Part 52 (2/2)

The train of thought into which reminiscence had plunged him carried him over his whole life. He realized for the first time that his religious experiences had been little more than a reflection of those of Philip. It was Ashe who had interested him in spiritual things, who had led him into the church, who had practically determined for him that he should become a priest. For the first time, and with profound amazement, Maurice realized how completely his theological life had been the growth of the mind of Ashe rather than of his own. The thought brought with it a sense of weakness and self-contempt.

”Haven't I any strength of character?” he asked himself. ”In everything practical Phil has always relied on me. It was always Phil I cared for, not the church.”

Imperfectly as he was able to phrase it, Maurice was not in the end without some reasonably clear conception of the fact that in his life Philip had represented the feminine element. It was by love for his friend that he had been led on. Now that his reason was fully awake this emotional yielding to the thought of another was no longer possible; now that his heart was filled with a pa.s.sion for Berenice his nature no longer responded to the appeal of the feminine in Ashe.

Maurice was half aware that his was a character sure to be influenced greatly by affection; but he felt that it would never again be possible for him so to give up to another the guidance of his life as he now saw that he had yielded it to his friend. He had learned his weakness, and the lesson had been enforced too sharply ever to be forgotten.

He was coming now into the region of his old home. The forests were beginning faintly to show the approach of spring; the treetops were dimly warming in color, the branches thickening against the sky. Here and there Maurice looked down on a brook black with the late rains and with the floods from the snow-drifts still melting on the distant hills. Now he caught a far flash of the river where he had skated in winters almost forgotten, so fast does time move, where he had fished and bathed in summers so long gone that they seemed to belong to the life of some other. Yet once more and a distant hill, duskily blue against the bluer heavens, wakened for him some memory of his boyhood, seeming to challenge him to renew the old joys and to revel in the by-gone fervors.

All these things softened the mood in which Maurice came back to the old town, and as he walked up the village street, so well remembered yet so strange, he had a sense of unreality. The very homely familiarity of it all made it appear the more like a dream. He felt his heart-beats quicken as he approached the Ashe place, wondering if he should see Mrs. Ashe. He had always, with all his affection, felt for Philip's mother a sort of awe, as if she were more than a simple human creature. He found it difficult to understand that Mrs. Singleton should be staying with her, so incongruous was the a.s.sociation in his mind of two such women. With Mrs. Ashe, Alice must at least be at her best.

He walked up to the house, pa.s.sing under the leafless lilac bushes with a keen remembrance of how they were laden with odors in June. He wondered if the tansy still grew under the sitting-room window, and if the lilies-of-the-valley flourished on the north side of the house as of old. Then he knocked with the quaint old black knocker, and with the sound came back the present and the thought that he had before him an interview which might be neither pleasant nor easy.

Mrs. Singleton herself opened the door.

”I saw you coming,” she greeted him, ”and there is n.o.body at home but me.”

Maurice tried not to look disappointed.

”Then Mrs. Ashe is not at home?”

”No; she is out, and the girl is out. Will you come in? You probably didn't come to see me.”

”But I did come to see you.”

She led the way into the long, low sitting-room, with its many doors and its wide fireplace, so familiar that he might have left it yesterday.

”I can't imagine what you want of me,” Mrs. Singleton said, waving her hand toward a chair. ”The last time I saw you you didn't seem very fond of me.”

She seated herself by the side of the fire in a great old-fas.h.i.+oned chair covered with chintz and spreading out wings on either side of her head.

”You are still angry, Alice, I see,” he rejoined. ”Well, I can't help that. I did what was right. How in the world could you make up your mind to fool those people so?”

”They wanted to be fooled; why not oblige them?”

He regarded her with astonishment. He had expected her to deny that her deception was deliberate, to claim that the manifestations were real.

Her frank and cynical speech disconcerted him. He had no reply. She broke into a sneering laugh.

”There,” she said, ”you didn't come here to talk about that seance.

What did you come for?”

”I came to ask you if you still have Aunt Hannah's desk.”

She regarded him keenly.

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