Her response to this was that same puzzled, bewildered, appealing look that had followed him in his first departure from her after she had watched him light the candles in Littlegate church and they had waited behind the bolted door.
Chapter 8
The look with which Nelly had received his evasive parable haunted Richard all the next day and the day after.
He set himself to examine his own feelings and to try, if he could, to sound hers.
He was unable to write a line; and was thankful enough when his correspondence arrived from Paris and gave him something definite to do apart from poetry.
He had learnt from what John Moreton said, as they walked to the town together, that in no less than a month’s time they would have to move from the vicarage, so that the place might be made ready for his successor.
It was a wretched situation and the one thing that would have made his own way clearer, if not quite clear, a definite knowledge that Nelly really cared for him and did not care for Canyot, remained as obscure as ever.
He saw shrewdly enough the diabolical trap in which the girl was caught, with nothing except immediate marriage as an escape from a struggle for bare life with a helpless parent on her hands. He saw too that whoever did step in and rescue her, whether it were Canyot or himself, there would stiil be the difficulty of her pride and that horrid suspicion — was it out of pity?
On the third day after his walk with the old man, Richard set out, in the morning, to see Nelly again. He was in a bitter, miserable frame of mind; for a letter had reached him from Paris with that signature he knew so fatally well and he had broken his resolution by reading it. He had meant to destroy it, but he had read it, and it punished him cruelly now with its sweet passionate clinging sentences, soft and electric, like the fingers that had penned it.
This letter and the vibrations it had stirred, coming on the top of his trouble about Nelly, wrecked completely his peace of mind.
He tore the great dancer’s characteristic syllables into tiny bits and flung them from him into the hedge as he went along.
The contradictory emotions that swayed him — Nelly’s white face and great childish eyes and those monumental heathen gestures of the body born to kindle undying desire — broke up his whole inner integrity.
In vain he sought to associate first one and then the other with his new mystical faith.
‘I am nothing in myself,’ he said to his heart, seeking to quiet its angry agitation. ‘I am merely one momentary pulse of consciousness of the great earth-life that struggles to purge itself, to free itself, to enrich itself with a thousand new subtleties, to pass into the something else for which there is no name but the name of God.
‘This perilous woman and this rare child are mere incidents in the love life of a wretched chance-driven wanderer. I take one. I take the other. I leave them both. It matters nothing in the final issue. All that matters is that this personal life of mine should lose itself in the larger life that flows down the generations; that I should become that life and let it become me. And then that I should express its beauty, its tragic wonderful cool-breathing eternal beauty, in such words as I can hammer out!’
He said these things to himself as he strode the now well-known lane. But these things brought him no peace. That white face with the troubled eyes remained more important to him than any earth-soul. And those noble limbs moving in incomparable rhythms against the black curtains of the Théâtre des Arts refused to be reduced to the temporary and the irrelevant.
They pressed upon him, that girl’s face and that woman’s form. They demanded that his philosophy should include them, account for them, reconcile them. Ah! it could never reconcile them. That was, he thought with a bitter smile, precisely where philosophy broke down.
He half expected, as lovers do, that he would meet the girl where he had met her before; but he arrived at the vicarage without having caught a glimpse of her.
He found the door of the house open and he could see the buxom Grace at the further end of the kitchen garden pulling up lettuces.
He knocked. There was no answer. He knocked again. Still there was no answer. He wondered if he should shout to Grace and command her to announce his presence. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter to twelve.
‘They must both be out,’ he said to himself. Then it occurred to him to look into the church, where he had first seen her.
Yes! There she was; kneeling in the very spot where he had sat when he had lighted those candles to the memory of Benjamin and Susanna.
The old atheist priest — if so reverent a worshipper of Christ could be called an atheist — was celebrating what was certainly an unorthodox and probably an illegal Mass. Maybe for the last time too! thought Richard, as he slipped quietly into the building and knelt down at the girl’s side. She had lifted her head at the sound of his footsteps and as he took his place and she moved further into the pew to make room for him she gave him a smile so radiant, so full of spontaneous happiness, that it redeemed in one moment all the past days. It was certainly from a sincere and contrite heart that he muttered his ‘mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’ during that ancient rite, the one flawless work of art, whatever else it might be, of the passionate mutterings of the old man — and Richard noticed how often his heretical old lips blundered inevitably into the great word he loathed — it seemed to both of them that in a sense beyond anything they had ever felt they were lifted above the troubles of brain and flesh and nerves. ‘Lifted into what?’ the man asked himself, as they remained on their knees, with the passion of the thing upon them, as the unfrocked priest carried away the vessels he had used. ‘Not into any mere soul of the earth! Into something that belonged to the whole stellar system. Yes! and beyond that! Into something that belonged to the life which was behind and within life, from whose unknown heart the souls of men and gods and planets and stars drew the rhythm that sustained the universe.’
By a mutual impulse they moved out together without waiting for the old man. Nelly showed him her mother’s grave, upon which the orchis maculata now put forth tiny red buds. ‘Cecily’, murmured Richard, ‘what a delicious old-fashioned name! It seems to smell of herbaceous borders and box hedges!’
‘It’s my name!’ cried Nelly, laughing. ‘Eleanor Cecily Moreton,’ she repeated solemnly.
‘I should like to have known your mother,’ he said earnestly.
‘You’d have liked her much better than me,’ she responded. ‘She would have never said horrid things to you.’
They moved on to the grave of Benjamin and Susanna. It gave them both a peculiar satisfaction to feel how they were linked by this churchyard.
‘Why didn’t they call you Talbot?’ she asked.
‘They must have known what a rebel I was going to be. It wouldn’t do for a friend of revolutionaries to be called Talbot.’
‘Are you a revolutionary?’ she inquired. ‘You seem to me most awfully conservative — much more conservative than I am.’
‘I don’t know what I am,’ said Richard. ‘I met a man in Paris who’d have made a Red of me if I’d seen much more of him. I’m afraid I’m too easily influenced.’
‘I like people who can be influenced,’ she said gravely. ‘Father certainly can’t and I don’t think Robert can — except by me!’
This last phrase was thrown in after a pause and was accompanied by that mischievous elfish smile which had puzzled Richard before.