But never either found another
To free the hollow heart from paining.
They stood aloof, the scars remaining,
Like cliffs which had been rent asunder.
A dreary sea now flows between,
But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder,
Shall wholly do away, I ween,
The marks of that which once hath been.
The mother handed the book back to the daughter without looking at her. “No,” she said; “I don’t think it is a case like that.”
But a moment later she wiped her eyes furtively, and then she told her daughter more, it is to be feared, than Mrs. Fairchild would have approved.
* * * * *
Sir Robert, when they were gone, went heavily to the library, a panelled room looking to the back, in which it was his custom to sit. For many years he had passed some hours of every day, when he was at home, in that room; and until now it had never occurred to his mind that it was dull or shabby. But it was old Mapp’s habit to lower the blinds for his master’s after-luncheon nap, and they were still down; and the half light which filtered in was like the sheet which rather accentuates than hides the sharp features of the dead. The faded engravings and the calf-bound books which masked the walls, the escritoire, handsome and massive, but stained with ink and strewn with dog’s eared accounts, the leathern-covered chair long worn out of shape by his weight, the table beside it with yesterday’s “Standard,” two or three volumes of the “Anti-Jacobin,” and the “Quarterly,” a month old and dusty—all to his opened eyes wore a changed aspect. They spoke of the slow decay of years, unchecked by a woman’s eye, a woman’s hand. They told of the slow degradation of his lonely life. They indicated a like change in himself.
He stood a few moments on the hearth, looking about him with a shocked, pained face. The months and the years had passed irrevocably, while he sat in that chair, poring in a kind of lethargy over those books, working industriously at those accounts. Asked, he had answered that he was growing old, and grown old. But he had never for a moment comprehended, as he comprehended now, that he was old. He had never measured the difference between this and that; between those days troubled by a hundred annoyances, vexations, cares, when in spite of all he had lived, and these days of sullen stagnancy and mere vegetation.
He found the room, he found the reflection, intolerable. And he went out, took with an unsteady hand his garden hat and returned to that broad walk under the elms beside the pool which was his favourite lounge. Perhaps he fancied that the wonted scene would deaden the pain of memory and restore him to his wonted placidity. But his thoughts had been too violently broken. His hands shook, hid lip trembled with the tearless passion of later life. And when his agitation began to die down and something like calmness supervened, this did but enable him to feel more keenly the pangs, not of remorse, but of regret; of bitter, unavailing regret for all the things of which the woman who had lain on his bosom had robbed his life.
Stapylton stood in a side valley projected among the low green hills which fringe the vale of the Wiltshire Avon. From where he stood all within sight, the gentle downs above the house, the arable land which fringed them, the rich pastures below—all, mill and smithy and inn, snug farm and thatched cottage, called him lord. Nay, from the south end of the pool, where a wicket gave entrance to the park—whence also a side view of the treble front of the house could be obtained—the spire of Chippinge church was visible, rising from its ridge in the Avon alley; and to the base of that spire all was his, all had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. But not an acre, not a rood, would be his child’s.
This was no new thought. It was a thought that had saddened him on many and many a summer evening when the shadow of the elms lay far across the sward, and the silence of the stately house, the pale water, the far-stretching farms whispered of the passing of the generations, of the passage of time, of the inevitable end. Where he walked his father had walked; and soon he would go whither his father had gone. And the heir would walk where he walked, listen to the same twilight carollings, hear the first hoot of the distant owl.
Cedes coemptis saltibus, el domo
Villaque, flavus quam Tiberis lavit,