BRASES

BRASESÀ Madame Bohomoletz

BRASES

À Madame Bohomoletz

BRASESILIKEanother foreigner, I had my ideal of the Irishwoman—bewitching, naturally, but built upon somewhat hackneyed and high-coloured lines: vivacious play of feature, blue-black hair, violet eyes, and complexion made up of lilies and roses. So when Trueberry, the gallantest friend man ever found on English shores, asked me to join him in a trip to Erin, imagination hastily evoked this resplendent creature of my desire, and I straightway proposed to myself the pleasing excitement of a flirtatious romance. I told Trueberry I thought nothing more delightful than the prospect I had formed, to fall in love, and ride away. Trueberry, in his fatal Saxon way, made some grim rejoinder about the riding away being the pleasantest part of it.We shot and rode and fished, and staredat the girls, without any fervour of glance or flutter of pulse, it must be confessed, I alertly on the look-out for this creature of dazzling contrasts and laughing provocation. With fancy still uncomforted, Trueberry was dangerously hurt, and we were several miles distant from the nearest village. A peasant offered to help me carry my comrade down the glen, and assured me that the lady of the grey manor would be glad to receive him. Our claim at the hall was courteously responded to by an old man-servant, who drew a couch out on which we stretched my moaning friend, and then I was directed to the doctor’s house, some way along the uplands. My guide offered me the shelter of his roof hard by, when I spoke of looking for a lodging.It was late in the afternoon when the doctor and I reached the manor. The sun was level on the western horizon, an arch of misty gold upon a broad sheet of silver lying behind the nearer low-hanging clouds, so that the silver heaven, beyond this chain of grey and opal hills, looked mystically remote and clear, while lower down lake and purple mountains were softened by a fine white veil of mist, and the sea was visiblecurling its delicate foam upon the crest of the tide among the rocks. The valley below was dusk, shut in by the grand sweep of girdling mountains, and so still was the air that every far-off sound carried, from the echo of ocean’s murmuring to the nearer crash of a waterfall hissing down the rocks, and the pleasant lilt at my feet of a little rivulet lipping its daisied marge. The birds were in full chorus, and each of the dense trees nested song. We left the breezy, wandering moors, which swept the horizon in a measurelessness of space as triumphant and vast seemingly as the illimitable Atlantic rolling from their base, and took the narrow road that sloped down to the glen of firs and oak, where the light could scarce make a path among the deepening shadows. Outside all was great, in air, on land, on water. Here intolerable compression of space and such a diminution of light as to harass nerves and imagination. My preoccupation about Trueberry rather stimulated than blunted my visual faculties, and I noted with abhorrence each detail of the sharp, precise landscape; the thin vein of water glimmering through the darkening grass like a broken mirror, the abrupt curve of the road fromthe shoulder of the bluff, and the stiff, dim plumes of the heather washed of purple pretension in the twilight, while through a clump of black firs the rough front of the manor made a fainter shade in the grey air. The solitude was scented with the fragrance of wild thyme, and as we approached, old-fashioned odours blew against us from the garden.Trueberry was restored to a vague consciousness, and lay with shut eyes in a darkened room. I walked outside with the doctor, who was a cheery, hopeful fellow, and in diagnosing my friend’s case, furnished me with no occasion for alarm. I found it strange that no member of the family had come forward to explain the gracious hospitality by a personal interest in the wounded man. As I stood in the chill air musing on this odd unconcern, I heard a light step behind, coming from the house. I turned, and faced the woman who was to dominate my heart by one swift sweep of all that had ever claimed it.She looked at me, and in one grave, steadfast glance the miracle was accomplished. Is this love? I have been so often, so continuously in love, and yet have never known anything thatapproached it. It was like the mystery of life and death—not to be explained, not to be conquered, not to be eluded. It needs no will to be born, to die; so it needs no will to surrender to such an influence. Upon a single throb of pulse, it has established itself permanently upon the altar of life, and sentimental fancies and shabby yearnings drop out of memory with the sacramental transfusion of soul.Of course I saw that she was a beautiful woman, but this only afterwards. What I first saw was the deep impersonal gaze that drew the heart from my breast. It met mine with a full, free beam, and held it upon a wave of inexplicable emotion. Bondage to it was a glory, a consecration of my manhood. The subtle, the elusive nature of my captivation was the spiritual point upon an ordinary passion. It was the spurs, the belt of knighthood. For this I understood to be no mere command of senses, but the imperative claims of life-long allegiance, whether for suffering or for happiness.Perhaps by nature I was attuned to such surrender. Since ever romantic hopes first broke their deeps in my boyish brain, and myheart was lifted on the first warm wave of desire, I have eagerly yearned for free passionate servitude to one sovereign lady. There was always the mediæval strain in me, though I have fluttered idly enough, like the moth round the flame, and hovered in a sort of protective sympathy and admiration, round pretty womanhood, not objecting to being trampled on as a holocaust to graceful and bewildering caprice. But now had come the enslavement of the soul, not of the senses; of the spirit, not of the eye. Homage did not bend in banter, but was exalted on the wings of reverence. It was only afterwards that I remembered the details of the face: its unchanging pallor and exceeding finish, the peculiar unrippling sheen of the blonde hair, like gold leaf in its unshaded polish, the inner curves of coil as deep an amber as the outer edges, without shadow of curl or ring round neck and temple. So smooth and shining a frame was admirably adjusted to the small, grave, glacial oval, with its look of wistful abstracted charm, with a delicate chiselling only an inspired pencil could copy, with an exquisite line from brow to chin. Such was the transparency of the colourless skin that like a shell,it seemed in the light to reflect the warm rose of life beneath. Under the arch of the unerring brows, long grey eyes, shadowed blackly, that in girlhood must have presaged storm, but now the black lay broodingly, a seal to the clear grey depths. You looked into, not through them; and found them too bewilderingly unstirred by the yearning trouble of the gazer.There was, perhaps, a conscious but not an undignified expression in her dress. Sweeping folds of grey matched the austere stillness of her eyes, as did the full cambric of throat a wanness reminiscent of a mediæval saint. Long sleeves lined with silk fell backward, and the inner ones were of crimped cambric: hardly affectation, but the supreme touch to beauty so visibly haloed as hers. Her voice was in keeping with the clear eloquence of her glance; full, unperturbed, sustained without conscious modulation or trick, harmonious like all sounds of natural sweetness. It fell with the sentence, as the Irish voice habitually does, but softly, without abrupt cadences or huskiness.‘All that lies in our power for your friend’s care and comfort will be done,’ she said, after her unhurried survey of me. ‘There is little tooffer in such an out-of-the-way place but home medicines and home resources, and there will not be much in the way of distraction for him, since I live here alone with my children, and my solitude is unbroken. I regret that you have decided to lodge elsewhere, but pray do not spare us your visits. The house is your friend’s, and I am honoured in being of use to him.’It was hardly a bow she made, but drooped her eyelids with a curious movement, and lowered her chin from its ineffable upward line. The words I scarcely heard, though every fibre trembled with emotion at her speech. I thought the voice, with the softening syllables dropping into silence, more exquisite than any music dreamed of. Its tones accompanied me as a murmur rather than the remembrance of actual words in my walk up to the free bluff, whence I could look down on the grey manor, and mixed with the resounding roar of ocean, as the wind blew the melody of the waves shoreward. What was the distinction of this woman who through all the days to come offered me rapture and agony by noontide and by midnight? Not her beauty so much as her essential difference from others. Not the gleaming gold ofher hair, but the solemn simplicity of her bearing in such accord with the vast and unbroken solitude around her. Her voice I acknowledged without shrinking or terror, as we accept all essential elements, to be henceforth the dominant key of life for me, the note to sound my depths and touch me at will as an impassive instrument. Was this woman free? I asked myself, with a thrill of revolt, as I remembered her mention of children. But no word of husband! This fact let in a ray of hope upon my dread. I could never again belong to myself with the cheap security of an hour ago, and what was there for me if there was no room for me in the chambers of her heart?At the cottage I found my host frying some salmon for supper. He was a tall, bent peasant, meagre and pallid from much thinking and under-feeding, with all the Celt’s quaint mixture of melancholy and humour in his keen blue eyes and wrinkled smile. He did the honours of his humble dwelling with stately courtesy, and was too proud and well-bred to offer futile apologies for the poverty of his shepherd fare and rude bed.‘Your friend, sir, is not anything worse, Itrust,’ he said. I gave him the doctor’s report, and said it was now a case for complete rest and care. I reddened with remorse, remembering how little I had been thinking of Trueberry.‘Ah, ’tis he that’s in excellent hands,’ said the peasant, turning the salmon, and then dreamily rested his cheek against the closed hand that held the fork, with his elbow supported on the other wrist.‘May I not learn to whom we are indebted for so much kindness?’ I asked tremulously.‘Your friend, sir, is at the house of Lady Brases Fitzowen,’ he answered, and I shrank beneath the sharp look he cast on me. ‘’Tis herself, sure, we all love and delight in as if she was one of God’s angels.’This seemed to me in my exalted mood as such an obvious statement that I received it with the same simplicity it had been uttered. Were we not brother Celts,—albeit, I a Parisianised Breton, and he an illiterate native of wild Kerry uplands? His tribute to the lady of my destiny raced a flame through me like a delicious flattery.‘I have seen her,’ I said, striving to command my voice in unconfessing tones. ‘I can quitebelieve you. I should like to know something of her, if you will not deem my curiosity an impertinence. She spoke of her children. Does her husband live?’‘He does,’ the peasant answered, I thought sullenly.I caught a fork fiercely in my hand, and bent to trace figures with it on the cloth, hoping thereby to shield my excessive pain from his sharp scrutiny.‘She did not mention him to me,’ I half cried.‘’Tis natural. They’re no longer one.’Oh, the warm revulsion, the wild joy in that queer reply. I read in it the peasant’s definition of divorce. It sprang light and flame through me, and heated senses benumbed a moment ago. It gave definiteness to rash hope, and melted away all doubt and apprehension. Brases free was to be wooed. Heaven knows conceit was never more eliminated from self-judgment than then, but I felt the urgent claim of the rare passion so instantaneously born. All my worth lay in the quality of that love, and it was not such that any woman could reject without a pang.‘Then she is free,’ I said, and heard the thrill in my own voice.‘Free!’ exclaimed the peasant, frowning. ‘That’s as may be. Them Protestants believe such-like things, but we don’t, sir. However things happen, we hold folk once married can only be freed by death. I take it, sir, you come from foreign parts, though ’tis a wonder to me how you have learnt the English tongue so well. May be, beyond in your land, they’re like the Protestants, and play fast and loose with the marriage tie.’He laid the dish of salmon on the table, and disappeared outside. My state of mixed emotions, of exasperated nerves, of pulses throbbing against my consciousness like a discordant instrument, anger with that prejudiced peasant predominating, reduced me to the level of savage and child. The fellow in his implied abhorrence of divorce was so aggravatingly phlegmatic, so heartlessly unconscious of all it might mean for me. I did not knock him down or force him to eat his obnoxious words, but sat still and endeavoured not to observe the rest of his rational preparations for the evening meal. I was on fire for further facts of the tale,but dared not question, in my uncontrollable temper. When the peasant at length seated himself opposite me, with a dish of salmon, smoking potatoes, and a bottle of potheen between us, I was able to make a fair pretence of hunger. I had no difficulty in praising the salmon and the big flowery potatoes, the best of the world, and novelty supplied the needful sauce. The potheen was simply barbarous, a suitable drink for Caliban or the Indian brave, and no amount of water could soothe it to my French palate. But between lively grimaces over it, I was enabled to ask, without self-betrayal—‘Then, I suppose, Lady Fitzowen’s husband does not live at the manor?’He looked at me gravely over his glass, and nodded.‘They are divorced?’‘Not quite as I should say. Separated, they call it.’Here was a toppling down of the airiest edifice built of gossamer. I could have cried out at the stab like any thwarted child. And yet the barrier of a living husband, like an unclean skeleton, between us, made that vision in theearly twilight no less pure and spiritual than when not seen across the tragic story,married widowhood. A widow, still had sanctity lain upon my suit, where now reproach would lie as a pall. Suppose my love drew hers, how should I live through terror of waking some poisonous snake to her mortal injury, of the nameless dread of slander to breathe its dark flame against her sinless brow? A shadow upon such devotion as mine was an unacceptable desecration. Torture itself prompted me to further questioning.‘Was it she who sought separation?’‘I believe it was her people, sir. He was a bad lot, they say, wild after the women, and not over nice in his ways. She’s gentle now, but she was proud and passionate as a girl, and she felt the shame of the thing and ran. ’Tis a wonder the poor crathurs don’t oftener run, the provocation thim fine gentlemen gives them. Anyway, her people settled the matter, and she came to live here, ’tis now close on four years ago. The second child was born here, God bless it, and we all love it like our own.’I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night. One never wants forproof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out for ever into her desperate loneliness. Joy seemed to me a miserable mockery, the portion of trivial, contemptible humanity. The best proof of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple depths of sky.I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. Tears were the mark ofthe elect, and had given her eyes that penetrating, unjoyous clearness of the stars, had given her beautiful lips their set line of austere silence, had placed on that frail white brow the conquering seal of valour and forbearance. A passion so remote from whimpering sentiment as that which she had inspired, was one to take pride in, and I cared not now whether grief or weal were my portion, for I, too, was crowned, and, like her, stood apart.I was glad to face the wide, empty moors by sunrise. The valley lay below the brilliantly lit mountain shoulder, where scarcely a shadow offered rest for the eyes. The Reeks opening out, peak upon peak, glittering and wild, made a magnificent picture. Here a crescent of shattered points, there a sunny tarn through the hollow of the cliff, shot with amber rays; and downward, deep valley beyond deep valley, dusk with foliage, and broken by zigzag pathways. I sat on the shelf of a rock, whence I could perceive the glen and grey mass of the manor. An eagle sweeping over the brow of the bluff, the shrill cry of curlews in their undulary shoreward flight, presaging tempest, the thunder of the Atlantic in the steady rollof its surges, were the sole sounds in my majestic solitude.I sat and dreamed, and filled in the unknown pages of that one volume now for me, the life of an innocent and high-spirited girl, urged in the passivity of an untroubled heart into an uncongenial marriage. The thought that she might have loved a worthless husband was an intolerable smart, and I rejected it for the more bearable belief that she had entered bondage in a neutral condition, without any apprehension of the warmer moments of life, unawakened to the imperious claims of the heart.And in dwelling bitterly on the penalties of such experience, the illimitable price exacted for limitable error, I started to my feet in angry denial that part of the price was the harsh sentence against other choice. What did it matter if the world’s wisdom rebuked our folly? What did it matter if the callous eye saw stain where I felt glory? What did anything matter, so long as I had the will to leap all barriers that lay between Brases and me? To pass through flame and wave, so that she was on the other side of peril with outstretched arms?The manor, with its air of rude decay, was curious rather than picturesque. It fronted a lawn that dropped into a thick plantation of fir, along which ran a silver trout-stream. The gravelled walks wandered away into the woodlands that waved in brilliant arches of beech and larch by an upward slope to the horizon, where the spires of pine scalloped the skyline. Trueberry was asleep, so I amused myself by inspecting the portraits of the hall. They were all members of my hostess’s family. That was obvious, even if the old butler had not informed me of the fact. A fair lady in velvet and long ruffles looked at me with her clear eyes, just so sweet, but bolder, and one tall girl was so vividly like her that I greeted her with a flame of enamoured recognition I would not dare bestow on the living woman. The same gold-leaf of hair, the same exquisite intangibility of look, the same wanness of cheek and ineffable upward line of chin and brow.When at last I saw Trueberry, I found him coherent and eager for my visit. He lay in a faded, heavily-curtained room, so old and dim that the bright rays of morning penetrating through the crimson curtains sparkled incongruously,and turned squares of the silk into blood-red. Coming in from the sunlit air, its sombreness shot me blind, and I could see nothing until I had blinked the sun out of my eyes.‘What a dark room!’ I cried.‘Oh, it’s a delightful room,’ said Trueberry dreamily, with the look of a visionary. ‘I’m so glad I had that accident, and was carried in here. Visions seem to start out of half-forgotten romances, and everything is suggestive. It’s so dark and quaint and big. Just the room to be ill in, and not mope. I like my condition, too, now that pain is on the wane. Fact and fancy are so deliciously inextricable. I never know what is really happening and what I am imagining. Last night I saw a picture that seemed to be real, and was in perfect harmony with the antique air of the room. A sort of Saint Elizabeth in a mediæval frame. You know one’s ideal of St Elizabeth?’ he added, looking at me with a little quizzical stir in his languid glance. ‘Sweet, serious, and lovely, carrying roses from heaven, and smiling softly on children and the sick. She smiled at me when she saw me staring.’‘Your hostess?’ I asked, chill with apprehension.‘I suppose so, if it wasn’t a dream. There’s fever in my blood still, and at night the imagination is a terrible agent. Yet the picture remains so distinct upon memory: the voice was so real, so musical, I can hear it still.’‘Tell me about it,’ I said, curious and alarmed.‘I was trying to make out my surroundings in the dull lamplight, and wondering where you were, when a curtain was lifted by the whitest hand I have ever seen, and framed in the folds was a beautiful pale woman in grey. She held a lamp high up, and the light caught and played over her brilliant hair till it shone like living gold. I feared to wink lest the vision should vanish. The light revealed the bust, while the folds of the skirt fell into heavy shadow. It was the crimped white about neck and wrists and the long queer sleeves that made me imagine fever had evoked some recollection of Italian galleries—half Giotto, half Botticelli: but she actually moved, and the unfathomable gravity of her gaze held mine, and when she smiled, I ceased to feel pain.’He spoke almost to himself, as if he had forgotten my presence, and as I looked down athim, so drowsily contented, I saw the old tragic monster lifting its terrible head between us. For the first time I was conscious of a jealous pang in contemplation of his favour of person.Grands dieux!and I so fatally ugly! And if Trueberry had possessed nothing but good looks, I had my brains and my reputation to balance that advantage. But he was no mere hero of sentimental girlhood—he was a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with all the finest qualities to repay a noble woman’s love, with all the personal charm to captivate a fastidious woman’s fancy. What had won my admiring friendship might be trusted to win Brases’ responsive love:—his sincerity, a certain picturesque dash that always made me think of Buckingham as described by Dumas—Anne of Austria’s Buckingham. It breathed so essentially the high air of romance, the chivalry, the ennobling sentimentality of vigorous manhood. He was no troubadour, but as I have said, Buckingham to the heels in modern raiment, unflinching before peril, of delightful manners, faithful to friend, implacable to foe, brilliant, generous, and full of romantic spirit. Such a woman as Brases I deemed above susceptibilityto a mere facile charm of manner, averse from so vulgar a quality as fascination. But Trueberry did not fascinate: he captivated. He carried sunshine with him to appeal to the austerest temperament, and in some subtle way, without an effort, became a need. A more attractive manliness was nowhere to be met, and if in friendship I found him indispensable, what would he not be to the woman whose heart he won?Should I repeat the peasant’s talk? Better not. Silence between us was best until speech could not be avoided. So I took an aching heart back to the cottage, with a promise to return in the afternoon.IIThat afternoon, passing through the hall on my way to Trueberry’s room, I was arrested upon no direct effort of will by the face of the pale blonde girl, looking at me so vividly out of canvas through the dear glance my own ached with longing to behold. Standing thus, my ear detected with a thrill of recognition thelight footfall behind me. I turned, and the sight was water to a man fevered with thirst. All morning I had wondered if a transient state of nerves might not be accountable for an effect perhaps over-excited imagination had exaggerated. But this second meeting was full confirmation of the agonising power of Brases over me. I rejoiced in this added proof of my servitude. Because of her presence, life revealed deeper meaning, earth fresher hues. My heart fluttered on the topmost crest of emotion, and tossed on a violent wave of joy. The awful quietude of our full long gaze held me tranced in silence.‘You found your friend better,’ she said, and her voice in that tense moment was like the bursting of the surges upon their swell. My eyes must have told it with fatal illumination, had hers not absently fallen on a portrait. ‘I should gladly press you to stay here with him, but I fear you would find it dull. The house, I know, is gloomy, and I see no one. But if you can face the dulness for your friend’s sake, if it would lessen your anxiety——’‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason repelled by the suggestionof Trueberry and myself together under her roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined, and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence. But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, butnot penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it—I could not command my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry between Trueberry and me,—self at odds with the finest friendship that ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes burning darkly.‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.‘Yes.’The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a surprised voice—‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.I sat down, and took up a volume ofThe Ring and the Book, which lay on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he shouted, as if a wound were pressed.I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already, when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning—“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear, fresh, expansive way.‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife, the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was dreaming.’I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:‘And if they recognised in a critical flashFrom the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,His need of—say a woman to perish for,The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,Do no harm, save to himself—?’Sully Prudhomme, I thought, would have expressed the idea more exquisitely. I preferred the soft musical murmur of that unapproachable little poem, the breathing soul of a tenderer chivalry:‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,Plus rien, même plus d’amitiéJe n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.Mais elle est pâle, délicate,Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.Je sais comment sa main repousse,Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,Ne la faites jamais pleurer.Je pourrais vivre avec l’idéeQu’elle est chérie et possédéeNon par moi mais selon mon cœur.Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’But the virile sweep of the sentiment Browning revealed had something of ocean’s strength and immensity that aroused the sea-born Breton under the extraneous veneer of culture. A Parisian cannot escape the charm of classic polish, but now and then with us the Celt runs riot, and sentiment rebels against the leash of form.Under the cynicism of the analytical novelist’s sacrifice, renunciation, the conquering strife of passion over duty, noble failure, the greatly borne martyrdom of humanity, are the things that have ever appealed to me. I have always desired to love and be loved in the cleansing fire of pain rather than in the facile yielding to the senses. So that there really was no logical reason why I should whimper and mope because Brases had not dropped into my arms by some magnetic influence. And even if she chose elsewhere! So long as her choice was justified by happiness, what need had I to complain?I murmured Sully Prudhomme’s lines, of a more subtle beauty of feeling than Browning’s, and Trueberry cocked a wistful brow.‘Repeat them louder, they sound so beautiful,’ he urged, and I repeated them.‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’he cried, with water in his eyes. ‘Could you picture yourself, Gontran, saying that of the woman you loved to the man who had gained her!’‘I hope so,’ I replied, smiling. ‘The bitter would be so sweet. And then the magnificent retort upon broken hopes:“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’I spoke lightly, like the cynical boulevardier, while inwardly I was bleeding. But Trueberry, bereft, by weakness and love, of all power of scrutiny or penetration, saw nothing of my suffering. He was in the absorbing paradise of a new-born claim, in the unconscious premonition of response, and smiled vaguely at me, dear fellow, as if a strong but agreeable opiate had drugged him.Trueberry was so improved next morningthat I found the children playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.While we played and chattered, and those pretty creatures rolled over Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly, and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepenedthe grey of her eyes, and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion. I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’ To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and stretched under her roof on my back.She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression, not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes, of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable tendernessof maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their little arms about her neck, were her one joy.‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me. While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech, Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical grasp, and I toppled rudely over myairy ideal of renunciation and self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend, and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of nature burst their barriers.Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay, and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a stone.‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work foryou, counting the stars be night, and crying for the moon be day.’‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied, ignoring his rebuke.‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a useless sort of thing.’‘So it seems, viewed in any light—rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to stay?’‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away. You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you. But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself has no business to go hankering after one as has known deceptionand wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know. Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and ’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on us.’‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight, pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart, or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude of unacknowledged, unexactingdevotion. I was a poor exasperated human wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of it. I had craved so little,—the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish, of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity and our intelligence.IIINext morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound, conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone, and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting environment.We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked, quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French, and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with theintoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer adroitly changed the conversation.When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air, as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour. Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the divine and hidden.They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as when he first came.’I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little moment of her life unshared with him!‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,—and strength to live my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened, and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers, with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died before hearing words so sad from her lips.Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fellin a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral march of my dead youth.’It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her, but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet—and yet——!Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back. She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky. I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow, unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’I questioned the stars in my blind anguish to learn if there were no resources in nature to wall in this terrible blank of being that stretched so miserably, so limitlessly before me as a future without Brases or Trueberry. Old interests, oldtastes, old desires had dropped from me, and I stood beggared of sum and aim of life.’I was abroad upon the moors by sunrise, lessening my feeling of personal diminution in the earth’s grandeur and the wavering immensity of the Atlantic as it rolled under the lemon-tinted horizon. I took my last look of forked mountains against the grey-shot blue of the heaven, of shattered rocks, and sombre tarn seen through the opening of a valley, and the distant plain, an inner sea of bracken and heather. Ever the sound of water, of moaning wave, of mingling rill, of foaming fall, the shrill cry of eagle and curlew, and the melody of the early birds. An hour hence should find me trudging to Kilstern, away from the wild beauty of this place—the home of Brases! On my way back, I met my host, and mentioned my intention. ‘That’s as it should be,’ was all he said.His curt approval galled me, and to silence discourteous retort, I flung myself over the stone ledge, and took the manor path like a chased creature. With what unconscious accuracy of observation I noted each leaf, each colour and form of a scene memory was destinedto retain for evermore! following with eager eyes the light as it made its own short road of gold among the dense shadows, and these as they picked out in blots the sunny spaces.The hall door as usual was open, and in passing the portraits, I took my last look of the boy with curls and ruffles, and beyond of the girl with the proud fair face that might be a portrait of Brases in younger days. I inspected it steadily, and traced where resemblance stopped in the lack of the subtle stamp of the soul, the ennobling seal of grief. It was a Brases who had never wept, never thought, a creature of mere bodily beauty.I found Trueberry walking up and down in restless expectation. I could see that sight of me brought an uncontrollable smart of disappointment to his eyelids, and his expressive mouth twitched like a child’s.‘What’s the matter, Gontran?’ he asked, with an affectionate effort, and placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘You look frightfully battered, my poor fellow.’‘Last night I meant to go away in silence,’ I said, not able to meet his kind glance, ‘butto-day I decided I owed my friend a franker course. Neither of us is responsible for the fact, but we must separate now.’‘You would desert me, Gontran—now!’ he cried, and the bitter tone of his reproach fetched a sob to my throat.‘I wish to God it should not be, that I had the unselfish courage to stay and witness your happiness——’‘Happiness!’ he shouted frantically. ‘My poor boy, I am more miserable than yourself,’ he added, with a dejected movement.‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes, felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might havelonged to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame, tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers. While I——’‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness. Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finerfeelings, and left me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost, whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body, with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive, elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of equality in misery between us.‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go to-day?’The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse, and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lackedmy brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.I consented to go with him, and hurried back to the cottage, where I found my host busy over my portmanteau. I told him my friend was coming with me too, upon which he scrutinised my face mildly, and, I thought, with satisfaction. He strapped the portmanteau, and remarked in a dry tone: ‘That, too, is as it should be, and I am glad there is no quarrel.’ Taking no note of my astonishment at his incredible discernment, he added: ‘You’ll drink a last drop of the mountain dew to your success and happiness in another spot, sir, where the girls, God bless them! are fresh and pretty and plentiful as the flowers in May.’He went into the kitchen, and I stood at the window watching light chase shadow over the bold visage of a reek, and assured myself gloomily that there were a thousand ways, after all, of threading a path through despair. Whose life is crowned with happiness?—and hope of it must come to an end sooner or later. Pleasure still remains when we have shed the last tear, and whatever may be said to the contrary in pessimistic moments, pleasure to the lastpeeps out at us through the thorniest brambles, with its varied allurements. This I told myself, and though I could think of no possible pleasure at the time, or compensation for the miserable duty of facing life, I drearily supposed I would come, like another, to find my round of petty joys and mean delights. There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see, and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise. My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. The blood flowed from heart to brain on a dizzy wave, where it surged, so that I had some knowledge of the sensation of insanity. This explains my sin against honour in standing there. I could not have left the spot by any imperative order of conscience. I stood as immovable as a hypnotised figure.Like a spectator of the drama, with feelings unconcerned, I was quick to note the searching pathos and beauty of the picture.They two stood together in the middle of the room, she with her hands on his shoulders, he with an arm round her waist, holding one of her little hands clasped above. The passionate gaze of both was matchless in its eloquence. Both faces were white and luminous, as if touched with a ray from heaven, anguish adequately mixed with transport. Such a look from a woman’s eyes was surely worth dying for.‘Brases, must I go away?’ Trueberry asked brokenly.She moved a little in his embrace, and pressed her face against his breast, then recovered herself, and said firmly—‘You must, dear friend.’‘Think of it, beloved,’ he cried, holding her closer to him. ‘Such links as chain us. We two as one, is it not madness to dream of living apart? Every beat of life within you, Brases, must cry out against this parting. It is murder of our souls. Go, I may, but with you, Brases.’‘Don’t make me go over it again,’ she pleaded, in a tired voice, ‘it was so hard before. Whilea man lives who calls me wife, can I come to you with a tarnished name?’‘Tarnished!’ The smile he shed upon her was convincing enough to redeem a fallen angel, it was so warm, and soft, and indulgent, with all love’s sweetness and shelter. ‘The stain is on his name, and that you would drop. The law will release you. Come, come. You cannot live alone now, any more than I can. Think of what it means—craving light and love and happiness, all within reach, and we dying apart on the brink.’‘No, no, don’t tempt me. Your desire is my weakness. Your voice draws my being from its roots, and my pulses beat to the rhythm of yours. See how much I confess, and then be merciful, and go.’‘Is it always right to follow our ideal of duty, when nature points so clearly another way?’ he still urged. ‘What reason have we always to regard our judgment as better than hers, since she is so big and mighty, and we so small and helpless.’ He held her hand pressed against his lips, and I could hear his murmuring speech through the trembling fingers. ‘What is the past with such a present as ours, such a futureas we might have? My love would soon blot it from your memory. Trust me, Brases, I too have my past with its burden of regrets I would fain forget.’‘Ah, had I met you before fatality crossed my path,’ she said, upon a quick sob, ‘when my palm was as clean as a child’s, how my spirit would have bounded to the wedding of yours! But that may never be now.’Her arms dropped renouncingly, and the smile that travelled slowly over her blanched face shed a rapturous light upon his. His eyes held hers in willing bondage. Though this was her farewell I could divine the supreme effort that kept her from his arms, by the fingers fluttering like the wings of a bird against her dress, while it were hard to say which her half-lifted, gently averted face, with the eyes straining back to his, most eloquently expressed: surrender or renouncement.Trueberry sprang to her and caught her to him, and their lips met in a kiss that had the solemnity of a sacrament. I staggered back, clapping my hand over my mouth to prevent a shout of white-hot anguish, and could see the darkness sweep down upon me like a big comfortingwing. I hoped it was death come to gather me like a suffering, inarticulate child, into its soft mother’s arms.But I struggled back into life, and had again to front the road of care and blind endeavour. How long later I cannot say, but I saw Brases standing over me, looking at me in pitying wonder. She took my hand in both of hers, and bending, softly kissed my cheek. This was the mother’s kiss I hoped death had given me. I stared at her, too broken for wonder or emotion, and sitting down beside me, with my hand still in hers, she said—‘We were very much frightened, you were so long unconscious. Mr. Trueberry told me you have not slept of late, and that you are very unhappy. I, too, am unhappy, and that is why I kissed you. But you are better now, and you will try to forget your pain, or, at least, to bear it well. It is the best any of us can do. They will drive you to Kilstern, and you will return to France alone, carrying my best wishes for your welfare. Mr. Trueberry has gone already.’I struggled to my feet, swallowed the wine she poured out for me, and then, in a dull,uneager voice, asked, ‘Did Trueberry leave no message for me, Madame?’‘He was very much concerned, and full of sympathy, but he has his own trouble to bear, and thinks he will bear it best alone. He will write to you to Paris in a few days.’A trap was at the door, and she came out with me, and when we had shaken hands in silence, stood looking after me, as I was indeed forcibly carried away. She was dim to my sight, a mere blurred grey figure, with light about her head, and the landscape looked watery and broken, as if seen through bits of bobbing glass.

LIKEanother foreigner, I had my ideal of the Irishwoman—bewitching, naturally, but built upon somewhat hackneyed and high-coloured lines: vivacious play of feature, blue-black hair, violet eyes, and complexion made up of lilies and roses. So when Trueberry, the gallantest friend man ever found on English shores, asked me to join him in a trip to Erin, imagination hastily evoked this resplendent creature of my desire, and I straightway proposed to myself the pleasing excitement of a flirtatious romance. I told Trueberry I thought nothing more delightful than the prospect I had formed, to fall in love, and ride away. Trueberry, in his fatal Saxon way, made some grim rejoinder about the riding away being the pleasantest part of it.

We shot and rode and fished, and staredat the girls, without any fervour of glance or flutter of pulse, it must be confessed, I alertly on the look-out for this creature of dazzling contrasts and laughing provocation. With fancy still uncomforted, Trueberry was dangerously hurt, and we were several miles distant from the nearest village. A peasant offered to help me carry my comrade down the glen, and assured me that the lady of the grey manor would be glad to receive him. Our claim at the hall was courteously responded to by an old man-servant, who drew a couch out on which we stretched my moaning friend, and then I was directed to the doctor’s house, some way along the uplands. My guide offered me the shelter of his roof hard by, when I spoke of looking for a lodging.

It was late in the afternoon when the doctor and I reached the manor. The sun was level on the western horizon, an arch of misty gold upon a broad sheet of silver lying behind the nearer low-hanging clouds, so that the silver heaven, beyond this chain of grey and opal hills, looked mystically remote and clear, while lower down lake and purple mountains were softened by a fine white veil of mist, and the sea was visiblecurling its delicate foam upon the crest of the tide among the rocks. The valley below was dusk, shut in by the grand sweep of girdling mountains, and so still was the air that every far-off sound carried, from the echo of ocean’s murmuring to the nearer crash of a waterfall hissing down the rocks, and the pleasant lilt at my feet of a little rivulet lipping its daisied marge. The birds were in full chorus, and each of the dense trees nested song. We left the breezy, wandering moors, which swept the horizon in a measurelessness of space as triumphant and vast seemingly as the illimitable Atlantic rolling from their base, and took the narrow road that sloped down to the glen of firs and oak, where the light could scarce make a path among the deepening shadows. Outside all was great, in air, on land, on water. Here intolerable compression of space and such a diminution of light as to harass nerves and imagination. My preoccupation about Trueberry rather stimulated than blunted my visual faculties, and I noted with abhorrence each detail of the sharp, precise landscape; the thin vein of water glimmering through the darkening grass like a broken mirror, the abrupt curve of the road fromthe shoulder of the bluff, and the stiff, dim plumes of the heather washed of purple pretension in the twilight, while through a clump of black firs the rough front of the manor made a fainter shade in the grey air. The solitude was scented with the fragrance of wild thyme, and as we approached, old-fashioned odours blew against us from the garden.

Trueberry was restored to a vague consciousness, and lay with shut eyes in a darkened room. I walked outside with the doctor, who was a cheery, hopeful fellow, and in diagnosing my friend’s case, furnished me with no occasion for alarm. I found it strange that no member of the family had come forward to explain the gracious hospitality by a personal interest in the wounded man. As I stood in the chill air musing on this odd unconcern, I heard a light step behind, coming from the house. I turned, and faced the woman who was to dominate my heart by one swift sweep of all that had ever claimed it.

She looked at me, and in one grave, steadfast glance the miracle was accomplished. Is this love? I have been so often, so continuously in love, and yet have never known anything thatapproached it. It was like the mystery of life and death—not to be explained, not to be conquered, not to be eluded. It needs no will to be born, to die; so it needs no will to surrender to such an influence. Upon a single throb of pulse, it has established itself permanently upon the altar of life, and sentimental fancies and shabby yearnings drop out of memory with the sacramental transfusion of soul.

Of course I saw that she was a beautiful woman, but this only afterwards. What I first saw was the deep impersonal gaze that drew the heart from my breast. It met mine with a full, free beam, and held it upon a wave of inexplicable emotion. Bondage to it was a glory, a consecration of my manhood. The subtle, the elusive nature of my captivation was the spiritual point upon an ordinary passion. It was the spurs, the belt of knighthood. For this I understood to be no mere command of senses, but the imperative claims of life-long allegiance, whether for suffering or for happiness.

Perhaps by nature I was attuned to such surrender. Since ever romantic hopes first broke their deeps in my boyish brain, and myheart was lifted on the first warm wave of desire, I have eagerly yearned for free passionate servitude to one sovereign lady. There was always the mediæval strain in me, though I have fluttered idly enough, like the moth round the flame, and hovered in a sort of protective sympathy and admiration, round pretty womanhood, not objecting to being trampled on as a holocaust to graceful and bewildering caprice. But now had come the enslavement of the soul, not of the senses; of the spirit, not of the eye. Homage did not bend in banter, but was exalted on the wings of reverence. It was only afterwards that I remembered the details of the face: its unchanging pallor and exceeding finish, the peculiar unrippling sheen of the blonde hair, like gold leaf in its unshaded polish, the inner curves of coil as deep an amber as the outer edges, without shadow of curl or ring round neck and temple. So smooth and shining a frame was admirably adjusted to the small, grave, glacial oval, with its look of wistful abstracted charm, with a delicate chiselling only an inspired pencil could copy, with an exquisite line from brow to chin. Such was the transparency of the colourless skin that like a shell,it seemed in the light to reflect the warm rose of life beneath. Under the arch of the unerring brows, long grey eyes, shadowed blackly, that in girlhood must have presaged storm, but now the black lay broodingly, a seal to the clear grey depths. You looked into, not through them; and found them too bewilderingly unstirred by the yearning trouble of the gazer.

There was, perhaps, a conscious but not an undignified expression in her dress. Sweeping folds of grey matched the austere stillness of her eyes, as did the full cambric of throat a wanness reminiscent of a mediæval saint. Long sleeves lined with silk fell backward, and the inner ones were of crimped cambric: hardly affectation, but the supreme touch to beauty so visibly haloed as hers. Her voice was in keeping with the clear eloquence of her glance; full, unperturbed, sustained without conscious modulation or trick, harmonious like all sounds of natural sweetness. It fell with the sentence, as the Irish voice habitually does, but softly, without abrupt cadences or huskiness.

‘All that lies in our power for your friend’s care and comfort will be done,’ she said, after her unhurried survey of me. ‘There is little tooffer in such an out-of-the-way place but home medicines and home resources, and there will not be much in the way of distraction for him, since I live here alone with my children, and my solitude is unbroken. I regret that you have decided to lodge elsewhere, but pray do not spare us your visits. The house is your friend’s, and I am honoured in being of use to him.’

It was hardly a bow she made, but drooped her eyelids with a curious movement, and lowered her chin from its ineffable upward line. The words I scarcely heard, though every fibre trembled with emotion at her speech. I thought the voice, with the softening syllables dropping into silence, more exquisite than any music dreamed of. Its tones accompanied me as a murmur rather than the remembrance of actual words in my walk up to the free bluff, whence I could look down on the grey manor, and mixed with the resounding roar of ocean, as the wind blew the melody of the waves shoreward. What was the distinction of this woman who through all the days to come offered me rapture and agony by noontide and by midnight? Not her beauty so much as her essential difference from others. Not the gleaming gold ofher hair, but the solemn simplicity of her bearing in such accord with the vast and unbroken solitude around her. Her voice I acknowledged without shrinking or terror, as we accept all essential elements, to be henceforth the dominant key of life for me, the note to sound my depths and touch me at will as an impassive instrument. Was this woman free? I asked myself, with a thrill of revolt, as I remembered her mention of children. But no word of husband! This fact let in a ray of hope upon my dread. I could never again belong to myself with the cheap security of an hour ago, and what was there for me if there was no room for me in the chambers of her heart?

At the cottage I found my host frying some salmon for supper. He was a tall, bent peasant, meagre and pallid from much thinking and under-feeding, with all the Celt’s quaint mixture of melancholy and humour in his keen blue eyes and wrinkled smile. He did the honours of his humble dwelling with stately courtesy, and was too proud and well-bred to offer futile apologies for the poverty of his shepherd fare and rude bed.

‘Your friend, sir, is not anything worse, Itrust,’ he said. I gave him the doctor’s report, and said it was now a case for complete rest and care. I reddened with remorse, remembering how little I had been thinking of Trueberry.

‘Ah, ’tis he that’s in excellent hands,’ said the peasant, turning the salmon, and then dreamily rested his cheek against the closed hand that held the fork, with his elbow supported on the other wrist.

‘May I not learn to whom we are indebted for so much kindness?’ I asked tremulously.

‘Your friend, sir, is at the house of Lady Brases Fitzowen,’ he answered, and I shrank beneath the sharp look he cast on me. ‘’Tis herself, sure, we all love and delight in as if she was one of God’s angels.’

This seemed to me in my exalted mood as such an obvious statement that I received it with the same simplicity it had been uttered. Were we not brother Celts,—albeit, I a Parisianised Breton, and he an illiterate native of wild Kerry uplands? His tribute to the lady of my destiny raced a flame through me like a delicious flattery.

‘I have seen her,’ I said, striving to command my voice in unconfessing tones. ‘I can quitebelieve you. I should like to know something of her, if you will not deem my curiosity an impertinence. She spoke of her children. Does her husband live?’

‘He does,’ the peasant answered, I thought sullenly.

I caught a fork fiercely in my hand, and bent to trace figures with it on the cloth, hoping thereby to shield my excessive pain from his sharp scrutiny.

‘She did not mention him to me,’ I half cried.

‘’Tis natural. They’re no longer one.’

Oh, the warm revulsion, the wild joy in that queer reply. I read in it the peasant’s definition of divorce. It sprang light and flame through me, and heated senses benumbed a moment ago. It gave definiteness to rash hope, and melted away all doubt and apprehension. Brases free was to be wooed. Heaven knows conceit was never more eliminated from self-judgment than then, but I felt the urgent claim of the rare passion so instantaneously born. All my worth lay in the quality of that love, and it was not such that any woman could reject without a pang.

‘Then she is free,’ I said, and heard the thrill in my own voice.

‘Free!’ exclaimed the peasant, frowning. ‘That’s as may be. Them Protestants believe such-like things, but we don’t, sir. However things happen, we hold folk once married can only be freed by death. I take it, sir, you come from foreign parts, though ’tis a wonder to me how you have learnt the English tongue so well. May be, beyond in your land, they’re like the Protestants, and play fast and loose with the marriage tie.’

He laid the dish of salmon on the table, and disappeared outside. My state of mixed emotions, of exasperated nerves, of pulses throbbing against my consciousness like a discordant instrument, anger with that prejudiced peasant predominating, reduced me to the level of savage and child. The fellow in his implied abhorrence of divorce was so aggravatingly phlegmatic, so heartlessly unconscious of all it might mean for me. I did not knock him down or force him to eat his obnoxious words, but sat still and endeavoured not to observe the rest of his rational preparations for the evening meal. I was on fire for further facts of the tale,but dared not question, in my uncontrollable temper. When the peasant at length seated himself opposite me, with a dish of salmon, smoking potatoes, and a bottle of potheen between us, I was able to make a fair pretence of hunger. I had no difficulty in praising the salmon and the big flowery potatoes, the best of the world, and novelty supplied the needful sauce. The potheen was simply barbarous, a suitable drink for Caliban or the Indian brave, and no amount of water could soothe it to my French palate. But between lively grimaces over it, I was enabled to ask, without self-betrayal—

‘Then, I suppose, Lady Fitzowen’s husband does not live at the manor?’

He looked at me gravely over his glass, and nodded.

‘They are divorced?’

‘Not quite as I should say. Separated, they call it.’

Here was a toppling down of the airiest edifice built of gossamer. I could have cried out at the stab like any thwarted child. And yet the barrier of a living husband, like an unclean skeleton, between us, made that vision in theearly twilight no less pure and spiritual than when not seen across the tragic story,married widowhood. A widow, still had sanctity lain upon my suit, where now reproach would lie as a pall. Suppose my love drew hers, how should I live through terror of waking some poisonous snake to her mortal injury, of the nameless dread of slander to breathe its dark flame against her sinless brow? A shadow upon such devotion as mine was an unacceptable desecration. Torture itself prompted me to further questioning.

‘Was it she who sought separation?’

‘I believe it was her people, sir. He was a bad lot, they say, wild after the women, and not over nice in his ways. She’s gentle now, but she was proud and passionate as a girl, and she felt the shame of the thing and ran. ’Tis a wonder the poor crathurs don’t oftener run, the provocation thim fine gentlemen gives them. Anyway, her people settled the matter, and she came to live here, ’tis now close on four years ago. The second child was born here, God bless it, and we all love it like our own.’

I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night. One never wants forproof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out for ever into her desperate loneliness. Joy seemed to me a miserable mockery, the portion of trivial, contemptible humanity. The best proof of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple depths of sky.

I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. Tears were the mark ofthe elect, and had given her eyes that penetrating, unjoyous clearness of the stars, had given her beautiful lips their set line of austere silence, had placed on that frail white brow the conquering seal of valour and forbearance. A passion so remote from whimpering sentiment as that which she had inspired, was one to take pride in, and I cared not now whether grief or weal were my portion, for I, too, was crowned, and, like her, stood apart.

I was glad to face the wide, empty moors by sunrise. The valley lay below the brilliantly lit mountain shoulder, where scarcely a shadow offered rest for the eyes. The Reeks opening out, peak upon peak, glittering and wild, made a magnificent picture. Here a crescent of shattered points, there a sunny tarn through the hollow of the cliff, shot with amber rays; and downward, deep valley beyond deep valley, dusk with foliage, and broken by zigzag pathways. I sat on the shelf of a rock, whence I could perceive the glen and grey mass of the manor. An eagle sweeping over the brow of the bluff, the shrill cry of curlews in their undulary shoreward flight, presaging tempest, the thunder of the Atlantic in the steady rollof its surges, were the sole sounds in my majestic solitude.

I sat and dreamed, and filled in the unknown pages of that one volume now for me, the life of an innocent and high-spirited girl, urged in the passivity of an untroubled heart into an uncongenial marriage. The thought that she might have loved a worthless husband was an intolerable smart, and I rejected it for the more bearable belief that she had entered bondage in a neutral condition, without any apprehension of the warmer moments of life, unawakened to the imperious claims of the heart.

And in dwelling bitterly on the penalties of such experience, the illimitable price exacted for limitable error, I started to my feet in angry denial that part of the price was the harsh sentence against other choice. What did it matter if the world’s wisdom rebuked our folly? What did it matter if the callous eye saw stain where I felt glory? What did anything matter, so long as I had the will to leap all barriers that lay between Brases and me? To pass through flame and wave, so that she was on the other side of peril with outstretched arms?

The manor, with its air of rude decay, was curious rather than picturesque. It fronted a lawn that dropped into a thick plantation of fir, along which ran a silver trout-stream. The gravelled walks wandered away into the woodlands that waved in brilliant arches of beech and larch by an upward slope to the horizon, where the spires of pine scalloped the skyline. Trueberry was asleep, so I amused myself by inspecting the portraits of the hall. They were all members of my hostess’s family. That was obvious, even if the old butler had not informed me of the fact. A fair lady in velvet and long ruffles looked at me with her clear eyes, just so sweet, but bolder, and one tall girl was so vividly like her that I greeted her with a flame of enamoured recognition I would not dare bestow on the living woman. The same gold-leaf of hair, the same exquisite intangibility of look, the same wanness of cheek and ineffable upward line of chin and brow.

When at last I saw Trueberry, I found him coherent and eager for my visit. He lay in a faded, heavily-curtained room, so old and dim that the bright rays of morning penetrating through the crimson curtains sparkled incongruously,and turned squares of the silk into blood-red. Coming in from the sunlit air, its sombreness shot me blind, and I could see nothing until I had blinked the sun out of my eyes.

‘What a dark room!’ I cried.

‘Oh, it’s a delightful room,’ said Trueberry dreamily, with the look of a visionary. ‘I’m so glad I had that accident, and was carried in here. Visions seem to start out of half-forgotten romances, and everything is suggestive. It’s so dark and quaint and big. Just the room to be ill in, and not mope. I like my condition, too, now that pain is on the wane. Fact and fancy are so deliciously inextricable. I never know what is really happening and what I am imagining. Last night I saw a picture that seemed to be real, and was in perfect harmony with the antique air of the room. A sort of Saint Elizabeth in a mediæval frame. You know one’s ideal of St Elizabeth?’ he added, looking at me with a little quizzical stir in his languid glance. ‘Sweet, serious, and lovely, carrying roses from heaven, and smiling softly on children and the sick. She smiled at me when she saw me staring.’

‘Your hostess?’ I asked, chill with apprehension.

‘I suppose so, if it wasn’t a dream. There’s fever in my blood still, and at night the imagination is a terrible agent. Yet the picture remains so distinct upon memory: the voice was so real, so musical, I can hear it still.’

‘Tell me about it,’ I said, curious and alarmed.

‘I was trying to make out my surroundings in the dull lamplight, and wondering where you were, when a curtain was lifted by the whitest hand I have ever seen, and framed in the folds was a beautiful pale woman in grey. She held a lamp high up, and the light caught and played over her brilliant hair till it shone like living gold. I feared to wink lest the vision should vanish. The light revealed the bust, while the folds of the skirt fell into heavy shadow. It was the crimped white about neck and wrists and the long queer sleeves that made me imagine fever had evoked some recollection of Italian galleries—half Giotto, half Botticelli: but she actually moved, and the unfathomable gravity of her gaze held mine, and when she smiled, I ceased to feel pain.’

He spoke almost to himself, as if he had forgotten my presence, and as I looked down athim, so drowsily contented, I saw the old tragic monster lifting its terrible head between us. For the first time I was conscious of a jealous pang in contemplation of his favour of person.Grands dieux!and I so fatally ugly! And if Trueberry had possessed nothing but good looks, I had my brains and my reputation to balance that advantage. But he was no mere hero of sentimental girlhood—he was a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with all the finest qualities to repay a noble woman’s love, with all the personal charm to captivate a fastidious woman’s fancy. What had won my admiring friendship might be trusted to win Brases’ responsive love:—his sincerity, a certain picturesque dash that always made me think of Buckingham as described by Dumas—Anne of Austria’s Buckingham. It breathed so essentially the high air of romance, the chivalry, the ennobling sentimentality of vigorous manhood. He was no troubadour, but as I have said, Buckingham to the heels in modern raiment, unflinching before peril, of delightful manners, faithful to friend, implacable to foe, brilliant, generous, and full of romantic spirit. Such a woman as Brases I deemed above susceptibilityto a mere facile charm of manner, averse from so vulgar a quality as fascination. But Trueberry did not fascinate: he captivated. He carried sunshine with him to appeal to the austerest temperament, and in some subtle way, without an effort, became a need. A more attractive manliness was nowhere to be met, and if in friendship I found him indispensable, what would he not be to the woman whose heart he won?

Should I repeat the peasant’s talk? Better not. Silence between us was best until speech could not be avoided. So I took an aching heart back to the cottage, with a promise to return in the afternoon.

II

That afternoon, passing through the hall on my way to Trueberry’s room, I was arrested upon no direct effort of will by the face of the pale blonde girl, looking at me so vividly out of canvas through the dear glance my own ached with longing to behold. Standing thus, my ear detected with a thrill of recognition thelight footfall behind me. I turned, and the sight was water to a man fevered with thirst. All morning I had wondered if a transient state of nerves might not be accountable for an effect perhaps over-excited imagination had exaggerated. But this second meeting was full confirmation of the agonising power of Brases over me. I rejoiced in this added proof of my servitude. Because of her presence, life revealed deeper meaning, earth fresher hues. My heart fluttered on the topmost crest of emotion, and tossed on a violent wave of joy. The awful quietude of our full long gaze held me tranced in silence.

‘You found your friend better,’ she said, and her voice in that tense moment was like the bursting of the surges upon their swell. My eyes must have told it with fatal illumination, had hers not absently fallen on a portrait. ‘I should gladly press you to stay here with him, but I fear you would find it dull. The house, I know, is gloomy, and I see no one. But if you can face the dulness for your friend’s sake, if it would lessen your anxiety——’

‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason repelled by the suggestionof Trueberry and myself together under her roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’

What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined, and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence. But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, butnot penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it—I could not command my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry between Trueberry and me,—self at odds with the finest friendship that ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.

I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes burning darkly.

‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.

‘Yes.’

The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a surprised voice—

‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’

‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.

I sat down, and took up a volume ofThe Ring and the Book, which lay on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.

‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he shouted, as if a wound were pressed.

I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already, when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.

‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning—

“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?

“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?

‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear, fresh, expansive way.‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife, the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was dreaming.’

I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:

‘And if they recognised in a critical flashFrom the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,His need of—say a woman to perish for,The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,Do no harm, save to himself—?’

‘And if they recognised in a critical flashFrom the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,His need of—say a woman to perish for,The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,Do no harm, save to himself—?’

‘And if they recognised in a critical flashFrom the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,His need of—say a woman to perish for,The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,Do no harm, save to himself—?’

‘And if they recognised in a critical flash

From the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,

His need of—say a woman to perish for,

The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,

Do no harm, save to himself—?’

Sully Prudhomme, I thought, would have expressed the idea more exquisitely. I preferred the soft musical murmur of that unapproachable little poem, the breathing soul of a tenderer chivalry:

‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,Plus rien, même plus d’amitiéJe n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.Mais elle est pâle, délicate,Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.Je sais comment sa main repousse,Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,Ne la faites jamais pleurer.Je pourrais vivre avec l’idéeQu’elle est chérie et possédéeNon par moi mais selon mon cœur.Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’

‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,Plus rien, même plus d’amitiéJe n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.Mais elle est pâle, délicate,Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.Je sais comment sa main repousse,Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,Ne la faites jamais pleurer.Je pourrais vivre avec l’idéeQu’elle est chérie et possédéeNon par moi mais selon mon cœur.Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’

‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,Plus rien, même plus d’amitiéJe n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.Mais elle est pâle, délicate,Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.

‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,

Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,

Plus rien, même plus d’amitié

Je n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.

Mais elle est pâle, délicate,

Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.

Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.Je sais comment sa main repousse,Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,Ne la faites jamais pleurer.

Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,

Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,

N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.

Je sais comment sa main repousse,

Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,

Ne la faites jamais pleurer.

Je pourrais vivre avec l’idéeQu’elle est chérie et possédéeNon par moi mais selon mon cœur.Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’

Je pourrais vivre avec l’idée

Qu’elle est chérie et possédée

Non par moi mais selon mon cœur.

Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,

Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,

Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’

But the virile sweep of the sentiment Browning revealed had something of ocean’s strength and immensity that aroused the sea-born Breton under the extraneous veneer of culture. A Parisian cannot escape the charm of classic polish, but now and then with us the Celt runs riot, and sentiment rebels against the leash of form.

Under the cynicism of the analytical novelist’s sacrifice, renunciation, the conquering strife of passion over duty, noble failure, the greatly borne martyrdom of humanity, are the things that have ever appealed to me. I have always desired to love and be loved in the cleansing fire of pain rather than in the facile yielding to the senses. So that there really was no logical reason why I should whimper and mope because Brases had not dropped into my arms by some magnetic influence. And even if she chose elsewhere! So long as her choice was justified by happiness, what need had I to complain?I murmured Sully Prudhomme’s lines, of a more subtle beauty of feeling than Browning’s, and Trueberry cocked a wistful brow.

‘Repeat them louder, they sound so beautiful,’ he urged, and I repeated them.

‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’

‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’

‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’

‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,

N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’

he cried, with water in his eyes. ‘Could you picture yourself, Gontran, saying that of the woman you loved to the man who had gained her!’

‘I hope so,’ I replied, smiling. ‘The bitter would be so sweet. And then the magnificent retort upon broken hopes:

“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’

“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’

“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’

“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,

Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?

Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’

I spoke lightly, like the cynical boulevardier, while inwardly I was bleeding. But Trueberry, bereft, by weakness and love, of all power of scrutiny or penetration, saw nothing of my suffering. He was in the absorbing paradise of a new-born claim, in the unconscious premonition of response, and smiled vaguely at me, dear fellow, as if a strong but agreeable opiate had drugged him.

Trueberry was so improved next morningthat I found the children playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.

While we played and chattered, and those pretty creatures rolled over Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly, and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.

Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepenedthe grey of her eyes, and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion. I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’ To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and stretched under her roof on my back.

She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression, not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes, of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable tendernessof maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their little arms about her neck, were her one joy.

‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’

Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me. While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech, Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.

It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical grasp, and I toppled rudely over myairy ideal of renunciation and self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend, and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of nature burst their barriers.

Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay, and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a stone.

‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work foryou, counting the stars be night, and crying for the moon be day.’

‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied, ignoring his rebuke.

‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a useless sort of thing.’

‘So it seems, viewed in any light—rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to stay?’

‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away. You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you. But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’

His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.

‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself has no business to go hankering after one as has known deceptionand wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know. Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and ’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on us.’

‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’

I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight, pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart, or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude of unacknowledged, unexactingdevotion. I was a poor exasperated human wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of it. I had craved so little,—the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish, of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.

Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity and our intelligence.

III

Next morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound, conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone, and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting environment.

We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked, quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French, and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with theintoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer adroitly changed the conversation.

When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air, as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour. Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the divine and hidden.

They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.

‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as when he first came.’

I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little moment of her life unshared with him!

‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,—and strength to live my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened, and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers, with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died before hearing words so sad from her lips.

Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fellin a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.

‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral march of my dead youth.’

It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her, but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet—and yet——!

Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back. She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky. I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow, unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’

I questioned the stars in my blind anguish to learn if there were no resources in nature to wall in this terrible blank of being that stretched so miserably, so limitlessly before me as a future without Brases or Trueberry. Old interests, oldtastes, old desires had dropped from me, and I stood beggared of sum and aim of life.’

I was abroad upon the moors by sunrise, lessening my feeling of personal diminution in the earth’s grandeur and the wavering immensity of the Atlantic as it rolled under the lemon-tinted horizon. I took my last look of forked mountains against the grey-shot blue of the heaven, of shattered rocks, and sombre tarn seen through the opening of a valley, and the distant plain, an inner sea of bracken and heather. Ever the sound of water, of moaning wave, of mingling rill, of foaming fall, the shrill cry of eagle and curlew, and the melody of the early birds. An hour hence should find me trudging to Kilstern, away from the wild beauty of this place—the home of Brases! On my way back, I met my host, and mentioned my intention. ‘That’s as it should be,’ was all he said.

His curt approval galled me, and to silence discourteous retort, I flung myself over the stone ledge, and took the manor path like a chased creature. With what unconscious accuracy of observation I noted each leaf, each colour and form of a scene memory was destinedto retain for evermore! following with eager eyes the light as it made its own short road of gold among the dense shadows, and these as they picked out in blots the sunny spaces.

The hall door as usual was open, and in passing the portraits, I took my last look of the boy with curls and ruffles, and beyond of the girl with the proud fair face that might be a portrait of Brases in younger days. I inspected it steadily, and traced where resemblance stopped in the lack of the subtle stamp of the soul, the ennobling seal of grief. It was a Brases who had never wept, never thought, a creature of mere bodily beauty.

I found Trueberry walking up and down in restless expectation. I could see that sight of me brought an uncontrollable smart of disappointment to his eyelids, and his expressive mouth twitched like a child’s.

‘What’s the matter, Gontran?’ he asked, with an affectionate effort, and placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘You look frightfully battered, my poor fellow.’

‘Last night I meant to go away in silence,’ I said, not able to meet his kind glance, ‘butto-day I decided I owed my friend a franker course. Neither of us is responsible for the fact, but we must separate now.’

‘You would desert me, Gontran—now!’ he cried, and the bitter tone of his reproach fetched a sob to my throat.

‘I wish to God it should not be, that I had the unselfish courage to stay and witness your happiness——’

‘Happiness!’ he shouted frantically. ‘My poor boy, I am more miserable than yourself,’ he added, with a dejected movement.

‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes, felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’

‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might havelonged to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.

‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’

‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame, tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers. While I——’

‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’

He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness. Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finerfeelings, and left me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost, whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body, with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive, elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of equality in misery between us.

‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.

Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.

‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go to-day?’

The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse, and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lackedmy brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.

I consented to go with him, and hurried back to the cottage, where I found my host busy over my portmanteau. I told him my friend was coming with me too, upon which he scrutinised my face mildly, and, I thought, with satisfaction. He strapped the portmanteau, and remarked in a dry tone: ‘That, too, is as it should be, and I am glad there is no quarrel.’ Taking no note of my astonishment at his incredible discernment, he added: ‘You’ll drink a last drop of the mountain dew to your success and happiness in another spot, sir, where the girls, God bless them! are fresh and pretty and plentiful as the flowers in May.’

He went into the kitchen, and I stood at the window watching light chase shadow over the bold visage of a reek, and assured myself gloomily that there were a thousand ways, after all, of threading a path through despair. Whose life is crowned with happiness?—and hope of it must come to an end sooner or later. Pleasure still remains when we have shed the last tear, and whatever may be said to the contrary in pessimistic moments, pleasure to the lastpeeps out at us through the thorniest brambles, with its varied allurements. This I told myself, and though I could think of no possible pleasure at the time, or compensation for the miserable duty of facing life, I drearily supposed I would come, like another, to find my round of petty joys and mean delights. There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see, and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise. My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. The blood flowed from heart to brain on a dizzy wave, where it surged, so that I had some knowledge of the sensation of insanity. This explains my sin against honour in standing there. I could not have left the spot by any imperative order of conscience. I stood as immovable as a hypnotised figure.Like a spectator of the drama, with feelings unconcerned, I was quick to note the searching pathos and beauty of the picture.

They two stood together in the middle of the room, she with her hands on his shoulders, he with an arm round her waist, holding one of her little hands clasped above. The passionate gaze of both was matchless in its eloquence. Both faces were white and luminous, as if touched with a ray from heaven, anguish adequately mixed with transport. Such a look from a woman’s eyes was surely worth dying for.

‘Brases, must I go away?’ Trueberry asked brokenly.

She moved a little in his embrace, and pressed her face against his breast, then recovered herself, and said firmly—

‘You must, dear friend.’

‘Think of it, beloved,’ he cried, holding her closer to him. ‘Such links as chain us. We two as one, is it not madness to dream of living apart? Every beat of life within you, Brases, must cry out against this parting. It is murder of our souls. Go, I may, but with you, Brases.’

‘Don’t make me go over it again,’ she pleaded, in a tired voice, ‘it was so hard before. Whilea man lives who calls me wife, can I come to you with a tarnished name?’

‘Tarnished!’ The smile he shed upon her was convincing enough to redeem a fallen angel, it was so warm, and soft, and indulgent, with all love’s sweetness and shelter. ‘The stain is on his name, and that you would drop. The law will release you. Come, come. You cannot live alone now, any more than I can. Think of what it means—craving light and love and happiness, all within reach, and we dying apart on the brink.’

‘No, no, don’t tempt me. Your desire is my weakness. Your voice draws my being from its roots, and my pulses beat to the rhythm of yours. See how much I confess, and then be merciful, and go.’

‘Is it always right to follow our ideal of duty, when nature points so clearly another way?’ he still urged. ‘What reason have we always to regard our judgment as better than hers, since she is so big and mighty, and we so small and helpless.’ He held her hand pressed against his lips, and I could hear his murmuring speech through the trembling fingers. ‘What is the past with such a present as ours, such a futureas we might have? My love would soon blot it from your memory. Trust me, Brases, I too have my past with its burden of regrets I would fain forget.’

‘Ah, had I met you before fatality crossed my path,’ she said, upon a quick sob, ‘when my palm was as clean as a child’s, how my spirit would have bounded to the wedding of yours! But that may never be now.’

Her arms dropped renouncingly, and the smile that travelled slowly over her blanched face shed a rapturous light upon his. His eyes held hers in willing bondage. Though this was her farewell I could divine the supreme effort that kept her from his arms, by the fingers fluttering like the wings of a bird against her dress, while it were hard to say which her half-lifted, gently averted face, with the eyes straining back to his, most eloquently expressed: surrender or renouncement.

Trueberry sprang to her and caught her to him, and their lips met in a kiss that had the solemnity of a sacrament. I staggered back, clapping my hand over my mouth to prevent a shout of white-hot anguish, and could see the darkness sweep down upon me like a big comfortingwing. I hoped it was death come to gather me like a suffering, inarticulate child, into its soft mother’s arms.

But I struggled back into life, and had again to front the road of care and blind endeavour. How long later I cannot say, but I saw Brases standing over me, looking at me in pitying wonder. She took my hand in both of hers, and bending, softly kissed my cheek. This was the mother’s kiss I hoped death had given me. I stared at her, too broken for wonder or emotion, and sitting down beside me, with my hand still in hers, she said—

‘We were very much frightened, you were so long unconscious. Mr. Trueberry told me you have not slept of late, and that you are very unhappy. I, too, am unhappy, and that is why I kissed you. But you are better now, and you will try to forget your pain, or, at least, to bear it well. It is the best any of us can do. They will drive you to Kilstern, and you will return to France alone, carrying my best wishes for your welfare. Mr. Trueberry has gone already.’

I struggled to my feet, swallowed the wine she poured out for me, and then, in a dull,uneager voice, asked, ‘Did Trueberry leave no message for me, Madame?’

‘He was very much concerned, and full of sympathy, but he has his own trouble to bear, and thinks he will bear it best alone. He will write to you to Paris in a few days.’

A trap was at the door, and she came out with me, and when we had shaken hands in silence, stood looking after me, as I was indeed forcibly carried away. She was dim to my sight, a mere blurred grey figure, with light about her head, and the landscape looked watery and broken, as if seen through bits of bobbing glass.

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