“her words to ScornAre scattered, and her mouth is stopt with Dust!”
“her words to ScornAre scattered, and her mouth is stopt with Dust!”
His hand shut involuntarily, painfully, on hers, and as though his breath cut him, he said, “Don’t—don’t, Eppie.”
But with her gaiety she insisted: “Oh, but let us have the truth. You must think it. What else could you think?” and, again with the note of pity that would atone for the cruel lightness, “Poor Gavan! My poor, darling Gavan! And I must leave you with your thoughts—your empty thoughts, alone.”
He had taken a long breath over the physical pang her words had inflicted, and now he looked down at her hand, gently, one after the other, as though unseeingly, smoothing her fingers.
“While I go on,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” he assented.
“You humor me with that. You are so glad, for me, that I go with all my illusions about me. Aren’t you afraid that, because of them, I’ll be caught in the mill again and ground round and round in incarnations until, only after such a long time, I come out all clean and white and selfless, not a scrap of dangerous life about me—Alone with the Alone.”
He felt now the fever in her clearness, the hovering on the border of hallucination. The colors flamed indeed, and her thoughts seemed to shoot up in strange flickerings, a medley of inconsequent memories and fancies strung on their chain of unnatural lucidity.
He answered with patient gentleness, “I’m not afraid for you, Eppie. I don’t think all that.”
“Nor I for myself,” she retorted. “I love the mill and its grindings. But what you think,—I knowperfectly what you think. You can’t keep it from me, Gavan. You can’t keep anything from me. And I found something that said it all. I can remember it. Shall I say it to you?”
He bowed his head, smoothing her hand, not looking up at her while, in that voice of defiance, of fever, yet of such melancholy and echoing sweetness, she repeated:
“Ne suis-je pas un faux accordDans la divine symphonie,Grâce à la vorace IronieQui me secoue et qui me mord?“Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!C’est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!Je suis le sinistre miroirOù la mégère se regarde!“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!Je suis le soufflet et la joue!Je suis les membres et la roue,Et le victime et le bourreau!”
“Ne suis-je pas un faux accordDans la divine symphonie,Grâce à la vorace IronieQui me secoue et qui me mord?
“Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!C’est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!Je suis le sinistre miroirOù la mégère se regarde!
“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!Je suis le soufflet et la joue!Je suis les membres et la roue,Et le victime et le bourreau!”
She paused after it, smiling intently upon him, and he met the smile to say:
“That’s only one side of it, dear.”
“Ah, it’s a side I know about, too! Didn’t I see it, feel it? Haven’t I been all through it—with you, for you, because of you? Ah, when you left me—when you left me, Gavan—“
Still she smiled, with brilliant eyes, repeating,
“Qui me secoue et qui me mord.”
“Qui me secoue et qui me mord.”
He was silent, sitting with his pallid, drooping head; and suddenly she put her other hand on his, on the hand that gently, mechanically, smoothed her fingers.
“You caress me, you try to comfort me,—while I am tormenting you. It’s strange that I should want to torment you. Is it that I’m so afraid you sha’n’t feel? I want you to feel. I want you to suffer. It is so horrible to leave you. It is so horrible to be afraid—sometimes afraid—that I shall never, never see you again. When you feel, when you suffer, I am not so lonely. But you feel nothing, do you?”
He did not answer her.
“Will you ever miss me, Gavan?”
He did not answer.
“Won’t you even remember me?” she asked.
And still he did not answer, sitting with downcast eyes. And she saw that he could not, and in his silence, of a dumb torture, was his reply. He looked the stricken saint, pierced through with arrows. And which of them was the victim, which the executioner?
With her question a clearness, quieter, deeper, came to her, as though in the recoil of its engulfing anguish she pushed her way from among vibrating discords to a sudden harmony that, in holy peace, resolved them all in unison. Her eyelids fluttered down while, for an instant, she listened. Yes, under it all, above it all, holding them all about, there it was. She seemed to see the pain mounting, circling, flowing from its knotted root into strength and splendor. But though he was with her in it he wasalso far away,—he was blind, and deaf,—held fast by cruel bonds.
“Look at me,” she commanded him gently.
And now, reluctantly, he looked up into her eyes.
They held him, they drew him, they flooded him. With the keenness of life they cut into his heart, and like the surging up of blood his love answered hers. As helpless as he had ever been before her, he laid his head on her breast, his arms encircling her, while, with closed eyes, he said: “Don’t think that I don’t feel. Don’t think that I don’t suffer. It’s only that;—I have only to see you;—something grasps me, and tortures me—“
“Something,” she said, her voice like the far flute echo of the voice that had spoken on that night in the old Scotch garden, “that brings you to life—to God.”
“Oh, Eppie, what can I say to you?” he murmured.
“You can say nothing. But you will have to wake. It will have to come,—the sorrow, the joy of reality,—God—and me.”
It was his face, with closed eyes, with its stricken, ashen agony, that seemed the dying face. Hers, turned gently toward him, had all the beneficence, the radiance of life. But when she spoke again there was in her voice a tranced stillness as though already it spoke from another world.
“You love me, Gavan.”
“I love you. You have that. That is yours, forever. I long for you, always, always,—even when I think that I am at peace. You are in everything: Ihear a bird, and I think of your voice; I see a flower, or the sky, and it’s of your face I think. I am yours, Eppie—yours forever.”
“You make me happy,” she said.
“Eppie, my darling Eppie, die now, die in my arms, dearest—in your happiness.”
“No, not yet; I can’t go yet—though I wish it, too,” she said. “There are still horrid bits—dreadful dark places—like the dreadful poem—the poem of you, Gavan—where I lose myself; burning places, edges of pain, where I fight to find myself again; long, dim places where I dream—dream—. I won’t have you see me like that; you might think that you watched the scattering of the real me. I won’t have you remember me all dim and broken.”
Her voice was sinking from her into an abyss of languor, and she felt the swirl of phantom thoughts blurring her mind even while she spoke.
As on that far-away night when he held her hand and they stood together under the stars, she said, speaking now her prayer, “O God! God!”; and seeming in the effort of her will to lift a weight that softly, inexorably, like the lid of a tomb, pressed down upon her, “I am here,” she said. “You are mine. I will not be afraid. Remember me. So good-by, Gavan.”
“I will remember,” he said.
His arms still held her. And through his mind an army seemed to rush, galloping, with banners, with cries of lamentations, agony, regret, passionate rebellion. It crashed in conflict, blood beneath it, and above it tempests and torn banners. And the bannerswere desperate hopes riddled with bullets; and the blood was love poured out and the tempest was his heart. It was, he thought, even while he saw, listened, felt, the last onslaught upon his soul. She was going—the shadow of life was sliding from her—and from him, for she was life and its terror and beauty. Above the turmoil was the fated peace. He had won it, unwillingly. He could not be kept from it even by the memory that would stay.
But though he knew, and, in knowing, saw his contemplative soul far from this scene of suffocating misery, Eppie, his dear, his beautiful, was in his arms, her eyes, her lips, her heart. He would never see her again.
He raised his head to look his last, and, like a faint yet piercing perfume, her soul’s smile still dwelt on him as she lay there speechless. For the moment—and was not the moment eternity?—the triumph was all hers. The moment, when long, long past, would still be part of him and her triumph in it eternal. To spare her the sight of his anguish would be to rob her. Anguish had been and was the only offering he could make her. He felt—felt unendurably, she would see that; he suffered, he loved her, unspeakably; she had that, too, while, in their last long silence, he held her hands against his heart. And her eyes, still smiling on him with their transcendent faith, showed that her triumph was shadowless.
HEheard next day that she had died during the night.
Peace did not come to him for long; the woundsof the warring interlude of life had been too deep. He forgot himself at last in the treadmill quiet of days all serene laboriousness, knowing that it could not be for many years that he should watch the drama. She had shattered herself on him; but he, too, had felt that in himself something had broken. And he forgot the wounds, except when some sight or sound, the song of a bird in Spring, a spray of heather, a sky of stars, startled them to deep throbbing. And then a hand, stretched out from the past, would seize him, a shudder, a pang, would shake him, and he would know that he was alone and that he remembered.