Dear Stephen,—I wished for a word with you. But as thematter is urgent, I write. I should like to express to youmy sense of the generous chivalry of your conduct towardYvonne. I should also like to hold out to you the hand ofsincere friendship.In earnest of this I approach you, as man to man, withreference to one of the most solemn affairs in life. Yvonne,gratefully acknowledging the vast obligations under whichshe is bound to you, has made her acceptance of my offer ofremarriage dependent upon your consent. For this consent,therefore, I earnestly beg you.For the future, in what way soever my friendship can be ofuse to you, it will most gladly be directed.Yours sincerely,E. Chisely.Burgon’s Hotel, W.
Joyce grew faint as he read. The words swam before his eyes. A great pain shot through his heart. The letter contained one torturing fact—that of Yvonne’s acquiescence. The Bishop’s acknowledgment of his uprightness, the courtesy of the formal request, the offer of friendship—all were meaningless phrases. Yvonne was going to leave him—of her own free-will. Although his fears had anticipated the blow, it none the less stunned him. He flung himself down by his table, with a groan, and buried his face in his arms. The realisation of what Yvonne was to him flooded him with a mighty rush. She was his hope of salvation in this world and the next, his guardian angel, his universe. Without her all was chaos, void and horrible.
Presently Yvonne’s voice was heard calling him from the top of the stairs:—
“Stephen!”
He raised a haggard face, and with an effort steadied his voice to reply. Then he rose, turned off the gas, from force of habit, and went with heavy tread up the stairs.
“Your tea,” said Yvonne, busying herself with a kettle. “I am making you some afresh.”
“I will go and wash my hands,” he said drearily.
He mounted to his bedroom and cleansed himself from the book-dust and returned to Yvonne. He drew his chair to the table. She poured him out his tea, and helped him to butter, according to a habit into which she had fallen. She deplored the spoilt toast. He said that it did not matter. But when he tried to eat, the food stuck in his throat. Yvonne made no pretence at eating, but trifled with her teaspoon, with downcast eyes. Joyce looked at her anxiously. She seemed to have grown older. The childlike expression had changed into a sad, womanly seriousness. Presently she raised her eyes, soft and appealing as ever, and met his.
“Did you see Everard?” she asked.
“No. I was out. But he left a note—that told me everything.”
“He asks for your consent?”
“Yes.”
“And will you give it?” she asked, below her breath.
“It would be worse than folly for me to try to withhold it,” he said, bitterly.
“I will stay with you, and go on living this life, if you wish.”
“And yourself?”
“I don’t count,” she said, “I must do as I am told.”
“Would you be happy with Everard?” he asked huskily.
“Yes—of course—I was before,” she replied. But her cheek grew paler.
“And you would stay, if I asked you, and share all this struggle and poverty with me?”
“How could I refuse? Don’t I owe you my life?”
He looked for a tremulous second into her pure eyes and knew that he was master of her fate. The condition she had imposed upon Everard was no graceful act of acknowledgment. It was a serious placing of her future in his hands. He was silent for a few moments, deep in agitated thought, trembling with a struggle against a fierce temptation. The hand that nervously tugged at his moustache was shaking. Yvonne read the anxious trouble on his face.
“Don’t worry over it now,” she said, gently. “There is time, you know. Why should people always want to decide things straight off?”
“You are right, Yvonne,” said Stephen. “Let us forget it for a little.”
“Your poor tea,” add Yvonne, with pathetic return to her old manner. “It will never be drunk. And do eat something, to please me.”
But it was a miserable meal. The tabooed subject filled the heart and thoughts of each. It was with an effort that they caught the drift of casual commonplaces uttered from time to time. Now and then, during the long spells of silence, Yvonne stole a swift feminine glance at his face. But his sombre expression seemed to tell her nothing of that which she longed to know. At last the farce ended. They rose from the table and went to their usual seats by the fireside. Joyce filled his pipe, and was fumbling in his pockets for a match, when Yvonne came forward with a spill and stood before him holding it until the pipe was alight. He tried to thank her, but the words would not come. The tender act of intimacy made his heart swell too painfully. Yvonne rang the bell and the elderly, slatternly maid-of-all-work, cleared away the tea-things. Sarah was one of the elements of the establishment that made Joyce hate his poverty. She drank, was unclean, was a perpetual soil in the atmosphere that Yvonne breathed. The sight of her was a new factor in the case against himself.
It was a terrible decision that he was called upon to make. On the one hand, wealth and ease and social happiness for Yvonne, despair and misery for himself. On the other, a selfish happiness for himself, and for Yvonne this squalor and ostracism. He knew that her sweet, gentle nature would accept the latter portion unmurmuringly. A voice rang in his ears the certainty that she would marry him, if he pleaded. To repress the temptation to cast all other thoughts but his yearning passion to the winds was indescribable torture.
“I wish I could sing to you,” she said, breaking a long silence. “I don’t know what to do now, when I feel things. Once I could sing them.”
“I should ask you to sing Gounod’s ‘Serenade,’” said Joyce.
“Oh, not that!” she cried quickly. “It was the last thing I ever sang to you, and it brought us bad luck.”
For a moment he put a lover’s passionate interpretation upon her words. His heart beat fast. He controlled the wild impulse that seized him, biting through the amber of his pipe with the nervous effort.
And then he realised that he must be alone to work out this stern problem, on whose solution depended the happiness of three human lives. He rose to his feet.
“I am going out, Yvonne,” he said, in a constrained voice. “All this is rather upsetting—and you had better go to bed early. You look tired.”
“Yes. I have a splitting headache,” said Yvonne.
She tried to smile brightly, as he wished her good-night. But when the door closed upon him, the smile faded, and her face grew drawn, almost haggard. A spirit had descended, touched her with magical wings, and changed at last the child into the woman. Her eyes were set in steadfast envisaging of the future; and they beheld the responsibilities and sadnesses of life, no longer as vague terrors and discomforts from which her light bird-like nature shrank to the nearest refuge, but as dull realities, commonplace in form and grey in hue.
It was her duty to go back to Everard, Stephen not wanting her; for she had promised. It was her duty to ask Stephen for his consent. And it was Stephen’s duty to give it, if he did not want her for more than daily companionship. She had proved that Stephen did not love her. Never had she felt so keenly the failure of her womanhood. It had not cleared his life of haunting cares. If it had, his heart would have been stirred with needs for closer union. The weapon of her sex was powerless. Newer knowledge had come to her. He needed her less than Everard. She argued with desperate logic. And yet there was a lingering, feverish hope—one that made her now and then draw a sharp convulsive breath, as she sat staring, with clear vision, at her life.
He could walk no longer through the drizzling rain, in futile struggle with his soul’s needs. As possible to cut out his heart and fling it at Everard’s feet as to surrender Yvonne. He called himself a fool.
The glare in front of a cheap music-hall attracted him. He entered, mounted to the nine-penny balcony, where he stood leaning over the wooden partition, wedged among a crowd of loungers. The air was filled with the smoke of cheap tobacco and the fumes of the bar behind. A girl on the stage was singing a song in the chorus of which the thronged house roared lustily. Then came a tenor vocalist with drawing-room ballads. Joyce attended absently, hearing and seeing in a confused dream. A neighbour asking him for a light aroused him from his reverie. He wondered why he had come. To-night of all nights, when he might be at home in the joy of his heart’s desire. Yet he stayed.
A flashing family appeared riding on nondescript cycles. He watched them with half-shut eyes, caressing a quaint conceit that they were his thoughts whirling around in concrete form. The bursts of deafening applause seemed to soothe him. Presently a street-scene cloth was let down and a battered man appeared and sang a song about drink and twins and brokers. He threw such humourous gusto into the performance that Joyce laughed in spite of his preoccupation, and remained in amused anticipation of his second turn. The bell tinkled. The “comedian” came on and was greeted with vociferous applause. With music-hall realism he was dressed in prison-clothes, glengarry, woollen stockings, and black-arrowed suit all complete. He had made up his face into a startling brute. Joyce felt sick. He did not catch the first verse; only the concluding lines of the chorus,
"I ‘ve done my bit of time,
For ’itting of my missus on the chump, chump, chump.”
But then the man began to speak, and Joyce could not help hearing. A horrible fascination held him. The ignoble figure poured out with grotesque and voluble cynicism the comic history of the prison-life; the plank-bed, the skilly, the oakum, the exercise-yard. He sketched his pals, detailed the sordid tricks for obtaining food, the mean malingering, the debasing habits. And all with a horrible fidelity. The audience shrieked with laughter. But Joyce lost sense of the mime. The man was real, one of the degraded creatures with whom he himself had once been indistinguishably mingled—a loathsome fact from the past. The smell of the prison floated over the footlights and filled his nostrils. All his overwrought nerves quivering with repulsion, he broke through the crowd hemming him in against the partition, and rushed down into the street.
How long and whither he walked he did not know. At last he found himself within familiar latitudes, outside the Angel Tavern. He was wet through from the fine, penetrating rain, tired, cold, and utterly miserable. The revulsion of feeling in the music-hall had thrown him back years in his self-esteem. The soil of the gaol had never seemed so ineffaceable. In the blaze of light by the tavern door he paused, irresolute. Then, remembering the disastrous results of an attempt years before to seek such consolation, he shivered and turned away. It was too dangerous.
About a hundred yards further, a woman passed him, turned, and overtook him.
“I thought it was you,” she said. He recognised the voice as that of Annie Stevens. It was not far from the spot where he had first met her, and where, some short time after, he had met her again. For months, however, he had lost sight of her. He recognised her voice, but her appearance was unfamiliar, and her face was half hidden by a Salvation Army bonnet. The apparent cynicism of her attire revolted him.
“Why are you masquerading like this?” he asked, continuing to walk onwards.
“It’s not masquerading. It’s real. I recognised you, and thought perhaps you’d care to know.”
He slackened his pace imperceptibly, and she walked by his side.
“You don’t seem to believe it,” she resumed. “I don’t tell lies. It’s the truth that has generally cursed me.”
“Then why are you walking up and down here at this time of night?”
“Doing rescue work.”
“Have you rescued any one yet?” asked Joyce, with a touch of sarcasm.
“No. I scarce expect to.”
“Then why are you trying?”
“Because it’s the beastliest thing I could think of doing,” she said, stopping abruptly, and facing him, as he turned, in the defiant way he remembered from the theatre days.
“You ’re an odd girl,” he said.
“You don’t suppose I wear this disgusting bonnet and get hustled by roughs and blackguarded by women because I like it! I haven’t been converted, and I don’t shriek out ‘Hallelujah,’ and I won’t,—but I earn an honest living at the Shelter during the day, and at night I come out. It’s the beastliest thing I can think of doing,” she repeated. “If I knew of anything beastlier I’d do it. I ’ve had flames inside me since I gave you away,—I’d have killed myself for you after,—and hell since I went on the streets,—but I think the other was worse. I ’ve learned what you felt like; now I’m trying to burn out the fire—”
“Stop for a moment,” he said, with a queer catch in his throat. “Do you mean you are doing this for your own inner self?”
“Yes,” she replied, her direct intuition divining the implied alternative. “I don’t know much about Jesus and my immortal soul. That ’ll come. I want one day to be able to remember that I loved you—without hating myself and feeling sick with the shame and the horror of it all. You may think me a silly fool if you like, but that’s why I’m doing it. Let us walk on. We need n’t attract attention.” This was wise; for more than one passer-by had turned round, struck by the two intent white faces. Joyce obeyed passively, but continued for some moments to look down upon her in great wonder. An idea, which he became dimly aware had been struggling for birth in the dark of his soul for the past two hours, dawned upon him amid a strange, exulting excitement. Suddenly he took her by the arm and held it very tightly. She looked up at him, astonished.
“What is the matter with you?”
“Do you know what you have done tonight?” he said, in a shaking voice. “You have shown me how to burn out my hell too. You have retrieved any wrong you have done me. If my forgiveness is worth having, you have it, from the depths of my soul.”
He was strangely moved. In the impulse of his exaltation, he drew her quickly into the gloom of a doorway—the pavement was momentarily deserted—and kissed her. She uttered a little cry and shrank back.
“Is that for forgiveness?”
“Yes,” he cried; and then he broke from her abruptly, and went on along the pavement with great strides.
He was no longer uncertain. The problem of his life was solved. His mind was crystal clear. At last the time had come for the great atonement to his degraded self, the supreme sacrifice that should clear his being of stain.
At last he could perform that act of renunciation that would give the strength back into his eyes to meet calmly the scrutiny of his fellow-man. Renunciation! The word rang in his ears and echoed to his footsteps.
He did not doubt that it would not be to Yvonne’s lesser happiness to regain her lost environment of luxury and tender care. On the other hand, he judged her rightly enough to know that she would have found compensating pleasures in a life of privation with himself. Had it not been so, mere manliness would have decided in the Bishop’s favour. In perfect fairness (he saw now), he could have claimed her. His sacrifice was made in pure loyalty to his conscience.
And it had been reserved, too, for that ignorant, wayward woman, who had groped her unguided way thus grotesquely to the Principle, to have led him thither and revealed its elemental application. He felt a stirring of shame that strengthened his manhood.
The rain had stopped. The clouds broke and drifted across the heavens, and a misty moon appeared at intervals, shedding its pale light upon the unlovely thoroughfare. A fresh breeze sprang up and made Joyce, in his wet things, shiver with cold. At the nearest tavern he stopped, entered, called for some hot spirits, this time from no temptation to drown care, and asked for writing materials. Then, in the midst of the noise of thick voices and clatter of drinking vessels, he wrote at a corner of the bar his letter of renunciation.
Dear Everard,—I accept your letter in the spirit in whichit was written. I put the sweetest and purest of God’screatures into your keeping. Cherish her.Yours sincerely,Stephen Joyce.
A few minutes afterwards he dropped it into a pillar-box. The faint patter of its fall inside struck like a death-note upon his ear, shocked him with a sense of the irrevocable. Now that the act of renunciation was accomplished, he felt frightened. The immensity of his sacrifice began to loom before him. He became conscious of the dull premonitions of an agony hitherto undreamed of, for all his suffering in the past.
Shiveringly he bent his steps homeward. The gas was burning dimly in the sitting-room. As was usual on the rare occasions when he had spent the evening out, Yvonne had brought down his bedroom candle and had laid his modest supper neatly for him. His slippers were warming by the fire. At the sight, his pain grew greater. Having taken off his wet boots and lit his candle—he could eat no supper—he turned off the gas, and went out of the room. On the landing outside Yvonne’s door were the tiny shoes she had placed there for Sarah to clean. He looked at them for a second or two and mounted the stairs hurriedly.
In the shock and excitement of battle a man can bear the amputation of a mangled limb without great suffering. It is afterwards that the agony sets in, when the nerves have quieted to responsiveness. So it was with Joyce on that sleepless night of his great renunciation, and with his misery was mingled despair lest all should prove to be futile, his theory of renunciation; a ghastly fallacy. Time was when he would have mocked at the proposition. Could he even now defend it upon rational grounds? Had he not cut off his leg to compensate for the loss of an arm, thereby adding to the gaiety of the high gods? He tossed about in the bed in anguish, “burning out his hell.”
A man of sensitive, emotional temperament, however, cannot pass through such an ordeal unchanged. Some fibres must be shrivelled up, whilst others are toughened. Joyce rose in the morning with aching head and exhausted nerves, but still with a dull sense of calm. Fallacy or not, at any rate he had chosen the man’s part. The consciousness of it was an element of strength. He dressed and went downstairs.
Yvonne was already in the room, neat and dainty as usual, making the toast for breakfast. She was pale and had the faint rings below the eyes that ever tell tales on a woman’s face. She looked round at him anxiously, as she knelt before the fire. He saw her trouble and went and sat in the armchair beside her and spread out his hands to warm them.
“You have been worrying, my poor little Yvonne,” he said gently. “I was a selfish beast to let you think I wanted to make up my mind, when my course was so plain. I wrote to Everard last night. I told him to cherish the treasure that he has got. You shouldn’t have worried over it.”
Yvonne turned away her face from him, and remained silent for some moments, half kneeling, half sitting, the toasting-fork drooping idly from her hand.
“It was foolish of me,” she replied at last “But it seemed hard to leave you alone—and I ’ve got so used to this little place—one gets attached to places, like a cat—Did you—were you sorry to give me away?”
“Of course,” said Joyce. “I thought we could go on being brother and sister till the end of all things. Well, all things have an end, and this is it.”
“You would not prefer me to stay?” asked Yvonne, in her soft voice.
He would have given his soul to have been able to throw his arms round her, passionately and wildly—she was so near him, so maddeningly desired. Did she realise, he wondered, what flame was in her words? He leaned back in the chair, as if to avert the temptation by increasing the distance between them.
“No,” he said, with a sharp breath, “I could not—it will be a wrench breaking up the—partnership. But it is all for the best. I know you will be happy and cared for, and that will be a happiness to me.”
Sarah brought in the breakfast and retired. They sat down to table. Somehow or other the meal proceeded. Two things had come by post for Joyce, one a belated but laudatory notice of “The Wasters,” the other a cheque from the office of a weekly paper. He passed them both to her, according to custom.
“You mustn’t bother about me at all, Yvonne. I am in a different way of business altogether from what I was when we first started housekeeping. The new book will do ever so much better than ‘The Wasters.’ I shall miss you terribly—at first—but it will all dry straight, Yvonne. I dare say I shall go on living here. Runcle and I are immense pals, you know—perhaps I may go into partnership with him and bring some modern go-ahead ideas into the concern—become a Quaritch or Sotheran—who knows? Yes, I should n’t like to leave these quaint, dear old rooms,” he said, looking round, anywhere but in Yvonne’s face, with an air of cheerfulness that he felt in his heart must be ghastly. “Something of you and your dear companionship will linger about them. I shall pretend, like the ‘Marchioness,’ that you are with me.”
He passed his tea-cup, and, meeting her eyes, tried to smile. The comers of her lips responded bravely.
“And at last you will come into indisputed possession of your furniture,” she said.
He had not the heart to protest. So they continued to talk in this light strain of the coming parting, until Joyce, looking at his watch, found it was time to go down to the shop. At the door, on his way out, he paused to relight his pipe. Then, without trusting himself to look round, he left her. But if he had turned he would have seen her grow suddenly very white, clutch the mantel-piece for support with one hand while the other pressed her bosom hard, and sway for a second or two with shut eyes.
Downstairs he resumed his unfinished task of the evening before. He worked at it doggedly, trying not to think. But it was as futile as trying to hold one’s breath beyond a certain period.
“Yvonne is going—to marry Everard—going for ever—I shall be alone—she will lie in his arms—I shall go mad—God help me—if it is more than I can bear, there is a way out—I can keep up till she goes—she shall not know—afterwards.” His brain could not work beyond. The same thoughts throbbed with almost rhythmic recurrence as he priced and catalogued the books. Once he opened a tattered “Marcus Aurelius”:—
“If pain is an affliction, it must affect either the body or the mind; if the body is hurt, let it say so; as for the soul, it is in her power to preserve her serenity and calm, by supposing the accident no evil.”
He laughed to himself mirthlessly, and threw the book on the fourpenny heap. “Or pretending, like the Marchioness,” he said. He was scarcely in a mood for “Marcus Aurelius.”
A messenger-boy appeared with a letter for Madame Latour. Joyce sent it up to her by the shop-boy, who presently brought down a reply note. The preparations for her departure had begun. Joyce’s heart seemed set in a vice and he nearly cried aloud with the pain.
The hours wore on; the piles of books were disposed of; nothing to do, but wait for customers. To keep himself employed he copied untidy pages of his manuscript. He went up for dinner. Yvonne was more subdued than at breakfast, and they scarcely spoke. When the meal was over, she told him quietly of the letter she had received.
“Everard says that he is getting the special licence to-day, and the marriage will take place to-morrow at St Luke’s, Islington. Considering the circumstances, he thinks it best that there should be no delay.”
“It is just as well,” he replied. “When changes come, it is best that they should come swiftly. Has he made any more definite arrangements—the hour?”
“He will send me a message later.”
“You will have to put up your things. If I can help you, Yvonne—”
“Thanks—no. I have so little. The few odds and ends I shall leave you—as mementoes. You would like to keep them, would n’t you?”
“Thank you, Yvonne,” he said, turning away. They had spoken in subdued voices, as folks do when discussing funeral arrangements. Joyce, blinded and dazed by his misery, was unperceptive of her joylessness. At the most, he was conscious of a seriousness that, under the circumstances, was not unnatural. His own pain he hid with anxious effort.
The afternoon hours passed. He lit the gas in the shop, and proceeded with whatever mechanical employment he could find. It was a relief to be alone. The old man’s gossip would have jarred upon him, driven him up to the sitting-room where the ordeal was fiercest, or out into the hard-featured streets. He would have two or three days of solitude before Runcle returned from Exeter.
Messages came from the Bishop. One for Yvonne. Another for him, acknowledging his letter, announcing that the hour of noon had been fixed upon, shortly before which time a carriage would be sent to convey Yvonne to the church, and begging him in most courteous terms to assist at the ceremony and give Yvonne away. An echo of the Salvation Army girl’s voice came back to him, and he smiled grimly. “It’s the beastliest thing I can do.”
He scribbled a line of acquiescence and gave it to the waiting messenger-boy. “I had not thought of the dregs,” he said to himself.
That evening they sat drearily in their accustomed places by the fireside, each knowing it to be their last together. Night after night they had spent in each other’s society, Yvonne sewing or reading or dreaming in a lazy, contented way, Joyce writing upon a board laid across his knees. Sometimes she would come and lean over the back of his chair and watch the words as they came from his pen, her soft wavy black hair very near his fair, close-trimmed head.
“Send me away if I’m worrying you,” she used to say.
Whereupon he would laugh happily and answer:—
“See how beautifully I am writing. I should never have thought of that remark if you had not been there.”
“I like to play at feeling a guardian angel,” she said once.
“You can feel it without the playing,” he replied, drawing his head aside and looking round at her. “When your wings are over me like that, I do work that I could n’t do unaided.”
And she had blushed and felt very happy.
But now, on this last evening, they sat apart—half the world already between them—and talked constrainedly, with long silences. For the greater part of the time he shaded his face with his hand, sparing himself the sight of her hungered-for sweetness and saving her the sight of the hunger he felt was in his eyes. When at last she rose to bid him good-night, he nerved himself to meet her gaze calmly. And then for the first time he was shocked at the change that the night and the day had wrought in her.
She stood before him, infinitely sweet and simple; but more wan even than she had been on that day in the hospital when she had learned the loss of her voice. For the still unvanished pathos of childhood that had then smoothed her face was gone, and the sterner pathos of the woman’s experience had taken its place. Yet the interpretation did not come to him.
“My poor child,” he said. “You are scarcely strong enough yet to bear such an upheaval as this. Try to have a good sleep.” He held the door for her to pass out. And then with a great gulp, he continued, “You must look your best to-morrow.”
He caught her soft cold hand, put it to his lips, and shut the door quickly. The prison seemed as comfort when compared with this torment.
In the middle of the night he broke down utterly. If he had been a strong man he would not have yielded to the series of temptations that had culminated in his crime and his disgrace. Or, passing that, his spirit would not have been broken during the months of his punishment If he had been even of slightly robuster fibre, the sense of degradation would not have palsied his life. He would have gone at once to a new land and made himself master of his destiny. A strong man would not have been found by Yvonne, that August morning, sitting, a self-abhorring outcast before his rich uncle’s door. He would not have lost his wit and courage, when assailed by his prison companion at Hull. He would not have joined fortunes with Noakes in their futile African expedition. A strong man would not have clung for comfort and moral support to the poor ridiculous creature, his own protection of whom was that of the woman rather than that of the man. A strong man would not have yielded to the numbing despair of the after solitude in Africa, nor writhed that night in agony of spirit upon the lonely star-lit veldt And lastly, a strong man would not have had that terror of loneliness which had made him in the first place cling to Yvonne much as a child, afraid of the dark, clings to the hand of another child weaker than itself.
By the law of evolution the strong survive and the weak die. But in the eternal struggle between humanity and the pitiless law, conditions are modified, and the sympathy of the race, that expression of revolt which we call civilisation, gives surviving power to the weak, so that not only the strong man has claims to life and love. And when the weak man strives with all his quivering fibres towards strength, he is doing a greater deed than the strong wot of.
So Joyce, fool or hero, had performed an act of strength beyond his nature. The strain of the day had been intense. Every nerve in his body was stretched to breaking-point. At last, in the middle of the night, as he was pacing the room, one of them seemed to snap, and he fell forwards on to the bed and broke into a passion of sobbing. Ashamed he buried his face in the blankets and bit them with his teeth. But a grown man’s sobbing is not to be checked, like a child’s. It is a terrible thing, which comes from the soul’s depths and convulses flesh and spirit to their foundations; and it is horrible to hear. The shuddering heaves came into his throat and forced their way in sound through his lips. And the utterances of pain came from him, inarticulate prayers to God to help him, and half-stifled cries for his love and for Yvonne. But he knew that he was wrestling with his spirit for the last time, and that, after this paroxysm of agony, would come calm and strength to meet his fate.
And Yvonne, clad in dressing gown and bare-footed, with her hair about her shoulders, stood trembling outside his door and heard. Although his room was not immediately above hers, being over the sitting-room, yet in her sleeplessness she had listened for hours and hours to his movements. At last, obeying an incontrollable impulse, she had crept up the stairs. A long time she waited, her hand upon the door, his name upon her lips, shaking from head to foot with the revelation of the man’s agony. Every sound was like a stab in her tender flesh. The warm, impulsive old Yvonne within her would have burst at the first sob into his room, but the newer womanhood held her back. When all was silent she crept downstairs again into her bed, and lay there, throbbing and shivering until the morning.
And Joyce, unconscious that she had been so near to him, that had he but opened his door, he would have been caught in her arms and been given for all eternity that which he was renouncing, lay down in his bed exhausted, and when the morning was near at hand, sank into heavy sleep. He awoke later than usual. The water that Sarah had put for him was nearly cold. He drew up the blind and saw a cheerless grey morning—a fitting dawn for his new life. The minor details of the day before him presented themselves painfully. The first was the necessity of being well shaven, groomed and dressed. He drew from the drawer the clothes of decent life that he could now so seldom afford to wear. The last time he had put them on was three weeks ago, when he had taken Yvonne to a ballad concert at St. James’s Hall. He remembered how, in her bright way, she had said, on their way thither, “You look so handsome and distinguished, I feel quite proud.”
And now he was to wear them at her wedding with another man. And he was to give her away.
He had regained his nerve, felt equal to the task. After dressing with scrupulous care, he slowly went down to breakfast,—his last breakfast with Yvonne. He contemplated the fact with the fatalistic calmness with which men condemned to death often face their last meal on earth. Yvonne had not yet appeared. Sarah had not even brought up the breakfast. He sat down and waited, unfolded his halfpenny morning paper and tried to read. After a time he became aware that he was studying the advertisements. So he laid it aside.
Presently he went up to his room to get a handkerchief, and on his return to the landing he noticed that Yvonne’s bedroom door was ajar. She was stirring, evidently. He knocked gently and called her name. There was no reply. Perhaps she was still sleeping, he thought; but it was odd that her door should be open. He returned to the sitting-room, wandered about nervously, looked out of the window into the dismal street. The pavement was wet, people were hurrying by with umbrellas up, the capes of drivers gleamed miserably in the misty air. He turned away and put some coals on a sulky fire, and again took up the paper. But an undefined feeling of uneasiness began to creep over him. It was long past nine o’clock. He went again and knocked at Yvonne’s door. It opened a little wider and he saw by the light in the room that the blind had been drawn up. He called her in loud tones. His voice seemed to fall in a void. Agitated, he ventured to take a swift glance into the room. The bed was empty. There was no Yvonne.
He went back and rang the bell violently. After a short interval Sarah appeared, leisurely bringing in the breakfast-tray.
“Where is Madame Latour?” asked Joyce. “Oh, she went out early, and said you weren’t to wait breakfast for her.”
“At what time did she go out?”
“Shortly after eight.”
“Thank you,” said Joyce.
“I think she was took ill, and was going to see a doctor,” said Sarah, unloading the tray noisily.
“Did Madame Latour tell you so?”
“No. But she was looking so bad I was frightened to see her.”
“Very well,” said Joyce, not wishing to show the servant his agitation. “She will be back soon. Yes, you can leave the breakfast.” Sarah quitted the room with her heavy, scuffling step. Joyce remained by the fire tugging at his moustache, his mind filled with nameless anxieties. The presentiment of ill grew in intensity. Why had Yvonne left the house at that early hour? Sarah’s suggestion was manifestly absurd. If Yvonne had been poorly, she would have sent for a doctor. Yet the servant’s last remark frightened him. He remembered Yvonne’s pallor of the night before. A dreadful surmise began to dawn upon him. Had he been blind, all the way through, and condemned her to a fate impossible to bear? Once, in South Africa, he had seen an innocent man sentenced to death. The picture of the man’s face in its wistful despair rose before him. It was terribly like Yvonne’s. Had she, then, pronounced sentence on herself?
He walked to and fro in feverish helplessness, his heart weighed down by the new load. The cheap American clock on the mantel-piece struck ten. There came, soon after, a knock at the door. Joyce sprang to open it. But it was only the boy from the shop wanting to know if any one was coming down. Joyce put his hand to his forehead. He had entirely forgotten Mr. Runcle’s absence and his own consequent responsibility.
“You can take the money for any book outside, Tommy,” he said, after a little reflection. “If a customer wants anything inside, come up and call me.”
The boy went away, proud at being left in charge. Joyce filled a cup with the rapidly cooling coffee, and drank it at a draught. The minutes crept on. If his wild and dreadful fancies were groundless, where could Yvonne be? She could not have chosen a time before the shops were open to make any necessary purchases before the ceremony. Or had she gone out of the house so as to avoid spending a painful morning in his company? But that was unlike Yvonne. At last he descended, and stood bareheaded in the raw air, gazing up and down the street.
“I ‘ve taken eightpence already,” said the boy, handing him a pile of coppers.
Joyce took them from him absently, and put them in his pocket, while Tommy went back to his seat on the upturned box, and resumed his occupation of blowing on his chilled fingers. No sign of Yvonne. Several passers-by turned round and looked at Joyce. In his well-fitting clothes, and with his refined, thorough-bred air, he seemed an incongruous figure standing hatless in the doorway of the dingy secondhand book-shop.
Presently he became aware of an elderly man trying to pass him. He stepped aside with apologies, and followed the customer.
“Are you serving here?” asked the latter, with some diffidence.
On Joyce’s affirmative, he enquired after two editions of “Berquin,” which he had seen in Runcle’s catalogue. Joyce took one from the shelves,—the original edition. It was priced two guineas. The customer haggled, then wished to see the other. As this was on the top shelf at the back part of the shop, Joyce had to mount the ladder and hunt for it in the dusky light. While thus employed, he felt something sweep against the foot of the ladder, and, looking down, he saw Yvonne. She shot a quick upward glance, and hurriedly disappeared.
His heart gave a great bound as he saw her, and he dropped the books he was holding. He could not seek any more for the “Berquin.” In another moment he was by the side of the customer.
“We must have sold the other copy. How much will you give for this?”
“Thirty-five shillings.”
“You can have it,” said Joyce.
Never was book tied up at greater speed. He thrust it into the man’s hand, received the money without looking at it, and left the elderly man standing in the middle of the shop, greatly astonished at the haste of the transaction.
Joyce flew up the stairs into the sitting-room.
“Oh, where—” he began.
Then he stopped, dazed and bewildered, for Yvonne, her arms outstretched, her head thrown back, her lips parted, and a great yearning light in her eyes, came swiftly to him from where she stood, uttering a little cry, and in another moment was sobbing in his arms.
“Oh, my love, my dear, dear love!” she cried, “I could not leave you—take me—for always. I love you—I love you—I could n’t leave you!”
“Yvonne,” he cried hoarsely, his pulses throbbing like a great engine’s piston-rod, in the tremendous amazement, as he held her—how tightly he did not know—and gazed down wildly into her face, “Yvonne, what are you saying? What is it? Tell me—for God’s sake—the marriage—Everard?” Then she threw back her head further against his arm, and their eyes met and hung upon each other for a breathless space. And there was that in Yvonne’s eyes—“the light that never was on sea or land”—that no man yet had seen or dreamed of seeing there. The straining, passionate love too deep for smiling, glorified her pure face.
“There will be no marriage,” she murmured faintly, still holding him with her eyes, “I went to Everard this morning.”
She raised her lips almost unconsciously toward him, and then the man’s whole existence was drowned in the kiss.
For many moments they scarcely spoke. Passion plays its part in swift burning utterances and tumultuous silences. At last, she freed herself gently and moved towards the fire. But only to be taken once again into his clasp.
“Oh, my darling, my darling, is this joy madness, or is it real?”
“It is real,” said Yvonne. “Nothing can ever part us, until we die.”
He helped her off with her hat and jacket and led her to the great armchair by the fire and knelt down by her side.
“Oh, Stephen dear,” she said in piteous happiness, “it has been such suffering.”
“My poor child,” he said tenderly.
“I did n’t know that you cared about me—in this way—until last night. I tried to make you tell me—Stephen darling, why didn’t you? I was bound to go to Everard—I had promised, and he wanted me—and what could I tell him? I could n’t say to him, dear, that I would go on for ever living on your dear charity, a burden upon you—yes, in a sense I must be one—rather than keep my promise and marry him, could I, dear? I could only refer him to you—and when you said I must go, it was miserable, for I hungered all the time to stay. And I knew you were sad, it was natural—but I thought you found you did not love me enough to want me as a wife and felt it your duty to give me up. Why did you give me up when you loved me so?”
“I will tell you all, some day, dear, not now,” said Joyce. “But one thing—I did not know either that you loved me—like this. When did you begin to love me, Yvonne?”
“I think I must have begun in the years and years ago—but I only knew it last night—knew it as I do now,” she added, with a tremor in her voice.
She closed her eyes, gave herself up for a flooded moment to the lingering sense of the first great kiss she had ever given. And before she opened them, the memory had melted into actuality as she felt his lips again meet hers.
“Thank God, I have got you, my own dear love,” she murmured. “It has been a hard battle for you—this morning. I went out as soon as I dared—to go to him. I seemed to be going to do an awful thing—to give him that pain for our sakes. He told me I had not treated him wickedly—but I felt as if I had been committing murder, until I saw your face at the door. I told him all—all that I knew about my own feelings and yours. I said that you did not know I loved you—that your noble-heartedness was making the sacrifice—that I would marry him and leave you and never see you again, and be a devoted wife to him, if he wished it, but that my love was given to you. And he looked all the time at me with an iron-grey face, and scarcely spoke a word. Tell me, Stephen dear, does it pain you to hear?”
“No,” said Joyce, softly. “Your heart has been bursting with it. It is best for us to share it, as we shall share all things, joy and pain, to the far end.”
“I shall feel lighter for telling you. It was so terrible to see him—oh, Stephen, if I had not loved you, I couldn’t have borne it—he seemed stricken. Oh, why is there all this pain in the world? And to think that I—Yvonne—should have had to inflict it—either on him, who has been good and kind to me, or on you, whom I love better than I thought I could love anything in the world! And when I had ended, he said, ‘He is young, and I am old; he has had all the sufferings and despair of life, and my lot has been cast in pleasant places; he has come out of the furnace with love and charity in his heart, and I have pampered my pride and uncharitableness. Go back to him—and I pray God to bless you both.’ He spoke as if each word was a knife driven into him—and his face—I shall never forget it—it seemed to grow old, and ashen, and hardened.”
She covered her face with her hands for a moment, and then, suddenly, the memory of the night flashing through her, she dashed them away with a woman’s fierceness and clasped his head.
“But your need was greater, a million times greater than his,” she cried in ringing tones, “and your sufferings greater, and your heart nobler, and I should have died if I had not come to you—you are my king, my lord, my God, my everything.”
In the formally appointed hotel sitting-room, where Yvonne had twice parted from him, sat Everard Chisely, with grey, withered face. The blow had fallen heavily. He had hungered for her of late years with a poor, human, unidealising passion. The pitifulness of it had galled his pride, and he had striven to put her out of his thoughts. He had lived an austere life, seeking in an unfamiliar asceticism to conquer the inherited, unregenerate cravings for a fuller aesthetic and emotional existence. Yet he had longed intensely for the death of the man who stood between himself and Yvonne. Twice a year his agent in Paris had reported news of Amédée Bazouge. Such communications he had opened with trembling fingers: the man was still alive; he prayed passionate prayers that the murder in his heart might not be counted to him as a sin. At last, in the New Zealand spring, came the news of Bazouge’s death. His blood tingled like the working sap in the trees. He could not wait. He came and found Yvonne.
For thirty-six hours he had become a young man again, treading on air, hurrying on events with a lover’s impatience. And now the crash had come. He was an old man. He sat by his untasted breakfast, and covered his face in his hands. His life rose up before him, self-complacent, dignified, immaculate. Yet, somehow, he felt like a Pharisee. He was a Churchman first, a Christian afterwards. His religion had given him very little comfort. It had taken Yvonne from him once, at a time when he might have won her to him forever, and it had brought him no consolation. A man does not often get a glimpse at his own soul; when he does, he finds it rather a pitiable sight. The Bishop saw in its depths poignant regret that he then had not loved the woman enough to sin for her sake. And there, too, was revealed to him miserably that outraged pride, disillusion, the traditions of social morality, the authority of the Church’s ordinances—all externals—had been the leading factors of his life’s undoing. A great wish rose amid the bitterness of his heart that he had been, like Stephen, one of the publicans and sinners, upon whom could shine the Light of the World.
Joyce and Yvonne were married one morning quietly at a registrar’s, and came back to continue the day’s routine. The old bookseller did not appear astonished when Joyce informed him of the unusual change of relationship.
“You have both had your troubles,” he said, shrewdly, looking up over his spectacles, and keeping his thumb in the volume of Origen he was reading. “Any one can see that. You would n’t be here otherwise. And I’m not enquiring into them. But I hope they’re ended. And now,” he continued, rising with an old man’s stiffness, “I ’ve got some old Madeira that I bought thirty years ago with a job-lot of things out of a gentleman’s chambers, and I’d like to open a bottle in your honour.”
Joyce brought Yvonne down to the back-parlour. The wine came out of the dirt-encrusted bottle like sunshine breaking through a cloud, and gladdened their hearts. And that was their marriage feast. Thus began the wedded life of these two. Years of struggle, poverty, and ostracism lay before them. They faced it all fearlessly. To each of them the long-denied love had come, at last, new and vivifying, changing the meaning of existence. Yet the final word of mutual revelation awaited the loosening touch. It came with tragic unexpectedness.
One evening, not long after their marriage, Joyce, looking through the shop copy of “The Islington Gazette,” caught the head-line, “Salvation lassie commits suicide in New River.” A presentiment of what would follow flashed upon him. It was true. Annie Stevens had killed herself.
“Good God!” he said involuntarily.
Yvonne looked up from her sewing, and grew alarmed at the distress on his face.
“What is it?”
He was silent for a few moments. To tell her would involve long explanations. Yvonne knew of Annie Stevens in connection with his disgrace on the tour of “The Diamond Door,” but he had not spoken of after meetings. Yvonne put her work aside, in her quick way, and came and sat down on the footstool by his feet. As he bent and kissed her, she drew his arm round her neck, holding his hand.
“What has pained you?”
And then he told her the whole of the girl’s miserable story, her love for him, her degradation and downfall, and her wild idea of atonement.
“And this is the end,” he said, showing her the paragraph.
“Poor girl!” said Yvonne, deeply touched. “It was so pathetically impossible, was n’t it?”
“Yes, dear,” Joyce answered. “I, too, know that.”
“What?”
“The tragic futility of such self-crucifixion. I have never told you the history of that night—why I gave you up—and the part this poor dead girl played in it.”
In a low voice, he went over the old ground of degradation and his longing for atonement, and briefly laid before her the facts of his renunciation.
“I know now,” he concluded, “that it could only add misery to misery. Nothing that a man or a woman alone can do can restore lost honour and self-reverence. No fasting or penance or sacrifice is of any use.”
Yvonne drew her face away from him, so as to see him better. Pain was in her eyes. Her lips quivered.
“Then—Stephen—dear—is it still the same with you about the prison—the old horror and shame?”
“My dearest,” he said tenderly, “I said man alone was powerless. It is the touch of your lips that has wiped away all stain for ever.”
They looked deep into each other’s eyes for a long, speechless moment And then Yvonne, like a foolish woman, fell a-sobbing on his knees.
“Oh, thank God, my dear, thank God!” she said.