“Ah, that’s good,” he said; “it is warm, yet it has got the touch of autumn in it. What sort of a day is it, Madge? Is it a blue day or a yellow day?
“Well, the sky is blue——” she began.
“Yes, I didn’t suppose it was yellow,” said he. “But what’s the rest? Is the air between us and the hills yellow or blue? Oh, Lord, what would I not give for one more sight of it! I would look so carefully just this once. Tell me about it, dear.”
So Madge, as well as she could, tried to make him see with her eyes. She told him of the brown, foam-flecked stream that wound and crawled in the shadowed gully below them, of the steep hillside opposite, that climbed out of the darkness into the broad, big sunlight of the afternoon, of the feathery birch trees, just beginning to turn yellow, that fringed the moor, of the bracken, a tone deeper in gold, of the warm greyness of the bare hill above, with its corries lying in shadow, and its topmost serrated outline cutting the sky with so clear and well-defined a line that the sky itself looked as if it wasapplique,fitted on to it. Away to the left was a pine wood, almost black as contrasted with the golden of the bracken, but the red trunks of the trees burned like flames in it. Beyond that again lay the big purple stretches of heather over which ran the riband of the road to Golspie. Then in the immediate foreground there was a clump of rowan trees, covered with red berries; they found but a precarious footing, so steeply did the ground plunge towards the river; but halfway down there was a broad, almost level plateau, across which flowed the burn. It was covered with grass and low bushes, bog-myrtle, she thought, and a big flock of sheep were feeding there. The shepherd had just sent the collie to fetch themup, and the running dog was like a yellow streak across the green.
Evelyn gave a great sigh.
“Thanks, dear,” he said. “Now shall we go in? Somehow, I don’t think I can stand any more just yet. I suppose one will get more used to it. Ah, how unfair, how damnably unfair!” he cried suddenly. “Why should I be robbed like this? I wish to God I had been born blind, so that I could never know how much I miss. But to give me sight, to give me a glimpse of the world, just to take it away again! How can that be just? And I did like it so. It was all so pleasant!”
Never before had Madge so felt the utter uselessness of words. How could words be made to reach him? Yet how, again, could the yearning of her whole soul to console and comfort him fail to reach him? What she said she hardly knew; she was but conscious of the outpourings of herself in pity and love. She held that poor blind head in her hands, she kissed the mouth, she kissed the scars, she pushed up the dark spectacles and kissed the dear, empty eyelids, and all the horror that had involuntarily made her shudder when first she saw his face was gone, melted, vanished. For it had been but a superficial thing, as little her true self, as little to be taken as an index of what her heart felt, as the sudden shudder of goose-flesh, and just now at any rate it was swept away. That she would feel it again, often and often, she did not doubt, but of that she took no heed whatever. This—this pity and love—which had come upon her like a flash of revelation—was her true and her best self, and though again and again she might fall back from it, her flesh wincing and being afraid, yet there would be always the memory of this moment to guide and direct her. There would be difficult times; the whole of the rest of her life would be difficult, but it no longer presented the appearance of impossibility. And how full and dear to her heart was Evelyn’s response.
“Oh, Madge,” he said, “the worst of all was the thought that you would shrink from me. I minded that so much more than anything. I should not have reproached you, I don’t think I should have done that even to myself, after guessing, as I have guessed, what I must be like, for I should have understood. But what I don’t understand is how it isyou do not shrink. I don’t want to understand, either; it is quite enough for me that it is so. And when I am cross, as I shall be, and despondent, as I shall be, and odious, try to remember what I have said to you now. I want to be remembered by that.”
So that was his best moment, too.
Philip arrived by the dinner train that night with a couple of other guests, and when the rest of them went up at the usual early hour, to get a good night after the journey of the day in the fresh air, he and Madge lingered behind, for naturally he wanted to learn about Evelyn and also about her. Both also perhaps felt that it was inevitable that they should have one talk together; it could hardly have been otherwise.
It began abruptly enough. As soon as the door was shut behind the last of the outgoers she came towards him with hands outstretched.
“I know you don’t want me to say ‘thank you,’ Philip,” she said, “but I can’t help it. I can’t tell you how deeply I thank you.”
He held her hands for a moment, pressing them closely, and smiling at her.
“It is said, then. You mustn’t say it twice, you know. That is vain repetition, and we have so much to say to each other that we have no time for that. I also must say once that I thank you for letting me do what I can. It would have been easier for you to have refused my help and to have refused to see me. Also it would have been more conventional. Now, about that there is just one word more to be said, and it is this. You told me once you looked upon me as an elder brother. Well, you have got to do it again. I’m going to manage for you. You have got, you and Evelyn, to do as I tell you in practical matters, because I’m practical and you are not.”
A great lump rose in Madge’s throat. These days had tired her so; it was such an unutterable relief to have anything taken off her hands, to feel that the almost intolerable weight of the future was being shared by another. But for the moment she could not speak, and but just nodded to him.
“Now, I am the bearer of a message first of all,” hesaid, “and the message is from my mother. She wants you both—in fact, she insists on your coming down to Pangbourne for—for a period which she says had better be left indefinite. London, she truly says, is dust and ashes in September. It really would be the best plan, so will you join with me in persuading Evelyn, if persuasion is necessary?”
“Ah, Philip,” she said, “you cut me to the heart. And—and this makes it worse, that I accept your generosity for Evelyn’s sake. It is that which—which is so ruthless.”
Philip’s lip quivered a moment, but he went on bravely.
“Well, as an elder brother I recommend it, too,” he said; “for it is just that I want to be to you, dear. Ah, do you think I don’t guess?”
Madge got up, and drew a chair close to him.
“Tell me about yourself, if it does not hurt you to talk of that,” she said.
“No, I want you to know what has happened to me,” he said; “both because I have to ask your forgiveness for certain things——”
“Ah, don’t, don’t!” said she.
“Yes, you will see, and because perhaps what I have been through may help you. Well, Madge, I have been through deep waters, and waters as bitter as they were deep. For that month while I was in London I hated you and I hated him with such intensity that I think, but for the very hard work I did, I must have gone mad. And I think the only pleasure I felt was when I was the cause—indirectly anyhow—of his losing a large sum of money. I could have saved him that if I chose, but I did not choose. I must speak of that afterwards. But I loved you all the time I hated you, Madge, if you can understand that. All that was base and hard in me loathed you, because you had made me suffer; but there was something below, a very little thing, like a lump of leaven perhaps which still loved you, my infinitesimal better self. But all the time in London I did not know there was in me anything better than this worst.
“Then one morning I fainted, and they told me to ease off. So I went down into the country and stayed with the Hermit, who, I think, lived the happiest life that was ever lived on this earth. It was the contrast between him andme perhaps that first suggested to me whether it was worth while to hate, as I was hating, for that as far as I know was the beginning of what happened afterwards. It made me also throw away something I had bought in order to kill myself—never mind that. Then one night he talked about pain, on which he had turned his back, and told me that though he could not understand how or why it was necessary, it perhaps might be, and that he was willing himself, if so, to face anything that might be in store for him. And then, I must suppose that little lump of leaven began to work, because that night—we had talked also about free will—I asked myself if I chose, deliberately chose, to be bitter and hating. And I found I did not.
“It was not long after that—a week, I suppose—that the end came. By then I knew but this for certain, that I was not deliberately hard any longer. It was the contemplation of happiness and serenity that had produced that; I had begun also not to stare at a blank wall that had seemed to face me, but to say to myself that there was no wall except that of my own making. Do you know Watts’ picture of Hope? Of course you do. Well, I thought all my strings were broken, but they were not. There was just one left. But that I knew must inevitably break if I continued to be black and bitter. My bitterness had corroded it already.”
Philip paused a moment.
“I am jawing dreadfully about myself,” he said.
“Go on,” said she.
“Tom died in the night. I don’t want to tell you that in detail, but he died because he saw or thought he saw some revelation of the pain and sorrow of the world. Whether he imagined it or not, and whether what I thought I saw was imagination only, I don’t really care. He was sleeping in a hammock out of doors, and suddenly his cry rent the night. He called on God and on Christ. And when I went out I thought I saw a shadow like some dreadful goat skip from him. And he was dead.
“Now, how one learns anything I don’t know. But what I learned was pity for sorrow. And so, dear Madge, I am here.”
Again her hand sought his.“Oh, Philip, Philip,” she said. “What can I say to you? How could I guess what love was till I felt it? Ah, I don’t say that in excuse—you know that.”
“No, dear. It is no question of excuses, of course. And I have only told you all this that you may never need to look for any, and that you may understand that I am sorry for having been so bitter. And if you forgive that”—and the pressure of her hand answered him—“let us leave the past forever behind us, and look forward only. But it was better to have talked of it just once, so that we may dismiss it. Now, tell me about Evelyn.”
To Philip somehow she could pour out her heart in a way she could scarcely have done to anyone else, for the knowledge of what he had been through and of the bitterness from which he had emerged so unembittered threw open the golden gates of sympathy, and she spoke without reserve. She told him of the myriad dangers and difficulties that faced them, of the loss Evelyn had sustained which she could not yet estimate, which he, too, was only just beginning to realise, and which for a long time yet to come must daily grow more real to him. She spoke quite frankly, yet never without the utter sinking of herself, which is love, of his moods and transitions from boyish cheerfulness to a sort of dumb despair. She spoke finally of her first mortal horror when she saw his face, and her dread lest that should suddenly overmaster her, so that she should shrink from him and he should see it.
“But it is he,” she said, “whom I tremble for. He can stand it to-day, he will be able to stand it to-morrow, and for a week perhaps, or a month. But will it get easier for him to bear or more difficult? He can’t stand much more. He will break.”
“Ah, you mustn’t think about that,” said Philip. “It is no use adding up the sorrow and the pain that may be in front of one. One is meant just to bear the burden of the moment, and, God knows, it is heavy enough for you and him. Face difficulties as they arise, Madge, don’t make a sum of them and say the total is intolerable.”
He paused a moment.
“And let me bear all that you can shift on to me,” he said. “Because otherwise, you see, my coming here will be purposeless. And I hate, being a practical person, doing useless things.”
IT was a dismally wet afternoon some weeks later, and Evelyn was sitting in one of the deep window-seats in the drawing-room of Philip’s house above Pangbourne, which looked out on to the terrace, where only six months ago the nightingale had sat and sung on Tom Merivale’s finger. Below, communicating with the upper terrace by a flight of stone steps, was the bedless square of grass, below again the rose garden, from which the ground went steeply down to the river. He had occupied himself with closing the shutters of this row of windows, one of which, reaching down to the ground, communicated with the terrace, and, not satisfied with this, he had drawn the curtains over them, leaving the room in darkness. The window-seats were well cushioned, and having arrived at the last, he slipped between the curtains he had drawn and curled himself up in it. During this last month he had made, so everybody said, extraordinary progress; he could already read a little, fast enough, that is to say, to enable him to remember the sentences he spelled out with his fingers in the raised type; he could remember the cards in his hand sufficiently to enable him to play a game of bridge, and with a stick to feel his way he could walk alone. But none, except he, knew the dreadful progress which despair had made in his mind. He had begun to be able once to look forward, to frame the future; but now the future was unframeable, he was only able just to bear the present moment. Soon that might be unbearable, too.
For a week now this dull weight, starting from a definite moment, had been gaining on him, for a week ago he had gone with Philip to the lodge, and the four-year-old child of the lodge-keeper had come out with his father. Evelyn, sitting down and waiting while Philip spoke to him, had called the child, who toddled up to him, and then, when he got close, burst into shrieks of frightened dismay. Evelynhad understood, and he said nothing about it to anyone. But he put the fact away in his mind, and when he was alone he took it out and looked at it.
At this moment he was alone in the house. Mrs. Home was spending a few days in London, Philip would soon be due by the evening train, and Madge was out, doing some small businesses in Pangbourne. She had been unwilling to leave him, but he had made it unmistakably and ill-temperedly clear he would sooner be left. He thought with a dull wonder at himself of the fact that he could have been cross with her. It had happened often before, and in spite of its recurrence he never got used to it. It always seemed strange to him. And with a wonder that was almost incredulous, he thought how he had behaved to her to-day. For she had come to him with a word which a man can only hear once, to whisper which a woman nestles close to him, pouring out her very soul in the joy of knowing that she will some day put into his arms her first-born child. That Madge had told him, but he felt nothing; it did not reach him, neither joy for her nor for himself seemed any longer capable of being felt, and he had said only, “I shall never see it.” He was thinking about that now, if this leaden contemplation of facts could be called thought, of that and of the child that had cried when it saw his face. Over that face he passed his sensitive fingers.
“I’m sure I don’t wonder,” he said to himself.
The door opened once as he lay in this window-seat, and correctly and mechanically he pictured what was going on. Only one person entered; that he could tell by the footfalls, and that one person whistled gently to himself. He paused by the table, then went to the door again, and again re-entered and paused by another. Then he poked the fire and swept up the grate. Clearly the footman making the room ready, and he banged the door as he went out.
Now if that child had cried at the sight of his face, what must it be to others? Surely they would cry too if they obeyed their natural impulse, either cry or turn away, in pity, no doubt, but also in repulsion. It must be an effort to everybody to look at him, to be with him. And Madge was with him so much; she kissed him, she let him kiss her; she washis wife, the wife of this man with the nightmare face at which a child cried out as if it saw bogey. Philip had been quick and ready on that occasion, had said the child was teething, and wrung corroboration from the father. But he had answered, “Yes, it teethes when it sees me,” and Philip was not ready enough for that.
The crying child explained other things too; for Mrs. Home had cried when she saw him; he could hear from her voice that she was crying, there were sobs in it. He had thought then that it was from pity merely and sympathy, but he told himself now that it was not so; she cried from horror at him. All his life he had hated ugly things, and now it would be hard to match himself in that abhorred category.
The very kindness, too, and pity which he knew surrounded him were scarcely more bearable. He did not want to be pitied, he would sooner be left to drag out a lonely, shunned life than to be surrounded with pity; while with regard to kindness, the knowledge that he and Madge were frankly living on Philip became harder every day to swallow. Philip certainly had done all he could to minimise the burden of that; he had, soi-disant, bought the unfinished picture of himself, declaring that no finished picture could possibly be so like him; he had bought, too, after argument, the picture of Madge. The proceeds he had invested for Evelyn, promising since he had advised him so ill before to take greater care this time, and twice during this last month he had reported substantial profits from the investments he had made for him, so that if he insisted, as he did insist, on paying the bills for his nurse and doctor, he still could run up to London whenever he pleased if Pangbourne bored him. With luck, too, and care his investments would grow fatter yet.
On this occasion Evelyn had broken out.
“Ah, I can’t stand it,” he cried. “I can’t go on living here, Madge and I, indefinitely. Yes, I know how kind you are, both you and your mother, and how you would be pleased—really pleased—for us to stop forever, but can’t you see how impossible it is for me to accept your hospitality like that? I must, I simply must, pay my way, earn something, work and get tired, if only for the distraction of it. A barrel-organ, now. ‘Totally blind. Ky-ind Gentleman!’ That would be more self-respecting than to sit here and do nothing. It’s better to beg in the streets than to accept alms without begging for them. That’s why the poor have such a horror of the workhouse. They would sooner be cold and hungry, and so would I.”
He was silent a moment after this.
“I suppose I needn’t have said all that,” he observed drearily. “However, it doesn’t much matter what I say.”
Philip had a horror of improving the occasion, but he could hardly let such a chance of a word in season slip. He was, too, keenly wounded by this.
“You don’t recollect, my dear fellow,” he said, “that we are all doing our best, and that it is hard not to be hurt by words like those.”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t preach,” cried Evelyn.
Philip flushed for a moment rather angrily, but re-collected himself.
“Indeed, I hope not,” he said with a laugh. “Now are you ready to give me my revenge at picquet?”
It was quite dark behind the curtains, though to Evelyn, who lay there, whatever the light was, it would have been dark in any case, and in a grosser darkness than that, a darkness of despair unilluminable by any sun, he pondered these things, his own helplessness, his blindness, the horror of his own face, and the dead weight of his indebtedness to Philip, the one man in all the world whose charity, from the very nature of things, was most unbearable. Together, poor fellow they formed a blank wall which it seemed hopeless to try to scale; indeed, he no longer really wanted to scale it, he only wanted to be allowed to sit down and have not only sight, but hearing and feeling and taste and smell closed forever, for death was surely a thing far less bitter than this living death in life. He could no longer now look forward to the future at all; it required all his energies to get through the hour that was present, without some breakdown; decent behaviour for the moment, when he was with any of the others, was the utmost he was capable of, and even of that he often felt incapable. And his energies, such as they were, were gradually failing before the hourly task. He was in no sense beginning ever so slightly to get used to it all, andthe trials of each day, so far from making the trials of the next more easy to contemplate or to bear, only weakened his powers of bearing them. It was all so hopeless; for him hope was dead, and the last chord of her lyre had snapped.
But he did not feel this dully and vaguely; the very vividness and alertness of his nature which had made life so passionately sweet to him before made his hopelessness just as passionately felt now. He, too, like Tom Merivale, but with less of set purpose and more of instinct in his choice, had been in love with life, and that fire which had gone out had left not mere grey ash, but something burningly cold, and life was now as actively terrible to him as it had once been lovely.
There was the muffled sound of talking in the hall, and next moment the steps of two people entered, and Madge spoke. The other step went on towards the fireplace.
“Evelyn not here?” she said. “I suppose he’s gone to the library for tea.”
Then Philip’s voice spoke.
“How has he been to-day?”
“Ah, so bad, poor darling!” she said. “Sometimes I almost despair, Philip; if it wasn’t for you I know I should. Of course he tries all he can, but it seems almost as if his powers of trying were failing. It makes me utterly miserable to think of him.”
Evelyn did not move nor reveal his presence in any way. He felt as if the speaker was but being the echo of his own thoughts. Philip said something sympathetic in tone, but he did not catch that; he wanted only to hear how far Madge agreed with himself.
“And I dread his suspecting more,” she went on. “I so often see him feeling his face, as if trying to picture it to himself more clearly. And if for a moment I should break down and let him know—ah, I can’t talk of it. Let us go to the library and see if he is there.”
Her voice choked a little over this; then without more words they passed out of the drawing-room again, and Evelyn felt as if something had snapped in his brain. He almost wondered that they had not heard it.
As soon as the door had closed behind them he got swiftlyand quietly up from his seat and felt his way to the centre window, which opened on to the terrace. He undid the shutters of it, stepped out, and closed it behind him. He was hardly conscious of any motive in his action—he certainly had no plan as to what he should do next. One overwhelming fact had become a certainty to him, the fact contained in Madge’s last sentence, and he knew nothing more than that he must go away somewhere, lose himself somehow, do anything rather than go back to her, to be pitied, to be secretly shuddered at, to be a daily, hourly fear to her. Indeed, he would never look upon their child.
It was a cold, windless evening, and the rain descended in a steady downpour, hissing on to the shrubs, while the gutters of the house gurgled and chuckled. But louder than the rain and more sonorous was the great rush and roar of the river below, as it poured seawards, swollen to a torrent of flood from these persistent rains. And something in the strength and glory of that deep voice called to him; he must go down to the river, for it had something to say to him. Yet it was not the river that called to him, but in some mysterious way Tom Merivale, whose jovial, deep voice was shouting to him to come with the authenticity of actual hallucination. He hardly knew which it was; he knew only that he could never go back to the house he had just left, and that something called, with promise in its voice of life, real life, or of death and deliverance, he knew not which.
He had no stick to guide him, but without hesitation he crossed the gravel of the terrace, and felt his way along the wall of it to where a stone vase stood at the top of the steps leading to the lawn below. A purple clematis twined round it; he had made a study of it for a picture last summer. Then came the twelve steps, the shuffling across the soaked grass of the lawn, and a further flight of twelve steps into the rose garden.
But at the thought of deliverance of some kind so close to him, so that he need no more now think of “to-morrow and to-morrow,” and all the impossible to-morrows, his poor tired brain cleared, his myriad troubles and sorrows seemed to roll away from him, for though the bitterness of death was not past, the bitterness of life, in comparison to whichthe other was sweet, was over. So with unclouded mind and soul, which no longer rebelled and resented, he thought quietly, as he felt his way across the rose garden, and struck the steep path leading to the river, of all the past.
How wonderful and beautiful life had been; since his earliest boyish recollections, how full of surprising joys! Health and vigour had been his, a clean, wholesome life, the power of loving this exquisite world, an artistic gift that had made a daily Paradise, and, above all, love itself, and the fulfilment of love. Then had come a crash, a break, but how short had been these weeks in comparison of the rest. If this was the pain with which he had to make payment for all his joy, how cheap, to look at it fairly, had joy been. Now that he knew that was the full payment that would be demanded for the joy he had received in such unstinted abundance, he no longer complained, it was only while the payment seemed to be going to be charged him indefinitely, every day for years to come, that he had rebelled and owned himself bankrupt. The one eternal necessity of life, which, the moment it ceases to brace begins to paralyse, had passed from him, the necessity of going on always, every day and hour, having to meet one difficulty after another, and without hope of getting any respite, so long as life lasts. For now he knew that some end was very near.
He paused a moment to brush his dripping hair back from his face, wondering in a sort of vague, uninterested manner whether something had actually cracked in his brain, whether he had gone mad, or so the world could call it. But whatever had cracked, it had been the tension of it which all these weeks had caused his misery, and in this exquisite moment of peace that had suddenly come to him he almost laughed aloud for the unspeakable relief which the cessation of pain had brought. He felt that up till now his mental eyes had been as blind as his physical ones, that the blows that had been dealt him had been dealt from the dark, so that he could not guess who wielded the whip. But now they had ceased, and the clouds of darkness were rolled away, and there sat there One with a face full of infinite compassion, and since none but He was there, it must have been He, or some ministering angel of pain, who at his bidding had chastised him thus. Then Evelyn felt as if he had asked permission of Him to go on, for the river—or Tom’s voice—stillhailed him joyously; and since it was allowed, still without intention, without definite thought of any kind, he went on his way, with shuffling steps indeed that stumbled over the gravel of the path, but with a great, serene light shining on him.
He had by now come close to the edge of the river, and the rain for the moment had ceased, so that he could hear the suck and gurgle of the hurrying flood-water, which whispered and chuckled to itself. But this rapturous noise of swift-flowing water sounded but faintly, for a hundred yards below was the weir. All the sluices were raised, and tons of water momently plunged through the openings, bellowing with a great hoarse laugh of ecstasy as they fell into the pool below. It was to that place, somewhere in the middle of the narrow pathway of planks that he was called; it was from there, where he would be surrounded on all sides with the noise of waters, that the voice of Tom, that faithful lover of water, called him. That somehow, and he did not question how or why, was his goal, nor did he know whether life or death awaited him there; only there was going to be reconcilement in some manner.
He had been there many times before; he had been there, indeed, only yesterday to listen to the splendid tumult of water. But to-day its voice was redoubled, and he could feel the mist from the plunging stream wet on his face as he went slowly and cautiously out over the wet planks. Louder and more triumphantly every moment the voice of the river—or was it Tom laughing with open mouth, as he used to laugh when he swam in the garden pool below his cottage?—called to him. On both sides, before and behind, he was surrounded by the joyous riot of waters, that filled and possessed his brain till his whole consciousness was flooded with it till his voice too had to join in it. So he raised his arms, spreading them out to the night, and threw back his head with a great shout of ecstatic rapture. And as he did this his foot slipped on the wet planks, and he fell into the roaring, rushing pool below. So the great Mother took him back to herself.
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IT was just a year later, a warm, mellow afternoon of mid-October. For the last few nights there had been an early autumn frost, though the days were almost like a return of summer, and the beech-wood below Philip’s house at Pangbourne was just beginning to don its russet livery. The frost, too, had made its mark on blackened dahlias, but the chrysanthemums were still gorgeous. And on the terrace were walking two figures, both dressed in black, one tall, who strolled beside the other, Madge and Mrs. Home. The latter was still as like a Dresden shepherdess as ever in the pretty china delicacy of her face, but Madge had changed somewhat. Trouble had written its unmistakable signs on her face, but tenderness had been at work there, too, and though her eyes were sad, yet with the sadness was mingled something so sweet and gentle that no one who loved her would have wished that the sadness should not be there, if the other had come hand-in-hand with it. And it was hand-in-hand that they had come during the last eighteen months of her life, which had been to her of such infinitely greater import than all the years that had gone before.
“Yes, it is even as I tell you,” she was saying. “I never think of Evelyn as blind. I think of him—well, a good deal, but he always comes back to me, not as he was in those last weeks, but in those first few weeks before, bright-eyed—you know how bright his eyes were—and full of a sort of boyish joy at this jolly world. No, I scarcely feel sad when I think of him. He was fragile; he would have broken if he had had to bear more. And I think God knew that, and spared him by letting him die.”
She walked on a little without speaking. Mrs. Home’s hand on her arm pressed its sympathy, but she said nothing.
“I have been allowed to forget, too,” Madge went on, “or to remember it only as a nightmare from which I awoke,the way I shrank from him, and I only wonder now whether, if he had lived, I should have got used to it. Ah, surely it must have been in a dream only that I shrank from him.”
“Yes, dear, it was only that,” said Mrs. Home. “At least, no one knew. You behaved so that no one guessed.”
“Philip knew. If it had not been for him during those months I think I should have gone mad. And for the second time he kept me—it is hardly an exaggeration—kept me sane when baby died.”
Mrs. Home, when she had anything important and difficult to say, often gave out little twittering, mouse-like noises before she could manage to speak. Madge knew this, and thus, hearing them now, waited for her to overcome her embarrassment.
“And is there no hope for Philip, dear?” she asked at length.
Madge had rather expected this was coming, but her answer gave her less embarrassment than the question had caused his mother.
“I owe Philip everything,” she said, “and though I don’t suppose I can ever love again in the way that I have loved, still—you know once I told him quite truthfully that I would give him all that I was capable of. You see, I did not know then what love meant. That was a niggardly gift to offer him. And now again I can give him—oh, so gratefully—all I am capable of. It is, I hope, not quite such a mean thing as it was. I think——”
Madge paused a moment.
“I think sorrow has made me a little more worthy of him,” she went on. “It has made me a little more like a woman. So if he cares still——”
“Ah, my dear, you say ‘still.’ Why, day by day he loves you more.”
Madge looked at Mrs. Home a moment in silence, and the sadness of her eyes was melted into pure tenderness.
“You are sure?” she said.
“He will tell you better than I.”
Madge gave a long sigh, then let her gaze wander down the steep path to the river, which crossed the weir and formed a short cut through the fields of Pangbourne. The sun, which was near to its setting, dazzled her a little, and she put up her hand to shade her eyes.
“Ah, that is he coming up the path,” she said. “He must have caught the earlier train. Shall we go to meet him?”
“You go, dear,” said Mrs. Home. “I will wait for you here.”
THE CHALLONERS
ByE. F. BENSON
12mo. Cloth, $1.50.
The theme is a father’s concern lest his children become contaminated by what he considers an unwholesome social atmosphere. The book is filled with Mr. Benson’s clever observations on the English smart set, and the love-story shows him at his best.
MORGANATIC
By MAX NORDAU
12mo. Decorated cloth, $1.50.
This new book by the author of “Degeneration,” has many of the qualities which gave its predecessor such a phenomenal sale. It is a study of morganatic marriage, and full of strong situations.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA
BACCARAT
ByFRANK DANBY
AUTHOR OF “PIGS IN CLOVER”
12mo. Six illustrations in color. Cloth, $1.50.
The story of a young wife left by her husband at a Continental watering place for a brief summer stay, who, before she is aware, has drifted into the feverish current of a French Monte Carlo.
A dramatic and intense book that stirs the pity. One cannot read “Baccarat” unmoved.
“The finished style and unforgettable story, the living characters, and compact tale of the new book show it to be a work on which care and time have been expended.“Much more dramatic than her first novel, it possesses in common with it a story of deep and terrible human interest.”—Chicago Tribune.
“The finished style and unforgettable story, the living characters, and compact tale of the new book show it to be a work on which care and time have been expended.
“Much more dramatic than her first novel, it possesses in common with it a story of deep and terrible human interest.”—Chicago Tribune.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA
OLIVE LATHAM
By E. L. VOYNICH
Author of “Jack Raymond” and “The Gadfly.” Cloth, $1.50“The author’s knowledge of this matter has been painfully personal. Her husband, a Polish political refugee, at the age of twenty-two, was arrested and thrown into a vile Russian prison without trial, and spent five years of his life thereafter in Siberian exile, escaping in 1890 and fleeing to England. Throughout ‘Olive Latham’ you get the impression that it is a veritable record of what one woman went through for love.... This painful, poignant, powerfully-written story permits one full insight into the cruel workings of Russian justice and its effects upon the nature of a well-poised Englishwoman. Olive comes out of the Russian hell alive, and lives to know what happiness is again, but the horror of those days in St. Petersburg, the remembrance of the inhumanity which killed her lover never leaves her.... It rings true. It is a grewsome study of Russian treatment of political offenders. Its theme is not objectionable—a criticism which has been brought against other books of Mrs. Voynich’s.”—Chicago Record-Herald.“So vividly are the coming events made to cast their shadows before, that long before the half-way point is reached the reader knows that Volodya’s doom is near at hand, and that the chief interest of the story lies not with him, but with the girl, and more specifically with the curious mental disorders which her long ordeal brings upon her. It is seldom that an author has succeeded in depicting with such grim horror the sufferings of a mind that feels itself slipping over the brink of sanity, and clutches desperately at shadows in the effort to drag itself back.”—New York Globe.
Author of “Jack Raymond” and “The Gadfly.” Cloth, $1.50
“The author’s knowledge of this matter has been painfully personal. Her husband, a Polish political refugee, at the age of twenty-two, was arrested and thrown into a vile Russian prison without trial, and spent five years of his life thereafter in Siberian exile, escaping in 1890 and fleeing to England. Throughout ‘Olive Latham’ you get the impression that it is a veritable record of what one woman went through for love.... This painful, poignant, powerfully-written story permits one full insight into the cruel workings of Russian justice and its effects upon the nature of a well-poised Englishwoman. Olive comes out of the Russian hell alive, and lives to know what happiness is again, but the horror of those days in St. Petersburg, the remembrance of the inhumanity which killed her lover never leaves her.... It rings true. It is a grewsome study of Russian treatment of political offenders. Its theme is not objectionable—a criticism which has been brought against other books of Mrs. Voynich’s.”—Chicago Record-Herald.
“So vividly are the coming events made to cast their shadows before, that long before the half-way point is reached the reader knows that Volodya’s doom is near at hand, and that the chief interest of the story lies not with him, but with the girl, and more specifically with the curious mental disorders which her long ordeal brings upon her. It is seldom that an author has succeeded in depicting with such grim horror the sufferings of a mind that feels itself slipping over the brink of sanity, and clutches desperately at shadows in the effort to drag itself back.”—New York Globe.
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA.