Yet, Rector or not, married or not, Edwin Frere had entered her world like the exacting memory of a previous incarnation. He had shimmered into focus as he skated on the ice. Her soul knew this man, and the knowledge had deeply troubled her. It swung her heart from fits of exaltation into a profound, sometimes petulant gloom. Almost she might have hated him for his intrusion on her inward peace. Yet all the long weeks of her work, and all the happier visions that had possessed her sleeping and her waking mind, had revolved around the thought of him. He had been present to her in the Decoy Lodge throughout. He had inspired her thoughts. The work had been done for him, and it should be possible to announce it now; to admit how much she knew of Emilia’s motives, how conscious she had been of his increasing distress in recent weeks and how she had longed for this moment which she knew must come.
On all these things she was constrained to silence. She saw that the man would be instantly overwhelmed by such admissions. He sat across from her, stiff, muddy-booted, scarcely daring to acknowledge the fact that he had entered, such was the temerity of presenting himself at this late hour in such a lonely place. How grave must his crisis have been to permit this to happen at all! Were she to behave as though considerations of propriety were trivial, he would be embarrassed and amazed. He would drag himself away in confusion, back into the night, to be lost to her for ever. And that must not happen. The fear of it filled her with cold dismay.
She had made tea which they sat drinking together, as though this were four in the afternoon and he on a pastoral visit to a parishioner, except that the cup and saucer rattled a little in his hand, and he had forgotten all the platitudes that might grace the opening of such an event.
“Miss Agnew,” he ventured at last, “pray assure yourself that only a great loneliness of heart would occasion this intolerable importunity on your privacy… on your kindness.” She tried to put him at ease, to assure him that this was no imposition, that she considered his visit a privilege rather. He seemed hardly to hear. “I had nowhere to turn, you see…” His eyes were bereft of hope. “I was walking the woods for a long time… for a very long time… and then I remembered my wife’s parting words… how, if I should find myself in need of company, yours was known to her experience as a charitable heart… yet I felt I could not seek you out at the Hall. I have walked and walked, and came by here only because I was sure that at such a late hour the Lodge must be empty. I wished only to sit here for a while.” He looked up, smiling in a wan attempt to lighten his confession. “Perhaps I was thinking that some of the wisdom you have uncovered here might cast a little light on my darkness. I did not think to find you here… and when I saw your lamp…”
“I am most happy that you did. It seems your need of company was very great.”
“Indeed.” He stared into his empty cup, then looked for a place to put it aside. She took it from him – no, he would not take more. “I think perhaps that I should…”
“Will you not venture to share something of your troubles with me?” she encouraged and, when she saw the doubt in his glance, added, “…in the knowledge that a burden shared is a burden halved.”
He sighed and shook his head. “I would scarce know where to begin.”
It was evident that he was reluctant to begin at all, and for reasons quite other than his native diffidence, but having extended her hand – however metaphorically – Louisa would not lightly withdraw it. “With your wife’s departure for Cambridge perhaps?”
He searched her face, then every corner of the room, as he rubbed his fingers at Pedro’s soft ear, for the dog propped its muzzle on his lap, gazing up at him with an expression quite as soulful as his own. “It is an older tale than that, I fear.”
She waited. He withdrew into frowning silence. She saw how white were the knuckles of his free hand against the arm of the chair.
“But one must begin somewhere?”
Was it wrong not to admit that she had been privy to Emilia’s plans? The confession might prompt a more fluent revelation of his unhappy thoughts, but it was for him to speak; her part was to listen, to make speech possible. She must be delicate with her exhortations.
He pulled himself stiffly upright in the chair. “I have been gravely in error to trouble you,” he said abruptly, and would have made to stand, but – so quickly that he was amazed into immobility by the act – she leant forward and put out a hand to restrain him. For a moment it rested at his knee. He stared down at it as though burnt by the touch.
“You have been brave enough to come,” she said quietly, “be brave enough to remain.”
Having made its point, the hand was lifted. Involuntarily he moved his legs away. Pedro, thinking his advances rejected, turned to curl himself before the fire. Frere stared across at the young woman’s gentle eyes. She saw the contest in the muscles of his face. “I am not brave, Miss Agnew,” he said brokenly. “I am not brave at all.” And suddenly this burly, mud-bedraggled figure of a man was trembling.
Told of a piece, from the first flickerings of dismay in India to this last dreadful night in the Rectory, it would have been impossible for him. The language did not exist in which an unhappily married parson could impart to an unchaperoned spinster of the parish his sense of degradation. Therefore much must remain in the lonely province of silence. Nor could he afford to reveal more than the merest hints of the wretchedness between himself and his wife. He must skate across the trembling surface there, though alas with none of the command he had brought to the ice at Easterness. So no more than clues, allusions, fragments of confession left his lips. But he was speaking, speaking.
And someone was there who listened. She listened without judgement, with concern and a tender regard for every difficulty in which he struggled. There were moments when he dared to look up into the searching blue of her eyes and he might have believed it possible to say anything – anything and everything of his shame and rage, his fears and his fathomless dread. Never had he felt himself in the presence of so receptive a spirit. She was more truly priest than he was himself. She would silence nothing, forbid nothing. She would exhort nothing but such measure of honesty as he felt able to share. She would exact no critical penance. Yet he withdrew from each rash impulse of trust. He told himself that she could not possibly understand. She was too young, too innocent. And, in any case, it did not matter. What mattered was that for these moments while he spoke he was human again, and not entirely alone.
He could not guess how much Louisa already knew of his wife, and the pain of their life together. Still less was he aware how much this young woman did understand of mental, spiritual and carnal anguish. She listened, aware of her untapped resources, of how much she might offer if only he dared to hear. And, as his story unfolded in fragments, the man became ever more visible to her. Nothing he might have said would shock or bewilder. She was seeing him whole, the dark and the light of him. He would have been mortified to silence had he known how nakedly he sat before her. He could not have believed how all that he took for his most secret ignominy appeared to her only as the passionate self-torment of a precious spirit entangled in matter. What she saw was the darkened star-fire burning in his soul.
How brave and bright it was to speak, however covertly, of its most anguished yearnings! Yes, the man had been weak. Yes, he must have wrought confusion in India, just as India had wrought confusion in his mind. Yes, Emilia must herself have suffered, and suffered grievously, at his many misprisions in their emotional life together. But theirs had been no true marriage, no irrevocable meeting of souls. It had been no more than a frail alliance made expediently from fear, and, like all such alliances, when the community of interests ceased, the hidden rancour was revealed. And how bitter were the terms of the treaty then, how costly that hour of vows and rings!
None of this escaped her. And none of it deeply mattered. With every word he uttered, with each new gesture of delicate evasion, every weakness fallibly revealed, she felt herself ever more deeply committed to this ma
n. Emilia had not understood what she was doing when she consigned him to her care.
Neither – it was evident – did he. Nor did he discern it now as he sat staring into the fire, speaking his way tentatively back towards some sense of dignity. And Louisa could not tell him. She must be silent there, and that was the only silence that deeply hurt. It was like flame at her throat, for she knew herself elected into love, and there was no possibility that her love could be returned. For the rest of her life she must learn to live with this knowledge. Here was her durable fire.
She might have despaired at the loneliness of the thought were it not for an invincible certainty that love is not a fixed condition of the soul but its motion: returned or not, it was a directed impulse outwards into life, into ever richer renewal of meeting.
Yet it burned. How painfully it burned.
Frere sat with his elbow at his knee, pinching the bridge of his nose, eyes closed. The little silver clock chimed midnight. He righted himself, gazed across at her, dazed with relief, and with perplexity.
“I am so grateful,” she said, “that you should repose such trust in me.”
He shook his head. “The gratitude is all mine, Miss Agnew. I…”
“Louisa,” she corrected, smiling. “I think we are true friends now. I think perhaps we should…”
“My dear Louisa” – the name rippled uncertainly on his tongue – “you cannot know it but I think by bearing with me so patiently this evening you may have saved…” He faltered from the extremity of the thought.
She saw the eddy of distress, sought to ease it with a light touch. “Not your soul, dear friend. Your soul was in no danger.”
“But my mind…”
The murmur was half lost in the dry well of his throat. He was suddenly aware how little he had said to justify the first terrible claim with which he had won admission to her intimacy. Strangely he could not quite believe it now himself.
Yet his mind had been endangered; even – when he remembered the doubts that had engulfed him – his Christian soul. And he had said nothing of this, not truly. And with the full confession withheld, he saw how things might merely be in remission, pacified by her gentle company, only to wait for him again in the empty Rectory.
A further thought flickered across his troubled mind: that in making this young woman his confidante he might only have exacerbated his guilt. Once apart from her, he might swiftly regret this exchange. Bereft of her patient sympathy, he could quickly relapse into new agonies of mind, wondering whether he had said too much. Already he was severing himself from her at the prospect.
She felt him drift from her. It was as though the room grew colder. She knew that if she let him leave now he would not dare to return. She might earnestly embolden him to do so, but it would make no difference. And the loneliness left in his wake would be insupportable.
However illicit this love she felt for him, however it transgressed all bounds of honour, order, rectitude, a truth burned there that might never be spoken but must never be denied. To let him walk off into the night, muttering sincere yet distant protestations of gratitude only to revert, later, into mere formality and separateness, would be such a denial. It must not happen.
“The mind is often our most intimate enemy,” she said. Then added quietly, attempting to hold his gaze, “I would have you know that I feel myself to be your intimate friend.”
His quest for a gracious retreat was arrested by this quiet profession. He saw that she could not hold his gaze, that her cheeks were suffused, her breath quickly drawn.
As immediately now were his own. It was as if every motion of his metabolism suddenly chimed with hers. He looked at her, unable to draw his eyes away, unable to answer. Between where she sat, gazing down upon her folded hands, and where he trembled a little now, the air was mute. Then her eyes were raised again, modestly, but changing, widening, as they too entered on the spell that held him there. The merest dragonfly of breath hovered at his throat. To hold the gaze would be calamity, yet to break it must do injury both to her delivered spirit and to his inward conviction of his own existence, for it was like looking into a bright glass mirroring his soul.
Something must be said. Both knew it, and both were panicked by the thought.
“I think,” she began uncertainly, “from the moment of our first true meeting… that morning in the park… when you were so discountenanced by Gypsy May…” She looked up in appeal that the memory was alive and present to him also.
It was, but without the fondness she had hoped to find, unless she had misunderstood his quick gasp of withdrawal; yet she had begun and must continue now.
“…I think I recognized yours as a questing spirit… one which must traverse many dark passes on its quest for…” But she faltered there. Already, in her uncertainty, she had ventured too far. She shook her head – the ringlets momentarily danced about her shoulders – then looked down where she fidgeted with the ring on her right hand.
The knock of Frere’s heart demanded that she unfold this thought, but he was appalled at where it might lead. That she had spoken that name – as though she had divined the darkest corner of his secret mind… No, this must cease. Already he had permitted too much. A frown clove his brow.
And shadowed hers. She had erred, was losing him. Some way must be found to speak again.
“Perhaps I overstep…”
“My dear Miss Agnew…”
“Louisa.”
“Yes…”
“Some thought has troubled you?”
“It is…”
“Yes?”
“…nothing of which I may permit myself to speak…” He was wearing the face she had first seen that morning in the park at Easterness, and – as then – she found herself smiling, though less confidently, just as his own frown was yet more troubled. “I think, dear friend,” she said, “that we have arrived at such a moment before… on that very morning… and did we not find our way through?”
He too remembered how lightly she had dispelled the fear brooding over him. If it had been possible then, might it not be possible again? His heart and mind were in collision now, but a response was required. He could not rise and leave. “It is strange,” he ventured, “that you should mention…”
“That morning?” She saw how difficult his breath; saw more. “Gypsy May?”
He nodded, silenced, looked down where his fingers wrestled.
“Why so?”
And still he could not speak.
“Why so, dear friend?”
“The image has been… much upon my mind of late…”
“And does she still discountenance you?”
“I had thought not, but…”
“Yes?”
He looked away. Silence swarmed like fog. A silence he must break or choke. “She has returned to haunt some of my darker hours… We are not at peace with one another.” He looked up, stricken, and sought to avoid the damage he might do. He sought for some lightness to dispel the panic in him. “I have not grown up with her as you have…”
“Yet I think she has always been with you.”
The words had been uttered quietly, and she had not even looked at him as they were spoken, but their impact devastated. She saw it on his blanched features, hastened to add, “She is with us all. Always.” And then, more softly still, “Though I who lost my mother at my birth may be more conscious of her than most…”
When she looked up again, she found no comprehension in his face, only a white bewilderment of anxiety, as though he were afraid she might speak some word of blasphemy. Bravely she held his eyes. “She is our Mother. The Mother of All. We are part of her, and she of us.”
“But, Miss Agnew…”
She winced at this further retreat to formality. “Louisa,” she whispered again, though wistfully now, as though it was his name she had uttered as he vanished towards some distant horizon.
“As a Christian… a clergyman…” he mumbled, “I cannot admit…”
“But…”
Again she watched him flounder. Then, in a voice that now staked everything on his response, she declared, “It is a great sin to deny her. She belongs on your church. A church consecrated solely to the Father is but half a church.” And having dared so much, her sadness could not restrain a further thought: “As a life devoted to the father is but half a life.”
Now he thought he understood. Regret for her own unmarried condition must explain all this. The confusions of an unwedded female mind had somehow misconstrued the quirks of an eccentric father… his dabblings in obscure systems of belief. Or again – more charitably – this strange profession might be no more than the yearnings of a child for her lost mother. Yes, she had admitted as much.
He was about to find some appropriate, corrective word of sympathy when she added, “She is completion, Edwin. Without her we are less than ourselves. As you, I think, have been less than yourself.”
He sat, stunned by the power in her, stunned by a fierce lightning-flicker of illumination in his mind. Then he recoiled, for every Christian cell in his brain was now rising in indignation.
He saw his earlier extenuations inadequate. The power in her face would not be reduced to such simple form. Dimly he remembered that first evening at Easterness – the way he had lightly remarked to Henry Agnew that, if Apuleius was to be believed, even asses had been initiated into mystery. It was, after all, no joke. The man would not have seen it so. What a blind fool he had been not to recognize the forces at work inside the Hall! Such professions were taken seriously here. An entire world, an entire universe, was suddenly in question. Seriously, seductively, she was asking him to place that monstrous figure in the mercy seat. To venerate it.
The Chymical Wedding Page 44