To Laurence, looking at her through the eyes of that elder personality of his, these details and these suggestions were conspicuous. She presented a perfect example of an immensely effective type. He recognised that; yet he stared at it in almost desperate wonder, and something approaching hopelessness.
"Why, you are there!" she exclaimed. "I am glad. I wanted you."
"Your people have all cleared out, haven't they?"
"Yes, they have gone. They had a grand time, I believe. I really think it was very well your uncle's death put me into mourning. It has afforded me the opportunity of giving my family a lovely summer. It might have been a catastrophe; I have made it into an occasion. They appreciate that."
Virginia made these statements with evident self-complacency.
"Of course," Laurence said. He still stared at her. She placed her hands on her hips, smoothing down her close-fitting skirt. Her hands were very small. Much art had been expended upon the finger nails.
"I think it was perfectly sweet of Horace Greener to come right on and see me," she continued. "It was like a breath of air from the outside. And I was glad he should know how finely everything was going. I think they all thought I might feel a little left over. He knows now it is they who are left over.—Laurence, you must hurry. I arranged you should be at the club pavilion in an hour. I have to change my dress; but if it should still be very hot I will not play. I will have you take my place."
"Horace Greener is a charming fellow," he answered, "all the same I'm afraid I can't play golf with him this afternoon."
"But I told him you would do so," Virginia rejoined, with absolute assurance. "It is settled. I never go back on an engagement."
"Ah! but I'm afraid I do," Laurence said. "Specially in the case of engagements about the making of which I have not been consulted."
So far the young lady had been occupied with her own conversation and her own person to the exclusion of any particular observation of her companion. Now she deigned to regard him more closely.
"Dear me!" she exclaimed, "you appear to me to be looking pretty wretched."
"Upon my word I believe I am pretty wretched," Laurence answered, smiling. "My home letters have brought me some news I don't in the very least like. It entails a journey to England. And instead of playing golf with Horace Greener, I must take the seven o'clock train to New York, and see if there is a decent state-room vacant on any of the outward-bound liners."
It was, in a way, characteristic of Virginia that her face, notwithstanding her natural vivacity, possessed no great mobility or range of expression. There were such a number of emotions she had never been called upon to entertain. And now no movement of appeal or regret crossed it. It merely hardened a little, becoming as serenely obstinate as heretofore it had been serenely complacent. She spoke with exactly the same conviction and assurance.
"But you cannot do that," she said.
"Oh, yes, but indeed I can," Laurence replied quite good-temperedly. He felt so singularly unrelated to her, that assertion was sufficient. It did not enter his head to protest or argue.
"You misunderstand," she said; "it is that I do not intend to have you do it."
He paused a moment, making an honest effort to range himself in line with her thought.
"Oh, come along," he began. But the young lady interrupted him with the same unwavering composure—
"You place me in an objectionable position," she declared, "by forcing me to explain. That is not considerate. You should meet me half-way; you should be beforehand so as to secure me against the annoyance of referring to all that. I had determined to sink it. But you make that impossible. It is derogatory to me to explain."
Laurence sat down on the arm of the nearest chair. He felt curiously helpless, and yet all the while he was getting the bit between his teeth. If obstinacy was about, well, he had his share of it. Across the Atlantic matters of such profound moment were awaiting him. It was difficult to reckon seriously and courteously with this unlooked-for opposition, and not to brush it impatiently aside. It seemed little short of ridiculous.
"I give you my word, Virginia, I don't know what you are talking about," he said. "I have the most cogent reasons for going over—you haven't given me an opportunity of stating them yet, but that doesn't alter the fact. It is necessary I should go; and after all, you know, I am not such a conceited ass as to imagine you can't do without me for three weeks or so."
"I am not thinking of myself, I am thinking of others," she remarked, with a certainnaïveté.
Laurence smiled.
"Oh, in that case I can book my passage with a clear conscience," he said.
But the young lady continued:—
"It is extraordinary to me how little regard you have for appearances. Comments were made upon the length of your former absence. They came round to me. That was not to be endured in the case of my husband. I put a stop to all that by cabling for you."
"Ah! yes, I see," Laurence said slowly. "When I arrived there certainly seemed no very obvious reason for the sending of that cable. That was unlike you. When I thought of it I confess I was puzzled."
"If you leave again after so short a stay, it will give colour to those comments." Virginia spoke with emphasis, almost with solemnity. "I do not propose to submit to that. So you must choose, Laurence. Either you must give up going, or you must wait till it is convenient to me to go with you. I do not care for a summer voyage; it is dull. Between the seasons nobody one ever heard of is crossing. One may meet the wrong people. My leaving would cause great disappointment here. It would break up their summer. Still I would risk that to avoid the other. It would be a scramble too, and nothing is more annoying than a scramble, but I dare say I could arrange to be ready in two weeks from now."
"That's very good of you," Laurence replied. "But unfortunately I must go at once, and, pardon my saying so, it will be better for me to go alone. Everything is at sixes and sevens. Confusion reigns at Stoke Rivers. I would not take you there under existing circumstances. You'd receive a quite wrong impression. Oh, it would be utterly disastrous!" he exclaimed.
For the first time he beheld Virginia depart from her faultless self-complacency, lose herself a little and display signs of anger. Her chin went up with a quick jerk, her eyes flashed, her features seemed for the moment swollen. This shocked him, it was so wholly unprecedented. He felt very sorry, as though he had been careless and clumsy, as though he had broken something hitherto flawless, and therefore charming, if not of supreme intrinsic value.
"I begin to believe," she cried, "you have an intention I shall never see Stoke Rivers at all."
"No, no, my dear," he answered rapidly, rising as he spoke. "Nothing of the kind. You are very distinctly mistaken. I have never been more ready that you should see Stoke Rivers than within the last hour—that is, when Stoke Rivers is fit to be seen. The poor, old house seems to have been in jeopardy of final disappearance about a week ago. There's where my bad news comes in. They write me word of a nasty fire there. Nobody's fault—an electric light wire heated, and not being properly cased charred some of the panelling which finally caught alight. The house has been kept at such a high temperature for years, that the woodwork is like so much tinder."
Virginia's chin was still in the air, but she had in great measure recovered her self-control. Her manner was rather elaborately cold.
"That is a pity," she said calmly. "But, of course, the house and its contents are insured."
"Oh, yes, the loss is more a matter of sentiment than of money. Only one room is burnt out, as far as I can gather; and it didn't contain any very valuable pictures, or any part of my uncle's collection."
"Probably it is as well this fire occurred, then," Virginia observed. "I have always supposed Stoke Rivers would need some reconstruction before it came up to the level of modern requirements."
"Possibly—" he spoke rather drily. "Only, you see, I happened to entertain a peculiar fondness for this particular room, and I am sorry to part with the outward and visible signs of certain memories."
The young lady did not answer immediately, but examined the dial-plate of the little watch, set in diamonds, upon her wrist.
"The carriage will be here," she said. "I have not time to change my dress. I cannot play golf with Horace Greener. It is very embarrassing. I have no valid excuse to offer him."
"Oh, the heat, my dear, the heat," Laurence said, smiling. "Any excuse is valid if you make it with sufficient conviction."
Virginia looked hard at him.—"I wonder just what you mean by that," she retorted. She put up her hand, puffing her hair out a little more over her ears. "That fire was not very serious on your own admission," she continued, "I cannot see that it necessitates your hurrying over with this frantic haste. And if I am to live in it it would be desirable I should overlook the reconstruction of the house myself."
Her tone was meditative. Her statements were concise. Laurence felt his back against the wall. He must take the consequences of his own action however distasteful and disagreeable. His course would have been very obvious had his record been quite clean in regard to Virginia; but, he was an honest man. Something of exquisite, of incalculable value had tempted him; and the peculiarities of his temperament had heightened that temptation. He had been saved from falling, not by his own virtue, but by the virtue and self-sacrifice of one adorably his superior. He could not plume himself upon the achievement. He acknowledged that his conscience was not clear in respect of Virginia; and this necessitated the payment of a heavy penalty in connection with his own self-esteem. His pride rebelled against "giving himself away," against further self-revelation; only, the logic of the situation prevailed. It cut him to the quick, yet it had to be done.
"You're quite right," he said. "The matter of the fire could have waited a little, I dare say, though it isn't exactly satisfactory to know part of one's house is roofless under a wet, English, July sky; but I had other bad news to-day." He paused a moment. "I heard of the funeral of a very dear connection of mine."
Virginia moved slightly, sweeping those fanwise-cut flounces to one side.
"Funeral?" she said quickly. "Really you have the very oddest manner of statement. Had you not already heard of his death, then?"
The young man moved too. He turned away, and a poignant sensation tore and hacked at him, so to speak. It hurt him physically. He gazed out over the dazzling whiteness of the smooth river seeing nothing, his whole being tense with the effort to resist the showing of that pain.
"Yes, yes, I have heard of her death, but I refused to believe it," he answered.
There was a moment of ominous silence, save for the shrilling of the insects, and lapping of the stream.
"Oh, a woman!" she said, with an almost alarming calm. "Have I ever heard of her?"
"I think not," Laurence answered.
"Then Louise had grounds for her assertions," she said, still with that deadly calm. "I thought it unworthy to listen. I forbade her to write or speak to me upon the subject. I—"
Laurence wheeled round. His eyes were dangerous. All the fanaticism of his race, and something finer than that, looked out of them.
"Think what you please of me," he cried; "but of her, think no evil. Never dare to think any evil. She was one of the saints of God; and you, of all women, have no cause to misjudge her. She saved me from committing a great sin."
A singular expression crossed the young lady's face, an imperious desire to ask, to search out the ultimate of the matter. But it was momentary. Spoilt child of fortune, she was too unaccustomed to vital drama to know how to deal with it. It staggered, it also slightly disgusted her. She could not rise to it. So conventionality proved stronger than even this very legitimate curiosity. Virginia remained true to her somewhat artificial traditions, to her own canons of good taste and self-respect, to that singular clause of the social creed which declares the thing unsaid also non-existent. Virginia appeared, in a way, admirable just then, yet she gave the measure of her nature. It was not great. She turned aside, with a movement of well-defined and lofty superiority.
"Are you aware that you become very indelicate?" she asked.
"Most men are indelicate at times, unfortunately."
"But not over here," she said. "American women do not permit that. You must remember whom you have married."—She waited a little. "The English standards are different, I presume," she added, not without a touch of sarcasm.
"I begin to think they are," Laurence answered.—He was paying, paying abominably; yet there was a sensible relief in so doing.—"They are based on the logic of fact," he continued. "And fact is more often indelicate than not. It has never yet, you see, learned to be a respecter of persons."
There was a pause, in which once again the fiddlings of the grasshoppers and soothing lap of the water became audible.
"Do you still propose to go to England?"
Laurence nodded. "Yes," he said.
"Then"—began Virginia; but the young man held up his hand, partly in warning, partly demanding a cessation of hostilities. His thought had taken a new departure in regard to his wife. Somehow she had destroyed her own legend. She was more slight and shallow a creature than he had supposed, and he would never really stand in awe of her again. His smile was sad yet wholly friendly.
"Then—in a couple of weeks or so—I shall come back and fetch you," he declared. "And then, like wise and politic human beings, we will eschew controversy, each giving the other as much room as possible. I fancy you'll find we shall shake down pretty easily, and rub along like most other married people.—Meanwhile what's becoming of poor, neglected Horace Greener? Go and amuse both yourself and him, my dear. If you're not in before I start—well—for the moment,addio."
It was all very much in keeping with his mood—the reposeful landscape, heavy with the solid green of the August foliage, the sweep of the low, grey sky, the warm, still rain which drew forth an indefinable fragrance from the pastures and hedgerows, the wayside flowers, and the underwood. Already the evenings had begun to shorten. The rambling village-street and its inevitable commotion of boys and dogs left behind, Laurence looked away, with a stirring of the heart, over this goodly land of which he was owner, as the brown thorough-bred breasted the hilly road leading up from the station to Stoke Rivers house. The prospect at once soothed and stimulated him. Emotion had been conspicuous principally by its absence lately; it was pleasant to feel again.
At the hall-door the two men-servants met him; and Renshaw's large, egg-shaped countenance bore an expression almost paternal.
"Excuse me, sir," he said, his complexion ripening to mulberry with the effort of speech—"I do not wish to put myself forward, or go beyond my place, but I must express the pleasure we take in welcoming you home, sir. I speak not only for myself, but for Mr. Lowndes and Mr. Watkins, and all the other servants—both upper and under, sir."
Lowndes, the grey-haired, long-armed valet, subsequently gave vent to even more cordial sentiments.
"Excepting for the fire, we have been very dull during your absence, sir," he said, as he laid out the young man's dress clothes, with a critical eye to their packing which did not evidently quite commend itself to his taste. "Living in this house has been like living inside a run-down clock. I hope you have returned to make some stay, sir. We want a head; we have forgotten how to take a holiday and amuse ourselves. Our habits have been so very regular for so many years, you see, sir, we feel lost without our accustomed duties."
This too was pleasant. To be precious in the sight of those who serve you lends a singular graciousness to the conduct of daily life. Laurence felt at harmony with himself and his surroundings, and with that sense of harmony arose certain stirrings of hope. During the days and nights of the past week, while the great ship ploughed her way eastward across the mighty ridge and furrow of the Atlantic, he had not been wholly unconscious of that hope—the hope that even now all might not be over, and that he might once again be blessed by the vision, for however brief a space, of his dear fairy-lady. Yet he had kept that hope under with a stern hand. It was present, but at the postern gate, so to speak, of the castle of his reason and his will. He kept it there, doing his heart much violence by refusing it admittance and entertainment, since he knew that, once admitted, it would have proved so dangerously absorbing and alluring a guest. He tried to deny it admittance still; yet he shuffled a little with his own conscience, permitting himself a renewing of the routine which had marked his former sojourn at Stoke Rivers. He dressed, dined, and waited until the twilight had very sensibly closed in before visiting that which might remain of the room of mysterious and enchanted meetings.
The near end of the corridor offered no noticeable signs of disturbance or injury. Still it appeared to Laurence that, as on a former occasion, a spirit of disorder, the winnowing wings of a profound and elemental fear, had but lately swept through it. He could have imagined the sightless, marble faces of the Roman emperors less impassive, less wholly scornful, their heads carried with something less of arrogant and invincible pride. An acrid odour of burned stuffs, burned woodwork, pervaded the place. He had cabled instructions that nothing might be removed, nothing renovated before his arrival. The tapestry curtain still hung in its accustomed position; but it was blackened and shrivelled to the obliteration of the figures wrought upon it. The satyr no longer leered, from his monticule, upon the naked and reluctant woman hurried towards him by the company of naughty loves. Tongues of fire had licked away that pictured wantonness and purged its offence.
Behind the wreck of theportière, the door—its panels split and tormented by flame—stood wide open, as on the night when, straining every muscle to carry that apparently so light and fragile burden, Laurence had lifted Agnes Rivers across the threshold. Once within the yellow drawing-room the desolation of that heretofore gracious and friendly apartment touched hard on tragedy, seen, as now, in the furtive, evening light. The rain had ceased, and through the remaining sheets of glass, in the partially boarded and barricaded bay-window, the flower-beds of the Italian garden showed in rich variety of leaf and blossom. The statues gleamed calm and graceful from their white pedestals. The spires of the cypresses rose with a certain velvet softness of density towards the pensive and slowly clearing sky. But the room itself was ruined in most unsightly fashion, stained by smoke, rendered clammy and dank in places by water. Wreckage of the pretty, costly furniture lay scattered in formless heaps upon the blackened floor—with here and there a shred of fine porcelain, the gilt handle of a drawer, the pages of a book reduced to tinder, or the unlovely remnant of carpet or hanging. It was as a place that has suffered siege, and which relentless foemen have sacked and trodden underfoot. So that it came to Laurence, very surely, that not here would he find his sweet fairy-lady, were he indeed destined, in this life, ever to find her again. Her gentle spirit could never be subjected to the indignity of dwelling amid this scene of destruction. Some incongruities are inadmissible to the imagination. They are too violent, too gross. Therefore the days of his beloved companion's pilgrimage were ended—it could not be otherwise—in respect of this once so comely place.
But though convinced that here it was useless to await her presence, there remained somewhat for Laurence in all tenderness and reverence to see. Since the electric light was now unavailable, he had ordered candles to be placed upon the chimney-piece, which, though yellow and disfigured, still remained practically intact. He moved across from the neighbourhood of the doorway—sad, little clouds of corpse-coloured ashes arising about his feet as he stepped—and put a match to the candles. Then, as the light of them strengthened and steadied, he looked, shading his eyes with his hand, towards that portion of the wall at right angles to which the painted, satin-wood escritoire, with all its pathetic store of cherished love-tokens, had formerly stood. The high wainscot and brocade-covered panels masking this space had been entirely burned away, disclosing a low, vaulted chamber hollowed out of the thickness of the outer wall. This chamber had been roughly and somewhat clumsily ceiled. The whole construction showed unmistakeable traces of hasty and unskilled labour.
Yet Laurence looked at this rough-hewn place of sepulture with an infinite tenderness, a chastened reverence, while a very vital emotion clutched at his throat, and far-reaching questions of life past, life future, and the august purposes of being through the abysm of the ages and on to the ultimate goal of things, held and sifted his intelligence and his heart. For it was here, upon the morning following the fire, that Agnes Rivers's coffin had been found. And it was from here, from this hard and narrow bed—by what alchemy and agency he knew not—it transcended his powers to conceive—that her sweet ghost had come forth nightly, through all those long and dreary years of which it sickened him to think, flitting impalpable, in vain endeavour to find the key to her little treasure chest, that was also the key to the love she had so pathetically lost. And it was here also, to this same hard and narrow bed, that she had returned with quick and innocently gladsome farewells in the first flush of returning day, when that love, by unprecedented circumstance—circumstance trenching on actual miracle—had been restored to her.
Viewing that harsh and meagre resting-place which for the better part of a century had held all that remained of her dear body, Laurence felt himself strangely reconciled to actual happenings. For it was better, ten thousand times better, that all now subsisting of her mortal investiture should rest in Mother Earth's lap—blessed and set apart by the faith and piety of ages as was that pleasant plot of sun-visited grass, where the little shadows danced and beckoned, in the age-old quiet of Stoke Rivers's churchyard. There he would go and watch for her possible coming, and pay her the homage of his devotion, when the small hours drew on towards to-morrow's dawn.
Meanwhile there was time to be passed, and he did not care to leave this spot, though its present desolation tore at his very vitals, with memories of incalculable promise, and of unconsummated delight. As, awakening from his dream of satisfied love long ago, during that strange former existence, in the summer noon under the light, sibilant shelter of the lime grove, so now he hungered for completeness of possession, for the crowning of desire. Yet he kept himself in hand, even as he had kept the young, brown, thorough-bred horse in hand, when, finding the level, would have broken its pace and run riot more than once on the road up from the station. He moved away and sat down on the defaced and ragged sill of the bay-window. The moon had risen, but its mild light was often obscured by softly-moving floats of thin, opalescent vapour. These crossed its face in apparently endless procession, herded up from southward and the narrow Channel sea. Laurence watched them, at first almost unconsciously, his mind occupied with other, and, to himself, more immediate and vital interests. But at length their slow and stately progress began to work upon his imagination, and insinuate itself into the very substance and foundation of his thought. He began to see in them a procession of the souls of all those generations of men and women, whose efforts and emotions, power of intellect, fiercely pursued ambitions, passionate devotions, passionate revolts, had gone to generate his own constitution, mental and physical, and determine his ultimate fate. And so he came to regard them with a sustained and deepening attention, since their aspect seemed pregnant with suggestion of admonition, of encouragement, of warning, or restraint. Once again he decided to keep vigil in this house, to watch with the unnumbered and unrecorded dead whose offspring and inheritor he was. Not until all of them should have passed by, and the moon ride solitary in the heavens, would he go across the valley—himself now somewhat bitterly solitary—and visit Agnes Rivers's grave.
But that procession of low-floating vapours proved long in passing. More than once a break came in it, making the young man suppose that the whole of them was gone by. And then again, out of the south, now one alone, now in close ranged companies, strangely shaped, as though draped in dragging shrouds, that interminable procession crossed the vault of the sky. A terror of incalculable number, of unthinkable multitude, began to lay hold on him, as still they came, and came. Was it conceivable that each human life had this almost appalling vista of human lives behind it, of which it was the outcome and result, and in which it had, consciously or unconsciously, taken part? There was a certain splendour in the thought, though it left but little room for personal vanity. Yet even while watching, and pondering of all this, the personal note remained—for he pondered also, not without profound discouragement, of his great adventure which just now appeared so signally to have failed. At the half hours and hours the striking clocks warned him that the night was far spent, but still that endless and mystic procession passed before his watching eyes. As once before, in this same room, his individuality seemed to sink away from him, while a horrible sense of his own nullity and nothingness prevailed. But at last, at last, when the first chill grey of the dawn began just perceptibly to lighten the horizon behind the lime grove, the last of these trailing vapours arose, passed over and disappeared. The moon declined towards her setting, yet, though she hung low, the whole field of heaven was at length her own.
Then Laurence rose, and went away across the quiet park and up the deep, tree-shadowed lane to the churchyard, on the hillside across the valley, sheltered by the bank of high-lying woods. The grass was long, starred with tall-growing buttercups, blue speedwell, and ox-eye daisies, heavy and hanging with wet. Only the plot beneath the grey wall of the little chancel was neatly mown, while, on the near side of it, conspicuous from the smooth surface of the turf rising immediately surrounding it, was a new-made grave. The sods covering it were kept in place by a cage of osier rods. Some one—and Laurence found it in his heart to bless that unknown ministrant—had laid a spray of pink wild-rose upon the head of the grave, twisted into a little crown, at once of blossom and of thorns.
Laurence stood at the foot of the long, narrow mound, and again he kept vigil—hearing the breathing of the moist earth, the quick sounds of the woodland, and that strange, indeterminate, stirring of awakening life—beast, bird, insect, herb, and tree—which immediately precedes the birth of day. More than once his heart thumped against his ribs, and the love-light sprang into his eyes, for, deceived by the growing colour of the east, he fancied for an instant he again beheld the dear rose-red of his fairy-lady's clinging, old-world, silken gown. But that fond delusion was soon dissipated. Wherever her light footsteps might now tread, they would never, in visible fashion, tend earthwards again.
Then on a sudden, from the stables up at the house, came the crowing of a cock, answered in gallant challenge from cottage and from farmyard—growing faint in the far distance, ringing out again close at hand, lusty and vigorous, full of the joy of living. Stung by the merry sound, Laurence straightened himself up, looked away from the osier-bound, rose-crowned grave, over the fertile, peaceful landscape. The hops hung heavy upon the poles. The corn warmed to ruddy yellow. The grass and hedgerows, as the sun's rays touched them, glittered with a thousand diamond points, even as his lost love's little, embroidered slippers had glittered when he first led her forth along the alleys of the Italian garden. A glad wind swept up landward, from that great thoroughfare of the nations, that highway of stately ships, the narrow Channel sea. It raced through the woodland, swayed the sombre, plume-like branches of the ancient yew-trees, and passed, exultant, to fulfil its cleanly, life-giving mission elsewhere. Laurence took a long breath, filling his lungs with it. It was good to taste, sane and wholesome. And then, somehow, those divine words came to him, spoken in the far Syrian country nearly two thousand years ago.—"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
Laurence stood erect and very still, his head held high, his face keen, his lips parted in silent laughter, his whole being vibrant with the surprise of a great conviction, a great discovery. For at length he too saw and understood. He perceived that his love far from being lost was his, close and intimately, as she had never been before, in either this life, or that other half-remembered life, in both of which he had loved her so well. He perceived that his amazing and desperate experiment, far from being a failure, was on a high-road to a success hitherto undreamed of. He perceived that his splendid adventure, far from being ended, had but just begun; and that, could he but keep faith with his present seeing, it would not end until he too had pushed back the heavy curtain, and finally crossed the threshold of so-called death. Nor would it end even then, were light lived in the light of this his present seeing. The future was illimitable, since the goal of it was nothing less than union with the Divine Principle itself. However innumerable the company of human lives that had gone to produce his own, his individuality was secure henceforth, since he had recognised and embraced the life which alone eternally exists and subsists—the life in, and of, God.
Five months ago, crossing the Atlantic, in the chill of the March night, while the big ship steamed eastward and the stars danced in the rigging as she sunk and swung in the trough and then rose—as a horse at a fence—at the coming wave, he had asked himself the question as to the profit of gaining the whole world, if in so doing a man should lose his own soul. All his experience since then had been a setting of that vital question at rest for ever. For he had found his soul. The matter was simply to the point of laughter, when once apprehended. In bidding him farewell, his sweet companion had promised him that she and he would at last be made one, being one with Almighty God. He had heard that as he might mere rhetoric, idle though pretty words, placing it in some unimaginable future, his mind still in bondage to human conception of time and space. Now he beheld this consummation as already accomplished, immediately present, constant, here, now, permanent. All that it needed was just an attitude and habit of mind, and then work. Work, not so much for any great benefit derivable by others from that work (though the desire of the welfare of others must be a fundamental element in that work); but for the maintenance of the said all-important attitude and habit of mind in himself. Almost any work would do. There was his property; and, happily, sufficient of the feudal idea still remains in England to make the possession of a great landed-estate fruitful in humane relations between class and class. There was the dear earth, too, to till and sow, and render more fertile, and more useful to man. There were politics and public affairs. In the light of his present illumination he dare approach these things, strong to carve out a career for himself, yet for ever keeping his secret against his heart. Salvation is for the individual, each individual must find it for him or herself. Souls cannot be saved in batches. But to each and all it may, and will, come, if they have courage, and fortitude, and the single eye which refuses illusion.
"And so farewell, yet never farewell, my first, and last, and only love," he said, looking at the osier-bound grave, while the shadows of the feathery yew-trees danced and beckoned upon the churchyard grass. "There have been partings before, cruel to be born; there may be partings again, but they will be transitory. I am not afraid that I shall ever lose you, or you me. I am secure in that. Meanwhile for your sake, O dear soul of me—for so indeed you are—I will make the best use of the years I may still have to live here on earth. And since you once were woman, no woman shall ever suffer at my hands—all womanhood being sacred thenceforth since you once were woman.—Now the work of the world calls, and, God helping me, I will help to do it. After all, dear love, we go forth together,—amen."
There are things Virginia does not quite comprehend in her husband. She tells the Van Reenan family, that "the English character is very obscure." But she has had no more dramatic moments in respect of that character. She pays a long visit yearly to "the other side," and is as popular as ever. On this side too she has had her social triumphs. The yellow drawing-room at Stoke Rivers has been rebuilt, but Laurence keeps it for his own use. He has moved the books into it from the libraries, thus giving Virginia a large suite of rooms for social entertainments. Lately, when the red flame of war threatened the integrity of the British Empire, Laurence went south; and for a time lived that larger life—in which woman takes her place, perhaps her safest one, as a hope or a memory merely—the life a man lives among men. Jack Bellingham volunteered also. He thinks Laurence a better fellow than ever; yet is perplexed at moments as to whether he has, or has not, developed—like so many of his family—into a thorough-paced crank.
THE WAGES OF SINTHE CARISSIMAMRS. LORIMERA COUNSEL OF PERFECTIONCOLONEL ENDERBY'S WIFELITTLE PETER
THE WAGES OF SINTHE CARISSIMAMRS. LORIMERA COUNSEL OF PERFECTIONCOLONEL ENDERBY'S WIFELITTLE PETER