‟GABRIEL, dear,” said the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, looking up at her fiancé from the blue shadows of her parasol, “you are very dull to-day; I hope I am not boring you too utterly.”
The man standing by the garden-chair looked down at the face that belied somewhat in its aggressive stare the mild method of the girl’s reproof.
“You are charming, and I—I am gauche.”
“But why?”
“These functions always make me melancholy. I begin moralizing the moment I am one of a crowd, an egotistical habit of mine. Please ignore my cynicism.”
“Cynicism, indeed!”
“Well, you see, dear, this sort of affair is such a revulsion. When one has been elemental for an hour or two, these social inanities rather try one’s patience. I detest turning myself into a species of orthodox dummy, wound up to spout commonplaces to equally commonplace people. Laugh me out of it with those eyes of yours.”
The girl’s mood was not all for peace on the instant. Where a woman does not understand, she waxes querulous, especially if the enigma touches her heart.
“You might be sympathetic enough to realize that you no longer have only your own morbid humors to consider.”
“Pardon me, I am selfish.”
“So early?”
“You shall reform me.”
Ophelia flashed a queer look at him from her strangely magnetic eyes. A sudden quick spasm of passion seemed to pass through both frames. The electric sentiment met—and sparked desire. Gabriel colored under his straw hat.
“You have wonderful eyes.”
“Have I? Well—”
“I suppose we cannot help it.”
“What does it matter?”
The man sighed.
“It will not be long,” he said.
“And yet—”
She laughed—a deep quaver of passion.
“I am much of an Eve,” she said. “If you have any pity, do get me an ice.”
Mrs. Mince had prepared a garden-party at the Saltire vicarage, a cosmopolitan affair that effectually repaid the neighborhood for courtesies accorded during the year. It was one of those thoroughly inane and tiresome functions where every individual seemed intent on covering his or her identity with a facile and vapid mask. People smiled upon one another with a suspicious reserve and insulted one another’s immortality with that effete social patois that distinguishes such gatherings. Women “my deared” plentifully and dissected one another’s toilets. Men looked bored and bunched together in corners to talk with a vicious and morose earnestness. It was a mock festival in the name of pleasure, where the local culture displayed its rites for the edification of the young.
“You should go out and get to know people,” ran John Strong’s favorite dogma to his son. “Mix in society; it will give you ease, my boy, and gentlemanly fluency in conversation.” Unfortunately ideas did not bloom under the Saltire bonnets, and the higher culture was not to be culled from the tents of propriety.
Mrs. Marjoy and Miss Zinia Snodley were partnering each other under the shade of Mr. Mince’s walnut-tree. The doctor’s wife was dressed in damask red, with a dowdy black hat perched ungracefully on her crisp, black hair. Her gloves were grease-stained and her unbrushed jacket bore a generous covering of dust and discarded hair. Mrs. Marjoy always declared that really handsome women could wear anything, and that style was a personal magnetism, and not the result of milliner’s craft. Mrs. Marjoy lived up to the ideal with admirable sincerity. It cannot be said that in the matter of personal proof she converted others. Mrs. Marjoy’s art was crude and elemental; her friends designated it with the title of slovenliness. They even whispered that Mrs. Marjoy might so far sink her convictions as to manicure her nails.
Four ladies were amusing themselves at croquet on a neighboring lawn, and the voices of tennis-players came from the vicarage meadow. The tea-table had attracted quite a crowd of votaries, and Mr. Mince, with his parsonic leer, was running about with dishes of cake and fruit. “He is such a charming man!” to quote Miss Snodley. The day found Mrs. Marjoy in one of her fervid moods. The doctor had been playing croquet with pretty Mrs. Grandison, a dainty, warm-hearted creature, the wife of an artist who had taken a cottage near Saltire for the summer. And Mrs. Marjoy hated all pretty women, not through any realization of inferiority, but with the zest of a being who believed herself entitled to the Juno’s share of popular devotion. Mrs. Marjoy was a woman who never looked in any other mirror save that of confident egotism. At that very moment she was in the midst of a candid critique, while her husband was smiling over his teacup into Mrs. Grandison’s gentle, blue eyes.
“Don’t you think that woman shockingly overdressed, Zinia?” she said. “That is the worst of being an inferior person; a woman like that has to rely wholly on her costumier. London people are so abominably self-confident. That chit there might really have come from behind a bar.”
“These affairs are always so mixed!” said Miss Snodley, with a simper.
“Poor, dear Mrs. Mince, she always will ask everybody. I believe in lady-like selections. Look at her talking to Miss Ginge; she detests that girl, but that shows what a thorough woman of the world she is. We Christian ladies, my dear Zinia, have to suffer our social inferiors with cultured resignation. I never hurt anybody’s feelings. It is really an effort at times to be charitable and to do justice to one’s neighbors. But that is the essence of Christianity, my dear. Hallo, there’s young Strong and his mistress.”
Ophelia, with Gabriel at her side, moved across the lawn in the direction of the rose-walk. The girl was superbly dressed and indubitably lovely. She moved with her usual complacent hauteur, the semi-languid and physical egotism that betrayed her fibre. Gabriel appeared melancholy. They were both of them silent.
“Young Strong looks bored.”
“Poor fellow!”
“No good can come of such a scandalous intrigue,” said the doctor’s wife. “It’s nothing more, my dear Zinia. They are going to live at The Friary. Nice dance that woman’ll lead him. Serve the prig right. She’s all vanity and lace.”
“Perhaps they will be happy,” said Miss Snodley, with a sigh.
“I believe marriage improves many women, and then—children. They must make such a difference to a woman.”
Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.
“Don’t be sentimental, Zinia. I always try to eliminate my own prejudices, but that Gusset girl is a regular harpy. Did you ever see a really good woman dress like that? Ah, here’s James; my dear, you look bored.”
The doctor tilted his Panama hat and smiled somewhat apologetically at his wife.
“That awful dowdy has been exhausting you with her chatter.”
“Mrs. Grandison?”
“Of course.”
“Mrs. Grandison is really a charming little woman,” observed the doctor. “We have been talking about children; she has two such quaint little elves, and she adores them. They have not been spoiled.”
Mrs. Marjoy sniffed; her spectacles glittered.
“You are always admiring other people’s children, James.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Are you aware of the fact that I have had no tea?”
The doctor displayed immediate concern.
“I will get you some at once.”
“Don’t trouble; it’s of no consequence.”
“But Miss Snodley—”
“Of course you will be delighted to wait on Miss Snodley. Bring us one of those small tables. I’m not going to have crumbs all over my dress.”
Later in the afternoon, Gabriel, who had left Ophelia chatting with Sir Mark Melluish, an amusing old ragamuffin who reminded one of a walking edition of Punch, unearthed Dr. Marjoy from a pool of millinery and engaged him with a casual friendliness in a thoroughly orthodox gossip. The doctor knew most folk in the neighborhood; for bad debts had made him vigilant. He was, in fact, the very species of person Gabriel needed.
“By-the-way,” he remarked, after discussing the possibilities of a local tennis tournament, “a friend of mine asked me whether I knew anything of an eccentric old fellow living somewhere near here; a bit of a miser, I believe. You are ubiquitous in these parts. I might inquire of you.”
The doctor appeared encouraged; he was in a limp and idealess mood; domesticities had depressed him. It was a relief to talk to a keen, kindly young fellow whose eyes were full of sunlight. They drew two chairs under the shade of a lime. Gabriel produced cigars. The two men exchanged a species of mischievous twinkle that was vastly human.
“Off duty, eh?”
“For half an hour.”
“Rum things, women. Take my tip—make ’em knuckle under early; now or never. Are these Murias?”
“Yes.”
“Nicotina is never in a temper. Terrible thing being a doctor. These functions make me sweat. We medicoes have to trot round and do the affable shop-walker to the community. Good for the practice, you know. By Jove, we have to salve every soul with blarney. It’s blarney, blarney, blarney from morning till night. My tongue’s dry. Going to be married soon?”
“In a month or two.”
“Fine woman your fiancée, fit to make every subaltern in the Rilchester barracks envy you like the devil. Let me see, you wanted information. What’s the person’s name?”
Gabriel appeared to flog his memory.
“I almost forget it. Gilder—Gildersleeve—Gildersedge. Ah, yes, Gildersedge! Rather a miser, my friend said.”
The doctor withdrew his cigar from his lips.
“By George! yes. I know the old beggar—a regular Silas; lives in a house smothered up in trees on the third hill beyond Rilchester—a regular hermitage, like a house out of a novel. You can’t see it for trees till you get well inside the gate. I attended there on one solitary occasion. It was the servant. Res natura. I only got paid after a lawyer’s letter. Never been there since.”
Gabriel appeared interested despite his affectation. He had turned the doctor into good grazing land, and anecdotes bristled. Dr. Marjoy had not lived fifteen years with his wife without assimilating some of her linguistical propensities.
“I remember talking with Clissold, of the bank,” he said, “and he told me that old Gildersedge’s figures totted up phenomenally. He’s worth two Scrooges. And, by Jeremy! he has a daughter; I was forgetting that daughter.”
Gabriel tilted his chair and surveyed the clouds.
“A pretty beauty, I suppose,” he said, with cynical facility. Dr. Marjoy, on the contrary, leaned forward and appeared curiously in earnest.
“I call it a damned sin,” he observed, oblivious for the moment of his surroundings.
Gabriel stared.
“I remember that girl well. She is a splendid creature, and I wondered how such an old slut had been able to create such an anomaly. Poor little beggar, she had the airs of a convent child and a queen rolled into one. And to think of that young thing being penned up with a money-crusted sot and a beast of a servant!”
Gabriel’s chair tilted forward abruptly. He sat rigid and nearly bit through his cigar.
“This sounds Russian.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Poor little woman! I suppose she’s only a child. Her surroundings must mar her in the making.”
The doctor cogitated.
“I don’t know about that,” he said; “women are queer creatures. Rear one in a regular moral hothouse, and she’ll turn out a scarlet devil. Bring up another in a dirty back garden, and she’ll grow up a regular snow-white seraph. I only saw that girl once, but I’ll swear there’s real grit in her.”
“God grant it!”
And from that moment the two men seemed to become strangely solemn.
Gabriel left Saltire that afternoon in the Gabingly carriage. He was to stay the night at the castle and to attend a flower-show next day under the auspices of the Gussets. It had already been mooted by the two parents that Gabriel should stand for the constituency at the next election. Old Sir Hercules Dimsdale was a decadent politician and none too eager to continue in the ruck of publicity. The Gusset influence was powerful, and John Strong ambitious. He was too old, he declared, to contest the seat himself; his pride should be perfected in his son.
The dust flew from the wake of the thoroughbreds that whirled the Gusset escutcheon through the streets of Saltire. Ophelia lounged in one corner of the landau, a mass of intricate millinery, her sunshade shadowing her somewhat peevish face. Her sister sat upright in the corresponding corner, with her hat awry and her hands ungloved. Gabriel faced them both on the front seat.
Ophelia was out of temper with the world at large. The parched and dusty weather suited neither her complexion nor her humor. Moreover, the Mince function had been deplorably dull, and Gabriel less the beau chevalier than usual.
“Thank Heaven, that’s over!” she observed; “a tea-and-shrimp affair. Blanche, I believe you enjoyed yourself.”
The younger sister responded cheerily.
“Had some rattling tennis and a smack at Mrs. Marjoy. Really, old Mince keeps his grass in better order than his parish.”
“Sir Mark Melluish was the only bearable person I could discover. Gabriel, you must have lunched on suet-pudding. I never saw such a bored creature.”
The man smiled philosophically.
“These functions always addle my brain. I am beginning to recover.”
“For Heaven’s sake, hurry up, then.”
“My poor boy,” said Blanche, with a sly twinkle, “see what you have taken upon yourself. Awful responsibility being engaged. You must keep up appearances till you’re married, and then you can be as rude as you like. Only another month or so. Cheer up.”
Gabriel passed half an hour alone with Ophelia in the conservatory that evening. Her humor had changed, and the man’s brain was full of the fumes of her beauty ere she had ended. Gabriel’s window at Gabingly looked southward over the woods towards the sea. A full moon swam in a crystal sky that night, bathing the earth in mysterious splendor. A transcendent calm seemed to have compassed the sun-wearied trees. The world breathed anew under the benisons of the stars, and there was no sound to shake the silver web of sleep.
Gabriel crouched in the window-seat and stared out into the night. The glimmering spirelets of the forest thrust up multitudinous on the hill-side. The dark swell of the moors ran dim and distant beyond the far spirals of the Mallan. A great melancholy had fallen upon the man’s soul. His face shone white in the light of the moon. The cool breeze breathing from the sea seemed savored with a spiritual purity that wounded hope.
Restless visions glimmered in his brain. He saw himself and his own being circled in fire that fed upon his manhood. A girl’s face haunted him; her voice played through the moonlight. He beheld a figure radiant with a divine womanliness moving within the coil of sin and squalor, the sordid earthliness of an unlovely life. Forgotten chivalry had stirred his manhood like some ghostly trumpet-cry out of the past. He breathed out aspirations to the stars, dreams fair and impossibly pathetic. Joan Gildersedge! Joan Gildersedge! To dare, to suffer, to liberate, to love! Life born of sacrifice! Divine passion instinct with the inevitable yearnings of the soul!
The castle clock chimed midnight. In the echoing silence that ensued, sundry quick-snapping chords struck from a mandolin startled his abandonment. He stood up half wearily, passed a hand over his forehead, stared into space. Again the summons sounded from a neighboring casement. The man moved to and fro in the shadowy room like a soul that paces the darkened chamber of the flesh. Pierced by a sudden flashing pessimism, he moved to the door, opened it noiselessly, stepped out, turned and withdrew the key. Moonlight flooded from a large lancet window into the long gallery. And was this life! To sow unto corruption, to surrender the spirit to the dominion of the senses! Gabriel shuddered, but obeyed.
FOR several days a morbid dejection had possessed the heavens, and clouds pressed gray and ponderous from over the sea. Rain had fallen perpetually, beating the beauty from the flowers, weighing down the foliage. A chill atmosphere had swept like the breath of an ice giant into the radiant loggias of summer. The wind never rested. It moaned and imprecated, pleaded and besought, broke forth into wild gusts of desperate blasphemy. The trees whispered together like shivering and misty ghosts before the gates of death. Their dim arms gesticulated in the rain. Their green bosoms stirred with a troubled breathing, impotent and piteous.
Atmospheric conditions exert an undue influence over minds that have wandered from the radiance of health into the twilight of morbidity. The stanch, big-chested toiler takes the storm into his bosom and laughs like a Norseman buffeting ice-brilliant seas. To those of feeble moral vitality the drearier passages of life are packed with intangible temptations and imagined possibilities for sin. The man whose heart is warm and clean cares nothing for rough weather. It is the bleached æsthetic who turns pessimist or sensualist to cheat his own shivering and hungry soul. Give the world a Tolstoï, rugged viking struggling giant-like towards the truth, rather than some De Musset or Baudelaire hugging an impotent sexuality in the lap of a prostituted art. The world needs prophets, not pessimists. Pessimism is the result of moral dyspepsia. It is a nobler thing to lift some simple lamp of truth to light the hearts of men than to build a brilliant philosophic system for the entangling of the intellect.
Zeus Gildersedge had suffered for a week from an exaggerated melancholia. Evil weather always appeared to irritate his opiated brain, inspiring a more sinister barbarism, a more restless temper. No man can quench utterly his primitive intuitions. When the wind howled Zeus Gildersedge shivered, drew his ragged philosophy closer about his soul, and warmed his marrow with a more generous share of wine. The wind woke the coward in him, revealed that native superstition that is lodged deep in every heart. Moreover, certain words that he had heard in the silence of his own garden had haunted his brain like the emissaries of an outraged God. He had been drinking heavily, and taking more opium than even his Mithridatic body could tolerate. His hands trembled more; his moods were violent and spasmodic; an unusual restlessness interfered with his mechanical régime.
It was the evening of a gray and blustering day. The rain had ceased, and streaks of silvery light were ribbing the clouds. A calm had fallen; the wind breathed in infrequent stanzas, showering rattling moisture from the leaves. A rich perfume refreshed the atmosphere, the scent of foliage drenched yet shimmering in the awakening sun.
Joan Gildersedge came over the meadows from the sea. She loved rough weather and the cold kisses of the rain upon her face. Her rough frieze skirt hung drenched about her knees, and her hair was dark and wet with the storm. A rich color had risen in her cheeks, scourged by the wet west wind.
Joan looked long at the breaking sky before setting the iron gate grating on its rusty hinges. The gravel drive was green with grass and weeds. As she threaded its tangled shadows, the cypresses, stirred by the wind, shook long showers of glittering dew. At one point a large seringa overweighted by the storm bowed over to touch the trailing branches of an untrimmed laurel. Joan had to bend beneath this rustic yoke. A spray of green leaves brushed her lips, leaves pure and fresh as the lips they had touched.
As she drew from the shadows of the shrubs sounds sinister in their suggestiveness smote upon her ears. Two voices were in altercation—the one shrill, strenuous, feminine, the other the untutored growl of a man scorning compulsion. Joan Gildersedge stood still and listened. The window of the dining-room stood open; she could hear plainly enough what passed within.
“I tell you I sha’n’t,” said the woman’s voice, very rapidly. “Do yer think I’m going to sell myself for fifteen pounds a year? You go and cheat your grandmother. You’re drunk, Zeus Gildersedge, and what do I care for an old sot of sixty. Am I to drudge and scrape and sell myself here for nothing? I’ve had enough of it, I tell you. You give me that key, old light of love, and I’ll help myself for once. Come along now, or I’ll make no sport for you.”
The man’s voice retorted, thick and tangled, the expression of a clouded and cunning intellect.
“You think I’m drunk, eh?”
“Half an’ half.”
“You’re a pretty beauty. Give you the key of my strong-box, eh? Nice game, that. Pretty old gudgeon you think you’re talking to. I’m drunk, am I? Not fuddled enough yet to be fooled by such as you.”
The woman’s voice rose shriller.
“You’re a man, you are. Take all and give nothing. Taunt me, would you?”
“Who’s to blame? Speak up.”
“That’s manly, that is. Put it all off your own shoulders; shove all the blame on mine. You’re the saint, are you, and I the sinner? You owe me a quarter’s wages. I’ll have that and more—fifty gold sovereigns, not a farthing less. ’Ain’t I earned it by sacrificing my immortal soul to an old scarecrow like you?”
“You have, you innocent.”
“Give me the key, then.”
An outbreak of blasphemy greeted the appeal. Zeus Gildersedge chuckled and swore in alternation. He had lost every shred of that quality that might have been christened by courtesy self-control.
“That’s right,” jeered the feminine voice, “cheat a woman and then laugh over it. More drink! Whiskey—neat, too! Half a tumbler! Nice stuff for a respectable man of sixty! You’ll be seeing devils in a jiffy.”
The clatter of glass sounded in the room. Joan Gildersedge slipped round towards the porch under the shadows of the trees. She was pale, but very bright and keen about the eyes. Her lips were compressed into a thin, straight line. The look of childish repose had left her face as she stood in the porch and listened.
Rebecca’s voice rose again, less shrewish, more persuasive.
“I reckon it’s no good ranting,” she said; “there’s only one thing as will make you generous, and I suppose you know what that is!”
“I reckon I do,” came the thick and lethargic response. “Pour me out some more whiskey, Becky.”
“You’ll have your own way, I suppose. Half a glass, not a drop more. Why don’t you slip into one of your chuck-me-under-the-chin moods and give me that key?”
Zeus Gildersedge’s voice seemed weaker; his voice had less edge than before.
“You leave that key alone.”
“What go you’ve got for a man of sixty!”
“You know that, eh?”
“Don’t I. Look at me; what am I here for?”
They both laughed unrestrainedly. Joan, standing in the porch, with rain dripping monotonously from the leaves, seemed to stiffen into stone. Her hands gripped the trellis of the porch. She seemed to steady herself as one who meets the onrush of some storm-driven billow or as a virgin martyr facing the flames. In these few seconds the dream-cloak had been shrivelled about her soul. She trod the furnace; fire licked her limbs. The mordant realism of life burned at last before her reason.
“I’m damned sleepy,” said the man’s voice, ending in a prolonged yawn.
“That there whiskey’s heavy stuff.”
“Where’s Joan, eh?”
“Out still.”
“That girl’s a bit mad; you— It’s all right, Becky, keep your temper straight; I’ll pay.”
There was an indefinite muttering in the room that Joan could not unravel. She heard a sleepy chuckle, a series of yawns. Rebecca’s voice reduced to an insinuating cadence.
“It’s time I cooked supper. Go to sleep, uncle, dear; there’s your handkerchief to keep the flies off. Ta-ta! I’ll vanish.”
From Zeus Gildersedge there came no response. Silence followed, broken by the drip of the rain and the sound of heavy breathing. A quarter of an hour passed with preternatural slowness. Joan had been listening for the noise of Rebecca’s footsteps in the hall, but had heard nothing. The heavy oak door stood ajar. She pushed it open silently, slipped in, and peered into the darkening room.
Zeus Gildersedge sat in his big chair, his head fallen back upon the cushion as in deep sleep. Bending over him stood the woman Rebecca, with her back turned towards the door. The woman had unbuttoned Zeus Gildersedge’s flannel shirt at the neck, and her hand was groping in his bosom. Even as Joan watched her Rebecca drew up a small key fastened about the man’s neck by a long noose of twine. She cut the string with a knife, turned suddenly, saw Joan standing in the doorway.
The servant’s brown eyes darkened and the sullen look on her sensual face grew the more expressive. Her fingers closed and hid the key. She made one step, stood motionless, her figure thrown into a hesitating stoop. Before her stood Joan, tall, silent, and implacable, a pale and purposeful Athene. There was a grim look in the girl’s gray eyes.
“Give me that key.”
Rebecca’s fingers closed the tighter. Her broad figure seemed to stiffen with an obstinate insolence; her large, florid face was repulsively confident.
“Give me that key.”
“Sha’n’t.”
“You will.”
“Master promised it me.”
“Don’t lie.”
“A liar, am I?”
It was done with a quietness that was peculiarly impressive. Joan Gildersedge had advanced with her eyes fixed on the woman’s face. A powerful purpose seemed concentrated in her every movement. She was half a head taller than Rebecca; her strong, white hand fastened on the woman’s wrist. She drew Rebecca’s hand towards her so steadily that an observer would hardly have guessed that the woman’s muscles were rigidly resistant.
“Open your hand.”
There was a moment’s obstinacy. The white hand tightened; the firm mouth grew a shade paler; the gray eyes outstared the brown. It was a battle of willpower, and the conclusion was inevitable. Rebecca’s fingers unclosed upon the key.
“Take it, then.”
The two women still eyed each other—the one stern and keen as a white frost, the other florid and furtive, subduedly vindictive.
“You’ll tell him?”
Joan nodded.
“Nice old gentleman, your father, when—”
The revulsion was instantaneous. Sudden color surged into the girl’s face; her eyes flamed. Like a figure of divine vengeance she stood as at the gate of Eden, hounding shame into the dark unknown.
“Woman—”
“Ah!”
“You have fouled a home. You are unclean. You go to-night.”
A sudden grim sympathy leaped lightning-like from face to face. Rebecca cringed, gave back a step. The gray eyes scathed her with a scorn that stripped her soul naked in the sun. She gave a hoarse cry, cowered back, a woman scourged by a woman’s scorn.
“Miss Joan—”
“Don’t speak to me.”
Rebecca’s hands clutched her bosom. She still retreated, strove to speak, but choked in her throat. Sudden elemental shame had stricken her, shame shining from the divine cleanliness that drove her into the dark.
“I’ll go. Don’t jeer; don’t look at me like that. Give me my money.”
“Your hire.”
The words stung like flame. The woman slunk away like a Judas, crept into the hall silently, stooping and holding her throat. In the shadows she turned with the snarl of a smitten brute.
“I’ll pay you for this.”
“Go.”
The woman disappeared. Joan heard footsteps on the stairs and the slamming of an attic door. She bent over her father’s chair. He was breathing heavily, stertorously, as under the influence of a narcotic or a deadening dose of alcohol. She touched his shoulder, shook him, but he never heeded her. She reknotted the twine about his neck, dropped the key into his bosom, and refastened his shirt.
Joan stood at her full height for a moment with her hands over her eyes, thinking. She had grown calm again after her passion, but the same solemn resolve abode in her mind. Childhood had elapsed in an hour, a brief sunset swallowed up in gloom. Henceforth the unknown stretched forward streaked with the imagined amber of the dawn. A woman, she had the woman’s part to play amid the stress of evil days.
Zeus Gildersedge was a spare man; his weight was inconsiderable. His daughter put her arms about him, lifted him from the chair, and laid him upon the tattered sofa. His head rolled heavy upon her shoulder; his reeking breath beat upon her cheek. She shuddered and recoiled from him with an invincible disrelish as he lay snoring and gulping in his sleep. This sodden, greed-steeped piece of clay was her father.
Joan changed her drenched dress in her bedroom, looked into Rebecca’s attic and found it empty. She descended to the kitchen. The door stood wide and the place was empty; the fire had dwindled in the grate. A square of paper scrawled over with ill-formed characters lay on the table.
“Cook your own hash,” it ran. “I shall send my cousin Jim for my box to-morrow. I’ve gone, and pretty glad to go, you bet.”
Joan crumpled the document and flicked it into the fire. She closed and locked the kitchen door and made her supper off home-baked cake and milk. It had grown dusk apace. She lit a candle, passed through the hall, locking the door, and entered the dining-room again. Her father still snored on the sofa. She set the candle on the table and seated herself in the window-seat with the casement open.
A cleft in the agate foliage showed her the wizard west. The clouds had broken, and great bars of light gleamed in the darkening sky. A purple stairway seemed to ascend to a mysterious shrine shrouded in golden vapor.
Rossetti should have painted her as she sat at the casement with the failing light bathing her face. Her neck shone like alabaster. An infinite wistfulness mingled with the awakened sense of womanhood that burned in her eyes. Virgo Victrix! A fair soul set like a white rose in the dusky tresses of the night!
Great loneliness possessed her in the empty house. Her thoughts were shimmering in the sunshine by the green banks of a river. A willow overarched her head. Through the void of solitude thought echoed thought and soul answered soul. She imagined kisses on her lips. She imagined the touch of a man’s hand.
Night came and the west faded. The solitary candle burned on, streaking the gloom with its meagre flame. For hours the girl watched on wide-eyed into the night, beside the inanimate carcass of her drunken sire. Ere dawn came she had fallen asleep in the window-seat with her head pillowed on her arm. And a smile played upon the lips of the woman who dreamed a dream.
ASPIRIT of unrest had fallen upon Gabriel Strong, a passionate discontent crying like a wild, prophetic voice out of the future. He was oppressed by numberless forebodings; his own heart piped dismally a traitorous refrain. A flippant levity served to cheat the curiosity of numberless excitable neighbors. Even John Strong believed his son to be in most excellent fettle and thoroughly enamoured of so passionate a bargain.
Judith, seraph of the pearly brow, had questioned her brother out of the deep tenderness of her love for him. Evening stood golden-bosomed in the west and a glimmering silence covered the world. The two were wandering over the Saltire lawns, swaying slowly side by side under the black arches of the yews and cedars.
Gabriel’s words had failed to satisfy the girl’s soul. Her doubts had found an echo in his brain; his desire for sympathy quickened his unrest. Stirred by the dogged melancholy that held him, she broke forth into an appeal, ardent as her heart’s blood, wistful as the wild music of a wind.
“For God’s sake, Gabriel,” she said, “play the man. What is the smart of a month compared to the misery of years. If you perjure yourself, you will do much to slay two souls.”
The man boasted an artificial strength that spoke with facile scorn.
“I am as happy as I can expect to be in this world,” he argued. “I have given up heroics, and intend to see things as they are. It is an error to meditate over one’s psychical inconsistencies. Always ask yourself whether you are happy, and you are doomed to be miserable.”
Judith was not the woman to be deluded with sophistry. She had convictions—convictions that could not live on air.
“You know very well whether you are happy or not,” she said.
“I have never arrived at any such conclusion since I began to think, eight years ago.”
“A soul never attains to happiness by theorizing.”
“Possibly not. The mind of the thinker is always daring storm and shipwreck. Mentally I am a species of Raleigh, ever promising myself an El Dorado, a dream that other people always quash. I find my friends the surest iconoclasts of my ideals.”
Judith halted under the great cedar; green grass stretched brilliant at her feet; the western sunlight shone upon her face.
“Your very words betray you. You are flippant.”
“Men are often flippant when they are most in earnest,” he answered her. “Little woman, you create moral problems unnecessarily.”
Judith withstood him, gracious and beautifully eager.
“I will ask you a simple question,” she said. “Would you be happier if at this moment you were free?”
He hung his head and looked into the gloom of the trees.
“No one is free from the cradle. We are beset by eternal obligations.”
“You prevaricate.”
“Life is one long obligation. I only maintain the inevitable.”
“Gabriel, break off this alliance.”
The man laughed, half cynically, yet with a wistful scorn.
“There are many things you do not understand,” he said.
“Reconsider it.”
“I can reconsider nothing.”
Judith shook her head and looked long at him out of her large eyes.
“My heart tells me that all is not well with you,” she said.
Her brother gazed at her with a smile of melancholy tenderness.
“Judith,” he answered her, “why worry yourself over my future. A man may often repent; he can rarely alter. By my own deeds I have made this match inevitable. You can only pain me by suggesting impossibilities. I have incurred a debt—a debt heavier than you can guess. I am happier in doing my duty as a man of honor than I should be in playing the craven. You have the truth.”
Judith hid her eyes from him under her lashes.
“This is a sad world,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
“Men pledge themselves to an error and spend their blood in justifying it.”
“What of sincerity?”
“True sincerity never errs,” she said. “It looks ahead and deceives not the future. The greatest strength is that which emancipates itself from a moral lie.”
“Well and good,” he answered her; “but sheer egotism is unpardonable under certain circumstances.”
“It is the false egotism that in the beginning shackles the true.”
“Then must the true try to remedy the false. We all err. Errors are the illegitimate offspring of the soul; as their parents, we must maintain them. They are ours and of us. The laws of society saddle us with the responsibility. My dear girl, say no more.”
Thus ended Judith’s pleading with her brother ineffectually, though not for lack of eloquence or ardor. Possibly the man knew himself a fool in the deep recesses of his heart. When present in the flesh, his betrothed overpowered him with her perilous splendor. She poured her sensuous magic upon his soul, and, like Tannhäuser, he knelt before her impotent and helpless. The hashish of her beauty had lulled his deeper self to sleep.
Matters mundane were moving on apace. John Strong had draughted a company of craftsmen into the antique rooms and galleries of The Friary. Tapestries were being spread, walls garnished, friezes gilded, rich fabrics wafted into its dusky rooms. The merchant’s coffers ran gold. Truly the house was a haunt for lovers, consecrated by all the charters of romance.
September waited to hear the bells of Saltire pealing for the pair. Italy was to receive them, passionate pilgrims, treading the earth to the tune of love. Ophelia, gracious maid, had wandered from Arcady to the marts of the City of Lud to spend a novitiate amid fabrics from the loom. Her large eyes sparkled amid the splendors of Bond Street, and glib-tongued ’prentices bowed before her feet. She was very radiant, very fair, very pleasurable. Many a delectable dandy coveted unconsciously the lot of Gabriel Strong.
THE day before his journey to join the Gussets in London, Gabriel awoke in one of his errant and aspiring moods. Finality had oppressed him of late. The world seemed to have narrowed to the tangible prosaicisms of excess. The cry of his old romanticism awoke within him that morning an Arthurian spirit, the wistful questing after a mysterious unknown. Beauty gleamed anew in the wild twilight of romance. The present cringed in the dust.
Noon found him heading for the sea over the wooded hills that rolled north to Rilchester. A brisk breeze tempered the summer heat and reclaimed the hour from languor. Gabriel had certain Roman ruins as his goal—a mouldering wall, some scattered capitols, broken strands of stone, the flower-grown site of an old forum. Ruins accorded with the spirit of romance, though sentiment is not always disinterested in the consideration of things inanimate. Could Troy spare the glamour of a Helen? On the hills above Rilchester dark trees held within their shadows a house that was magical for elemental reasons. Perhaps Gabriel could have gainsaid his soul the relics of an ancient empire. Instincts more ancient perpetuated in him their power.
The woods had poured down to possess this city of the dead. Crumbling flints showed amid the claws of some huge oak’s roots. The old walls were bowered in green, mantled in ivy, plumed with gilliflower, snap-dragon, and flowering grass. The forum, an open square closed with grass banks, stood almost free of the trees. Its roadway and the foundation of its shops still showed in the turf. Fragments of pillars and pediments lay sunken in the sward. Flowers bloomed over the dead pavements, a mist of daisies, harebells, and golden ragwort. On the summit of the central mound stood the ruins of an altar, wreathed and overrun by masses of purple nightshade. Southward the sea glimmered. Around rolled the wooden hills, nebulous and haze-wrapped, guardians of mystery.
Gabriel climbed the altar mound and sentinelled himself on the mouldering stone. To the romantic mind a tender melancholy wraps the infinite with all the idyllic colors of twilight. To the eye of the poet seas are bluer, skies more splendid, moons more magical, roses more ravishing to the soul. It is only the dullard who beholds in a cloud nothing but visible vapor. Primeval man was more spiritual in many of his notions than the commercial gentleman of to-day.
Hope is often father to the fact. Desire and dream of a thing, and in some strange fashion the imagined fruit bends sudden to the hand. Day-dreams are the first dawn-shafts of great minds. Those who live for the present deserve nothing of the future. As for Gabriel, the stars would have fallen in his lap if his dreams had gotten a proportionate reward.
Thought-waves or no, there is some strong influence flowing from importunate thought. Spiritual waves of desire move betwixt soul and soul, drawing them imperceptibly towards each other. Love beacons unto love, even over hill and sea. As water to the moon, so Joan Gildersedge had been drawn from her home that day. Some vibrating lustre-light of the soul had set her wandering on the hills above the sea. Even from childhood she had haunted the gray ruins by the woods, weaving idyls out of the past, listening like Joan of France to the mysterious utterances of nature.
Thus it befell that morning that Gabriel, seated on the crumbling altar, saw the figure of a girl moving in the shadows under the trees. She moved slowly, with eyes downcast. Even in miniature her form had that superb eloquence of grace that was more than Grecian, seeing that a more than Grecian spirit abode there in the flesh.
Gabriel’s memory hailed her with that hurrying of the heart that comes with the inspiration of the breath of life. His cheeks burned in the sun. Fear touched him as with the finger of prophecy. Scoff who will, there is a divine dread that seizes on strong men in the sanctuary of passion. Even as the harp trembles as it bears the burden of some solemn song, so the highly strung soul vibrates to melodies, perilous yet divine. Only clay is passive and unfearful. The mere animal loves with his loins, and is of the earth earthy. That man is indeed to be pitied who has never felt the splendid awe that the pure loveliness of a woman can inspire.
Gabriel left the mound, color in his cheeks and on his lips a half-shy smile. If he had never believed in Schopenhauer, the faith of a pessimist failed him ignominiously at that moment. He was mediæval to the core. Nor did he believe Shakespeare to be a fool.
A warmer color had risen to Joan Gildersedge’s face. Her eyes had a lustre in the sunlight, such a light that makes a woman a thousand times more desirable than of yore.
“You are a long way from home,” she said, considering him with an ingenuous gravity that was very magical, “and yet I had a presentiment that I should meet you here to-day.”
“And so you came?”
“Yes.”
They turned back with spontaneous consent, climbed the mound together, and seated themselves side by side upon the altar stone. The scene seemed utterly natural, yet quick with a rare unreality that kindled beauty. Joan unpinned her hat and laid it beside her. A great oak overarched the mound and reared a shadowy canopy above them.
“It is nearly a month since we met,” she said.
Gabriel was staring over the sea. A wilderness of romance had risen about his soul, a wild shadow-land drowned in moonlight, swept by a complaining wind.
“It seems as yesterday,” he answered her.
“Strange that we should meet so.”
“Perhaps.”
She smiled, half mysteriously, yet with a frankness that imaged truth.
“I have passed through trouble since I spoke with you by the river,” she said.
Gabriel listened in silence as she spoke to him of much that had passed at the house amid the yews. The twain might have been in each other’s hearts for years. When he questioned her at the end thereof she showed him her hands, less white than of yore and roughened with toil.
“I am alone now,” she said.
“No one to help.”
“I do all for my father’s sake. It is better so. He is growing very decrepit.”
“You must be utterly lonely.”
“I am—at times.”
“And yet you have no friends?”
“None.”
“It is over hard.”
She smiled, and there was a look of strange happiness upon her face. Perhaps the man’s sympathy was more to her than either of them had realized. Gabriel had forgotten for a moment the eternal bathos of modernity.
“I would that I could help you,” he said.
Joan’s eyes were turned suddenly to his.
“You have helped me,” she answered.
“I?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You have often been in my thoughts,” she said. “Pardon me if I seem too much a child. I have never been taught the shame of speaking what is uppermost in my mind. I am vastly ignorant.”
“You are wiser than I am.”
“No.”
“Pardon me, the world has not stiffened you with its multitudinous hypocrisies. We society fools are jointed up in false affectations. We cannot live like honest human beings.”
“You do not seem false to me,” she said.
“God forbid!” he answered, with a sudden stirring of his conscience.
They were both silent a season. The girl’s words had rent the sky above the man’s head. He was conscious of the perilous egotism that had taken the guise of a darkling vision to lead him onward into a shadow-land of desire.
“You should not dream too much,” he said.
His voice startled her; she looked him in the face, her instincts probing his meaning.
“Why do you say that?” she said.
“By reason of a certain melancholy wisdom.”
“And yet—”
“I have been a dreamer,” he said, “but I have played the traitor to my dreams. I suppose it was inevitable in a land such as this. One cannot always stand with one’s back to the wall and fight orthodox dullards. I have not the energy to exist as a living protest against Philistinism. We men are often fools. Have you ever read of Tantalus?”
She pondered a moment and her face lightened.
“Tantalus?”
“The man in hades.”
“Who clutched at grapes when thirst tormented him, but was baffled ever.”
“Even so.”
“Cursed by the gods.”
“I am Tantalus,” he said.
She looked into the woods, solemn as a prophetess lost in dreams. A cloud had fallen upon Gabriel’s face. The girl felt its presence, though she had not looked into his eyes again.
“I should not have imagined it,” she said; “you did not seem to me to be unhappy.”
“Perhaps not.”
“I am sorry.”
“I do not deserve that you should be sorry for my sake.”
“I cannot think that.”
Gabriel mastered self with a grimness that would have served him well on certain other occasions had he been more the man. In negative fashion this girl gave him strength to adjudicate against his own dreams. She inspired and condemned by the same pure ravishment of beauty.
“I would have you know,” he said, “that I am a man bound by chains of my own forging. The blame is mine; I accept it. I may not say, ‘Lo, here is my heart; I may surrender it into the hand of her whose head touches the stars.’ My eyes must remain mute, my soul untongued. I am no longer myself. Think over these words and you may understand in measure.”
Joan Gildersedge did not answer him for several minutes.
“I understand,” she said; “and yet you are not happy.”
“That is the mockery of life. Men think I have everything; I have nothing.”
“Then we are both lonely.”
“Nor may we help each other.”
The sky had darkened; a cloud seemed to have dimmed the sun. A wind woke restless in the woods and the flowers shivered in the waning sunlight. Joan had risen from the altar. She held her hat in her hand, but did not look at Gabriel as he stood in silence at her side.
“I wonder if I shall ever see you again,” she said.
The man had grown pale, and his eyes were stern, yet miserable.
“Perhaps,” he answered.
“I shall think of you.”
“And I also.”
“Good-bye.”
As by a sudden inspiration he kissed her hand as he had kissed it by the Mallan water. When she had left him he remained by the crumbling altar, with its screen of purple nightshade, staring out over the sea. Man-wise, he would have given heaven to have left unsaid the words he had spoken to the girl that day.
The same night he read a letter from Ophelia, a letter garrulous with vapid passion, decreeing the day when they should wed. Gabriel sat by the window as the dusk came down and watched the night embalm the world in gloom. A sonnet fell from his lips as he brooded. He wrote it down, a rough scrawl in the twilight.