Tongues of Conscience Part 34

Yet Maurice often thought of Lily. And now that he was no longer bowed under the tyranny of a shattered nervous system he felt a new tenderness for her. He recalled her devotion and no longer linked her with his persecution. He remembered her unselfishness. He wished her back again.

And then--he remembered all his misery, and that, with her, it went. And his selfishness said to him--it is better so. And his mental cowardice whispered to him--your safety is in your solitude. And he put the memory of Lily's love and of the beauty of her nature from him.

So his silent autumn pa.s.sed by. And his silent winter came. One day, in a December frost, he met the Canon, m.u.f.fled up to the chin and on his way to see Miss Bigelow, who professed herself once again _in extremis_.

They stopped in the snow and spoke a few commonplace words, but Maurice thought he observed a peculiar furtiveness in the old man's manner, a hint of some suppressed excitement in his voice.

"How is Lily?" Maurice asked.

"Fairly well," the Canon said.

"She is still at the inn?"

"No, she lately moved into a little house further up the valley."

"Further up the valley," Maurice said. "But there's only one other house in that direction. I have been there you know," he added hastily.

"Lily told me you had stayed there."

"Well, but--" Maurice persisted, "there is only one house, a private house."

"They have been building up there," the Canon said evasively. "Houses are springing up. It is a pity. Good-night."

And he turned and walked away. Maurice stood looking after him. So they had been building in the valley, and End Cottage no longer possessed the distinction of being the finale of man in that Arcadia of woods and streams, and rugged hills on which the clouds brooded, from which the rain came like a mournful pilgrim, to weep over the gentle shrine of nature.

So they had been building in the valley.

Maurice made his way home. His mind was full of memories.

The close of the year drew on. It was a bad season, a cruel season for the poor. Men went about saying to one another that it was a hard winter. The papers were full of reports of abnormal frosts, of tremendous falls of snow, of ice-bound rivers and trains delayed. There were deaths from cold. The starving died off like flies, under hedges by roadsides, in the fireless attics of towns. Comfortable and well-to-do persons talked vigorously of the delights of an old-fashioned Christmas.

The doctors had many patients. Among them Maurice was very busy. His talent had monopolised Brayfield and his time was incessantly occupied.

He scarcely noticed Christmas. For even on that day he was full of work.

Several people managed to be very ill among the plum puddings. The year died and was buried. The New Year dawned, and still the evil weather continued. In early January Maurice came down one morning to find by his plate a letter written in a hand of old age, straggling and complicated.

It proved to be from Mrs. Whitehead, Lily's old nurse; and it contained that summons of which Lily had spoken long ago in her letter to her husband. Lily was ill and wished to see Maurice at once. The letter, though involved, was urgent.

Maurice laid it down. There was a date on it but no name of a house. By the date Maurice saw that the letter had been delayed in transit.

Blizzards, snow-storms, had been responsible for many such delays. He got up from the table. At that moment there was no hesitation in his mind. He would go to Lily at once, as fast as rail could carry him. In a few moments his luggage was packed. Within an hour he was on his way to the station. He stopped the carriage at the Rectory and asked to see the Canon for a moment. The servant, looking reproachful, told him her master had started three days before to see "Miss Lily," who was ill.

"Miss Lily," Maurice said. "You mean Mrs. Dale. I am on my way to see her too. What is the matter? They do not tell me."

"I don't know, sir," the servant said, softening a little on learning that Maurice was going north to his wife.

Maurice drove on to the station.

In all his after life he never could forget his white journey. It seemed to him as if nature gathered herself together to delay him, to turn him from his purpose of obeying the summons of Lily. Even the line from Brayfield to London was blocked, and when at length Maurice reached London he found the great city staggering under a burden of snow that rendered its features unrecognisable. All traffic was practically suspended. He missed train after train, and when he drove at last into Euston Station and expressed his intention of going north by the night mail the porter shook his head and drew a terrible picture of that arctic region.

"Most of the lines are blocked, sir," he said, "or will be. It's a-coming on for more snow."

"I can't help that," Maurice said. "I must go. Label my luggage."

The train was due to start at midnight. Maurice had a lonely dinner at the station hotel. While he ate in the gaily lighted coffee-room he thought of Lily and of his coming journey. The influence of the weather had surrounded it with a curious romance such as English travel seldom affords. Maurice was very susceptible to the mental atmosphere engendered by outward circ.u.mstances, and yielded more readily than the average man to the wayward promptings of the faithful spirit that nestles somewhere in almost every intellect. He began to regard this white journey to the ice-bound and rugged north with something of a child's wide-eyed, half-delighted, half-alarmed antic.i.p.ation. He thought of the darkness, of the dangers by the way, of the mult.i.tudes of lonely snow-wreathed miles the train would have to cover; of the increasing cold as they went higher and higher up the land, of the early dawn over fells and stone walls, of the grey light on the grey sea. Then he listened to the strangely m.u.f.fled roar of a London hoa.r.s.e with cold. And he shivered and had feelings of a man bound on some tremendous and novel quest. As he came out of the hotel the wintry air met him and embraced him. He entered the station, dull and sinister in the night, with its haggard gas-lamps and arches yawning to the snow. There were few pa.s.sengers, and they looked anxious. The train drew in. Maurice had his carriage to himself. The porter wished him good luck on his journey with the voice and manner of one clearly foreseeing imminent disaster and death. The whistle sounded, and the train glided, a long black and orange snake, into the white wonder of the clouded night. Snow beat upon the windows, incrusted with the filagree work of frost, and as the speed of the train increased the carriage filled with the persistent music of an intense and sustained activity. This music, and the thoughts of Maurice fought against sleep. He leaned back with open eyes and listened to the song of the train. Its monotony was like the monotony of an irritable man, he thought, always angry, always expressing his anger.

Beneath bridges, in tunnels, the anger was dashed with ripples of fury, with spurts of brutalising pa.s.sion. And then the normal current of dull temper flowed on again as before. Maurice wished that the windows were not merely thick white blinds completely shutting out the night. He longed to see the storm in which they fled towards greater storms, the country which they spurned as they sprang northwards! Northwards! And to that valley!

His thoughts went to his old life alone there, to the coming into it of the haunting voice, to his terror, his struggle, his flight southward.

He had never thought to return there. Yet now he fled towards that place of memories, calm, sane, cleansed of persecution, with his mind fortified, and his heart steadily and calmly beating, unshaken by the agonies of old. Was he the same man? It seemed almost impossible. And now Maurice said to himself again that perhaps after all the cry of the child had been imagination, a symptom of illness in him from which he had--perhaps even through some obscure physical change--recovered completely. Yet Lily had believed in the cry and believed in the unquiet spirit behind it. But women are romantic, credulous--

The train rocked in a rapture of motion. Maurice drew his rugs more closely round him. With the advance of night the cold grew more deadly.

Towards morning the pace of the train incessantly decreased. Huge ma.s.ses of snow had drifted upon the line. For a rising wind drove it together under hedgerows and walls until expanding upon the track, it impeded the progress of the engines. Maurice let down a window and peered out. He saw only snow, stationary or floating, at rest in shadowy heaps that fled back in the darkness, or falling in a veil before his eyes. It seemed to him now as if a hand were stretched out to stay his impetuous advance to Lily. The train went slower and slower. At last, towards morning, it stopped. A long and distracted whistling pierced the air.

There was a jerk, a movement forward, then another stoppage. They were snowed up in the middle of a desolate stretch of country, with a blizzard raging round them.

How many hours pa.s.sed before they were released Maurice never knew. He lay wrapped up to the eyes, numbed and pa.s.sive, of body, but mentally travelling with an extraordinary rapidity. At first he was in the valley. He saw it, as he had seen it in old days, in snow, its river ice-bound, its waterfall arrested in the midst of an army of crystal spears. White mountains rose round it to a low sky, curved, like a bosom, in grey cloud shapes. The air was sharp and silent, clearer than southern air, a thing that seemed to hold itself alert in its narrow prison on the edge of solitude. He heard the bark of a dog on the hills, in search of the starving sheep.

Then he came to one of those new houses of which the Canon had spoken, and in it he found Lily. She was pale, but he scarcely noticed that, engrossed in the strangeness of finding her there. For in the south he had never fully realised Lily at home in the valley, walking on the desolate narrow roads by day, sleeping in the shadow of the hills by night. Now he began to realise her there. Where would the house be? Near End Cottage, perhaps in sight of the garden to which he had stolen on that evil night to listen for the voice of a bird!

After many hours the train was dug out of the snow, and sped forward again in daylight. Maurice slept a little, but uneasily. And now, when he was awake, he began to be filled with an unreasonable apprehension, for which he accounted by taking stock of the low temperature of his body, and of the loss of vitality occasioned by want of food and rest.

He was seized with fear as he came up into the north and saw vaguely the moors around him, the snowy waves where the white woods rippled up the flanks of the white hills. He began to realise again his former condition when his life was full of the lamentation of the child. He began to feel as if he drew near to that lamentation once more. Perhaps the little sorrowful spirit had only deserted him to return to the valley in which it first greeted him. Perhaps it would come again to him there. He might hear the cry from the garden of the cottage as he hastened past.

He shuddered and cursed his wild fancies. But they stayed with him through all the rest of the journey, through all the delays and periods of numb patience. And they increased upon him. When at last he reached the dreary station by the flat sandbanks, at which he changed into the valley train, he was pale and careworn, and full of alarm.

Very slowly the tiny train crawled up into the heart of the hills as the darkness of the second night came down. Maurice was the only pa.s.senger in it. He felt like one alone in a lonely world, fearing inhabitants unseen, but whose distant presence he was aware of. Could Lily indeed be here, beyond him in this desolation? It seemed impossible. But the child might be here, wandering, a lost spirit, in this unutterable winter. That would not be strange to him. And his soul grew colder than his body. He could see nothing from the window, but occasionally he heard the dry tapping of twigs upon the gla.s.s, as the train crept among the leafless woods. And this tapping seemed to him to be the tiny fingers of the child, feebly endeavouring to attract his attention. He shrank away from the window to the centre of the carriage.

At the last station in the valley the train stopped. Maurice got out into the darkness, and asked the guard the name of the house in which Mrs. Dale lived.

"Mrs. Dale," he said, in the broad c.u.mberland dialect, "Oh, she bides at End Cottage."

Maurice stared at his rugged face peering above the round lamp which he held.

"End Cottage?"

"Yes, sir. The poor lady took it on a six months' lease, but I hear she's--"

But Maurice had turned away with a muttered:

"I'll send up for the luggage."

He stumbled out into the white lane and through the little village. One or two lads, roughly dressed and sprinkled with snowflakes, eyed him from the shelter of the inn porch. As he moved past them, he heard their muttered comments. He left the houses behind and found himself among snow-laden trees. End Cottage was hidden in this narrow wood which was generally full of the sound of the waterfall.

Now the waterfall was silent, motionless, a dead thing in a rocky grave.

Maurice saw a faint and misty light among the bare trees. It came from his old home, and now his hand touched the white garden gate, p.r.i.c.kly with ice. He pushed it open and stole up the path till he reached the little porch of the cottage. As he stood there his heart beat hard and his breath fluttered in his throat. It seemed to him that there must be some strange and terrible meaning in Lily's presence here. With a shaking hand he pulled at the bell. He waited. No one came. He heard no step. The silence was dense, even appalling. After a long pause he turned the handle of the door, opened it, and stood on the threshold of the cottage. Instead of entering at once he waited, listening for any sound of life within the house, for the voices or footsteps of those inhabiting it.

Just so had he waited on a summer night long ago, with the moon behind him and leaf-laden trees. He listened, and, after a moment of profound stillness, he heard--as he had heard in that very place so long ago--the faint cry of a child. It came from within the house, clear and distinct though frail and feeble.

Involuntarily Maurice moved a step backward into the snow. Horror overwhelmed him. The dead child was here then with Lily, in his old abode. The spirit was not laid to rest. It had only deserted him for a while to greet him again here, to take up again here its eternal persecution; and this resurrection appalled and unmanned him more than all the persistent haunting of the past. He was dashed from confidence to despair. The little cry paralysed him, and he leaned against the wall of the porch almost like a dying man.

And again he heard the cry of the child.

How live and how real it was! Maurice remembered that he had said to himself that the cry was a phantasy of the brain, an imaginary sound vibrating from an afflicted body. And now his intellect denied such a supposition; the cry came from a thing that lived, although it lived in another world. It seemed to summon him with a strange insistence.

Against his will, and walking slowly as one in a trance, he moved forward up the narrow stairway till he reached the room that had been his old bedroom.

The cry came surely from within that room. The dead child was shut in there. Yes, never before had Maurice been able to locate the cry precisely. Now he could locate it. With shaking fingers he grasped the handle of the door. He stood in a faint illumination, and the cry of the child came louder to his ears. But there mingled with it another cry, faint yet thrilling with joy: