The Necromancers | Page 7

could but see her again, hold her hand for one instant,
look into her eyes mysterious with the secret of death. He had but three
or four words to say to her, just to secure himself that she lived and was
still his, and then ... then he would say good-bye to her, content and
happy to wait till death should reunite them. Ah! he asked so little, and
God would not give it him.
All, then, was a mockery. It was only this past summer that he had
begun to fancy himself in love with Maggie Deronnais. It had been an
emotion of very quiet growth, developing gently, week by week,
feeding on her wholesomeness, her serenity, her quiet power, her cool,
capable hands, and the look in her direct eyes; it resembled respect
rather than passion, and need rather than desire; it was a hunger rather
than a thirst. Then had risen up this other, blinding and bewildering;
and, he told himself, he now knew the difference. His lips curled into
bitter and resentful lines as he contemplated the contrast. And all was
gone, shattered and vanished; and even Maggie was now impossible.
Again he writhed over, sick with pain and longing; and so lay.
* * * * *
It was ten minutes before he moved again, and then he only roused

himself as he heard a foot on the stairs. Perhaps it was his mother. He
slipped off the couch and stood up, his face lined and creased with the
pressure with which he had lain just now, and smoothed his tumbled
clothes. Yes, he must go down.
He stepped to the door and opened it.
"I am coming immediately," he said to the servant.
* * * * *
He bore himself at lunch with a respectable self-control, though he said
little or nothing. His mother's attitude he found hard to bear, as he
caught her eyes once or twice looking at him with sympathy; and he
allowed himself internally to turn to Maggie with relief in spite of his
meditations just now. She at least respected his sorrow, he told himself.
She bore herself very naturally, though with long silences, and never
once met his eyes with her own. He made his excuses as soon as he
could and slipped across to the stable yard. At least he would be alone
this afternoon. Only, as he rode away half an hour later, he caught a
sight of the slender little figure of his mother waiting to have one word
with him if she could, beyond the hall-door. But he set his lips and
would not see her.
It was one of those perfect September days that fall sometimes as a gift
from heaven after the bargain of summer has been more or less
concluded. As he rode all that afternoon through lanes and across
uplands, his view barred always to the north by the great downs above
Royston, grey-blue against the radiant sky, there was scarcely a hint in
earth or heaven of any emotion except prevailing peace. Yet the very
serenity tortured him the more by its mockery. The birds babbled in the
deep woods, the cheerful noise of children reached him now and again
from a cottage garden, the mellow light smiled unending benediction,
and yet his subconsciousness let go for never an instant of the long elm
box six feet below ground, and of its contents lying there in the stifling
dark, in the long-grassed churchyard on the hill above his home.
He wondered now and again as to the fate of the spirit that had

informed the body and made it what it was; but his imagination refused
to work. After all, he asked himself, what were all the teachings of
theology but words gabbled to break the appalling silence? Heaven ...
Purgatory ... Hell. What was known of these things? The very soul
itself--what was that? What was the inconceivable environment, after
all, for so inconceivable a thing...?
He did not need these things, he said--certainly not now--nor those
labels and signposts to a doubtful, unimaginable land. He needed Amy
herself, or, at least, some hint or sound or glimpse to show him that she
indeed was as she had always been; whether in earth or heaven, he did
not care; that there was somewhere something that was herself, some
definite personal being of a continuous consciousness with that which
he had known, characterized still by those graces which he thought he
had recognized and certainly loved. Ah! he did not ask much. It would
be so easy to God! Here out in this lonely lane where he rode beneath
the branches, his reins loose on his horse's neck, his eyes, unseeing,
roving over copse and meadow across to the eternal