Viewing that harsh and meagre resting-place which for the better part of a century had held all that remained of her dear body, Laurence felt himself strangely reconciled to actual happenings. For it was better, ten thousand times better, that all now subsisting of her mortal investiture should rest in Mother Earth's lap—blessed and set apart by the faith and piety of ages as was that pleasant plot of sun-visited grass, where the little shadows danced and beckoned, in the age-old quiet of Stoke Rivers's churchyard. There he would go and watch for her possible coming, and pay her the homage of his devotion, when the small hours drew on towards to-morrow's dawn.
Meanwhile there was time to be passed, and he did not care to leave this spot, though its present desolation tore at his very vitals, with memories of incalculable promise, and of unconsummated delight. As, awakening from his dream of satisfied love long ago, during that strange former existence, in the summer noon under the light, sibilant shelter of the lime grove, so now he hungered for completeness of possession, for the crowning of desire. Yet he kept himself in hand, even as he had kept the young, brown, thorough-bred horse in hand, when, finding the level, would have broken its pace and run riot more than once on the road up from the station. He moved away and sat down on the defaced and ragged sill of the bay-window. The moon had risen, but its mild light was often obscured by softly-moving floats of thin, opalescent vapour. These crossed its face in apparently endless procession, herded up from southward and the narrow Channel sea. Laurence watched them, at first almost unconsciously, his mind occupied with other, and, to himself, more immediate and vital interests. But at length their slow and stately progress began to work upon his imagination, and insinuate itself into the very substance and foundation of his thought. He began to see in them a procession of the souls of all those generations of men and women, whose efforts and emotions, power of intellect, fiercely pursued ambitions, passionate devotions, passionate revolts, had gone to generate his own constitution, mental and physical, and determine his ultimate fate. And so he came to regard them with a sustained and deepening attention, since their aspect seemed pregnant with suggestion of admonition, of encouragement, of warning, or restraint. Once again he decided to keep vigil in this house, to watch with the unnumbered and unrecorded dead whose offspring and inheritor he was. Not until all of them should have passed by, and the moon ride solitary in the heavens, would he go across the valley—himself now somewhat bitterly solitary—and visit Agnes Rivers's grave.
But that procession of low-floating vapours proved long in passing. More than once a break came in it, making the young man suppose that the whole of them was gone by. And then again, out of the south, now one alone, now in close ranged companies, strangely shaped, as though draped in dragging shrouds, that interminable procession crossed the vault of the sky. A terror of incalculable number, of unthinkable multitude, began to lay hold on him, as still they came, and came. Was it conceivable that each human life had this almost appalling vista of human lives behind it, of which it was the outcome and result, and in which it had, consciously or unconsciously, taken part? There was a certain splendour in the thought, though it left but little room for personal vanity. Yet even while watching, and pondering of all this, the personal note remained—for he pondered also, not without profound discouragement, of his great adventure which just now appeared so signally to have failed. At the half hours and hours the striking clocks warned him that the night was far spent, but still that endless and mystic procession passed before his watching eyes. As once before, in this same room, his individuality seemed to sink away from him, while a horrible sense of his own nullity and nothingness prevailed. But at last, at last, when the first chill grey of the dawn began just perceptibly to lighten the horizon behind the lime grove, the last of these trailing vapours arose, passed over and disappeared. The moon declined towards her setting, yet, though she hung low, the whole field of heaven was at length her own.
Then Laurence rose, and went away across the quiet park and up the deep, tree-shadowed lane to the churchyard, on the hillside across the valley, sheltered by the bank of high-lying woods. The grass was long, starred with tall-growing buttercups, blue speedwell, and ox-eye daisies, heavy and hanging with wet. Only the plot beneath the grey wall of the little chancel was neatly mown, while, on the near side of it, conspicuous from the smooth surface of the turf rising immediately surrounding it, was a new-made grave. The sods covering it were kept in place by a cage of osier rods. Some one—and Laurence found it in his heart to bless that unknown ministrant—had laid a spray of pink wild-rose upon the head of the grave, twisted into a little crown, at once of blossom and of thorns.
Laurence stood at the foot of the long, narrow mound, and again he kept vigil—hearing the breathing of the moist earth, the quick sounds of the woodland, and that strange, indeterminate, stirring of awakening life—beast, bird, insect, herb, and tree—which immediately precedes the birth of day. More than once his heart thumped against his ribs, and the love-light sprang into his eyes, for, deceived by the growing colour of the east, he fancied for an instant he again beheld the dear rose-red of his fairy-lady's clinging, old-world, silken gown. But that fond delusion was soon dissipated. Wherever her light footsteps might now tread, they would never, in visible fashion, tend earthwards again.
Then on a sudden, from the stables up at the house, came the crowing of a cock, answered in gallant challenge from cottage and from farmyard—growing faint in the far distance, ringing out again close at hand, lusty and vigorous, full of the joy of living. Stung by the merry sound, Laurence straightened himself up, looked away from the osier-bound, rose-crowned grave, over the fertile, peaceful landscape. The hops hung heavy upon the poles. The corn warmed to ruddy yellow. The grass and hedgerows, as the sun's rays touched them, glittered with a thousand diamond points, even as his lost love's little, embroidered slippers had glittered when he first led her forth along the alleys of the Italian garden. A glad wind swept up landward, from that great thoroughfare of the nations, that highway of stately ships, the narrow Channel sea. It raced through the woodland, swayed the sombre, plume-like branches of the ancient yew-trees, and passed, exultant, to fulfil its cleanly, life-giving mission elsewhere. Laurence took a long breath, filling his lungs with it. It was good to taste, sane and wholesome. And then, somehow, those divine words came to him, spoken in the far Syrian country nearly two thousand years ago.—"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."
Laurence stood erect and very still, his head held high, his face keen, his lips parted in silent laughter, his whole being vibrant with the surprise of a great conviction, a great discovery. For at length he too saw and understood. He perceived that his love far from being lost was his, close and intimately, as she had never been before, in either this life, or that other half-remembered life, in both of which he had loved her so well. He perceived that his amazing and desperate experiment, far from being a failure, was on a high-road to a success hitherto undreamed of. He perceived that his splendid adventure, far from being ended, had but just begun; and that, could he but keep faith with his present seeing, it would not end until he too had pushed back the heavy curtain, and finally crossed the threshold of so-called death. Nor would it end even then, were light lived in the light of this his present seeing. The future was illimitable, since the goal of it was nothing less than union with the Divine Principle itself. However innumerable the company of human lives that had gone to produce his own, his individuality was secure henceforth, since he had recognised and embraced the life which alone eternally exists and subsists—the life in, and of, God.
Five months ago, crossing the Atlantic, in the chill of the March night, while the big ship steamed eastward and the stars danced in the rigging as she sunk and swung in the trough and then rose—as a horse at a fence—at the coming wave, he had asked himself the question as to the profit of gaining the whole world, if in so doing a man should lose his own soul. All his experience since then had been a setting of that vital question at rest for ever. For he had found his soul. The matter was simply to the point of laughter, when once apprehended. In bidding him farewell, his sweet companion had promised him that she and he would at last be made one, being one with Almighty God. He had heard that as he might mere rhetoric, idle though pretty words, placing it in some unimaginable future, his mind still in bondage to human conception of time and space. Now he beheld this consummation as already accomplished, immediately present, constant, here, now, permanent. All that it needed was just an attitude and habit of mind, and then work. Work, not so much for any great benefit derivable by others from that work (though the desire of the welfare of others must be a fundamental element in that work); but for the maintenance of the said all-important attitude and habit of mind in himself. Almost any work would do. There was his property; and, happily, sufficient of the feudal idea still remains in England to make the possession of a great landed-estate fruitful in humane relations between class and class. There was the dear earth, too, to till and sow, and render more fertile, and more useful to man. There were politics and public affairs. In the light of his present illumination he dare approach these things, strong to carve out a career for himself, yet for ever keeping his secret against his heart. Salvation is for the individual, each individual must find it for him or herself. Souls cannot be saved in batches. But to each and all it may, and will, come, if they have courage, and fortitude, and the single eye which refuses illusion.
"And so farewell, yet never farewell, my first, and last, and only love," he said, looking at the osier-bound grave, while the shadows of the feathery yew-trees danced and beckoned upon the churchyard grass. "There have been partings before, cruel to be born; there may be partings again, but they will be transitory. I am not afraid that I shall ever lose you, or you me. I am secure in that. Meanwhile for your sake, O dear soul of me—for so indeed you are—I will make the best use of the years I may still have to live here on earth. And since you once were woman, no woman shall ever suffer at my hands—all womanhood being sacred thenceforth since you once were woman.—Now the work of the world calls, and, God helping me, I will help to do it. After all, dear love, we go forth together,—amen."