“If I depart from thee I cannot live;And in thy sight to die, what were it elseBut like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”
“If I depart from thee I cannot live;And in thy sight to die, what were it elseBut like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”
“If I depart from thee I cannot live;And in thy sight to die, what were it elseBut like a pleasant slumber in thy lap?”
Afterall, Lavinia is not unrecognizable. Scarcely has she left Mrs. Prince, whose brow is still creased by the thought of an imminent son-in-law, when one and another claim greetings from her, and in half an hour she has shaken hands with three parts of the gathering; has been presented to the strange clergy—St. Gengulpha’s has a new vicar since last year—and been cordially pressed by Christopher to feel the biceps of one of the East End curate’s arms, which has shown its merits in the just-ended tug-of-war.
In the eyes of all them to whom she was already known, has been welcome, a little hesitating surprise, and a not unkindly curiosity. They know that she has passed through deep waters since last in her bloom and bonniness they had looked upon her, though they little guess the awful Dead Sea bitterness of taste of the waters that have gone over her. Is she recovered enough to be treated like any one else? Will it be better to allude to her long absence,rejoicing in its having ended; or to take her reappearance for granted? Some answer the question in one way and some in the other, as tact or insight diversely guides them; and she responds quietly to all, with a gravely grateful look from under the frills of her white muslin hat, and that overpowering sense that the acquaintances that accost her are no more real than she herself. But she is not unrecognizable! Through the haze that enwraps her sensations pierces a throb of joyful reassurance, proportioned to the apprehension that had forerun it—an apprehension not formulated to herself, that if she has so changed as to be unknowable by persons, many of whom have been acquainted with her from childhood, she may, in the dim and distant possibility of their ever meeting again, be passed unrecognized by one whose whole knowledge of her had only covered six weeks.
She has come back from the grave! Is it any wonder that at first she walks in a maze—as one suddenly awakened from a century of sleep, doubtfully re-entering the kingdom of life? Glad voices are in the air around her; glad movement on the pleasant earth about her; a misty gladness, dim and vast, somewhere deep, deep down in her own being; and through it all a bewildering misgiving that this feast of life cannot be spread forher; that she does but dream, and will presently awake to the black gown, and the manuscript on the bureau, and the long treadmill of remorse and expiation.
She is roused from her trembling fantasies by the reality of Mrs. Darcy’s slender arm commandingly hooked into hers, and whirling her away to plaister a barked shin and stem a bleeding nose. But it is only as long as the need for her cobwebs and cold keys lasts that she can keep a hold upon the solid commonplaces of existence. Even while “God save the Queen” is melodiously ringing across the evening meads, even while the gratefully vociferous boys are making their sweet voices hoarse with prolonged cheering from the vehicles packed for their return, she falls back into the uncertain domain of the dream.
In the bustle of subsidiary adieux that follow those of the choir, in reciprocal congratulations upon success and thanks for help, Lavinia steals away unnoticed. She gives no directions to her feet whither to carry her, but, though otherwise will-less in the matter, they know that she shrinks from at once regaining the mournful emptiness of the house on the hill. Anywhere else—anything but that! It is all one to her!
Only a step to the hop-garden at the foot of Campion Place, only a rough cart-track running between the old red-brick wall of the latter and the green battalions of the hop-poles, now clothed with twining verdure from top to bottom. She strolls, still in a dream, along a green aisle, looking down a vista of apparently unending length, the bines, that have been tied round the poles to prevent their straggling, waving defiant strong tendrils over her head to stretch out and embrace the opposite rank, and make pointed arches of Early English in the green cathedral. Showers of pallid green bloomshang above her, so light and fairy-like in their airy droop, that it seems blasphemy to connect them as necessary concomitants with that contemptible creature—small beer! Parallel aisle upon aisle of riotous verdure, making one gigantic green fane!
At the end of the lofty silence beneath which she is passing burns an altar fire of evening sunshine; and towards it her feet, still without any conscious direction on her part, slowly carry her. But when the end of the vista is reached, and its verdant glow exchanged for the evening red of the fair pasture outside, the altar fire has moved further away, and is blazing with ruddy promise for to-morrow behind the trees of Rumsey Brake. Will she pursue it even thither? where for fifteen months her steps have never trod, which has been to her a banned place since——? Yet her feet still bear her onwards. In the sloping meadows through which she passes, lambs on that day were butting and bounding; there is neither butt nor bounding in the fleecy adults dully cropping and waddling to-night. There were buttercups—millions of buttercups—that day; to-day there are none! To-day the gate that leads into the Brake is open; on that day it was locked. With a shiver of retrospective passion, she recalls the roughness with which she had rebuffed his offer of help, knowing what a conflagration even so casual a contact must light in them both. After all, it might as well have happened then as later! She is on the very path now that they had paced in their burning pain—that woof of pain whose warp was stinging pleasure.
On that day the moor-hens were leading little dainty broods out of the sedge; to-day there is no life at all on the sunset-painted mirror of the pool. Only that hot blaze that has turned it into the semblance of a cup full of the rosy elixir of life! Here is where they paused to listen to the nightingale. Intolerable nightingale! forcing them to hear things forbidden—things that drove them away in terror of him and of each other; drove them away in the vain hope of averting what must happen, whathadto happen!
Hadto happen! Yes, anddidhappen! A sort of exaltation in what she has hitherto always shuddered from as the memory of a crime, takes possession of her. Itwasa sin! Under the circumstances it was a sin and a treachery! But she has paid for it. No one can say that she has not paid for it! and oh, if it could only happen again! The memory of her fault and her suffering alike grow faint; while with her whole tingling body and craving soul she feels again the grip of his arms, the thundering beat of his heart against her breast, the scorching insistence of his lips. She will go to the very spot where it happened; will tryst him there in the aching realism of a memory that seems for once to have been given the never-given privilege of saying to the dead past, bound hand and foot in grave-clothes, “Stand forth!”
Slowly she paces—her knees trembling a little in the vividness of that deliberate reconstruction—to the very place of their parting. A bend in the grass over-flung path hides it from her till she isclose upon it. The intervening curve is rounded, and her goal is reached. Rooted to the earth she stands; for hasn’t the force of her compelling passion evoked his spirit to meet hers? Yet had ever spirit such shoulders? such a sea-tanned face? such a blaze in such eagle eyes? It is no spirit; it is in very truth, in gallant bodily presence, her own dear upstanding fighting man, in the glory and vigour of his manhood, such as till now she has never seen him.
“I can neither live nor die without you, and I have come to tell you so!”
And the grip of his arms is no dream!
FINISPRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.