Part 46

"Perhaps. But only as a memory, not as a jingle of bells, not as a definite noise, like a noise a man may hear in the street any day. That must be impossible. Now--don't you say so?"

Lily, on her sofa, had noticed the very peculiar excitement of the young doctor's manner, and that his denial was really delivered in the form of an ardent interrogation. But the Canon's mind was not so alert after the strain of pulpit oratory. He was calmly unaware of any personal thrill in the discussion.

"I would not be sure," he said. "God may have what men would call supernatural ways of punishment as well as natural ones."

"I decline to believe in the supernatural," Maurice said, rather harshly.

"Granted that these bells might ring in a man's mind, so that he believed that his ears actually heard them. That would be just as bad for him."

"Then, I suppose, he is a madman," Lily said.

Maurice started round on his chair.

"That's a--a rather shocking presumption, isn't it?" he exclaimed.

"Well," the Canon said, knocking the ashes slowly out of his pipe, "if you exclude the supernatural in such a case, and come upon the natural, I must say I think Lily is not far wrong. The man who hears perpetually a non-existent sound connected with some incident of his past will at any rate soon be on the highway to insanity, I fancy."

Maurice said nothing for a moment, but Lily noticed that he looked deeply disturbed. His lips were pressed together. His eyes shone with excitement, and his pale forehead frowned. In the short silence that followed on the Canon's remark, he seemed to be thinking steadfastly. At last he lifted up his head with a jerk and said:

"A man may have a strong imagination, without being a madman, Canon. He may choose to translate a mere memory into a sound-companion, just as men often choose to play with their fancies in various ways. He may elect to say to himself, I remember vividly the cry of--" He stopped abruptly, then went on hastily, "the sound of bells. My mind hears them. Let me--for my amusement--push on my imagination a step further and see what will happen. Hark! It's done. My ears can hear now what a moment ago only my mind could hear. Yes, my ears hear it now."

He spoke with such conviction, and the gesture which he linked with his words, was so dramatic, that Lily pushed herself up on the pillows of the sofa, and even the Canon involuntarily assumed an attitude of keen attention.

"Why, Dale," the latter said after a moment, "you should have been an actor, not a doctor. Really you led me to anticipate bells, and I only hear the wind. Lily, didn't you feel as I did, eh?"

Lily had gone a little pale. She looked across at Maurice.

"I don't know that I expected to hear bells, father," she said slowly.

As she said those words, Maurice Dale, for the first time, felt as if a human being drew very near to his secret. Lily's glance at him asked him a question. "What was it that pierced through the wind so faintly?" it seemed to say.

"What then?" the Canon asked.

"I don't know," she replied.

Maurice got up.

"I must go now," he said.

The Canon protested. It was early. They must have one more smoke. But Maurice could not be induced to stay. As he walked rapidly homeward in the darkness he told himself again and again that he was a fool. How could it be? How could she hear the cry? The cry of the child?

That night Lily did not read a French novel. She lay awake. Her fancy was set on fire by the evening's talk. Her girlish imagination was kindled. In those dark and silent hours she first began to weave a web of romance round Maurice, to see him set in a cloud of looming tragedy. He looked more beautiful to her in this cloud than he had looked before. Lily thought it might be wicked, but somehow she could not help loving mental suffering--in others. And the face of Maurice gazed at her in the blackness beneath a shadowy crown of thorns.

Next day, at the early service, she was inattentive to the ministrations of religion. Her father seemed a puppet at its prayers, the choir a row of surpliced dolls, the organ an empty voice. Only at the end, when silence fell on the kneeling worshippers, did she wake with a start of contrition to the knowledge of her impiety, and blush between her little hands at her concentration upon the suspected sorrow of the young doctor. But in that night and that morning Lily ran forward towards Maurice, set her feet upon the line that divides men from women. She knew that she had done so only when she next encountered him. Then, as their eyes met she was seized with a painful idea of guilt, bred by an absurd feeling that he could see into her mind, and know how all her thoughts had been crowding about him. It is a dangerous symptom that sensation of one's mind being visible to another as a thing observed through glass. Lily did not understand her danger, but she was full of a turmoil of uneasiness. Maurice noticed it and felt conscious also, as if some secret understanding existed between him and Lily, yet there was none, there could be none.

In conclave the individually stupid can sometimes almost touch cleverness. Brayfield only began to talk steadily about Lily and the young doctor from the day of this meeting of self-consciousnesses which had, as it chanced, taken place on the pavement of the curved parade by the sea. Till that day the little town had attributed to Maurice hopelessness, to Lily simply friendship for a sad young man. Now its members talked the usual gossip that attends the flirtations of the sincere, but added to it a considerable divergence of opinions as to the likelihood of Maurice's conversion from despair. Lily, they were all decided, began to love Maurice. But some believed and some denied, that Maurice began to love Lily. This would have been hard for Lily had she noticed it, but her fanciful and enthusiastic mind was concentrated on one thing only and her range of vision was consequently narrowed. She was incessantly engaged in trying to trace the footsteps of the doctor's misery, of which she was now fully convinced. And indeed, since that Sabbath evening already described, Maurice had scarcely endeavoured to play any part of ordinary happiness to her. Her partial penetration of his secret quickly brought a sense of relief to him. There was something consoling in the idea that this little girl divined his loneliness of soul, if not its reason.

By degrees they grew quietly so accustomed to the silent familiarity existing between their ebbing and flowing thoughts; they were--without a word spoken--so thoroughly certain of the language their minds were uttering to each other, that when their lips did speak at length, the words that came were like a continuance of an already long conversation.

Lily was, once more, knocked up, and the Canon called in Maurice to prescribe. He arrived in the late afternoon and was taken by the Canon into Lily's little sitting-room, where she lay on a couch by the fire. A small, shaded, reading lamp defined the shadows craftily.

"Now, Dale," the Canon said, "for goodness' sake tell her to be more orderly and to do less--mind and body. She behaves as if life was a whirlpool. She swims stupendously, tell her to float--and give her a tonic."

And he went out of the room shaking his head at the culprit on the couch.