As soon as the hall door banged Maurice looked up at Lily.
"Poor, dear father," she murmured.
"I am glad," Maurice said abruptly.
The remark might have been called rude, but it was so simply made that it had the dignity belonging to any statement of plain truth. Neither rude nor polite, it was merely a cry of fact from an overburdened human soul. Lily felt that the words were forced from the young doctor by some strange agitation that fought to find expression.
"You wish—you wish—" she began.
Then she stopped. The flood of expression that welled up in her companion's face frightened her. She trembled at the thought of the hidden thing, the force, that could loose such a sea.
"What is it?" she said like a schoolgirl—or so, a moment afterwards, she feared.
"I ought not to tell you," Maurice said, "I ought not, but I must—I must."
He had got up and was standing before her. His back was to the fire, and a shadow was over his face.
"I want to tell you. You have made me want to. Why is that?"
He spoke as if he were questioning his own intellect for the reason, not asking it of her. And she did not try to answer his question.
"I suppose," he continued, "it is because you are the only human being who has partially understoodthat there is something with me that sets me apart from all my kind, from all the others."
"With you?" Lily said.
She felt horribly frightened and yet strong and earnest.
"Yes, with me," he answered. "I told you that I was a haunted man. Miss Alston, can you, will you bear to hear what it is that is with me, and why it comes. It is a story that, perhaps, your father might forbid you to read. I don't know. And, if it was fiction, perhaps he would be right. But—but—I think—I wonder—you might help me. I can't see how, but—I feel—"
He faltered suddenly, and seemed for the first time to become self-conscious and confused.
"Tell me, please," Lily said.
She felt rather as if she were beginning to read some strange French story by night. Maurice still stood on the hearth.
"It is a sound that is with me," he said. "Only that; never anything else but that."
"A sound," she repeated.
She thought of their conversation about the bells.
"Yes, it is a cry—the cry of a child."
"Yes?"
"That's nothing—you think? Absurd for a man to heed such a trifle?"
"Why do you think it comes?"
Maurice hesitated. His eyes searched the face of the little girl with an almost hard gaze of scrutiny,as if he were trying to sum up the details of her nature.
"Long ago—before I came here, before I was qualified, I was cruel, bitterly cruel to a child," he said at last, speaking now very coldly and distinctly.
His eyes were on Lily. Had she made just then any movement of horror or of disgust, had an expression betokening fear of him come into her eyes, Maurice knew that his lips would be sealed, that he would bid her good-night and leave her. But she only looked more intent, more expectant. He went on.
"I was bitterly cruel to my own child," he said.
Then Lily moved suddenly. Maurice thought she was going to start up. If she had intended to she choked the impulse. Was she shocked? He could not tell. She had turned her face away from him. He wondered why, but he did not know that those last words had given to Lily an abrupt and fiery insight into the depths of her heart.
"At that time," Maurice said, still speaking very distinctly and quietly, "I was desperately ambitious. I was bitten by the viper whose poison, stealing through all a man's veins, is emulation. My only desire, my only aim in life was to beat all the men of my year, to astonish all the authorities of the hospital to which I was attached by the brilliance of my attainments and my achievements, I was ambition incarnate, and suchmad ambition is the most cruel thing in the world. And my child interfered with my ambition. It cried, how it cried!"
He was becoming less definitely calm.
"It cried through my dreams, my thoughts, my endeavours, my determinations. Do you know what a weapon a sound can be, Miss Alston? Perhaps not. A sound can be like a sword and pierce you, like a bludgeon and strike you down. A little sound can nestle in your life, and change all the colour and all the meaning of it. The cry of the living child was terrible to me, I thought then. But—then—I had never heard the cry of the dead child. You see I wanted to forget something. And the tiny cry of the child recalled it. There were no words in the cry, and yet there were words,—so it seemed to me—telling over a past history. This history—well, I want to say to you—"
Lily had now put a guard on watch over against her impulsive nature. When Maurice stopped speaking she was able to look towards him again and murmur:
"Say all you want to."
"Thank you," he said, almost eagerly. "If you knew—Miss Alston, before this time, when I was a very young student, I had fallen into one of the most fatal confusions of youth. I had made a mistake as to the greatest need of my own nature. I had, for a flash of time, thought my greatest need was love."
"And it wasn't," the girl said, with a note of wonder in her voice.
"No, it was success, to outstrip my fellows. But I thought it was love, and I followed my thought and I sacrificed another to my thought. My child's mother died almost in giving her to me, and, in dying, made me promise to keep the child always with me. I kept that promise. I was a young student, very poor. My love had been secret. Now I was alone with this helpless child. I left my own lodgings and took others. I brought it there, and its presence obliged me to shut my doors against my own family and against my friends. To keep the door shut I put forward the excuse of my ambition. I said that I was giving myself up to work and I shut myself in with the child. I was its nurse as well as its father. I thought I should be sufficient for it. But it missed—her, whom I scarcely missed."
"You had not loved her?"
Maurice bent his head.
"I had made a mistake, as I said. I had only thought so. Long before she died I had almost hated her for crippling my ambition. She was swept out of my path. But the child was left crying for her."
"Yes. I know."
"Its wail came eternally between me and my great desire. When I sat down to work the sound—which I could not quiet—perplexed my brain. When I lay down to get, in sleep, powerfor fresh work, it struck through my dreams. I heard it when the stars were out over London, and in the dawn, when from my lodging windows I could see the first light on the Thames. Miss Alston, at last it maddened me."
Lily was pale. She scarcely knew of what she was expectant.
"I had tried to comfort the child. I had failed. Now I determined to forget it, to shut it out from my working life. At last, by force of will, I almost succeeded. I read, I wrote, I analysed the causes of disease, the results of certain treatments as opposed to the results of others. And sometimes I no longer heard my child, no longer knew whether it wailed and wept or whether it was silent. But one evening—"
Maurice stopped. His face was very white and his eyes burned with excitement.
"One evening," he repeated, speaking almost with difficulty, and with the obstinate note in his voice of one telling a secret half against his will and better judgement, "I could not work. The wail of the child was so loud, so alarmed, so full of a fear that seemed to my imagination intelligent, and based on a knowledge of something I did not know, that my professional instinct was aroused. At first I listened, sitting at my writing table. Then I got up and softly approached the folding doors. Beyond them, in the dark, the child lamented like one to whom a nameless horror draws near. Never had I known it toweep like this; for this was no cry after a mother, no cry of desire, no cry even of sorrow. It was a half-strangled scream of terror, I did not go into the room, but as I listened, I knew—"
He faltered.
"Yes," Lily said.
"As I listened I knew what the cry meant. Miss Alston, is it not strange that even a baby who scarcely knows life knows so well—death?"
"Death!"
"Yes, recognises its coming, shrinks from it, fears it with the terror of a clear intelligence. Is it not very strange?"
"Death!" Lily repeated.
She too was pale. Maurice continued in a low voice.
"I understood the meaning of the cry, and I did not enter the inner room. No, I walked back to my writing table, put my hands over my ears—to deaden the cry—and gave myself again to work. How long I worked I don't know, but presently I heard a loud knocking at the door of my room. I sprang up and opened it. My landlady stood outside.
"'What do you want?' I asked.
"The good woman's face was grave.
"'Sir, I know that child must be ill,' she said.
"'Ill—why? What do you mean?'
"'Oh, sir, its crying is awful. It goes right through me.'
"I pushed the woman out almost roughly.
"'It is not ill,' I said. 'It is only restless. Leave me. Don't you see I am working?'
"And I shut the door sharply. I sat down again at my table and toiled till dawn. I remember that dawn so well. At last my brain had utterly tired. I could work no longer. I pushed away my papers and got up. The room was misty—so I thought—with a flickering grey light. The dirty white blind was drawn half up. I looked out over the river, and from it I heard the dull shout of a man on a black barge. This shout recalled to me my child and the noise of its lament. I listened. All was silent. There was no murmur from the inner room. And then I remember that suddenly the silence, for which I had so often longed and prayed, frightened me. It seemed full of a dreadful meaning. I waited a moment. Then I walked softly across the room to the folding doors. They were closed, I opened them furtively and looked into the bedroom. It was nearly dark. Approaching the bed I could scarcely discern the tiny white heap which marked where the child lay among the tumbled bedclothes. I bent down to listen to the sound of its breathing. I could not hear the sound. Then I caught the child in my arms and carried it over to the sitting-room window so that the dawn might strike upon its little face. The face was discoloured. The heart was not beating. Miss Alston, while I worked, my child had died in a convulsion. It had striven against death, poorfeeble baby, and had had no help from its father. My medical skill might have eased its sufferings. Might have saved it. But I had deliberately closed my ears to its appeal for love, for assistance. I had let it go. I should never hear it again."
Maurice had spoken the last words with excitement. Now he paused. With an obvious effort he controlled himself and added calmly:
"I buried my child and gave myself again to work. My examination was close at hand. I passed it brilliantly. But I shuddered at my success. Those lodgings by the river had become horrible to me. I left them, took a practice in a remote Cumberland valley, and withdrew myself from the world, from all who had known me. In this retirement, however, I had a companion of whose presence at first I was unaware. The dead child followed me, the child of whom now I feel myself to have been the murderer."
"No—no—not that!" Lily whispered. But he did not seem to hear her.
"One night," he continued, "in my lonely house in the valley I was awakened by some sound. I sat up in bed and listened. All was black around me, and at first all was quiet too. I lay down again to sleep. But as I touched the pillow I heard a faint murmur that seemed to come from far away. I said to myself that it was a fancy of my mind but again it came. Then I thought it was the wind caught in some cranny of my house. I opened my window and leanedout. But there was no wind in the trees. What was the noise then? The cry of a bird perhaps. Yes, it must be that. Yet did any note of a bird have a thrill of pain in it? I hurried on some clothes and let myself out into the garden. I would hear that bird again. I would convince myself of its presence. But in the garden I could hear nothing save the thin murmur of the stream that threaded the valley. So I returned to the house, and at the door I was greeted by a little cry from within. Miss Alston, it was the cry of my dead child, full of pain and of eternal reproach. I shut the door, closing myself in with my fate, and since that night I have been a haunted man. Scarcely a day has passed since then, scarcely a night has gone by without my hearing that appeal for help which once I disregarded, which now I can never reply to. I fled from the valley, in a vain hope of leaving that voice behind me. I came here. But the child's spirit is here too. It is forever with me."
He stopped abruptly, then he added, "I can even hear it now, while I look at you, while I touch your hand."
His burning eyes were fixed on Lily's face. His burning hand closed on hers as if seeking assistance.
"What am I to do?" he said, and for the first time his voice broke and failed.
"Pray!" she whispered.
"I have prayed. But God forgives only thosewho reverse their evil acts. Mine can never be reversed. I can never be kind to my child to whom I have been bitterly cruel. There is no help for me, none. Yet I had a feeling that—that you might help me."
"If I could!" the girl cried with a blaze of sudden eagerness. Her heart leaped up at the words, leaped up from its depth of pity for Maurice to a height of almost fiery enthusiasm.
"But how?" he said.
Then his face hardened and grew stern.
"No," he said, "there can be no help for me, none in this world."
The drawing-room door opened and the Canon appeared.
"Miss Bigelow has not died for the thirteenth time," he said, coming up to the fire.
When the Canon kissed his daughter that night, after Maurice Dale had gone home, he seemed struck by a new expression in her face.
"Why, how excited you look, child!" he said, "what is it?"
But Lily returned his kiss hastily and ran away without a word. Once in her room she locked the door—for no reason except that she must mark the night by some unwonted action—put on her dressing-gown and threw herself down on her bed. Her mind was alive with thoughts. Her imagination was in flames. For so much had come upon her that evening. In the first place she understood that she loved Maurice. Sheknew that, when he spoke the words, "My child," and jealousy of an unknown woman struck like some sharp weapon to her heart. She realised that he did not love her, yet so great was her simple unselfishness, that she did not dwell on the knowledge, or blame for an instant the selfishness which concentrated Maurice's mind so entirely upon himself and his own sorrow. Her only anxiety was how to help him. Her only feeling was one of tender pity for his agony. And yet, for Lily was a girl of many fancies and full of the wilful side-thoughts of women, she found room in her nature for a highflown sense of personal romance which now wrapped her round in a certain luxury of complacency. She moved in a strange story that was true, a story that she might have read with a quickening of the pulses. She and Maurice, whom she loved, moved in it together heroine and hero of it. And none knew the story but themselves. And then she burst into silent tears, calling herself cruel for having this moment of half joy in the tragedy of another. She pushed down into the depths of Maurice's misery. And then, with a clearer mind, she sat up on the bed. It was dead of night now. Was he listening in the silence to that haunting cry that was destroying him? She wondered breathlessly. And she recalled the conversation about "The Bells." Was Mathias truly haunted? or was he mad? She asked herself that, putting Maurice eventually behind footlights in his place. Wasthere really a veritable cry, allowed to come out of the other world to Maurice? or did his diseased brain work out his retribution? She could not tell. Indeed she scarcely cared just then. In either event, the result upon him was the same and was terrible. In either event, the outcome might be what she dared not name even to herself. And, though he did not love her, he turned to her for help. Lily flushed in the thought of this. Almost more than if she had his heart it seemed to have his cry for assistance. She must answer it effectually. She must. But how? And then she sprang up and began to pace the room. How to help him. Slowly, and with a minute examination, she went in memory through his story, with its egoism, its cruelty, its ambition, its punishment, its childlike helplessness of to-night, and of many nights. She recalled each word that he had spoken until she came to almost the last, "I have prayed. But God forgives only those who reverse their evil acts. Mine can never be reversed. I can never be kind to my child—" Just there she stopped. Maurice's words flew against what Lily's religion taught her of the Great Being who can pardon simply and fully so long only as the sinner entirely and deeply repents. But she accepted them as true for Maurice. There was the point to be faced. She felt that his nature, haunted indeed or betrayed by its own weakness, but still loved by her, could only be restored to peace if he could fulfil the impossible, reverse—as heexpressed it—that act of his past. Ah, that cry of the little dying, helpless child, of his little child. Lily could almost hear it too, the tears came into her eyes. How could she still it? How could she lay the little spirit to rest forever? Peace for child, peace for father, sinned against and sinner—she felt she would gladly sacrifice her own life, her own peace, to work the miracle of comfort on dead and living. Yes, she could give up her love,—if—. Suddenly Lily threw herself down on her bed and buried her burning face deep in the pillows. A thought had come to her, so strange that she wondered whether it were not wicked. The hot red colour surged over her with this thought, and all the woman in her quivered as she asked herself whether, in this life of sorrows and of abnegations, it could ever be that the grief and the terror of another could be swept away by one who, in the endeavour to bring solace, must obtain intense personal happiness. In books it is ever self-sacrifice that purges and persuades, martyrdom of the senses that renews and relieves. Lily was ready indeed to be a martyr for the man she loved. But the strange way she saw of being his possible saviour lay only in a light of the sun forever on herself.
She wept and saw the light, herself and Maurice walking in it together, till the church bell chimed in the morning, and the tide came up in the sunshine to murmur that it was day.
Maurice Dale was puzzled. He noticed a change in Lily so marked that even his self-centred nature could not fail to observe it. This girl, whom he had thought pretty, fanciful, tenderhearted and gently sympathetic, who had attracted his confession by her quick and feminine receptiveness, now seemed developed into a woman of strength and purpose, full of calm and of dignity. Her shining eyes were more steadfast than of old, her manner was less changeful, less enthusiastic, but more reliant. Brayfield wondered what had come to Miss Alston. Maurice wondered too, dating the transformation accurately from the night when he unburdened his soul in search of the help, which, after all, no human being could give to him. It was strange, he thought, that a man's terror, a man's weakness, should endow a weak girl with confidence and with power. It was too strange, and he laughed at himself for supposing that he had anything to do with the new manifestation of Lily's nature. Nevertheless she began to attract him more than he had believed possible. The nightmare in which his life was encircled grew less real when he was with her. There was virtue in her that went out to him. He came to desire always to be with her and yet he could not say to himself that he loved her with the passion of man for woman. Rather was the desire that he felt for her like that of a criminal towards a place of refuge, of a coward towards an asylum of safety. Sometimes helonged that she might share his trouble, selfishly longed that in her ears might ring the cry of pain that tormented his.
One day, when they were together on a down that overlooked the sea, he told her this.
"I wish it too," she answered softly.
"You are all unselfishness, as I am all selfishness," he said, condemning himself, and nearer to loving her than ever before.
The sails went by along the wintry sea, and the short afternoon faded quickly into a twilight that was cold in its beauty like a pale primrose in frost. They were descending slowly towards the little town that lay beneath them in the shadows.
"I have no voice to trouble my life,—no dead voice, that is," Lily said.
"No dead voice?" Maurice asked. "And the living?"
"Oh, in most lives there is some one voice that means almost too much," Lily answered slowly.
Maurice stopped.
"Whose voice means so much to you?" he said.
"Why do you care to ask?"
"Is it mine?"
The girl had stopped too. Her face was set towards the sea and its great sincerity, which murmurs against the lies and the deceptions of many lives that defile the land, and takes so manymore to itself that they may persist no longer in their evil doing. And perhaps it was her vision of the sea that swept from Lily any desire to be a coquette, or to be maidenly,—that is, false. She looked from the sea into Maurice's eyes.
"Yes," she answered. "It is yours."
"You love me then, Lily?"
"Yes, I love you, Maurice."
There was no tremor in her voice. There was no shame in her eyes. Alone in her chamber on the night of Maurice's confession she had flushed and trembled. Now she stood before him and made this great acknowledgement simply and fearlessly. And yet she knew that he did not love her with the desire of man to the woman whom he chooses out of the world to be his companion. She was moved by a resolve that was very great to ignore all that girls think most of at such a moment. Maurice took a step towards her. How true and how strong she looked.
"I dare not ask you to share my life," he said. "It is too shadowed, too sad. I have not the right."
"If you will ask me, I will share it."
She put her hand into his. He felt as if her soul lay in it. They walked on. Already the evening was dark around them.
Canon Alston was a little surprised, merely because he was a father, and fathers are always a little surprised when men love their children.But he liked Maurice heartily and gave his consent to the marriage. Miss Bigelow ordered a valuable wedding-present, and resolved to live until over the marriage day at least. And Brayfield gossiped and gloried in possessing a legitimate cause for excitement.
As for Lily, she was strangely happy with a happiness far different from that of the usual betrothed young girl. She loved Maurice deeply. Nevertheless she did not blind herself to the fact that he was still unhappy, restless, self-engrossed and often terror-stricken, although he tried to appear more confident than of old, and to assume a gaiety suitable to his situation in the eyes of the world. She knew he could never be entirely free to love so long as the cry of the child rang in his ears. And he told her that, strangely enough, since their engagement it had become more importunate. Once he even tried to break their contract.
"I cannot link my life with another's," he said desperately. "Who knows—when you are one with me, you may be haunted as I am. That would be too horrible."
It was a flash of real and heartfelt unselfishness. Lily felt herself thrill with gratitude. But she only said:
"I am not afraid."
On another occasion—this was about a month after they became engaged—Maurice said:
"Lily, when shall we be married?"
She glanced up at him, and saw that he was paler even than usual, and that his face looked drawn with fatigue.
"Whenever you wish," she answered.
"Let it be soon," he said. And then he broke out almost despairingly:
"I cannot bear this much longer. Lily, what can it mean? There is something too strange. Ever since you and I have been betrothed the curse that is laid upon me has been heavier, the cry of the child has been more incessantly with me. I hear it more plainly. It is nearer to me. It is close to me. In the night sometimes I start up thinking the child is even beside me on the pillow, complaining to me in the darkness. I stretch out my hand. I feel for its little body. But there is nothing—nothing but that cry of fear, of pain, of eternal reproach. Why does the spirit persecute me now as it never persecuted me before? Is it because it believes that you will make me happier? Is it because it wishes to deny me all earthly joy? Sometimes I think that, once we are actually husband and wife the cry will die away. Sometimes I think that then it will never leave me even for a moment. If that were so, Lily, I should die, or I should lose my reason."
He covered his face with his hands. He was trembling. Lily put her soft hand against his hands. A great light had come into her eyes as he spoke.
"Let us be married, Maurice," she said. "Perhaps the little child wants me."
He looked up at her and his dark eyes seemed to pierce her, hungry for help.
"Wants you?" he said. "How can that be? No, no. It cries against my thought of happiness, against my desire for peace."
"We must give it peace. We must lay it to rest."
"No one can do that. If I have not the power to redeem my deed of wickedness, how can you, how can any one living redeem it for me?"
Lily looked away from him. Her cheeks were burning with a blush. A tingling fire seemed to run through all her veins and her pulses beat.
"There is some way of redemption for every one," she said.
But he answered gloomily:
"Your religion teaches you to say that, Lily, perhaps to believe it. But there is no way. The dead cannot return to earth that we may give them tenderness instead of our former cruelty. No—no!"
"Maurice—trust me. Let us be married—soon."
That night, before she went to bed, Lily knelt down and prayed until the night was old. She asked what thousands of women have asked since the world was young. But surely never woman before had so strange a reason for her request. And when at length she rose from her knees shefelt that time must bring the gift she had prayed for, unselfishly, and with her whole heart.
A month afterwards, on a bright spring morning, Maurice and Lily were married. It was a great occasion for Brayfield. The church was elaborately decorated by the many young ladies who had secretly longed to be the brides of the interesting doctor. Crowds assembled within and without the building. Miss Bigelow rose from her fourteenth death-bed in a purple satin gown and a bonnet prodigious with feathers and testified to the possibility of modern resurrection in a front pew. Flowers, rice, wedding marches filled the air. But people remarked that the bridegroom looked like a man who went in fear. Even when he was on the doorstep of the church in the throng of curious sightseers he moved almost as one whom a dream attends, who sees the pale figures, who hears the faint voices that inhabit and make musical a vision of the night. The bride too, had no radiant air of a young girl fulfilling her girlish destiny and giving herself up to a protector, to one stronger, more able to fight the world than a woman who loves and fears. Her face, too, was pale and grave, even—some thought—a little stern. As she passed up the church she glanced at no one, smiled at no friend. Her eyes were set steadfastly towards the altar where Maurice waited. And when, after the ceremony, she came down the church to the sound of music her eyes were fixed on herhusband. She took no heed of any one else, for her hand pressed upon his arm, felt that he was trembling. And her ears seemed to hear through all the jubilant music, through all the murmur of the gazing crowd, a cry, far away, yet more distinct than any sound of earth, thin, piercing, full of appeal to her—the spirit-cry of the child.
Thehoneymoon of Lily and Maurice was short, and many would have called it sad, could they have known how different it was from the marriage holiday of most young couples. Maurice had looked forward to the wedding as a desperate man looks forward to a new point of departure in his life. He had fixed all his hopes of possible peace upon it. He had dated new days of calm, if not of brightness, from it. He had sometimes vaguely, sometimes desperately, looked to it as to a miracle day, on which—how or why he knew not—the shadow would be lifted from his life. The man who is doomed to death has a moment of acute expectation when some new doctor places him under a fresh mode of treatment. For a few days the increased vitality of his anxious mind sheds a dawn of apparent life through his body. But the mind collapses. The dawn fades. The darkness increases, death steals on. So it was with Maurice. Immediately after the wedding, Lily noticed that he fell into a strangely watchful condition of abstraction. Hewas full of tenderness to her, full of cares for her comfort, but even in his moments of obvious solicitude he seemed to be on the alert to catch the stir of some remote activity, or to be listening for the sound of some distant voice. His own fate engrossed him even in this first period of novel companionship with another soul. The monomania of the haunted man gripped him and would not release him. He thought of Lily, but he thought more, and with a deeper passion, of himself.
The girl divined this, but she did not for an instant rebel. She had set up a beautiful unselfishness in her heart and had consecrated it. Purpose does much for a woman, helps her sometimes to rise higher than perhaps man can ever rise, to the pale and vacant peaks of an inactive martyrdom. And Lily was full of a passion of purpose known only to herself. She loved Maurice not merely as a girl loves a man, but also as the protective woman loves the being dependent upon her. His secret was hers, but hers was not his. She had her beautiful loneliness of silent hope, and that sustained her.
They went away together. In the train Maurice said to her suddenly, with a sort of blaze of hungry eagerness:
"Lily—Lily—to-day there is a silence for me. Oh, Lily, if you have brought me silence."
He seized her hand and his was hot like fire.
"Will it last—can it last?" he whispered.
And he glanced all round the carriage like one anticipating an answer to his question from some unknown quarter, then he said:
"The noise of the train is so loud, perhaps—"
"Hush!" Lily said. "Don't fight your own peace, Maurice."
"Fight it—no, but I can scarcely believe in it. Lately the—it has been so ceaseless, so poignant. Lily, I have had a fancy that you alone could be my saviour. If it is so! Ah, but how can that be?"
She gave him a strange answer.
"Maurice," she said, "it may be so, but do not despair if the cry comes again."
"What!" he exclaimed almost fiercely, "you—do you hear it then?"
"No, no, but it may come."
"It shall not. The silence is so beautiful."
He put his arms around her. The tears had sprung into his eyes.
"How weak I am," he said, with a fury against his own condition, "you must despise me."
"I love you," she said.
He looked at her with a creeping astonishment.
"I wonder why," he said, slowly. "How can you love a man who has been so miserable that he has almost ceased to be a man?"
"I love even your misery. Don't think me selfish, Maurice. But it was your sorrow, you see, that first taught you to think of me."
He leaned from her suddenly towards the window which was open and pulled it sharply up.
"Why do you do that?" Lily said quickly.
"One hears such noises in the air when one travels at this speed," he answered. "With the window down one might fancy anything. I must shut out fancy. There are voices in the wind that passes, in the rustling woods that we rush through. I won't hear them."
The train sped on.
Their destination was an inland village set in the midst of a rolling purple moor, isolated in a heather-clad gold of the land, distant from the sea, distant from the murmur of modern life; a sleepy, self-contented and serene abode of quiet women and ruminant men, living, loving, and dying with a greater calm than often pervades our modern life. A lazy divinity seemed to preside over the place, in spring-time at least. Men strolled about their work as if Time waited on them, not they on Time. The children—so Maurice thought—played more drowsily than the children of towns. The youths were contemplative. Even the girls often forgot to giggle as they thought of wedding rings and Sunday love-making. Little dogs lay blinking before the low-browed doors of the cottages, and cats reposed upon the garden walls round-eyed in sober dreams. If Maurice sought a home of silence surely he had it here. Lily and he put up at a small inn on the skirt of the village and facingthe rippling emptiness of the moor. Before going to bed they stepped out into the night and the wide air. Stars were bright in the sky. Cottage lights twinkled here and there behind them in the village. They heard a stream running away into the heart of the long solitude that lay beyond them. Lily was very quiet. Her heart was full. Thoughts, strange and beautiful, overflowed in her mind. She felt just then how much bigger the human soul is than the human body, how much stronger the prisoner is than the prison in which nevertheless it is dedicated to dwell for a time. Her hand just touched the arm of Maurice as she looked across the soft darkness of the moor. He, too, felt curiously happy and safe. Taking off his cap he passed his hand over his hair.
"Lily," he said, "peace is here for me, in this place with you. My brain has been playing me tricks because I have been so much alone, the devil dwells in a man's loneliness. Listen to the silence of these moors. What a music it is!"
The lights in the cottages were extinguished one by one, as bed claimed their owners. But Maurice and Lily, sitting on the dry fringe of the heather, remained out under the stars. Her hand lay in his and suddenly she felt his quiver.
"What is it, Maurice?" she asked.
He got up and made a step forward.
"Lily," he said, "there is—there must be some one near us, a child lost on the moor, or forgotten by its mother. I hear it crying close tous. Say you hear it too. No, no, it is not the old sound. Don't think that. It can't be. There's a natural explanation of this—I'll swear there is. Come with me."
He pulled her hastily up and pressed forward some steps, stumbling among the bushes. Then he stopped, listening.
"It is somewhere just here, by us," he said. "I must see. Wait a moment. I'll strike a light."
He drew out his match-box and struck a match, protecting the tiny flame between his hands. Then he bent down, searching the uneven ground at their feet. The flame went out.
"I wish I had a lantern," he muttered.
"Maurice," Lily said, "let us go back to the inn."
"What! and leave this child out here in the night. I tell you there is a child crying near us."
He spoke almost angrily.
"Let us go back, Maurice."
He stood for a moment as if uncertain.
"You think—" he began, then he stopped. She took his hand and led him towards the village in silence. As they reached the inn door, the faint light from the coffee-room encircled them. Maurice was white to the lips. He looked at Lily without speaking, and he was trembling.
"Wasn't there anything?" he whispered. "Is it here too? Can't you keep it away?"
Lily said nothing. She opened the inn door. Maurice stepped into the passage, heavily, almost like a drunken man. And this was the first night of their honeymoon.
The incident of the moor threw Maurice back into the old misery from which he had emerged for a brief moment, and, indeed, plunged him into an abyss of despair such as he had never known before. For now he had sincerely hoped for salvation, and his hope had been frustrated. He had clung to a belief that Lily's love, Lily's companionship might avail to rescue him from the phantom, or the reality, that was destroying his power, shattering his manhood. The belief was dashed from him, and he sank deeper in the sea of terror. They stayed on for a while in this Sleepy Hollow, but Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was, cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it, making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world, became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded more horrible in solitude.
"I cannot stay here," he said to Lily. "Let us go back. I will take up my work again. I will try to throw myself into it as I did when I was a student. I shut out the living cry then, I will shut out the dead cry now. For you—you cannot help me."
He looked at her while he spoke almost contemptuously, almost as one looks at some woman whose courage or whose faith one has tried and found wanting.
"You cannot help me," he repeated.
Secretly he felt a cruel desire to sting Lily into passion, to rouse her to some demonstration of anger against his cowardice in thus taunting her love and devotion. But she said nothing, only looked at him with eyes that had become strangely steadfast, and full of the quiet light of a great calm and patience.
"D'you say nothing?" he said.
"If you wish to go, Maurice, let us go."
He had got up and was standing by the low window that looked across the moor.
"Don't you see," he said, "that I am going mad in this place? And you do nothing. Why did I ever think that you could help me?"
"Try to think so still."
She, too, got up, followed him to the window and put her two hands on his shoulders.
"Perhaps the time has not come yet," she said.
Suddenly he took her hands in his and pushed her a little way from him, so that he could look clearly into her face.
"What do you mean? What can you mean?" he said. "Sometimes I think you have some secret that you keep from me, some purpose that I know nothing of. You look as if—as if you were waiting for something; were expectant; I don'tknow—" he broke off, "After all what does it matter? Only let us go from here. Let us get home. I hate that stretch of moorland. At night it is full of bewailing and misery."
He shuddered although the warm spring sunshine was pouring in at the window. Then he turned and left the room without another word. Lily stood still for a moment, with her eyes turned in the direction of the door. Her cheeks burned with a slight blush and her lips were half opened.
"If he only knew what I am waiting for!" she murmured to herself. "Will it ever come?"
She sank down on the broad, old-fashioned window seat, and leaned her cheek against the leaded panes of glass. The bees were humming outside. She listened to their music. It was dull and dreamy, heavy like a golden noon in summer time. And then the white lids fell over her eyes, and the hum of the bees faded from her ears, and she heard another music that made her woman's heart leap up, she heard the first tiny murmur of a new-born child.
It was sweeter than the hum of bees. It was sweeter than the soul the lute gave up to the ears of Nature when Orpheus touched the strings. It was so sweet that tears came stealing from under Lily's eyelids and dropped down upon her clasped hands. She sat there motionless till the twilight came over the moor, and Maurice entered, white and weary, to ask impatiently of what she was dreaming.
As Maurice wished it, they returned the next day to Brayfield and settled into the house that was to be their home. It stood on a low cliff overlooking the sea; a broad green lawn, on which during the season a band played and people promenaded, lay in front of it. Beyond, the waves danced in the sunshine. The situation of the house was almost absurdly cheerful, and the house itself was new and prettily furnished. But the life into which Lily entered was strangely at variance with the surroundings, strangely antagonistic to the brightness of the sea, the sweetness of the air, the holiday gaiety that pervaded the little town in the summer. For work did not abolish, did not even lull the sound of the voice that pursued Maurice with an inexorable persistence. It was obvious that on his return home after the honeymoon, he made a tremendous effort to get the better of his enemy. He called up all his manhood, all his strength of character. He refused to hear the voice. When it cried in his ears, he went to sit with Lily, and plunged into conversation on subjects that interested them both. He made her play to him, or sing to him in the twilight. He read aloud to her. This was at night. By day he worked unremittingly. When he was not driving to see patients he laboured to increase his knowledge of medicine. He pursued the most subtle investigations into the causes of obscure diseases, and specially directed his enquiries towards the pathology ofthe brain. He analysed the multitudinous developments of madness and traced them back to their beginnings; and when, as was often the case, he discovered that the mad man or woman whose malady was laid bare to him had inherited this curse of humanity, he smiled with a momentary thrill of joy. His ancestors on both sides of the family had been sane. Yet one of the commonest, most invariable delusions of the insane was the imaginary idea that they were pursued by voices, ordering them to do this or that, suggesting crimes to them or weeping in their ears over some tragedy of the past. Maurice knew that the mind which does not inherit a legacy of insanity may yet be overturned by some terrible incident, by a great shock, or by an unexpected bereavement. But surely such a mind would be aware of its transformation, even as a man who, from an accident, becomes disfigured is aware of the alteration of his face from beauty to desolation. Maurice was not aware that his mind had been transformed. Deliberately, calmly, he asked himself, "Am I insane?" Deliberately, calmly, his soul answered, "No." Yet the cry of the child rang in his ears, pursued his goings out and comings in, filled his days with lamentation, and his nights with horror.
Then, leaving the subject of madness, Maurice began to institute a close investigation into the subject of alleged hauntings of human beings by apparitions and by sounds. He read of the actress, whose lover, who had slain himself in despair at her cruelty, remained for everwith her, manifesting his presence, although invisible, by cries, curses, and clappings of the hands. He read of the clergyman who was haunted by the footsteps of his murdered sweetheart, which even ascended the pulpit stairs behind him, and pattered furtively about him when he knelt to pray for pardon of his sin. He filled his mind with visionary terrors, but they seemed remote or even ridiculous to him, and he said to himself that they were the clever inventions of imaginative people. They were worked up. They were moulded into conventional stories. They pleased the magazines of their time. He alone was really haunted of all men in the world, so far as he knew. And then a great and greedy desire came upon him to meet some other man in a like case, to hear from live lips the true and undecorated history of a despair like his own, one of those bald and terse narratives which pierce the imagination of the hearer like a sword, with no tinselled scabbard of exaggeration and of lies. He wondered whether upon the earth a man walked in a darkness similar to that which fell round him like a veil. He wondered whether he was unique, even as he felt. Sometimes he caught himself looking furtively at a harmless stranger, a bright girl tanned by the sea, or a lad just back from a fishing excursion to Raynor's Bay, and saying to himself low and drearily: "Does any spirit trouble you, I wonder? Does any spirit cry to you in the night?" But neitherhis work, his excursions of the imagination, nor the presence of Lily in his house, availed to cleanse the life of Maurice from the stain of sound, that ever widened and spread upon it. He fought for freedom for a while, strenuously, with all his heart and soul. But the lost battle left him with his energies exhausted, his courage broken. One night he said to Lily:
"Do you know all I have been doing since we came back here?"
"Yes, Maurice, I know."
"And that it has all been in vain," he said, with a passion of bitterness that he could not try to conceal.
"That too I understand, Maurice—I knew it would be in vain."
He looked at her almost as at an enemy, for his heart was so full of misery, his mind was so worn with weariness, that he began to lose the true appreciation of human relations, and to confuse the beauty near him with the ugliness that companioned him so closely.
"You knew it? What do you mean?" he said. "How could you know it?"
"I felt it, Maurice; do not try any longer to work out alone your own redemption."
"You can say that to me?"
"Yes, for I believe that it is useless—you will fail."
He set his lips together and said nothing. But a frown distorted his face slowly.
"Leave your redemption to God. Oh, Maurice, leave it," Lily said, and there were tears in her eyes. "If this cry of the dead child is his punishment to you it must—it will—endure so long as he pleases. Your efforts cannot still it now. You yourself told me so once."
"I told you?"
"Yes—for the dead are beyond our hands and our lips. We cannot clasp them. We cannot kiss them. We cannot speak to them."
"But they can speak to us and mock us. You are right. I can't still the cry—I can't! Then it's all over with me!"
Suddenly, with a sob, Maurice flung himself down. He felt as if something within him snapped, and as if straightway a dissolution of all the man in him succeeded this rupture of the spirit. Careless of the pride of man, before the world and even in his own home, he gave himself up to a despair that was too weak to be frantic, too complete to be angry; a despair that no longer strove but yielded, that lay down in the dust and wept. Then, presently, raising his head and seeing Lily, in whose eyes were tears of pity, Maurice was seized with an enmity against her, unreasonably wicked, but suddenly so vehement that he did not try to resist it.
"You have broken me," he said. "You have told me that there is no redemption, that I am in the hands of God, who persecutes me. You have told me the truth and made me hate you."
"Maurice!"
The cry came from her lips faintly, but there was the ring of anguish in it.
"It is so," he repeated doggedly. "And, indeed, I believe that you have added to the weight of my burden. Since we have been married the persecution has increased. Once, when I was alone, I could bear it. Now you are here I cannot bear it. The child hates you. When you are near—in the night—its cry is so intense that I wonder you can sleep. Yet I hear your quiet breathing. You say you love me. Then why are you so calm? Why do you tell me to trust? Why do you hint that I may yet find peace, and then tell me to cease from working for my own peace? You don't love me, you laugh at my trouble. You despise me."
He burst out of the room almost like a man demented.
It might be supposed that Lily, who loved him, would have been overwhelmed by this ecstasy of anger against her. But there was something that sheathed her heart from death. She might be wounded, she might suffer; but she looked beyond the present time, over the desert of her fate to roses of a future that Maurice, in his misery, could not see, in his self-engrossment could not divine. There is no living thing that understands how to wait, that can feel the beauty of patience, as a woman understands and feels. The curious depth of calm in Lily which irritatedMaurice was created by a faith, half religious, half unreasoning, wholly strong and determined, such as no man ever knows in quite the same fullness as a woman. It is such a perfection of faith which gilds the silences in which the souls of many women wait, surrounded by the clouds of apparently shattered lives, but conscious that there is a great outcome, obscure and remote, but certain as the purpose which beats forever in Creation.
From that day Maurice no longer kept up a pretence of energy, or a simulation of even tolerable happiness in his home. The idea that the spirit of the dead child was stirred to an intense disquietude by his connection with Lily, and that, consequently, his marriage had deepened his punishment, grew in him until at length it became fixed. He brooded over it for hours together, his ears full of that eternal complaining. He began to feel that by linking himself with Lily he had added to his original sin, that his wedding had been a ceremony almost criminal, and that if he had scourged himself by living ascetically, and by putting rigorously away from him all earthly happiness, he might at last have laid the child to rest and found peace and forgiveness himself. And this fixed idea led him to shut Lily entirely out from his heart. He looked upon the fate of her being with him in the house as irrevocable. But he resolved that he ought to disassociate himself from her as far as possible, and, without explainingfurther to her the thought that now possessed him, he ceased to sit with her, ceased to walk out with her.
After dinner at night he retired to his study leaving her alone in the drawing-room. He let her go up to bed without bidding her good-night. When he was obliged to be with her at meals he maintained for the most part an obstinate silence.
Yet the cry of the child grew louder. The spirit of the child was not mollified. Its persecution continued and seemed to him to grow more persistent with each passing day.
What else could he do? How could he separate himself more completely from Lily?
Canon Alston came one day to solve this problem for him. The Canon had resolved on taking a holiday, and being no lover of solitude in his pleasures, he wished to persuade Maurice to become a grass widower for three weeks.
"Can you let Lily go?" he said. "I know it is a shame to leave you alone, but—"
He stopped, surprised at the sudden brightness that had come into Maurice's usually pale and grave face. Maurice saw his astonishment and hastened to allay it.
"I shall miss Lily of course," he began. "Still, if you want her, and she is anxious to go—"
"I have not mentioned it to her," the Canon said.
And at this moment Lily came into the room.The project was laid before her. She hesitated, looking from her father to her husband. Her perplexity seemed to both the men curiously acute, even to Maurice who was on fire to hear her decision. The prospect of solitude was sweet to his tormented heart now that he was possessed by the fancy that Lily's presence intensified his martyrdom. Yet Lily's obvious disturbance of mind surprised him. The two courses open to her were really so simple that there seemed no possible reason why she should look upon the taking of one of them as a momentous matter.
"Well, Lily, what do you say?" the Canon asked, after a pause. "Will you come with me?"
"But Maurice—"
"Maurice permits it, and I want you."
"I—I had not meant to leave home at present, father, not till after—"
She stopped abruptly.
"Till after what, my dear?" enquired the Canon.
She made no answer.
"Lily," Maurice said, trying to make his voice cool and indifferent, "I think you ought to go. It will do you good. Do not mind me. I shall manage very well for a little while."
"You would rather I went, Maurice?"
"I think we ought not to let your father go on his holiday alone."
"I will go," she said quietly.
So it was arranged. The Canon was jubilant at the prospect of his daughter's company, and asked her where they should travel.
"What do you say to the English Lakes, Lily?" he asked, "they are lovely at this time of year, and the rush of the tourist season has scarcely begun. Shall we go there?"
"Wherever you like, father," she said.
The Canon was feeling too gay to notice the preoccupation of her manner, the ungirlish gravity of her voice. That day, in the evening, when she was at dinner with Maurice, Lily said:
"You lived near the Lakes once, didn't you, Maurice?"
"Yes," he said.
"What was the name of the valley?"
He told her.
"And the house?"
"End Cottage. It was close to the waterfall. I hate it," he added almost fiercely. "It was there that I first heard—but I have told you."
He relapsed into silence and sent away the food on his plate untasted. Lily glanced across at him. But she said nothing more. And Maurice was struck by the consciousness that she took his strangeness strangely, with a lack of curiosity, a lack of protestation unlike a woman; almost for the first time since they were married he was moved to wonder how much she loved him, indeed whether she still loved him at all. He had got up from the dinner table and stood with one handleaning upon it as he looked steadily, with his heavy and hunted eyes, across at Lily.
"Are you glad to go with the Canon?" he asked.
"I am quite ready to go," she said quietly.
"You don't mind leaving me?"
"I think you wish me to leave you—"
"Perhaps I do," he said, watching her to see if she winced at the words.
But her face was still and calm.
"What then?"
"Then it is better for me to go for a little while than to stay."
"For a little while," he repeated, "yes."
He turned and went slowly out of the room, and suddenly his face was distorted. For, in the darkness of the hall, he heard the child crying and lamenting. He stopped and listened to it like a man who resolutely faces his destruction. And, as so many times, he asked himself; "Is this a freak of my imagination, a trick of my nerves?" No, the sound was surely real, was close to him. It thrilled in his ears keenly. He could not doubt its reality. Yet he acknowledged to himself that he could not actually locate it. Only in that respect did it differ from other sounds of earth. As he stood in the half darkness, listening, a horror, greater than he had ever felt before, came over him. The cry seemed to him menacing, no longer merely a cry for sympathy, for assistance, no longer merely the cry of a helpless creature inpain. He turned white and sick, and clapped his two hands to his ears. And just as he did so the dining-room door opened and Lily came out, a thin stream of light following her and falling upon Maurice. He started at the vision of her and at the revealing illumination. His nerves were quivering. His whole body seemed to vibrate.
"Don't come near me," he cried out to Lily. "It is worse since you are with me. Your presence makes my danger. Ah!"
And with a cry he dashed into his study, banging the door behind him, as if he fled from her.
A few days later Maurice stood at the garden gate and helped Lily into the carriage that was to take her to the station. A summons to a patient prevented him from seeing her and the Canon off on their journey northwards. Just before Lily put her foot on the step she stopped and wavered.
"Wait a moment," she said.
She ran back into the little house which had been her home since she was married. Maurice supposed that she had forgotten something. But she only peeped into her bedroom, into the gay drawing-room, into Maurice's den. And as she looked at this last little chamber, at the books, the ruffled writing-table, the pipes ranged against the wall, her photograph standing in a silver frame upon the mantelpiece, her eyes filled with tears, and there was a stricken feeling at her heart.
"Lily, you will miss the train," Maurice called to her.
She hurried out, got into the carriage and was driven away, wondering why she had gone back to take a last glance at her home, why she had scarcely been able to see it for her tears.
That evening Maurice returned from his round of visits in a curious state of excitement and of anticipation, mingled with nervous dread. He felt as if the eyes of the dead child were upon all his doings, as if the mind of the dead child pondered every act of his, as if the brain of the dead child were busy about his life, as if the soul of the dead child concerned itself for ever with his soul, which it had secretly dedicated to a loneliness assured now by the departure of Lily. By living alone, even for a few weeks, was he not in a measure obeying the desire of the little spirit, which possessed his fate like some inexorable Providence? If so, dare he not hope for an interval of peace, for that stillness after which he longed with an anxiety that was like a physical pain?
He entered his house. Twilight was falling, and the hall, in which on the previous night the child had complained in so grievous a manner, was shadowy. He stood there and listened. He heard the distant wash of the sea, the voices of two servants talking together behind the swing door that led to the kitchen. No sound mingled with the sea, or with the chattering voices. Slowly he ascended the stairs and entered thebedroom, in which Lily had slept quietly, while he, by her side, endured the persecution of the child. The blinds were up. The dying daylight crept slowly from the room, making an exit as furtive and suppressed as that of one who steals from a death chamber. Maurice sat down upon the bed and again listened for a long time.
He was conscious of the sense of relief which comes upon a man who, through some sudden act, has removed from his shoulders a terrible burden. He took this present silence to himself as a reward. But would it last? Opening the window he leaned out to hear the sea more plainly. All living voices, whether of Nature or of man, were beautiful to him, they had come to make his silence.
A servant knocked at the door. Maurice went down to dine. He passed the late evening as usual in his study. He slept calmly. He woke—to silence. Did not this silence confirm his fixed idea that his marriage with Lily had vexed that wakeful spirit, had troubled that unquiet soul of the child? Maurice, wrapped in a beautiful peace, felt that it did. And, as the silent lovely days, the silent lovely nights passed on he came gradually to a fixed resolve.
Lily must not return to him, must not live with him again.
He pondered for a long time how he was to compass their further separation. And, at length,he sat down and wrote a letter to Lily telling her the exact truth.
"Think me cruel, selfish," he wrote at the end of his letter. "I am cruel. I am selfish. Despair has made me so. The fear of madness has made me so. I must have peace. I must and will have it, at whatever cost."
He sent this letter to theposte restanteat Windermere, as Lily had directed. She and her father were moving about in the Lake district, and did not know from day to day where they might be. He received a reply within a week. It reached him at breakfast time, and, happening to glance at the postmark before he opened it, his face suddenly flushed and his heart beat with violence. For the letter came from that lonely village in that sequestered mountain valley in which he had once lived, in which he had first heard the cry of the child. What chance had led Lily's steps there? Maurice read the letter eagerly. It was very gentle, very submissive. And there was one strange passage in it:
"I understand that you are at peace," Lily wrote. "Yet the child is not at peace. It is crying still. You will ask me how I know that. Do not ask me now. Some day I shall send for you and tell you. When I send for you, if it is by day or night, promise that you will come to me. I claim this promise from you. And now good-bye for a time. My father is very unhappy about us. But he trusts me completely, and Ihave told him that you and I must be apart, but only for a time. I shall not write to you again till I send for you. Even my letter may disturb your peace and I would give up my life to give you peace."
There was no allusion in the letter to the reason which had led Lily and her father to the out-of-the-way valley which had seen the dawn of Maurice's despair. And Maurice was greatly puzzled. Again there came over him a curious conviction that Lily had some secret from him, some secret connected with his fate, and that she was waiting for the arrival of some day, fixed in her mind, on which to make a revelation of her knowledge to him. This mention of an eventual summons, "by day or night." What could it mean otherwise? Maurice read the letter again and again. Its last words touched him by their perfect unselfishness and also by their feminine romance. He had a moment's thought of the many emotional stories Lily had read. "She lives in one now," he said to himself. And then, as usual, he became self-engrossed, saw only his own life, possibly touched for ever with a light of peace.
The Canon returned alone. He met Maurice gravely, almost sternly.
"I trust my child entirely," he said. "She has told me that for a time you must live apart. She has made me promise not to ask you the reason of this separation. I don't ask it, but if you—"
His voice broke and he turned away for a moment. Then he said:
"Lily remains in the place from which she wrote to you."
"She is going to live there!" Maurice exclaimed.
"For the present, I could not persuade her otherwise. Her old nurse, Mrs. Whitehead, is going up to be with her. I cannot understand all this."
The old man cast his eyes searchingly upon Maurice.
"What—?" he began, then, remembering his promise to his daughter, he stopped short.
"We will talk no more about this," he said slowly. "No more."
He bade Maurice good-bye and returned, sorrowful, to the Rectory.
Lily kept her word. Maurice had no more letters from her. He only heard of her from the Canon, and knew that she remained in that beautiful and terrible valley, which he remembered so vividly and hated so ardently. Meanwhile he dwelt in a peace that was strange to him. The little voice had gone out of his life. The cry of the child was hushed. Often, in the past, Maurice had contemplated the coming of this exquisite silence, but he had always imagined it as a gradual approach. He had fancied that if the lamentation of the child ever died out of his haunted life it would fade away as the sound of the sea fadeson a long strand when the whispering tide goes down. Day by day, night by night, her crying would grow less poignant, less distinct in a long diminuendo, as if the restless spirit withdrew slowly farther and farther away, till the cry became a whisper, then a broken murmur, then—nothing. This abrupt cessation of persecution, this violent change from something that had seemed like menace to perfect immunity from trouble, was a fact that Maurice had never thought of as a possibility. He had grown to believe that Lily's presence in his home intensified the terror from which he suffered, certainly. But he had never supposed that her removal from him would lay the spirit entirely to rest. And she said that it was not at rest. How could she know that? And if it were not at rest, in what region was it pursuing its weird activity? Whither had it gone? He wondered long and deeply. And then he resolved to wonder no more. Peace had come to him at last. He would not break it by questioning the reason of it. He would accept it blindly, joyfully. Man blots the sunshine out of life by asking "Why?"
Time passed on. Brayfield had gossiped, marvelled and sunk into a sort of apathy of unrewarded and quiescent curiosity. The Canon pursued his life at the Rectory. Maurice visited his patients and continued unremittingly his medical researches. The immunity he now enjoyed gradually wrought a great change in him.He emerged from prison into the outer air. His health rapidly improved. His heavy eyes grew bright. His mind was active and alert. He was a new man. The darkness faded round him. He saw the light at last. For the silence endured. And at last he even forgot to listen, at dawn or in the silent hours of the night, for the cry of the child. Even the memory of it began to grow faint within his heart. So rapidly does man forget his troubles when he still has youth and the years are not heavy on him.