Sharp disappointment awaited him. The yellow drawing-room was brilliantly lighted. The atmosphere of it was fresh, almost to the point of chill. The miniatures lay side by side upon the escritoire, where he had placed them some four or five hours earlier; but his sweet fairy-lady was not there to receive him. The room was vacant of all human, all visible, presence save his own.
The hours which followed were among the most poignant that Laurence had ever experienced. He had made so certain that he needed but to open that door to regain the unreal world, yet world—as he believed—of profoundest reality, which enchanted, while it baffled and perplexed him. He found himself compelled to admit, moreover, not without a sense of humiliation, that his attitude was not exclusively pathological or scientific. A good deal of the natural man, and the natural man's affections and vanities, entered into it. He craved once again to see that slender, flitting figure, to feel the vibration of that otherwise impalpable hand, to read the trust and exquisite sympathy of those lovely eyes; he craved again to be aware of the fervour of his own eloquence, the rush and spring of his own thought. Moreover, he felt jealous, absurdly but increasingly jealous, of that other Laurence Rivers, of whom, for all his vitality and immediate consciousness of living energy and active will, he seemed to be but a second edition. The man had forestalled him in face and semblance, forestalled him too in the heart of the woman it would be—it was, he feared—only too easy for him to love.
And so he wandered aimlessly, restlessly about the bright, empty room, almost as his sweet rose-clad lady had wandered on the night he first met her, searching, searching for some lost good; while, as time lengthened and his nerves grew strained by impatient waiting and want of sleep, fears that by his own action he had procured this disappointment began to assail him. He was always over-confident, blundering from too great self-belief. For might it not be that in opening her little treasure-chest, in touching those objects so dear to her dead fingers and dead eyes, in reading her letters—nay, in striving to approach her and establish relations with her at all—he had outraged her delicacy, had, in a sense, assaulted her soul, had been guilty of spiritual insult, as in grosser, material existence a man might assault or insult a woman's person? Had he, unwittingly, transgressed some law obtaining in the world of spirits, in the state of being which lies outside and beyond the Gates of Death, and of which human beings, bound by the conditions of their earthly environment, have as yet no cognisance?—Why should not the mind and heart be sublimated to as exquisite a fineness of texture, in her case, as the body had been? This idea of possible outrage, of unwitting grossness towards her, was horrible to Laurence. It stabbed him with shame, and provoked in him a passionate desire for absolution. If she would only come—only come, that he might implore her pardon, gain forgiveness, or—still better—receive comfortable assurance that he had not sinned!
His restless wanderings brought him at length to the bay-window, and he looked out into the night. The storm had not abated. Dimly he could perceive, in the light streaming outward from the window, the rain-washed steps, the pale balustrades and statues of the garden; the near cypresses, too, bowed and straining in the gale which shrieked across the open lawns and bellowed hoarsely in the woodland like some fierce beast let loose. And Laurence, viewing this tumult and listening to it, suffered further humiliation. He became but a small thing in his own estimation, weak, futile, incapable. For to what, after all, did his force of will and power of compelling events amount? He thought of Armstrong, the level-headed and circumspect Scotch agent; of his uncle, dignified, and even in mortal illness faithful to the clear purposes of his long life. He thought of Virginia, strong in virtue of her very limitations, glittering as a well-cut jewel, concrete, complete. All these persons occupied a definite place, served, in their degree, a definite end. Whereas, for himself, was he not the veriest sport of nature and of circumstance, endowed with just sufficient wit, sufficient talent, to court failure in any and every direction? His initiative, that had lately showed god-like, now shrivelled to microscopic proportions; while a further unwelcome question presented itself. For had the gracious spectre—he no longer quarrelled with that definition—lived, as he had fondly supposed, through his life, regained reason and glad, human sympathy through the influence of his will, or had the case, in very truth, been precisely the reverse? Had not she been the active, he the merely passive principle? Had he not reached a higher development, and gloried—for a little space—in conscious possession of genius, had he not lived, in short, through her—and this not by exercise of direct intention on her part, but merely in obedience to the might of her love for another man—a man long dead, but whose name he chanced to bear, and whose appearance he chanced to resemble?
And thereupon a hideous persuasion of his own nullity and emptiness took hold of Laurence. Individuality fled away, disintegrated, dissolved, and was not. The component parts of his physical being returned to their original elements—flesh to earth, gases to air, heat to fire, blood to water. While all the qualities of his mind, his tastes and affections, suffered like dispersal, being claimed and absorbed by the members of those many generations, whose earthly existence had contributed to the eventual production of his own. And the terror of this was augmented, in that, although every atom of his being was thus scattered and appropriated, every smallest fraction of that which had gone to compose his personality was dispersed, yet annihilation of thought did not follow. He was reduced to absolute nothingness; but knowledge of disintegration, knowledge of loss, knowledge—rebellious and despairing—of that same nothingness remained.
Appalled, with the instinct of flight upon him as from some menacing and immeasurable danger, Laurence turned and groped his way back—as a blind man gropes—into the centre of the brightly lighted room. The persuasion of his own nothingness seemed to extend itself to his surroundings. All partook of the nature of illusion, from which sense of sight and touch alike seemed powerless to redeem them. And this begot in the young man an immense desolation and a corresponding need of comfort and of quick human sympathy. Involuntarily, in his extremity, his thought fixed itself, stayed itself, upon Agnes Rivers. Ah! if she would but show herself—she, his well-beloved fairy-lady—he was convinced peace and clear-seeing would follow in her train, that this terror of nothingness would depart, and that sanely, calmly, he should enter into possession of himself once more!
And then, presently, as he moved to and fro in restless search for her, it appeared to him that a rose-red gleam of silk, a just perceptible whiteness of muslin and lace, the faintest vision of a vision of her sweet and lovely face, moved beside him as he moved. It was as though an indefinable tenderness yearned towards him from out some impassable distance, striving to declare itself, to make itself seen and felt, yet without force to master some opposing influence and accomplish its object. And this awoke in Laurence not only an answering tenderness, but an answering struggle. He stood quite still, yet with every nerve, every faculty strained to attain and overcome. He felt braced by a sudden exhilaration of battle. Silently, fiercely, he fought with some awful, unseen enemy,—with dimly apprehended powers of time and place, of death, of things spiritual and things material, which intervened between him and the love which sought to reach him. Never had he desired anything as he desired this love. His individuality was actual enough now; and his whole body ached with the effort to penetrate that resistant medium, to be face to face with that love, and look on it, and so doing to read the riddle both of his future and his past.
But when the warfare was at its height, and the unseen enemy seemed to yield a little, while the slender form of his rose-clad lady grew more distinct to Laurence's eyes, unaccustomed noise and confusion arose within the dead-quiet house. Doors opened and slammed, as with the hurry of panic. Men's footsteps echoed imperatively down the corridors and upon the stairs.—Another moment and he would overcome all resistance, and his dear companion would stand before him, smiling, gracious, full of consolation and of help; but just then voices were raised in quick discussion without. Suddenly the door was thrown open. Upon the threshold was Renshaw the butler, bereft of his usual correctness of demeanour, his eyes starting, his skin mottled with purple stains. Behind him stood Watkins holding back the leather-lined curtain to the utmost of its length, thereby disclosing a triangular vista of dark-panelled passage and the proud heads and arrogant, impassive faces of the rulers of Imperial Rome.
Evidently both men dreaded to venture one step further into the room.
"Will you please to come at once, sir," Renshaw called hoarsely. "Excuse me, sir, you are wanted. Mr. Rivers is very ill. He has asked for you. Mr. Lowndes fears he is dying."