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 breastplate 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 Pontitfex’s workroom. She and Linda had been invited by Dr.
Raughty to lunch wi
th 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.
The sea was calm and motionless, its hardly stirring waves clearer and more translucent in their green depths than when blown upon by impatient winds or touched by shameless and glaring light.
A soft opalescent haze lay upon the houses, turning their gables, their chimneys, their porches, and their roofs, into a pearl-dim mystery of vague illusive forms; forms that might have arisen out of the “perilous sea” itself, on some “beachéd margent” woven of the stuff of dreams.
The queer old-fashioned ornaments of the room where the friends ate their meal took to themselves, as Nance in her dreamy emotion drew them into the circle of her thoughts, a singular and symbolic power. They seemed suggestive, these quaint things, of all that world of little casually accumulated mementoes and memories with which our troubled and turbulent humanity strews its path and fills the places of its passionate sojourning. Mother-of-pearl shells, faded antimacassars, china dogs, fruit under glass-cases, old faded photographs of long-since dead people, illuminated texts embroidered in bright wool, tarnished christening mugs of children that were now old women, portraits of celebrities from days when Victoria herself was in her cradle, all the sweet impossible bric-a-brac of a tea-parlour in a village shop surrounded them as they sat there, and thrilled at least two of their hearts—for Linda’s mood was as receptive and as sensitive as Nance’s—with an indescribable sense of the pathos of human life.
It was of “life”—in general terms—that Dr. Haughty was speaking, as the two young girls gave themselves up to the influence of the hour and played lightly with their food.
“It’s all nonsense,” the doctor cried, “this confounded perpetual pessimism! Why can’t these people read Rabelais and Montaigne, and drink noble wine out of great casks? Why can’t they choose from among the company of their friends gay and honest wenches and sport with them under pleasant trees? Why can’t they get married to comfortable and comely girls and regale themselves in cool and well-appointed kitchens?”
He helped himself as he spoke to another slice of salmon and sprinkled salt upon a plateful of tomatoes and lettuce.
“Whose pessimism are you talking about, Fingal?” inquired Nance, playing up to his humour.
“Don’t get it only for me,” Mr. Traherne cried, addressing the demure and freckled damsel who waited on them. “I’m asking for a glass of ale, Doctor. They can send out for it. But I don’t want it unless—”
The Doctor’s eyes shone across the table at him like soft lamps of sound antique wisdom. “Burton’s,” he exclaimed emphatically. “None of friend Renshaw’s stuff! Burton’s! And let it be that old dark mahogany-coloured liquor we drank once under the elm-trees at Ashbourne.”
The waitress regarded him with a coquettish smile. She laboured under the perpetual illusion that every word the Doctor uttered was some elaborate and recondite gallantry directed towards herself.
The conversation ran on in lively spasmodic waywardness. It was not long before the ale appeared, of the very body and colour suggested by the Doctor’s memories. Nance refused to touch it.
“Have some ginger-pop, instead, then,” murmured Fingal, pouring the brown ale into a china jug decorated with painted pansies. “Linda would like some of that, I know.”
The priest held out his glass in the direction of the jug.
“A thousand deep-sea devils—pardon me, Nance, dear!—carry off these pessimists,” went on the Doctor, filling up the clergyman’s glass and his own with ritualistic solemnity while the little maid, the victim of an irrepressible laughing-fit, retired to fetch ginger-beer. “Let us remember how the great Voltaire served God and defended all honest people. Here’s to Voltaire’s memory and a fig for these neurotic scribblers who haven’t the gall to put out their tongues!” He raised his glass to his lips, his eyes shining with humorous enjoyment.
“What scribblers are you talking about?�
� inquired Nance, peeling a golden apple and glancing at the misty roofs through the window at her side.
“All of these twopenny-halfpenny moderns,” cried the Doctor, “who haven’t the gall in their stomachs to take the world by the scruff of its neck and lash out. A fig for them! Our poor dear Adrian, when he gets cured, will write something—you mark my words—that’ll make ’em stir themselves and sit up!”
“But Adrian is pessimistic too, isn’t he?” said Nance, looking wistfully at the speaker.
“Nonsense!” cried the Doctor. “Adrian has more Attic salt in him than you women guess. I believe, myself, that this book of his will be worthy to be put beside the ‘Thoughts ‘of Pascal. Have you ever seen Pascal’s face? He isn’t as good-looking as Adrian but he has the same intellectual fury.”
“What’s your opinion, Fingal,” remarked Mr. Traherne, peering anxiously into the pansied jug, “about the art of making life endurable?”
Dr. Raughty surveyed him with a placid and equable smile. “Courage and gaiety,” he said, “are the only recipe, and I don’t mind sprinkling these, in spite of our modern philosophers, with a little milk of human kindness.”
The priest nodded over what was left of his ale. “De fructu operum tuorum, Domine, satiabitur terra: ut educas panem de terra, et vinum laetificet cor hominis; ut exhilaret faciem in oleo, et panis cor hominis confirmet,” he muttered, stretching out his long legs under the table and tilting back his chair.
“What the devil does all that mean?” asked the Doctor a little peevishly. “Can’t you praise God in simple English? Nance and I couldn’t catch a word except ‘wine’ and ‘bread’ and ‘oil.’”
Mr. Traherne looked unspeakably ashamed. “I’m sorry, Nance,” he murmured, sitting up very straight and pulling himself together. “It was out of place. It was rude. I’m not sure that it wasn’t profane. I’m sorry, Fingal!”
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