As love-making in which we have no share is apt to be either tantalising or monotonous, I propose to skip the next fortnight and introduce myself to the reader at a moment when I am once more alone. It is about six o'clock on a summer afternoon, I am in Paris, and seated at one of the little marble tables of the Cafe de la Paix, dreamily watching the glittering tide of gay folk passing by,—
"All happy people on their wayTo make a golden end of day."
Meditatively I smoke a cigarette and sip a pale greenish liquor smelling strongly of aniseed, which isn't half so interesting as a commonplace whiskey and soda, but which, I am told, has the recommendation of being ten times as wicked. I sip it with a delicious thrill of degeneration, as though I were Eve tasting the apple for the first time,—for "such a power hath white simplicity." Sin is for the innocent,—a truth which sinners will be the first to regret. It was so, I said to myself, Alfred de Musset used to sit and sip his absinthe before a fascinated world. It is a privilege for the world to look on greatness at any moment, even when it is drinking. So I sat, and privileged the world.
It will readily be surmised from this exordium that—incredible as it may seem in a man of thirty—this was my first visit to Paris. You may remember that I had bought Orlando's tickets, and it had occurred to Sylvia and me to use them. Sylvia was due in London to fulfil a dancing engagement within a fortnight after our arrival; so after a tender good-bye, which there was no earthly necessity to make final, I had remained behind for the purposes of study. Though, logically, my pilgrimage had ended with the unexpected discovery of Sylvia Joy, yet there were two famous feminine types of which, seeing that I was in Paris, I thought I might as well make brief studies, before I returned to London and finally resumed the bachelorhood from which I had started. These were the grisette of fiction and the American girl of fact. Pending these investigations, I meditated on the great city in the midst of which I sat.
A city! How much more it was than that! Was it not the most portentous symbol of modern history? Think what the word "Paris" means to the emancipated intellect, to the political government, to the humanised morals, of the world; not to speak of the romance of its literature, the tradition of its manners, and the immortal fame of its women. France is the brain of the world, as England is its heart, and Russia its fist. Strange is the power, strange are the freaks and revenges, of association, particularly perhaps of literary association. Here pompous official representatives may demur; but who can doubt that it is on its literature that a country must rely for its permanent representation? The countries that are forgotten, or are of no importance in the councils of the world, are countries without literature. Greece and Rome are more real in print than ever they were in marble. Though, as we know, prophets are not without honour save in their own countries and among their own kindred, the time comes when their countries and kindred are entirely without honour save by reason of those very prophets they once despised, rejected, stoned, and crucified. Subtract its great men from a nation, and where is its greatness?
Similarly, everything, however trifling, that has been written about, so long as it has been written about sufficiently well, becomes relatively enduring and representative of the country in which it is found. To an American, for example, the significance of a skylark is that Shelley sang it to skies where even it could never have mounted; and any one who has heard the nightingale must, if he be open-minded, confess its tremendous debt to Keats: a tenth part genuine song, the rest moon, stars, silence, and John Keats,—such is the nightingale. The real truth about a country will never be known till every representative type and condition in it have found their inspired literary mouthpiece. Meanwhile one country takes its opinion of another from the apercus of a few brilliant but often irresponsible or prejudiced writers,—and really it is rather in what those writers leave out than in what they put in that one must seek the more reliable data of national character.
A quaint example of association occurs to me from the experience of a friend of mine, "rich enough to lend to the poor." Having met an American friend newly landed at Liverpool, and a hurried quarter of an hour being all that was available for lunch, "Come let us have a pork-pie and a bottle of Bass" he had suggested.
"Pork-pies!" said the American, with a delighted sense of discovering the country,—"why, you read about them in Dickens!" Who shall say but that this instinctive association was an involuntary severe, but not inapplicable, criticism? A nightingale suggests Keats; a pork-pie, Dickens.
Similarly with absinthe, grisettes, the Latin Quarter, and so on.
Why, you read about them in Murger, in Musset, in Balzac, and in Flaubert; and the fact of your having read about them is, I may add, their chief importance.
So rambled my after-dinner reflections as I sat that evening smoking and sipping, sipping and smoking, at the Cafe de la Paix.
Presently in my dream I became aware of English voices near me, one of which seemed familiar, and which I couldn't help overhearing. The voice of the husband said,—you can never mistake the voice of the husband,—
'T was the voice of the husband,I heard him complain,—
the voice of the husband said: "Dora, I forbid you! I will NOT allow my wife to be seen again in the Latin Quarter. I permitted you to go once, as a concession, to the Cafe d'Harcourt; but once is enough. You will please respect my wishes!"
"But," pleaded the dear little woman, whom I had an immediate impulse, Perseus-like, to snatch from the jaws of her monster, and turning to the other lady of the party of four,—"but Mrs. —— has never been, and she cannot well go without a chaperone. Surely it cannot matter for once. It isn't as if I were there constantly."
"No!" said the husband, with the absurd pomposity of his tribe.
"I'm very sorry. Mrs. —— will, of course, act as she pleases; but I cannot allow you to do it, Dora."
At last the little wife showed some spirit.
"Don't talk to me like that, Will," she said. "I shall go if I please. Surely I am my own property."
"Not at all!" at once flashed out the husband, wounded in that most vital part of him, his sense of property. "There you mistake. You are my property, MY chattel; you promised obedience to me; I bought you, and you do my bidding!"
"Great heavens!" I ejaculated, and, springing up, found myself face to face with a well-known painter whom you would have thought the most Bohemian fellow in London. And Bohemian he is; but Bohemians are seldom Bohemians for any one save themselves. They are terrible sticklers for convention and even etiquette in other people.
We recognised each other with a laugh, and presently were at it, hammer and tongs. I may say that we were all fairly intimate friends, and thus had the advantage of entire liberty of speech. I looked daggers at the husband; he looked daggers at me, and occasionally looking at his wife, gave her a glance which was like the opening of Bluebeard's closet. You could see the poor murdered bodies dangling within the shadowy cupboard of his eye. Of course we got no further. Additional opposition but further enraged him. He recapitulated what he would no doubt call his arguments,—they sounded more like threats,—and as he spoke I saw dragons fighting for their dams in the primeval ooze, and heard savage trumpetings of masculine monsters without a name.
I told him so.
"You are," I said,—"and you will forgive my directness of expression,—you are the Primeval Male! You are the direct descendant of those Romans who carried off the Sabine women. Nay! you have a much longer genealogy. You come of those hairy anthropoid males who hunted their mates through the tangle of primeval forests, and who finally obtained their consent—shall we say?—by clubbing them on the head with a stone axe. You talk a great deal of nonsense about the New Woman, but you, Sir, are THE OLD MALE; and," I continued, "I have only to obtain your wife's consent to take her under my protection this instant."
Curiously enough, "The Old Male," as he is now affectionately called, became from this moment quite a bosom friend. Nothing would satisfy us but that we should all lodge at the same pension together, and there many a day we fought our battles over again. But that poor little wife never, to my knowledge, went to the Cafe d'Harcourt again.
This meeting with William and Dora was fortunate from the point of view of my studies; for that very night, as I dined with them en pension, I found that providence, with his usual foresight, had placed me next to a very charming American girl of the type that I was particularly wishful to study. She seemed equally wishful to be studied, and we got on amazingly from the first moment of our acquaintance. By the middle of dinner we were pressing each other's feet under the table, and when coffee and cigarettes had come, we were affianced lovers. "Why should I blush to own I love?" was evidently my quaint little companion's motto; and indeed she didn't blush to own it to the whole table, and publicly to announce that I was the dearest boy, and absolutely the most lovable man she had met. There was nothing she wouldn't do for me. Would she brave the terrors of the Latin Quarter with me, I asked, and introduce me to the terrible Cafe d'Harcourt, about which William and Dora had suffered such searchings of heart? "Why, certainly; there was nothing in that," she said. So we went.
Nothing is more absurd and unjust than those crude labels of national character which label one country virtuous and another vicious, one musical and another literary. Thus France has an unjust reputation for vice, and England an equally unjust reputation for virtue.
I had always, I confess, been brought up to think of Paris as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah in one. Good Americans might go to Paris, according to the American theory of a future state; but, certainly I had thought, no good Englishman ever went there—except, maybe, on behalf of the Vigilance Society. Well, it may sound an odd thing to say, but what impressed me most of all was the absolute innocence of the place.
I mean this quite seriously. For surely one important condition of innocence is unconsciousness of doing wrong. The poor despised Parisian may be a very wicked and depraved person, but certainly he goes about with an absolute unconsciousness of it upon his gay and kindly countenance.
"Seeing the world" usually means seeing everything in it that most decent people won't look at; but when you come to look at these terrible things and places, what do you find? Why, absolute disappointment!
Have you ever read that most amusing book, "Baedeker on Paris"?
I know nothing more delightful than the notes to the Montmartre and Latin Quarters. The places to which you, as a smug Briton, may or may not take a lady! The scale of wickedness allowed to the waxwork British lady is most charmingly graduated. I had read that the cafe where we were sitting was one of the most terrible places in Paris,—the Cafe d'Harcourt, where the students of the Latin Quarter take their nice little domestic mistresses to supper. But Baedeker was dreadfully Pecksniffian about these poor innocent etudiantes, many of whom love their lovers much more truly than many a British wife loves her husband, and are much better loved in return. If you doubt it, dare to pay attention to one of these young ladies, and you will probably have to fight a duel for it. In fact, these romantic relations are much more careful of honour than conventional ones; for love, and not merely law, keeps guard.
I looked around me. Where were those terrible things I had read of? Where was this hell which I had reasonably expected would gape leagues of sulphur and blue flame beneath the little marble table? I mentally resolved to bring an action against Baedeker for false information. For what did I see? Simply pairs and groups of young men and women chattering amiably in front of their "bocks" or their "Americains." Here and there a student would have his arm round a waist every one else envied him. One student was prettily trying a pair of new gloves upon his little woman's hand. Here and there blithe songs would spring up, from sheer gladness of heart; and never was such a buzz of happy young people, not even at a Sunday-school treat. To me it seemed absolutely Arcadian, and I thought of Daphnis and Chloe and the early world. Nothing indecorous or gross; all perfectly pretty and seemly.
On our way home Semiramis was so sweet to me, in her innocent, artless frankness, that I went to bed with an intoxicating feeling that I must be irresistible indeed, to have so completely conquered so true a heart in so few hours. I was the more flattered because I am not a vain man, and am not, like some, accustomed to take hearts as the Israelites took Jericho with the blast of one's own trumpet.
But, alas! my dream of universal irresistibility was but short-lived, for next afternoon, as William and I sat out at some cafe together, I found myself the object of chaff.
"Well," said William, "how goes the love-affair?"
I flushed somewhat indignantly at his manner with sanctities.
"I see!" he said, "I see! You are already corded and labelled, and will be shipped over by the next mail,—'To Miss Semiramis Wilcox, 1001 99th St., Philadelphia, U.S.A. Man with care.' Well, I did think you'd got an eye in your head. Look here, don't be a fool! I suppose she said you were the first and last. The last you certainly were. There are limits even to the speed of American girls; but the first, my boy! You are more like the twelfth, to my ocular knowledge. Here comes Dubois the poet. He can tell you something about Miss Semiramis. Eh! Dubois, you know Miss Semiramis Wilcox, don't you?"
The Frenchman smiled and shrugged.
"Un peu," he said.
"Don't be an ass and get angry," William continued; "it's all for your own good."
"The little Semiramis has been seducing my susceptible friend here. Like many of us, he has been captivated by her naturalness, her naivete, her clear good eyes,—that look of nature that is always art! May I relate the idyl of your tragic passion, dear Dubois, as an object lesson?"
The Frenchman bowed, and signed William to proceed.
"You dined with us one evening, and you thus met for the first time. You sat together at table. What happened with the fish?"
"She swore I was the most beautiful man she had ever seen,—and I am not beautiful, as you perceive."
If not beautiful, the poet was certainly true.
"What happened at the entree?"
"Oh, long before that we were pressing our feet under the table."
"And the coffee—"
"Mon Dieu! we were Tristram and Yseult, we were all the great lovers in the Pantheon of love."
"And what then?"
"Oh, we went to the Cafe d'Harcourt—mon ami."
"Did she wear a veil?" I asked.
"Oui, certainement!"
"And did you say, 'Why do you wear a veil,—setting a black cloud before the eyes and gates of heaven'?"
"The very words," said the Frenchman.
"And did she say, 'Yes, but the veil can be raised?'"
"She did, mon pauvre ami," said the poet.
"And did you raise it?"
"I did," said the poet.
"And so did I," I answered. And as I spoke, there was a crash of white marble in my soul, and lo! Love had fallen from his pedestal and been broken into a thousand pieces,—a heavy, dead thing he lay upon the threshold of my heart.
We had appointed a secret meeting in the salon of the pension that afternoon. I was not there! (Nor, as I afterwards learnt, was Semiramis.) When we did meet, I was brutally cold. I evaded all her moves; but when at last I decided to give her a hearing, I confess it needed all my cynicism to resist her air of innocence, of pathetic devotion.
If I couldn't love her, she said, might she go on loving me? Might she write to me sometimes? She would be content if now and again I would send her a little word. Perhaps in time I would grow to believe in her love, etc.
The heart-broken abandonment with which she said this was a sore trial to me; but though love may be deceived, vanity is ever vigilant, and vanity saved me. Yet I left her with an aching sense of having been a brute, and on the morning of my departure from Paris, as I said good-bye to William and Dora, I spoke somewhat seriously of Semiramis. Dora, Dora-like, had believed in her all along,—not having enjoyed William's opportunities of studying her,—and she reproached me with being rather hard-hearted.
"Nonsense," said William, "if she really cared, wouldn't she have been up to bid you good-bye?"
The words were hardly gone from his lips when there came a little knock at the door. It was Semiramis; she had come to say good-bye. Was it in nature not to be touched? "Good-bye," she said, as we stood a moment alone in the hall. "I shall always think of you; you shall not be to me as a ship that has passed in the night, though to me you have behaved very like an iceberg."
We parted in tears and kisses, and I lived for some weeks with that sense of having been a Nero, till two months after I received a much glazed and silvered card to the usual effect.
And so I ceased to repine for the wound I had made in the heart of Semiramis Wilcox.
Of another whom I met and loved in that brief month in Paris, I cherish tenderer memories. Prim little Pauline Deschapelles! How clearly I can still see the respectable brass plate on the door of your little flat—"Mademoiselle Deschapelles—Modes et Robes;" and indeed the "modes et robes" were true enough. For you were in truth a very hard-working little dressmaker, and I well remember how impressed I was to sit beside you, as you plied your needle on some gown that must be finished by the evening, and meditate on the quaint contrast between your almost Puritanic industry and your innocent love of pleasure. I don't think I ever met a more conscientious little woman than little Pauline Deschapelles.
There was but one drawback to our intercourse. She didn't know a word of English, and I couldn't speak a word of French. So we had to make shift to love without either language. But sometimes Pauline would throw down her stitching in amused impatience, and, going to her dainty secretaire, write me a little message in the simplest baby French—which I would answer in French which would knit her brows for a moment or two, and then send her off in peals of laughter.
It WAS French! I know. Among the bric-a-brac of my heart I still cherish some of those little slips of paper with which we made international love—question and answer.
"Vous allez m'oublier, et ne plus penser a moi—ni me voir. Les hommes—egoistes—menteurs, pas dire la verite..." so ran the questions, considerably devoid of auxiliary verbs and such details of construction.
"Je serais jamais t'oublier," ran the frightful answers!
Dear Pauline! Shall I ever see her again? She was but twenty-six. She may still live.
So ended my pilgrimage. I had wandered far, had loved many, but I came back to London without the Golden Girl. I had begun my pilgrimage with a vision, and it was with a vision that I ended it. From all my goings to and fro upon the earth, I had brought back only the image of a woman's face,—the face of that strange woman of the moorland, still haunting my dreams of the night and the day.
It was autumn in my old garden, damp and forsaken, and the mulberry-tree was hung with little yellow shields. My books looked weary of awaiting me, and they and the whole lonely house begged me to take them where sometimes they might be handled by human fingers, mellowed by lamplight, cheered by friendly laughter.
The very chairs begged mutely to be sat upon, the chill white beds to be slept in. Yes, the very furniture seemed even lonelier than myself.
So I took heed of their dumb appeal.
"I know," I answered them tenderly,—"I too, with you, have looked on better days, I too have been where bells have knoll'd to church, I too have sat at many a good man's feast,—yes! I miss human society, even as you, my books, my bedsteads, and my side-boards,—so let it be. It is plain our little Margaret is not coming back, our little Margaret, dear haunted rooms, will never come back; no longer shall her little silken figure flit up and down your quiet staircases, her hands filled with flowers, and her heart humming with little songs. Yes, let us go, it is very lonely; we shall die if we stay here all so lonely together; it is time, let us go."
So thereon I wrote to a furniture-remover, and went out to walk round the mossy old garden for the last time, and say good-bye to the great mulberry, under whose Dodonaesque shade we had sat half frightened on starry nights, to the apple-trees whose blossom had seemed like fairy-land to Margaret and me, town-bred folk, to the apricots and the peaches and the nectarines that it had seemed almost wicked to own,—as though we had gone abroad in silk and velvet,—to the little grassy orchard, and to the little green corner of it, where Margaret had fallen asleep that summer afternoon, in the great wicker-chair, and I had brought a dear friend on tiptoe to gaze on her asleep, with her olive cheeks delicately flushed, her great eyelids closed like the cheeks of roses, and her gold hair tumbled about her neck...
Well, well, good-bye,—tears are foolish things. They will not bring Margaret back. Good-bye, old garden, good-bye, I shall never see you again,—good-bye.
This book is like a woman's letter. The most important part of it is the postscript.
Six years lie between the end of the last chapter and the beginning of this. Meanwhile, I had moved to sociable chambers within sound of the city clocks, and had lived the life of a lonely man about town, sinking more and more into the comfortable sloth of bachelorhood. I had long come to look back upon my pilgrimage as a sort of Indian-summer youth, being, as the reader can reckon for himself, just on thirty-seven. As one will, with one's most serious experiences, hastening to laugh lest one should weep, as the old philosopher said, I had made some fun out of my quest, in the form of a paper for a bookish society to which I belonged, on "Woman as a Learned Pursuit." It is printed among the transactions of the society, and is accessible to the curious only by loan from the members, and I regret that I am unable to print any extracts here. Perhaps when I am dead the society will see the criminal selfishness of reserving for itself what was meant for mankind.
Meanwhile, however, it is fast locked and buried deep in the archives of the club. I have two marriages to record in the interval: one that of a young lady whom I must still think of as 'Nicolete' to Sir Marmaduke Pettigrew, Bart., of Dultowers Hall, and the other the well-known marriage of Sylvia Joy...
Sylvia Joy married after all her fine protestations! Yes! but I'm sure you will forgive her, for she was married to a lord. When one is twenty and romantic one would scorn a woman who would jilt us for wealth and position; at thirty, one would scorn any woman who didn't. Ah me! how one changes! No one, I can honestly say, was happier over these two weddings than I, and I sent Sylvia her petticoat as a wedding present.
But it was to tell of other matters that I reopen this book and once more take up my pen—matters so near to my heart that I shrink from writing of them, and am half afraid that the attempt may prove too hard for me after all, and my book end on a broken cry of pain. Yet, at the same time, I want to write of them, for they are beautiful and solemn, and good food for the heart.
Besides, though my pilgrimage had been ended so long, they are really a part, yea, the part for which, though I knew it not, all the rest has been written—for they tell how I came to find by accident her whom so long I had sought of design.
How shall I tell of Thee who, first and last of all women, gave and awoke in me that love which is the golden key of the world, the mystic revelation of the holy meaning of life, love that alone may pass through the awful gates of the stars, and gaze unafraid into the blue abysses beyond?
Ah! Love, it seemed far away indeed from the stars, the place where we met, and only by the light of love's eyes might we have found each other—as only by the light of love's eyes... But enough, my Heart, the world waits to hear our story,—the world once so unloving to you, the world with a heart so hard and anon so soft for love. When the story is ended, my love, when the story is ended—
It was a hard winter's night four years ago, lovely and merciless; and towards midnight I walked home from a theatre to my rooms in St. James's Street. The Venusberg of Piccadilly looked white as a nun with snow and moonlight, but the melancholy music of pleasure, and the sad daughters of joy, seemed not to heed the cold. For another hour death and pleasure would dance there beneath the electric lights.
Through the strange women clustering at the corners I took my way,—women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites,—and I thought, as I looked into their poor painted faces,—faces but half human, vampirish faces, faces already waxen with the look of the grave,—I thought, as I often did, of the poor little girl whom De Quincey loved, the good-hearted little 'peripatetic' as he called her, who had succoured him during those nights, when, as a young man, he wandered homeless about these very streets,—that good, kind little Ann whom De Quincey had loved, then so strangely lost, and for whose face he looked into women's faces as long as he lived. Often have I stood at the corner of Titchfield Street, and thought how De Quincey had stood there night after night waiting for her to come, but all in vain, and how from the abyss of oblivion into which some cruel chance had swept her, not one cry from her ever reached him again.
I thought, too, as I often did, what if the face I seek should be here among these poor outcasts,—golden face hidden behind a mask of shame, true heart still beating true even amidst this infernal world!
Thus musing, I had walked my way out of the throng, and only a figure here and there in the shadows of doorways waited and waited in the cold.
It was something about one of these waiting figures,—some movement, some chance posture,—that presently surprised my attention and awakened a sudden sense of half recognition. She stood well in the shadow, seeming rather to shrink from than to court attention. As I walked close by her and looked keenly into her face, she cast down her eyes and half turned away. Surely, I had seen that tall, noble figure somewhere before, that haughty head; and then with the apparition a thought struck me—but, no! it couldn't be she! not HERE!
"It is," said my soul, as I turned and walked past her again; "you missed her once, are you going to miss her again?"
"It is," said my eyes, as they swept her for the third time; "but she had glorious chestnut hair, and the hair of this woman is—gilded."
"It is she," said my heart; "thank God, it is she!"
So it was that I went up to that tall, shy figure.
"It must be very cold here," I said; "will you not join me in some supper?"
She assented, and we sought one of the many radiating centres of festivity in the neighbourhood. She was very tired and cold,—so tired she seemed hardly to have the spirit to eat, and evidently the cold had taken tight clutch of her lungs, for she had a cough that went to my heart to hear, and her face was ghastly pale. When I had persuaded her to drink a little wine, she grew more animated and spots of suspicious colour came into her cheeks. So far she had seemed all but oblivious of my presence, but now she gave me a sweet smile of gratitude, one of those irradiating transfiguring smiles that change the whole face, and belong to few faces, the heavenly smile of a pure soul.
Yes, it was she! The woman who sat in front of me was the woman whom I had met so strangely that day on that solitary moorland, and whom in prophecy still more strange my soul had declared to be, "now and for ever and before all worlds the woman God had created for me, and that unless I could be hers and she mine, there could be no home, no peace, for either of us so long as we lived—" and now so strangely met again.
Yes, it was she!
For the moment my mind had room for no other thought. I cared not to conjecture by what devious ways God had brought her to my side. I cared not what mire her feet had trodden. She had carried her face pure as a lily through all the foul and sooty air. There was a pure heart in her voice. Sin is of the soul, and this soul had not sinned! Let him that is without sin amongst you cast the first stone.
"Why did you dye that wonderful chestnut hair?" I asked her presently—and was sorry next minute for the pain that shot across her face, but I just wanted to hint at what I designed not to reveal fully till later on, and thus to hint too that it was not as one of the number of her defilers that I had sought her.
"Why," she said, "how do you know the colour of my hair? We have never met before."
"Yes, we have," I said, "and that was why I spoke to you to-night. I'll tell you where it was another time."
But after all I could not desist from telling her that night, for, as afterwards at her lodging we sat over the fire, talking as if we had known each other all our lives, there seemed no reason for an arbitrary delay.
I described to her the solitary moorland road, and the grey-gowned woman's figure in front of me, and the gig coming along to meet her, and the salutation of the two girls, and I told her all one look of her face had meant for me, and how I had wildly sought her in vain, and from that day to this had held her image in my heart.
And as I told her, she sobbed with her head against my knees and her great hair filling my lap with gold. In broken words she drew for me the other side of the picture of that long-past summer day.
Yes, the girl in the gig was her sister, and they were the only daughters of a farmer who had been rich once, but had come to ruin by drink and misfortune. They had been brought up from girls by an old grandmother, with whom the sister was living at the time of my seeing them. Yes, Tom was her husband. He was a doctor in the neighbourhood when he married her, and a man, I surmised, of some parts and promise, but, moving to town, he had fallen into loose ways, taken to drinking and gambling, and had finally deserted her for another woman—at the very moment when their first child was born. The child died "Thank God!" she added with sudden vehemence, and "I—well, you will wonder how I came to this, I wonder myself—it has all happened but six months ago, and yet I seem to have forgotten—only the broken-hearted and the hungry would understand, if I could remember—and yet it was not life, certainly not life I wanted—and yet I couldn't die—"
The more I came to know Elizabeth and realise the rare delicacy of her nature, the simplicity of her mind, and the purity of her soul, the less was I able to comprehend the psychology of that false step which her great misery had forced her to take. For hers was not a sensual, pleasure-loving nature. In fact, there was a certain curious Puritanism about her, a Puritanism which found a startlingly incongruous and almost laughable expression in the Scripture almanac which hung on the wall at the end of her bed, and the Bible, and two or three Sunday-school stories which, with a copy of "Jane Eyre," were the only books that lay upon the circular mahogany table.
Once I ventured gently to chaff her about this religiosity of hers.
"But surely you believe in God, dear," she had answered, "you're not an atheist!"
I think an atheist, with all her experience of human monsters, was for her the depth of human depravity.
"No, dear," I had answered; "if you can believe in God, surely I can!"
I repeat that this gap in Elizabeth's psychology puzzled me, and it puzzles me still, but it puzzled me only as the method of working out some problem which after all had "come out right" might puzzle one. It was only the process that was obscure. The result was gold, whatever the dark process might be. Was it simply that Elizabeth was one of that rare few who can touch pitch and not be defiled?—or was it, I have sometimes wondered, an unconscious and after all a sound casuistry that had saved Elizabeth's soul, an instinctive philosophy that taught her, so to say, to lay a Sigurd's sword between her soul and body, and to argue that nothing can defile the body without the consent of the soul.
In deep natures there is always what one might call a lover's leap to be taken by those that would love them—something one cannot understand to be taken on trust, something even that one fears to be gladly adventured ... all this, and more, I knew that I could safely venture for Elizabeth's sake, ere I kissed her white brow and stole away in the early hours of that winter's morning.
As I did so I had taken one of the sumptuous strands of her hair into my hand and kissed it too.
"Promise me to let this come back to its own beautiful colour," I had said, as I nodded to a little phial labelled "Peroxide of Hydrogen" on her mantelshelf.
"Would you like to?" she had said.
"Yes, do it for me."
One day some months after I cut from her dear head one long thick lock, one half of which was gold and the other half chestnut. I take it out and look at it as I write, and, as when I first cut it, it seems still a symbol of Elizabeth's life, the sun and the shadow, only that the gold was the shadow, and the chestnut was the sun.
The time came when the locks, from crown to tip, were all chestnut—but when it came I would have given the world for them to be gold again; for Elizabeth had said a curious thing when she had given me her promise.
"All right, dear," she had said, "but something tells me that when they are all brown again our happiness will be at an end."
"How long will that take?" I had said, trying to be gay, though an involuntary shudder had gone through me, less at her words than because of the strange conviction of her manner.
"About two years,—perhaps a little more," she said, answering me quite seriously, as she gravely measured the shining tresses, half her body's length, with her eye.
One fresh and sunny morning, some months after this night, Elizabeth and I stood before the simple altar of a little country church, for the news had come to us that her husband was dead, and thus we were free to belong to each other before all the world. The exquisite stillness in the cool old church was as the peace in our hearts, and the rippling sound of the sunlit leaves outside seemed like the very murmur of the stream of life down which we dreamed of gliding together from that hour.
It was one of those moments which sometimes come and go without any apparent cause, when life suddenly takes a mystical aspect of completeness, all its discords are harmonised by some unseen hand of the spirit, and all its imperfections fall away. The lover of beauty and the lover of God alike know these strange moments, but none know them with such a mighty satisfaction as a man and a woman who love as loved Elizabeth and I.
Love for ever completes the world, for it is no future of higher achievement, no expectation of greater joy. It lives for ever in a present made perfect by itself. Love can dream of no greater blessedness than itself, of no heaven but its own. God himself could have added no touch of happiness to our happy hearts that grave and sunny morning. You philosophers who go searching for the meaning of life, thinkers reading so sadly, and let us hope so wrongly, the riddle of the world—life has but one meaning, the riddle but one answer—which is Love. To love is to put yourself in harmony with the spheral music of creation, to stand in the centre of the universe, and see it good and whole as it appears in the eye of God.
Even Death himself, the great and terrible King of kings, though he may break the heart of love with agonies and anguish and slow tortures of separation, may break not his faith. No one that has loved will dream even death too terrible a price to pay for the revelation of love. For that revelation once made can never be recalled. As a little sprig of lavender will perfume a queen's wardrobe, so will a short year of love keep sweet a long life. And love's best gifts death can never take away. Nay, indeed, death does not so much rob as enrich the gifts of love. The dead face that was fair grows fairer each spring, sweet memories grow more sweet, what was silver is now gold, and as years go by, the very death of love becomes its immortality.
I think I shall never hear Elizabeth's voice again, never look into her eyes, never kiss her dear lips—but Elizabeth is still mine, and I am hers, as in that morning when we kissed in that little chancel amid the flickering light, and passed out into the sun and down the lanes, to our little home among the meadow-sweet.
She is still as real to me as the stars,—and, alas, as far away! I think no thought that does not fly to her, I have no joys I do not share with her, I tell her when the spring is here, and we sit beneath the moon and listen to the nightjar together. Sometimes we are merry together as in the old time, and our laughter makes nightfaring folk to cross themselves; my work, my dreams, my loves, are all hers, and my very sins are sinned for her sake.
Two years did Elizabeth and I know the love that passeth all understanding, and day by day the chestnut upon her head was more and the gold less, till the day came that she had prophesied, and with the day a little child, whose hair had stolen all her mother's gold, as her heart had drained away her mother's life.
Ah! reader, may it be long before you kneel at the bedside of her you love best in the world, and know that of all your love is left but a hundred heart-beats, while opposite sits Death, watch in hand, and fingers upon her wrist.
"Husband," whispered Elizabeth, as we looked at each other for the last time, "let her be your little golden girl..."
And then a strange sweetness stole over her face, and the dream of Elizabeth's life was ended.
As I write I hear in the still house the running of little feet, a fairy patter sweet and terrible to the heart.
Little feet, little feet—perhaps if I follow you I shall find again our mother that is lost. Perhaps Elizabeth left you with me that I should not miss the way.
Tout par soullas.