases at your leisure. I am afraid I'm a bit of a barbarian, and don't reckon with them as reverently as I ought. I am a good deal better up in the points of polo ponies than in those of Popes' rings, I know."

"That is no matter for regret," the doctor replied, in his most courtly manner. "My esteem for the barbarian increases rather than diminishes as I grow older. And I never forget that these delicacies of art are, after all, the refuge of those who have outlived or injured their digestion of, and appet.i.te for, simpler and more wholesome diet. Such dyspeptics are to be commiserated rather than commended. As long as the romance of sport and travel holds you, as long as you still 'love the bright eyes of danger,' you can very well afford to leave the consolations offered by gems, and ivories, and such like sweepings from the ruins of departed civilisations, to the physically and emotionally decrepit."

He shrugged his shoulders.

"Ah, youth," he said, "immortal youth, and the rather savage joys of it!--I congratulate you far more profoundly upon the possession of these, and upon the magnificent health which I cannot but perceive to be yours, than upon your extremely interesting house and both its seen"--he paused, looking rather hard at Laurence and smiling--"and unseen treasures.--A cigar? Yes, thanks, I think I will permit myself that indulgence on my way down to the station.--But to return to my contention. Remember we only take to sweet-sop when our teeth are no longer sound enough for ship's biscuit. Eat ship's biscuit and relish it just as long as a merciful Providence permits you to do so, my dear young gentleman. The days of sweet-sop, of the armchair, of what we are pleased to call 'the judicial att.i.tude of mind,' but which is really nothing save the natural consequence of a sluggish and defective circulation, will come all too soon in any case. Adieu to you--"

A flash of carriage lamps at the open hall door, the two men-servants--restored to their habitual correctness of bearing--armed with rugs, greatcoat, and narrow leather bag of slightly sinister aspect--the snort of a horse in the night air, fresh from the comfortable warmth of the stable--and, after further farewells, Laurence went back into the hot, bright, silent house.

"No one need sit up, Renshaw," he said to the waiting butler. "I shall watch in Mr. Rivers's room alone to-night."

For this was to be a night of abstinence, so the young man had decided, from the dear sight of his fairy-lady and the delight of her miraculously recovered speech. He had a duty to perform to the dead man, lying solitary upstairs--though hardly more solitary now, than during the long years past in which he had repudiated all solace of human affection. To Laurence himself life had become almost terribly well worth living since he had set foot in Stoke Rivers little more than a week ago; and it was to this man, of cold and narrow nature, that, after all, he owed this notable enlargement of interests and opportunity--not to mention those material advantages of houses, lands, and costly furnishings which had come to him. Grat.i.tude was very much in place; and it seemed to him that a silent vigil in that stately bed-chamber would be only fitting, both as an act of piety, and as testimony to the grat.i.tude now no longer permitted expression either in spoken word or kindly act. Nor could Laurence help hoping that during those solemn hours he might arrive at a clear determination regarding the future--ceasing merely to drift pa.s.sive and acquiescent to the push of circ.u.mstance, as a rudderless boat to the push of the tide. He would direct his own course, be master of his own action, prepared to take--for good or ill--all the consequences that action might involve.

For, all the while--and it was worse than useless to shirk remembrance of that--all the while, across the Atlantic, under the bright American skies, bright as they, immediate and modern as the civilisation on which they look down, was the vivacious, young, society beauty, whom he had believed he loved, whom he very certainly had married, and to whom--in the opinion of both her world and his own--his honour and his whole future stood pledged. The question of Virginia--for the whole situation resolved itself fundamentally into that--the question of Virginia must be reckoned with, and the results of such reckoning accepted once and for all.

He had not visited that upstairs room since the night of his uncle's death. The impression then received of the furnace-like fire, and the apparent life and motion of those figures of enslaved and half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l womanhood supporting the bed, were still present to his recollection.

But now, as he pa.s.sed into the room, he found the change worked there very arresting. All trace of that which had gone forward, earlier in the evening, under the hands of the eminent surgeon, had been obliterated.

The room was orderly, stately as ever; but it was very cold. The hearth was swept and empty. One cas.e.m.e.nt stood wide open, and by it entered a continuous breathing of bleak wind. A single electric burner was turned on, and, in the low steady light shed by it, the carven figures of the ebony bed offered no illusion of life or motion; they showed rigid as the long, narrow body they guarded, the angular outline of which was perceptible beneath the fine linen sheet--upon the surface of which sprigs of rosemary and box lay scattered.

Laurence moved across, intending to turn back the upper part of the sheet and look on the face of the dead; but as he did so a bent form rose silently from the armchair, set at right angles to the fireless hearth, and took up its position on the far side of the bed opposite to him. Though by no means addicted to nervous alarms, Laurence felt a chill run through him, right up to the roots of his hair. Was it conceivable that he beheld the Umbra or Corporeal Soul, of which Ovid speaks, and that this phantom would keep watch with him over its own unburied corpse during the coming hours? His sweet fairy-lady was one thing, and this quite another, in the line of disembodied spirits. Stoke Rivers, apparently, was not a comfortable place to die in. Laurence registered a hasty vow that he, for one, would take precious good care to arrange to die somewhere else! But as he gazed, somewhat fearfully, at the intruder, it declared itself pathetically and pitifully human--nothing more recondite, indeed, than Lowndes, the wiry, long-armed, grey-faced valet.

"I thought it proper to wait till you should come, sir," he said, under his breath. "Though Mr. Rivers has no need of my services now, I have attended on him too constantly to feel it fitting I should be out of call."--His voice quavered, and he cleared his throat.--"He was a gentleman that rarely praised, sir. Some might have thought him harsh; but that was because his mind was so engaged with study. In all the forty years I waited on him, he never gave me an uncivil word; and it is not many gentlemen of whom you can say that."

He lent across, carefully removed some sprigs of box lying high on the sheet, then folded it down quickly and skilfully across the chest.

Laurence was aware of a jealous devotion in his att.i.tude. No hands save his own should again touch his dead master. But the sheet once arranged to his satisfaction, he stepped back, a pace or two, into the shadow of the damask curtains.

Then the young man looked long and silently upon the dead.

Notwithstanding its extreme emaciation, the face was gentler than in life. This was not merely owing to the closing of the brilliant eyes. An immense calm rested on it. The hunger of the intellect was stayed at last; and the face was majestic in its composure--the face of one who has pa.s.sed, for ever, beyond the tyranny of desire. Looking on it, Laurence bowed himself reverently in spirit, while the conviction rooted itself in him, that of all virtues the most fertile, the most admirable, is courage. For the weak, the dismayed, for skulkers, liars, and dastards, in whatever department of action or of thought, there is small hope--so he told himself--either here or hereafter. The battle is to the strong; and, therefore, to be strong is the one and only thing which really signifies.

And then it came to him, with a sense of sudden satisfaction, that this most desirable thing, strength, was altogether part of his own inheritance, did he choose to claim it. For the first time he appreciated the value of that strain of fanaticism resident in his blood. He had feared it a little, and apologised to himself for its existence heretofore. He had made a prodigious mistake; for now that strain of fanaticism revealed itself as among the most excellent things of his birthright. He remained motionless, gazing, no longer at the carven bed and its rigid burden, but away to the open cas.e.m.e.nt--in at which came the breathing of the bleak night-wind--his head held high, and a singular compression about the corners of his mouth.

Virginia?--Just now Virginia, and all and any obligation he might have contracted towards her, went for very little. He stood apart, complete in himself, regardless of custom, regardless even of so-called morality, should these interfere between him and his purpose. His sense of humour in regard to himself--humour, eternal enemy of all exaggerations and fixed ideas--was in abeyance. He knew that, knew it was dangerous. But then, as the courtly surgeon had so lately reminded him, what so adorable, after all, as those same "bright eyes of danger"--let danger come, how and when it may?--Conventionalities? He bade them pack, all the sort of them. Their day was over. The day of scruples was over likewise. His position was unexampled. He took the risks, along with the joys, of it. As his forefathers had been, so would he be. He felt an extraordinary exaltation and freedom of spirit. And feeling this he laughed a little, just as he had laughed when rallying his men amid the roar of cannon and scream of the grinding ships, in the famous sea-fight off the southern Spanish coast at Trafalgar.

But the old valet, hearing that most unexpected, and to him unseemly, sound, emerged from the discreet shadow of the damask curtains and stretched his long arms to draw the sheet again up over the face of the corpse.

"You have done, sir?" he asked in accents of severity.

"No," Laurence answered, the excitement of his thoughts still strong upon him--"I have only just begun; but, thank G.o.d, or devil, or what you will, I have begun at last."

XX

The funeral was over. Those few gentlemen of the neighbourhood who had felt it inc.u.mbent upon them to appear in person, had departed. So had the empty broughams of their more numerous neighbours, who proposed to offer a maximum of respect to the dead with a minimum of trouble to themselves. The Archdeacon also had started on his homeward journey to Bishop's Pudbury. At Mr. Beal's earnest entreaty he had been invited by Laurence Rivers to take part in the function. The young clergyman had been sadly exercised by scruples regarding the propriety of consigning the mortal remains of an admitted sceptic and scoffer to the grave, with words of Christian hope and blessing. What was left for believers if unbelievers thus benefited? The conscience of his superior officer was happily of less flabby texture.

"Charity before all things, my dear Walter," the latter had said, in his full, sonorous voice, when the ingenuous young man had unfolded his difficulties. "It is not for you, or even for me, to judge and condemn a fellow-creature. If not an active churchman, remember Mr. Rivers displayed no leanings towards Rome or any other schismatic body. For this we must be very thankful. There are occasions, moreover, as you will learn in time, when the purely ecclesiastical att.i.tude may fitly be modified by the knowledge of the man of the world. We yield no point, mark you; but we abstain from pressing a wrong point at a wrong time.

Judgment, statesmanship--therein lies the practical application of the sacred injunction, 'Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves.' To raise objections in the present case would be to increase rather than mitigate the possibility of scandal--probably, moreover, it would be to alienate the sympathies of young Mr. Rivers. We must learn never to sacrifice the future to the present, my dear Walter. To do so is to fall into errors of misplaced zeal--a very dangerous thing. Much, I cannot but think, may be done with young Mr. Rivers. Wisely handled, he should prove of considerable local service to the Church."