'That we are greater than we know!'
How it impresses itself upon us as the only miracle which will bear our leaning upon, and stand the strain of human questioning! It was borne in upon Eustace, as he sat bowed beside his dying sister, that through this fragile body and this failing breath the Eternal Mind was speaking, and that in Marie's love the Eternal Love was taking voice. He said so to her brokenly, and her sweet eyes smiled back upon him a divine answer of peace and faith.
Then she called faintly, 'Paul!' The distant figure came back; and she laid her head upon her husband's breast, while Eustace was gently drawn away by the nurse. Presently, he found himself mechanically taking food and mechanically listening to the low-voiced talk of the kindly white-capped woman who was attending to him. Every fact, every impression, was misery,—these details so unexpected, so irrevocable, so charged with terrible meaning, which the nurse was pouring out upon him,—that presence in the neighbouring room of which his every nerve was conscious,—and in front of him, like a frowning barrier shutting off the view of the future, the advancing horror of death! Yesterday, at the same time, he had been walking along the sandy Surrey roads, delighting in the last autumn harmonies of colour, and conscious of the dawn of a period of rest after a period of conflict, of the growth within him of a temper of quiet and rational resignation to the conditions of life and of his own individual lot, over the development of which the mere fact of his sister's existence had exercised a strong and steadying influence. Life, he had persuaded himself, was for him more than tolerable, even without love and marriage. The world of thought was warm and hospitable to him; he moved at ease within its friendly familiar limits; and in the world of personal relations, one heart was safely his, the sympathy and trust and tenderness of one human soul would never fail him at his need. And now this last tender bond was to be broken with a rough, incredible suddenness. The woman he loved with passion would never be his; for not even now, fresh from contact with his sister's dying hope, could he raise himself to any flattering vision of the future; and the woman he loved, with that intimate tenacity of affection which is the poetry of kinship, was to be taken from him by this cruel wastefulness of premature death. Could any man be more alone than he would be? And then suddenly a consciousness fell upon him which made him ashamed. In the neighbouring room his ear was caught now and then by an almost imperceptible, murmur of voices. What was his loss, his agony, compared to theirs?
When he softly returned into the room he found Marie lying as though asleep upon, her husband's arm. It seemed to him that since he had left her there had been a change. The face was more drawn, the look of exhaustion more defined. Paul sat beside her, his eyes riveted upon her. He scarcely seemed to notice his brother-in-law's entrance; it was as though he were rapidly losing consciousness of every fact but one; and never had Kendal seen any countenance so grief-stricken, so pinched with longing. But Marie heard the familiar step. She made a faint movement with her hand towards him, and he resumed his old place, his head bowed upon the bed. And so they sat through the morning, hardly moving, interchanging at long intervals a few words—those sad sacred words which well from the heart in the supreme moments of existence—words which, in the case of such natures as Marie de Châteauvieux, represent the intimate truths and fundamental ideas of the life that has gone before. There was nothing to hide, nothing to regret. A few kindly messages, a few womanly commissions, and every now and then a few words to her husband, as simple as the rest, but pregnant with the deepest thoughts and touching the vastest problems of humanity,—this was all. Marie was dying as she had lived—bravely, tenderly, simply.
Presently they roused her to take some nourishment, which she swallowed with difficulty. It gave her a momentary strength. Kendal heard himself called, and looked up. She had opened the hand lying on the bed, and he saw in it a small miniature case, which she moved towards him.
'Take it,' she said—oh, how faintly!—'to her. It is the only memento I can think of. She has been ill, Eustace: did I tell you? I forget. I should have gone—but for this. It is too much for her,—that life. It will break her down. You can save her and cherish her—you will. It seems as if I saw you—together!'
Then her eyes fell and she seemed to sleep—gently wandering now and then, and mentioning in her dying dream names and places which made the reality before them more and more terrible to the two hushed listeners, so different were the associations they called up. Was this white nerveless form, from which mind and breath were gently ebbing away, all that fate had grudgingly left to them, for a few more agonised moments, of the brilliant, high-bred woman who had been but yesterday the centre of an almost European network of friendships and interests! Love, loss, death,—oh, how unalterable is this essential content of life, embroider it and adorn it as we may!
Kendal had been startled by her words about Isabel Bretherton. He had not heard of any illness; it could hardly be serious, for he vaguely remembered that in the newspapers he had tried to read on the journey his eye had caught the familiar advertisement of theCalliope. It must have happened while he was in Surrey. He vaguely speculated about it now and then as he sat watching through the afternoon. But nothing seemed to matter very much to him—nothing but Marie and the slow on-coming of death.
At last when the wintry light was fading, when the lamps were being lit outside, and the bustle of the street seemed to penetrate in little intermittent waves of sound into the deep quiet of the room, Marie Raised herself and, with a fluttering sigh, withdrew her hand softly from her brother, and laid her arm round her husband's neck. He stooped to her—kissed the sweet lips and the face on which the lines of middle age had hardly settled—caught a wild alarm from her utter silence, called the nurse and Kendal, and all was over.
The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of the summer warmth vanishes from the air. It had been the saddest, dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realising her mistress's death.
It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little air of comfort over the forsakensalon. She had kindled the fire, watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the threshold into thesalon, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a sudden blow. He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down and closed the blinds, Félicie watching him anxiously from the landing through the half-open door. Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from the outside, said a kind word to Félicie, and himself slipped noiselessly down again and out into the Champs Elysées. There he had paced up and down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves were still hanging in the December air.
He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it. He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before, his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering. How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and possession after possession swept away, and still find the years tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to century the invincible motive power of the race?
Presently—by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit—his mind brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally turned outward—towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an onlooker—a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of his own,—these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes, which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his interest in his particularrôlehad been comparatively weak, and in analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a repressed and hidden energy. He had learnt in his own person what it means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton, and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of sorrow and passion. His first relation to her had been that of one who knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief, balm for his wound,—the answer of human tenderness to human need.
How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and hers! In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her. How was the news to be broken to her? He himself did not feel that he could leave his brother-in-law. There was a strong regard and sympathy between them; and his presence in the house of mourning would undoubtedly be useful to Paul for a while; besides, there were Marie's words—'Will you stay with him a few days—after—?'—which were binding on him. He must write, then; but it was only to be hoped that no newspaper would bring her the news before his letter could reach.
However, as the day wore on, Paul came noiselessly out of the quiet room where the white shrouded form seemed still to spread a tender presence round it, and said to Eustace with dry, piteous lips:
'I have remembered Miss Bretherton; you must go to her to-morrow, after—the funeral'
'I can't bear the thought of leaving you,' said Kendal, laying a brotherly hand on his shoulder, 'Let me write to-day.'
Paul shook his head. 'She has been ill. Any way it will be a great shock; but if you go it will be better.'
Kendal resisted a little more, but it seemed as if Marie's motherly carefulness over the bright creature who had charmed her had passed into Paul. He was saying what Marie would have said, taking thought as she would have taken it for one she loved, and it was settled as he wished.
When his long pacing in the Champs Elysées was over Kendal went back to find Paul busy with his wife's letters and trinkets, turning them over With a look of shivering forlornness, as though the thought of the uncompanioned lifetime to come were already closing upon him like some deadly chill in the air. Beside him lay two miniature cases open; one of them was the case which Eustace had received from his sister's hand on the afternoon before her death, and both of them contained identical portraits of Marie in her first brilliant womanhood.
'Do you remember them?' Paul said in his husky Voice, pointing them out to him. 'They were done when you were at college and she was twenty-three. Your mother had two taken—one for herself and one for your old aunt Marion. Your mother left me hers when she died, and your aunt's copy of it came back to us last year. Tell Miss Bretherton its history. She will prize it. It is the best picture still.'
Kendal made a sign of assent and took the case. Paul rose and stood beside him, mechanically spreading out his hands to the fire.
'To-morrow, as soon as you are gone, I shall go off to Italy. There are some little places in the south near Naples that she was very fond of. I shall stay about there for a while. As soon as I feel I can, I shall come back to the Senate and my work. It is the only thing left me,—she was so keen about it.' His voice sank into a whisper, and a long silence fell upon them. Women in moments of sorrow have the outlet of tears and caresses; men's great refuge is silence; but the silence may be charged with sympathy and the comfort of a shared grief. It was so in this case.
The afternoon light was fading, and Kendal was about to rise and make some necessary preparations for his journey, when Paul detained him, looking up at him with sunken eyes which seemed to carry in them all the history of the two nights just past. 'Will you ever ask her what Marie wished?' The tone was the even and passionless tone of one who for the moment feels none of the ordinary embarrassments of intercourse; Kendal met it with the same directness.
'Some day I shall ask her, or at least I shall let her know; but it will be no use.'
Paul shook his head, but whether in protest or agreement Kendal could hardly tell. Then he went back to his task of sorting the letters, and let the matter drop. It seemed as if he were scarcely capable of taking an interest in it for its own sake, but simply as a wish, a charge of Marie's.
Kendal parted from him in the evening with an aching heart, and was haunted for hours by the memory of the desolate figure returning slowly into the empty house, and by a sharp prevision of all the lonely nights and the uncomforted morrows which lay before the stricken man.
But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew nearer, and the shores of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him. He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible. Death and silence on the one side—oh, how true and how irreparable! But on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say, completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much alarmed the audience at theCalliopelast week. She was able to playElviraas usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.
He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless winter.
He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his embassy to Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to rights. They lay scattered about—books, proofs, and manuscript. As his orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must see her, and all my heart is hers!'
The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying the little case with him. As he stood outside the Bayswater house, in which she had settled for the winter, he realised that he had never yet been under her roof, never yet seen her at home. It was his own fault. She had asked him in her gracious way, on the first night ofElvira, to come and see her. But, instead of doing so, he had buried himself in his Surrey lodging, striving to bring the sober and austere influences of the country to bear upon the feverish indecision of his mood. Perhaps his disappearance and silence had wounded her; after all, he knew that he had some place in her thoughts.
The servant who opened the door demurred to his request to see Miss Bretherton. 'The doctor says, sir, that at home she must keep quiet; she has not seen any visitors just lately.' But Kendal persisted, and his card was taken in, while he waited the result. The servant hurried along the ground-floor passage, knocked at the door at the farther end, went in for a moment, and came out beckoning to him. He obeyed with a beating heart, and she threw open the door for him.
Inside stood Isabel Bretherton, with eager surprise and pleasure in her whole attitude. She had just risen from her chair, and was coming forward; a soft white cashmere shawl hung around her; her dress, of some dark rich stuff, fell with the flowing, stately lines peculiar to it; her face was slightly flushed, and the brilliancy of her colour, of her hair, of her white, outstretched hand, seemed to Kendal to take all the chill and gloom out of the winter air. She held some proof sheets of a new play in her hand, and the rest lay piled beside her on a little table.
'How kind of you, Mr. Kendal,' she said, advancing with her quick impulsive step towards him. 'I thought you had forgotten us, and I have been wanting your advice so badly! I have just been complaining of you a little in a letter to Madame de Châteauvieux! She—'
Then she suddenly stopped, checked and startled by his face. He was always colourless and thin, but the two nights he had just passed through had given him an expression of haggard exhaustion. His black eyes seemed to have lost the keenness which was so remarkable in them, and his prematurely gray hair gave him almost a look of age in spite of the lightness and pliancy of the figure.
He came forward, and took her hand nervously and closely in his own.
'I have come to bring you sad news,' he said gently, and seeking anxiously word by word how he might soften what, after all, could not be softened. 'M. de Châteauvieux sent me to you at once, that you should not hear in any other way. But it must be a shock to you—for you loved her!'
'Oh!' she cried, interrupting him, speaking in short, gasping words, and answering not so much his words as his look. 'She is ill—she is in danger—something has happened?'
'I was summoned on Wednesday,' said Kendal, helpless after all in the grip of the truth which would not be managed or controlled. 'When I got there she had been two days ill, and there was no hope.'
He paused; her eyes of agonised questioning implored him to go on. 'I was with her six hours—after I came she had no pain—it was quite peaceful, and—she died in the evening.'
She had been watching him open-eyed, every vestige of colour fading from cheek and lip; when he stopped, she gave a little cry. He let go her hand, and she sank into a chair near, so white and breathless that he was alarmed.
'Shall I get you water—shall I ring?' he asked after a moment or two, bending over her.
'No,' she whispered with difficulty; 'let me alone—just for a minute.'
He left her side, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece, waiting anxiously. She struggled against the physical oppression which had seized upon her, and fought it down bravely. But he noticed with a pang now that the flush was gone, that she looked fragile and worn, and, as his thought went back for a moment to the Surrey Sunday and her young rounded beauty among the spring green, he could have cried out in useless rebellion against the unyielding physical conditions which press upon and imprison the flame of life.
At last the faintness passed off, and she sat up, her hands clasped round her knees, and the tears running fast over her cheeks. Her grief was like herself—frank, simple, expressive.
'Will you tell me more about it? Oh, I cannot believe it! Why, only last week when I was ill she talked of coming to me! I have just been writing to her—there is my letter. I feel as if I could not bear it; she was like a mother to me in Paris. Oh, if I could have seen her!'
'You were one of her chief thoughts at the last,' said Kendal, much moved. And he went on to tell her the story of Marie's dying hours, describing that gentle withdrawal from life with a manly tenderness of feeling and a quick memory for all that could soften the impression of it to the listener. And then he brought out the miniature and gave it to her, and she accepted it with a fresh burst of sorrow, putting it to her lips, studying it and weeping over it, with an absolute spontaneity and self-abandonment which was lovely because it was so true.
'Oh, poor M. de Châteauvieux!' she cried after a long pause, looking up to him. 'How will he live without her? He will feel himself so forsaken!'
'Yes,' said Kendal huskily; 'he will be very lonely, but—one must learn to bear it.'
She gazed at him with quick startled sympathy, and all her womanly nature seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes. It was as though her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her. And then she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting between them. He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied standard. His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for his sister had touched and charmed her. But she had never been conscious of any intimacy with him. Still less had she ever dreamt of sharing a common grief with him, of weeping at his side. And the contrast between her old relation with him and this new solemn experience, rushing in upon her, filled her with emotion. The memory of the Nuneham day woke again in her—of the shock between her nature and his, of her overwhelming sense of the intellectual difference between them, and then of the thrill which his verdict uponElvirahad stirred in her. The relation which she had regarded as a mere intellectual and friendly one, but which had been far more real and important to her than even she herself had ever guessed, seemed to have transformed itself since he had entered the room into something close and personal. His last words had called up in her a sharp impression of the man's inmost nature as it was, beneath the polished scholarly surface. They had appealed to her on the simplest, commonest, human ground; she felt them impulsively as a call from him to her, and her own heart overflowed.
She rose, and went near to him, bending towards him like a spirit of healing, her whole soul in her eyes 'Oh, I am so sorry for you!' she exclaimed, and again the quick tears dropped. 'I know it is no common loss to you. You were so much more to each other than brother and sister often are. It is terrible for you.'
His whole man was stirred by her pity, by the eager expansiveness of her sympathy.
'Say it again!' he murmured, as their eyes met; 'say it again. It is so sweet—from you!'
There was a long pause; she stood as if fascinated, her hands falling slowly beside her. Her gaze wavered till the eyelids fell, and she stood absolutely motionless, the tears still on her cheek. The strange intoxicating force of feeling, set in motion by sorrow and pity, and the unsuspected influence of his love, was sweeping them out into deep waters. She could hardly breathe, but as he watched her all the manhood in him rose, and from the midst of grief put forward an imperious claim to the beloved and beautiful woman before him. He came forward a step, took the cold, unresisting hands, and, bending before her, pressed them to his lips, while her bewildered eyes looked down upon him.
'Your pity is heavenly,' he said brokenly; 'but give me more, give me more! I want your love!'
She gave a little start and cry, and, drawing away her hands from him, sank back on her chair. Her thoughts went flying back to the past—to the stretches of Surrey common, to the Nuneham woods, and all she had ever seen or imagined of his feelings towards her. She had never, never suspected him of loving her. She had sent him her friendly messages from Venice in the simplest good faith; she had joined in his sister's praises of him without a moment's self-consciousness. His approval of her play inElvirahad given her the same frank pleasure that a master's good word gives to a pupil—and all the time he had loved her—loved her! How strange! how incredible!
Kendal followed, bent over her, listened, but no word came. She was, indeed, too bewildered and overwhelmed to speak. The old bitter fear and certainty began to assert itself against the overmastering impulse which had led him on.
'I have startled you—shocked you,' he cried. 'I ought not to have spoken—and at such a time. It was your pity overcame me—your sweet womanly kindness. I have loved you, I think, ever since that first evening after theWhite Lady. At least, when I look back upon my feeling, I see that it was love from the beginning. After that day at Nuneham I knew that it was love; but I would not acknowledge it; I fought against it. It seemed to me that you would never forget that I had been harsh, that I had behaved rather like an enemy than a friend. But you did forget—you showed me how noble a woman could be, and every day after we parted in July I loved you more. I thought of you all the summer when I was buried in the Country—my days and nights were full of you. Then when your great success came—it was base of me—but all the time while I was sending my congratulations to you through my sister at Venice, I was really feeling that there was no more hope for me, and that some cruel force was carrying you away from me. Then cameElvira—and I seemed to give you up for ever.'
Her hands dropped from her face, and her great hazel eyes were fixed upon him with that intent look he remembered long ago when she had asked him for the 'truth' about herself and her position. But there was no pain in it now; nothing but wonder and a sweet moved questioning.
'Why?' The word was just breathed through her parted lips.
Kendal heard it with a start—the little sound loosed his speech and made him eloquent.
'Why? Because I thought you must inevitably be absorbed, swallowed up by the great new future before you; because my own life looked so gray and dull beside yours. I felt it impossible you should stoop from your height to love me, to yield your bright self to me, to give me heart for heart. So I went away that I might not trouble you. And then'—his voice sank lower still—'came the summons to Paris, and Marie on her death-bed tried to make me hope. And just now your pity drew the heart out of my lips. Let me hear you forgive me.'
Every word had reached its mark. She had realized at last something of the depth, the tenacity, the rich, illimitable promise of the passion which she had roused. The tenderness of Marie seemed to encompass them, and a sacred pathetic sense of death and loss drew them together. Her respect, her reverence, her interest had been yielded long ago; did this troubled yearning within mean something more, something infinitely greater?
She raised herself suddenly, and, as he knelt beside her, he felt her warm breath on his cheek, and a tear dropped on his hands, which her own were blindly and timidly seeking.
'Oh!' she whispered, or rather sobbed, 'I never dreamt of it. I never thought of anything like this. But—do not leave me again. I could not bear it.'
Kendal bowed his head upon the hands nestling in his, and it seemed to him as if life and time were suspended, as if he and she were standing within the 'wind-warm space' of love, while death and sorrow and parting—three grave and tender angels of benediction—kept watch and ward without.