CHAPTER IX.

THE FACE IN THE CHURCH.

Two months had gone since that first visit to Lola’s grave, when the husband and wife had knelt so near each other, and yet so far apart in the infinite mystery of human consciousness; he with his secret thoughts and secret woes, which she had never fathomed. He, unaware of her neighbourhood; she, chilled by a vague suspicion and sense of estrangement which had been growing upon her ever since her daughter’s death.

It was summer again, the ripe full-blown summer of mid-July. The awful anniversary of their bereavement had passed in silence and prayer. All things at Enderby looked as they had looked in the years that were gone, except the faces of the servants, which were for the most part strange. That change of the household made a great change in life to people so conservative as George Greswold and his wife; and the old home seemed so much the less like home because of that change. The Squire of Enderby felt that his popularity was lessened in the village for which he had done so much. His severe dealing with the offenders had pleased nobody, not even the sufferers from the epidemic, whose losses he had avenged. He had shown himself implacable; and there were many who said he had been unjust.

“It was hard upon Wadman and his wife to be turned off after twenty years’ faithful service,” said one of the villagers. “The Squire may go a long way before he’ll get as good a bailiff as Thomas,” said another.

For the first time since he had inherited the estate George Greswold felt himself surrounded by an atmosphere of discontent, and even dislike. His tenants seemed afraid of him, and were reticent and moody when he talked to them, which he did much seldomer than of old, making a great effort in order to appear interested in their affairs.

Mildred’s life during those summer weeks, while the roses were opening and all the flowers succeeding each other in a procession of loveliness, had drifted along like a slow dull stream that crawls through a desolate swamp. There was neither beauty nor colour in her existence; there was a sense of vacuity, an aching void. Nothing to hope for, nothing to look back upon.

She did not abandon herself slavishly to her sorrow. She tried to resume the life of duty which had once been so full of sweetness, so rich in its rewards for every service. She went about among the cottagers as of old; she visited the shabby gentilities on the fringe of the market town, the annuitants and struggling families, the poor widows and elderly spinsters, who had quite as much need of help as the cottagers, and whom it had always been her delight to encourage and sustain with friendliness and sympathy, as well as with delicate benefactions, gifts that never humiliated the recipient. She took up the thread of her work in the parish schools; she resumed her old interest in the church services and decorations, in the inevitable charity bazaar or organ-fund concert. She played her part in the parish so well that people began to say,

“Mrs. Greswold is getting over her loss.”

In him the shock had left a deeper mark. His whole aspect was changed. He looked ten years older than before the coming of sorrow; and though people loved her better, they pitied him more.

“She has more occupations and pursuits to interest her,” said Mr. Rollinson, the curate. “She is devoted to music, and that employs her mind.”

Yes, music was her passion; but in these days of mourning even music was allied to pain. Every melody she played, every song she sang, recalled the child whose appreciation of that divine art had been far beyond her years. They had sung and played together. Often singing alone in the summer dusk, in that corner of the long drawing-room, where Lola’s babyish chair still stood, she had started, fancying she heard that other voice mingling with her own—the sweet clear tones which had sounded seraphic even upon earth.

O, was she with the angels now; or was it all a fable, that fond vision of a fairer world and an angelic choir, singing before the great white throne? To have lost such a child was almost to believe in the world of seraphim and cherubim, of angels and purified spirits. Where else could she be?

Husband and wife lived together, side by side, in a sad communion that seemed to lack the spirit of unity. The outward semblance of confiding affection was there, but there was something wanting. He was very good to her—as kind, as attentive, and considerate as in their first year of marriage; and yet there was something wanting.

She remembered what he had been when he came as a stranger to The Hook; and it seemed to her as if the glass of Time had been turned backwards for fourteen years, and that he was again just as he had been in those early days, when she had watched him, curiously interested in his character as in a mystery. He was too grave for a man of his years—and with a shade of gloom upon him that hinted at a more than common grief. He had been subject to lapses of abstraction, as if his mind had slipped back to some unhappy past. It was only when he had fallen in love and was wholly devoted to her that the shadow passed away, and he began to feel the joyousness of life and the fervour of ardent hopes. Then the old character dropped off him like the serpent’s slough, and he became as young as the youngest—boyish even in his frank felicity.

This memory of her first impressions about him was so strong with her that she could not help speaking of it one evening after dinner when she had been playing one of Beethoven’s grandest adagios to him, and they were sitting in silence, she by the piano, he far away by an open window on a level with the shadowy lawn, where the great cedars rose black against the pale gray sky.

“George, do you remember my playing that adagio to you for the first time?”

“I remember you better than Beethoven. I could scarcely think of the music in those days for thinking so much of you.”

“Ah, but the first time you heard me play that adagio was before you had begun to care for me—before you had cast your slough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Before you had come out of your cloud of sad memories. When first you came to us you lived only in the past. I doubt if you were more than half-conscious of our existence.”

She could only distinguish his profile faintly defined against the evening gray as he sat beside the window. Had she seen the expression of his face, its look of infinite pain, she would hardly have pursued the subject.

“I had but lately lost my mother,” he said gravely.

“Ah, but that was a grief which you did not hide from us. You did not shrink from our sympathy there. There was some other trouble, something that belonged to a remoter past, over which you brooded in secret. Yes, George, I know you had some secrets then—that divided us—and—and—” falteringly, with tears in her voice—“I think those old secrets are keeping us asunder now, when our grief should draw us nearer together.”

She had left her place by the piano, and had gone to him as she spoke, and now she was on her knees beside him, clinging to him tearfully.

“George, trust me, love me,” she pleaded.

“My beloved, do I not love you?” he protested passionately, clasping her in his arms, kissing away her tears, soothing her as if she had been a child. “My dearest and best, from the first hour I awakened to a new life in your love my truth has never wavered, my heart has never known change.”

“And yet you are changed—since our darling went—terribly changed.”

“Do you wonder that I grieve for her?”

“No, but you grieve apart—you hold yourself aloof from me.”

“If I do it is because I do not want you to share my burden, Mildred. Your sorrow may be cured, perhaps—mine never can be. Time may be merciful to you—for me time can do nothing.”

“Dearest, what hope can there be for me that you do not share?—the Christian’s hope of meeting our loved one hereafter. I have no other hope.”

“I hardly know if I have that hope,” he answered slowly, with deepest despondency.

“And yet you are a Christian.”

“If to endeavour to follow Christ, the Teacher and Friend of humanity, is to be a Christian—yes.”

“And you believe in the world to come?”

“I try so to believe, Mildred. I try. Faith in the Kingdom of Heaven does not come easily to a man whose life has been ruled by the inexorable Fates. Not a word, darling; let us not talk of these things. We know no more than Socrates knew in his dungeon; no more than Roger Bacon knew in his old age—unheard, buried, forgotten. Never doubt my love, dearest. That is changeless. You and Lola were the sunshine of my life. You shall be my sunshine henceforward. I have been selfish in brooding over my sorrow; but it is the habit of my mind to grieve in silence. Forgive me, dear wife; forgive me.”

He clasped her in his arms, and again she felt assured of her husband’s affection; but she knew all the same that there was some sorrow in his past life which he had kept hidden from her, which he meant her never to know.

Many a time in their happy married life she had tried to lead him to talk of his boyhood and youth. About his days at Eton and Oxford he was frank enough, but he was curiously reticent about his home life and about those years which he had spent travelling over the Continent after he had left his father’s house for good.

“I was not happy at home, Mildred,” he told her one day. “My father and I did not get on together, as the phrase goes. He was very fond of my elder brother. They had the same way of thinking about most things. Randolph’s marriage pleased my father, and he looked to Randolph to strengthen the position of our family, which had been considerably reduced by his own extravagance. He would have liked my mother’s estate to have gone to the elder son; but she had full disposing power, and she made me her heir. This set my father against me, and there came a time when, dearly as I loved my mother, I found that I could no longer live at home. I went out into the world, a lonely man; and I only came back to the old home after my father’s death.”

This was the fullest account of his family history that George Greswold had given his wife. From his reserve in speaking of his father she divined that the balance of wrong had been upon the side of the parent rather than of the son. Had a man of her husband’s temper been the sinner he would have frankly confessed his errors. Of his mother he spoke with undeviating love; and he seemed to have been on friendly terms with his brother.

On the morning after that tearful talk in the twilight Mr. Greswold startled his wife from a pensive reverie as they sat at breakfast in the garden. They always breakfasted out of doors on fine summer mornings. They had made no change in old customs since their return, as some mourners might have done, hoping to blunt the keen edge of memory by an alteration in the details of life. Both knew too well how futile any such alteration of their surroundings would be. They remembered Lola no more vividly at Enderby than they had remembered her in Switzerland.

“My dearest, I have been thinking of you incessantly since last night, and of the loneliness of your life,” George Greswold began seriously, as he sat in a low basket-chair, sipping his coffee, with his favourite setter Kassandra at his feet; an Irish dog that had been famous for feather in days gone by, but who had insinuated herself into the family affections, and had got herself accepted as a household companion to the ruin of her sporting qualities. Kassandra went no more with the guns. Her place was the drawing-room or the lawn.

“I can never be lonely, George, while I have you. There is no other company I can ever care about henceforward.”

“Let me always be the first, dear; but you should have female companionship of some kind. Our house is empty and voiceless. There should be some young voice—some young footstep—”

“Do you mean that I ought to hire a girl to run up and down stairs, and laugh in the corridors, as Lola used? O, George, how can you!” exclaimed Mildred, beginning to cry.

“No, no, dear. I had no such thought in my mind. I was thinking of Randolph’s daughter. You seemed to like her when she and her sister were here two years ago.”

“Yes, she was a nice, bright girl then, and my darling was pleased with her. How merry they were together, playing battledore and shuttlecock over there by the yew hedge! Don’t ask me ever to see that girl again, George. It would make my heart ache.”

“I am sorry to hear you say that, Mildred. I was going to ask you to have her here on a good long visit. Now that Rosalind is married, Pamela has no home of her own. Rosalind and her husband like having her occasionally—for a month or six weeks at a time; but Sir Henry Mountford’s house is not Pamela’s home. She would soon begin to feel herself an incubus. The Mountfords are very fond of society, and just a little worldly. They would soon be tired of a girl whose presence was no direct advantage. I have been thinking that with us Pamela would never be in the way. You need not see too much of her in this big house. There would be plenty of room for her to carry on her own pursuits and amusements without boring you; and when you wanted her she would be at hand, a bright companionable girl, who would grow fonder of you every day.”

“I could not endure her fondness. I could not endure any girl’s companionship. Her presence would only remind me of my loss.”

“Dearest, I thought we were both agreed that, as nothing can make us forget our darling, it cannot matter to us how often we are reminded of her.”

“Yes, by silent, unreasoning things like Kassandra,” touching the dog’s tawny head with a caressing hand; “or the garden—the trees and flowers she loved—her books—her piano. Those things may remind us of our darling without hurting us. But to hear a girl’s voice calling me—as she used to call me from the garden on summer mornings—to hear a girl’s laughter——”

“Yes, it would be painful, love, at first. I can understand that, Mildred. But if you can benefit an orphan girl by having her here, I know your kind heart will not refuse. Let her come for a few weeks, and if her presence pains you she shall stay no longer. She shall not be invited again. I would not ask you to receive a stranger, but my brother’s daughter is near me in blood.”

“Let her come, George,” said Mildred impulsively; “I am very selfish—thinking only of my own feelings. Let her come. How strangely this talk of ours reminds me of something that happened when I was a child!”

“What was that, Mildred?”

“You have heard me speak of Fay, my playfellow?”

“Yes.”

“I remember the evening my father asked mamma to let her come to us. It seemed just now as if you were using his very words; and yet all things were different.”

Mildred had told him very little about that childish sorrow of hers. She had shrunk from any allusion to the girl whose existence bore witness against her father. She, too, fond and frank as she was, had kept her own counsel, had borne the burden of a secret.

“Yes, I have heard you speak of the girl you called Fay, and of whom you must have been very fond, for the tears came into your eyes when you mentioned her. Did she live with you long?”

“O, no, a very short time! She was sent to school—to a finishing-school at Brussels.”

“Brussels!” he repeated, with a look of surprise.

“Yes. Do you know anything about Brussels schools?”

“Nothing personally. I have heard of girls educated there. And what became of your playfellow after the Brussels school?”

“I never heard.”

“And you never tried to find out?”

“Yes, I asked my mother; but there was a prejudice in her mind against poor Fay. I would rather not talk about her, George.”

Her vivid blush, her evident confusion, perplexed her husband. There was some kind of mystery, it seemed—some family trouble in the background, or Mildred, who was all candour, would have spoken more freely.

“Then may I really invite Pamela?” he asked, after a brief silence, during which he had responded to the endearments of Kassandra, too well fed to have any design upon the dainties on the breakfast-table, and only asking to be loved.

“I will write to her myself, George. Where is she?”

“Not very far off. She is at Cowes with the Mountfords, on board Sir Henry’s yacht the Gadfly. You had better send your letter to the post-office, marked Gadfly.”

The invitation was despatched by the first post; Miss Greswold was asked to come to the Manor as soon as she liked, and to stay till the autumn.

The next day was Sunday, and Mr. and Mrs. Greswold went to church together by the path that led them within a few paces of Lola’s grave.

For the first time since her daughter’s death Mildred had put on a light gown. Till to-day she had worn only black. This morning she came into the vivid sunlight in a pale gray gown of soft lustreless silk, and a neat little gray straw bonnet, which set off the fairness of her skin and the sheen of her golden hair. The simple fashion of her gown became her tall, slim figure, which had lost none of the grace of girlhood. She was the prettiest and most distinguished-looking woman in Enderby Church, although there were more county families represented there upon that particular Sunday than are often to be seen in a village church.

The Manor House pew was on one side of the chancel, and commanded a full view of the nave. The first lesson was long, and while it was being read Mildred’s eyes wandered idly along the faces in the nave, recognising countenances that had been familiar to her ever since her marriage, until that wandering gaze stopped suddenly, arrested by a face that was strange.

She saw this strange face between other faces—as it were in a cleft in the block of people. She saw it at the end of a vista, with the sunlight from the chancel window full upon it—a face that impressed her as no face of a stranger had ever done before.

It looked like the face of Judas, she thought; and then in the next moment was ashamed of her fancy.

“It is only the colouring, and the effect of the light upon it,” she told herself. “I am not so weak as to cherish the vulgar prejudice against that coloured hair.”

“That coloured hair” was of the colour which a man’s enemies call red and his friends auburn or chestnut. It was of that ruddy brown which Titian has immortalised in more than one Venus, and without which Potiphar’s wife would be a nonentity.

The stranger wore a small pointed beard of this famous colouring. His eyes were of a reddish brown, large, and luminous, his eyebrows strongly arched; his nose was a small aquiline; his brow was wide and lofty, slightly bald in front. His mouth was the only obviously objectionable feature. The lips were finely moulded, from a Greek sculptor’s standpoint, and would have done for a Greek Bacchus, but the expression was at once crafty and sensual. The auburn moustache served to accentuate rather than to conceal that repellant expression. Mildred looked at him presently as he stood up for the _Te Deum_.

He was tall, for she saw his head well above intervening heads. He looked about five-and-thirty. He had the air of being a gentleman.

“Whoever he is, I hope I shall never see him again,” thought Mildred.