Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?—D. G. Rossetti.
Shall soul not somehow pay for soul?—D. G. Rossetti.
Fay did not sleep that night.
For a long time past, she seemed to have been gradually, inevitably approaching, dragging reluctant feet towards something horrible, unendurable. She could not look this veiled horror in the face. She never attempted to define it to herself. Her one object was to get away from it.
It had not sprung into life full grown. It had gradually taken form after Michael's imprisonment. At first it had been only an uneasy ghost that could be laid, a spectre across her path that could be avoided; but since she had come home it had slowly attained gigantic and terrifying proportions. It loomed before her now as a vague but insistent menace, from which she could no longer turn away.
A great change was coming over Fay, but she tacitly resisted it. She did not understand it, nor realise that the menace came from within her gates, was of the nature of an insurrection in the citadel of self. We do not always recognise the voice of the rebel soul when first it begins to speak hoarsely, unintelligibly, urgently from the dark cell to which we have relegated it.
Some of us are so constituted that we can look back at our past and see it as a gradation of steps, a sortof sequence, and can thus gain a kind of inkling of the nature of the next step against which we are even now striking our feet.
But poor Fay saw her life only as shattered, meaningless fragments, confused, mutilated masses without coherence. The masses and the gaps between them were of the same substance in her eyes. She wandered into her past as a child might wander among the rubbish heaps of its old home in ruins. She was vaguely conscious that there had been a design once in those unsightly mounds, that she had once lived in them. On that remnant of crazy wall clung a strip of wall-paper which she recognised as the paper in her own nursery; here a vestige of a staircase that had led to her mother's room. And as a child will gather up a little frockful of sticks and fallen remnants, and then drop them when they prove heavy, so Fay picked up out of her past tiny disjointed odds and ends of ideas and disquieting recollections, only to cast them aside again as burdensome and useless.
The point to which she wandered back most frequently—to stare blankly at it without comprehension—was her husband's appeal to her on his deathbed. To-night she had gone back to it again as to a tottering wall. She had worn a little pathway over heaps of miserable conjectures and twisted memories towards that particular place.
She saw again the duke's dying face, and the tender fixity of his eyes. She could almost hear his difficult waning voice saying:
"The sun shines. He does not see them, the spring and the sunshine. Since a year he does not see them.Francesca, how much longer will you keep your Cousin Michael in prison?"
Since a year he does not see them.
It was two years now.
The shock to Fay at the moment those words were spoken had been that her husband had known all the time. That revelation blotted out all other thoughts for the time being. It even blotted out all considerations of her own conduct towards Michael, which it might conceivably have rendered acute. It made her mind incapable of receiving the impression that the duke had perhaps hoped his deliberate last words might make on it; that surely she would not, after his death, still keep Michael in his cell. Throughout the early weeks of her widowhood Fay remained as one stunned. Even Magdalen, who hurried out to her, supposed at first that she was stunned by grief.
"Then Andrea knew all the time." That was the constant refrain of her bewildered, half-paralysed mind.
Gradually in the quiet monotonous life at Priesthope the question made itself felt. "How did he know?"
That question was never answered by Fay, deeply though she pondered over it. It remained a mystery to her all of her life. She recalled little scraps of his conversation, tiny incidents which might have shown her that he knew. But she had noticed nothing at the time. Her cheek burned when she recalled his tranquil, sarcastic voice.
"Not on the high road. You are in the right. How dusty, how dirty, is the high road! But I have known, not once, nor twice, women to murder men veryquietly. Oh! so gently and cleanly—to let them die."
When first she remembered those words of her dead husband, a horrible revulsion of feeling against him seized her. She had been vaguely miserable and remorseful at his death until those words, so tranquilly spoken in a primrose dawn, came back to her.
Then she was suddenly glad he was dead, gone for ever. She almost hated him once more. It was dreadful to live with people whom she did not understand, who knew things they kept secret, whose minds and thoughts and motives were incomprehensible to her, who believed horrible untrue things of her. It had been a fixed idea with Fay during her husband's lifetime that he believed horrible untrue things about her. But what they were she would have found it difficult to say.
Fay's was not a suspicious nature in its normal state, but most persons of feeble judgment become suspicious when life becomes difficult. They cannot judge, and consequently cannot trust. Fay had never learnt even so much of her husband as that she might have trusted him entirely. Now that he was gone without betraying her, the knowledge that he had known her secret and had guarded it faithfully did not make her feel, with a flood of humble contrition, how deeply she had misjudged him, how loyal he had been from first to last; it only aroused in her a sense of fear and anger. How secretive Andrea had been, how underhand! Perhaps part of the doom of a petty, self-centred nature is that it does not know when it has been generously and humanely dealt with.
When Fay had somewhat recovered from the shockof her husband's dying speech she had turned with all her might to Magdalen, had cast herself upon her, clung to her in a sort of desperation. Magdalen at any rate believed in her.
For many months after she came to Priesthope, her mind remained in a kind of stupor, and it seemed at first as if she were regaining a sort of calm, caught as it were from Magdalen's presence.
But gradually miserable brooding memories returned, and it seemed at last as if something in Magdalen's gentle serenity irritated instead of soothing Fay as heretofore. Was Magdalen a sort of unconscious ally of that fainting soul within Fay's fortress? Were chance words of Magdalen's beginning to make the rebel stir in his cell? At any rate something stirred. Something was making trouble. Fay began to shrink from Magdalen, involuntarily at first, then purposely for long moody intervals. Then she would be sarcastic and bitter with her, jibe at the housekeeping, and criticise the household arrangements. A day later she would be humbly and hysterically affectionate once more, asking to be forgiven for her waywardness. She could not live without the comfort of Magdalen's tenderness. And at times she could not live with it. Magdalen preserved an unmoved front. She ignored her sister's petulance and spasmodic fault-finding. She knew they were symptoms of some secret ill, but what that ill was she did not know. She kept the way open for Fay's sudden remorseful return to affectionate relations, and waited.
Those who, like Magdalen, do not put any value on themselves, are slow to take offence. It was not thatshe did not perceive a slight, or a rebuff, or a sneer at her expense, but she never, so to speak, picked up the offence flung at her. She let it lie, by the same instinct that led her to step aside in a narrow path rather than that her skirt should touch a dead mole. No one could know Magdalen long without seeing that she lived by a kind of spiritual instinct, as real to her as the natural instincts of animals.
Fay became more and more haggard and irritable as the months at Priesthope drew into a year. A new element of misery was added to her life by the sight of Wentworth, and his visits were becoming frequent. His mere presence made acute once more that other memory, partially blurred, persistently pushed aside—the memory of Michael in prison. The figure of the duke had temporarily displaced that other figure in its cell.
But now the remembrance of Michael, continually stirred up by poor Wentworth, with his set, bereaved face, was never suffered to sleep. With every week of her life it seemed to Fay some new pain came.
Magdalen could not comfort her. Magdalen, who was so fond of Michael.
If Magdalen knew!
Magdalen must never, never know.She could not live without Magdalen. Magdalen was not like Andrea in that. She at any rate was concealing nothing, could know nothing. Now that Andrea was dead, only one living person beside herselfknew—Michael. Fay was unconsciously growing to hate the thought of that one other person, to turn with horror from the remembrance of Michael: his sufferings, his patient life indeath filled her with nausea, disgust. Her vehement selfish passion for him had been smothered by the hideous débris which had been cast upon it.
She had never loved him, as the duke well knew, and now the shivering remembrance of him, constantly renewed by Wentworth, had become like a poignard in a wound that would not heal. Wentworth had to-day yet again unconsciously turned the dagger in the wound, and her whole being sickened and shuddered. Oh! if she could only tear out that sharp-bladed remembrance and cast it from her, then in time the aching wound in her life might heal, and she might become happy and well and at peace once more;—at peace like Magdalen. An envious anger flared up in her mind against Magdalen's calm and happy face.
Oh, if poor Michael could only die! He wanted to die. If only he could die and release her.Release her from what?
From her duty to speak and set him free? Those were the words which she never permitted the rebel voice within to say. Still, they were there, silenced for the time, but always waiting to be said. Their gagged whisper reached her in spite of herself.
Oh! if only Michael were dead and out of his suffering, then she would never be tortured by them any more. Then, too, her husband's words would lose their poisoned point, and she could thrust them forth from her mind for ever.
"Francesca, how much longer will you keep your cousin Michael in prison?"
Oh! Cruel, cruel Andrea, vindictive to the very gates of death.
Down the empty, whispering gallery of ghostly fears in which her life crouched, Michael's voice spoke to her also. She could hear his grave, low tones. "Think of me as in fairy-land."
That tender, compassionate message had a barbed point which pierced deeper even than the duke's words.
Her lover and her husband seemed to have conspired together to revenge themselves upon her.
Fay leaned her pretty head against the window-sill and sobbed convulsively.
Poor little soul in prison, weeping behind the bars of her cell, that only her own hands could open!
Were not Fay and Michael both prisoners, fast bound: she in misery, he only in iron.
The door opened gently and Magdalen came in in a long white wrapper, with a candle in her hand.
She put down the candle and came towards Fay. She did not speak. Her face quivered a little. She bent over the huddled figure in the window seat, and with a great tenderness drew it into her arms. For a moment Fay yielded to the comfort of the close encircling arms, and leaned her head against Magdalen's breast.
Then she wrenched herself free, and pushed her sister violently from her.
"Why do you come creeping in like that?" she said fiercely. "You only come to spy upon me."
Magdalen did not speak. She had withdrawn a pace, and stood looking at her sister, her face as white as her night-gown.
Fay turned her tear-drenched face to the window and looked fixedly out. There was a faint movement in the room. When she looked round Magdalen was gone.
Fay, worn with two years of partially eluded suffering, restless with pain, often sick at heart, was at last nearing the last ditch:—but she had not reached it yet.
Many more useless tears, many more nights of anguish, many more days of sullen despair still lay between her and that last refuge.
Il n'y a point de passé vide ou pauvre, il n'y a point d'événements misérables, il n'y a que des événements misérablement accueillis.—Maeterlinck.
Il n'y a point de passé vide ou pauvre, il n'y a point d'événements misérables, il n'y a que des événements misérablement accueillis.
—Maeterlinck.
Magdalen went back to her own room, and set down her candle on the dressing-table with a hand that trembled a little.
"I ought not to have gone," she said half aloud, "and yet—I knew she was awake and in trouble. And she nearly spoke to me to-day. I thought—perhaps at last—the time had come like it did with Mother. But I was wrong. I ought not to have gone."
The large room which had been her mother's, the elder Fay's, seemed to-night crowded with ghostly memories: awakened by the thought of the younger Fay sobbing in the room at the end of the passage.
In this room, in that bed, the elder Fay had died eighteen years ago.
How like the mother the child had become who had been named after her.
Magdalen saw again in memory the poor pretty apathetic mother who had taken so long to die; a grey-haired Fay, timid as the present Fay, unwise, inconsequent, blind as Fay, feebly unselfish, as alas! Fay was not.
There is in human nature a forlorn impulse, to which Mrs. Bellairs had yielded, to speak at last when the great silence draws near, of the things that have longcankered the heart, to lay upon others part of the unbearable burden of life just when death is about to remove move it. Mrs. Bellairs had always groped feebly in heavy manacles through life, in a sort of twilight, but her approaching freedom seemed towards the last to throw a light, faint and intermittent but still a light, on much that had lain confused and inexplicable in her mind. Many whispered confidences were poured into Magdalen's ears during those last weeks, faltered disjointed revelations, which cut deep into the sensitive stricken heart of the young girl, cutting possibly also new channels for all her after life to flow through.
Did the mother realise the needless anguish she inflicted on the spirit of the grave, silent girl of seventeen. Perhaps she was too near the great change to judge any longer—not that she had ever judged—what was wise or unwise, what was large or small. Trivial poisoned incidents and the deep wounds of life, petty unreasonable annoyances and acute memories were all jumbled together. She had never sorted them, and now she had ceased to know which was which. The feeble departing spirit wandered aimlessly among them.
"You must stand up to your father, Magdalen, when I'm gone. I never could. I was too much in love with him at first, and later on when I tried he had got the habit of my yielding to him, and it made a continual wretchedness if I opposed him. He always thought I did not love him if I did not consent to everything he wished, or if I did not think him right whatever he did. I did try to stand up about the children, but at last I gave up that too. I was not fit to have children, if I sacrificed their wellbeing to his caprice andhis whim, but that was what I did. I have been a poor mother, and an unfaithful friend, and an unjust mistress. Women like me have no business to marry....
"You don't remember Annie, do you? She was second housemaid, the best servant I ever had. She was engaged to William, the footman with the curly hair. He is butler now at Barford. She cared for him dreadfully, poor soul. But your father could not bear her because she had a squint, and he never gave me any peace till I parted with her. I did part with her—and I got her a good place—but—I spoilt her marriage. It did not take much spoiling perhaps, for after she was gone he soon began to walk with the kitchen maid, but—she had been kind to me. So good once when I was ill, and my maid was ill. She did everything for me. I have often cried about that at night since."
"Mother always used to tell me and I never believed it, but it is true—men are children and it is no good thinking them different. They never grow up. I don't know if there are any grown up men anywhere. I suppose there must be—but I have never met one. I don't know any Prime Ministers or Archbishops, but I expect they are just the same as your father in home life."
"I daresay your father will be sorry when I'm gone. People like your father are always very fond of someone who is dead, who has no longer any claim upon them: a mother or a sister, whom they did not take much trouble about when they were alive.
"Of course I am going to die first, but I sometimes used to think if your father died before me and if he were allowed to come back after death—such things do happen—I had a friend who saw a ghost once—whether he would be as vexed then at any little change as he is now. You know, Magdalen, it has always been a cross to me that the writing-table in my sitting-room is away from the light. My eyes were never strong. I moved it near the window when I first came here, but your father was annoyed and had it put back where it is now, because his mother always had it there. But I really could not see to write there. And I have often thought if he came back after he was dead whether he would mind if he found I had moved it nearer the window."
"The Bishop of Elvaston married us. I daresay you don't remember him, my dear. He died a few years later. He had a wart on his chin and he once shook hands with baby's feet. But he was good. He told me I must sacrifice all to love. But what has been the use of all my sacrifices, first of myself and then of others? Your father has not been the happier or the better for it, but the worse. I have let him do so many cruel little things for which others have suffered. It was not exactly that he did not see what he was doing. He would not see. Some people are like that. They won't look, and they become dreadfully angry if they are asked to look. I gave it up at last. Oh, my poor husband! I knew I had failed everybody else, but at any rate not him. But I see now,"—the weak voice broke—"I see now that I have failed him, too. Weought never to have married. Love is not any guide to happiness. Remember that, Magdalen. We were both weak. He was weak and domineering. I was weak and yielding. I don't know which is the worst."
As the shadows deepened all the tacit unforgiveness of a weak, down-trodden nature which has been vanquished by life whispered from the brink of the grave.
"I have never been loved. I have given everything, and I have had nothing back. Nothing. Nothing. Don't marry, Magdalen. Men are all like that. Lots of women say the same. They take everything and they give nothing. It is our own fault. We rear them to it from their cradles. From their schooldays we teach them that everything is to give way to them, beginning with the sisters. With men it is Take, Take, Take, until we have nothing left to give. I went bankrupt years ago. There is nothing left in me. Ihavenothing and Iamnothing. I'm not dying now. I have been dead for years."
"You say I am going to be at peace, Magdalen, but how do you know? I daresay I'm not. I daresay I am going to hell, but if I do I don't care. I don't care where I go so long as it is somewhere where there aren't any more husbands, and housekeeping, and home, weary, weary home, and complaints about food. I don't want ever to see anything again that I have known here. I am so tired of everything. I am tired to death."
Poor mother and poor daughter.
Who shall say what Magdalen's thoughts were as she supported her mother's feeble steps down to thegrave. Perhaps she learned at seventeen what most of us only learn late, so late, when life is half over.
Bitterness, humiliation, the passionate despair of the heart which has given all and has received nothing,—these belong not to the armed band of Love's pilgrims, though they dog his caravan across the desert.
These are only the vultures and jackal prowlers in Love's wake, ready to pounce on the faint hearted pilgrim who through weakness falls into the rear, where fang and talon lie in wait to swoop down and rend him.
If we adventure to be one of Love's pilgrims we must needs be long suffering and meek, if we are to win safe with him across the desert, and see at last his holy city.
Tears welled up into Magdalen's eyes as one piteous scene after another came back to her, enacted in this very room.
Poor little mother, who had seemed to Magdalen then so old and forlorn, who, when she died, had only been a year or two older than Magdalen herself was now.
And poor little wavering life sobbing in the room at the end of the passage over some mysterious trouble.
The elder Fay lived on in the younger Fay. Was she also to be vanquished by life, to become gradually embittered and resentful? There seemed to be nothing in her lot to make her so. What was it, what could it be that was casting a blight over Fay's life?
How to help her, how to release her from the self-imposed fetters in which her mother had lived and—died.
Just as some persons have the power of making something new out of refuse—paper out of rags—soMagdalen seemed to have the power of cherishing and transforming the weaker, meaner elements of the characters with which she came in contact. Certain qualities in those we are inclined to love daunt us. Insincerity, callousness, selfishness, treachery in its more refined aspects, these are apt to arouse at first incredulity and at last scorn in us. But they aroused neither in Magdalen. She saw them with clearness, and dealt tenderly with them.
What others discarded as worthless, she valued. To push aside the feeble and intermittent affection of a closed and self-centred nature, believing it is giving its best, what is that but to push aside a poor man's little offering. Many years ago Magdalen had accepted not without tears, one such offering from a very poor man indeed.
Loving-kindness, tenderness, have their warped, stunted shoots as well as their free-growing, stately blossoms. It is the same marvellous, fragrant life struggling to come forth through generous or barren soil. There are some thin, dwarfed, almost scentless flowers of love and friendship, of which we can discern the faint fragrance only when we are on our knees. But some of us have conscientious scruples about kneeling down except at shrines. Magdalen had not.
She knew that Fay cared but little for her in reality. But she also knew that she did care a little. Fay had turned to her many times, and had repulsed and forgotten her not a few times.
Magdalen had a good memory.
"When she really wants me she will turn to me again," she said tranquilly to herself.
Toute passion a son chemin de croix.
Toute passion a son chemin de croix.
And Michael?
What of him during these two endless years?
What did he think about during his first year in prison: what was the first waking in his cell like, the second, the third, the gradual discovery of what it means to be in prison? Was there a bird outside his window to wound him? The oncome of summer, the first thrill of autumn, how did he bear them?
His was not a mind that had ever dwelt for long upon itself. The egoist's torturing gift of introspection and self-analysis was not his. He had never pricked himself with that poisoned arrow. So far he had not thought it of great importance what befell him. Did he think so now? Did he brood over his adverse fate? Did he rebel against it, or did he accept it? Did angels of despair and anguish wrestle with him through the hot nights until the dawn? Did his famishing youth rise up against him? Or did that most blessed of all temperaments, the impersonal one, minister to him in his great need?
Perhaps at first he was supported by the thought that he was suffering voluntarily for Fay's sake. Perhaps during the first year he kept hold of the remembrance of her love for him. Perhaps in time he forgot what he had read in the depths of her terror-strickeneyes as he had emerged from behind the screen. There had been no thought of him at that moment in those violet eyes, no anxiety for him, no love.
Or perhaps he hadnotforgotten, and had realised that her love for him was very slenderly built. Perhaps it was the foreshadow of that realisation that had made him know in his first weeks in prison, before the trial, that she would not speak.
Michael had unconsciously readjusted several times already in pain his love for Fay. He did it again during that first year in prison. He saw that she was not capable of love as he understood it. He saw that she was not capable of a great sacrifice for his sake. The sacrifice which would have exonerated him had been altogether too great. Yes, he saw that. It had been cruel of him to think even for a moment that she might make it. What woman would! His opinions respecting the whole sex had to be gently lowered to meet the occasion. Nevertheless shedidlove him in her own flower-like way. She would certainly have made asmallsacrifice for his sake. His love was tenderly moved and re-niched into a smaller demand on hers, one that she could have met without too much distress. His bruised mind comforted itself with the conviction that if a slight sacrifice on her part could have saved him she would indubitably have made it.
After a year in prison the news tardily reached Michael through his friend, the doctor, that the duke was dead.
The news, so long expected, gave him a pang when it did at last arrive. He had liked the duke. For a moment they had been very near to each other.
But now,now, Fay would release him. It would still be painful to her to do so, but in a much lesser degree than heretofore. She would have to endure certain obvious, though groundless, inferences from which her delicacy would shrink. But she was free to marry him now, and that made all the difference as to the explanation she would have to give. A little courage was all that was needed, just enough to make a small sacrifice for him. She would certainly have that amount. The other had been too much to expect.But this——
Michael leaned his forehead against the stone wall of his cell, and sobbed for joy.
Oh! God was good. God was merciful. He knew how much he could bear. He knew that he was but dust. He had not tried him beyond his strength.
Michael was suffused with momentary shame at the joy that the death of his friend had brought him.
Nevertheless, like a mountain spring that will not be denied, joy ever rose and rose afresh within him.
Fay and he could marry now. The thought of her, the hungered craving for her was no longer a sin.
It was Sunday evening. The myriad bells of Venice were borne in a floating gossamer tangle of sound across the water.
Joy, overwhelming, suffocating joy inundated him.
He stumbled to his feet, and clung convulsively to the bars of his narrow window.
How often he had heard the bells, but never with this voice!
He looked out across the wide water with its floating islands, each with its little campanile. His eyes followed the sails of the fishing boats from Chioggia,floating like scarlet and orange butterflies in the pearl haze of the lagoon.
How often he had watched them in pain. How often he had turned his eyes from them lest that mad rage for freedom which entered at times into the man in the next cell, when the boats passed, should enter also into him, and break him upon its wheel.
He looked at the boats now with tears in his eyes. They gleamed at him like a promise straight from God. How freely they moved. Free as air; free as the sea-mew with its harsh cry wheeling close at hand under a luminous sky.
He also should be free soon, should float away past the gleaming islands, over a sea of pearl in a boat with an orange sail.
For Fay would come to him. The one woman in the world of counterfeits would come to him, and set him free. She would take him in her arms at last, and lay her cool healing touch upon his aching life. And he would lean his forehead against her breast, and his long apprenticeship to love would be over. It seemed to Michael that she was here already, her soft cheek against his.
He pressed his face to the stone wall, and whispered as to her:
"Fay, have I served you?"
He almost heard her tremulous whisper, "Yes."
"Do you still love me?"
"Yes."
"We may love each other now."
Again Fay's voice very low. "Yes."
It had to be like that. This moment was only a faintforeshadowing of that unendurable joy, which inevitably had to come.
A great trembling laid hold on Michael. He could not stand. He fell on his knees, but he could not kneel. He stretched himself face downwards on his pallet. But it was not low enough. He flung himself on the floor of his cell, but it was not low enough. A grave would hardly have been low enough. The resisting stone floor had to do instead.
And through the waves of awe and rapture that swept over him came faintly down to him, as from some dim world left behind, the bells of Venice, and the thin cry of the sea-mew rejoicing with him.
Can we call a life sad which has had in it one such blessed hour?
Luminous day followed luminous day, and the nights also were full of light. His work was nothing to him. The increasing heat was nothing to him. His chains were nothing to him.
But at last when the weeks drew into a month, two months, a chill doubt took up its abode with him. It was resolutely cast out. But it returned. It was fought against with desperation. It was scorned as want of faith. Michael's strength waned with each conflict. But it always returned. At last it became to him like a mysterious figure, always present with him.
"Fay," he whispered over and over again through the endless burning nights of summer. "Dear one, come soon."
There was neither speech nor language, only the lying bells in the dawn.
The shadow deepened.
A frightful suspense laid its cold, creeping hold on Michael.
What could have happened?
Was she ill?
Was she dead?
He waited, and waited, and waited. Time stood still.
Let no one say that he has found life difficult till he has known what it is to wait; till he has waited through the endless days that turn into weeks more slowly than an acorn turns into a sapling; through the unmoving weeks that turn into months more slowly than a sapling turns into a forest tree,—for a word which does not come.
Late in the autumn, six months and five days after the death of the duke—Michael marked each day with a scratch on the wall—he received a letter from Wentworth. He was allowed to receive two letters a year.
He dreaded to open it. He should hear she was dead. He had known all the time that she was dead. That flowerlike face was dust.
With half blind eyes, that made the words flicker and run into each other, he sought through Wentworth's long letter for her name. Bess, the retriever, had had puppies. The Bishop of Lostford's daughter had married his chaplain—a dull marriage, and the Bishop had not been able to resist appointing his son-in-law to a large living. The partridges had done well. He had got more the second time over than last year. But he did not care to shoot without Michael.
He found her name at last on the third sheet, just a casual sentence.
"Your cousin, the Duchess of Colle Alto, has come to live at Priesthope for good. She has been there nearly six months. I see her occasionally. At first she appeared quite stunned by grief, but she is becoming rather more cheerful as time passes on."
The letter fell out of Michael's hand.
"Rather more cheerful as time passes on."
Someone close at hand laughed, a loud, fierce laugh.
Michael looked up startled. He was alone. He never knew that it was he who had laughed.
"Rather more cheerful as time passes on."
He looked back and saw the months of waiting that lay behind him,—during which the time had passed on. He saw them pieced together into a kind of map; an endless desert of stones and thorns, and in the midst a little figure in the far distance, coming toiling towards him, under a blinding sun.
That figure was himself. And this was what he had reached at last. He had touched the goal.
She had left Italy for good. She had gone back to her own people; not lately, but long ago, months ago. When he had first heard of the duke's death, even while he was counting daily, hourly, on her coming as the sick man counts on the dawn; even then she was arranging to leave Italy for good. Even then, when he was expecting her day by day, she must have made up her mind not to speak. She would not face anything for his sake. She had decided to leave him to his fate.
She who looked so gentle, was hard; she who wept at a bird's grief over its rifled nest, was callous of suffering. She, who had seemed to love him—he felt stillher hands holding his hands against her breast—had never loved him. She did not know what love was.
She was inhuman, a monster. He saw it at last.
There is in love a spiritual repulsion to which physical repulsion at its worst is but a pale shadow. Those who give love to one who cannot love may not escape the stroke of that poisoned fang. Sooner or later that shudder has to come.
Only while we are young do we believe that the reverse of love is hate. We learn later, and that lesson we never forget, for love alone can teach it, that the reverse of love is egotism. The egoist cannot love. Can we endure that knowledge and go on loving? Can we be faithful, tender, selfless to one who exacts all and gives nothing, who forgets us and grieves us, even as day by day we forget and grieve our unforsaking and faithful God?
Can we endure for love of man what God endures for love of us?
The duke's words came back to Michael.
"Why do you deceive yourself, my friend? There is only one person for whom she has a permanent and deep affection—for her very charming self."
He had thought of her as his wife for six months and four days.
Michael beat his manacled hands against the wall till they bled. He broke his teeth against his chains.
If Fay had come in then he would have killed her, done her to death with the chains he had worn so patiently for her sake.
"IF FAY HAD COME IN THEN HE WOULD HAVE KILLED HER, DONE HER TO DEATH WITH THE CHAINS HE HAD WORN SO PATIENTLY FOR HER SAKE"
And that night the convict in the next cell, who had at times such wild outbursts of impotent rage when the boats went by, heard as he lay awake a low sound of strangled anguish, that ever stifled itself into silence, and ever broke forth anew, from dark to dawn.
Qui sait ce qui peut advenir de la fragilité des femmes? Qui sait jusq'où peut aller l'inconstance de ce sable mouvant?—Alfred de Musset.
Qui sait ce qui peut advenir de la fragilité des femmes? Qui sait jusq'où peut aller l'inconstance de ce sable mouvant?
—Alfred de Musset.
The Italian winter was closing in. The nights were bitter cold.
Had Michael reached at last the death of love? Was its strait gate too narrow for him?
After that one night he held his peace, even with himself, even with the walls of his cell. He did not sleep nor eat. He had no time to sleep or eat. He was absorbed in one idea.
Michael was not a thinker. He was a man of action, whose action, sharp, rapier-like, and instantaneous, was unsheathed only by instinctive feeling, by chivalry, honour, indignation, compassion, never by reflection, judgment, experience. He could not really think. What he learned had to reach him some other way. His mind only bungled up against ideas, hustled them, so to speak, till they turned savage.
He sat idly in his cell when his work was done. There was a kind of pressure on him, as if the walls were closing in on him. Sometimes he got up, and pushed them back with his hands.
The sun had shifted his setting as the winter drew in, and for a few minutes every afternoon laid a thong of red light upon his wall. He looked at it sternly while it burned. It looked back sternly at him.
He had no wish to be free now, no wish for anything.
The doctor came to see him, and looked closely at him, and spoke kindly to him. He was interested in the young Englishman, and, like several of the warders, was convinced of his innocence.
Michael took no notice of him, barely answered his questions. He was impatient of any interruption.
He was absorbed in one thought.
He had loved Fay for a long time. How long was it? Five years? Ten years? Owing to his peculiar fate love had usurped in Michael's life too large a place, the place which it holds in a woman's life, but which is unnatural in a man's. He did not know it, but he had travelled a long way on the road towards an entire oblivion of Fay when he came to Rome. But the one great precaution against her he had not taken. He had not replaced her, and "Only that which is replaced is destroyed." He had grown accustomed to loving her.
In these days he went over, slowly, minutely, every step of his long acquaintanceship with her, from the first day, when he was nineteen and she was seventeen, to the last evening six years later, when he had kissed the cold hand that could have saved him, and did not.
Old people, wise old learned people, smoke-dried Dons and genial bishops sitting in their dignified studies, had spoken with guarded frankness to him in his youth on the temptations of life. They had told him that love, save when it was sanctified by marriage, was only a physical passion, a temporary madness, afever which all men who were men underwent, but to which a man of principle did not succumb, and which if vigorously suppressed soon passed away.
Why had it not been so with him? He had never had to contend with the coarse forms of temptation of which his elders had spoken, as if they were an integral part of his youth.
Why, then, had he loved this pretty, false, selfish woman so long? Why had he allowed himself to be drawn back into her toils after he had known she was false? Why was he more weak, more credulous, more infatuated than other men?
The duke had actually been her husband, had actually possessed that wonderful creature, and yet he, under the glamour of her personal presence, which it made Michael gasp to think of, he, the duke, had not been deceived.
Why had he, Michael, been deceived?
He remembered the exhortations of his tepid-minded, painlessly married tutor at Oxford, who read the vilest French novels as a duty, and took a walk with his wife on fine afternoons; and whose cryptic warnings on the empire of the passions would have made a baboon blush.
Michael laughed suddenly as he recalled the mild old-maidish face. What was the old prig talking about? What did he know, dried up and shrivelled like a bit of seaweed between the leaves of a folio.
Everyone had told him wrong.
Why had they decried this awful power, why had they so confused it with sensual indulgence that he had had to disentangle it for himself? Why had they notwarned him, on the contrary, that the love of woman was a living death, a pitfall from which there was no escape, from the depths of which you might stare at the sky till you starved to death, as he was doing now.
With all their warnings they had not warned him, these grave men, these instructors of youth, who had never known any world except their little world of books, who ranged women into two camps, one in which they held a docile Tennysonian place, as chaste adorners of the sacred home, mothers of children, man's property, insipid angel housekeepers of his demure middle age; the other where they were depicted as cheap, vulgar temptresses, on a level with the wine cup and the gambling table.
Why had he allowed himself to be duped and hoodwinked by his elders and by his own shyness, into chastity? They had entreated him to believe it was the only happy life.It was not.To be faithful to his future wife. Ha! Ha! That was the beginning of the trap, the white sand neatly raked over the hidden gin.
If he had only lived like other men! If he had only listened to the worst among them, if he had only torn the veil early from every limb of that draped female figure, that iron maiden, if he had only seen it in its horror of nudity, with its sharp nails for eyes, and its jagged knives where the bosom should be, he should not be pressed to death in its embrace now.
He had been deceived, betrayed, fooled. That was why he was shut up. He had believed in a woman, had believed that the cobra's bite was only a wasp's sting. Good Lord, what an imbecile! He was insane of course,raving mad. And he had been here eighteen months and only saw the joke now.
Michael laughed again, shouted with laughter.
The sun was setting again. It was always setting now. It set in the mornings as well. The red thong of light was on the wall again. Blood red! He rocked to and fro shaking with laughter.
The doctor and a warder came in. It was just like them. They were always coming in when they were not wanted.
He pointed at the bar of light, stumbled to it, and tried to tear it from the wall. It had been there long enough. Too long. And as he tore at it with hands dyed crimson, something that was pressing upon him lightened suddenly, and the blood gushed forth from his mouth, flooding the sun-stained wall.
"I have put out that damned sunset at last," he said to himself as he fell.