Evelyn laughed.
“Oh, dear, no,” he said. “You see, I so often see no beauty in my sitters, because most people are so very plain. But I believe that the finest portraits of all are those which, when you look at them, make you feel as you would feel if you were on intimate terms and in the presence of the people they represent. Besides, people are so often quite unlike their faces; in that case you have to paint not what their faces are like but what they are like.”
Mr. Dennison’s tone was rising a little; that impressive baritone could never be shrill, but it was as if he wanted to be a tenor.
“Ah, that explains a great deal,” he said; “it explains why sometimes I find your portraits wholly unlike the people they represent. And the conclusion is that if I knew them better, I should find them more like.”
“That is exactly what I mean,” said Evelyn.
But here Lady Dover broke in.
“You must have some great talks, Mr. Dundas,” she said, “with Mr. Dennison; it is so interesting to hear different points of view. One cannot really grasp a question, can one, unless one hears both sides of it. I think Lady Ellington has finished. Let us go.”
But the verdict over this little passage of arms was unanimous; Mr. Dennison was no longer in anyone’s mind the pope and fountain-head of all art and all criticism thereon. His impressiveness had in the last ten minutes fallen into the disrepute of pomposity, his grave pronouncements were all discredited; a far more attractive gospel had been enunciated, far more attractive, too, was this new evangelist. And as Lady Dover passed him on the way out she had one more word.
“That is a delightful doctrine, Mr. Dundas,” she said. “You must really do a portrait of yourself, and if we think it is unlike, the remedy will be that we must see more of you.”
Evelyn drew his chair next to the Academician; he had heard the rise of voice and seen the symptoms of perturbation, to produce which there was nothing further from his intention.
“I’m afraid I talk awful rot,” he said, with the most disarming frankness.
Now Mr. Dennison was conscious of having been ratherrude and ruffled, he was also conscious that Evelyn’s temper had been calmer than the moon. He felt, too, the charm of this confession, which was so evidently not premeditated but natural.
“But that does not diminish my pleasure in meeting you, Mr. Dundas,” he said.
Afterwards the same triumphant march continued. Mr. Dennison even showed to Madge how a couple of his most astounding conjuring tricks were done, and Lady Ellington talked to her son-in-law in a corner about Madge, until the council of war summoned them to debate. Then, when it was decided that Madge should join the fishmongers on the river, Mr. Osborne instantly suggested that she would be Mrs. Sea-Trout, and though a cavilling mind might find in this but a futile attempt to establish himself once more as the life and soul of the party, it was not indeed so, but meant merely as a compliment, a tribute to Madge. Then, when the council of war was over, more remarkable things happened, for the whole party played Dumb-Crambo till long after half-past ten, quite forgetful, apparently, how important it was to get a good rest after all the day spent in the open air. How such a subversion of general usage occurred no one knew, but certainly there was something in Evelyn which conduced to silly gaiety. And nobody was a whit the worse for it, while the effects of the moon-light on the hills opposite, which had nightly been the admiration of the whole party, went totally unheeded, and all the exquisite lights and shadows, the subtlety of which it had become the office of Mr. Dennison to point out and Lady Dover to appreciate, might never have been in view at all.
Lady Ellington went with Madge to her room when the women retired; she had not really meant to do so, but Lady Dover’s “Good night” had made this necessary.
“Dear Madge,” she had said, “I know your mother will want to talk to you, so I shall not come to see you to your room. I hope you have everything you want. Breakfast at a quarter to ten, or would you rather have it in your room after your journey? We have been so late to-night too. How excellent Mr. Dundas’s last charade was. Only Mr. Dennison guessed. Good night, dear.”
Lady Ellington was thus, so to speak, forced into Madge’s room; she carried with her her glass of hot water, she carriedalso, which was even more warming, the memory of the undisguised welcome that not only Madge but the impossible artist had received. She almost, in fact, reconsidered her valuation of wealth; had Philip Home appeared in Evelyn’s place this evening, she knew quite well he would not have been able to stir the deadly gentility of this house half so well as the impossible artist. He could not have piped so as to make them dance, yet this, this key to the sort of set which she knew really mattered most, the solid, stolid, respectable upper class, had been just rats to his piping. His natural enjoyment, his animal spirits, to put that influence at its lowest, had simply played the deuce with the traditions of the house, where she herself never ventured to lift her voice in opposition or amendment to what was suggested. But Evelyn’s “Oh, let’s have one more Dumb-Crambo” had revised the laws of the Medes and Persians, and another they had. Even at the formal council of war he had refused to say what he would like to do to-morrow, a thing absolutely unprecedented.
“Oh, may I go and shoot if it is fine,” he had said, “and do nothing at all if it is wet? Don’t you hate shooting, Lord Dover, if your barrels are covered with rain? And birds look so awfully far away in the rain. But I should love to shoot in any case,” he added. “My goodness, Madge, think of the King’s Road and the ’buses.”
Yet all this revolt against the established laws, so Lady Ellington felt, had somehow not transgressed those laws of propriety which she was so careful about here. Evelyn, from ignorance, no doubt, rode rough-shod, and no one resented his trespasses. Even Lord Dover had been stirred into speech, a thing he did not usually indulge in except on the subject of the grouse that had been shot and the fish that had been killed that day.
“My dear boy,” he said, “you shall do exactly what you like to-morrow. There is a rod for you on the river, or we should like another gun on the moor. Tell us at breakfast.”
All this Lady Ellington took up to Madge’s room with her hot water; that Lady Dover would be as good as her word, and that, having asked these two to Glen Callan, would give them a genuine welcome, she had never doubted, but whatwas surprising she was the extreme personal success of her once better-forgotten son-in-law. This stronghold and central fortress of what was correct and proper had received him as if he was almost a new incarnation of what was correct and proper, or if that was putting it too strongly, at any rate as if no question of his correctness and propriety had ever arisen. Surprising though it was, it was wholly satisfactory.
“We are so late, dear Madge,” she said, “that I can only stop a minute. Has it not been a delightful evening?”
The desire to say something salutary struggled long in her mind. She wanted so much to indicate that it was for the sake of her feelings, even in consequence of her own intervention, that so charming a welcome had been extended to Madge and her husband. And to be quite truthful, it was not the instinct for truth that prevented her, but the quite certain knowledge that Madge would not stand anything that suggested a hint of patronisation. Besides the house was Lady Dover’s, that person who, as Lady Ellington was beginning to learn, was natural because she happened to be natural, and was quite truthful, not because this was a subtler sort of diplomacy. That naked dagger of truth was an implement that required a deal of mail-coat to ward off. Any moment Lady Dover might wreck any scheming policy with one candid word, and the corresponding surprise and candour of her eyes. But the welcome had been so warm that Madge could not but be warmed by it, even to the point of confession.
“Oh, mother,” she said, “I have been disquieting myself in vain. All this last month I have been wondering secretly whether people were going to be horrid to us. How senseless it all was! I have been thinking all sorts of things.”
She put down her candle and drew a couple of chairs to the fire.
“I have had all sorts of thoughts,” she said. “You see, you did not write to me. I thought you might—well, might have washed your hands of me. I thought that people like Lady Dover would think I had been heartless and Evelyn worse than heartless. I was hopelessly wrong; everybody is as nice as possible. But, heavens, how I have eaten my heart out over that all this month in London!”
She poked the fire with a certain viciousness, feeling thatshe pricked these bubbles of senseless fear as she pricked the bubbling gas of the burning coal.
“All in vain,” she said; “I have been making myself—no, not miserable, because I can’t be otherwise than happy, but disquieted with all sorts of foundationless fears. I thought people would disregard—yes, it is that—would disregard Evelyn and me; would talk of the fine day instead. And then, you see, Evelyn would also have nothing to do, nobody would want to be painted by him. We should be miserably poor; he would have to paint all sorts of things he had no taste for just to get a guinea or two and keep the pot boiling. Ah, I shouldn’t have minded that—the poverty, I mean—but what I should mind would be that he should have to work at what he felt was not worth working at. Don’t you see?”
Never perhaps before had Madge so given herself away to her mother. Lady Ellington’s system had been to snip off all awkward shoots, and train the plant, so to speak, in such a way as should make it most suitable as a table ornament. The table for which it was destined, it need hardly be remarked, was an opulent table. There was to be no wasting of sweetness on the desert air; Mayfair was to inhale its full odour. And as things now stood, the destination of this flower was as likely to be Mayfair as ever. Lady Ellington respected success, nobody more so, nor was there anything she respected so much, and on a rapid review of the evening, the success she felt inclined to respect most was that of her impossible son-in-law. If a plebiscite for popularity had knocked at the doors of the occupied bedrooms, she had no doubt as to the result of the election. There was nothing left for her but to retract, wholly and entirely, all her own resentment and rage at the marriage. And since this had to be done, it was better done at once.
“Dearest Madge,” she said, “how foolish of you to make yourself miserable! Of course at first I was vexed and troubled at it all, and I was, and am still, very sorry for Philip. But though I did wish that certain things had not happened, and that others had—I mean I wish that you had been in love with Philip, for I am sure you would have been very happy, yet since it was not to be so, and since you fell in love with Evelyn, what other issue could I have desired?”
Suddenly, quick as a lizard popping out and in again ofsome hole in the wall, there flashed through Madge’s mind the impression—“I don’t believe that.” She could not be held responsible for it, for it was not a thought she consciously entertained. It just put its head out and said “Here I am.” What, however, mattered more was that this was her mother’s avowed declaration now; these were the colours anyhow she intended to sail under. She had been launched anew, so to speak, with regard to her attitude towards her daughter, and Lady Dover had christened her, and broken a bottle of wine over her for good luck.
But having made her declaration, Lady Ellington thought she had better be moving. From a child Madge had been blessed with a memory of hideous exactitude, which enabled her, if she choose, to recall conversations with the most convincing verbal accuracy, and Lady Ellington did not feel equal, off-hand, to explaining some of those flower-like phrases which had, she felt certain, fallen from her in her interview with Madge after the thunderstorm in the New Forest, if perchance the fragrance of them might conceivably still linger in her daughter’s mind. Nor did she wish to be reminded, however remotely (and as she thought of this she made the greater speed) of the letter from Madge to Evelyn which had lain in the hall one afternoon as she came in, with regard to which her maternal instinct had prompted her to take so strong a line. So she again referred to the lateness of the hour, “all owing to those amusing games,” and took the rest of her hot water to finish in her own room.
But she need not have been afraid; nothing was further from Madge’s intention than to speak of such things, and though she could not help knowing that she did not believe what her mother had said, she deliberately turned her mind away, and so far from exercising her memory over the grounds of her disbelief, she put it all away from her thoughts. Such generosity was easy, her present great happiness made it that.
She felt in no mood to go to bed, even after the night she had spent in the train, and from the thought of the vain disquietude she had felt about how people would behave to them, she passed in thought to another disquietude that she told herself was as likely to be as vain as that. For what was the sense of measuring and gauging and taking soundingsinto the manner of Evelyn’s love for her, and comparing it unfavourably, to tell the truth, with hers for him? For she knew quite well, the whole fibre of her being knew, that in so far as he was complete at all, his love for her was complete; there were no reservations in it; he loved her with all his soul and strength. Yet when the best thing in the world was given her, here she was turning it over, and wondering, so to speak, if the ticket to show its price was still on it, and if it was decipherable! It is ill to look thus at any gift, but when that gift is the gift of love, which is without money and without price, such a deed is little short, so she told herself now, of a desecration.
The next day bore out the reliability of Lord Dover’s aneroid, and there was no fear of Evelyn finding rain-drops on his gun-barrel. The Honourable Company of Fishmongers—Mr. Osborne was at it again—went to the river, Mr. Dennison to a further point of view up the glen, and the shooters to the moor. They started a little before the party for the river, and Madge saw them off at the door. They were to shoot over a beat of moor not far from the house, which would bring them close to the river by lunch-time, and it was arranged that both parties should lunch together. Gladys started with them, for she was going to fish up the river from the lower reaches; Lady Ellington and Madge would begin on opposite sides at the top. This would bring them all together about two o’clock at what was called the Bridge-pool, where Madge, fishing on this side, would cross, meeting Lady Ellington and Gladys, who would have worked up from below, while the shooters converged on them from the moor.
It would indeed have been a sad heart that did not rejoice on such a morning, while to the happy the cup must overflow. There had been a slight touch of early frost in the night, which, as Madge skirted the river bank, which was still in shadow, lay now in thick, diamond drops on the grass, ready when the sun touched it to hover for a moment in wisps of thin mist, and then to be drawn up into the sparkle of the day. Swift and strong and coffee-coloured at her feet the splendid river roared on its way, full of breakers and billows at the head of the pools, and calming down intobroad, smooth surfaces before it quickened again into the woven ropes of water down which the river climbed to the next pool. Every pool, too, was a mystery, for who knew what silver-mailed monster might not be oaring his way about with flicks of the spade-like tail that clove the waters and sent him arrow-like up the stream? The mystery of it all, the romance of the gaudy fly thrown into this seething tumult of foam and breaker, its circling journey (followed by eager eye and beating heart) that might at any moment be interrupted by a swirl of waters unaccounted for by the stream, and perhaps the sight of a fin or a silver side; then a sudden check, the feeling of weight, the nodding of the tapering rod in assent, and the shrill scream of the reel—all this, all the possibility of every moment, the excitement and tension, all added effervescence to the vivid happiness that filled Madge and inspired all she did with a sort of rapture.
So step by step she made her way down the first pool; the broken water at the head gave no reply to the casting of the fly upon the waters, and with a little more line, and still a little more line as the pool grew broader, she went down to the tail. There, far out in mid-stream, was a big submerged rock, with a triangle of quiet water below it, and more line and more line went out before she could reach it. Then—oh, moment of joy!—the fly popped down on the far side of the rock, and with entrancing little jerks and oscillations of the rod, she drew it across the backwater. And then—she felt as if it must be so—the dark stream was severed, a fin cut the surface, the rod nodded, bent to a curve, with an accelerating whizz-z-z out ran the line, and a happy fishmonger looked anxiously, rapturously at her gillie.
A couple of hours later Madge had come to within a hundred yards of the Bridge-pool, her fish secure in the creel, and her aspirations for it reaching, somewhat sanguinely as she knew, as high as sixteen pounds. The Bridge-pool itself was this morning part of Lady Ellington’s water, for on Madge’s side it ran swirling and boiling round a great cliff of nearly precipitous rock, some fifty feet high, over which she had to pass before getting to the skeletonwire bridge which crossed the river just below the pool. She could see her mother half-way down the pool already, and called to her, but her voice was drowned by the hoarse bass of the stream as it plunged from rapid to rapid into the head of the pool below, and after trying in vain to make her hear, and communicate the glorious tidings of the fish, Madge followed her gillie up the steep, rocky pass which led over this cliff. As she mounted the stony stair, steep and lichen-ridden, the voice of the water that had been in her ears all morning, and rang there still like the tones of some secret, familiar friend, grew momently more faint, but another voice, the voice of the sunny noon, as friendly as the other, took its place, and grew more intense as the first faded. From the shadow and coolness and water-voices she emerged into the windy sunlight of the moor; bees buzzed hotly in the heather, making the thin, springlike stems of the ling quiver and nod beneath their honey-laden alightings, swallows and martins chided shrilly as they passed, and peewits cried that note which is sad or triumphant according to the mood of the hearer. Then as she gained the top of this rocky bastion, sounds more indicative of human presences were in the air, the report of a gun came from not far off, and immediately afterwards a string of shots. Though she had killed her salmon with such gusto only an hour or two before, Madge could not help a secret little joy at the thought that probably this particular grouse had run the gauntlet of all the guns and had escaped again for another spell of wild life on the heather. Then, following the gillie’s finger, she saw not half a mile away the shooting party, who were also approaching the generalrendez-vouswith the same coincident punctuality as she, while a quarter of a mile further down from this point of vantage she could see Gladys coming up. The shooters were walking in line across a very steep piece of brae that declined towards the river, three of them, but with the gillies and dog-men seeming quite a party. The hillside was covered with heather, and sown with great grey boulders.
Madge was a few minutes before the others; Gladys had still several hundred yards to go before she reached the bridge which was now but thirty yards off, while Lady Ellington had still the cream of the Bridge-pool in front of her, and she sat down on a big rock at the top of the cliffwhile the rest of the party converged. At this distance it was impossible to make out the identity of the shooters; they were but little grey blots on the hillside, but every now and then the muffled report of a shot or of two or three shots reached her, and though she had felt glad that one grouse had perhaps escaped the death-tubes, yet she felt glad another way that they seemed to be having good sport. Then her mind and her eye wandered; she looked up the glen down which she had come; she saw the river sparkling a mile away in torrent of sun-enlightened foam; above her climbed the heathery hill, crowned with the larches of the plantation round the house itself, and from the house the gleam of a vane caught her eye. Beside her sat the brown-bearded gillie, in restful Scotch silence, ready and courteous to reply should she speak to him, but silent till that happened. And “pop-pop” went the guns from the hillside opposite.
Suddenly he got up, looking across no longer vaguely, but with focussed eyes, and she turned. The little grey specks of men were closer, and it was possible now to see that there was some commotion among them. From the right a little grey speck was running down hill; from the left another was running up. And that was all.
Madge watched for a moment or two, still full of sunny thoughts. Then from the point of convergence of the little grey specks one started running towards the bridge by which she would cross. At that, faint as reflected starlight, an impulse of alarm came to her. But it was so slight that no trace of it appeared in her voice.
“What is happening, do you think?” she asked the gillie.
But the courteous Scotsman did not reply; he gazed a moment longer, and then ran down the steep descent to the bridge. And in Madge the faint feeling of alarm grew stronger, though no less indefinable, as she looked at the leaping little grey speck growing every moment larger. At last she saw who it was; it was Mr. Osborne jumping and running for all he was worth. At that she followed her gillie, and hurried after him across the wire bridge. And as if a drum had beat to arms, legions of fears no longer indefinable leaped into her brain in hideous tumult.
A hundred yards ahead her gillie had met the running figure, and in a moment he had slung off the creel and startedto run towards her, leaving Mr. Osborne to drop down, as if exhausted, in the heather.
“What is it?” she cried as he approached.
“An accident, ma’am,” he said. “I don’t know what.”
Madge did not delay him, but went on towards Mr. Osborne. As she got near he sprang up from his seat.
“Ah, my dear Mrs. Dundas,” he said; “don’t go—don’t go!”
His panting breath made him pause a moment, but he looked at her face of agony and apprehension, and, clenching his hands, went on.
“No, not killed; there is nobody dead. But there has been an accident, a ricochet off one of those rocks. Someone has been—yes, my poor, dear lady, it is your husband. But don’t go; it is terrible.”
But before he could say more to stop her she had passed him, and was running up the hill.
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SINCE the moment when the ice had been broken between Philip and Tom Merivale, and, what was perhaps more vital, since that terrible ice round Philip’s heart had begun to thaw, talk between them, till then so scanty and superficial, had taken a plunge into the depths of things, into those cool, wavering obscurities that lie round the springs of life and death. And the import of this was perhaps no less weighty to the Hermit than it was to Philip; never before had he unveiled, not his mystery, but his exceeding simplicity, to another, except in so far as half-laughing paradox and the apparent marvel of the nightingale that sat on his hand and sang could be considered as unveiling. But he was very conscious in himself, with that premonition that birds and beasts, and all the living things, that have not had their natural instincts blunted for generations by indoor and artificial life, possess, that something critical was at hand. What that was he could not guess, and, indeed, refrained from trying to do so. But for months now he had waited for some revelation, as a neophyte waits for a further initiation. As far as he could tell he knew all the secrets of that antechamber in which he waited. Up to a certain point his knowledge was complete and consolidated; the joy of animate nature was utterly his, no thrush or scudding blackbird knew better than he the joy that comes from the mere fact of life and air and food and sleep and drink, of which every moment brings its own reward. To none, too, could he have stated this so easily as to his old friend, and the very fact that Philip was but now just beginning to emerge from black and bitter waters, made his understanding of it more piercing. It was the fresh, vital air to a man who has sunk and nearly been drowned in a pool, from the depths of which he has but just had strength to struggle, and lie with eyes but half open and mouth that could only just drink in the freshness ofthe day God made. And it was this very sunlight and freshness of air which penetrated to those other depths which were the springs of life and death. From the bitter depth of his own hell Philip had swum up into life, and yet as he went up he was getting down, by the same movement, into other depths; but these were cool, and no blackness mingled with their veiled obscurities.
Early September this year in the New Forest had harked back to June. After that day or two of storm and hot rain, the weather had cleared again, and a week of golden hours, golden with the sun by day and with the myriad shining of the stars by night, made one almost believe that time had stopped, or that its incessant wheel had begun to run back to the clean and early days of the world. That moment which had come to Philip, when the outpouring of his bitterness and resentment were stayed, was an epoch to him, which ranked by itself. It drew away from his other days and deeds, it was a leaven that worked incessantly, clouds cleared, Marah itself began to grow sweet, and splash by splash pieces of his bitterness dropped like stones into that sea of forgetfulness and forgiveness which, before any soul is complete and ready to stand before God, must spread from pole to pole. The determination to forget in most cases, as here, sets the tides on the flow; forgiveness, the higher quality, is often the natural sequel. Yet to forget a grudge is to have forgiven it, while forgiveness may be a hard, metallic thing—the best perhaps of which we are capable—but it will not grow soft until forgetfulness has come as well. The cause for the grudge must cease to exist in the mind before the grudge can be wholly forgiven. Poor Philip was not near that yet, but still bits of the grudge kept falling into the sea of forgetfulness as from the stalactitic roof of a cavern. Some dropped on the beach merely, and were still hard and unabsorbed, but others fell fair, and a dead splash was the end of them.
These tranquil golden days helped it all; while the huge beeches grew slim and straight against the sky, while the warm, wholesome air was an anæsthetic to his pain, and while above all this serene, joyous youth, a patent, undeniable proof of the practical power of inward happiness, was withhim, it became daily more impossible to nurse and cherish any bitterness, however well nourished.
Philip had been here now nearly three weeks, and for the last ten days he had lived completely cut off from any world but this. Telegrams and communications at first had followed him from the City, but times were quiet, and he had entrusted his junior partner with all power to act in his absence, saying also that he felt sure that no business need be referred to him. He wanted a month’s complete rest, and if any news or call for a decision came to him he would disregard it. He was to be considered as at sea; nothing must reach him. Also he had begged Tom Merivale not to take in any daily paper on his account; he was at sea—that was exactly it—without the disadvantage of having to sleep in a berth and use a quarter-deck for exercise. But on this transitory planet an end to all things comes sooner or later, even when those things are as imperishable as golden days. And, physically and spiritually, the end was very near.
They had dined one night as usual on the verandah, but for the first time for ten days the wonderful twilight of stars was quenched, and a thick blanket of cloud again overset the sky, and the heat of the evening portended thunder. A week before this Merivale had told his friend of that thunderstorm when Madge had been here with Evelyn, and had confessed to passive complicity in their love. Philip had not resented this either openly or secretly; Merivale had not encouraged it; he had, so he thought to himself, but seen that it was inevitable. And to-night the thunderous air brought up the previous storm to the Hermit’s mind.
“The traces of that are cleared away,” he said. “The tree that was struck is firewood in the wood-shed now. But there is a wound; the senseless fire came down from Heaven; it killed a beautiful living thing, that tree.”
They had finished dinner, and Philip turned his chair sideways to the table.
“Yes, and where is the compensation?” he said. “Surely that is needless suffering and needless death.”
“Ah, I don’t believe that. You and I say it is needless, because we cannot see what life is born from it. Your suffering, my dear fellow, you thought that gratuitous, like a lightning flash, but it isn’t; you know that now.”
This had so often been mentioned between them that Philip did not wince at it.
“I take it on trust only,” he said, “but the proof will come when, because of what has happened to me, I am kinder, more indulgent to others. If it has taught me that it is all good, but at present no test has come. I have but lived here with you.”
He paused a moment.
“And I must soon get back,” he said. “Yourmétieris here, but mine isn’t. This is your life, it has been my rest and my healing and my hospital. But when one is well, one has to go back again. Oh, I know that, I feel it in my bones. This has been given me in order that I may make my life again. With it behind me I have to go—I should be a coward if I did not; I should tacitly imply that I ‘gave up’ if I did not face things again.”
He drew his chair a little closer to his friend.
“Tom, you have saved me,” he said, “but my salvation has to be proved. It is all right for you to stop here, that I utterly believe, but I believe as utterly that it is not for me. I must go back, and be decent, and not be bitter. I must continue my normal life, I must play Halma with my mother, and slang the gardeners if they are lazy. Now, dear old chap, since my time here will be short, I want to talk to you about your affairs. Or rather I want you to talk about them. I want to grasp as clearly as I can any point of view which is not my own. That will help me to understand the—the damnable muddle the world generally has got into. It’s all wrong; I can see that. Nobody goes straight for his aim. We all—you don’t—we all compromise, because other people compromise. Now I don’t want to do that any more. I want to see my aim, and go straight for it. So tell me yours, and let me criticise. Any point of view that is quite clear helps one to believe that there are other points of view as clear, if one could but see them.”
A tired light came over the sky, as if drowsy eyelids had winked. Through the clouds the reflection of distant lightning illuminated the garden for a moment. There was a gap in the trees by the stream, where the stricken tree had stood, but of its corpse nothing remained; it had all been cut up and taken to make firewood for the winter. But ahot air blew, and in the bushes those strange, unaccountable noises of creaking twigs sounded insistently loud.
“Ah, you know my gospel well enough,” said Merivale. “The joy of life; the joy inherent in the fact of life. I have really nothing more to tell you of it—from living here with me you know it all. And you have to peel life like an orange, to simplify it, to take the rind of unnecessary things off, before you can really taste it.”
“Well, speak to me of your fear then.”
“I have no fear.”
He smiled with the convincing, boyish smile, that is pure happiness.
“Oh, lots of things may happen,” he said, “but I assure you that I don’t fear them. At least, I don’t fear them with my reason. I feel convinced—and that is a lot to say—that my general scheme of life was right for me. Was? And will be. The future holds no more terrors than the past. Indeed the two terms, which sound so opposite to most people, are really one. Past or future, it is I. I have pursued the joys of life, not beastly, sensual joys, for never have I had part in them, but the clean, vital joy of living. And you tell me, as Evelyn has told me, that there are vital pains of living, as clean and as essential as those joys. Well, let them come. I am ready. They can come to-night if they choose. Ah, the huge Bogey of pain and sorrow may come and lie on my chest, like a nightmare. But my point is this——”
He paused a moment.
“If that is to be, if that is essential,” he said, “I give it the same welcome as I have ever given to joy. It may frighten me out of existence, because the body is a poor sort of thing, and an ounce of lead or less will kill it, or, what is worse, deprive it of sight or hearing. But whatever can happen cannot hurt me, this me. Do you tell me that a rifle bullet, or a hangman’s noose can kill me? And can a frightful revelation of all the sorrow of the world, and its pain, and its terror, and its preying, the one creature on another, touch my belief that life is triumphant, and that joy is triumphant over pain? Oh, I can believe most things, but not that. Should that come, I daresay my stupid flesh would shrink, shrink till it died if you like. But me? How does it touch me?”
He looked round with a sudden startled air, even as the words were on his lips.
“Tramp, tramp,” he said, “there is a skipping and jumping in the bushes. I saw a frightful big goat on the ridge to-day, and it followed me, butting and sparring. I could almost think it had got into the garden. There is a sort of goaty smell, too. Well, it can’t reach me in the hammock. Ah, there is lightning again: there is going to be a storm to-night.”
“Sleep indoors,” said Philip quietly. He was quiet, for fear of his nerves. But Tom laughed.
“I should rather say to you ‘Sleep outside,’” he said. “If the lightning makes another shot here, it will certainly shoot at the highest thing, and the house is much higher than my hammock.”
He looked at him a moment in silence, with the pity that is akin not to contempt, but to love.
“Ah, you are afraid of fear,” he said. “That is one degree worse than anything we need be afraid of. It is of our own making, too. We dress up Fear like a turnip-ghost and then scream with terror at it. Or, don’t you remember as a child making faces at yourself in a looking-glass till you were so frightened you could scarcely move? That is what most of us do all our lives.”
Again, and rather more vividly, a blink of lightning was reflected in the clouds, and from far off the thunder muttered sleepily.
“So when I go,” asked Philip, “I can think of you as being as happy and fearless—as certain of yourself and the scheme of the world as ever?”
Merivale smiled.
“Yes, assuredly you can do that,” he said, “and though I do not like to hear you talk of going, of course I know you must. If you stopped here you would get bored and fidgetty. You have not at present because you have been getting well, and in convalescence all conditions, so long as one is allowed to stop still, are delightful. But your place, your work is not here. I feel that as strongly as you. You have the harder part; you have to go back and sort the grains of gold from the great lumps of worthless alloy, and distinguish many things that glitter from the royal metal. However, you know all that as well as I do.”
He leaned forward over the table, and looked very earnestly at Philip.
“Think of me always as happy,” he said, “and think of me as of a man who is waiting in an antechamber, waiting to be summoned to a great Presence. At least that is how I feel myself, how strongly and certainly I cannot explain to you. Here am I in this beautiful and wonderful antechamber, the world which I love so, in which I have passed days and months of such extraordinary happiness. But at one end of the antechamber there is a curtain drawn, and behind that is the Presence. Soon I think it will be drawn back and I shall see what is behind it. I think it will be drawn soon, for—all this imagery is so clumsy for what is so simple—for lately the curtain has been stirred, so it seems to me, from the other side: it has been jerked so that often I have thought that each moment it was to be drawn away, whereas till lately it has always hung in heavy, motionless folds. And I am waiting in front of it, conscious still—oh, so fully conscious—of all the beautiful things I have loved, but looking at them no longer, for I can look nowhere but at the curtain which stirs and is twitched as if someone is on the point of drawing it back.”
He paused a moment, but did not take his eyes off Philip, but continued looking at him very gravely, very affectionately.
“Of course I cannot help guessing what lies behind,” he said, “and conjecturing and reasoning. It may be several things; at least it may appear under several forms, but of this I am certain, that it is God. And will there be a blinding flash of joy, which shows me that even the sorrow and the death which is everywhere is no less part of perfection than the joy and the life? Even now, as you know, in my puny little attempts to be happy in the way that Nature is happy, youth has come back to me in some extraordinary manner, and when I see what I shall see, will immortal life, lived here and now, be my portion? I don’t know; I think it quite possible. And if that is so, if that is the initiation—ah, my God! that impulse of joy which I shall receive will spread from me like the circles in a pool when a stone is thrown into it.”
He paused again, his smooth brown hands trembling a little.
“The Pan-pipes, too,” he said—“they are never silent now: I hear them all the time, and I take that to mean that I am at last never unconscious of the hymn of life. I heard them at first, you know, just in snatches and broken stanzas, when I could screw myself up to the realisation of the song without end and without words that goes up from the earth day and night. Where does it come from? As I told Evelyn, I neither know nor care. Perhaps my brain conceives it, and sends the message to my ears, but it is really simpler to suppose that I hear it, just as you hear my voice talking to you now. For there is no question as to the fact of its existence; the hymn of praise does go on forever. So, perhaps, in my small way, I am complete, so to speak, with regard to that. Then—then there is another thing that may be behind the curtain. It may be that I shall be shown, and if I am shown this, it must be right and necessary—all the sorrow and pain and death that is in the world. I have turned my back on it; I have said it was not for me. But perhaps it will have to be for me. And that—to use a convenient phrase—will be to see Pan.”
He paused on the word, then shook his hair back from his forehead, and got up.
“And now I have told you all,” he said.
Philip got up, too, feeling somehow as if he had been mesmerised. He could remember all that Merivale had said; it was strangely vivid, but it had a dreamlike vividness about it; the fabric, the texture, the colour of it, for all its vividness, was unreal somehow, unearthly. But as to the reality of it and the truth of it, no question entered his head. He had never heard anything, no commonplace story or chronicle of indubitable events which was less fantastic. He looked out in silence a moment over the garden, and though half an hour ago he had been vaguely frightened at the thought of the mysterious and occult powers that keep watch over the world, yet now when they had been spoken of with such frankness, so that they seemed doubly as real as they had before, he was frightened no longer. It was, indeed, as Merivale had said; he had been afraid of fear.
It was already very late, and after a few trivial words he went indoors to go up to bed. As he got to the bottom of the stairs he looked back once, and saw his friend standing still on the verandah, with his face towards him. And asPhilip turned, Merivale, standing under the lamp in his white shirt and flannels, with collar unfastened at the neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbow, smiled and nodded to him.
“Good night!” he said; “sleep well. I think you are learning how to do that again.”
Philip began undressing as soon as he got to his room, feeling unaccountably tired and weary. His servant slept in a room just opposite him, and he hesitated for a moment as to whether he should tell him not to call him in the morning till he rang, for he had that heaviness of head which only satiety of sleep entirely removes. But it was already late, and the man had probably been in bed and asleep for some time. So he closed his door, drew the blind down over his window, and put out his light. His brain, for all the vividness of that evening’s talk, seemed absolutely numb and empty, as if all memory were dead, and he fell asleep instantly.
He slept heavily for several hours, and then external sounds began to mingle themselves with his dreams, and he thought he was in a large, empty, brown-coloured hall lit by dim windows very high up, through which a faint, tired light was peering. But now and again the squares of these windows would be lit up for a moment vividly from outside, and as often as this happened some low, heavy, tremulous sound echoed in the vault above him like a bass bourdon note. He was conscious, too, that many unseen presences surrounded him; the hall was thick with them, and they were all saying: “Hush-sh-sh!” A sense of deadly oppression and coming calamity filled him, he was waiting for something, not knowing what it was. Then the coils of sleep began to be more loosened, and before long he awoke. His room looked out over the garden, and the “Hush-sh-sh” was but the rain that fell heavily on to the shrubs below his window. Then the light and the tremulous note were explained too, for suddenly the window started into brightness, and a couple of seconds after a sonorous roll of thunder followed. But the uneasiness of the dream had not passed: he still felt frightfully apprehensive. All desire for sleep, however, had left him, and for some half hour, perhaps,he lay still, listening to the windless rain, for the night was so still that his blind hung over the open window without tapping or stirring. Then with curious abruptness the rain ceased altogether and there was dead silence.
Then suddenly a frightful cry rent and shattered the stillness, and from outside a screaming, strangled voice called:
“Oh, my God!” it yelled. “Oh, Christ!”
For one moment Philip lay in the grip and paralysis of mortal fear, but the next he broke through it, and sprang out of bed, and, not pausing to light a candle, stumbled to the door. At the same moment his servant’s door flew open, and he came out with a white, scared face. He carried a lighted candle.
“It was from the garden, sir,” he said. “It was Mr. Merivale’s voice.”
Philip did not answer, but went quickly downstairs, followed by the man. The door into the verandah stood open, as usual, and he hurried out. There on the table were the cloth and the remains of dessert; his chair stood where he had sat all evening; Merivale’s was pushed sideways. The moon was somewhere risen behind the clouds, for thick as they were, the darkness was not near pitch, and followed by the servant, the light of whose candle tossed weird, misshapen shadows about, Philip set his teeth and went down towards where the hammock was slung in which Merivale usually slept.
That strange, pungent smell, which he had noticed more than once before, was heavy in the air, and infinitely stronger and more biting than it had been. And for one moment his flesh crept so that he stopped, waiting for the man to come up with the light. He could not face what might be there alone.
A few yards further on they came in sight of the hammock. Something white, a flannelled figure, glimmered there, but, like some strange, irregular blot, something black concealed most of the occupant. Then that black thing, whatever it was, suddenly skipped into the air and ran with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds and tappings on the brick path of the pergola, down to the far end of the garden, where they lost sight of it. Then they came to the hammock.
Merivale was sitting up in it, bunched up together withhis head drawn back, as if avoiding some deadly contact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, so that the gums showed, his eyes were wide-open, and terror incarnate sat there, and the pupils were contracted to a pin-point as if focussed on something but an inch or two from him. He was not dead, for his chest heaved with dreadful spasms of breathing, and Philip took him up and carried him away from that haunted place into the house, laying him on a rug in the passage.
But before they had got him there the breathing had ceased, the mouth and the eyes had closed, and what they looked on was just the figure of a boy whose mouth smiled, and who was sunk in happy, dreamless sleep.
There was nothing to be done. Philip knew that, but he sent his servant off at once to fetch a doctor from Brockenhurst, while he waited and watched by Merivale or what had been he. All terror and shrinking had utterly passed from that face, and Philip himself, in spite of the frightful, inexplicable thing that had happened, was not frightened either, but sat by him, feeling curiously calm and serene, hardly conscious even of sorrow or regret. Nor did he fear any incomer from the garden. For the curtain had been drawn, and the dead man had felt so sure that whatever form the revelation was to take, it would be God, that the assurance of his belief filled and quieted the man who watched by him.
His shirt was open at the neck, as Philip had seen him last, standing below the lamp on the verandah, and his sleeves were rolled back to above the elbow. And as Philip looked, he saw slowly appearing on the skin of his chest and the sunburnt arms curious marks, which became gradually clearer and more defined, marks pointed at one end, the print of some animal’s hoofs, as if a monstrous goat had leaped and danced on him.
It was a week later, and Philip was seated alone with his mother in the small drawing-room of his house at Pangbourne which they generally used if there was no one with them. He had arrived home only just before dinner that night, and when it was over he had talked long to her, describing all that had happened during his stay with Merivale,all that had culminated in that night of terror about which even now he could hardly speak. The story had been a long one, sometimes he spoke freely, at other points there were silences, for the words would not come, and his choking throat and trembling lips had to be controlled before he could find utterance. For it concerned not Merivale only; and, indeed, friend of his heart as he had been, one who could never be replaced, Philip could scarcely think of his death as sad.
“For though,” he said, “just for that moment when he cried on God’s name and on the name of Christ, when that terror, whatever it was, came close to him, the flesh was weak, yet I know he was not afraid. He had told me so: his spirit was not afraid. And he so longed to see the curtain drawn.”
The joy of getting Philip back again, the joy, too, of knowing that that black crust of hate and despair no longer shut him off from her, was so great, that Mrs. Home hardly regarded the anxiety she would otherwise have felt. For she had never seen Philip like this; what had happened had stirred him to the depths of his soul. Even the sudden and dreadful death of so old a friend she could not have imagined would have affected him so.
“Philip, dear,” she said, “you are terribly excited and overwrought. Get yourself more in control, my darling.”
He was quiet for a moment, and even lit a cigarette, but he threw it away again immediately.
“Ah, mother, when I have finished you will see,” he said. “Let me go on.”
He paused a moment, and the soft stroking of her hand on his calmed him.
“It was just dawn when Flynn came back with the doctor,” he said; “a clear, dewy dawn, the sort of dawn Tom loved. The doctor needed but one glance, one touch. Then he said: ‘Yes, he has been dead for more than an hour.’ So I suppose I had sat there as long as that; I did not think it had been more than a minute or two. Then his eye fell on those marks and bruises I told you of, and he looked at them. He undressed him a little further: there were more of them. I needn’t go into that, but you know what the surface of a lane looks like when a flock of sheep has passed?—it was like that.
“All this, of course, came out at the inquest, where I told all I knew, and Flynn corroborated it. I saw also what Tom had told me that afternoon, how a huge goat had sparred and gambolled round him as he came home across the forest. And the verdict, as you say, perhaps, was brought in, in accordance with that. The world will be quite satisfied. I am satisfied, too, but not in that way.”
He was silent again a moment, and then went on.
“It all hangs together,” he said; “the dear Hermit was not as all of us are: he could talk to birds and beasts, and the very peace of God encompassed him. He knew, in a way we don’t, that all-embracing fatherhood. I learned slowly, these weeks I was with him, what the truth of that was to him. And he used often to speak, as you know, of the grim side of Nature, of the cruelty and death, which he had turned his face from, which he called Pan, who, as the myths have it, appeared in form like a goat, to see whom was death. We had been talking of it that night, we both heard curious tramplings in the bushes, and the pungent smell of a goat. Every sensible person, considering, too, that he had seen a big goat that afternoon, would come to the conclusion that, somehow or other the brute had found its way into the garden, and had sprung on him like a wild beast, and trampled him. Then, too, he was thinking about Pan; he might have imagined when the goat appeared, that this was what he in those imaginings, if you like, which were as real to him as the sun and moon, believed to be Pan, and that he died of fright. The jury took the view that some wild goat was the cause of his death: I daresay fifty juries would have done the same. But if you ask me whether I believe that a goat, a flesh and blood goat, killed him, why I laugh at you. For what goat was that? Who saw the goat except the Hermit?”
He paused again, and looked up at his mother with sudden solicitude.
“Ah, dear, you are crying,” he said. “Shall I not go on?”
Again that gentle, loving stroking of his hand began.
“Ah, my son,” she said.
Philip kissed the hand that stroked his. These lines were easy to read between.
But if he had more to tell his mother, she had something also to tell him that he did not know yet.
“You see, I saw such strange and impossible thingsthere,” he went on, “that nothing seems strange nor impossible. It was like an allegory: Tom himself was an allegory. The birds came to his bidding, the shy creatures of the forest were his friends. It was no miracle: it was but what we all could do, if we realised what he realised, and knew as he knew the brotherhood of all that lives. He put into practice the theory of Darwinism that no one in theory denies. The living things were his brothers and his cousins: they knew it, too. But from one huge fact, the fact of sorrow and pain, he turned aside, and, so I believe, it all came to him in a flash, making him perfect. And it came in material form, at least it was so material that it could bruise his flesh. It seems cruel; but—oh, mother, if you had seen his face afterwards, you would have known that the hand that made him suffer comforted him when he had learned what the suffering had to teach him. It could have been done, I must suppose, in no other way.”
Then for a little the strong man was very weak, and he broke down and wept. But one who weeps while eyes so tender watch, weeps tears that are not bitter, or at least are sweetened, each one, as it falls. Then again he went on: much as he had told, there was all to tell yet, yet that all was but short—a few words were sufficient.
“And so my lesson came home to me,” he said. “A month ago I said, as you know, ‘I will hate, I will injure.’ A fortnight ago I said, ‘What good is that?’ But now, when poor Tom, who was all kind and all gentle, had to be taught like that, with those battering hoofs, that pain must be and that one must accept it and sorrow, and not leave them out of life, now I say, ‘Can I help? May not I bear a little of it?’”
He got up.
“You don’t know me,” he said. “I don’t know myself. But I suppose this is how such a thing comes to one. I have been in an outer darkness: I have been black and bitter and all my life before that I was hard. That, I suppose, was needful for me. I don’t think I am going to be a prig, but if that is so, perhaps it doesn’t much matter. But I do know this, that I am sorry for poor things.”
Mrs. Home said nothing for the moment; then she turned her eyes away as she spoke.
“You have not heard then, dear?” she said.
“I have heard nothing.”
“It was in the paper this evening,” she said. “I know no more than that. Evelyn was shot in the face yesterday.”
Then her voice quivered.
“They think he will live,” she said. “But they know he will be blind. Oh, Philip, think of Evelyn blind!”
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THE room where Madge had talked with her mother on the evening of her first day at Glen Callan was darkened, and only a faint, muffled light came in through the blinded windows. The clean, neat apparatus of nursing was there, a fire burned on the hearth, by which Madge sat, and on the bed lay a figure, the face of which was swathed in bandages. The whole of the upper part of it was thus covered, only the chin and mouth appeared, and round the mouth was the three days’ beard of a young man.
It was a little after midday; the nurse had gone to her lunch, and had told Madge to ring for her if she wanted her. It was not the least likely: all was going as well as it apparently could, but while Evelyn was still feverish it was necessary to be on the guard for any one of a myriad dangers that might threaten him. There was the danger of blood-poisoning; there were the after-effects of the shock; other things also were possible. Madge had not inquired into it all; she knew only what it was right for her to know if she was in charge of the sick-room for an hour or two. If he got very restless, if he came to himself—for he was kept drowsy with drugs—and complained of pain, she was to ring the bell. But the nurse did not think that there was any real likelihood of any of these things happening.
They had carried him back over the wire bridge, above which the accident had happened, and now for nearly forty-eight hours he had lain where he lay now. By great good luck a surgeon of eminent skill had been staying in a house not very far off, and he had come over at once, in answer to this call, and done what had to be done. Madge had seen him afterwards, and very quietly, as Evelyn’s wife, had asked to be told, frankly and fully, what had been necessary. Sir Francis Egmont, whose surgical skill was only equalled by his human kindness, had told her all.
“He won’t die, my dear lady,” he had said. “I feel sure of that. He will get over it, and live to be strong again. But—yes, you must be brave about it, and more than that, you must help him to be brave, poor fellow.”
This happened in the sitting-room adjoining. Sir Francis took a turn up and down before he went on. Then he sat in a chair just opposite Madge, and took her hands in his. And his grey eyes looked at her from under the eyebrows, which were grey also.
“Yes, you have got to make him brave,” he repeated, “and there is your work cut out for you in the world. You are young and strong, and your youth and strength have got their mission now. Don’t label me an old preacher; old I am, but I don’t preach, Mrs. Dundas, unless I am sure of my audience. And I am sure of you. Your husband will get well. But his face will be terribly disfigured. That must be. That could not be helped. And there is another thing. He will be blind. Yes, yes, take the truth of that now, for it is you who have to enable him to bear it. Blind! Ah, my dear girl—I call you that: you are so young, and I am so sorry!”
How it had happened hardly interested her. They had been walking in line, it appeared, on the steep hill-side, where she had seen them as she sat on the top of the cliff above the Bridge-pool. Then a hare had got up, and Lord Ellington had fired. The shot struck a rock not far in front, and of the whole charge some ten pellets had ricocheted back and hit Evelyn in the face. One eye was destroyed, the other was so injured that it had been found impossible to save it; other pellets had lodged in his face. All this—the manner of the accident—did not matter to Madge: the thing had happened, it was only wonderful that he was alive.
But the operation—what it was Madge did not inquire, for it would do no good—had satisfied the surgeon. He could not have expected better results, he would not have predicted results so good. With the unhesitating obedience to duty, which is the motto and watchword of his profession, he had stopped in Lady Dover’s house, waiting till he could without misgiving or fear of after-results, leave the case. All yesterday he had been in and out of the sick-room, he had slept in the dressing-room last night, and had only left anhour or two before, when he could put his patient into the skilled hands of the nurse who had come from Inverness. He was a kind, shy man, and fumbled dreadfully in his pockets as Lady Dover saw him off.
“You will do me a great service, Lady Dover,” he had said, “if you will convey somehow to Mrs. Dundas that her debt to me, whatever it is, is discharged. Discharged it is; to see a woman being brave is sufficient. Besides, I am on my holiday: I could not think of taking a fee. So if so absurd a notion occurs to her—ah, the motor is ready, I see, but if so absurd a thing occurs—you, my dear lady, will please exercise your tact, you will let her be under no obligation, please. A Daimler surely—beautiful machines, are they not—yes, just a little tact—I was in the house or something—I am sure you will manage it—besides, on my holiday. Yes, good-bye, good-bye. I think I have told the nurse everything, and the doctor from Inverness—dear me, his name has gone again, whom I am very pleased to have met, is, I am sure, most reliable. God bless my soul, poor Dundas, a rising painter too; well, I’m no judge. But it is pitiful, isn’t it? Of course, if I am wanted again, I’ll step over at once: Brora, you know, it’s no trouble at all. And the poor fellow, too, who caused this accident; I’m sorry for him, too—nobody’s fault. But tell him we’ll pull Mr. Dundas through—oh, yes, we’ll pull him through, and there’s Braill’s system and all afterwards. A brave woman, you know, Mrs. Dundas is; does one good, that sort of woman. Very brave. She’ll need to be, poor thing, too. Good-bye, good-bye.”
But Evelyn lay still, and there was no need for Madge to ring for the nurse. Sometimes he shifted his head from side to side, and occasionally he put a hand up to the bandage that covered his face, with little moans and sighs below his breath. Madge had been warned to be on the alert for this, and very gently, as often as he did this, she would take the feeble, wandering fingers in hers and lay his arm back again on the blanket. It was something even to have that to do, the slightest, most trivial act, was a relief from absolute inaction. Yet all the time she dreaded with ever-increasing shrinking of the heart the hour when she should have to act indeed, when her husband would come to, and begin to ask questions. No one but she, she was determined, should answer them; it was she who would tell him all that he had yetto learn. Would it kill him, she wondered, when he knew? Would he die simply because life was no longer desirable or possible? Blind! Madge could not fully grasp that herself yet, but she felt she must realise it, she must make haste to realise it before she was called upon to tell him. Lady Dover, her mother, Sir Francis, had all urged her to let him be told by someone else; but Madge would not hear of it; some wifely instinct was stronger than any reason that could be suggested.
There was another thing which she shrank from, too, though in part that would be spared Evelyn, the disfigurement about which Sir Francis had spoken. He had told her it would be terrible, and she had to get used to that in anticipation, so that when she saw it, she should not shrink, or let Evelyn guess. He would not be able to see it himself; as far as that went, it was merciful. All that splendid beauty, which she loved so, the brightness and the sunshine of his face, she would never see again. A few details about that the surgeon had told her; it was horrible. Her love for him, her love for his beauty were inseparable; she could not disentangle them, the latter was part of the whole. Yet though she knew that it was gone, it was impossible to imagine that the whole was diminished, though a part of it was withdrawn. But she had been warned how terrible the change would be, and what if involuntarily, without power of control, her flesh recoiled, her nerves shrank from him? Yet that was the one thing that must not be; all that she could do for him was to make him know and feel that in every way the completeness of her love for him was undiminished, and only that pity, the broad, sweet shining of pity, framed it as with a halo. She knew that this was true essentially and fundamentally, but she had to make it true not only in principle, but in the conduct of the little trivial deeds of life. She must act up to it always; his closeness, his bodily presence, must not be one whit less physically dear to her.
Blind! Ah, if she only could take that and bear it for him, how vastly easier even to her personally than that it should be borne by him! For it was from that, from the exquisite pleasures of the eye, that as from a fountain his gaiety, his joy of life, chiefly sprang. Of the five senses that one was to him more than all the rest put together; of the five chords that bound him to life and made the material world real thestrongest had been severed, and the others in comparison were but as frayed strings. Any other loss would have been trivial compared with this, and how doubly, trebly trivial would the same loss have been to her. But that it should come to him! How could he bear it?
There was nothing to be reasoned about in all this: she had but to let thoughts like these just go round and round in her head, till she got more used to them. Round and round they went, yet at each recurrence each seemed not a whit less unendurable. She tried to imagine herself telling him; she went even over forms of words, choosing the speech that should tell it him most gently, and even while she spoke should make him, force him, to feel that by the very fact of her love the burden and the misery of it all was more hers to bear than his. Yet what were words, this mere formula, “It hurts me more than you?” That did not make it hurt him less. A pain that is shared by another is not diminished; there is double the pain to bear, a dreadful automatic multiplication of it alone takes place. It was all too crushingly recent yet for poor Madge to refrain from such a conclusion; it seemed to her as yet that this was a dark place into which the light of sympathy could not penetrate. She herself certainly was at present beyond its range; the kindness, the deep pity, which all felt for her did not reach her yet.
The nurse returned from her dinner, and with her came the Inverness doctor, a kind, rugged man. Bandages had to be changed, and fresh dressings to be put on, and Madge left the room for this, for she had been told that if she saw his face now she would be needlessly shocked. When the wounds healed, it would not be nearly so bad. So, though she would really have preferred to know worse than the worst, she yielded to this.
Madge went downstairs while this was going on, and found Lady Dover waiting in the hall. The rest of the party had all left yesterday, and though Lady Ellington had offered, and, indeed, really wished to remain, Madge had persuaded her to go; for the girl, out of the range of sympathy and pity at present, found the consolation that Lady Ellington tried to administer like a series of sharp raps on a sore place. Also Madge could not help reading into it a sort of tacit reproach for her having married him. The accident, indeed, seemed to have stained backwards in Lady Ellington’smind, and to have re-endowed the marriage itself with disaster.
But Lady Dover’s touch was very different to her mother’s; indeed it was because it did not seem to be a “touch” at all that Madge unconsciously answered to it.
“Ah, there you are, dear,” she said; “I was expecting you. Will you not get on your hat, and come out for a little? It will do you good to get the air, and it is a lovely afternoon. I have never seen the lights and shadows more exquisite.”
It was this that poor Madge wanted, though she did not know she wanted it, just the cool spring water, the wholesome white bread of a kind, natural woman. Sympathy was no good to her yet, consolation could not touch her, but just the quiet, patient kindness was bearable, it made the moment bearable from its very restfulness; the lights and the shadows were still there, Lady Dover still talked of them, and though she did not know it, it was this very fact that other lives went on as usual that secretly brought a certain comfort to Madge.
“Yes, I will come out,” she said; “but I don’t want a hat. I cannot go far, though.”
“No, we will just take a turn or two up and down the terrace. We get the sun there, and it is sheltered from the wind, which is rather cold to-day.”
Simple and unsophisticated as the spell was, if spell indeed there was, it worked magically on the poor girl, and for a little while that dreadful round of the impossible images which formed the panorama of her future ceased to turn in her head. Had Lady Dover’s tone suggested sympathy, or, which would have been worse, spoken of the healing power of time, Madge could not have spoken. But now, when that incessant procession of the unthinkable future was stayed, she could focus her mind for a little on a practical question which must soon arise, and on which she wanted advice.
“I want your counsel,” she said. “They are going to give Evelyn, the doctor told me, no more drugs, and by this evening he will be himself again, fully conscious. Now, unless I deceive him, unless I tell him that he is being kept for the present in absolute darkness, he must find out that—that he is blind. Soon, anyhow, he must know it. Is it any use, do you think, putting it off?”
Lady Dover did not, as Madge’s mother would certainly have done, squeeze her hand and utter words of sympathy.She did not even look at Madge, but with those clear, level eyes looked straight in front of her while she considered this. Her first instinct was, as would have been the instinct of everyone, to say something sympathetic, but her wisdom—the existence of which Lady Ellington really did not believe in—gave her better counsel. For to be natural is not synonymous with doing the first thing that happens to come into one’s head.
“That must be partly for Dr. Inglis to decide,” she said; “but if he sanctions it, I should certainly say that you had better tell him at once. I think people get used to things better and more gradually while they are still weak and perhaps suffering, though Dr. Inglis said he thought he would have no pain, whereas the same thing is a greater shock if one is well; it hits harder then. He perhaps will half-guess for himself, too; all that would torture him. To know the worst, I think, is not so bad as to fear the worst.”
They had reached the end of the terrace and looked out over the river a couple of hundred feet below. Just opposite them was the Bridge-pool, beyond which rose the steep moorland. Ever since it had happened, Madge had given no outward sign of her helpless, devouring anguish; she had been perfectly composed; there had been no tears, no raving cries. But now she turned quickly away.
“I can’t bear to look at it,” she said. “There was a piece of white heather, too, where he fell.”
Lady Dover’s sweet, rather Quakerish face did not change at all, her quiet wisdom still held sway.
“We are wrong, I think,” she said, “to associate material things with great grief. One cannot always wholly help it, but I think one should try to discourage it in oneself. I remember so well walking on this terrace, Madge, just after my mother died. It was a day rather like this; there were the same exquisite lights on the hills. And I remember I tried consciously to dissociate them from my own grief. I think it was wise. I would do it again, at least, which, in one’s own case, comes to the same thing.”
She paused a moment; there was one thing she wanted to say, and she believed it might do Madge good to have it said. Deep and overwhelming as her grief was, Lady Dover knew well that anything that took her mind off herself was salutary.
“But sometimes, on the other hand,” she went on, “we ought to remember those people who have been most associated with it. It does not do any good to anyone to shudder at the heather. But I think, dear, it would be kind if you just wrote a line to Lord Ellington. I think you have forgotten him, and what he must feel.”
For the moment she doubted if she had done wisely, so bitter was Madge’s reply.
“Ah, I can never forgive him!” she cried. “To think that but for him——” And she broke off with quivering lip.
Lady Dover did not reply at once, but the doubt did not gain ground.
“I think, dear, that that is better unsaid,” she replied at length. “You do not really mean it either; your best self does not mean it.”
Again she paused, for she did not think very quickly.
“And this, too,” she said, “you must consider. How can you help Mr. Dundas not to feel bitter and resentful, for he has more direct cause to feel it than you, if you have that sort of thought in your heart? You will be unable to help him, in the one way in which you perhaps can, if you feel like that. Also, dear, supposing any one of us, Dover, I, Mr. Osborne, had to become either Mr. Dundas or Lord Ellington, do you think any of us could hesitate a moment? Do you not see that of all the people who have been made miserable by this terrible accident, which of them must be the most miserable?”