“He is an enemy of God!” cried the minister. “He professes to believe in God; but ‘he that is not with me is against me.’ He has faith neither in heaven nor hell. He denies the sacredness of Scripture. He says a soul is nothing but a word—that there is as much soul in a ruby or a rose as there is in himself! And the kind of immortality he looks forward to is worse than none. He is a perfect pagan!”
The table rang with it for days. Of course it was Mary who supplied the necessary additions to the story. Incidentally, albeit unconsciously, she likewise supplied additions to her own story of which I had begun to feel a certain lack. Marvin had received his caller courteously, it seemed; had even consented, with a new quietness that had come upon him, to listen to Wentworth’s exhortations. But the poor zealous young man finally lost his head and allowed himself to say that they both knew where Daphne had gone, and it wasn’t heaven either. Well, the minister departed rather suddenly, and Marvin went out to his laurel tree.
With all this going on at the table, I found it hard to keep up my Jesuitism. I was more than ever caught by the case of this pagan who was the legitimate child of a New England village. It was such a strange example of the protean perversity of things to melt into one another. Then the poetry of it simply undid me. I sat there smugly writing New England novels, but I could never have imagined anything like this. And the trains it started off—! Had that little tree indeed despoiled the secrets of the grave? Had some taproot, blindly groping through the dark soil, become a channel whereby was made manifest the alchemy of the earth? Was the laurel literally a transfiguration? Might it be proof of the infinite resource of life that that unhappy heart which life had broken should at once forget its pain and dishonour and be transmuted into beauty?
To me more than ever the wind and the waters spoke mysteriously. For me more than ever was there a kinship between crystal and plant and creature transcending the jealous immortality of man. There was neither superiority nor inferiority. It was all part of the unceasing life of the earth—of that deathless ebb and flow which draws the ancient elements again and again into new combinations, which always has wrought with the same ones and always must, in changing forms of beauty and wonder.
And I came the nearest ever to seeking Marvin’s acquaintance. He made me think of what Pater says of Leonardo, who “seemed to those about him as one listening to a voice silent for other men.” I was interested to the verge of indiscretion. I even went so far, I must confess, as to walk oftener than elsewhere on the Poorhouse road—whence could be seen the sacred laurel above its little stream. It was indeed a prodigy. Such blossoms I never saw in my life. It turned one’s head to see them there, aflame among their glossy green, with the brook skirling below. Mary told me that Marvin would never pick them. Indeed he never picked any flowers now, she said. It began the spring after Daphne died, when the trailing arbutus came out. She had brought him some, one day, thinking to please him. But he asked her not to do it again. It hurt them, he said. And they were Daphne’s cousins, the arbutus....
I do not know how far I might have gone. But there came a day when all hope of acquaintance was suddenly cut off. There came a day! I shall never forget it. I had been on a long walk in the country. My book was stuck, and I knew of old that the only way to unstick a book is to let it alone. So I walked miles and miles in one of those delicious New England afternoons of early summer when the air is an elixir of eternity. It made me think of the Pagan and it quickened in me a growing sense that the earth existed as a whole and endured as a whole; that men were but one phase of its immense secret energy whose so-called consciousness had unbalanced them a little, was merely another mode of an energy more astounding still, as light and heat are but two modes of vibrations which possess others undreamed. It was for this reason, perhaps, that I came home by the Poorhouse road.
As I rounded the turn by the orchard I looked as usual toward the laurel tree. To my surprise, I saw figures moving on the mound; and there was a cart tied at the gate. It was so out of the ordinary that I stopped in spite of myself. Then I suddenly discovered that the laurel was gone! I could not believe my eyes. The thing was too inconceivable. It was to me as if I had stumbled upon a scene of murder. In the first horror of it, in the certainty that something terrible had happened, I forgot my habit of taking no personal part in that village drama. My unuttered feeling for Marvin caught me like a hand and led me, choking, toward the mound.
All I had eyes for at first was the laurel. It lay inert on the ground, that a few hours before had waved so royally aloft; and already the magic flowers looked a little wilted in their green. Beside it crouched Marvin. He said nothing; but the inarticulate sounds that came from him were the most piteous I ever heard. And the way he caressed his stricken beauty was more than one could bear to see. No lover could more tenderly, more passionately, address the limbs of his dead. He straightened out contorted twigs. He lifted petals from their contact with the ground. Now and again he put his hand to the poor sawn trunk, whence a little pale moisture was oozing, as if to stanch a mortal flow. And all the while he kept by him the severed knot of the root, with its one thick stem that had been broken off deep in the ground.
After the first instant the indecency of looking at such a spectacle overwhelmed me. I turned away. I noticed Mary then for the first time. Two men whom I recognised as farm-hands of the Bennetts were also there, and another whom I did not know. And Wentworth. Wentworth! All the shock of the moment suddenly flared into my long latent dislike of the man.
“Are you responsible for this?” I almost shouted at him.