CHAPTER VIII
Nicholas had gone straight home, neither speaking to nor seeing a
soul. From that hour a change seemed to come over him. He had ever
possessed a full share of self-consciousness; he had been readily
piqued, had shown an unusual dread of being personally obtrusive.
But now his sense of self, as an individual provoking opinion,
appeared to leave him. When, therefore, after a day or two of
seclusion, he came forth again, and the few acquaintances he had
formed in the town condoled with him on what had happened, and pitied
his haggard looks, he did not shrink from their regard as he would
have done formerly, but took their sympathy as it would have been
accepted by a child.
It reached his ears that Bellston had not appeared on the evening of
his arrival at any hotel in the town or neighbourhood, or entered his
wife's house at all. 'That's a part of his cruelty,' thought
Nicholas. And when two or three days had passed, and still no
account came to him of Bellston having joined her, he ventured to set
out for Froom-Everard.
Christine was so shaken that she was obliged to receive him as she
lay on a sofa, beside the square table which was to have borne their
evening feast. She fixed her eyes wistfully upon him, and smiled a
sad smile.
'He has not come?' said Nicholas under his breath.
'He has not.'
Then Nicholas sat beside her, and they talked on general topics
merely like saddened old friends. But they could not keep away the
subject of Bellston, their voices dropping as it forced its way in.
Christine, no less than Nicholas, knowing her husband's character,
inferred that, having stopped her game, as he would have phrased it,
he was taking things leisurely, and, finding nothing very attractive
in her limited mode of living, was meaning to return to her only when
he had nothing better to do.
The bolt which laid low their hopes had struck so recently that they
could hardly look each other in the face when speaking that day. But
when a week or two had passed, and all the horizon still remained as
vacant of Bellston as before, Nicholas and she could talk of the
event with calm wonderment. Why had he come, to go again like this?
And then there set in a period of resigned surmise, during which
So like, so very like, was day to day,
that to tell of one of them is to tell of all. Nicholas would arrive
between three and four in the afternoon, a faint trepidation
influencing his walk as he neared her door. He would knock; she
would always reply in person, having watched for him from the window.
Then he would whisper--'He has not come?'
'He has not,' she would say.
Nicholas would enter then, and she being ready bonneted, they would
walk into the Sallows together as far as to the spot which they had
frequently made their place of appointment in their youthful days. A
plank bridge, which Bellston had caused to be thrown over the stream
during his residence with her in the manor-house, was now again
removed, and all was just the same as in Nicholas's time, when he had
been accustomed to wade across on the edge of the cascade and come up
to her like a merman from the deep. Here on the felled trunk, which
still lay rotting in its old place, they would now sit, gazing at the
descending sheet of water, with its never-ending sarcastic hiss at
their baffled attempts to make themselves one flesh. Returning to
the house they would sit down together to tea, after which, and the
confidential chat that accompanied it, he walked home by the
declining light. This proceeding became as periodic as an
astronomical recurrence. Twice a week he came--all through that
winter, all through the spring following, through the summer, through
the autumn, the next winter, the next year, and the next, till an
appreciable span of human life had passed by. Bellston still
tarried.
Years and years Nic walked that way, at this interval of three days,
from his house in the neighbouring town; and in every instance the
aforesaid order of things was customary; and still on his arrival the
form of words went on--'He has not come?'
'He has not.'
So they grew older. The dim shape of that third one stood
continually between them; they could not displace it; neither, on the
other hand, could it effectually part them. They were in close
communion, yet not indissolubly united; lovers, yet never growing
cured of love. By the time that the fifth year of Nic's visiting had
arrived, on about the five-hundredth occasion of his presence at her
tea-table, he noticed that the bleaching process which had begun upon
his own locks was also spreading to hers. He told her so, and they
laughed. Yet she was in good health: a condition of suspense, which
would have half-killed a man, had been endured by her without
complaint, and even with composure.
One day, when these years of abeyance had numbered seven, they had
strolled as usual as far as the waterfall, whose faint roar formed a
sort of calling voice sufficient in the circumstances to direct their
listlessness. Pausing there, he looked up at her face and said, 'Why
should we not try again, Christine? We are legally at liberty to do
so now. Nothing venture nothing have.'
But she would not. Perhaps a little primness of idea was by this
time ousting the native daring of Christine. 'What he has done once
he can do twice,' she said. 'He is not dead, and if we were to marry
he would say we had "forced his hand," as he said before, and duly
reappear.'
Some years after, when Christine was about fifty, and Nicholas fifty-
three, a new trouble of a minor kind arrived. He found an
inconvenience in traversing the distance between their two houses,
particularly in damp weather, the years he had spent in trying
climates abroad having sown the seeds of rheumatism, which made a
journey undesirable on inclement days, even in a carriage. He told
her of this new difficulty, as he did of everything.
'If you could live nearer,' suggested she.
Unluckily there was no house near. But Nicholas, though not a
millionaire, was a man of means; he obtained a small piece of ground
on lease at the nearest spot to her home that it could be so
obtained, which was on the opposite brink of the Froom, this river
forming the boundary of the Froom-Everard manor; and here he built a
cottage large enough for his wants. This took time, and when he got
into it he found its situation a great comfort to him. He was not
more than five hundred yards from her now, and gained a new pleasure
in feeling that all sounds which greeted his ears, in the day or in
the night, also fell upon hers--the caw of a particular rook, the
voice of a neighbouring nightingale, the whistle of a local breeze,
or the purl of the fall in the meadows, whose rush was a material
rendering of Time's ceaseless scour over themselves, wearing them
away without uniting them.
Christine's missing husband was taking shape as a myth among the
surrounding residents; but he was still believed in as corporeally
imminent by Christine herself, and also, in a milder degree, by
Nicholas. For a curious unconsciousness of the long lapse of time
since his revelation of himself seemed to affect the pair. There had
been no passing events to serve as chronological milestones, and the
evening on which she had kept supper waiting for him still loomed out
with startling nearness in their retrospects.
In the seventeenth pensive year of this their parallel march towards
the common bourne, a labourer came in a hurry one day to Nicholas's
house and brought strange tidings. The present owner of Froom-
Everard--a non-resident--had been improving his property in sundry
ways, and one of these was by dredging the stream which, in the
course of years, had become choked with mud and weeds in its passage
through the Sallows. The process necessitated a reconstruction of
the waterfall. When the river had been pumped dry for this purpose,
the skeleton of a man had been found jammed among the piles
supporting the edge of the fall. Every particle of his flesh and
clothing had been eaten by fishes or abraded to nothing by the water,
but the relics of a gold watch remained, and on the inside of the
case was engraved the name of the maker of her husband's watch, which
she well remembered.
Nicholas, deeply agitated, hastened down to the place and examined
the remains attentively, afterwards going across to Christine, and
breaking the discovery to her. She would not come to view the
skeleton, which lay extended on the grass, not a finger or toe-bone
missing, so neatly had the aquatic operators done their work.
Conjecture was directed to the question how Bellston had got there;
and conjecture alone could give an explanation.
It was supposed that, on his way to call upon her, he had taken a
short cut through the grounds, with which he was naturally very
familiar, and coming to the fall under the trees had expected to find
there the plank which, during his occupancy of the premises with
Christine and her father, he had placed there for crossing into the
meads on the other side instead of wading across as Nicholas had
done. Before discovering its removal he had probably overbalanced
himself, and was thus precipitated into the cascade, the piles
beneath the descending current wedging him between them like the
prongs of a pitchfork, and effectually preventing the rising of his
body, over which the weeds grew. Such was the reasonable supposition
concerning the discovery; but proof was never forthcoming.
'To think,' said Nicholas, when the remains had been decently
interred, and he was again sitting with Christine--though not beside
the waterfall--'to think how we visited him! How we sat over him,
hours and hours, gazing at him, bewailing our fate, when all the time
he was ironically hissing at us from the spot, in an unknown tongue,
that we could marry if we chose!'
She echoed the sentiment with a sigh.
'I have strange fancies,' she said. 'I suppose it MUST have been my
husband who came back, and not some other man.'
Nicholas felt that there was little doubt. 'Besides--the skeleton,'
he said.
'Yes . . . If it could not have been another person's--but no, of
course it was he.'
'You might have married me on the day we had fixed, and there would
have been no impediment. You would now have been seventeen years my
wife, and we might have had tall sons and daughters.'
'It might have been so,' she murmured.
'Well--is it still better late than never?'
The question was one which had become complicated by the increasing
years of each. Their wills were somewhat enfeebled now, their hearts
sickened of tender enterprise by hope too long deferred. Having
postponed the consideration of their course till a year after the
interment of Bellston, each seemed less disposed than formerly to
take it up again.
'Is it worth while, after so many years?' she said to him. 'We are
fairly happy as we are--perhaps happier than we should be in any
other relation, seeing what old people we have grown. The weight is
gone from our lives; the shadow no longer divides us: then let us be
joyful together as we are, dearest Nic, in the days of our vanity;
and
With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come.'
He fell in with these views of hers to some extent. But occasionally
he ventured to urge her to reconsider the case, though he spoke not
with the fervour of his earlier years.
Autumn, 1887.
