Tongues of Conscience Part 31

He put his arms around her. The tears had sprung into his eyes.

"How weak I am," he said, with a fury against his own condition, "you must despise me."

"I love you," she said.

He looked at her with a creeping astonishment.

"I wonder why," he said, slowly. "How can you love a man who has been so miserable that he has almost ceased to be a man?"

"I love even your misery. Don't think me selfish, Maurice. But it was your sorrow, you see, that first taught you to think of me."

He leaned from her suddenly towards the window which was open and pulled it sharply up.

"Why do you do that?" Lily said quickly.

"One hears such noises in the air when one travels at this speed," he answered. "With the window down one might fancy anything. I must shut out fancy. There are voices in the wind that pa.s.ses, in the rustling woods that we rush through. I won't hear them."

The train sped on.

Their destination was an inland village set in the midst of a rolling purple moor, isolated in a heather-clad gold of the land, distant from the sea, distant from the murmur of modern life; a sleepy, self-contented and serene abode of quiet women and ruminant men, living, loving, and dying with a greater calm than often pervades our modern life. A lazy divinity seemed to preside over the place, in spring-time at least. Men strolled about their work as if Time waited on them, not they on Time. The children--so Maurice thought--played more drowsily than the children of towns. The youths were contemplative. Even the girls often forgot to giggle as they thought of wedding rings and Sunday love-making. Little dogs lay blinking before the low-browed doors of the cottages, and cats reposed upon the garden walls round-eyed in sober dreams. If Maurice sought a home of silence surely he had it here. Lily and he put up at a small inn on the skirt of the village and facing the rippling emptiness of the moor. Before going to bed they stepped out into the night and the wide air. Stars were bright in the sky. Cottage lights twinkled here and there behind them in the village. They heard a stream running away into the heart of the long solitude that lay beyond them. Lily was very quiet. Her heart was full. Thoughts, strange and beautiful, overflowed in her mind. She felt just then how much bigger the human soul is than the human body, how much stronger the prisoner is than the prison in which nevertheless it is dedicated to dwell for a time. Her hand just touched the arm of Maurice as she looked across the soft darkness of the moor. He, too, felt curiously happy and safe.

Taking off his cap he pa.s.sed his hand over his hair.

"Lily," he said, "peace is here for me, in this place with you. My brain has been playing me tricks because I have been so much alone, the devil dwells in a man's loneliness. Listen to the silence of these moors. What a music it is!"

The lights in the cottages were extinguished one by one, as bed claimed their owners. But Maurice and Lily, sitting on the dry fringe of the heather, remained out under the stars. Her hand lay in his and suddenly she felt his quiver.

"What is it, Maurice?" she asked.

He got up and made a step forward.

"Lily," he said, "there is--there must be some one near us, a child lost on the moor, or forgotten by its mother. I hear it crying close to us.

Say you hear it too. No, no, it is not the old sound. Don't think that.

It can't be. There's a natural explanation of this--I'll swear there is.

Come with me."

He pulled her hastily up and pressed forward some steps, stumbling among the bushes. Then he stopped, listening.

"It is somewhere just here, by us," he said. "I must see. Wait a moment.

I'll strike a light."

He drew out his match-box and struck a match, protecting the tiny flame between his hands. Then he bent down, searching the uneven ground at their feet. The flame went out.

"I wish I had a lantern," he muttered.

"Maurice," Lily said, "let us go back to the inn."

"What! and leave this child out here in the night. I tell you there is a child crying near us."

He spoke almost angrily.

"Let us go back, Maurice."

He stood for a moment as if uncertain.

"You think--" he began, then he stopped. She took his hand and led him towards the village in silence. As they reached the inn door, the faint light from the coffee-room encircled them. Maurice was white to the lips. He looked at Lily without speaking, and he was trembling.

"Wasn't there anything?" he whispered. "Is it here too? Can't you keep it away?"

Lily said nothing. She opened the inn door. Maurice stepped into the pa.s.sage, heavily, almost like a drunken man. And this was the first night of their honeymoon.

The incident of the moor threw Maurice back into the old misery from which he had emerged for a brief moment, and, indeed, plunged him into an abyss of despair such as he had never known before. For now he had sincerely hoped for salvation, and his hope had been frustrated. He had clung to a belief that Lily's love, Lily's companions.h.i.+p might avail to rescue him from the phantom, or the reality, that was destroying his power, shattering his manhood. The belief was dashed from him, and he sank deeper in the sea of terror. They stayed on for a while in this Sleepy Hollow, but Maurice no longer felt its peace. Remote as it was, cloistered in the rolling moors, the cry of the child penetrated to it, making it the very centre, the very core of all things hideous and terrible. Even the silence of the village, its aloofness from the world, became hateful to Maurice. For they seemed to emphasise and to concentrate the voice that pierced more keenly in silence, that sounded more horrible in solitude.

"I cannot stay here," he said to Lily. "Let us go back. I will take up my work again. I will try to throw myself into it as I did when I was a student. I shut out the living cry then, I will shut out the dead cry now. For you--you cannot help me."

He looked at her while he spoke almost contemptuously, almost as one looks at some woman whose courage or whose faith one has tried and found wanting.

"You cannot help me," he repeated.

Secretly he felt a cruel desire to sting Lily into pa.s.sion, to rouse her to some demonstration of anger against his cowardice in thus taunting her love and devotion. But she said nothing, only looked at him with eyes that had become strangely steadfast, and full of the quiet light of a great calm and patience.

"D'you say nothing?" he said.

"If you wish to go, Maurice, let us go."

He had got up and was standing by the low window that looked across the moor.

"Don't you see," he said, "that I am going mad in this place? And you do nothing. Why did I ever think that you could help me?"

"Try to think so still."

She, too, got up, followed him to the window and put her two hands on his shoulders.

"Perhaps the time has not come yet," she said.

Suddenly he took her hands in his and pushed her a little way from him, so that he could look clearly into her face.

"What do you mean? What can you mean?" he said. "Sometimes I think you have some secret that you keep from me, some purpose that I know nothing of. You look as if--as if you were waiting for something; were expectant; I don't know--" he broke off, "After all what does it matter? Only let us go from here. Let us get home. I hate that stretch of moorland. At night it is full of bewailing and misery."

He shuddered although the warm spring suns.h.i.+ne was pouring in at the window. Then he turned and left the room without another word. Lily stood still for a moment, with her eyes turned in the direction of the door. Her cheeks burned with a slight blush and her lips were half opened.

"If he only knew what I am waiting for!" she murmured to herself. "Will it ever come?"

She sank down on the broad, old-fas.h.i.+oned window seat, and leaned her cheek against the leaded panes of gla.s.s. The bees were humming outside.

She listened to their music. It was dull and dreamy, heavy like a golden noon in summer time. And then the white lids fell over her eyes, and the hum of the bees faded from her ears, and she heard another music that made her woman's heart leap up, she heard the first tiny murmur of a new-born child.

It was sweeter than the hum of bees. It was sweeter than the soul the lute gave up to the ears of Nature when Orpheus touched the strings. It was so sweet that tears came stealing from under Lily's eyelids and dropped down upon her clasped hands. She sat there motionless till the twilight came over the moor, and Maurice entered, white and weary, to ask impatiently of what she was dreaming.

As Maurice wished it, they returned the next day to Brayfield and settled into the house that was to be their home. It stood on a low cliff overlooking the sea; a broad green lawn, on which during the season a band played and people promenaded, lay in front of it. Beyond, the waves danced in the suns.h.i.+ne. The situation of the house was almost absurdly cheerful, and the house itself was new and prettily furnished.

But the life into which Lily entered was strangely at variance with the surroundings, strangely antagonistic to the brightness of the sea, the sweetness of the air, the holiday gaiety that pervaded the little town in the summer. For work did not abolish, did not even lull the sound of the voice that pursued Maurice with an inexorable persistence. It was obvious that on his return home after the honeymoon, he made a tremendous effort to get the better of his enemy. He called up all his manhood, all his strength of character. He refused to hear the voice.