It was all very much in keeping with his mood—the reposeful landscape, heavy with the solid green of the August foliage, the sweep of the low, grey sky, the warm, still rain which drew forth an indefinable fragrance from the pastures and hedgerows, the wayside flowers, and the underwood. Already the evenings had begun to shorten. The rambling village-street and its inevitable commotion of boys and dogs left behind, Laurence looked away, with a stirring of the heart, over this goodly land of which he was owner, as the brown thorough-bred breasted the hilly road leading up from the station to Stoke Rivers house. The prospect at once soothed and stimulated him. Emotion had been conspicuous principally by its absence lately; it was pleasant to feel again.
At the hall-door the two men-servants met him; and Renshaw's large, egg-shaped countenance bore an expression almost paternal.
"Excuse me, sir," he said, his complexion ripening to mulberry with the effort of speech—"I do not wish to put myself forward, or go beyond my place, but I must express the pleasure we take in welcoming you home, sir. I speak not only for myself, but for Mr. Lowndes and Mr. Watkins, and all the other servants—both upper and under, sir."
Lowndes, the grey-haired, long-armed valet, subsequently gave vent to even more cordial sentiments.
"Excepting for the fire, we have been very dull during your absence, sir," he said, as he laid out the young man's dress clothes, with a critical eye to their packing which did not evidently quite commend itself to his taste. "Living in this house has been like living inside a run-down clock. I hope you have returned to make some stay, sir. We want a head; we have forgotten how to take a holiday and amuse ourselves. Our habits have been so very regular for so many years, you see, sir, we feel lost without our accustomed duties."
This too was pleasant. To be precious in the sight of those who serve you lends a singular graciousness to the conduct of daily life. Laurence felt at harmony with himself and his surroundings, and with that sense of harmony arose certain stirrings of hope. During the days and nights of the past week, while the great ship ploughed her way eastward across the mighty ridge and furrow of the Atlantic, he had not been wholly unconscious of that hope—the hope that even now all might not be over, and that he might once again be blessed by the vision, for however brief a space, of his dear fairy-lady. Yet he had kept that hope under with a stern hand. It was present, but at the postern gate, so to speak, of the castle of his reason and his will. He kept it there, doing his heart much violence by refusing it admittance and entertainment, since he knew that, once admitted, it would have proved so dangerously absorbing and alluring a guest. He tried to deny it admittance still; yet he shuffled a little with his own conscience, permitting himself a renewing of the routine which had marked his former sojourn at Stoke Rivers. He dressed, dined, and waited until the twilight had very sensibly closed in before visiting that which might remain of the room of mysterious and enchanted meetings.
The near end of the corridor offered no noticeable signs of disturbance or injury. Still it appeared to Laurence that, as on a former occasion, a spirit of disorder, the winnowing wings of a profound and elemental fear, had but lately swept through it. He could have imagined the sightless, marble faces of the Roman emperors less impassive, less wholly scornful, their heads carried with something less of arrogant and invincible pride. An acrid odour of burned stuffs, burned woodwork, pervaded the place. He had cabled instructions that nothing might be removed, nothing renovated before his arrival. The tapestry curtain still hung in its accustomed position; but it was blackened and shrivelled to the obliteration of the figures wrought upon it. The satyr no longer leered, from his monticule, upon the naked and reluctant woman hurried towards him by the company of naughty loves. Tongues of fire had licked away that pictured wantonness and purged its offence.
Behind the wreck of the portière, the door—its panels split and tormented by flame—stood wide open, as on the night when, straining every muscle to carry that apparently so light and fragile burden, Laurence had lifted Agnes Rivers across the threshold. Once within the yellow drawing-room the desolation of that heretofore gracious and friendly apartment touched hard on tragedy, seen, as now, in the furtive, evening light. The rain had ceased, and through the remaining sheets of glass, in the partially boarded and barricaded bay-window, the flower-beds of the Italian garden showed in rich variety of leaf and blossom. The statues gleamed calm and graceful from their white pedestals. The spires of the cypresses rose with a certain velvet softness of density towards the pensive and slowly clearing sky. But the room itself was ruined in most unsightly fashion, stained by smoke, rendered clammy and dank in places by water. Wreckage of the pretty, costly furniture lay scattered in formless heaps upon the blackened floor—with here and there a shred of fine porcelain, the gilt handle of a drawer, the pages of a book reduced to tinder, or the unlovely remnant of carpet or hanging. It was as a place that has suffered siege, and which relentless foemen have sacked and trodden underfoot. So that it came to Laurence, very surely, that not here would he find his sweet fairy-lady, were he indeed destined, in this life, ever to find her again. Her gentle spirit could never be subjected to the indignity of dwelling amid this scene of destruction. Some incongruities are inadmissible to the imagination. They are too violent, too gross. Therefore the days of his beloved companion's pilgrimage were ended—it could not be otherwise—in respect of this once so comely place.
But though convinced that here it was useless to await her presence, there remained somewhat for Laurence in all tenderness and reverence to see. Since the electric light was now unavailable, he had ordered candles to be placed upon the chimney-piece, which, though yellow and disfigured, still remained practically intact. He moved across from the neighbourhood of the doorway—sad, little clouds of corpse-coloured ashes arising about his feet as he stepped—and put a match to the candles. Then, as the light of them strengthened and steadied, he looked, shading his eyes with his hand, towards that portion of the wall at right angles to which the painted, satin-wood escritoire, with all its pathetic store of cherished love-tokens, had formerly stood. The high wainscot and brocade-covered panels masking this space had been entirely burned away, disclosing a low, vaulted chamber hollowed out of the thickness of the outer wall. This chamber had been roughly and somewhat clumsily ceiled. The whole construction showed unmistakeable traces of hasty and unskilled labour.
Yet Laurence looked at this rough-hewn place of sepulture with an infinite tenderness, a chastened reverence, while a very vital emotion clutched at his throat, and far-reaching questions of life past, life future, and the august purposes of being through the abysm of the ages and on to the ultimate goal of things, held and sifted his intelligence and his heart. For it was here, upon the morning following the fire, that Agnes Rivers's coffin had been found. And it was from here, from this hard and narrow bed—by what alchemy and agency he knew not—it transcended his powers to conceive—that her sweet ghost had come forth nightly, through all those long and dreary years of which it sickened him to think, flitting impalpable, in vain endeavour to find the key to her little treasure chest, that was also the key to the love she had so pathetically lost. And it was here also, to this same hard and narrow bed, that she had returned with quick and innocently gladsome farewells in the first flush of returning day, when that love, by unprecedented circumstance—circumstance trenching on actual miracle—had been restored to her.