Again she was sitting beside him on the stairs, a fairylike little figure in white, eating ice pudding supplied to them by the goodnatured Geraghty. “I somehow think your father and mine will be talking together to-night?” she said, her sweet blue eyes looking as though they could see right into that spirit world of which she spoke.
On thundered the train, and yet another vision rose before Ralph. He was in Westminster Abbey and there before him he suddenly saw a face which took his heart by storm—the face of his old playfellow grown into gentle gracious womanhood. Then the same face, but with wistful love-lit eyes was lifted up to his outside the house in Queen Anne’s Gate kindling hope in his heart and filling him with a glow of happiness which had carried him through the pain of the parting. These same love-lit eyes and a yet more wonderful response of soul to soul rose in vision before him as he recalled a certain summer afternoon by the sea shore. What did it matter to him that the cold spring wind raged round the carriage piercing every crevice, or that the hail-stones rattled angrily against the glass! He was far away from it all, seeing blue waves and the mellow brown side of a boat and Evereld’s blushing face. The memory of that August day lasted him all the rest of the way to London; then in the chilly dawn they made their way to the nearest hotel, where the order of things was reversed for Ralph at last fell sound asleep on a sofa in the reading room and it was Macneillie who was wakeful and saw visions of the past—visions that he dared not dwell upon because with them there came the maddening recollection that he was close to Christine, that it would be the easiest thing in the world, yet the most fatal, to go that afternoon and call upon her. What was she doing? How did she struggle on in the difficult life on which she had embarked? All the craving to know, all the longing to serve her must be crushed down in his heart. Alone she must dree her weird. Alone he must bear the anguish of her pain and his own bitter loss.
Almost involuntarily, those hard views of God from which years ago he had been rescued by Thomas Erskine’s book “The Spiritual Order,” returned now to him, flooding his mind with rebellious thoughts.
Why did all this misery come to him? Why were the mistakes and sins of others visited upon him? Why were the ways of God so unequal? Other men prospered. Other men had the desire of their hearts granted. Why was he for ever to be thwarted? For years he knew that he had made strenuous efforts to live uprightly, yet there seemed nothing before him but sorrow; while over yonder there was a mere boy of one and twenty about to gain after the briefest of struggles the woman he loved.
The Tempter had however defeated his own object by introducing the thought of Ralph Denmead. Macneillie’s heart was too large for jealousy to harbour in it. Jealousy can only rest long and comfortably in narrow, and cramped hearts where self love and petty absorption in trifles has contracted the space.
As he glanced across the room he saw that the sunlight was streaming full upon the sleeper, he got up and lowered the blind pausing for a minute by the sofa to look at his companion. Ralph was sound asleep, and his untroubled, boyish face was worth looking at if only for its peace. To Macneillie it suggested many thoughts. He remembered his first impression of Ralph, lying in the last stage of misery on the banks of the Leny, and he delighted to think that partly by his aid the lad had battled through his difficulties and had got his foot firmly planted on the ladder of success.
There is nothing so strange in life as the manner in which a kindly deed re-acts in a thousand subtle ways on the doer. And now, as had been the case before, Macneillie was lured back to life by the one he had helped long ago. The hard thoughts passed, he stood there in the bright spring morning strong once more in the belief that the eternal patience of the All-Father schools each son in the best possible way.
Sitting down to the writing-table he filled up a couple of hours with answering the letters of the previous day, then when the time came, set off with Ralph to the Abbey and finding the way to the Baptistry unbarred waited there beside the busts of Maurice and Kingsley, lifted a degree nearer to that Light and Love of which their epitaphs spoke by the struggle he had just passed through.
They were joined here by Mrs. Hereford, Bride, and Evereld, and Macneillie thought he had never seen anything more winning than Evereld’s eager welcome of her lover. He felt very much in harmony with their happiness as they all went together into the choir, and indeed throughout the day the depression which had overwhelmed him since he had received the bad news at Brighton was banished by the unalloyed bliss of the two who were just stepping into their goodly heritage of mutual love and companionship.
It was a thoroughly unconventional wedding with merely the merry Irish family in the house, with Bride and the two little Hereford girls for bridesmaids, and Macneillie and an old school fellow who had returned from Canada just in time to be Ralph’s best man, as the only outsiders.