CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She read the letter, and she is not going to set down here what it said — not out of any wish to spare a reader, for she had done with sparing, but because the words were never the thing, and to copy them out would be to pass along the strap and keep back the load.
She read them twice by a guttering candle, and they went into her, and at the end of it she understood that she had learnt nothing a person could have written down; what she had learnt was a weight; for one does not read a binding so much as receive the weight of it, after which one carries the weight, and the words are only ever the strap by which it is lifted.
So she carried it out to Ashcombe before the dawn, the weight, and there she found out what it looks like when a person sets such a weight down for the last time.
They rode out together in the grey, all of them, for she would not let Darcy go alone and he would not now attempt it, and where the two of them went the rest of the party followed.
Ashcombe churchyard lay in a fold of the pale valley, older than the others, its stones leaning like tired men, and the wrong-coloured ground had risen so high among them that the graves appeared to wade in it; and at the lychgate a lantern was burning, and beneath the lantern an old man sat upon an upturned barrow with his hands loose between his knees, in the settled attitude of a person who has known for some days that a thing is coming and has resolved not to be discovered running from it.
"You will be the keepers out of Kent," he said, when they came up to him. "Word came you were about. I am Wren — Elias Wren, sexton here, and my father before me, and his before him." He looked them over without any great curiosity. "You have come to see to the wall."
"We have come to hold it," Darcy said.
"No," said Elias Wren, gently, as one corrects a child upon some small matter of fact.
"You have come to watch me hold it. It is not yours to hold, sir, begging your pardon; it is mine, and always has been.
" And Elizabeth, who had read the letter where Darcy had only meant to, understood him before her husband did: that the binding for this ground was Wren's own, with his name written into it as it had been written into his father's, an ordinary gift in an ordinary man, handed down with the spade and the bell-rope, so slight a thing that no soul beyond the parish had ever suspected the Wrens of being anything grander than the men who dug the graves and kept the yard swept.
A whole family, across four centuries, quietly holding the one wall, and never a word of it spoken, for who would ever think to ask the sexton.
"You cannot pay it in my place," Elias went on, still gently, to Darcy, who had gone white about the mouth.
"I know your sort means it kindly. But a binding is not a debt another man may settle for you; it takes the one whose it is, or it takes no one at all; and should it take no one, this ground opens, and Ashcombe is lost, and it carries the three joined wards of the line down after it.
You know it — your face knows it, even as your mouth would argue.
" He got up off the barrow, slowly, upon an old man's complaining knees.
"I have had my three weeks' warning, which is more than most men are granted, and I have used it to put my affairs in a row.
So let us not stand about in the cold, if you please; it is bad upon my hands. "
Darcy did not move, and Elizabeth understood the whole of what the standing there cost him: for she had watched him try to spend himself for a fortnight, and had fought him over it, and caught him at it, and forbidden it; and here at last was the thing she had never thought to have to dread, that a man who had come into the east meaning to pay every price himself must instead stand still and watch a stranger pay one, and could not lift a hand to prevent it, because it was not his to prevent — and the not-being-able-to-prevent-it was doing something to his face that she knew she would carry for the rest of her life.
"Let me at least—" he began.
"There is nothing to let, sir," said Elias.
"That is the mercy of it and the cruelty of it both.
There is nothing any man can do here but the man whose it is.
You may hold the lantern, if you have a mind to; that would be a real kindness; my hands will want to be free.
" And so it was Darcy who held the lantern, in both his hands, as though it were the last order left in the world that he understood how to obey, while the old man went to the wall.
The rest of them stood back — Mary with her jaw set hard, Anne gone very still, Denny with his hat off, Kitty white and silent — and Elizabeth stood where she could see the whole of it, because a dead woman had taught her to see, and because it seemed to her that someone of their party ought to witness the thing entire and not look away, and she had appointed herself to the office.
Elias Wren laid both his hands upon the wall of his churchyard; and Elizabeth, who had read the letter, knew exactly what was happening, and found that the knowing was a great deal worse than the not-knowing would have been.
It did not look like anything at all. That was the thing Harding had told her in a cottage near Lewes, and Mary in a letter, and she had believed neither of them, not in the body, until now; for there was no drama in it, no light, no cry, nothing a painter could have used — only an old man leaning on a wall in the grey, his shoulders easing, his tired face going smooth and then going peaceful, the way a face goes peaceful when a long pain has at last let go of it — and the pale ground at his feet, the wrong drowned green of it, beginning very slowly to darken, and to warm, and to come right.
He was pouring himself into it; she could feel it against her own skin, the way she had felt the river; and there was no wall in him to say enough, precisely as Harding had promised, so that it went out of him and went out of him, soft as sleep and warm as sleep, and Elias Wren's face grew the more peaceful the emptier he became — which was the horror of it entire, that he was content, that he went gladly, that the going felt to him like rest.
"Not so far, Elias," Mary said suddenly, sharp, stepping toward him, for Mary knew walls and could read the measure of a thing. "That is enough now — it will hold upon what you have already given it—"
"It will not, though, miss," he said, and his voice had gone dreamy and far off.
"A little more. The Ashcombe ground was always greedy; my father used to say so.
" And a little more of him went into the stone, and the ground darkened another yard, and he said, "There.
That has got it. That has got it now" — and then, when Mary said his name again, only: "S'alright, miss.
It does not hurt. Nobody ever believes me, but it does not hurt at all. "
He gave more than he had, and Elizabeth saw the very moment he crossed over into it, because she had read the letter and knew the shape to watch for — the moment he ceased spending what he could spare and began spending what he could not, with nothing in the world to stop him, no pain to pull his hand from the stone, only a greedy ground and a kind old man meeting one another in the grey while five keepers out of Kent stood three feet distant and could not so much as lift a finger; and Mary wept, silently, and did not wipe it, and no one remarked upon her weeping, for there was nothing to be said that would not have been an impertinence in the face of what the man was doing.
The ground went green, proper green, the first honest green Elizabeth had seen in that whole valley, spreading outward from the churchyard wall into the growing light; Ashcombe was held; the twelve were still twelve; the rope of climbers had not fallen.
And Elias Wren slid down the wall to sitting, gentle and boneless, an old man lowering himself onto the grass he had just that moment saved, still smiling, with almost nothing left behind his eyes.
Almost nothing; but not quite nothing. He looked up at Darcy, who had gone down on his knees before him with the lantern, and said, in a voice with hardly any Elias left in it, "Tell the parish the yard is mended.
They worried. Tell them old Wren saw to it.
" And then, after a long pause, with the light going out of him by inches: "Was there a bell?
I feel I ought to ring a bell. There was a thing I did, with a rope — I cannot — what was the—" But he did not finish it; and he did not die, either, which was the part she had not braced for; he only stayed, sitting against his mended wall in the new green, breathing, warm, and empty, a kind husk where a sexton had been, with the whole map of his long life poured out into the ground to hold it, and the lights on in the cottage of him and nobody at home, and a smile upon his face because it had not hurt.
It never hurts. That is the whole of the difficulty, and it was Elias Wren who taught it her at last, where the captain and the sister and the dead aunt had only been able to say it.
Later — though she could not have said how much later, for the sun had come up somewhere in the middle of it without her marking the hour — Anne found her at the far wall, where she had gone to be quietly and thoroughly sick, and did not remark upon that any more than she had remarked upon the weeping, but only came and stood beside her, looking out at the green as one looks at a thing one has paid a great deal too much to be able to admire.
"Now you know," Anne said, quietly. "What the letters do.
What is in the box, all of them. That." And she nodded back toward the small warm shape of Elias Wren, whom his parish had come out to tend now, weeping over a man who smiled and did not know them.
"Not a spell. Not a sacrifice, even, not truly.
Only a person, poured out into the ground to hold it, and going gladly, because it does not hurt, and no wall in them to say enough. "
"I read the letter," Elizabeth said, and her voice was not working quite as it should. "Last night. I believed the reading would be the brave thing — the knowing."
"And?"
"And it taught me nothing at all." She watched the parish gather up their sexton like a thing that had been spilled.
"This taught me. Him. I might have read every letter in the box a hundred times over and known nothing, until I stood here and watched an ordinary man do it gladly and forget his own bell-rope in the middle of it. "
Anne was silent a while. "That is why my mother would not explain it," she said at last. "In the cold room, when you asked her what the instruction meant, and she would not say.
She told you that you would understand it from a person, and not from her.
" Elizabeth said that she remembered. "She was right," Anne said, watching Elias Wren's daughter kneel in the green and take her father's empty smiling face between her two hands.
"She was always right; it is the most unforgivable thing about her.
There are eleven more, Elizabeth — at the least. And now we have each of us seen the bottom of what one costs, and there is no unseeing it, and we must still decide which of us pays the next, knowing exactly what we decide.
That is the third case, entire. Not the doing of the terrible thing in ignorance. "
"The doing of it," Elizabeth said, "having watched."
"Having watched," Anne agreed; and the two of them stood a while longer at the wall of the mended churchyard, in the first green morning Elizabeth had seen in the east, while behind them a parish grieved a man who was not dead.
And she made herself look at Elias Wren until she could do it without her knees giving under her, and then she went down and helped his daughter carry him home.