If the Sun and Moon should doubtThey'd immediately go out.
If the Sun and Moon should doubtThey'd immediately go out.
Balked of his actual physical presence in one way I would seek it in another. Memory would essay where Visualization had at the ultimate instant always failed, and would guide me moment by moment through the whole of the old Torribridge time, from the first glimpse, and Uncle Simeon's introduction, through egg-day and fight-day to the supreme midnight hour; at last I found I could reconstruct our happiness together so vividly thatit was actually happening again. Eternity had turned backwards, the past had become the living present, I was sore from the cruel flogging, I was twelve-year-old Mary again, and Robbie's arms were around me. Then Memory in his turn failed me; in a swift physicalway I felt inside me the years scuttling back into their place: it was the old eternal present, and the ideal unconsummated, and the loneliness.
Then doubt and fear and need would all together assail me, pressing in unison the chief question. When he is real to you, are you as real to him? The answer was always Yes, and the answer was always No. In either case I fell to sorrowing for him: if he wanted me, because of his need; if he did not know he wanted me, because of his need also. And I would forget myself altogether, and think only of his need of love. How could I give him most, give myself to him most? How could I discover and lay at his feet the wild unimagined sacrifices for which my heart was aching? I knew I could give him everything, live for him only, destroy my own happiness for him, give him my heart, my life, my hope of everlasting death. Ah, for his sake I would take God's nameless gift of immortality, if He would but set Robbie free, grant him the eternal sleep. I would do the far greater thing than die for him; for him I would live for ever.
Ah, no, no, no!—Robbie asleep for ever, and me for ever alive. Ah, no, oh loving Heavenly Father, that alone I could not bear.
In two months I filled three large new volumes of Diary: all with Robbie.
Much of it was in the form of a series of letters between us. The first letter was addressed from me to him: a tremulous self-conscious composition, asking him to excuse my taking the liberty of writing, feeling certain that he would doubtless remember who I was, recalling that we had been rather good friends,n'est-ce-pas?, in that short period when we had been together as children, etc., etc. I tortured myself for a whole fortnight awaiting, in fear and delicious hope, his reply. This I composed—as I wanted to compose it: friendly, enthusiastically reminiscent, but not (being his first letter) so affectionate as to damage my scheme of a longcrescendoof ever more affectionate letters to come. Then my reply, and his reply, till soon the floodgates were opened.
"Oh, Robbie (at last I wrote), Tell me you are the same Robbie; that now, as a man, you are not some strange man I should not know, but that you have the same loving heart, only more passionate and tender than before; the same loving arms, only manlier and even more ready to embrace me; the same loving boy's face, only transfigured, developed, ennobled by the long lonely years of the love you have given me. Tell me that in body as well as spirit you are coming soon, to love me for ever as I do you."
"Oh, Robbie (at last I wrote), Tell me you are the same Robbie; that now, as a man, you are not some strange man I should not know, but that you have the same loving heart, only more passionate and tender than before; the same loving arms, only manlier and even more ready to embrace me; the same loving boy's face, only transfigured, developed, ennobled by the long lonely years of the love you have given me. Tell me that in body as well as spirit you are coming soon, to love me for ever as I do you."
He replied:
"Post haste I write, because I must speak back to you. I got your letter this morning, and ever since then have been full of it, and full of joy. Never in all the letters you have written me have I felt so much of you in it, never have I felt you so near, so completely in sympathy and understanding, so exquisitely, so utterly in love. (I cannot restrain myself from uttering this.) As I read and re-read your letter, I feel, at this very moment as I write, that we are alone, alone and together; I can hear you crying out and I send back the echo; but it is no echo now, for we are so near: only distances echo, my Mary dear. Tonight I am fuller than I have ever been before, full because of your inspiration, of your influence; but not this alone, because I am my own influence, and it is this which sways me now. The outer world is a great silence, a mere waste of towns and cities, empty and desolate as a city of the dead, a place of graves. All the people around me are shadows, are only for themselves, but we are for each other, and all all else is dead."The Christmas promise has come true for ever. Now it is a great joy to live, and not to live has no terrors. Everything is at the highest point of its change; all is changed by this thing we know, this secret we have discovered, and I am glad. We alone are its guardian, but it needs no guardian, because Mary and Robbie before discovered it, and have guarded it ever since."I shall come very soon now. But do not fret: this long absence in form has meant a more palpable presence in spirit. For the soul needs space: it flies, like a kite, and you hold the line; the line is of interminable distance, the kite of immeasurable power. It flies happy, among the life-giving, high breezes; and it makes you happy, a child at the other end, a child with a kite—the child whom I loved that night long ago and who loved me, the dear Mary whom I will love and who will love me for ever. She is the child who has not changed—it is the same face, though a woman's now, and it is with me by day and by night...."
"Post haste I write, because I must speak back to you. I got your letter this morning, and ever since then have been full of it, and full of joy. Never in all the letters you have written me have I felt so much of you in it, never have I felt you so near, so completely in sympathy and understanding, so exquisitely, so utterly in love. (I cannot restrain myself from uttering this.) As I read and re-read your letter, I feel, at this very moment as I write, that we are alone, alone and together; I can hear you crying out and I send back the echo; but it is no echo now, for we are so near: only distances echo, my Mary dear. Tonight I am fuller than I have ever been before, full because of your inspiration, of your influence; but not this alone, because I am my own influence, and it is this which sways me now. The outer world is a great silence, a mere waste of towns and cities, empty and desolate as a city of the dead, a place of graves. All the people around me are shadows, are only for themselves, but we are for each other, and all all else is dead.
"The Christmas promise has come true for ever. Now it is a great joy to live, and not to live has no terrors. Everything is at the highest point of its change; all is changed by this thing we know, this secret we have discovered, and I am glad. We alone are its guardian, but it needs no guardian, because Mary and Robbie before discovered it, and have guarded it ever since.
"I shall come very soon now. But do not fret: this long absence in form has meant a more palpable presence in spirit. For the soul needs space: it flies, like a kite, and you hold the line; the line is of interminable distance, the kite of immeasurable power. It flies happy, among the life-giving, high breezes; and it makes you happy, a child at the other end, a child with a kite—the child whom I loved that night long ago and who loved me, the dear Mary whom I will love and who will love me for ever. She is the child who has not changed—it is the same face, though a woman's now, and it is with me by day and by night...."
"Robin," I answered, "your letter is the goodliest yet: it has given me a day and a waking night of celestial happiness—for I had it yesterday only, and like you I reply 'post-haste.' You bring me to the house of happiness, and your banner over me is Love: but when will your left hand be under my head and your right hand embrace me? My lettersbring you happiness too: but when will you read them with the eyes of the flesh as well as the eyes of the spirit? You say you will come to me 'very soon:' but you will come before the ink on these pages has faded? (If it can ever fade, for it is the blood of my aching heart.)"Now dear, I kiss your brow, your dear eyes, your mouth; I place my lips upon your dear glorious little heart. All the love that was in the beginning of the world, that is in the universe now, that will people Paradise through all the everlasting years, is in me now; I assemble and concentrate it into this moment, into the kiss that I am giving you at this moment as I write. From face to feet, my heart's beloved, Good-night!"
"Robin," I answered, "your letter is the goodliest yet: it has given me a day and a waking night of celestial happiness—for I had it yesterday only, and like you I reply 'post-haste.' You bring me to the house of happiness, and your banner over me is Love: but when will your left hand be under my head and your right hand embrace me? My lettersbring you happiness too: but when will you read them with the eyes of the flesh as well as the eyes of the spirit? You say you will come to me 'very soon:' but you will come before the ink on these pages has faded? (If it can ever fade, for it is the blood of my aching heart.)
"Now dear, I kiss your brow, your dear eyes, your mouth; I place my lips upon your dear glorious little heart. All the love that was in the beginning of the world, that is in the universe now, that will people Paradise through all the everlasting years, is in me now; I assemble and concentrate it into this moment, into the kiss that I am giving you at this moment as I write. From face to feet, my heart's beloved, Good-night!"
At last, after two or three months of these imaginary letters, I wrote the real one which was the necessary condition of their ever becoming real: I wrote to Aunt Martha. I always wrote to her on her birthday: it was near birthday-time, so no other pretext was needed. I made my letter rather longer than usual, introducing the one thing that mattered with appropriately naïve and casual abruptness. "By-the-way," I asked, as careful after-thought, "do you ever hear anything now of Robert Grove. He was a nice boy, and I have often wondered what became of him?" And I made a Special Temporary Resolution to shut the door of my spirit as far as possible (weak proviso) till Aunt Martha should have given me some news.
It was only a day or two after writing this letter that a letter I received—from Lord Tawborough, now back in England—ushered in a new phase of spiritual trouble. Robbie had vanquished Almighty God: was he to be vanquished now by a mere peer of England? Very vividly the Stranger re-entered my imagination. He had thought it discreet and kinder to leave the Château almost immediately after the Fouquier crisis and Suzanne's flight, and in the turmoil of those days and of Elise's bitterness and then in the long loneliness and the following period of return to religion and to Robbie, he had been very little in my thoughts. This letter brought him gladly, warmly back. My heart brightened as I mused upon the well-loved features, the manifold gentleness, the secret sympathy, the goodness he had shown me, the delight I knew he found when near me. And this was no kindly benefactor's letter, no tenderest of distant cousin'sletter, no 7th of the Title's letter. It was but a Best Friend's letter. For a moment my heart recoiled from immediate irrepressible "Is it a Lover's letter?" Some one said "No": it was the Mary who wrote the mad missives to Robbie and the mad missives from Robbie to herself. Some one else said "Yes": it was the this-world Mary whom every one (save Mary) knew.
At that instant of time, I think, more surely and more strangely than at any other time in my life, I knew and in spiritual-physical fashion felt and understood that there was no such thing as "I": that there were many living and disparate beings inside me. As I mused pleasurably and lovingly on Tawborough (Quick! What was his Christian name?—I had never heard it, I must learn it, or invent it, find swiftly some endearing name to give him in my thoughts), not only Robbie, but the Mary who loved him beyond all heaven and earth, was some one far away, some one I had been, should be yet again, but was not now; some one else whom the present-moment "I" could contemplate from the outside, but from the inside not at all.
Thus there was no sense of conflict or contradiction. Simple souls say: You cannot love two people at once. Shrewder souls add: Not in the same way. Both miss the point, ignore the real mystery: thatyouis two folks and not one, a divine self and a human self: with two loves accordingly, a human love and a divine love. At the selfsame moment of time the two selves cannot both be in possession, and the two loves cannot be felt together. There is no clash and no conflict.
I reasoned out my hope. That the real Robbie, when I met him, would conquer utterly the human me, win all my liking, answer all my needs. Real Robbie and Dream Robbie would become one: real Mary and dream Mary would become one. Love would be everywhere, the two selves would mingle and make at last one Mary, the world would be revealed—God was in me, around me—I am the Universe—. There are no words....
But if chance—I dared not say Death—decreed that in this world I should never see Robbie? Then the human liking and earthly possibility could never merge into the divineromance. The quest my soul was created for would be over: Eternity would not be Love. Yet, I was a woman—and I loved the word "marry"—and the Stranger was my chief human liking and earthly possibility—and this world's happiness was worth possessing even though emptiness lay beyond.
So if Robbie is not given to you, said Reason, the Stranger will be a glorious second-best. "Glorious Second-Best." dinned Reason in my heart, and a whole crowd took up the echo: snobbery and sanity, and pride and probability, and intellectual sympathy and physical delight.
But first I would search the world for Robbie.
* * * * * * *
Suddenly my heart learned that Robbie, wherever he was, knew that I was musing thus: knew that I was toying with notions of Tawborough, and overhisdeathbed was meditating eventual treason. Suddenly my heart understood how his own was aching. The magnitude of my vileness sickened me. I could find no sleep, nor heart to sleep. All night I heard him crying out, saw his dear face wistful with doubt. I told him it was not true, that I loved him and him only. He did not hear me; I could not make him hear me; I knew that his heart was still aching.
I got out of bed, wrapped my dressing-gown around me, went through into the boudoir, and wrote in my Diary this following letter. (The inkpot was empty, and even if I had had the courage to take my candle and to go through the long dark corridor and down the stairs in search of ink, I should not have gone. For time was precious. I knew that, magically, each word as I wrote it would bring ease and comfort to Robbie somewhere far away, and my heart could not abide that his own should suffer for one moment longer. So I snatched a pencil, glad for Robbie's sake to mar the neat inky well-beloved uniformity of my eight years' diaries, and scrawled feverishly at the frantic dictation of my passionate heart. Today, as I copy, the pencil is faded, and the page the hardest to decipher in all the record):
To Robert Grove,Wheresoever You Are, my Dear!—How sorrowful you are tonight, how evil am I since I am the cause!But I write post-haste to send you tidings of comfort, to tell you there is no other in my heart but you, to send you my everlasting love. You came to me Christmas Night, and you came for ever. There has been no other, nor ever can.What can the man do that cometh after the king?My friend who is causing you such grief, you know who he is—tho' 'tis nine years now since the moment I knew you—tho' you have never seen him nor (in earthly way) even heard his name—I know that you know. He is Lord Tawborough, my cousin and my benefactor, and my very dear friend, tho' much older and cleverer than I. But do understand, dear Robbie, that the respect and affection in which I hold him areonlythe reflection of his generosity and loving kindness to me. It is he who gave me my education, gave me my good fortune, who has always been far, far too kind to me. And now that, here in this land, I have met with him again, I like him better than ever. How could I not?There is "like" for him and for you my whole girl's aching LOVE. Even when I am looking at my kind friend's face, suddenly I will stop the working of my mind and will turn to look for you, trying to grope out where in this world at the exact moment you are; and God always helps me to make a picture which I know is near reality. At this moment I can see you—vaguely—dreamily—in a bright city whose name I do not know, but where often I have sojourned in dreams. I cannot actuallytouchyou now: for our meeting-place is not in cities or houses or streets or fields; rather we go to meet each other in the skies and oh! Robbie! my spirit! my soul! what a meeting we have, how happy, how jubilant, how full of the glory which is not of the earth, unutterable, something I cannot speak, or say, or write; something only which tears my heart into a thousand particles of agony, which is the divinest, wildest, fiercest, holiest, sweetest joy of all. The agony of love, Robbie, how it wounds! The moments when, in vision, I cannot invoke your face, how cruelly long they seem! Then betimes your dear face forms among the mists of all my wildness and restlessness and smiles upon me in a peace that is infinite, and passeth all men's understanding. Now, Robbie, know that this is no earthly thing I have, you have, but a thing entirely of the soul, a gift entirely of God. It should leave us tolerant and truthful, ever knowing that no other friends (however dear) can ever endanger it, even conceive of its meaning; and ever waiting for its supreme fulfilment.Can I have this for any but you? Can any but you have this for me? Why, my Robbie, can you ask?I stretch out my arms through the unknown to reach you. I would comfort you, cover you with eternal kisses. Stretch your dear arms out too, put them around me, crush me against your breast.Come to me now, and come to me soon for the time that will be for ever.Mary of Christmas Night.
To Robert Grove,Wheresoever You Are, my Dear!—
How sorrowful you are tonight, how evil am I since I am the cause!But I write post-haste to send you tidings of comfort, to tell you there is no other in my heart but you, to send you my everlasting love. You came to me Christmas Night, and you came for ever. There has been no other, nor ever can.What can the man do that cometh after the king?
My friend who is causing you such grief, you know who he is—tho' 'tis nine years now since the moment I knew you—tho' you have never seen him nor (in earthly way) even heard his name—I know that you know. He is Lord Tawborough, my cousin and my benefactor, and my very dear friend, tho' much older and cleverer than I. But do understand, dear Robbie, that the respect and affection in which I hold him areonlythe reflection of his generosity and loving kindness to me. It is he who gave me my education, gave me my good fortune, who has always been far, far too kind to me. And now that, here in this land, I have met with him again, I like him better than ever. How could I not?
There is "like" for him and for you my whole girl's aching LOVE. Even when I am looking at my kind friend's face, suddenly I will stop the working of my mind and will turn to look for you, trying to grope out where in this world at the exact moment you are; and God always helps me to make a picture which I know is near reality. At this moment I can see you—vaguely—dreamily—in a bright city whose name I do not know, but where often I have sojourned in dreams. I cannot actuallytouchyou now: for our meeting-place is not in cities or houses or streets or fields; rather we go to meet each other in the skies and oh! Robbie! my spirit! my soul! what a meeting we have, how happy, how jubilant, how full of the glory which is not of the earth, unutterable, something I cannot speak, or say, or write; something only which tears my heart into a thousand particles of agony, which is the divinest, wildest, fiercest, holiest, sweetest joy of all. The agony of love, Robbie, how it wounds! The moments when, in vision, I cannot invoke your face, how cruelly long they seem! Then betimes your dear face forms among the mists of all my wildness and restlessness and smiles upon me in a peace that is infinite, and passeth all men's understanding. Now, Robbie, know that this is no earthly thing I have, you have, but a thing entirely of the soul, a gift entirely of God. It should leave us tolerant and truthful, ever knowing that no other friends (however dear) can ever endanger it, even conceive of its meaning; and ever waiting for its supreme fulfilment.
Can I have this for any but you? Can any but you have this for me? Why, my Robbie, can you ask?
I stretch out my arms through the unknown to reach you. I would comfort you, cover you with eternal kisses. Stretch your dear arms out too, put them around me, crush me against your breast.
Come to me now, and come to me soon for the time that will be for ever.
Mary of Christmas Night.
For over a year I was alone in the great empty château with my dreams.
I ate and slept, and took walks in the park and the country-lanes; I comforted the ever-shrivelling Countess; I read incessantly. But I did not live. The life of my soul was sometimes in the past, chiefly in the future, in the present not at all. By deliberate endeavour I made the present even less than it would have been, by encouraging myself to experience no emotion except in my dreamings, to take no interest in the small daily happenings (they were very small) of my Villebecq daily life, to remember that for me Life would begin at the moment when Vision and Reality became one. Till then the years were wasting. Time marked time. (Perhaps the real horror of Eternity—Time marking time for ever, with no Love beyond?)
In her reply to my birthday-letter Aunt Martha had omitted any reference to Robbie. It was a cruel disappointment. Probably she knew nothing, or had ignored or forgotten my query, thinking the postscript merely the casual after-thought it pretended to be, hardly calling for answer? Or perhaps, in a moment of intuition, such as might come even to Aunt Martha once in a way, she had divined the truth, and had deliberately omitted to reply?
After a while, the longing to get on the track of Robbie's this-world whereabouts—to hasten his Second Coming—became unbearable, and on Christmas Day 1869, being the Tenth Anniversary, I wrote to Aunt Martha again. I made the most of "A Happy New Year," and of the anxiety which I had for some months been beginning to feel as to my Grandmother's health and as to whether I ought not soon to be coming back to Devonshire once for all. Again, with beating heart, I penned the carefully thought-out afterthought. "By-the-way, I fancy I asked you once before, tho' can't remember your telling me anything on the point. Do you everhave news of Robert Grove who lived with you ten years ago, when I did? I sometimes think about him—he was a nice boy—and sometimes wonder where he is or what he may be doing?"
Was it by malice or accident that she consigned her barren response to the cry of my aching heart to a P.S. also? "You ask about Robert Grove: I have heard nothing of him for years. He must be a young man of 21 now."
Wretched woman! Well, I could wait no longer, I would go home and find him for myself. The main news in Aunt Martha's letter urged me to a like resolve:—"Mother and Aunt," she said, "are both ageing. Although Mother would never let you know it herself; also for fear of bringing to an end your life abroad, which she knows has been abundantly blessed to you—yet I know she would like you back."
I made up my mind at once—need for Robbie made the duty-call to my Grandmother's side clear and insistent—and told the weeping Countess within the hour.
Though her health was no better, Elise de Florian had at last decided to come home. When I wrote and told her I was returning to England, she replied that she would forward her plans and come back to Normandy at once. For the first few months after her departure she had ignored my existence except for formal courtesies in her infrequent letters to her mother. Then, suddenly, she had begun to write, and soon the letters were as friendly, as unhappy, and as passionate as the long talks in the old days together. I forgave her before I was half-way through the first letter, and had for some time been doing battle with Pride as to whether I should tell her how much I wanted to see her again.
She returned with Gabrielle one bitter January morning. I kissed her blue-pale forehead, and, as I gazed at the drawn ever-unloved face, felt for a moment bitterly ashamed of Love's triumphant futures that I hoped to garner in my own heart. That night I prayed God in His mercy to send her what her heart cried out for, knowing all the while that somehow God Himself could not grant my petition. I knew—understood physically—that Elise was a woman damned into the world to excite no supreme love in any heart; knew that ifI were a man I could not love her, knew that God had given her life without power to win the one good this life can give.
Next morning she was too frail to rise. At first we were hopeful, and put everything down to the fatigues of the long journey. As day succeeded day, however, and she was each day wearier, neither we nor she could elude the truth the doctor was whispering: that Mademoiselle was in the last and rapid stages of a decline.
One night I was lying in bed reading by candle-light. The door softly opened. My heart stopped. She stood there in a long white night-gown, trembling in the cold air, bare-footed, ghastly pale. There was something in the eyes that awed me.
"I am dying now," she said. Her voice was low, melodious, and as though from far-away; from another place, another body, another soul. "Some one must kiss me once—love me once, properly, before I go. Will you, Mary?"
I had jumped out of bed. I wrapped my dressing-gown round her, and supporting her cold and tottering body led her back to her own room, and comforting her all the while got her back into bed, and slipped down gently beside her.
I pressed her tenderly to me and told her a dozen foolish times that she would soon be better.
"No"—she spoke in English as I did—"it is over. I wish it had been over long ago. I had a heart that could have loved the world, but no one loved me in return. I shall die a good Catholic, but religion has never given me comfort—never what it has given you. I loved my little sister: but it was all one-sided, and that is not Love at all. Love is when the getting and the giving are equal, when the two bodies change souls. There is only love. Poor little Suzanne, she could not help it. I could never have seen in her eyes what I longed for her to see in mine. Oh, the need for some one to love me; sometimes my poor heart could have burst. I was not wanted in the world. I was—not—wanted."
The sentences came oddly, disjointedly, further and further apart.
For some moments she had not spoken. Then, suddenly, her arms tightened round me in supreme yearning; sheplaced her lips hard upon mine in an embrace of ultimate passionate sadness; her body trembled violently, and then, in a swift second, was still.
The lips were cold. My arms were round a corpse. I freed myself, got up, lit a candle.
The old misery had for ever left her eyes, which were happy, and full of love. I closed them reverently, kissed each lid as I closed it, and went out to awaken the household.
Immediately after the funeral, I left the desolate Château, the desolate Countess, the country of France soon to be made desolate, and, after nearly four years' absence, returned to my native land.
On Southampton Quay Lord Tawborough awaited me.
I saw him from the boat before I landed, and he saw me. I braved myself for the greeting: I would be pleasant, natural, would look him frankly in the eyes. I came down the little landing-bridge, we shook hands, for one half-instant of time I looked into his eyes; then self-consciousness and joy rolled through me like a tide, my heart beat unreasonably, I forgot who or where I was. When I got over the worst of it, I was conscious of how foolish I had been, and I flushed to think what he might be thinking. I still dared not look. He was busying himself with my luggage. We got into a cab, into a train....
If it was not love that filled me, what was it? If it was not love that I had seen for that swift second in his eyes, what was its name? Or was I once more judging others by my romantic self-conscious self, lending them looks and emotions they had never sought to borrow? Yet had he made this journey to Southampton for cousinship's sake, or through courtesy to my Grandmother, or for my mother's sake—or for any sake but mine? I knew that he had not. Then I must tell him I was "another's." How—without absurdity, immodesty? For I did not know, by any solid sign or certain token, that he loved me at all. He sat in the corner of the carriage reading his newspaper. I sat in my corner reading mine—the first English newspaper I had ever touched.
It was the last stage of our journey; we had changed at Exeter on to the North Devon line. He suddenly threw hisnewspaper aside and looked me bravely in the face, though he could not completely master his trembling eyes.
"Well, Miss Traies" (my name since my twenty-first birthday, when the lawyers had slain Miss Lee), "what are your plans? What are you going to do with your life? What is the program?" Would-be banteringly.
"You know," I replied. "I am coming home to help and look after my Grandmother and my Great-Aunt."
"They are old."
"So will you be one day."
"Perhaps I am old already. Do not mock at my poor grey hairs! But I wonder if I want to wait until I am as old as your Great-Aunt for some one to look after me. Young men want looking after, Miss Traies, as well as old women. Old age is lonely, but youth is lonelier. Perhaps there are younger folk than your good Grandmother and Great-Aunt whom you could help. There are men in the world too."
"I know," I said, realizing that in speaking aloud of my love of Robbie for the first time in all the years I should be doing the kindest thing to my dear friend the Stranger, and should at the same time be bringing that love magically nearer reality. For if I spoke of him, he was real: to utter his name to another human being made him suddenly part of this visible world. From this uttering of his name to meeting him was but a matter of hours—days. Devon was a little place: green fields and red loam flashed quickly past: as I spoke of him I saw him coming nearer. "I know—maybe thereisa man in the world I shall help—help him for all his life."
I could not look.
"Do I know him?" he asked. His voice was odd, toneless: steadied by supernatural effort: nearest despair, though still caressing hope.
"No," I replied shortly.
In the silence that followed I could see nothing, think nothing; hear nothing but my own negation ringing in my ears, harsher and more brutal as each second passed.
My cruelty filled me with exquisite pity: the insolent eternal offering from the soul that is not suffering to the soul that is. Poor heart, it could not be! My eyes were my chief difficulty:but the carriage window held resources. He went back to hisTimes.
Odd, crowding sensations overcame me as the train drew up in Tawborough station, the same to which, once upon a time, Satan Had Come—and the North Devon odour (western, immemorial, unmistakable: the smell of broad tidal rivers that are the sea, yet not the sea) filled my nostrils. We drove across the bridge: for the first moment the bright town spread out before me across the river wore the cardboard strangeness of a foreign land. There was an almost imperceptible instant of confusion, while my senses adjusted themselves to the changed physical world, and then the buildings around me—we had crossed the bridge by now—seemed normal, inevitable; and France was a dream I had to struggle to remember.
The same odd moment of physically-felt spiritual adjustment was repeated at the house, where my Grandmother stood at the gate of Number Eight to greet me. It was not so much that she was frailer, thinner, older, it was that she was a different person, or rather that the I who now beheld her was a different person from the I who had known her before, and to the new me she was a new creature. As I kissed her the years rolled back, my own self changed, and she was Grandmother of old.
Inside the house the strangeness and the same return were again repeated, this time less perceptibly. On the morrow I went very slowly over the whole house, remaining for some time in each room and staring at every corner and every article of furniture, while I summoned back to me all the ancient happenings that connected me with each. Here was Aunt Jael's front parlour, a little yellower, a little darker, a little dingier than of old. There on the floor by the window was the row of dismal etiolated plants, each in its earth-begrimed saucer. There was her bluebeard cupboard; I opened it, and a smell of decayed fruits and stale sweetmeats escaped; probably no one had been near it for months. There was a jar of ginger, and a French-plum jar. I got as far as handling the lids, but no further: what new flaming letters might not be writ within? Besides, the plums were probably bad, whileI neverreallycared for ginger. There too was the door that once had opened, through which a face of nameless horror once had peeped. There was Lord Benamuckee.
Here was the dining-room, with horsehair furniture and Axminster carpet perhaps shabbier than I remembered them, this room which all through my childhood, even too through my year in France, and in all my life since, has always,—in those moments when I behold myself from outside, when my soul flies away from my body and looks down upon it from afar—been the visual setting and earthly ambience of Mary. Here was the kitchen where Mrs. Cheese had lived, where Robinson Crewjoe had stealthily been born, where my love for scrubbing floors had for ever died. Here was the blue attic, cold, barren, airless; heavy with memories—of misery and cruelty and tears.
After a few nights' dreams in my old bedroom—confused visions of the Château and Fouquier and Elise and Napoleon—the four years of France became literally no more than a dream in my memory. I remembered them rather from the morning's impressions of these nightly visions than from the actual happenings themselves. If indeed they were actual happenings. For frequently I could not be sure, and would fancy that all the complex visions of the life in France had come to me in sleep: until Calendar and Common-Sense convinced me.
Aunt Jael seemed to share my illusions. She would ask me sometimes where I had been, and rail at me for "stopping out" so long, treating my absence as one of hours rather than years. Never, at any rate after the first day or two, did she treat me as though my life at Bear Lawn had been anything but continuous. I treated her likewise, swiftly forgetting the first moment of contact when (as with my Grandmother) she had seemed to me so much smaller, swarthier, dryer, older than in my memory: a stranger who immediately, imperceptibly, became familiar once again. She rarely got out of bed now, and her voice was huskier and less authoritative than of old. But she cursed and railed and threatened almost as bravely as ever. I alone had really changed, and wondered sometimes at the earlier Mary who had taken this bad old woman's imprecations so bitterly to heart. My new heart was too full of the hopes of love to feed on the broodingsof hate. Moreover, though the faithful thorned stick lay on the coverlet ready to hand for use it never struck out at me now, and the poor villainous veteran saw no service reminiscent of his ancient glory save floor-thumpings to summon meals—or Mary. I neither feared her nor hated her. I pitied her.
Some weeks before, Mrs. Cheese had been taken ill and had gone back to her friends in the country. About the same time Aunt Jael had taken permanently to her bed, and my Grandmother, who was herself rapidly failing, had had to attend to her sister and do the household work. Sister Briggs came to help in the kitchen in the mornings, and Simeon Greeber charitably allowed Aunt Martha to come over for the day on one or two occasions; but the two old women—the two dying old women—were virtually alone in the big house, with my Grandmother, probably the weaker of the two, struggling against pain, and against the fatigue which marks the journey's end, to keep on her feet for her sister's sake. I realized how selfish I had been not to have come sooner: except that in France another old woman had needed me almost as much.
"I'm glad 'eo've come, my dearie," said my Grandmother on the night of my return. "God has dealt very lovingly with me; but I am full of years, and 'tis time for me to go. I have finished the work He gave me to do. I was waiting for 'ee to come back, my dearie: now I can go Home."
I was sobbing.
"Don't 'ee," she reproved gently. "There is no place for sorrow. Heaven is near, and the peace of God which passeth all understanding."
One strange day I remember: the last valiant effort of Aunt Jael to revive the splendour of her stark imperial days. Glory and Salvation were old and frail now, especially Glory, and for a year and more, the Empress' famous Tuesdays had been abandoned.
"There'll be a last one," declared Aunt Jael, and one Tuesday morning when she felt stronger than usual, decreed a Final Feast. After dinner, which in the regular way I had taken to her in her bed, I helped her to dress, and gother down into the old armchair. Then, as bidden, I sallied forth, hired a cab, drove to Brother Brawn's (robing-house for Jordan) upon the Quay, and after infinite delay, while Glory made minutest traditional preparations with goat's milk, rusks and bags, haled those two mad old Christian women to Number Eight.
"Our last foregathering on earth," chuckled my Great-Aunt brightly throughout the afternoon.
Death was discussed till tea-time: with dogmatic satisfaction by Aunt Jael, with vulgar self-assurance by Salvation, with mystical hope by Glory, with reverent delight by my Grandmother.
"Though Death, mind 'ee, is a pain," said Salvation; wagging her head sagely.
"Nay, 'tis a portal," corrected Glory.
"Yes," said my Grandmother, "a portal to the Life Everlasting."
The Life Everlasting.Yet I looked and saw joy in the four old faces.
Glory was absolved her corner penitence for this Last Tea, and the five of us sat down when I had laid the table and got the meal ready.
Immediately a row began. Now saying grace was a strictly regulated detail of the Tuesday ritual. Decades of dispute had not enabled Aunt Jael to oust my Grandmother from an equal share in this privilege in our ordinary daily life alone, and a compromise had obtained through all the years I remember whereby Aunt Jael asked the blessing before breakfast and dinner, and Grandmother before tea and supper. But on Tuesdays, with two guests to be reckoned with, both of whom were as eager in pre-prandial "testimony" as their hostesses, the position was more complicated. Though sometimes challenged, the rule of taking turns Tuesday by Tuesday in saying grace, had gradually become established: a childish and democratic arrangement which can have been little to Aunt Jael's taste, but which, despite occasional bickerings, was accepted as early as I can remember.
It was for the privilege of asking the blessing at this Last Tea, this ultimate spread, that the dispute now arose.Grandmother and Glory took no part, but Aunt Jael and Salvation each swore it was her turn.
"We'll all ask a blessing," finally proposed my Grandmother. The suggestion was accepted, and in turn the Four Graces were solemnly declaimed.
Aunt Jael (stentorian, staccato):
"Oh Lord. Thou hast promised grace and glory to Thy Saints. Oh Lord. Change these husks to the fruitful meats of the spirit before our eyes. Support our footsteps to the Table of Thy bounties spread in the wilderness; where true believers may feast among the bones of those who sought Thee to their own destruction. Aymen."
My Grandmother (in a whisper, soft, sibilant):
"Behold us, O Lord of seedtime and harvest, set free from earthly care for a season that we may dwell on the bounties which Thy hand has provided. Thou preparest a table before us in the presence of our enemies (sic). Thy dear mercies now spread before us are many: sanctify them, we beg Thee, to our use, and us to Thy service. Make us ever grateful, and nourish us with the meat of Thy Word. For Jee-sus' sake."
Salvation (noisily; with sticky report, sound of spoon in treacle-jar sharply withdrawn):
"For what us are about to receive, may the Laur make we trewly thankful."
Glory (gauntly):
"Bless er-er-er these er-er-er meats!"
And we set to.
Grandmother prayed with me continually. She was too old to kneel. Propped up on her pillows, she would take my head upon her heart as I half-lay half-leant upon her bed. My vanity, my worldliness, my imperilled soul were the unvarying theme.
One night she stopped sharply in the middle of her prayer.
"Your soul, my dear, is not praying with me. The Lord tells me that at this moment your mind is on fleshly things. Look at the eyes of 'ee! You're hankering after earthly glory, after high station in this worldly life."
Then, after a moment's pause, shrewdly: "Has any oneever proposed to 'ee to give 'ee another station in life?"
"No. What do you mean, Grandmother? Who?"
"Nothing. Maybe no one." And she resumed her prayer.
I was more careful in pretending to listen, but ceased to listen at all. I was trying—with the conscientious, artificially lashed-up desperation of the egotistical soul that sees for a moment its own nakedness—to visualize what the Stranger's misery and hunger must be like if by some wild chance ("It is so," God shouted in my heart) he loved me, not as I loved him, but as I loved Robbie. Ah no, it could not be. There is never a love like our own.
" ... Send herThylove. ForJee-sus' sake. Aymen."
Soon Grandmother followed Aunt Jael, and took to her bed permanently. One Lord's Day evening I helped her upstairs for the last time.
My life was now spent in the two bedrooms where my Great-Aunt and Grandmother lay, and in crossing the corridor from one to the other as Aunt Jael's voice or my own sense of Grandmother's need alternatively summoned me. In the one room I was chiefly cursed at, in the other principally prayed for.
Sister Briggs came in most days to give me help in the kitchen; even so I found it a heavy task to do the whole work of the big house and to feed and mind and minister to two bedridden old women. But I preferred it to the heavy idleness of Villebecq: found waiting upon others more natural, more agreeable, more self-righteously satisfactory, than being waited upon. There was the pride of humility, the unctuous flattery of fatigue.
I never went out of doors except to Market and (for Breaking of Bread only) to Meeting. I had the lonely livelong day in which to work and to think of Robbie. Here I was back in Devon, the Devon where I had met him, the Devon where he lived: was I any whit the nearer finding him? My brain revolved in a futile circle of planlessness and hope: as usual, my imperial imagination failed cravenly when face to face with need for practical endeavour. The only plan I could decide upon was to broach the subject to Aunt Martha next time she should come over from Torribridge, to ask her brazenly for the address of the family in South Devon and the surname of Uncle Vivian, and then to write direct for news of my Beloved. It was high time Aunt Martha came over again—she had not been near her mother's bedside for a fortnight and more. When would she come?
My only other interest during these days was in the tremendous drama being enacted in the country I had just left. Unknown to my Grandmother I took in theTimesnewspaper daily, and had French ones specially sent to me. I followed every stage of the war and the political story with a passion that seemed sometimes incongruous in this bare Christian English house. What had Bear Lawn to do with this war?—or any other war? (I forgot that it had been built for barracks in the other Napoleon's day; that maybe redcoats who had seen and smashed Boney had slept and sworn in each familiar room.)
"Shall I tell you anything about the war?" I asked my Grandmother one evening. "There is only one war," she replied, "God's war with evil."
I was so infinitely more interested in persons than things, in the players than in the play, that never at any stage of these events across the Channel did I much reflect on their mighty political significance: how the Ruler of Europe who, through centuries, had lived in Paris, would live from this time onwards in Berlin; or how, together with the sword the last French Emperor handed to the first German Emperor at Sedan, he was handing also the secular leadership of civilization. I could only think of the hunch-shouldered suffering wretch who proffered the sword.
His lady, too, was an object-lesson for would-be empresses. Though if her fate was unambiguous, as the Lord's lessons are, the fashion in which she faced it was more doubtful, as History is. Some accounts spoke of her bravery: how calm and queenly she was while the savage mob in the Tuileries garden shrieked "Dethronement!" and would have torn her limb from limb—others of her cowardice: how cravenly she scuttled away at the first approach of realities, where a Maria Theresa would have driven hardily through the streets and by courage effected a revulsion of the people's feeling. Her Good-bye, how touching!—the last sad glance at the well-loved rooms in which for seventeen imperial years she had reigned, the thought for others, the dignified tears, the bitter "In France no one has the right to be unfortunate!" wrung from her anguished soul—or—the stealthy selfish escape under the protection of foreigners, the abandonmentof others, the skulking anxiety for her own skin only, the well-filled purse. The candid selfishness: "Do not think of me, think only of France"—or—the uneasy self-righteousness: "Have I not done my duty to the end?" "Yes, Madam": "I am on your arm" (to the Italian Ambassador): "Am I trembling?" "No, Madam, you are not trembling." "What more could I have done?": "Nothing, Madam."
How loving a wife she had been in the dark preceding weeks! In an agony of fear for her beloved husband's life if he should return to Paris, how she had sent him hourly telegrams, messages of aching anxiety and forethought and tenderness, to dissuade him from the project,—or—to keep him away from the Capital at all costs, since his return would put an end to her power, her Regency, the wreaking of her spites and vendettas, her even darker ambitions. How many hours of unrecorded prayer had she not spent with God!—praying for the sweet Emperor's safety—or—for the stray bullet that would achieve her ends.
France was ungrateful, France who had paid for her food and her follies for seventeen squandering years. And the journals were indiscriminating, to print such varying tales. And events were unkind, to give the poor later historian so embarrassing a choice between black and white and every colour between. But Fate was just, to turn his wheel abruptly against this over-fortunate woman; or unjust, maybe, to visit with spite so calamitous one who was no eviller or vainer than almost any other woman of us would have been in her place—no worse thanyou, Mary Lee.
No worse than me: granted. But in what way different from me, then, to have deserved those incomparable years? Ah, well, she would pay for them now: God gets even.
The place of pity is where Fate turns upon a nobler soul. I suffered with this gentle unscrupulous Man who had woo'd Ambition through the last dismal stages on the road where Ambition ends. A Bonaparte at the back of his armies, slinking from defeat to defeat. Bodily pain so monstrous that it could only be borne with the help of morphia injected every few hours by the sombre-faced young doctor who did duty for glittering aide-de-camp. A rudderless wretch, dragged at the heels of "his" army like so much tawdry baggage, a crownedcamp-follower, a commander without a command; flaunted by his officers, mocked by his soldiers, cajoled, disowned and threatened by his wife; not daring to return to his capital, not daring to show himself to his troops: shrinking back in the gorgeous Imperial carriage from the hisses of the townspeople in the cities of France he was abandoning to the foe, and the lewd and horrible insults of the troops. A hunchback haggard doll.
For Sedan he rouged himself. Why not? The play had lasted for eighteen years, and the hollow cheeks needed new cosmetics for the final scene. He quitted the stage with excruciating agony of soul and body, with painted dignity, with eternal inseparable calm. Nothing in his reign became him like the leaving it.
Vanity seeks ambition, and the end of ambition is Vanity. There is only love.
Before writing to Aunt Martha I waited for the moment in my aged kinswomen's increasing weakness when Conscience told me it was for their sakes only I was summoning her, and not for my own.
It was the second night after she had come. The hour was late, as Grandmother and Aunt Jael had been long in getting to sleep. Aunt Martha and I were sitting down to a bite of supper in the lamp-lit dining-room. All day I had been praying for boldness of heart and steadiness of voice that I might ask her my question. I stared now at her listless faded face. I was already moistening my lips for my introductory "I say, Aunt Martha—" or "By the way—."
Telepathy is true, or Coincidence longer-armed than Fate. I had not spoken the words; she took them out of my mouth.
"Oh, young Robert Grove: I forgot. Simeon heard he was dead—died nine years ago, I believe. Poor young fellow, how soon gone! How one longs to know that all was well with him before he died—."
I sat, staring.
For moments maybe. For Eternity perhaps. I do not know.
My heart was cold, my brain numb. My body and mind were gripped as in a vice; I could not move my head to one side or the other, I could not remove my unseeing eyes from a fixed point in emptiness straight before me; my brain could not work, could seek no details of where or when or why, could not move from one cramped corner of agony, in which it must listen ceaselessly to a far-away voice repeating "Robbie is dead. Robbie is dead. Robbie is dead."
I was nearly unconscious: there was no me left to be conscious. As in a dream I remember Aunt Martha being kind, being fussy, pleading, advising, exhorting, appealing. I would not, could not move. I sat in the same chair, in the same posture, staring, staring at nothing; speaking, speaking to no one. "Robbie is dead. Robbie is dead."
After a while Aunt Martha seemed to have gone. The lamp was still burning. Very slowly, through the hours of that eternal night, the meaning of what had happened entered my heart; broke my heart.
Grey morning light was entering the room. I got up from the chair, stiff and cramped after my long unmoving vigil, went up to my bedroom, discovered my diary in its secret haunt, brought theTimes-wrapped exercise-book downstairs again with me, blew out the lamp, and in the dim light of the autumn dawn, sat down amid the uncleared supper things to pen my last entry:—
"I am writing this at five o'clock on Lord's Day morning at the most miserable moment of my life. I have been up all night. I have not slept. I don't know how it happened: unless God, in His cruelty, heard the unspoken question in my heart and answered it through Aunt Martha's witless mouth. 'Oh, young Robert' she began—my heart stopped beating—'I forgot'! I could not have guessed what was coming, have guessed that his presence all these years was a lie, a vanity of my own creating.Dead.It was so terrible that I could not feel it soon, did not understand for a long time what it meant. My heart was broken; but did not understand. It is here, alone in the long night, that I have found out what it is. I can hardly see to write for my tears. What I feel, I cannot write. It is the cruellest thing (save creating me) that God has done to me; God who damned me into the world, hated, loveless. I have lived a life such as few girls—cowering, haunted, passionate; utterly unloving, unloved utterly. Then I loved this dark-haired boy on that Christmas Night when—more surely even than on Thy Jordan morning with me, O Lord God!—in tears and happiness I was BORN AGAIN. And ever since, in endless vision, with my soul and brain and body, I have been faint with loving him, and memory has kindled hope and hope excelled memory, and I have thanked the Lord God even for His nameless gift of immortality,—for it would be immortality with Robbie. God, I thought, had paid me for the unhappiness in which He had created me: He had given me Robbie. Year after year his heart was with me. I was gladder and more radiant than the ordinary happy woman could be. My heart sang aloud with my love."And now it is gone. It burns my heart as salt tears are burning my lashes. I understand. Love was never meant for me. I was conceived in hate. I shall die in hate. God gave me the wildest-loving soul He could fashion, and I kept it for my dear one only. And now my beloved is gone, gone to his long home, and the light is gone out of my life. For him there is no immortality: immortality is only for the damned. Sorrow is older than laughter, and sorrow alone lives. My lovely boy is dead for ever; I thank God only for this, that hehas spared him Eternity. And I, who loved him, must live on for ever alone: alone through all the merciless eternal years—oh, Christ Jesus on the Cross, strike me dead now, abolish the universe, abolish Thyself—ah Robbie, Robbie, come back."No, it is no good. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. For me it shall be weeping-time and mourning-time for ever. Joy and laughter are for other folk. I shall go, as I knew I must, the way of all my people, the way of bitterness and loneliness, the way of my Mother. (Mother dear, will God strive to keep us apart in Eternity?) I shall find no happiness under the sun; nor in heaven—nor hell—afterwards. The visions of the past can comfort me no more; for they were but phantoms of my own creating. This past year when night after night he has come to my body and soul, it was not he who came at all—his bright body was rotting in the grave (where? since when?)—but a cruel sham of Christ's, a silly clockwork presence born of my own love and hunger, a cowardly trick God played upon me."My beloved, there is Eternity and the grave between us. I cannot, dare not, conjure up your vision. In memory only, I will go back once, for the last time, to Christmas of long ago, feel your gentle dead arms around me, and kiss you Good-night and Good-bye.Mary Lee."
"I am writing this at five o'clock on Lord's Day morning at the most miserable moment of my life. I have been up all night. I have not slept. I don't know how it happened: unless God, in His cruelty, heard the unspoken question in my heart and answered it through Aunt Martha's witless mouth. 'Oh, young Robert' she began—my heart stopped beating—'I forgot'! I could not have guessed what was coming, have guessed that his presence all these years was a lie, a vanity of my own creating.Dead.It was so terrible that I could not feel it soon, did not understand for a long time what it meant. My heart was broken; but did not understand. It is here, alone in the long night, that I have found out what it is. I can hardly see to write for my tears. What I feel, I cannot write. It is the cruellest thing (save creating me) that God has done to me; God who damned me into the world, hated, loveless. I have lived a life such as few girls—cowering, haunted, passionate; utterly unloving, unloved utterly. Then I loved this dark-haired boy on that Christmas Night when—more surely even than on Thy Jordan morning with me, O Lord God!—in tears and happiness I was BORN AGAIN. And ever since, in endless vision, with my soul and brain and body, I have been faint with loving him, and memory has kindled hope and hope excelled memory, and I have thanked the Lord God even for His nameless gift of immortality,—for it would be immortality with Robbie. God, I thought, had paid me for the unhappiness in which He had created me: He had given me Robbie. Year after year his heart was with me. I was gladder and more radiant than the ordinary happy woman could be. My heart sang aloud with my love.
"And now it is gone. It burns my heart as salt tears are burning my lashes. I understand. Love was never meant for me. I was conceived in hate. I shall die in hate. God gave me the wildest-loving soul He could fashion, and I kept it for my dear one only. And now my beloved is gone, gone to his long home, and the light is gone out of my life. For him there is no immortality: immortality is only for the damned. Sorrow is older than laughter, and sorrow alone lives. My lovely boy is dead for ever; I thank God only for this, that hehas spared him Eternity. And I, who loved him, must live on for ever alone: alone through all the merciless eternal years—oh, Christ Jesus on the Cross, strike me dead now, abolish the universe, abolish Thyself—ah Robbie, Robbie, come back.
"No, it is no good. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. For me it shall be weeping-time and mourning-time for ever. Joy and laughter are for other folk. I shall go, as I knew I must, the way of all my people, the way of bitterness and loneliness, the way of my Mother. (Mother dear, will God strive to keep us apart in Eternity?) I shall find no happiness under the sun; nor in heaven—nor hell—afterwards. The visions of the past can comfort me no more; for they were but phantoms of my own creating. This past year when night after night he has come to my body and soul, it was not he who came at all—his bright body was rotting in the grave (where? since when?)—but a cruel sham of Christ's, a silly clockwork presence born of my own love and hunger, a cowardly trick God played upon me.
"My beloved, there is Eternity and the grave between us. I cannot, dare not, conjure up your vision. In memory only, I will go back once, for the last time, to Christmas of long ago, feel your gentle dead arms around me, and kiss you Good-night and Good-bye.
Mary Lee."
Grandmother and Aunt Jael were failing every hour. On the afternoon of the morrow of my misery old Doctor le Mesurier took me aside—I was the mistress now—and told me that for both of them it was only a matter of days.
"Which will be the first?" I asked him, between tears.
"I should not like to say."
"'Tis a close race, my dearie," was the way my Grandmother put it when, a few minutes later, I went upstairs to cry my heart out by her side: "a close race to glory, and the odds are even."
She smiled, with a tender frivolity that was new to me. New too was this form and manner of speech.
Both she and Aunt Jael knew that the end was near. I got a nurse the same evening, who took turns with me throughout the night, crossing from one bedroom to the other. I could not forget my own grief, but had little time to remember it. I was so dead-tired when I got to my bed that, almost for the first time in my life, there was no long waking-time: the breeding-time of misery and fear.
Aunt Jael developed jaundice, also a bronchial cough. She was soon too weak and suffering to be her own unpleasant self. The Devil, however, as late as four days before the end, made a last desperate struggle for the soul that had so long been His. It was one evening; I had brought the last beef-tea for the night, changed the hot-water jar, straightened her pillows and put everything right. Suddenly, without warning, she dashed the cup, full of the steaming liquid, into my face, which it cut and scalded; screaming the while like a mad thing. She was a vile, a repulsive sight. With her toothless hairy face distorted with rage, foul also with the dark-yellowish taint of the jaundice; with her beady black eyes gleaming savagely, her immense nose, her crested nightcap, she looked like some obscene monster, half-bird, half-witch. She clutched the ancient stick, slashed out at me savagely-feebly; her failureto hurt me bringing her to the last livid agony of rage. She screamed, grimaced, dribbled: "Ingrate, minx, harlot—oh, I'll kill 'ee, you and yer wicked idle Grandmother. I'll—." She was cut short by a fit of violent coughing. She lay back sweating with pain, almost unconscious with hate, her face too loathsome to behold. She was possessed of the Devil.
Drawn by the noise, the nurse came hurriedly from my Grandmother's room. But already Satan was cast out; now she was sobbing, grunting, wailing, in a maudlin pitiful way. For a moment our eyes met. I saw shame there, and my heart quickened towards her. "Never mind, Aunt. You had a nightmare. It is over now."
In the opposite bedroom, the end drew gentlier near. In her less painful hours, my Grandmother was livelier than I had ever known her. With the scent of Death's nostrils in the room, she grew skittish, gay, worldly. She gave me droll winks and knowing smiles, as she recounted pranks of eighty years ago: mighty jam-stealing forays, gingerbattues, historic bell-ringing expeditions; tremendous truantries, twelve-year-old amours.
"Grandmother," I said gravely (I was the godly parent now and she the child) "you've waited a long time to tell me this!" For a moment genuine priggery, and sour remembrance of the blows meted out for my own lean escapades, hindered my joining in her brazen glee. Then we laughed together till we cried.
"Ah, they were happy days," she said, wiping her eyes. "My unsaved days," she added, the holy familiar tone coming into her voice, "the days before I found the Lord."
Then she fell to talking of the Faith, and for the first and last time in her life spoke critically of the ways of the Lord's People.
"They do too much for them that are saved already, and too little to bring in them that are lost. 'Tain't the Lord's precept at all. 'Remember the ninety-and-nine.'"
As in everything, my Grandmother was right. Apart from the Foreign Field, our people make small stir to rescue the perishing. That, they feel, is not the business of religion: which is not so much to reclaim sinners as to edify saints, not to fight the Devil but to worship God. Thus they are in sharpest contrast with the later nineteenth-century evangelism,with its hordes of professional missioners—mountebanks, gipsies, Jews—its Transatlantic sensationalism and sentimentalism, its hysterical appeals to the spiritual egotism of the individual, its sinner hunts, its spectacular war with Satan.
Though they are not always free from the danger of spiritual pride, it may at least be said of our people that they worship the Lord in a quieter holier way, that they practise the fast-vanishing art of personal religion. Yet my Grandmother was right: "It is the sinners that Christ came to save. 'Remember the ninety-and-nine!'"
One morning I found Aunt Jael greatly changed. Her eyes were gentler than ever before, her face more peaceful.
I could see she had been waiting for me.
"Child," she said quickly, "is your Grandmother awake?" Her voice was soft.
"I haven't been in yet. I always come to you first. The nurse is with her."
"Go and see. I must speak to her."
"Speak to her, Aunt? You mean you want me to give her a message."
"No, Child. I must speak to her with my own voice. Go first and find whether she is awake."
"Yes," I reported.
"Now then. Open the door wide. Yes—now put that chair against it, so it can't swing to. Now go and do likewise with your Grandmother's door. First move me right to the edge of the bed—thank 'ee! There!" I propped her up amid her pillows.
Then with Grandmother and her door I did the same. (The nurse was downstairs.)
Though the two old women could not see each other, despite the width of the passage their faces cannot have been more than seven yards apart. Grandmother's deafness had increased with her years, but today, helped out now and then with a word from me, she heard everything. I stood just inside Grandmother's room, watching her face, and listening to Aunt Jael, whose voice was calm and clear.
"Can you hear me, Hannah?"
"Yes, Jael."
"Well, sister, I haven't many hours to go. The Lord is calling, but I've this to say to 'ee first. These eighty years we've been together I've been a hard sister to 'ee. These eighty years I've been a sinner. 'Ee 've been a loving forgiving woman, and I've been a bad and selfish one: full o' pride and wickedness. Before I go, I want to hear 'ee with your own lips say as 'ee forgive me, as maybe the Lord in His mercy will too—"
A fit of coughing cut her short. Her pride she had torn into shreds. Grandmother was sobbing with joy.
"Don't 'ee talk so, my dear! I've nothing to forgive 'ee."
"Hannah woman, 'tis not so. Come, oh say 'ee forgive me." The old woman was eager, desperate: pleading against time, against Eternity.
"I forgive 'ee," said my Grandmother.
The same evening Aunt Jael died in her sleep. The face was not ugly in death; the mouth was still hard and proud, but the eyes were serene.
She won the glory-race by just seven days. After this brief space of time—the same span as between my birth and my mother's death—my Grandmother followed.
It was the day after Aunt Jael's funeral. Towards the end she called me Rachel. At the very last she sat up in bed, gazed at me with a tenderness already radiant with the glory of the City of Heaven.
"I'm journeying away, Rachel,—up yonder. Mary is there. Can't 'ee see her, Rachel? What is the veil between 'ee?—I can see 'ee both. Look! There is New Jerusalem. The King in His Glory. Her words. Come—"
She fell back. I caught her in my arms. My soul could not follow.
About this time, indeed, persons in the play of Mary Lee were dying Hamletwise. One after another, swiftly, bodies were being trundled off the stage.
Aunt Jael's leadership of the Seven Old Maids of Tawborough was maintained in death. It was edifying to note that just as sixty years ago they had briskly emulated her Conversion, now with equal alacrity they followed her to her Home above.
Within three months Miss Glory Clinker departed. One February morning she went away; wide-eyed, stuttering, triumphant. I heard her last words. "The night is far spent, the day is at hand—er-er-er." Her eyes lit up; a beatific happiness brightened the kind foolish old face. "Er-er-er—." She was stammering before the Throne.
Of the Seven, Salvation alone survived for long: till her one hundred and fourth year, a few years only before the time at which I write, almost into the new century that is at hand. Her last words were incoherent. I could not catch them, though I tried to.
Pentecost Dodderidge outlived his most famous convert by seven months only. He was in his one hundredth year. A stroke of paralysis came suddenly, followed by a restless ten days, in which he suffered intense pain and displayed eternal patience, and which he filled with edifying epigrams and godly saws and instances, all reverently collected by the faithful ones around his bed and embodied in hisChoice Sayings. (The volume is before me as I write.) As the last saved soul to whom he had stood Baptist, and as the grand-niece and grandchild of "those two eminent bright jewels in our Saviour's crown," I was specially in request at the old man's bedside. His last words, spoken clearly and solemnly, with all the actor-like sincerity of his greatest days, were these, eachutterance coming a clear moment or two after the other:
"Peace within and rest."
"I have peace with God."
"The Peace of God which passeth all understanding—"
This, his last utterance, was given at about a quarter past eight. Some forty minutes later he passed away: voyaging peacefully to Heaven.
Of another death I knew only by hearsay. It was a Bonapartist intriguer who, just before the dynasty's disaster, had ratted to the Republicans, and in the struggle with the Red Commune of Paris became a spy for the Versaillais. I first saw the name and the bare fact in the French newspapers, but a fuller story reached me in another way. Of the Grand Rouquette, Red gaolers, a cage. A name on a list. One word at the foot: Condemned. A yard, a high wall covered with vines and creepers. A May morning, six priests who died like heroes, filthy insults, levelled rifles. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.Fire!an explosion. A curled-up corpse upon the ground.
His former employer lived a few years longer, keeping Death at bay by sheer fussiness. Her last gesture, Gabrielle wrote me, was a deprecatory shrug of the shoulder; her last (recorded) utterance "Enfin—"
In another, an uglier death than any, the human creature gave way to the passion of extreme sickening fear, to fawning appeals for God's mercy, to every last licence—except the use of the first person singular. I stood outside; Aunt Martha would not let me enter the room for very shame, though I peeped in once and saw the pale face livid with fear, streaming with sweat, contorted with agony of body and soul.
"Forgive, Lord, forgive!" he was whining, "all has been done for Thy sake. One sees one's filthy sinfulness, one sees the error of one's ways—"
Not in such cowardly supplication, but in arrogant prayer, prayer as to an equal, prayer to his young friend God, died a braver, wickeder old man. They found him kneeling against his bed: heart-failure, said the doctor. His face was insolent,beautiful, serene. His soul had strolled disdainfully into Heaven, as a gentleman's should. Among his papers were found two worn photographs; one of my mother, the only one she had ever had taken, showing her in all the innocent beauty of her maidenhood, the other of myself, taken in France, which, against my will Grandmother had managed to convey to him. On the back of each of them was written, in his hand-writing:—"I have kissed this picture to shreds. They do not know. God knows."
For me, those are his Last Words.