Chapter XXXI: The Squire's Dark Hour

WALKING heavily, like an old man, Mr. Stirling passed through the Rectory garden, took the path which led across a small triangular field and entered the churchyard. A very quiet spot; at this hour entirely deserted.

The blow, long dreaded, had fallen at last. Difficulties, warded off through years, had suddenly arisen like granite walls, threatening to close him in. No way of escape lay open, except through the immediate crushing of Doris's new love-affair. If Maurice were at once and effectually dismissed, things might still go on as they had done. But what if Maurice refused to be summarily dismissed? What if Doris insisted on having her own way?

It seemed that the young fellow, after years of extraordinary submission, had at last taken the bit between his teeth. And he might, even if rejected, insist upon further explanations.

Strange that the Squire's own action, in trying to get Doris out of the way of the Morrises, should have actually thrown her into contact with Maurice, should have actually brought about this disastrous state of things! Disastrous from his point of view.

He went round to the farther and still more deserted side of the church. No human being could be seen; no human habitation even, though a town lay so near. Rooks cawing hoarsely in a group of elms alone broke the silence. Typically fair and peaceful the scene; but peace lay far from the heart of Richard Stirling.

He found his way to a handsome marble monument, surrounded by railings; the tomb of his wife. He had refused to lay her in the dismal family vault, below the church. Here he could come and be with her, so to speak; could imagine her close by; could hold converse with her in thought. Not a week passed that he did not come. He would stand and gaze at the solid carved mass of marble, surmounted by an exquisitely beautiful marble figure of an angel, modelled after the form and features which he had loved so passionately. Nobody ever came near this part of the churchyard, when he was seen to go there. His lifelong sorrow was deeply respected.

And generally the spot soothed him. To-day it brought only keener memories,—more intense realisation of his present position.

His true position. Not as men saw it,—the admired and beloved Squire, looked up to by all the country round; handsome, rich, popular, distinguished. In very truth his was a poverty-stricken spirit. His "cupboard" held a "skeleton" which none guessed at.

It was his own doing, and he knew this. None the easier to bear for that! The troubles which we have brought upon ourselves, through wrong-doing, are harder far to endure than those which come straight from the Hand of our Heavenly Father.

If he had been brave, if he had spoken out at the time, if he had accepted with courage and patience, a trying condition of things, he would, no doubt, long before this have lived down all that was unpleasant, have recovered completely from the nine-days' wonder.

Ah, but in so doing he might have lost her, his Mary! There was the crucial point! For when the truth came out, he had not won her. He had only been on the verge of proposing; full indeed of hope and joy, confident that she would be his. But, if this had become known, just at the critical moment, it might have turned the scale against him. Not perhaps by Lady Mary's own will, but by her parents' decision. And she, always gentle and yielding, would have submitted.

Except for that one possibility, he did see now how infinitely better and wiser it would have been to accept the inevitable, to let things take their natural course, much as he would have disliked that course. But — how could he?— when it might have meant—when at the time he believed that it did mean—the loss of her who was to him more than life itself!

Standing thus, deep in thought, he went through the past, recalling dates and events.

His mind reverted to boyish days, when he and his only brother were as one; a joyous, inseparable pair. Recollections leaped up of the gentle dreamy lad, always ready to follow his stronger guidance, always winning and easily led. Never a shadow had come between them when—thirty-two years before this date—the younger brother married, only to lose his wife less than two years later. A year later still the widower went abroad, seemingly still broken-hearted, taking with him his tiny fragile Katherine, and a trained nurse to look after her; Nurse Molly of the farm.

Then came long intervals of silence on the part of the younger brother, and constrained short letters, perplexing the elder. Once and once only the two met for a few days in Paris. Something of a drifting apart had come about between the two. Stirling, not understanding, would have been sorely troubled, but for the engrossing claims of his own love-affair, his intense devotion to the fair and sweet Lady Mary, at whose heart he was laying persistent siege. Wrapped up in this one aim, he hardly realised that his brother's absence from England had lasted between four and five years.

Just when he hoped he had won his love, just as he was about to speak, a telegram summoned him to a distant and obscure German village, where his brother lay dying. He went without an hour's delay, only to arrive when all was over; only to have his eyes startlingly opened. Then he understood the constraint, the prolonged absence, the silence, the shadow, of the last few years.

A hard fight followed, with much weighing of both sides; and in this fight Richard Stirling was beaten. At all hazards, he determined to ensure secrecy. He could not, would not, consent to that which might in all probability mean—the loss of Mary! Whatever might be involved in silence, Lady Mary should not know; her people should not know. He could not give her up. He could not live without her. Everything went down before this test.

No doubt the temptation was immense. He felt that he had been ill-treated, in not learning sooner how things were. But temptation is never excuse. To secure the woman whom he adored, he stooped to a course of elaborate and long-continued deceit,—a course also of definite and deliberate wrong to others.

He had his way, and he paid his price. A price, not only in money. He had been paying the price ever since, through twenty-five long years.

For the weight of this secret wrong had been always upon him. Not always to the fore. During the life of his wife he had kept it mainly out of sight; out of his own sight. He had borne himself proudly, courageously. He had looked upon it as a thing to which he was driven by circumstances beyond his own control. He had felt a kind of calm certainty that the thing had to be, that there was no escape out of the tangle.

Her death came as an awakening and crushing blow; almost, to his thinking at the time, as a direct judgment upon his past decision. Yet he had struggled back to a tentative composure, again regarding the position of affairs as inevitable, and determined that for Katherine's sake no question as to continued secrecy could exist.

But of late the burden had pressed with a strange new force; especially during the last few months, since the coming of the Morrises to the farm. He had realised, as never before, what the long concealment really meant; not only as regarded injustice to those concerned, but as viewed from a higher, a Divine, standpoint. A darkness lay upon him; a sense of guilt, of bitter unworthiness. For he had been always accounted—nay, by nature and training he was, except in this one direction—a man of stainless honour. The contrast between what others thought of him, and what he knew himself to have done, weighed heavily.

He felt now that the shadow had been always there, even when he refused to see it. He felt that it always would be there, till he should speak out, should make the truth known, should right that which was wrong.

But—how could he? He—the beloved and esteemed and honoured Squire— the foremost man in the neighbourhood—he to confess all! He—Richard Raye Stirling of Lynnthorpe!—so to lower himself in the eyes of men! He—to put these people into their rightful position before the sight of the world, his world, which meant so much to him! The thing was impossible. Wildly, madly impossible.

Nobody imagined aught of what he was going through. He had great self-control, never betraying what he felt. "He isn't quite the thing— looks worried!" one or another might remark. But none dreamt of the ceaseless inward strife, the long slow torture of spirit.

It had amounted to that of late, as he weighed and examined the question, viewing it from this side, from that side, ever striving to excuse his own action, to prove how out of the range of practical possibilities any other course had lain. And he did prove it, times without number, to his own satisfaction. He would feel settled and almost happy, for an hour or two. Then he would revert to the endless topic, the perpetual facing of what he had done, the terrible reality of those long years of deceit; and he would see again, vividly, the hopelessness that aught except confession could put matters right, together with the desperate blank impossibility of confessing.

So the circle of misery went on; and all the while he was the courteous host, the pleasant friend, the affectionate uncle, the busy Squire. But the pressure was wearing him out. He lay down at night with his burden; he rose in the morning with it. Gradually it was becoming an obsession.

Now this fresh stroke had fallen. Now, it might be, the choice was no longer his. Instead of being allowed to put things straight himself— as he had always purposed to do some day—it seemed that the wrong-doing was about to find him out, that the truth might become known without choice on his part.

"It was for your sake, my Mary!" he murmured, gazing at the lovely marble figure. "For your sake—my darling!"

The thought came—was it not conceivable that, even if he had lost her by right action, life without her, and without also this clogging weight on heart and conscience, might have been not only better, fairer, but actually happier?

And—he might not have lost her. At the time it seemed as if he must; but since then he had learned how she loved him from the first. What if she would have clung to him through all? What if the whole miserable tissue of guile and duplicity had been, not only wrong, but needless?