Rodmoor (37 page)

There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.

Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you
remember
,” she said very solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”

A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines—you know the one I mean?—the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad mood, by saying it
always
made me think of old women in a work-house! You know the one, don’t you?”

The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same moment a
supernatural
 
light came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of
embarrassment
, she began to sing, in a low plaintive
melodious
voice, the following well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild,
primordial
religion, as different from paganism as it was different from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist and the falling leaves.

When it was finished there was a strange silence in the room, and Baltazar rose to his feet. His face was pale. He moved to her side and, for the first and last time in their curious relations, he kissed her—a long kiss upon the forehead.

With a heightened colour in her cheeks and a
nervous
deprecatory smile on her lips, she went with him to the door. “Listen, dear,” she said, as she took his hand, “I want you to think of that poem of Cowper’s written when he was most despairing—the one that begins ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ I want you to remember that though what he lays upon us seems
crushing
, there is always something behind it—infinite mercy behind infinite mystery.”

Baltazar looked her straight in the face. “I
wonder
,” he said, “whether it is I or you who is the most unhappy person in Rodmoor!”

She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like the weight of some great iron
engine
with jagged raw edges—like a battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings
backwards
and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”

“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.

She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another moment?”

They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his heart suggested.

“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.

“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see me.”

He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the
full-brimmed
current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the high mud-banks.

The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and
asserting
its identity with an exultant joy. It seemed almost to
purr
, with a kind of feline satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward
towards
the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it drew from it some sort of half-human sound—some whisper or murmur or protest of querulous complaining.

The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories moaned; and all the while, with
gurglings
and suckings and lappings and deep-drawn,
inward
,
self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.

On that night, of all nights, the Loon seemed to have reached that kind of emphasis of personality which things are permitted to attain—animate as well as inanimate—when their functional activity is at its highest and fullest.

And on that night, carefully divesting himself of his elegant clothes, and laying his hat and stick on the ground beside them, Baltazar Stork, without haste or violence, and with his brain supernaturally clear, drowned himself in the Loon.

B
ALTAZAR’S death, under circumstances which could leave no doubt as to the unhappy man’s intention to destroy himself, coming, as it did, immediately after his friend’s removal to the Asylum, stirred the scandalous gossip of Rodmoor to its very dregs.

The suicide’s body—and even the indurated hearts of the weather-battered bargemen who discovered it, washed down by the tide as far as the New Bridge, were touched by its beauty—was buried, after a little private extemporary service, just at the debatable
margin
where the consecrated churchyard lost itself in the priest’s flower-beds. Himself the only person in the place exactly aware of the precise limits of the sacred enclosure—the enclosure which had never been
enclosed
—Mr. Traherne was able to follow the most rigid stipulations of his ecclesiastical conscience
without
either hurting the feelings of the living or offering any insult to the dead. When it actually came to the point he was, as it turned out, able to remove from his own over-scrupulous heart the least occasion for future remorse.

The Rodmoor sexton—the usual digger of graves—happened to be at that particular time in the throes, or rather in the after-effects, of one of his periodic outbursts of inebriation. So it happened that the
curate-in-charge
 
had with his own hands to dig the grave of the one among all his parishioners who had remained most distant to him and had permitted him the least familiarity.

Mr. Traherne remained awake in his study half the night, turning over the pages of ancient scholastic
authorities
and comparing one doctrinal opinion with
another
on the question of the burial of suicides.

In the end, what he did, with a whimsical prayer to Providence to forgive him, was to
begin
digging the hole just outside the consecrated area, but by means of a slight northward
excavation
, when he got a few feet down, to arrange the completed orifice in such a way that, while Baltazar’s body remained in common earth, his head was lodged safe and secure, under soil blessed by Holy Church.

One of the most pious and authoritative of the early divines, Mr. Traherne found out, maintained, as no fantastic or heretical speculation but as a reasonable and reverent conclusion, the idea that the surviving portion of a man—his “psyche” or living soul—had, as its mortal tabernacle, the posterior lobes of the
human
skull, and that it was from the
head
rather than from the
body
that the shadowy companion of our earthly days—that “animula blandula” of the heathen emperor—melted by degrees into the
surrounding
air and passed to “its own place.”

The Renshaws themselves showed, none of them, the slightest wish to interfere with his arrangements, nor did Hamish Traherne ever succeed in learning whether the hollow-eyed lady of Oakguard knew or did not know that the clay mound over which every evening without fail, after the day of the unceremonious interment,
she knelt in silent prayer, was outside the circle of the
covenanted
mercies of the Power to which she prayed.

The “last will and testament” of the deceased—written with the most exquisite care—was of so strange a character, taking indeed the shape of
something
like a defiant and shameless “confession,” that Brand and Dr. Raughty, who were the appointed
executors
, hurriedly hid it out of sight. Everything Mr. Stork possessed was left to Mrs. Renshaw, except the picture of Eugenio Flambard. This, by a fantastic codicil, which was so extraordinary that when Brand and Dr. Raughty read it they could do nothing but stare at one another in silent amazement, was
bequeathed
, at the end of an astonishing panegyric, “to our unknown Hippolytus, Mr. Baptiste Sorio, of New York City.”

Baltazar had been buried on the first of November, and as the following days of this dark month dragged by, under unbroken mists and rain, Nance lived from hour to hour in a state of trembling expectancy. Would Baptiste’s ship bring him safely to England? Would he, when he came, and discovered what her relations with his father were, be kind to her and
sympathetic
, or angry and hurt? She could not tell. She could make no guess. She did not even know whether Adrian had really done what he promised and written to his son about her at all.

The figure of the boy—on his way across the
Atlantic
—took a fantastic hold upon her disturbed
imagination
. As day followed day and the time of his arrival drew near, she found it hard to concentrate her mind even sufficiently to fulfil her easy labours with the
little dressmaker. Miss Pontifex gently remonstrated with her.

“I know you’re in trouble, Miss Herrick, and have a great deal on your mind, but it does no good
worrying
, and the girls get restless—you see how it is!—when you can’t give them your full attention.”

Thus rebuked, Nance would smile submissively and turn her eyes away from the misty window.

But every night before she slept, she would see through her closed eyelids that longed-for boy,
standing
—that was how she always conceived him—at the bows of the ship, standing tall and fair like a young god; borne forwards over the starlit ocean to bring help to them all.

In her dreams, night after night, the boy came to her, and she found him then of an unearthly beauty and endowed with a mysterious supernatural power. In her dreams, the wild impossible hope, that somehow, somewhere, he would be the one to save Linda from the ruin of her youthful life, took to itself sweet
immediate
fulfilment.

Every little event that happened to her during those days of tension assumed the shape of something pregnant and symbolic. Her mind made auguries of the movements of the clouds, and found significant omens, propitious or menacing, from every turn of the wind and every coming and going of the rain. The smallest and simplest encounter took upon itself at that time a curious and mystic value.

In after days, she remembered with sad and woeful clearness how persons and things impressed her then, as, in their chance-brought groupings and gestures, they lent themselves to her strained expectant mood.

For instance, she never could forget the way she waited, on the night of the third of November, along with Linda and Dr. Raughty, for the arrival of the last train from Mundham, bringing Mr. Traherne back from a visit to the Asylum with news of Adrian.

The news the priest brought was unexpectedly
favourable
. Adrian, it seemed, had taken a rapid turn for the better, and the doctors declared that any day now it might become possible for Nance to see him.

As they stood talking on the almost deserted
platform
, Nance’s mind visualized with passionate
intensity
the moment when she herself would take Baptiste to see his father and perhaps together—why not?—bring him back in triumph to Rodmoor.

Her happy reverie on this particular occasion was interrupted by a fantastic incident, which, trifling enough in itself, left a queer and significant impression behind it. This was nothing less than the sudden
escape
from Mr. Traherne’s pocket of his beloved
Ricoletto
.

In the excitement of their pleasure over the news brought by the priest, the rat took the opportunity of slipping from the recesses of his master’s coat; and jumping down on the platform, he leapt, quick as a flash, upon the railway track below. Mr. Traherne, with a cry of consternation, scrambled down after him, and throwing aside his ulster which impeded his
progress
, began desperately pursuing him. The engine of the train by which the clergyman had arrived was now resting motionless, separate from the line of carriages, deserted by its drivers. Straight beneath the wheels of this inert monster darted the escaped rat. The agitated priest, with husky perturbed cries, ran backwards
and forwards along the side of the engine, every now and then stooping down and frantically endeavouring to peer beneath it.

It was so queer a sight to see this ungainly figure, dressed as always in his ecclesiastical cassock, rushing madly round the dark form of the engine and at
intervals
falling on his knees beside it, that Linda could not restrain an almost hysterical fit of laughter.

Dr. Raughty looked whimsically at Nance.

“He might be a priest of Science, worshipping the god of machines,” he remarked, assuming as he spoke a sitting posture, the better to slide down, himself, from the platform to the track.

The station-master now approached, anxious to close his office for the night and go home. The porter, a peculiarly unsympathetic figure, took not the least
notice
of the event, but coolly proceeded to extinguish the lights, one by one.

The ostler from the Admiral’s Head, who had come to meet some expected visitor who never arrived, leaned forward with drowsy interest from his seat on his cab and surveyed the scene with grim detachment,
promising
himself that on the following night at his familiar bar table, he would be the center of public interest as he satisfied legitimate local curiosity with regard to this unwonted occurrence.

Nance could not help smiling as she saw the
excellent
Fingal, his long overcoat flapping about his legs, bending forward between the buffers of the engine and peering into its metallic belly. She noticed that he was tapping with his knuckles on the polished
breastplate
of the monster and uttering a clucking noise with his tongue, as if calling for a recalcitrant chicken.

It was not long before Mr. Traherne, growing
desperate
as the oblivious porter approached the last of the station lamps, fell flat on his face and proceeded to shove himself clean under the engine. The vision of his long retreating form, wrapped in his cassock, thus worming himself slowly out of sight, drew from Nance a burst of laughter, and as for Linda, she clapped her hands together like a child.

He soon reappeared, to the relief of all of them, with his recaptured pet in his hand, and scrambled back upon the platform, just as the last of the lamps went out, leaving the place in utter darkness.

Nance, her laughter gone then, had a queer
sensation
as they moved away, that the ludicrous scene she had just witnessed was part of some fantastic unreal dream, and that she herself, with the whole tragedy of her life, was just such a dream, the dream perhaps of some dark driverless cosmic engine—of some remote Great Eastern Railway of the Universe!

The morning of the fourth of November dawned far more auspiciously than any day which Rodmoor had known for many weeks. It was one of those patient, hushed, indescribable days—calm and tender and full of whispered intimations of hidden reassurance—which rarely reach us in any country but England or in any district but East Anglia. The great powers of sea and air and sky seemed to draw close to one another and close to humanity; as if with some large and gracious gesture of benediction they would fain lay to rest, under a solemn and elemental requiem, the body of the dead season’s life.

Nance escaped before noon from Miss Pontitfex’s workroom. She and Linda had been invited by Dr.

Raughty to lunch with him and Hamish at the
pastry-cook
’s in the High Street. It was to be a sort of modest celebration, this little feast, to do honour to the good news which Mr. Traherne had brought them the night before and which was corroborated by a letter to Nance herself from the head doctor, with regard to Adrian’s astonishing improvement.

Nance felt possessed by a deep and tumultuous
excitement
. Baptiste surely must be near England now! Any day—almost any hour—she might hear of his arrival. She strolled out across the Loon to meet Linda, who had gone that morning to practise on the organ for the following Sunday’s services.

As she crossed the marsh-land between the bridge and the church, she encountered Mrs. Renshaw
returning
from a visit to Baltazar’s grave. The mistress of Oakguard stopped for a little while to speak to her, and to express, in her own way, her sympathy over Adrian’s recovery. She did this, however, in a manner so characteristic of her that it depressed rather than encouraged the girl. Her attitude seemed to imply that it was better, wiser, more reverent, not to cherish any buoyant hopes, but to assume that the worst that could come to us from the hands of God was what ought to be expected and awaited in humble
submissiveness
.

She seemed in some strange way to
resent
any
lifting
of the heavy folds of the pall of fate and with a kind of obstinate weariness, to lean to the darker and more sombre aspect of every possibility.

She carried in her hands a bunch of faded flowers brought from the grave she had visited and which she seemed reluctant to throw away, and Nance never
forgot
 
the appearance of her black-gowned drooping
figure
and white face, as she stood there, by the edge of the misty, sun-illumined fens, holding those dead stalks and withered leaves.

As they parted, Nance whispered hesitatingly some little word about Baltazar. She half expected her to answer with tears, but in place of that, her eyes seemed to shine with a weird exultant joy.

“When you’re as old as I am, dear,” she said, “and have seen life as I have seen it, you will not be sad to lose what you love best. The better we love them, the happier we must be when they are set free from the evil of the world.”

She looked down on the ground, and when she raised her head, her eyes had an unearthly light in them. “I am closer to him now,” she said, “closer than ever
before
. And it will not be long before I go to join him.”

She moved slowly away, dragging her limbs heavily.

Nance, as she went on, kept seeing again and again before her that weird unearthly look. It left the
impression
on her mind that Mrs. Renshaw had actually secured some strange and unnatural link with the dead which made her cold and detached in her attitude
towards
the living.