She raised her eyes from her sewing. “We must pray for him,” she said. “I have been praying for him all day — and all last night, too,” she added with a faint smile. “I let Philippa think I didn’t know what had happened. But I knew.” She shuddered a little. “I knew. I heard him in the ‘workshop.’”
“What I wanted to say, Aunt Helen,” he went on, “was this. I want you to remember — whatever happens to either of us — that I love you more than any one in the world. Yes — yes,” he continued, not allowing her to interrupt, “better even than Adriano!”
A look resembling the effect of some actual physical pain came into her face. “You mustn’t say that, my dear,” she murmured. “You must keep your love for your wife when you marry. I don’t like to hear you say things like that — to an old woman.” She hesitated a moment. “It sounds like flattery, Tassar,” she added.
“But it’s true, Aunt Helen!” he repeated with almost passionate emphasis. “You’re by far the most beautiful and by far the most interesting woman I’ve ever met.”
Mrs. Renshaw drew her hand across her face. Then she laughed gaily like a young girl. “What would Philippa say,” she said, “if she heard you say that?”
Baltazar’s face clouded. He looked at her long and closely.
“Philippa is interesting and deep,” he said with a grave emphasis, “but she doesn’t understand me. You understand me, though you think it right to hide your knowledge even from yourself.”
Mrs. Renshaw’s face changed in a moment. It became haggard and obstinate. “We mustn’t talk any more about understanding and about love,” she said. “God’s will is that we should all of us only completely love and understand the person He leads us, in His wisdom, to marry.”
Baltazar burst into a fit of heathen laughter. “I thought you were going to end quite differently, Aunt Helen,” he said. “I thought the only person we were to love was going to be God. But it seems that it is man — or woman,” he added bitterly.
Mrs. Renshaw bent low over her work and the shadow grew still deeper upon her face. Seeing that he had really hurt her, Baltazar changed his tone.
“Dear Aunt Helen!” he whispered gently, “how many happy hours, how many, how many! — have we spent together reading in this room!”
She looked up quickly at this, with the old bright look. “Yes, it’s been a happy thing for me, Tassar, having you so near us. Do you remember how, last winter, we got through the whole of Sir Walter Scott? There’s no one nowadays like him—is there? Though Philippa tells me that Mr. Hardy is a great writer.”
“Mr. Hardy!” exclaimed her interlocutor whimsically. “I believe you would have come to him at last — perhaps you will, dear, some day. Let’s hope so! But I’m afraid I shall not be here then.”
“Don’t talk like that, Tassar,” she said without looking up from her work. “It will not be you who will leave me.”
There was a pause between them then, and Baltazar’s eyes wandered out into the hushed misty garden.
“Mr. Hardy does not believe in God,” he remarked.
“Tassar!” she cried reproachfully. “You know what you promised just now. You mustn’t tease me. No one deep down in his heart disbelieves in God. How can we? He makes His power felt among us every day.”
There was another long silence, broken only by the melancholy cawing of the rooks, beginning to gather in their autumnal roosting-places.
Presently Mrs. Renshaw looked up. “Do you remember,” she said very solemnly, “how you promised me one day never again to let Brand or Philippa speak disrespectfully of our English hymn-book? You said you thought the genius of some of our best-known poets was more expressed in their hymns than in their poetry. I have often thought of that.”
A very curious expression came into Baltazar’s face. He suddenly leaned forward. “Aunt Helen,” he said, “this illness of Adrian’s makes me feel, as you often say, how little security there is for any of our lives. I wish you’d say to me those peculiarly sad lines — you know the one I mean? — the one I used to make you smile over, when I was in a bad mood, by saying it always made me think of old women in a work-house! You know the one, don’t you?”
The whole complicated subtlety of Mrs. Renshaw’s character showed itself in her face now. She smiled almost playfully but at the same moment a supernatural light came in her eyes. “I know,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation or the least touch of embarrassment, she began to sing, in a low plaintive melodious voice, the following well-known stanza. As she sang she beat time with her hand; and there came over her hearer the obscure vision of some old, wild, primordial religion, as different from paganism as it was different from Christianity, of which his mysterious friend was the votary and priestess. The words drifted away through the open window into the mist and the falling leaves.
“Rest comes at length, though life be long and weary,
The day must dawn and darksome night be past;
Faith’s journey ends in welcome to the weary,
And heaven, the heart’s true home, will come at last.”
When it was finished there was a strange silence in the room, and Baltazar rose to his feet. His face was pale. He moved to her side and, for the first and last time in their curious relations, he kissed her — a long kiss upon the forehead.
With a heightened colour in her cheeks and a nervous deprecatory smile on her lips, she went with him to the door. “Listen, dear,” she said, as she took his hand, “I want you to think of that poem of Cowper’s written when he was most despairing — the one that begins ‘God moves in a mysterious way.’ I want you to remember that though what he lays upon us seems crushing, there is always something behind it — infinite mercy behind infinite mystery.”
Baltazar looked her straight in the face. “I wonder,” he said, “whether it is I or you who is the most unhappy person in Rodmoor!”
She let his hand fall. “What we suffer,” she said, “seems to me like the weight of some great iron engine with jagged raw edges — like a battering-ram beating us against a dark mountain. It swings backwards and forwards, and it drives us on and on and on.”
“And yet you believe in God,” he whispered.
She smiled faintly. “Am I not alive and speaking to you, dear? If behind it all there wasn’t His will, who could endure to live another moment?”
They looked into one another’s face in silence. He made an attempt to say something else to her but his tongue refused to utter what his heart suggested.
“Good-bye, Aunt Helen,” he said.
“Good night, Tassar,” she answered, “and thank you for coming to see me.”
He left the house without meeting any one else and walked with a deliberate and rapid step towards the river. The twilight had already fallen, and a white mist coming up over the sand-dunes was slowly invading the marshes. The tide had just turned and the full-brimmed current of the river’s out-flowing poured swift and strong between the high mud-banks.
The Loon was at that moment emphasizing and asserting its identity with an exultant joy. It seemed almost to purr, with a kind of feline satisfaction, as its dark volume of brackish water rushed forward towards the sea. Whatever object it touched in its swift passage, it drew from it some sort of half-human sound — some whisper or murmur or protest of querulous complaining.
The reeds flapped; the pollard-roots creaked; the mud-promontories moaned; and all the while, with gurglings and suckings and lappings and deep-drawn, inward, self-complacent laughter, the sliding body of the slippery waters swept forward under its veil of mist.