CHAPTER XIII. IN THE LABORATORY.
The grey dawn was glimmering through the chancel when Mr. Santley regained consciousness. He looked wonderingly about him, and at first was unable to understand how he came to be in his present position. That physical collapse had been a merciful relief from a state of mental tension which had become intolerable. He felt faint but calm, and the horrible excitement of the last few hours presented itself to his memory as a sort of ghastly nightmare from which he had been providentially awakened.
He rose and went out into the churchyard. The air was moist and cool. A strange white mist lay in fantastic pools and streaks on the bare hayfields. The corn was full of an indistinct white gauzy vapour. So were the trees. There was not much of it in the open air. It had a spectral look, and, like spirits, it seemed to require some material thing to interpenetrate and rest upon. The grass was heavy with dew, and the gravelled walk as dark coloured as though there had been rain. From the corn came the sound of innumerable chirpings and twitterings. The fields seemed to be swarming with sweet, sharp musical notes. In the trees, too, though there was no stir of wings, there was a very tumult of bird-song—not the full, joyous outpouring, but a ceaseless orchestral tuning up and rehearsing as it were. The familiar graveyard in this unusual misty light, and alive with this strange music, seemed a place in which ne had never been before. The effect was as novel as the first appearance of a well-known landscape buried in snow.
The newness of what was so familiar excited an indefinable interest in him. He felt somehow as though he had passed through the valley of the shadow, and this was the day after death—that death by which we shall not all die, but by which we and all things shall be changed. He lingered in that mental state in which thought expands beyond the bounds of consciousness, and it was not till a low, faint flush of red began to colour the east that he returned to the Vicarage, and, throwing himself on his bed, fell into the deep, dreamless sleep of exhaustion.
It was fortunate for Mr. Santley that he had inherited a magnificent constitution, or the consequences of this wild conflict might have been disastrous. He woke late, but the brief period of rest and unconsciousness had repaired the reckless waste of nervous force. Only a profound sadness remained as a testimony of the terrible nature of the emotion he had endured. The rest of the week passed in a sort of weary, listless stupor and the same heavy sadness. When Sunday came round, he shuddered as he ascended the pulpit at the recollection of that phantasmal audience to which he had last preached; but his intellect was clear and sane, and he kept faithfully to the written discourse spread out before him. He was not surprised that Mrs. Haldane left before he had any opportunity of speaking to her.
He had half expected as much. She regarded him with a cold, haughty contempt—a contempt too passionless to permit her even to avenge the insult he had offered her by exposing him to his parishioners. She knew he loved her—and indeed was not this folly proof of the frantic character of his love?—and she knew that total loss of her would be the greatest chastisement even vindictiveness could wish to inflict upon him. It would have been possible for him, he thought, to bear in silence any punishment from her except this icy contempt and utter indifference. If she had hated him, if she had pursued him with bitter hostility, if she had disgraced him, he could have endured it; it would have been no more than he merited. But that she should simply ignore him, that she should not consider it worth her while even to be angry, was an intolerable humiliation.
In spite of all, he still loved her! It was useless to seek to delude himself into any belief to the contrary. He loved her, in defiance of honour, goodness; in spite of misery and shame; in spite of divine or human law; in spite of man or God. He loved her with a mad, despairing passion, which he might conceal from all eyes for a little while, but which he could never quell; which he felt would some day break out in a frantic paroxysm that would involve both him and her in a common ruin. Home, position, reputation, this life and the next—he could sacrifice all for her. He could not exist without her. To see her and be never seen by her was a living hell. If he were, indeed, to be for ever doomed to this misery, better that he should perish at once, and have done for ever with the torture of being.
This alternative presented itself to the vicar not merely as one of those exaggerated expressions of feeling common to many men in moments of unendurable pain or depression, but as a sober reality. An existence in which Mrs. Haldane took no part and shared no interest was literally to him an existence more hateful than self-destruction itself. On the Monday he proceeded to the neighbouring market town, and bought a revolver and a packet of cartridges. He loaded the weapon on the road, and threw the remaining cartridges away. That evening he spent in looking over his papers, a large number of which he burned. He then sat down, and wrote for some time; but when he had finished, he threw what he had written into the fire. What need was there to put any explanation on record? He then took from the bookcase the great poem of Lucretius, and read till a late hour.