SHE left him in the garden. They had talked quietly, of the past, of their childhood, and, as quietly, of the future—their immediate marriage and departure for long, wonderful voyages together. His head lay on her breast, and often, while they spoke of that life together, of the homecoming to Cheylesford Lodge and when he heard her voice tremble a little, he kissed the dear hand he held.
When she rose at last and stood before him, he said, still holding her hands, that he would sit on there in the darkness and think of her.
She felt the languor of his voice and told him that he was very tired and would do much better to go to bed and forget about her till morning; but, looking up at her, he shook his head, smiling: “I couldn’t sleep.”
So she left him; but, before she went, after the last gazing pause in which there seemed now no discord, no strife, nothing to hide or to threaten, she had suddenly put her arms around his neck, bending to him and murmuring, “Oh, I love you.”
“I seem to have loved you forever, Eppie,” he said.
But, once more, in all the strange oblivion of his acceptance, there had been for him in their kiss and their embrace the undertone of anguish, the distant tolling—as if for something accomplished, over forever—of a funeral bell.
He watched her figure—white was not the word for it in this midnight world—pass away into the darkness. And, as she disappeared, the bell seemed still to toll, “Gone. Gone. Gone.”
So he was alone.
He was alone. The hours went by and he still sat there. The white roses near him, they, too, only a strange blossoming of darkness, symbolized, in their almost aching sweetness, the departed presence. He breathed in their fragrance; and, as he listened to his own quiet breaths, they seemed those of the night made conscious in him. The roses remembered for him; the night breathed through him; it was an interchange, a mingling. Above were the deep vaults of heaven, the profundities of distance, the appalling vastness, strewn with its dust of stars. And it, too, was with him, in him, as the roses were, as his own breath came and went.
The veils had now lifted from the night and it was radiant, all its stars visible; and veil after veil seemed drifting from before his soul.
A cool, light breeze stirred his hair.
Closing his eyes, at last, his thought plunged, as his sight had plunged, into gulf under gulf of vacancy.
After the unutterable fatigue, like the sinking under anæsthesia, of his final yielding, he could notknow what was happening to him, nor care. It had often happened before, only never quite like this. It was, once more, the great peace, lapping wave after wave, slow, sliding, immeasurable waves, through and through him; dissolving thought and feeling; dissolving all discord, all pain, all joy and beauty.
The hours went by, and, as they went, Eppie’s face, like a drift of stars, sank, sank into the gulf. What had he said to her? what promised? Only the fragrance of the roses seemed to remember, nothing in himself. For what had he wanted? He wanted nothing now. Her will, her life, had seized him; but no, no, no,—the hours quietly, in their passing seemed to say it,—they had not kept him. He had at last, after a lifelong resistance, abandoned himself to her, and the abandonment had been the final step toward complete enfranchisement. For, with no effort now of his own at escape, no will at all to be free, he had left her far behind him, as if through the waters of the whirlpool his soul, like a light bubble, had softly, surely, risen to the air. It had lost itself, and her.
He thought of her, but now with no fear, no anguish. A vast indifference filled him. It was no longer a question of tearing himself from her, no longer a question of saving himself and her. There was no question, nor any one to save. He was gone away, from her, from everything.
When the dawn slowly stole into the garden, so that the ghosts of day began to take shape and color, Gavan rose among them. The earth was damp withdew; his hair and clothes were damp. Overhead the sky was white, and the hills upon it showed a flat, shadowless green. Between the night’s enchantments of stillness, starriness, veiled, dreaming beauty and the sunlit, voluble enchantments of the day,—songs and flights of birds, ripple and shine of water, the fugitive, changing color of land and sky,—this hour was poor, bare, monotonous. There wasn’t a ray of enchantment in it. It was like bleak canvas scenery waiting for the footlights and a decorated stage.
Gavan looked before him, down the garden path, shivering a little. He was cold, and the sensation brought him back to the old fact of life, that, after all, was there as long as one saw it. The coming of the light seemed to retwist once more his own palely tinted prism of personality, and with the cold, with the conscious looking back at the night and forward to the day, came a long, dull ache of sadness. It was more physical than mental; hunger and chill played their part in it, he knew, while, as the prism twined its colors, the fatiguing faculty of analysis once more built up the world of change and diversity. He looked up at the pale walls of the old house, laced with their pattern of creepers. The pine-tree lay like an inky shadow across it, and, among the branches, were the windows of Eppie’s room, the window where he and she had stood together on the morning of Robbie’s death—a white, dew-drenched morning like this. There she slept, dear, beautiful, the shadow of life. And here he stood, still living, after all, in their mutual mirage; still to hurt her.He didn’t think of her face, her voice, her aspect. The only image that came was of a shadow—something darkly beautiful that entranced and suffocated, something that, enveloping one, shut out peace and vacancy.
His cold hands thrust into his pockets, he stood thinking for a moment, of how he would have to hurt her, and of how much less it was to be than if what they had seen in the night’s glamour had been possible.
He wondered why the mere fact of the night’s revelation—all those passing-bell hours—had made it so impossible for him to go on, by sheer force of will, with the play. Why couldn’t he, for her sake, act the lifelong part? In her arms he would know again the moments of glamour. But, at the mere question, a sickness shuddered through him. He saw now, clearly, what stood in the way: suffering, hideous suffering, for both of them—permanent, all-pervading suffering. The night had proved too irrevocably that any union between them was only momentary, only a seeming, and with her, feeling her faith, her hope, her love, he could know nothing but the undurable discord of their united and warring notes.
Could life and death be made one flesh?
The horror of the thought spurred him from his rigor of contemplation. That, at least, had been spared her. Destiny, then, had not meant for them that final, tragic consummation.
He threaded his way rapidly among the paths, the flower-beds, under the low boughs of the old fruit-trees.She had left the little door near the morning-room open for him, and through it he entered the still house.
It wasn’t escape, now, from her, but from that pressing horror, as of something, that, unless he hastened, might still overtake them both. Yet outside her door he paused, bent his head, listened with a strange curiosity, helpless before the nearness of that loved, that dreaded being, the warring note that he sought yet fled from.
She slept. Not a sound stirred in the room.
He closed his eyes, seeing, with a vividness that was almost a hallucination, her face, her wonderful face, asleep, with the dark rivers of her hair flowing about it.
And, fixed as he was in his frozen certainty of truth, he felt, once more like the striking of a hand across a harp, a longing, wild and passionate, to enter, to take her, sleeping, in his arms, to see her eyes open on him; to hide himself in life, as in the darkness of her breast and arms, and to forget forever the piercing of inexorable thought.
He found that his hand was on the lock and that he was violently trembling.
It was inexorable thought, the knowledge of the horror that would await them, that conquered the leap of blind instinct.
Half an hour later a thin, intense light rimmed all the eastern hills, and a cold, clear cheerfulness spread over the earth. The moors were purple and the sky overhead palely, immaculately blue. About the tall lime-trees the rooks circled, cawing, and askylark sang far and high, a floating atom of ecstasy.
And in the clearness Gavan’s figure showed, walking rapidly away from the white house, down the road that led through the heather and past the birch-woods, walking away from it forever.
GRAINGER stood in Eppie’s little sitting-room, confronting, as Gavan had confronted the spring before, Miss Allen’s placidly sewing figure.
The flowers against which her uneventful head now bent were autumnal. Thickly growing Michaelmas daisies, white and purple, screened the lower section of the square outside. Above were the shabby tree-tops, that seemed heavily painted upon an equally solid sky. The square was dusty, the trees were dusty, the very blue of the sky looked grimed with dust.
The hot air; the still flowers, not stirred by a breath of breeze; Miss Allen’s figure, motionless but for its monotonously moving hand, were harmonious in their quiet, and in contrast to them Grainger’s pervasive, restless, irritable presence was like a loud, incessant jangling.
He walked back and forth; he picked up the photographs on the mantel-shelf, the books on the table, flinging them down in a succession of impatient claps. He threw himself heavily into chairs,—so heavily that Miss Allen glanced round, alarmed for the security of the furniture,—and he asked her half a dozen times if Miss Gifford would be in at five.
“She is seldom late,” or, “I expect her then,” Miss Allen would answer in the tone of mild severity that one might employ toward an unseemly child over whom one had no authority.
But though there was severity in Miss Allen’s voice, the acute glances that she stole at the clamorous guest were not unsympathetic. She placed him. She pitied and she rather admired him. Even while emphasizing the dismay of her involuntary starts when the table rattled and the chairs groaned, she felt a satisfaction in these symptoms of passion; for that she was in the presence of a passion, a hopeless and rather magnificent passion, she made no doubt. She associated such passions with Eppie,—it was trailing such clouds of glory that she descended upon the arid life of the little square,—and none had so demonstrated itself, none had so performed its part for her benefit. She was sorry that it was hopeless; but she was glad that it was there, in all its Promethean wrathfulness, for her to observe. Miss Allen felt pretty sure that this was the nearest experience of passion she would ever know.
“In at five, as a rule, you say?” Grainger repeated for the fourth time, springing from the chair where, with folded arms, he had sat for a few moments scowling unseeingly at the pansies.
He stationed himself now beside her and, over her head, stared out at the square. It was at once alarming and delightful,—as if the Titan with his attendant vulture had risen from his rock to join her.
“You’ve no idea from which direction she is coming?”
“None,” said Miss Allen, decisively but not unkindly. “It’s really no good for you to think of going out to meet her. She is doing a lot of different things this afternoon and might come from any direction. You would almost certainly miss her.” And she went on, unemphatically, but, for all the colorless quality of her voice, so significantly that Grainger, realizing for the first time the presence of an understanding sympathy, darted a quick look at her. “She gets in at five, just as I go out. She knows that I depend on her to be here by then.”
So she would not be in the way, this little individual. She made him think, now that he looked at her more attentively, as she sat there with her trimly, accurately moving hand, of a beaver he had once seen swiftly and automatically feeding itself; her sleek head, her large, smooth front teeth, were like a beaver’s. It was really very decent of her to see that he wanted her out of the way; so decent that, conscious of the link it had made between them, he said presently, abruptly and rather roughly, “How is she?”
“Well, of course she has not recovered,” said Miss Allen.
“Recovered? But she wasn’t actually ill.” Grainger had a retorting air.
“No; I suppose not. It was nervous prostration, I suppose—if that’s not an illness.”
“This isn’t the place for her to recover from nervous prostration in.” He seemed to fasten an accusation, but Miss Allen understood perfectly.
“Of course not. I’ve tried to make her see that.But,”—she was making now quite a chain of links,—“she feels she must work, must lose herself in something. Of course she overdoes it. She overdoes everything.”
“Overwork, do you think? The cause, I mean?”
Grainger jerked this out, keeping his eyes on the square.
Miss Allen, not in any discreet hesitation, but in sincere uncertainty, paused over her answer.
“It couldn’t be, quite. She was well enough when she went away in the summer, though she really isn’t at all strong,—not nearly so strong as she looks. She broke down, you know, at her uncle’s, in Scotland”; and Miss Allen added, in a low-pitched and obviously confidential voice, “I think it was some shock that nobody knows anything about.”
Grainger stood still for some moments, and then plunging back into the little room, he crossed and re-crossed it with rapid strides. Her guessing and his knowledge came too near.
Only after a long pause did Miss Allen say, “She’s really frightfully changed.” The clock was on the stroke. Rising, gathering up her work, dropping, with neat little clicks, her scissors, her thimble, into her work-box, she added, and she fixed her eyes on him for a moment as she spoke, “Do, if you can, make her—“
“Well, what? Go away?” he demanded. “I’ve no authority—none. Her people ought to kidnap her. That’s what I’d do. Lift her out of this hole.”
Miss Allen’s eyes dwelt on his while she nervedherself to a height of adventurous courage that, in looking back at it, amazed her. “Here she is,” she said, and almost whispering, “Well, kidnap her, then. That’s what she needs—some one stronger than herself to kidnap her.”
She slid her hand through his, a panic of shyness overtaking her, and darted out, followed by the flutter of a long, white strip of muslin.
Grainger stood looking at the open door, through which in a moment Eppie entered.
His first feeling was one of relief. He did not, in that first moment, see that she was “frightfully changed.” Even her voice seemed the same, as she said with all the frank kindness of her welcome and surprise, “Why, Jim, this is good of you,” and all her tact was there, too, giving him an impression of the resource and flexibility of happy vitality, in her ignoring by glance or tone of their parting.
She wore, on the hot autumn day, a white linen frock, the loose bodice belted with green, a knot of green at her throat, and, under the white and green of her little hat, her face showed color and its dear smile.
Relief was so great, indeed, that Grainger found himself almost clinging to her hand in his sudden thankfulness.
“You’re not so ill, then,” he brought out. “I heard it—that you had broken down—and I came back. I was in the Dolomites. I hadn’t had news of you since I left.”
“So ill! Nonsense,” said Eppie, giving his hand a reassuring shake and releasing her own to pull offher soft, loose gloves. “It was a breakdown I had, but nothing serious. I believe it to have been an attack of biliousness, myself. People don’t like to own to liver when they can claim graceful maladies like nervous prostration,—so it was called. But liver, only, I fear it was. And I’m all right now, thank goodness, for I loathe being ill and am a horrid patient.”
She had taken off her hat, pushing back her hair from her forehead and sinking into a chair that was against the light. The Michaelmas daisies made a background for the bronze and white of her head, for, as she rested, the color that her surprise and her swift walking had given her died. She was glad to rest, her smile said that, and he saw, indeed, that she was utterly tired.
Suddenly, as he looked at her, seeing the great fatigue, seeing the pallor, seeing the smile only stay as if with determination, the truth of Miss Allen’s description was revealed to him. She was frightfully changed. Her smile, her courage, made him think of adanse macabre. The rhythm, the gaiety of life were there, but life itself was gone.
The revelation came to him, but he felt himself clutch it silently, and he let her go on talking.
She went on, indeed, very volubly, talking of her breakdown, of how good the general and her aunt had been to her, and of how getting back to her work had picked her up directly.
“I think I’ll finally pitch my tent here,” she went on. “The interest grows all the time,—and the ties, the responsibility. One can’t do things by halfmeasures; you know that, thorough person that you are. I mustn’t waste my mite of income by gadding about. I’m going to chuck all the rest and give myself altogether to this.”
“You used to think that the rest helped you in this,” said Grainger.
“To a certain extent it did, and will, for I’ve had so much that it will last me for a long time.”
“You intend to live permanently down here?”
“I shall have my holidays, and I shall run up to civilization for a dinner or two now and then. It’s not that I’ve any illusions about my usefulness or importance. It’s that all this is so useful to me. It’s something I can do with all my might and main, and I’ve such masses of energy you know, Jim, that need employment. And then, though of course one works at the wrong side of the tapestry and has to trust that the pattern is coming right, I do believe that, to a certain extent, it does need me.”
He leaned back in his chair opposite her, listening to the voice that rattled on so cheerfully. With his head bent, he kept that old gaze upon her and clutched the clearer and clearer revelation: Eppie—Eppie in torment; Eppie shattered;—Eppie—why, it was as if she sat there before him smiling and rattling over a huge hole in her chest. And, finally, the consciousness of the falsity in her own tone made her falter a little. She couldn’t continue so glibly while his eyes were saying to her: “Yes; I see, I see. You are wounded to death.” But if she faltered it was only, in the pause, to look about for another shield.
“And you?” she said. “Have you done a great deal of climbing? Tell me about yourself, dear Jim.”
It was a dangerous note to strike and the “dear Jim” gave away her sense of insecurity. It was almost an appeal to him not to see, or, at all events, not to tell her that he saw.
“Don’t talk about me,” he said very rudely. She knew the significance of his rudeness.
“Let us talk of whatever you will.”
“Of you, then. Don’t try to shut me out, Eppie.”
“Am I shutting you out?”
“You are trying to. You have succeeded with the rest, I suppose; but, as of course you know, you can’t succeed with me. I know too much. I care too much.”
His rough, tense voice beat down her barriers. She sat silent, oddly smiling.
He rose and came to her and stood above her, pressing the tips of his fingers heavily down upon her shoulder.
“You must tell me. I must know. I won’t stand not knowing.”
Motionless, without looking up at him, she still smiled before her.
“That—that coward has broken your heart,” he said. There were tears in his voice, and, looking up now, the smile stiffened to a resolute grimace, she saw them running down his cheeks. But her own face did not soften. With a glib dryness she answered:
“Yes, Jim; that’s it.”
“Oh—“ It was a long growl over her head.
She had looked away again, and continued in the same crisp voice: “I’d lie if I could, you may be sure. But you put it so, you look so, that I can’t. I’m at your mercy. You know what I feel, so I can’t hide it from you. I hate any one, even you, to know what I feel. Help me to hide it.”
“What has he done?” Grainger asked on the muffled, growling note.
“Gavan? Done? He’s done nothing.”
“But something happened. You aren’t where you were when I left you. You weren’t breaking down then.”
“Hope deferred, Jim—“
“It’s not that. Don’t fence, to shield him. It’s not hope deferred. It’s hope dead. Something happened. What was it?”
“All that happened was that he went, when I thought that he was going to stay, forever.”
“He went, knowing—“
“That I loved him? Yes; I told him.”
“And he told you that he didn’t love you?”
“No, there you were wrong. He told me that he did. But he saw what you saw. So what would you have asked of him?”
“Saw what I saw? What do you mean?”
“That he would suffocate me. That he was the negation of everything I believed in.”
“You mean to tell me,” said Grainger, his fingers still pressing down upon her shoulder, “that it all came out,—that you had it there between you,—and then that he ran away?”
“From the fear of hurting my life. Yes.”
“From the fear of life itself, you mean.”
“If that was it, wasn’t it enough?”
“The coward. The mean, bloodless coward,” said Jim Grainger.
“I let you say it because I understand; it’s your relief. But he is not a coward. He is only—a saint. A saint without a saint’s perquisites. A Spinoza without a God. An imitator of Christ without a Christ. I have been thinking, thinking it all out, seeing it all, ever since.”
“Spinoza! What has he to do with it! Don’t talk rot, dear child, to comfort yourself.”
“Be patient, Jim. Perhaps I can help you. It calms one when one understands. I have been reading up all the symptoms. Listen to this, if you think that Spinoza has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, he knew all about it and would have seen very much as Gavan does.”
She took up one of the books that had been so frequently flung down by Grainger in his waiting and turned its pages while he watched her with the enduring look of a mother who humors a sick child’s foolish fancies.
“Listen to Spinoza, Jim,” she said, and he obediently bent his lowering gaze to the task. “‘When a thing is not loved, no strife arises about it; there is no pang if it perishes, no envy if another bears it away, no fear, no hate; yes, in a word, no tumult of soul. These things all come from loving that which perishes.’ And now the Imitation: ‘What canst thou see anywhere which can continue long under thesun? Thou believest, perchance, that thou shalt be satisfied, but thou wilt never be able to attain unto this. If thou shouldst see all things before thee at once, what would it be but a vain vision?’ And this: ‘Trust not thy feeling, for that which is now will be quickly changed into somewhat else.’”
Her voice, as she read on to him,—and from page to page she went, plucking for him, it seemed, their cold, white blossoms, fit flowers to lay on the grave of love,—had lost the light dryness as of withered leaves rustling. It seemed now gravely to understand, to acquiesce. A chill went over the man, as though, under his hand, he felt her, too, sliding from warm life into that place of shadows where she must be to be near the one she loved.
“Shut the books, for God’s sake, Eppie,” he said. “Don’t tell me that you’ve come to see as he has.”
She looked up at him, and now, in the dear, deep eyes, he saw all the old Eppie, the Eppie of life and battle.
“Can you think it, Jim? It’s because I see so clearly what he sees that I hate it and repudiate it and fight it with every atom of my being. It’s that hatred, that repudiation, that fight, that is life. I believe in it, I’m for it, as I never believed before, as I never was before.”
He was answering her look, seeing her as life’s wounded champion, standing, shot through, on the ramparts of her beleaguered city. She would shake her banner high in the air as she fell. The pity, the fury, the love of his eyes dwelt on her.
And suddenly, under that look, her eyes closed.She shrank together in her chair; she bowed down her head upon her knees, covering her face.
“Oh, Jim,” she said, “my heart is broken.”
He knew that he had brought her to this, that never before an onlooker had she so fallen into her own misery. He had forced her to show the final truth that, though she held the banner, she was shot through and through. And he could do nothing but stand on above her, his face set to a flintier, sharper endurance, as he heard the great sobs shake her.
He left her presently and walked up and down the room while she wept, crouched over upon her knees. It was not for long. The tempest passed, and, when she sat in quiet, her head in her hands, her face still hidden, he said, “You must set about mending now, Eppie.”
“I can’t mend. I’ll live; but I can’t mend.”
“Don’t say it, Eppie. This may pass as—well—other things in your life have passed.”
“Do you, too, talk Spinoza to me, Jim?”
“Damn Spinoza! I’m talking life to you—the life we both believe in. I’m not telling you to turn your back on it because it has crippled you. You won’t, I know it. I know that you are brave. Eppie, Eppie,”—before her, now, he bent to her, then knelt beside her chair,—“let me be the crutch. Let me have the fragments. Let’s try, together, to mend them. I ask nothing of you but that trying, with my help, to mend. He isn’t for you. He’s never for you. I’ll say no more brutalities of him. I’ll use your own words and say that he can’t,—that his saintship can’t. So won’t you, simply, let me takeyou? Even if you’re broken for life, let me have the broken Eppie.”
She had never, except in the moment of the kiss, seen this deepest thing in him, this gentleness, this reverent tenderness that, under the bullying, threatening, angry aspects of his love, now supplicated with a beauty that revealed all the angel in humanity. Strange—she could think it in all her sorrow—that the thing that held him to her was the thing that held her to Gavan, the deep, the mysterious, the unchangeable affinity. For him, as for her, there could be but one, and for that one alone could these depths and heights of the heart open themselves.
“Jim, dear, dear Jim, never, never,” she said. “I am his, only his, fragments, all of me, for as long as I am I.”
Grainger hid his face on the arm of her chair.
“And he is mine,” said Eppie. “He knows it, and that is why he fears me. He is mine forever.”
“I am glad for your sake that you can believe that,” Grainger muttered, “and glad, for my own, that I don’t.”
“Why, Jim?”
“I could hardly live if I thought that you were going to love him in eternity and that I was, forever, to be shut away. Thank goodness that it’s only for a lifetime that my tragedy lasts.”
She closed her eyes to these perplexities, laying her hand on his.
“I don’t know. We can only think and act for this life. It’s this we have to shape. Perhaps in eternity, really in eternity, whatever that may mean,I won’t need to shut you out. Dear, dear Jim, it’s hard that it must seem that to you now. You know what I feel about you. And who could feel it as I do? We are in the same boat.”
“No, for he, at least, loves no one else. You haven’t that to bear. As far as he goes,—and it isn’t far,—he is yours. We are not at all in the same boat. But that’s enough of me. I suppose I am done for, as you say, forever.”
He had got upon his feet, and, as if at their mutual wreckage, looked down with a face that had found again its old shield of grimness.
“As for you,” he went on, “I sha’n’t, at all events, see you suffocating. You must mend alone, then, as best you can. Really, you’re not as tragic as you might have been.”
Then, after this salutary harshness, and before he turned from her to go, he added, as once before, “Poor darling.”
GRAINGER hardly knew why he had come and, as he walked up the deep Surrey lane from the drowsy village station, his common-sense warred with the instinct, almost the obsession, that was taking him to Cheylesford Lodge. Eppie had been persistently in his thoughts since their meeting of the week before, and from his own hopelessness had sprung the haunting of a hope for her. Turn from it as he would, accuse himself angrily of madness, morbidity, or a mere tendency to outrageous meddling,—symptomatic of shattered nerves,—he couldn’t escape it. By day and night it was with him, until he saw himself, in a lurid vision, as responsible for Eppie’s very life if he didn’t test its validity. For where she had failed might not a man armed with the strength of his selfless love succeed?
He had said, in his old anger, that as Gavan’s wife Gavan would kill her; but he hadn’t really meant that literally; now, literally, the new fear had come that she might die of Gavan’s loss. Her will hadn’t snapped, but her vitality was like the flare of the candle in its socket. To love, the eremite of Cheylesford Lodge wouldn’t yield—perhaps for very pity’s sake; but if he were made to see the other side of it?—Grainger found a grim amusement in the paradox—the lover, in spite of love, might yield to pity. Couldn’t his own manliness strike some spark of manliness from Gavan? Couldn’t he and Eppie between them, with their so different appeals,—she to what was soft, he to what was tough,—hoist his tragically absurd head above water, as it were, into the air of real life, that might, who knew? fill and sustain his aquatic lungs? It gave him a vindictive pleasure to see the drowning simile in the most ludicrous aspects—Gavan, draped in the dramatic robes of his twopenny-halfpenny philosophies, holding his head in a basin of water, there resolved to die. Grainger felt that as far as his own inclinations were concerned it would have given him some pleasure to help to hold him under, to see that, while he was about it, he did it thoroughly; but the question wasn’t one of his own inclinations: it was for Eppie’s sake that he must try to drag out the enraptured suicide. It was Eppie, bereft and dying,—so it seemed to him in moments of deep fear,—whose very life depended on the submerged life. And to see if he could fish it up for her he had come on this undignified, this ridiculous errand.
Very undignified and very ridiculous he felt the errand to be, as he strode on through the lane, its high hedge-rows all dusty with the autumn drought; but he was indifferent enough to that side of it. He felt no confusion. He was completely prepared to speak his mind.
Coming to a turning of the lane, where he stoodfor a moment, uncertain, at branching paths, he was joined by an alert little parson who asked him courteously if he could direct him on his way. They were both, it then appeared, going to Cheylesford Lodge; and the Reverend John Best, after introducing himself as the rector of Dittleworth parish, and receiving Grainger’s name, which had its reverberations, with affable interest, surmised that it was to another friend of Mr. Palairet’s that he spoke.
“Yes. No. That is to say, I’ve known him after a fashion for years, but seen little of him. Has he been here all summer?” Grainger asked, as they walked on.
It seemed that Gavan had only returned from the Continent the week before, but Mr. Best went on to say, with an evidently temperamental loquacity, that he was there for most of the time as a rule and was found a very charming neighbor and a very excellent parishioner.
This last was a rôle in which Gavan seemed extremely incongruous, and Grainger looked his perplexity, murmuring, “Parishioner?”
“Not, I fear, that we can claim him as an altogether orthodox one,” Mr. Best said, smiling tolerantly upon his companion’s probable narrowness. “We ask for the spirit, rather than the letter, nowadays, Mr. Grainger; and Mr. Palairet is, at heart, as good a Christian as any of us, of that I am assured: better than many of us, as far as living the Christian life goes. Christianity, in its essence, is a life. Ah, if only you statesmen, you active men of the world, would realize that; would look past thesymbols to the reality. We, who see life as a spiritual organization, are able to break down the limitations of the dry, self-centered individualism that, for so many years, has obscured the glorious features of our faith. And it is the spirit of the Church that Mr. Palairet has grasped. Time only is needed, I am convinced, to make him a partaker of her gifts.”
Grainger walked on in a sardonic silence, and Mr. Best, all unsuspecting, continued to embroider his congenial theme with illustrations: the village poor, to whom Mr. Palairet was so devoted; the village hospital, of which he was to talk over the plans to-day; the neighborly thoughtfulness and unfailing kindness and charity he showed toward high and low.
“Palairet always seemed to me very ineffectual,” said Grainger when, in a genial pause, he felt that something in the way of response was expected of him.
“Ah, I fear you judge by the worldly standard of outward attainment, Mr. Grainger.”
“What other is there for us human beings to judge by?”
“The standard of our unhappy modern plutocratic society is not that by which to measure the contemplative type of character.”
Grainger felt a slight stress of severity in the good little parson’s affability.
“Oh, I think its standards aren’t at all unwholesome,” he made reply. He could have justified anything, any standard, against Gavan and his standards.
“Unwholesome, my dear Mr. Grainger? That is just what they are. See the beauty of a life like our friend’s here. It judges your barbarous Christless civilization. He lives laborious, simple days. He does his work, he has his friends. His influence upon them counts for more than an outside observer could compute. Great men are among them. I met Lord Taunton at his house last Sunday. A most impressive personality. Even though Mr. Palairet has abandoned the political career, one can’t call him ineffectual when such a man is among his intimates.”
“The monkish type doesn’t appeal to me, I own.”
“Ah, there you touch the point that has troubled me. It is not good for a man to live alone. My chief wish for him is that he may marry. I often urge it on him.”
“Well done.”
“One did hear,” Mr. Best went on, his small, ruddy face taking on a look of retrospective reprobation, “that there was an attachment to a certain young woman—the tale was public property—only as such do I allude to it—a very fashionable, very worldly young woman. I was relieved indeed when the rumor came to nothing. He escaped finally, I can’t help fancying it, this summer. I was much relieved.”
“Why so, pray?”
“I am rural, old-fashioned, my dear young man, and that type of young woman is one toward which, I own it, I find it difficult to feel charitably. She represents the pagan, the Christless element that I spoke of in our modern world. Her charm could nothave been a noble one. Had our friend here succumbed to it, she could only have meant disaster in his life. She would have urged him into ambition, pleasure-seeking, dissipation. Of course I only cite what I have heard in my quiet corner, though I have had glimpses of her, passing with a friend, a very frivolous person, in a motor-car. She looked completely what I had imagined.”
“If you mean Miss Gifford,” said Grainger, trying for temperateness, “I happen to know her. She is anything but a pleasure-seeker, anything but frivolous, anything, above all, but a pagan. If Palairet had been lucky enough to marry her it would have been the best thing that ever happened to him in his life, and a very dubious thing for her. She is a thousand times too good for him.”
“My dear Mr. Grainger, pardon me; I had no idea that you knew the lady. But,” Mr. Best had flushed a little under this onslaught, “I cannot but think you a partisan.”
“Do you call a woman frivolous who spends half of her time working in the slums?”
“That is a phase, I hear, of the ultra-smart young woman. But no doubt rumor has been unjust. I must beg you to pardon me.”
“Oh, don’t mind that. You heard, no doubt, the surface things. But no one who knows Miss Gifford can think of them, that’s all.”
“And if I have been betrayed into injustice, I hope that you will reconsider a little more charitably your impression of Mr. Palairet,” said Mr. Best, in whom, evidently, Grainger’s roughness rankled.
Grainger laughed grimly. “I can’t consider himanything but a thousand times too bad for Miss Gifford.”
They had reached the entrance to Cheylesford Lodge on this final and discordant phrase. Mr. Best kept a grieved silence and Grainger’s thoughts passed from him.
He had had in his life no training in appreciation and was indifferent to things of the eye, but even to his insensible nature the whole aspect of the house that they approached between high yew hedges, its dreaming quiet, the tones of its dim old bricks, the shadowed white of paneled walls within, spoke of pensive beauty, of a secure content in things of the mind. He felt it suddenly as oppressive and ominous in its assured quietness. It had some secret against the probes of feeling. Its magic softly shut away suffering and encircled safely a treasure of tranquillity.
That was the secret, that the magic; it flashed vaguely for Grainger—though by its light he saw more vividly his own errand as ridiculous—that a life of thought, pure thought, if one could only achieve it, was the onlysafelife. Where, in this adjusted system of beauty and contemplation, would his appeals find foothold?
He dashed back the crowding doubts, summoning his own crude forces.
The man who admitted them said that Mr. Palairet was in the garden, and stepping from opened windows at the back of the house, they found themselves on the sunny spaces of the lawn with its encompassing trees and its wandering border of flowers.
Gavan was sitting with a book in the shade of thegreat yew-tree. In summer flannels, a panama hat tilted over his eyes, he was very white, very tenuous, very exquisite. And he was the center of it all, the secret securely his, the magic all at his disposal.
Seeing them he rose, dropping his book into his chair, strolling over the miraculous green to meet them, showing no haste, no hesitation, no surprise.
“I’ve come on particular business,” Grainger said, “and I’ll stroll about until you and Mr. Best are done with the hospital.”
Mr. Best, still with sadness in his manner, promised not to keep Mr. Palairet long and they went inside.
Grainger was left standing under the yew-tree. He took up Gavan’s book, while the sense of frustration, and of rebellion against it, rose in him. The book was French and dealt with an obscure phase of Byzantine history. Gavan’s neat notes marked passages concerning some contemporary religious phenomena.
Grainger flung down the book, careless of crumpled leaves, and wandered off abruptly, among the hedges and into the garden. It was a very different garden from the old Scotch one where a sweet pensiveness seemed always to hover and where romance whispered and beckoned. This garden, steeped in sunlight, and where plums and pears on the hot rosy walls shone like jewels among their crisp green leaves, was unshadowed, unhaunted, smiling and decorous—the garden of placid wisdom and Epicurean calm. Grainger, as he walked, felt at his heart a tug of strange homesickness and yearning for thatNorthern garden, its dim gray walls and its disheveled nooks and corners. Were they all done with it forever?
By the time he had returned to the lawn Gavan was just emerging from the house. They met in the shadow of the yew.
“I’m glad to see you, Grainger,” Gavan said, with a smile that struck Grainger as faded in quality. “This place is a sort of harbor for tired workers, you know. You should have looked me up before, or are you never tired enough for that?”
“I don’t feel the need of harbors, yet. One never sees you in London.”
“No, the lounging life down here suits me.”
“Your little parson doesn’t see it in that light. He has been telling me how you live up to your duties as neighbor and parishioner.”
“It doesn’t require much effort. Nice little fellow, isn’t he, Best? He tells me that you walked up together.”
“We did,” said Grainger, with his own inner sense of grim humor at the memory. “I should think you would find him rather limited.”
“But I’m limited, too,” said Gavan, mildly. “I like being with people so neatly adapted to their functions. There are no loose ends about Best; nothing unfulfilled or uncomfortable. He’s all there—all that there is of him to be there.”
“Not a very lively companion.”
“I’m not a lively companion, either,” Gavan once more, with his mild gaiety, retorted.
Grainger at this gave a harsh laugh. “No, you certainly aren’t,” he agreed.
They had twice paced the length of the yew-tree shadow and Gavan had asked no question; and Grainger felt, as the pause grew, that Gavan never would ask questions. Any onus for a disturbance of the atmosphere must rest entirely on himself, and to disturb it he would have to be brutal.
He jerked aside the veils of the placid dialogue with sudden violence. “I’ve seen Eppie,” he said.
He had intended to use her formal name only, but the nearer word rushed out and seemed to shatter the magic that held him off.
Gavan’s face grew a shade paler. “Have you?” he said.
“You knew that she had been ill?”
“I heard of it, recently, from General Carmichael. It was nothing serious, I think.”
“It will be serious.” Grainger stood still and gazed into his eyes. “Do you want to kill her?”
It struck him, when he had said it, and while Gavan received the words and seemed to reflect on them, that however artificial his atmosphere might be he would never evade any reality brought forcibly into it. He contemplated this one and did not pretend not to understand.
“I want Eppie to be happy,” he said presently.
“Happy, yes. So do I,” broke from Grainger with a groan.
They stood now near the great trunk of the yew-tree, and turning away, striking the steel-gray bark monotonously with his fist, he went on: “I love her,as you know. And she loves you. She told me—I made her tell me. But any one with eyes could see it; even your gossiping little fool of a parson here had heard of it—was relieved for your escape. But who cares for the cackling? And you have crippled her, broken her. You have tossed aside that woman whose little finger is worth more to the world than your whole being. I wish to God she’d never seen you.”
“So do I,” Gavan said.
“I’d kill you with the greatest pleasure—if it could do her any good.”
There was relief for Grainger in getting out these fundamental things.
“Yes,—I quite understand that. So would I,” Gavan acquiesced,—“kill myself, I mean,—if it would do her any good.”
“Don’t try that. It wouldn’t. She’s beyond all help but one. So I am here to put it to you.”
The still, hot day encompassed their shadow and with its quiet made more intense Grainger’s sense of his own passion—passion and its negation, the stress between the two. Their words, though they spoke so quietly, seemed to fill the world.
“I am sorry,” Gavan said; “I can do nothing.”
Grainger beat at the tree.
“You love her.”
“Not as she must be loved. I only want her, when I am selfish. When I think for her I have no want at all.”
“Give her your selfishness.”
“Ah, even that fades. That’s what I found out.I can’t count on my selfishness. I’ve tried to do it. It didn’t work.”
Grainger turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; these moments under the yew-tree, that white figure with its pale smile, its comprehending gravity confronting him, would count in his life, he knew, among its most racking memories.
“I consider you a madman,” he now said.
“Perhaps I am one. You don’t think it for Eppie’s happiness to marry a madman?”
“My God, I don’t know what to think! I want to save her.”
“But so do I,” Gavan’s voice had its first note of eagerness. “Iwant to save her. And I want her to marry you. That’s her chance, and yours—and mine, though mine really doesn’t count. That’s what I hope for.”
“There’s no hope there.”
“Have patience. Wait. She will, perhaps, get over me.”
Grainger’s eyes, with their hot, jaded look of baffled purpose, so selfless that it transcended jealousy and hatred, were still on him, and he thought now that he detected on the other’s face the strain of some inner tension. He wasn’t so dead, then. He was suffering. No, more yet, and the final insight came in another vague flash that darkly showed the trouble at the heart of all the magic, the beauty, he, too, more really than Eppie, perhaps, was dying for love. Madman, devoted madman that he was, he was dying for love of the woman from whom he must always flee. It was strange to feel one’s sane,straightforward mind forced along this labyrinth of dazed comprehension, turning in the cruelly knotted paradox of this impossible love-story. Yet, against his very will, he was so forced to follow and almost to understand.
There wasn’t much more to say. And he had his own paradoxical satisfaction in the sight of the canker at the core of thought. So, at all events, one wasn’t safe even so.
“She won’t get over you,” he said. “It isn’t a mere love-affair. It’s her life. She may not die of it; that’s a figure of speech that I had no right, I suppose, to use. At all events, she’ll try her best not to die. But she won’t get over you.”
“Not even if I get out of the way forever?”
Gavan put the final proposition before him, but Grainger, staring at the sunlight, shook his head.
“The very fact that you’re alive makes her hold the tighter. No, you can’t save her in that way. I wish you could.”
GRAINGER had had his insight, but, outwardly, in the year that followed, Gavan’s life was one of peace, of achieved escape.
The world soon ceased to pull at him, to plead or protest. With a kindly shrug of the shoulders the larger life passed him by as one more proved ineffectual. The little circle that clung about him, as the flotsam and jetsam of a river drift from the hurrying current around the stability and stillness of a green islet, was, in the main, composed of the defeated or the indifferent. One or two cynical fighters moored their boats, for a week-end, at his tranquil shores, and the powerful old statesman who believed nothing, hoped nothing, felt very little, and who, behind his show-life of patriotic and hard-working nobleman, smiled patiently at the whole foolish comedy, was his most intimate companion. To the world at large, Lord Taunton was the witty Tory, the devoted churchman, the wise upholder of all the hard-won props of civilization; to Gavan, he was the skeptical and pessimistic metaphysician; together they watched the wheels go round.
Mayburn came down once or twice to see his poor,queer, dear old Palairet, and in London boasted much of the experience. “He’s too, too wonderful,” he said. “He has achieved a most delicate, recondite harmony. One never heard anything just like it before, and can’t, for the life of one, tell just what the notes are. Effort, constant effort, amidst constant quiet and austerity. Work is his passion, and yet never was any creature so passionless. He’s like a rower, rowing easily, indefatigably, down a long river, among lilies, while he looks up at the sky.”
But Mayburn felt the quiet and austerity a little disturbing. He didn’t, after all, come to look at quiet and austerity unless some one were there to hear him talk about them; and his host, all affability, never seemed quite there.
So a year, more than a year, went by.
It was on an early spring morning that Gavan found on his breakfast-table a letter written in a faltering hand,—a hand that faltered with the weeping that shook it,—Miss Barbara’s old, faint hand.
He read, at first, hardly comprehending.
It was of Eppie she wrote: of her overwork—they thought it must be that—in the winter, of the resultant fragility that had made her succumb suddenly to an illness contracted in some hotbed of epidemic in the slums. They had all thought that she would come through it. People had been very kind. Eppie had so many, many friends. Every one loved her. She had been moved to Lady Alicia’s house in Grosvenor Street. She, Aunt Barbara, had come up to town at once, and the general was with her.
It was with a fierce impatience that he went on through the phrases that were like the slow trickling of tear after tear, as if he knew, yet refused to know, the tragedy that the trivial tears flowed for, knew what was coming, resented its insufferable delay, yet spurned its bare possibility. At the end, and only then, it came. Her strength had suddenly failed. There was no hope. Eppie was dying and had asked to see him—at once.
A bird, above the window open to the dew and sunlight, sang and whistled while he read, a phrase, not joyous, not happy, yet strangely full of triumph, of the innocent praise of life. Gavan, standing still, with the letter in his hand, listened, while again and again, monotonously, freshly, the bird repeated its song.
He seemed at first to listen quietly, with pleasure, appreciative of this heraldry of spring; then memory, blind, numbed from some dark shock, stirred, stole out to meet it—the memory of Eppie’s morning voice on the hillside, the voice monotonous yet triumphant with its sense of life; and at each reiteration, the phrase seemed a dagger plunged into his heart.
Oh, memory! Oh, cruel thought! Cruel life!
After he had ordered the trap, and while waiting for it, he walked out into the freshness and back and forth, over and over across the lawn, with the patient, steady swiftness of an animal caged and knowing that the bars are about it. So this was to be the end. But, though already he acquiesced, it seemed in some way a strange, inapt ending. He couldn’t think of Eppie and death. He couldn’t see her dead. He could only see her looking at death.
THEearly train he caught got him to London by eleven, and in twenty minutes he was in Grosvenor Street. He had wired from the country, and Miss Barbara met him in the drawing-room of the house, hushed in its springtime gaiety. She was the frail ghost of her shadowy old self, her voice tremulous, her face blurred with tears and sleepless nights. Yet he saw, under the woe, the essential listlessness of age, the placidity beneath the half-mechanical tears. “Oh, Gavan,” she said, taking his hand and holding it in both her own—“Oh, Gavan, we couldn’t have thought of this, could we, that she would go first.” And that his own face showed some sharp fixity of woe he felt from its reflection on hers—like a sword-flash reflected in a shallow pool.
She told him that it was now an affair of hours only. “I would have sent for you long ago, Gavan; I knew—I knew that you would want it. But she wouldn’t—not while there was hope. I think she was afraid of hurting you. You know she had never been the same since—since—“
“Since what?” he asked, knowing.
“Since you went away. She was so ill then. Poor child! She never found herself, you see, Gavan. She did not know what she wanted. She has worn herself out in looking for it.”
Miss Barbara was very ignorant. He himself could not know, probably Eppie herself didn’t know, what had killed her, though she had so wellknown what she wanted; but he suspected that Grainger had been right, and that it was on him that Eppie’s life had shattered itself.
Her will, evidently, still ruled those about her, for when Miss Barbara had led him up-stairs she said, pausing in the passage, that Eppie would see him alone; the nurse would leave them. She had insisted on that, and there was now no reason why she should not have her way. The nurse came out to them, telling him that Miss Gifford waited; and, just before she let him go, Miss Barbara drew his head down to hers and kissed him, murmuring to him to be brave. He really didn’t know whether he were more the felon, or more the victim that she thought him. Then the door closed behind him and he was alone with Eppie.
Eppie was propped high on pillows, her hair twisted up from her brows and neck and folded in heavy masses on her head.
In the wide, white room, among her pillows, so white herself, and strange with a curious thinness, he had never received a more prodigious impression of life than in meeting her eyes, where all the forces of her soul looked out. So motionless, she was like music, like all that moves, that strives and is restless; so white, she was like skies at dawn, like deep seas under sunlight. In the stillness, the whiteness, the emptiness of the room she was illusion itself, life and beauty, a wonderful rainbow thing staining “the white radiance of eternity.” And as if, before its final shattering, every color flamed, her whole being was concentrated in the mere fact of its existence—its existence that defied death. A deep, quietexcitement, almost a gaiety, breathed from her. In the tangled rivers of her hair, the intertwined currents of dark and gold winding in a lovely disorder,—in the white folds of lawn that lay so delicately about her; in the emerald slipping far down her finger, the emeralds in her ears, shaking faintly with her ebbing heart-beats, there was even a sort of wilful and heroic coquetry. She was, in her dying, triumphantly beautiful, yet, as always, through her beauty went the strength of her reliance on deeper significances.
She lay motionless as Gavan approached her, and he guessed that she saved all her strength. Only as he took the chair beside her, horror at his heart, the old familiar horror, she put out her hand to him.
He took it silently, looking up, after a little while, from its marvelous lightness and whiteness to her eyes, her smile. Then, at last, she spoke to him.
“So you think that you have got the better of me at last, don’t you, Gavan dear?” she said. Her voice was strange, as though familiar notes were played on some far-away flute, sweet and melancholy among the hills. The voice was strange and sad, but the words were not. In them was a caress, as though she pitied his pity for her; but the old antagonism, too, was there—a defiance, a willingness to be cruel to him. “I did play fair, you see,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have you come till there was no danger, for you, any more. And now this is the end of it all, you think. You will soon be able to say of me, Gavan,