CHAPTER XLVI
THE GURGOYLE: ITS DOINGS
The tower of Weatherbury Church was a square erection offourteenth-century date, having two stone gurgoyles on each of thefour faces of its parapet. Of these eight carved protuberancesonly two at this time continued to serve the purpose of theirerection--that of spouting the water from the lead roof within. Onemouth in each front had been closed by bygone church-wardens assuperfluous, and two others were broken away and choked--a matter notof much consequence to the wellbeing of the tower, for the two mouthswhich still remained open and active were gaping enough to do all thework.
It has been sometimes argued that there is no truer criterion of thevitality of any given art-period than the power of the master-spiritsof that time in grotesque; and certainly in the instance of Gothicart there is no disputing the proposition. Weatherbury tower was asomewhat early instance of the use of an ornamental parapet in parishas distinct from cathedral churches, and the gurgoyles, which are thenecessary correlatives of a parapet, were exceptionally prominent--ofthe boldest cut that the hand could shape, and of the most originaldesign that a human brain could conceive. There was, so to speak,that symmetry in their distortion which is less the characteristicof British than of Continental grotesques of the period. All theeight were different from each other. A beholder was convinced thatnothing on earth could be more hideous than those he saw on the northside until he went round to the south. Of the two on this latterface, only that at the south-eastern corner concerns the story. Itwas too human to be called like a dragon, too impish to be like aman, too animal to be like a fiend, and not enough like a bird to becalled a griffin. This horrible stone entity was fashioned as ifcovered with a wrinkled hide; it had short, erect ears, eyes startingfrom their sockets, and its fingers and hands were seizing thecorners of its mouth, which they thus seemed to pull open to givefree passage to the water it vomited. The lower row of teeth wasquite washed away, though the upper still remained. Here and thus,jutting a couple of feet from the wall against which its feet restedas a support, the creature had for four hundred years laughed at thesurrounding landscape, voicelessly in dry weather, and in wet with agurgling and snorting sound.
Troy slept on in the porch, and the rain increased outside. Presentlythe gurgoyle spat. In due time a small stream began to tricklethrough the seventy feet of aerial space between its mouth andthe ground, which the water-drops smote like duckshot in theiraccelerated velocity. The stream thickened in substance, andincreased in power, gradually spouting further and yet further fromthe side of the tower. When the rain fell in a steady and ceaselesstorrent the stream dashed downward in volumes.
We follow its course to the ground at this point of time. The end ofthe liquid parabola has come forward from the wall, has advanced overthe plinth mouldings, over a heap of stones, over the marble border,into the midst of Fanny Robin's grave.
The force of the stream had, until very lately, been received uponsome loose stones spread thereabout, which had acted as a shield tothe soil under the onset. These during the summer had been clearedfrom the ground, and there was now nothing to resist the down-fallbut the bare earth. For several years the stream had not spoutedso far from the tower as it was doing on this night, and such acontingency had been over-looked. Sometimes this obscure cornerreceived no inhabitant for the space of two or three years, andthen it was usually but a pauper, a poacher, or other sinner ofundignified sins.
The persistent torrent from the gurgoyle's jaws directed all itsvengeance into the grave. The rich tawny mould was stirred intomotion, and boiled like chocolate. The water accumulated and washeddeeper down, and the roar of the pool thus formed spread into thenight as the head and chief among other noises of the kind createdby the deluging rain. The flowers so carefully planted by Fanny'srepentant lover began to move and writhe in their bed. Thewinter-violets turned slowly upside down, and became a mere mat ofmud. Soon the snowdrop and other bulbs danced in the boiling masslike ingredients in a cauldron. Plants of the tufted species wereloosened, rose to the surface, and floated off.
Troy did not awake from his comfortless sleep till it was broad day.Not having been in bed for two nights his shoulders felt stiff, hisfeet tender, and his head heavy. He remembered his position, arose,shivered, took the spade, and again went out.
The rain had quite ceased, and the sun was shining through thegreen, brown, and yellow leaves, now sparkling and varnished by theraindrops to the brightness of similar effects in the landscapes ofRuysdael and Hobbema, and full of all those infinite beauties thatarise from the union of water and colour with high lights. The airwas rendered so transparent by the heavy fall of rain that the autumnhues of the middle distance were as rich as those near at hand, andthe remote fields intercepted by the angle of the tower appeared inthe same plane as the tower itself.
He entered the gravel path which would take him behind the tower.The path, instead of being stony as it had been the night before, wasbrowned over with a thin coating of mud. At one place in the pathhe saw a tuft of stringy roots washed white and clean as a bundleof tendons. He picked it up--surely it could not be one of theprimroses he had planted? He saw a bulb, another, and another ashe advanced. Beyond doubt they were the crocuses. With a face ofperplexed dismay Troy turned the corner and then beheld the wreckthe stream had made.
The pool upon the grave had soaked away into the ground, and in itsplace was a hollow. The disturbed earth was washed over the grassand pathway in the guise of the brown mud he had already seen, and itspotted the marble tombstone with the same stains. Nearly all theflowers were washed clean out of the ground, and they lay, rootsupwards, on the spots whither they had been splashed by the stream.
Troy's brow became heavily contracted. He set his teeth closely,and his compressed lips moved as those of one in great pain. Thissingular accident, by a strange confluence of emotions in him, wasfelt as the sharpest sting of all. Troy's face was very expressive,and any observer who had seen him now would hardly have believed himto be a man who had laughed, and sung, and poured love-trifles intoa woman's ear. To curse his miserable lot was at first his impulse,but even that lowest stage of rebellion needed an activity whoseabsence was necessarily antecedent to the existence of the morbidmisery which wrung him. The sight, coming as it did, superimposedupon the other dark scenery of the previous days, formed a sort ofclimax to the whole panorama, and it was more than he could endure.Sanguine by nature, Troy had a power of eluding grief by simplyadjourning it. He could put off the consideration of any particularspectre till the matter had become old and softened by time. Theplanting of flowers on Fanny's grave had been perhaps but a speciesof elusion of the primary grief, and now it was as if his intentionhad been known and circumvented.
Almost for the first time in his life, Troy, as he stood by thisdismantled grave, wished himself another man. It is seldom that aperson with much animal spirit does not feel that the fact of hislife being his own is the one qualification which singles it out as amore hopeful life than that of others who may actually resemble himin every particular. Troy had felt, in his transient way, hundredsof times, that he could not envy other people their condition,because the possession of that condition would have necessitated adifferent personality, when he desired no other than his own. He hadnot minded the peculiarities of his birth, the vicissitudes of hislife, the meteor-like uncertainty of all that related to him, becausethese appertained to the hero of his story, without whom there wouldhave been no story at all for him; and it seemed to be only in thenature of things that matters would right themselves at some properdate and wind up well. This very morning the illusion completed itsdisappearance, and, as it were, all of a sudden, Troy hated himself.The suddenness was probably more apparent than real. A coral reefwhich just comes short of the ocean surface is no more to the horizonthan if it had never been begun, and the mere finishing stroke iswhat often appears to create an event which has long been potentiallyan accomplished thing.
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nbsp; He stood and meditated--a miserable man. Whither should hego? "He that is accursed, let him be accursed still," was thepitiless anathema written in this spoliated effort of his new-bornsolicitousness. A man who has spent his primal strength injourneying in one direction has not much spirit left for reversinghis course. Troy had, since yesterday, faintly reversed his; but themerest opposition had disheartened him. To turn about would havebeen hard enough under the greatest providential encouragement; butto find that Providence, far from helping him into a new course, orshowing any wish that he might adopt one, actually jeered his firsttrembling and critical attempt in that kind, was more than naturecould bear.
He slowly withdrew from the grave. He did not attempt to fill up thehole, replace the flowers, or do anything at all. He simply threw uphis cards and forswore his game for that time and always. Going outof the churchyard silently and unobserved--none of the villagershaving yet risen--he passed down some fields at the back, and emergedjust as secretly upon the high road. Shortly afterwards he had gonefrom the village.
Meanwhile, Bathsheba remained a voluntary prisoner in the attic. Thedoor was kept locked, except during the entries and exits of Liddy,for whom a bed had been arranged in a small adjoining room. Thelight of Troy's lantern in the churchyard was noticed about teno'clock by the maid-servant, who casually glanced from the window inthat direction whilst taking her supper, and she called Bathsheba'sattention to it. They looked curiously at the phenomenon for a time,until Liddy was sent to bed.
Bathsheba did not sleep very heavily that night. When her attendantwas unconscious and softly breathing in the next room, the mistressof the house was still looking out of the window at the faint gleamspreading from among the trees--not in a steady shine, but blinkinglike a revolving coast-light, though this appearance failed tosuggest to her that a person was passing and repassing in frontof it. Bathsheba sat here till it began to rain, and the lightvanished, when she withdrew to lie restlessly in her bed and re-enactin a worn mind the lurid scene of yesternight.
Almost before the first faint sign of dawn appeared she arose again,and opened the window to obtain a full breathing of the new morningair, the panes being now wet with trembling tears left by the nightrain, each one rounded with a pale lustre caught from primrose-huedslashes through a cloud low down in the awakening sky. From thetrees came the sound of steady dripping upon the drifted leaves underthem, and from the direction of the church she could hear anothernoise--peculiar, and not intermittent like the rest, the purl ofwater falling into a pool.
Liddy knocked at eight o'clock, and Bathsheba un-locked the door.
"What a heavy rain we've had in the night, ma'am!" said Liddy, whenher inquiries about breakfast had been made.
"Yes, very heavy."
"Did you hear the strange noise from the churchyard?"
"I heard one strange noise. I've been thinking it must have been thewater from the tower spouts."
"Well, that's what the shepherd was saying, ma'am. He's now gone onto see."
"Oh! Gabriel has been here this morning!"
"Only just looked in in passing--quite in his old way, which Ithought he had left off lately. But the tower spouts used to spatteron the stones, and we are puzzled, for this was like the boiling of apot."
Not being able to read, think, or work, Bathsheba asked Liddy to stayand breakfast with her. The tongue of the more childish woman stillran upon recent events. "Are you going across to the church, ma'am?"she asked.
"Not that I know of," said Bathsheba.
"I thought you might like to go and see where they have put Fanny.The trees hide the place from your window."
Bathsheba had all sorts of dreads about meeting her husband. "HasMr. Troy been in to-night?" she said.
"No, ma'am; I think he's gone to Budmouth."
Budmouth! The sound of the word carried with it a much diminishedperspective of him and his deeds; there were thirteen miles intervalbetwixt them now. She hated questioning Liddy about her husband'smovements, and indeed had hitherto sedulously avoided doing so; butnow all the house knew that there had been some dreadful disagreementbetween them, and it was futile to attempt disguise. Bathsheba hadreached a stage at which people cease to have any appreciative regardfor public opinion.
"What makes you think he has gone there?" she said.
"Laban Tall saw him on the Budmouth road this morning beforebreakfast."
Bathsheba was momentarily relieved of that wayward heaviness of thepast twenty-four hours which had quenched the vitality of youth inher without substituting the philosophy of maturer years, and sheresolved to go out and walk a little way. So when breakfast wasover, she put on her bonnet, and took a direction towards the church.It was nine o'clock, and the men having returned to work again fromtheir first meal, she was not likely to meet many of them in theroad. Knowing that Fanny had been laid in the reprobates' quarterof the graveyard, called in the parish "behind church," which wasinvisible from the road, it was impossible to resist the impulse toenter and look upon a spot which, from nameless feelings, she atthe same time dreaded to see. She had been unable to overcome animpression that some connection existed between her rival and thelight through the trees.
Bathsheba skirted the buttress, and beheld the hole and the tomb, itsdelicately veined surface splashed and stained just as Troy had seenit and left it two hours earlier. On the other side of the scenestood Gabriel. His eyes, too, were fixed on the tomb, and herarrival having been noiseless, she had not as yet attracted hisattention. Bathsheba did not at once perceive that the grand tomband the disturbed grave were Fanny's, and she looked on both sidesand around for some humbler mound, earthed up and clodded in theusual way. Then her eye followed Oak's, and she read the words withwhich the inscription opened:--
ERECTED BY FRANCIS TROY IN BELOVED MEMORY OF FANNY ROBIN
Oak saw her, and his first act was to gaze inquiringly and learn howshe received this knowledge of the authorship of the work, which tohimself had caused considerable astonishment. But such discoveriesdid not much affect her now. Emotional convulsions seemed to havebecome the commonplaces of her history, and she bade him goodmorning, and asked him to fill in the hole with the spade whichwas standing by. Whilst Oak was doing as she desired, Bathshebacollected the flowers, and began planting them with that sympatheticmanipulation of roots and leaves which is so conspicuous in a woman'sgardening, and which flowers seem to understand and thrive upon. Sherequested Oak to get the churchwardens to turn the leadwork at themouth of the gurgoyle that hung gaping down upon them, that by thismeans the stream might be directed sideways, and a repetition of theaccident prevented. Finally, with the superfluous magnanimity ofa woman whose narrower instincts have brought down bitterness uponher instead of love, she wiped the mud spots from the tomb as if sherather liked its words than otherwise, and went again home. [2]
[Footnote 2: The local tower and churchyard do not answer precisely to the foregoing description.]