Chapter XI (1)
The stone-rimmed basin in the old Physic Garden, fringed with a few yellowing reeds, held water that seemed as black as night, water that reflected, clear and blacker still, the bare interlaced boughs of a great tree beside it. And in this dark net, like a silver fish entangled in waterweeds, lay the shining half-moon, brilliant already, though it was only half-past four of a December afternoon. It was an afternoon, too, of extraordinary radiance, as if to mark that herald day of Christmas when the longing of the Church, no more to be suppressed, bursts through the monitory thoughts of Advent, in pure joy and expectation, with the first of the great antiphons of Magnificat, and hails as the Eternal Wisdom the Child so soon to come.
But there was nothing of this in the heart of the man who sat, his head in his hands, on a seat by the little pond. Reading, an hour ago, in his lodgings, the letter which he had just returned from Northamptonshire to find, he had felt that he must get out, away—anywhere—and pushing up the narrow, screaming High Street of St. Thomas’s, past the Castle keep, had come, through St. Ebbe’s, full on to the front of Christ Church, looking, in the golden light, like the battlements of an ethereal city. But he had gone blindly forward, and found himself, at last, in the old walled garden which had seen so many generations of flower and seed.
Horatia’s letter had been quite ordinary, speaking of the child, of his future, the necessity of her care, the joy that he was to her. But, of course, she understood... And three years ago he would willingly have died for her; now he could not even live for her! As for his own letter of last week, he could not think how he had ever brought himself to write it—and yet were it to write again, he must have said the same. He belonged, now, body and soul, to a force whose demands on some lives were so exorbitant as to come into mortal conflict even with the best and holiest human claims.
He ought never to have gone to Compton; he ought to have left Oxford, at whatever cost of unkindness. He could not say that it had been only pain to go and see her, and since he could not even now accuse himself of having done or said anything amiss, it must have been that his pleasure was visible.... He felt an outcast, a pariah. How deeply he had sinned against God he could not fathom, but he had sinned, it seemed to him irretrievably, against the code in which he had been brought up. For if he was a Christian and a priest he was a gentleman, too... or had been.
The thought of Dormer came into his mind as he sat there. Dormer would understand—he would despise him, no doubt, but he would understand. He could never tell him. He was sitting among his books in that well-known room scarcely a quarter of a mile away, yet a thousand miles might be between them. He could never tell him, because of Horatia. Besides, he had lost the habit of close intercourse.
And in his misery he did not know that Dormer was at that moment standing on the other side of the basin, looking at him, across the drowned moon, with the profoundest tenderness, wondering whether he could speak to him now. Only, after a while, he was conscious of someone on the seat beside him, and felt an arm laid across his shoulders.
“Tristram, Tristram, don’t sit here in the cold like this.... Come to my rooms.... I know all about it—she has told me; I have seen her and she wants me to tell you that she understands.... You must not take it so hardly; it is all quite simple, and... and wonderful, it seems to me.... My dear, dear fellow, I don’t want to pester you, but if you would only come away...” Dormer’s voice, ordinarily so cool and restrained, broke suddenly.
There was a silence; Tristram did not move. A London coach rolled over the bridge; the chimes of Magdalen struck a quarter to five. Dormer slowly took away his arm.
And at that Tristram removed one of his hands from his face, and put it out gropingly towards him.
“Carissime...”
(2)
The actual writing of the letter to Tristram had not cost Horatia the effort that she had anticipated. She hardly felt, indeed, what she was renouncing, for everything was swallowed up in the sense of rest, a feeling that was partly a physical reaction, due to the intensity of the emotional strain of her interview with Dormer. She seemed to be floating in a sea of such mental and spiritual relief as she had not known for years. Such peace as she had compassed in the summer—she knew it now—had only been a drugged peace after all.
She had had to tell her father. That had not been easy. Yet she had, somehow, dominated his bitter disappointment. She did not show him Tristram’s letter, but she did not keep from him the fact that she had been to Oriel. Perfectly calm, and not, apparently, in an exalted state, she yet produced on the Rector the impression of some change so profound as to make her seem another person. He was, if the truth be told, a little alarmed.
But it was the letter which, two days later, she was obliged to write to the Duchesse that really showed Horatia what she was losing. Madame de la Roche-Guyon had said that she should have her own establishment if she wished. It occurred to Horatia, rather bitterly, how much to be envied she would seem to her friends—young, titled, rich, her own mistress, with the entrée to the most exclusive society in the world; and yet—and yet, even with the child, all these advantages were as a pinch of dust. Better to be by Tristram’s side in some tiny parsonage, in some dull village...
And when this really came home to her she suddenly threw down the pen and covered her face, an action which was the cause of the straggling blot on the page which, later, drew forth from the Duchesse strictures on the untidiness of the English.
But Horatia, neglecting the blot, took up the pen again and went on without flinching to the end. In spite of the sense of suffering, she had something which she had not before. For the first time in her life she could really pray. And already, on this and the days that followed, she had some inkling of what Dormer had meant, some taste of the peace that truly comes to the resigned will. In this ocean of rest she lived for some days, thinking sometimes how wonderful it was that it should have enclosed her, with all her turbulent desires, in so sudden a gentleness, but not unconscious that its waves broke quietly over a rock of regret.
(3)
“Darling, what are you doing?” she exclaimed, coming suddenly into the study, and surprising her father on his hands and knees on the hearthrug, surrounded by a medley of objects, and trying to stuff something into a large stocking—trying also, with incomplete success, to hide from her both stocking and litter.
“Well, my dear, Christmas will be upon us before very long, and I thought I would try whether they will go in,” said the Rector, attempting to pull out the bulky object, which, having refused to enter the stocking now equally refused to be extracted.
He looked ten years older than he had done at the time of their conversation in the night nursery a few days ago. Horatia’s heart smote her as—not for the first time—she realised the change, and her eyes were full of tears when, kneeling down by him she put her arms round him and kissed the white hair by his temple.
“Dearest Papa, you can’t be going to give him all those toys; it will be so bad for him! Keep some of them for next Christmas.”
She had said it without thinking.
“And where... where will he be then?” asked her father rather gulpily. A single tear splashed on to the drum which he had succeeded in pulling from the stocking. Horatia bit her lip hard.
“I think, dear, that we shall always come home for Christmas. Or else you will come to us. You will have a curate soon; you know we discussed it the other day, and then you will be so free.—What a splendid drum! Where did you get all these things, you secretive old Papa? Surely not in Oxford?”
“I bought them when I was in London the other day, at the Soho Bazaar. I was thinking that we should have such a pleasant Christmas....”
A stab went through Horatia’s heart. That broken vision of his was in her mind too—the Christmas hearth, Tristram with the child in his arms, prefigurement of what should be henceforward... and what would now never be.
“It will be Maurice’s third Christmas,” went on the Rector, with an attempt at cheerfulness, thinking from her silence and averted face that he had been too cruel. “I made up my mind last Christmas that he should have——”
A knock caused him to scramble hastily from his unwonted position. Horatia jumped up and went to the door. Martha stood there.
“Please, Mam, would you come to the nursery. I don’t think Master Maurice seems quite himself.”
Horatia was gone before the Rector had got to his chair. She was back in a few minutes.
“Papa, if I may I shall send Sam Dawes for the doctor. I don’t think it is anything serious, at least I hope not, but he seems so drowsy and feverish, and he has been very sick, poor darling.”
“He was quite well this morning,” observed the Rector, astonished. “Indeed, he was making such a great noise in here that I could hardly get on with my sermon.”
(4)
Maurice de la Roche-Guyon, who was to have a drum and many other delights on his third Christmas Day, did not seem likely to receive these now, though as he lay, flushed and brilliant-eyed, chattering to himself, his rambling talk ran sometimes on his small possessions.
“A child to give back to God.” All through the two long agonising nights and days the words echoed in Horatia’s head, with those others “He is stripping you of everything.” Every few hours the doctor came, and there was never any change, except that Maurice’s breathing seemed to get more and more rapid as his lungs consolidated. And Horatia could do nothing, for now she could not even pray.
“He is stripping you of everything.” Then He wanted from her the last thing, the best thing, the thing incomparably the dearest, not the baby she had refused to look at, not the baby who had been a delightful toy at Plaisance, a growing interest in England, but her own child, her very own, to hold through the years against sorrow and change, to be, not her comfort but her existence, not a consolation for what she had lost, but life itself. And set against it all, inexorable, “a child to give back to God”—not hers at all, but only a treasure lent...
“O God, save Maurice—take the rest, take everything, I give it willingly, only save Maurice! I will give him back to You in the end, only leave him a little longer!” But she believed that her prayers could not pierce the thick cloud that hung now between her and the Christ she had so lately come to know, though she never doubted that prayer could reach Him—the prayer of a heart that prayed always...
Downstairs were the floods of toys, the half-filled stocking, the holly and the mistletoe; up here the gift of gifts was going away from her.
“O God, make me so that I can pray to You....”
But there was only Maurice asking, in his shrunk little voice of delirium, for something to drink.
(5)
It was always rather dark in St. Thomas’s, and what daylight remained to the December afternoon hung nearly vanquished in the little church. It had been much lighter when Tristram, unlocking the door, had come in over the planks laid along the aisle for a causeway in time of flood, and, passing the disproportionate pulpit, had entered the chancel and knelt down at the altar rails.
Many hours had he spent there during the last two days, holding up before God not his own suffering but that of the woman who suffered for him. Now he could pray no more, but he still knelt, a suppliant at the door of the Divine Pity, a beggar at the Heavenly Gate.
But as the light withdrew itself more and more from the sanctuary, till at last the bare table itself was scarcely visible, he became gradually conscious that this church was not more still than that inner place into which he found himself somehow to have passed, a place of great quietness, of which he had never before possessed the key—the innermost room in the house of his soul. He did not know how he had gained entrance to it—perhaps because he had ceased to strive—he only knew that he was there, that he could never again lose the way thither, and that this chamber held for him that open vision which he had sought so often and never found.
As he left St. Thomas’s he remembered that he must go to Christ Church and ask if the Precentor, who was indisposed, was likely to be well enough to preach the charity sermon on Christmas Day, or whether he wished him to do it. So he walked once more up the way of sorrows that he had traversed three or four days ago, and came out in just the same manner on the front of Christ Church. Lights were beginning to twinkle there, and down the narrow dusk of St. Aldate’s, along which he had so often ridden. In Tom Quad he met Mr. Pusey, who responded to his salutation by wishing him a happy Christmas, passed on and then turned back.
“By the way, Mr. Hungerford,” he said, “I am afraid the Grenvilles at Compton Regis are in sad trouble—but perhaps you know it? I heard from my brother this morning that the little boy, Madame de la Roche-Guyon’s child, is very ill—dying, they fear.”
The pain in his voice and eyes (his own little Katharine’s death being only a year-old wound) was lost on Tristram who, after a moment’s horror, forgetful alike of his errand and of himself, had turned and hurried back into St. Aldate’s to the nearest livery-stable for a horse.
He probably galloped most of the fifteen miles on the hard December road, for he got there by half-past six. Anyhow the hack came down with him in the dark just outside Compton village, and Tristram, merciful man though he was, left it to the two or three yokels who had collected and hastened on, oblivious of a slightly wrenched knee. Sick at the thought of what he might hear he rang the bell at the Rectory. Mr. Grenville himself answered it.
“O, my dear Tristram!” he exclaimed, his eyes brimming with tears. “Have you heard—is that why you have come?... No, the child is alive... the doctor is here now.—Forgive me, come in....”
“Is that Tristram?” exclaimed a breathless voice, and behind her father suddenly appeared Horatia herself. She almost pushed the Rector aside, and seized Tristram by the wrist. “O, thank God, thank God that you have come!” And, the ghost of herself, she fairly dragged him across the hall into the drawing-room and shut the door.
“Tristram, our Lord has sent you! Listen, for you can save Maurice—only pray, pray as you never prayed before! It is the crisis. He will listen to you—I know He will!”
And, as suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone.
The stable clock struck nine. Steps came down the stairs, and voices; the outer door shut.
The Rector appeared at the drawing-room door, mopping his eyes. He beckoned and Tristram, with a sinking heart, followed him out of the room and up the stairs. Half-way up Mr. Grenville put away his handkerchief, and it was then obvious that his tears were tears of joy. He gripped Tristram’s arm.
“He will live, my dear boy, he will live, thank God!”
He continued to ascend, and Tristram, hardly knowing why, went after him. They came to the nursery floor. A door was ajar. The Rector stood aside, but Tristram did not enter.
From the threshold he saw, as in a frame, part of the room within, and the little crib against the wall by which Horatia was kneeling, with bowed head. Over her shoulders was a shawl of Chinese silk, blue as lapis-lazuli, studded with the golden eyes of dragons, and glorified, like the shining auburn of her hair, by the mingled light of lamp and fire. For him the picture seemed to hold the love and pain of years, his own and hers, barren and fruitful both, and he did not know that he could look any more....
The child stirred. Horatia rose from her knees, and bending over him began very gently to rearrange a pillow. The change of position gave Tristram to her sight, and so he went softly in and stood by her side, looking down with her at him.
Maurice lay fast asleep, breathing quietly, and more natural of hue—a frail bark rejected by the great tide that washes so hungrily round the shores of the little island of life, and whose receding is nearly as full of awe as its oncoming. To the man and the woman looking at him the spray of that ocean seemed still wet in his curls.
“You have given him back to me,” said Horatia in a voice less than a whisper, and, to herself, more faintly still, “God did not ask all.”
For answer Tristram stooped and kissed her son.
In the doorway he looked back, and at last the toll levied on human nerves by days of so much strain and anguish was demanded of him. A momentary hallucination of the senses—nothing but that, he knew it—but all his life it was to remain with him, in mysterious consolation, that for one heart-beat he saw there, in Horatia’s place, a Woman wrapped, like her, in a blue mantle glinting with light, kneeling in adoration of a Child.