THE SACRIFICE
1
At half-past eight on the fateful morning, Mrs. Holmroyd left her home with Oswald for the last time. She dared not trust herself to take a farewell look at it, lest the action might deliver her to her weakness, or betray the nature of this leave-taking to unseen eyes; for though Elizabeth was sworn to secrecy, and had pledged her sacred word to keep the kitchen until Mrs. Holmroyd and her son should be far remote from curious sight, the discretion of old age is frail, and Mrs. Holmroyd hastened to put herself beyond its reach. A pale sun began to part the curtains of a mild October sky, and the morning air partook of both the freshness and languor of autumn, impregnated with the faint melancholy of dead leaves. Here and there a milkcart drawled its course, and the flash and rattle of its cans, and the milkman’s whistle, accosted Mrs. Holmroyd’s senses with a curious distinctness and novelty--as if they were familiar things noted for the first time after sickness or bereavement, recharged with that significance of which health and daily habit tend to rob them. At the corner of the street she turned to give one hasty glance behind. Already a group of figures gathered round about her door, recruited by the forsworn Elizabeth, who raised dramatic hands to heaven from a circle of rapt faces. But their curiosity fell without harm upon her at this distance, like feeble rays of sunlight, and in a moment she had turned the corner into the broad Horse Green. Her thoughts were busy and her heart was full, and she and her son walked in a silence unbroken on either side. From time to time Oswald raised curious eyes to his mother’s face, as if to seek the necessary guidance from it for his own demeanour. He would have welcomed sanction to display his self-importance to the world at large, and to reveal--through suitable deportment--the full consequence of this early morning expedition on which they were engaged. But his mother’s face encouraged no expansion of the pride, and so he did his best to pitch his feelings in her key and find his satisfaction in a prodigious solemnity. To which end he tried to walk, and look, as much like Councillor Burford as was possible, absorbed in matters of municipal concern, carrying in his right hand the spray of white chrysanthemums for Beryl’s grave with the gravity of a mace-bearer. As they traversed the Horse Green and came within sight of High Gate, Mrs. Holmroyd suddenly addressed her son, albeit without turning her head or gaze towards him.
“Oswald.”
“Yes, mother.”
“Just look round, dear. Do you see anybody?”
“Yes, mother.”
“Who?”
“Elizabeth.”
“Whereabouts is she?”
“Just at the end of Spring Bank Gardens. She has seen me, mother. Now she has stopped.”
“That will do, dear. Don’t look round again.
The spirit of Elizabeth, indeed, roused to a terrible pitch of excitement, had been able to bear no longer the cruel inhibition laid upon it. That she should keep house whilst Mrs. Holmroyd married at St. Saviour’s the son of him whose widow--but for providence and her own folly--she might this day have been, transcended human power. This was no time to hold by oaths or honour pledges. And so well had she bestirred the feelings of her auditors outside Mrs. Holmroyd’s doorstep that forthwith, intoxicated with her own excitement, she hastened in the wake of Oswald and his mother, consumed by one desire--to reach the church before the ceremony should have started. And so did her anxieties play tricks with time and delude her tortured senses, that every second seemed an hour, and the wedding ceremony had taken place a dozen times before her stumbling feet reached the Horse Green. The sight of Oswald and his mother threw all her fears into disorder. “They’re there!” she cried, staggering in her black shawl. “He’s looked round. He’s seed me! He’s told her. And I promised faithful.... She’ll never forgive me now! I’ve lost my charring.”
Aghast, with one hand pressing the tight-clasped housekey beneath her palpitating heart, and the other nipping the two edges of the prolific shawl about her stricken person, she retreated into Spring Bank Gardens, where, out of sight behind the corner, she leaned against the wall and wept foreboding tears into her shawl. But tears were impotent to quench the raging fire in her bosom. She had seen Joe Burford’s father buried. Should she fail to be witness of his son’s marriage to her old mistress? Nay, not her. Let them do what they liked at her after, she should not falter at this moment, when so much depended. And like a bird of dark omen she hovered the trail of Mrs. Holmroyd and her son, trying to conceal herself from sight with the ludicrous deception of old age that deceives only the deceiver.
2
The spectre of Elizabeth, casting its fitful shadow over an event that should have been serene and open, and not (as now) furtive and perplexed, served to deepen for Mrs. Holmroyd the atmosphere of subterfuge and shame in which she moved. Her heart contained no anger against the frail delinquent who thus broke faith and followed. In a world of Mrs. Holmroyd’s choosing none would have been more welcome at her marriage than this old creature in the black shawl. And even now she said: “Poor thing!” and grudged Elizabeth nothing of her pilfered satisfaction. But such a wedding as this ... before such a witness as that that followed.... Oh! it seemed a shabby, sordid, loveless, hopeless thing. All these weeks she had been trying hard to learn a liking for this man who was so soon to be her husband; to learn it off by rote, as if it had been a lesson, and say it over to herself until by repetition it became a part of her, and conscience could forget how painfully the task had been acquired. And she believed she had succeeded ... till now. At the narrow junction of the Horse Green with High Gate she trembled under a sudden fear that from their big bowed window the Rencils might catch sight of her upon her ignominious journey, and she walked more quickly, with averted head. The thought of Joseph Burford awaiting her arrival at St. Saviour’s Church, in a posture of complacent confidence, sure of himself and her; undoubting, imperturbable, filled her conscience with dismay. It came to this: in her own small house, in the seclusion of her own small world, before no witnesses, her acceptance of him had seemed natural and possible. But here ... beneath the open sky, before the eyes of the world, she was ashamed of her choice of him; of her husband to be. That was the sordid truth of all her shrinking. If this husband had been some other than he was ... some other such as she might love and honour; some other, say, like Arthur Rencil, smiling at her with his eyes of winsome sadness through their liquefying glasses....
Nay! At that, shocked into sudden horror and detestation of herself, she turned upon these thoughts and trod their sinful smoulder underfoot. Had she no higher sense of reverence and gratitude towards one whose timely worship saved her, and hers, from dire extremity? Had she no finer sense of duty, faith, and honour, than to accept so much from him to whom her love could give so little in exchange? Within the churchyard, stooping to adjust the spray of white chrysanthemums on the green mound that marked where Beryl lay, she offered up a heart-felt prayer to heaven that she might be assisted in her loyal effort to make herself a true wife to him whom, so shortly at God’s altar, she would take for better or for worse. Perhaps her prayer, though it could have gained no added fervour, might have been lengthened; but the ominous shadow of Elizabeth, perceptible beyond the railings, drove her inside the dreaded church.
3
Of all that marked the features of this marriage she was acutely, poignantly aware. Her senses sank on a sudden to a state of penitential calm, like some boisterous wind that drops at sundown and leaves a world that listens only to its own silence. The spacious dimness of the church, though offering refuge to her more external self, lent no comfort to the inner; it only served to emphasize her littleness. Here and there, in the central gloom that brooded between walls pierced with the violence of stained glass, she saw sparse heads above the woodwork of the pews; hats of women--though whether there for worship or from curiosity she knew not. They moved as she entered, and the rustle of the baize door multiplied itself throughout the empty church in whispers. A certain mild expectancy mingled with the torpid atmosphere of unpreparedness. The sabbath sanctity seemed gone; put off like a vestment. Only the outward features of solemnity remained, animated by no conscious spirit of reverence or worship. Pulpit and lectern dozed in their coverlets of calico, with the figures of last Sunday’s hymns staring apathetically from their oaken board. It was a house of worship in undress.
From somewhere out of the obscurity of the aisle the person of the verger detached itself, approaching Mrs. Holmroyd with the swiftness and directness of purpose. He shed something impalpable from his finger-ends in coming, with an airy, almost graceful gesture, as though he scattered benedictions, and his floating robes diffused odours of rappee and alcohol. Impeccable though his manner was, Mrs. Holmroyd’s sharpened consciousness detected accents of a certain secularity. He bade her “good morning” in the voice of almost conversational brightness, and imparted the information that “Councillor Burford’s sat waiting of you in the chancel. I’ve put him in Mrs. Bankett’s pew. I’m not sure whether Mr. Todd’s come yet, but I’ll let you know. He won’t be late, I feel confident, for him and me has to take an interment at the Cimitery this morning.” With these words and a tribute to the favourable character of the weather, he led Mrs. Holmroyd up the church at a pace smarter than the one reserved for Services and Sundays. If she had been some client paying a visit to her lawyer’s office (it seemed to her) she could not have been more sensible of the purely business air investing the procedure. The curious calm and clarity of her state of mind magnified, no doubt, the slightest impressions made upon it, and showed trifles more momentous than they were. For it is sure that the verger only sought to set her at her ease, and to impress his personality upon the bridal consciousness in its brightest and most helpful light, but Mrs. Holmroyd felt aware of a subtle absence of solemnity in her surroundings, as if a semi-surreptitious function such as this could not in reason hope for the full sanctification and blessing of the church.
In one of the chancel pews the Councillor awaited her, seated beside a large, inverted silk hat. He half rose to make way for Mrs. Holmroyd, shook her hand briefly as she passed him, saying: “Good morning, ma’am,” in a voice depressed to the tone of the edifice they sat in. But neither he nor she had any word to say to one another; The strangeness of their conjunction in these surroundings made them seem strange to one another. To Oswald the Councillor gave no sign of recognition, but re-seating himself broadly at the pew-mouth after Mrs. Holmroyd’s admission, blocked all further entry, and Oswald--after a moment of irresolution--took refuge in the pew behind. In this atmosphere of speculation and constraint he found himself all at once bereft of the self-importance that had filled his bosom up to the present, and he became once more but a little boy, waiting curiously and anxiously upon events, with no very clear perception of the duties incumbent on or expected of him, nor of what would be his fate. It seemed evident to him that a ceremony which imposed such deadly silence upon all participants, and transformed so utterly his mother and the Councillor, must possess elements of gravity for which he had not sufficiently allowed. His ignorance had always associated weddings with bells and cakes and great rejoicings, and he found it hard to reconcile what he had previously believed about such things with this dread silence of reality. Not less than her son was Mrs. Holmroyd sensible of the oppressive silence of the church, as though it had no comfort to impart nor consolation to breathe over them. And though she knew that one note of music would have dissolved all the resolute compression of her courage into tears, she could not help longing for the voice of the organ to awake the sanctity that was asleep, and lift her heart from its bed of clay to some place nearer heaven.
An unimaginable time they seemed to sit there, oppressed beneath the weight of silence, during which she strove in vain to pray coherently, and the Councillor drew out his watch, and made the circumference of his silk hat with a coat-sleeve. The frigid aloofness of this uncongenial place of worship, so different from the half secular and reassuring air of nonconformity, made him ill at ease. And the business man’s respect of punctuality chafed against the least liberties with time. And then again, this feeling of impotent attendance on the convenience of a curate rubbed dignity on the raw. He was disposed to reproach himself with having consented to come here at all; he owned no sympathy with church ways; he would have done better to insist on the Register Office. From this point of view his reproach shifted to lay the blame upon a false desire for privacy.
“If Annie’d been what a man’s daughter should have been by rights,” he reflected irately, “there’d have been no occasion for me to come to church in a hole and corner way like this. This is no sort of wedding for a Town Councillor. It’s neither one thing nor another. We ought to have done the whole affair on proper, business lines whilst we was about it. We might have had the Mayor and half the Corporation present, and who’s to say under them conditions we couldn’t have arranged for Canon Quexley to conduct the proceedings respectable.” For a few moments out of humour with himself, the world, and his surroundings, he was even conscious of a certain resentment towards the woman by his side; but this he promptly quelled. “It’s no use blaming her,” he told himself emphatically. “It’s not her fault. She’s not to blame any more than me. But it’s unfortunate for us both, as things has turned out. Very unfortunate. Are we to be kept sat here all day? If this is how the church conducts its services, such unbusiness-like ways doesn’t deserve to get no custom at all. There’ll be our cab waiting of us outside by this time.”
In point of fact they were kept waiting little beyond their due time. Almost simultaneously with the snapping of the vestry latch and the sound of commingled voices, the Curate appeared before the altar, completing the adjustment of his hood, and the verger, inflated with a new importance, beckoned to them from the end of the choir-stalls. Even Canon Quexley’s fleshy forefinger could not have conveyed the intimation with more episcopal dignity. Oswald, sitting solitary in his pew, beheld his mother and the Councillor advance and take their places together at the altar steps, beneath the crude blues and cardinals of the east window. Now they seemed to be in earnest conversation with the Curate; now they shook hands with one another; anon they knelt, whilst the verger, standing in the shadow of the organ, watched the proceedings with a critical eye. At length the Curate ceased to mumble. Councillor Burford offered an arm to his mother, and Prestwich stepped alertly forward, and he and they and the Curate retired to the vestry. Everybody seemed to have forgotten Oswald, and Oswald remained rivetted to his seat in the chancel pew, asking himself perplexedly: “Am I supposed to sit here?... Will they come back to me? What if they’ve forgotten, and gone out by the vestry door!”
But just as his anxieties were becoming acute, the Councillor and his mother returned. They moved down the chancel side by side, the Councillor with chest squared, and right arm protruding awkwardly at an angle, and the fingers of Oswald’s mother reposing lightly on his coat sleeve. The Councillor’s air of caged discomfort had given way to a look of visible relief, almost triumphant, as if the now surmounted worst had proved less formidable than his fears. Indeed, within the vestry a great part of this ecclesiastical constraint had been put aside. The Curate had doffed his ceremonial voice and air, and resumed his suspended humanity once more, congratulating the newly-wedded couple and offering his heartfelt wishes for the length and happiness of their married life. And the Councillor, taking his proffered hand in a broad grip of friendliness that forgot already the fretful thoughts engendered by delay, thanked him “on behalf of me and my wife.”
“You’ve conducted the proceedings most satisfactory, sir. I’m not a churchman myself, as perhaps you’re aware, but I venture to think we couldn’t have been married more comfortable in any place of worship, and me and my wife’s extremely obliged to you. I hope it won’t be the last time I shall attend this church, and I’m sure both me and Mrs. Burford will be happy to have the pleasure of seeing you at our own house after we’ve got nicely settled down.” To which the Curate had murmured with a flush of gratitude, as though the condescension were undeserved:
“How very kind of you!”
“Well! It’s a beginning!” the Councillor said to himself as he left the vestry. “Since we’ve took the first step, let’s go on with it.... After all, it will be more gratifying when one looks back, to think we was married in a church. The church has a dignity and standing--whatever some folks say. It hasn’t held its head up against all competitors for nothing.”
At first, so straight did his mother’s gaze stream out before her, as if she followed the pathway cleared by it, that Oswald feared she would have passed him by; but as she and her new husband came abreast with the pew in which he sat, she detached her hand gently from the Councillor’s coat-sleeve and moved to Oswald with a look that awed him. Her eyes were gleaming wet; he perceived she had been weeping, but there was a sort of radiance about them too, as if they were of stained glass like the windows all around, and an inward light shone through, flowing from some deep source of splendour. Before that flood of liberated feeling, of love, of tenderness and strangely stirred compassion, Oswald’s gaze flinched and fell. His youth lacked the self-possession to meet and to sustain a look of such intensity. But he felt, as his mother’s arms encompassed him, and he was sensible of the moisture of her eyes upon his face, that in some new way she had tremendous need of him; that her embrace served the purpose of an appeal ... a cry to all that was best and noblest in her son. And his lips quivered at this testimony of her faith in him, and at his own uplifting faith in the goodness and nobility of his nature. There, in the chancel of St. Saviour’s, whelmed by an emotion that stirred his very bowels, as the deep notes of Mr. Rencil’s organ sometimes did, he vowed that his mother should never be deceived in him; that her faith and hope should never be betrayed.
Her embrace was of the briefest. She clasped him but a moment and let him go, and took her husband’s arm again--with a slight gesture to Oswald that he must follow. Outside the church, not before the main gates but by the little iron wicket that Oswald and the choristers made use of, a one-horse cab was standing. “I’m sorry now it hadn’t been a pair,” the Councillor reflected to himself, at sight of it. “It would have been more in keeping. This desire for privacy can be carried too far. But me and her agreed to keep the whole thing very quiet for both our sakes, and I can’t be blamed. We said ’a cab’ and a cab’s what we’ve got. It’s too late to make any changes now.”
By this time the bridal party was close up to the little gate. The driver clambered on to the box; the verger, bare-headed, held the door open with an ingratiatory smile. A small knot of onlookers watched the proceedings with the intent interest always kindled by the spectacle of other folks’ affairs, and some rice was thrown half-heartedly by luke-warm fingers, that rattled with the chilliness of hailstones against the cab-windows and the Councillor’s top hat. The Councillor handed his new-made wife into the cab; his stooping shoulders and broad back followed her, and Prestwich was about to close the door when Mrs. Burford’s hand beyond the window made a faint movement of deterrence. It was for Oswald. Through the re-opened door he stepped into the cab with a growing sense of undesiredness and intrusion that caused him to diminish his small body into its smallest compass on the small front seat. The Councillor bestowed no glance upon him. From his mother he obtained the reassurance of a strained smile. Through the window, as the cab rolled away, he caught sight of the figure of Elizabeth, distracted between desire to see and horror of being seen, who, wrapping and re-wrapping her tormented person in the black shawl, followed every phase of the proceedings with a face of convulsive mobility. Oswald’s mother remarked the pathetic figure too, and a sudden impulse of compassion urged her to give one parting sign of recognition--that should serve Elizabeth both for acknowledgment and pardon. But the opportunity was lost--she knew not how--and the cab moved lugubriously on its journey. Its journey was, in the first instance, to the Councillor’s own house, where a light refection of wine and sandwiches was laid out upon the table in the dining-room, as a fortification against the impending journey by rail; the cab-horse meanwhile jingling its bit before the garden gate, and the driver drawing solace from a cold pipe. Time, being limited, favoured neither conversation nor eating, and to Oswald it seemed as if the repast had no sooner begun than the Councillor rose to his feet, watch in hand, and uttered a warning: “Well?” He had been cherishing the hope of accompanying his mother to the station in the cab, and of bidding her a last good-bye at the railway-carriage window, but the Councillor rudely broke the hope by saying--“You’ll have to be making your way back now, my lad. Me and your mother’s driving straight to the station.” The words fell percussively on Oswald’s hearing, and he lifted a face of instinctive appeal, towards his mother, but her gaze failed him; his look fell upon lowered eyes. For Mrs. Burford had cherished, too, the same hope as her son, but she heard the tone of resolution in the Councillor’s voice ... and this was no moment to dispute a husband’s will.
“The station is a very busy place, Oswald,” she said, as though subscribing to her husband’s greater wisdom. But when she kissed him, he knew that her kiss sought to speak to him, to tell him that his mother’s heart, at least, took no side with this greater wisdom to which both he and she must henceforth yield. And all at once, still carrying the warmth of her caress, and with her final recommendations ringing in his ears, he was “making his way back, my lad” as the Councillor had bidden him. He walked with his eyes fixed desperately on the shrinking outline of the cab from which, at intervals, emerged a microscopic hand, until both cab and hand were gone from sight, and then his spirit sank into a sea of utter loneliness, lead-weighted with the feeling of irreparable loss. Yes. A voice deep within him seemed to whisper that this morning’s marriage had cost him something very dear. An element of sweetness had been abstracted from life; elements of darkness and bitterness infused into it; its composition was changed already; it could never be the same again. His secret heart began to confess a fear of the future. This new father, to whose acquisition he had looked forward with such pride--he was afraid of him. Never once this morning had the Councillor’s eyes deigned to dwell openly on Oswald’s inconsiderable person; that the boy noted. They had appeared, rather, to avoid him, as if he were some displeasing and unwanted object whose too obvious existence they sought to shirk. It was borne in on Oswald with dismay that his new father did not care for him; that he had never cared for him; that this big, broad, burly figure would slowly shoulder him out of the place he held in his mother’s heart; dispossess him of all that his sonship had enjoyed under the reign of undivided love. And in this hour of utter loneliness his heart sickened for the old home, for the old life, for his old self, for the old familiar mother, attached by her slender fingers to no man’s arm.
But the old home was on its deathbed, expiring fast. Only just so much life had been preserved in it as to serve their necessities over this momentous morning. By nightfall Elizabeth’s fury would have robbed it of its last breath. Now his comprehension, sharpened by distress, began to grasp the meaning of his mother’s tears, and he perceived what it was that she had wept for. Oh, why had she wished to leave this house at all! Why had she not explained to him what marriage really meant, that he might have besought her earnestly to dwell with him forever in the life so dear to both? Immersed in a state of sorrow which to Oswald’s childish eyes seemed eternal, his feet had brought him to St. Saviour’s before he was aware. The church divulged no consciousness of all that had taken place so recently within its walls. Its tall spire, spun into the pale October sky, seemed to hold intercourse with heaven; the gilt numerals on the clock dial, gravely indicated by the creeping hands of gold, caught the sun and gleamed with a steadfast, holy light that made Oswald’s grief the more discernible. The churchyard was empty, and actuated by a sort of need to raise again the cup of sorrow to his lips, and taste such bitter dregs as might be left in it, Oswald entered. Here was the path they came by, he and his mother. Here was Beryl’s tiny grave; a mound of green surmounted by the spray of white chrysanthemums which they had laid upon the turf this morning, and over which his mother had bowed her head and stood for awhile with closed eyes. Oswald stood too, staring at the grassy shape through the single pane of loneliness with which his life seemed lit. Beryl was down there, he meditated, in the narrow place where they had laid her; deep beneath his feet, his little sister, whom he had once companioned and kissed, and played with. And stirred by a sudden impulse to test the silence of her tomb, and learn if--peradventure--his sister’s spirit of a truth resided there and hearkened, he said, in a low and urgent voice:
“Beryl!!”
... The sound of her name, uttered thus audibly by his own lips, shocked and startled him, and he looked sharply and shamefully on all sides to make sure no ear had overheard. After all, it was but his loneliness that cried upon her; she seemed nearer to him now, for all the feet of soil that lay between them, than his own mother. Oh, if his sister had but been alive to-day, that he might have charge of her and find in her sorrow assuagement and companionship for his own. From time to time, from the distant railway station, the sound of whistles reached him in the churchyard silence, and he said of this, or that, or the other: “Will that be it?”
Wearing always his new garment of wretchedness, he wandered slowly back to what--for want of any better name--he still called “home.” Elizabeth (he reflected) would be there by now; he might obtain some moments of melancholy satisfaction in her company, helping to destroy the last remnants of the old life; any food was more welcome to an empty heart than none. In the High Gate he passed the Organist’s door, and long and steadfastly he fixed his eyes upon its upper window, and very slowly did he walk--praying secretly that the Organist might emerge, or that some responsive face might show itself behind the window, or welcome hand make signal to his hungering hopes.
But no sign of life caused Oswald’s heart to leap. All that seemed left to him now out of the wreckage of his once bright world ... was the Great Ideal. Aye! The Ideal. That was the thing to cling to. Let him build dreams bright enough to fill his solitude and make him independent of the illusive pleasures of this outer world. Let him make himself forthwith resplendent with high resolve and noble aspiration, so that his mother should marvel at the change in him when next she pressed him to her bosom. Let the Great Ideal shine from his brow like a light set in some upper window: a beacon and a pledge.
THE END
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
blinked increduously=> blinked incredulously {pg 37}
vermilion poloneys=> vermilion boloneys {pg 38}
twenty years before rose up=> twenty years before she rose up {pg 35}
and and at the plate-glass=> and at the plate-glass {pg 85}
for the imformation=> for the information {pg 230}
conglomoration of cushions=> conglomeration of cushions {pg 236}
whose whimiscality seemed=> whose whimsicality seemed {pg 242}
no hurry extentuated his offence=> no hurry extenuated his offence {pg 295}
is social circle=> his social circle {pg 424}
One couldn’t reasonable expect=> One couldn’t reasonably expect {pg 428}