CHAPTER X
‘Yes, very, very pretty,’ said Gundred approvingly. ‘No sugar, thank you.’
Delicately, with neatly-lifted little finger, she raised her cup and sipped. From top to toe she was the fine flower of deportment, and her manner exhaled a mild consciousness of being the perfect model of decorum for the country neighbour on whom she was conferring the honour of a call. The afternoon being brilliantly fine, Lady Adela had wished to take her daughter-in-law to call on some intimate friends of hers, proprietors of a celebrated view, who lived on the other side of the lowland valley that stretched beneath the glen of Ivescar. Gundred was happy in the opportunity of exacting provincial approval, and, against everyone’s wishes, including his own, Kingston had insisted that he and Isabel should join the polite pilgrimage. Accordingly the landau had duly sallied forth with its burden of four, and after more than an hour’s drive through the soft country beneath the hills, had brought them to their destination. Now, on the famous terrace of Blakebank, Gundred sat full in the light of her hostess’s admiration, consuming cakes and tea with her usual crisp yet ethereal daintiness.
‘The lights on the hills!’ cried Mrs. Norreys ecstatically, anxious that Mrs. Darnley should appreciate the full beauty of the prospect.
‘Delightfully pretty,’ replied Gundred, casting a comprehensive glance across the world. ‘One quiteenvies you, Mrs. Norreys. We have no view like this at Ivescar. A charming place to have tea, out on this terrace. Oh, thank you. How greedy I am!—yes? But this air makes one so famished, and these little cakes of yours, so delightful.’
With a sweet smile Gundred accepted a second cake, and devoted her whole attention to its decent consumption.
In front of Blakebank the ground sloped away sharply to the river far down below. Dense woodland filled the hollow in which the water flowed, and rose again in a blue foaming mass on the farther side of the valley. Thence the eye followed undulation after undulation of meadow and copse, fields of soft green, plumed hedgerows, a placid country full of opulent peace. The foreground of the picture was formed by a strip of meadow beneath the terrace that dropped in a steep brow towards the woods. Here the grass was hidden and gilded by a sheet of buttercups, and the pure ardour of their gold was touched to a keener fire by the shafts of sunlight that slanted across them. Beyond their blaze lay the voluminous splendours of the woodland, dull and heavy in sullen shadow. For the day had its sharp notes of contrast. The air was leaden and lurid, dazzling, here and there, with a golden rain of sunlight, and here and there, again, made sombre by thunderous masses of cloud. Huge curling crags of purple and silver rolled and towered above the world, and the sky was opalescent with a hundred shifting colours. The landscape, drowsy and complacent, was transfigured into something mystic and dreamy. From the poignant glory of gold in the foreground the eye wandered on over the steamy blueness of the woods, over the rippling waves of vaporous green and blue that filled the valley, to where, seeming very far away across the glamour, the great rampart ofthe hill-country lay high against the faint rosy lights of the north. The lowering air, the sleepy, fantastic colours of the day, seemed to remove things distant to another world, and the mountains, dim, misty in shades of amethyst and azure, hardly appeared distinct from the ranges of cloud amid which they faintly loomed. Far away, far above the valleys, they lay in crests and billows of dreamland along the border of a fairy world. Yet only six miles of comfortable peace was all that lay between Gundred at her tea and those mysterious giants in the haze.
Full in the middle of that walled horizon, isolated on all sides, rose the mass of the Simonstone, unrolling his apathetic splendour on the ranges of lesser hills that formed his throne. In steep, precipitous slopes his lines dropped abruptly to the western valley; to eastward they trailed away in long, placid curves. The ranges of white limestone that formed his pedestal shone dimly pink across the distance, and the towering bulk of the mountain was lucent as a carved sapphire from crown to base. His sheer stern western cliff, his flat summit, loomed disdainfully over the sleepy valleys at his feet; and his presence, serene and enormous, ruled the whole country with the inevitable weight of its majesty. Steep glens in the range divided him from the heights to either side; he stood out the conspicuous tyrant of the horizon. Away to the right, over a range of smaller fells, the leonine head of Ravensber stood up in secondary authority, and above the western cleft where Ivescar incongruously squatted in the undiscoverable distance, rose the slouching back of Carnmor. But of the trinity that dominated the hill-country, Ravensber and Carnmor, the lesser and the greater, were both subordinate to the imperious sweep of the Simonstone. Here, from the terrace of Blakebank, in the complete contemplation of hisgrandeur, might be perceived the full grotesqueness of the insolence that had planted Ivescar beneath the sombre glory of his shadow. From that parvenu house itself the blatancy of the contrast was not so evident; for Carnmor and the Simonstone were both shut out from view by the amphitheatre of white cliffs that closed in the glen, and gave support to their dominating mass. But to Blakebank, far away, the whole supremacy of the hills lay revealed in all its greatness, and their empire seemed, in the mysterious clouded lights of rose and blue, to belong to a world that had no knowledge of man or his evanescent doings. Gundred, meanwhile, having finished her tea, began to think of departure. She set to work delicately drawing on her gloves and preparing her farewells.
‘Such a long drive—yes?’ she said; ‘I am afraid we must really be starting, Mrs. Norreys. My husband’s aunt is coming to us to-day, and we ought to be home in time to receive her.’
The carriage was ordered, and the party stood exchanging compliments and politenesses.
‘Such a delightful day,’ said Gundred, ‘and a drive home in the evening so charming in weather like this—yes?’
‘You will have a lovely view of the hills as you go home,’ replied Mrs. Norreys. ‘You will have them in front of you all the way. Do notice the sunset-lights; too exquisite they are.’
Long habit had developed in Mrs. Norreys a proprietary manner when she talked of the distant hills that made the attraction of her terrace. She spoke of them as a successful actor-manager might speak of a scene that his own great skill has contrived and arranged.
‘Charming, charming!’ answered Gundred, with the enthusiasm which everyone thinks it a duty tomanifest for landscape, though the true intelligent passion is so rare and sacred.
Then the carriage was announced, and the party from Ivescar embarked on their homeward voyage.
Kingston and Isabel had not contributed much to the gaiety of the entertainment. They had been possessed with the delight that Gundred had merely expressed. To them the beauty of the world as it lay unfolded before them had been so vast and holy as to make all comment obtrusive and irreverent. Kingston had felt the unspoken sympathy of Isabel’s mood, and her silence had mitigated for a time the feverish animosity with which he regarded her. As they drove home, there was little conversation between the four. Now and then Lady Adela made some remark on Mrs. Norreys’ kindness, her charm, the successful blend of her tea. But even Gundred was feeling too serene for speech. Everything combined to make her happy. Her gown was a perfect fit, the evening was comfortable, and she was conscious of having given her hostess a flawless model to copy—in manners, conversation, hair, and hat. Of course she never doubted her faultlessness or felt a qualm, but there were moments when its lovely perfection came upon her in a compelling wave of pleasure. She sat in a rapture of satisfaction as the carriage whirled her home through the quiet sunset. Tea and a good digestion assisted the placidity of her mood, and the influences of the atmosphere collaborated to make it complete. The twilight was pink and sweet as Gundred’s own opinion of herself. Immovably tranquil, roseate and mild, it had the fascination of a drowsy fairy tale. Cowslip and bean and hawthorn sent her their tribute in wafts of fragrance. She accepted everything as her due, and felt that all the world was showing a very proper spirit in conspiring to do her honour.
So their road led them up and down the gentle slopes that filled the valley with ripples of green. Sleepy old farmsteads they passed, nestling in dense knots of verdure, and villages with their brilliant little strips of garden. The day’s work was over, and in the clear air rose the song of peace and rest. Only far above, over the nearing mass of the mountains, rose stormy ranges of cloud, flushed and splendid in purple and gold. And so at last they had done with the broad lowland, and the road set itself to mount up towards the high glen of their destination. Now the country changed. Below lay the wooded, feathery richness of copse and hedgerow, meadow and pasture. Stone walls began to replace the hedges, stiff wiry moor-grass the lush growth of the valleys; the framework of the earth was near the surface; the soil became a thin stretched skin, no longer a warm soft coat of flesh; here and there the film broke, and the limestone bones protruded. So the road wound its way to the upper levels, and climbed at last to the glen between the hills. Far ahead of them it streamed away up towards Ivescar—an undulating stripe of whiteness. Above, to their right, rose, stiff and stark, a wall of white rock, shutting out from sight the mountain above. To their left lay the narrow desolation of the defile, a stream meandering among sparse meadows, with here and there a bare barn or a farm surrounded by a few wind-tormented trees. And beyond these again, towered the farther wall of the valley, another escarpment of long limestone cliffs, which could be seen rising tier upon tier to the first brown and violet slopes of Carnmor. The road, hugging the western precipice, commanded a full view of the valley’s eastern rampart, but of the cliffs overhead revealed only the first and lowest range. This, in the sunset-light, wasradiantly pink, but the sheer rocks across the stream, cut off from the light, were grey and grim, rising up in bank upon bank towards the moors above. No colour touched them, no softness made them lovable. Their inhospitable, irreconcilable sternness foreshadowed the abomination of desolation, and gave the valley a stony, lifeless melancholy that recalled the land that once flowed with milk and honey, but is now a wilderness of sterile stone.
As the road led on up the narrowing pass, so the shadows deepened across the way of the travellers. Suddenly, however, the western wall of cliffs overhead, now no longer touched by the sun, dipped in an abrupt cleft; and there, very far above them, hung the sheer western face of Simonstone. Keen, precipitous, menacing, the mass of the mountain impended suddenly over the valley, and the apparition was almost terrifying in its unexpectedness. Another twenty yards, and the lower ranges would once more conceal it from view; here, for a swift moment, it revealed its over-lordship of the glen at its feet. Behind and over its brow high volumes of cloud stood stationary, and in the glow of evening the mountain and all the upper air was rich with a glamour of amethyst and hot violet.
Gundred was dominated by this revelation, and her powers of expression rose to the emergency.
‘Oh, look, how pretty!—yes?’ she cried, indicating the obvious with a neat wave of her neat hand.
Never had her gift for inadequacy burst upon her husband in such a terrifying flash. For a moment he could not speak.
‘Quite good,’ he answered at last, incapable of saying more to a woman who would have been incapable of understanding it.
Isabel remained silent. Her eyes were fixed. Then she put out her hand in an eager gesture to stop the carriage.
‘Stop them, Gundred,’ she cried; ‘I want to get out. I am going up there into the glow and the glory. I am tired of this dull grey world. Kingston, come with me. Let us go and be gods on the heights.’
Gundred saw consent in her husband’s eyes. The carriage was stopped.
‘Well, don’t be late for dinner, darlings,’ she conditioned. ‘Remember, Aunt Minna will be arriving. Do you really think you will have time?’
‘What does time matter!’ exclaimed Isabel rebelliously. ‘There is no such thing.’
Kingston would have liked to go alone. Gundred had just succeeded in irritating him, he felt, to the last point of endurance. Her bland impenetrability was nothing short of tragic. Nothing could ever teach her what to say and what to leave unsaid, for nothing could teach her to feel. She had the sublime elephantine tactlessness of perfect self-satisfaction. Her husband, for one wild moment, wanted to get away from it all—from Gundred, level, monotonous, stodgy, yet unsatisfying; from the dear good old mother who did not count, who never could count; from Isabel, tormenting, tantalizing, odious Isabel. To be alone, up there in the radiance, far above the world of desire and dissatisfactions—that would be, at least for half an hour, rest and relief. But he was to have none; Isabel was to come, emphasizing at every point the exasperating perfections, the exasperating limitations of his wife. With her usual primitive clumsiness, so utterly at variance with Gundred’s well-drilled movements, Isabel flounced out of the carriage, alighting with a jumping flop that brought down a coil of hair and a shower of pins. Kingston noticed that, asusual, her placket was open. He waited in silence till she should have finished her untidy adjustments.
Gundred repeated her injunction.
‘Aunt Minna will be so surprised if you are not there in time to receive her,’ she said. ‘Do be certain that you have time, darling.’
Kingston forced himself to speak. ‘Ivescar is just over the hill,’ he said. ‘We shall be there as soon as you. It will be a short cut—up one side of the Simonstone, and down the other. Are you ready, Isabel?’
Yes, Isabel had finished tucking up her skirt. It was a skirt as inadequate for visiting as for mountaineering. And now she had bunched it up on one side to give her legs full play, and its effect was not only incongruous, but lumpy and lopsided. However, for such matters Isabel cared nothing. She was ready. Without another word, Kingston turned aside and opened a gate. Together they passed through into the field bordering the road, on their way to the copse above, that sloped up to the limestone cliff, and so led on to the heights overhead. Gundred watched them go. A faint, a very faint ripple of doubt trembled across the calm waters of her self-complacency. She had the strangest, the most ridiculous, the most unheard-of feeling that in some way she had not been at the height of the situation. In some way, she had a dim instinct of having failed. As the carriage drove on, she suddenly found herself feeling a little lonely, a little cold.
Kingston and Isabel wrestled their way to the cliff’s top, and found themselves on a flat floor of scar limestone that led straight away to the long, swift slope of the mountain. As if arranged by mortal hands, the blocks of white stone made a regular pavement, like the wrecked foundation of some Cyclopean temple. Between each block was a deep, dark rift, where fernsand lilies of the valley, and strange flowers with white plumy spires flourished in the shelter where no wind could ruffle them. Together the wanderers crossed the level, leaping and balancing lightly from rock to rock. Then heather and sedge began to break the even surface of the paving, and soon usurped its place altogether. Thence, to the summit, was nothing but moor and whortleberry, steep slopes of shale and grit. Kingston and Isabel addressed themselves resolutely to the ascent. Steep and arduous as it was, they had neither time for breath nor talking. They climbed strenuously, silently, taking pride in each step that proved their mastery over the earth by lifting them steadily higher, foot by foot, on the flank of the mountain that had seemed at first too vast to be conquered by any movements of so infinitesimal a creature as man. Slowly but certainly they found themselves advancing up the stark ladder of tussock and poised boulder. Each stone that they dislodged rolled crashing into farther depths, and at last they found themselves moving into the cold shadow of the clouds that evening seemed to be drawing down upon the summit. The crown of the mountain was now beyond their sight, cut off by the fierce angle of the slope; but they could see that the upper air was still aglow with sunlight round it, though the volumes of dark vapour seemed to be growing and darkening. Suddenly the acclivity took a swifter line, then paused for a moment from its labours. Surmounting it, they found that the ground lay for a few yards in a gentler curve, and there beyond, straight above them, was the summit, glorious and crimsoned. A last eager voiceless effort, and they had attained it. Around them whistled and hurtled a sharp wind, and before stretched away the round level plain of the hill’s crown.
It was with a sigh of relief that the climbers restedand faced round to see the extent of their conquest. The whole world far beneath them was misty, ardent, gorgeous in the glamour of evening. Kingston and Isabel made their way to the ruins of the old cairn that had sent northward the news of many centuries. Among the scattered, rough-hewn boulders they settled themselves for an interval of repose in achievement. Behind them rose the ruined wall of the beacon tower that had talked, in its day, of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, of the Armada’s coming, and the passing of the Tudors. Before them, unrolled at their feet like a map, two thousand feet below, was all the splendour of the earth, phantasmal and glorified—tiny towns, and the worm-like track of great rivers, the minute tessellation of meadows, and the dim velvet of wide forests. The whole air, before them and beneath, was a-tremble with motes of gold. Gold filled and pervaded the atmosphere, confounding detail in a haze of glitter, and softening the great dazzling stretches of the western sea into an imperial harmony with the golden heaven and the golden earth.
Kingston Darnley looked out across the glowing mystery beneath him. Rest, profound and eternal, seemed to be enveloping him. In reality, the very foundations of his nature were stirred and stirring. Insensibly, through the heat and worry of the foregoing days, his life had been growing ripe for a great upheaval. Slowly the tormenting desires, the incessant, unacknowledged hunger, the uneasy, restless, emotional uncertainty, the strenuous nourishment of artificial feelings, had all combined to bring his restless unhappiness to a head. Through unacknowledged storm and secret stress he had come at last to that deceptive calm which precedes the breaking up of the soul’s settled weather—the discharge of the soul’s accumulated electricity in a devastating nerve-cyclone.To-day his endurance of himself and his own forced contentment had touched its limit. Gundred had given him the last least touch that was needed to destroy the perilous equilibrium of his mood. Unconsciously he was waiting, in a breathless interval of suspense, for the crash of thunder that was to precipitate the crisis, and clear the air of all its unhealthy restraints.
Suddenly as he lay there, with Isabel silent and watchful at his side, the glory of the world shivered coldly and vanished. A black shadow swooped over the mountain-top, and soon only the uttermost distance retained the glimmer of gold. Down, down upon the old cairn sank, like the portcullis of a fairy castle, a heavy curtain of darkness, shutting out all that was left of the gleaming distance. The cloud was upon them. And, as their gaze was fixed on the gloom descending from above, no less abruptly, no less silently, in grey coils and whirling streamers the mist curled up at them from beneath, rippling and foaming over the rim of the mountain, as a devouring wave sweeps round an islet and over its crown. In an instant the world was blotted out by the white darkness. Uniform, monotonous, it obliterated everything. Only the old cairn and a few yards of ground around it could now be seen. Kingston and Isabel were cut off from the earth, set alone as Deucalion and Pyrrha in a new sphere, one solid point amid a vast ocean of chaos....
‘So much for the glory of life,’ said Isabel.
Kingston rose. ‘I don’t like this,’ he replied. ‘It will be the very mischief to get down again. Come and help me find a way.’
Together they moved away from the old cairn into the mist. As they went it widened before them, revealing a few dim feet of distance, then closed in again behind. Through the drifting pearly gloom objects were strangely magnified, made mysterious, portentous;rocks became monsters looming through the darkness, the level crown of the mountain, shifting fantasy of vapour. The ground beneath their feet seemed to swirl and shift with the movement of the fog, and, now that shape and colour had vanished from the world, an enormous crushing silence dominated the air. Faint and melting before their eyes stretched away the few visible yards of the flat soil, covered with short sedges, and, among the loose piles of grit, with a thick growth of little mountain-sorrel, whose brilliant reds and yellows had been levelled by the blank twilight into a sombre note, as of stale blood spilled out among the stones. Then, beyond, the solid earth wavered away into a phantom, revealing here and there a rock or a patch of grass, uncertainly, evanescently, as a faint, half-guessed shape, as the mist lightened or lowered.
So they wandered carefully on across the plane of the summit, till suddenly, ahead of them, grim and mysterious, rose a long grey barrier fading to right and left in the profundities of darkness. It was the old boundary wall of the summit, built by Celtic kings in the lost ages when the hill-top was the last great British outpost in the north. Humped, shapeless, an indistinguishable mound of stone, the old wall remained intact, running round the plateau in a solid ring, unbroken except at the point where the beacon tower stood. Knowing that outside its precinct cliffs and pitfalls awaited the unwary, Kingston and Isabel turned, and set themselves to follow it on its circuit, hoping to find an outlet or a path. At one point they came on a small stone chamber built into its bulk, but no sign of gateway or track could they discover. Now they were crossing a bare part of the summit, a wilderness of rocky wreckage. Here and there, at short intervals, great rings and semicircles of half-buriedstone could be divined in the level of the soil, foundation-lines to show where the huts and palaces of the Celtic kings had stood. Now they were but dim ridges, grown with dwarf sedge and sorrel, through which roughly burst the gritstone bones of their fabric. Adventurous climbers of the mountain had had their fun of the rocks that former occupants had made their houses and defence. Often the flat, hewn blocks had been lugged from their places by modern hands, to be arranged in some riddle or motto. One ambitious tourist had perpetrated a great design. Kingston and Isabel came suddenly upon it. It stretched bravely across the earth, a device of big boulders, carefully arranged. ‘I love you,’ it said to them, in its audacious, solid letters. ‘I’ and ‘you’ at either end of the legend faded away into the white obscurity beyond, and at their feet lay ‘love,’ obtrusive, unconquerable, built of sound stones so square and firm as to defy the enmities of time and weather.
‘I love you,’ read Isabel slowly.
Hitherto few words had passed. Words, in that blanched silence, seemed futile and impertinent. There was in that vast loneliness of the mist a sense of intimacy too close to be profaned by speech; man and woman were alone, two halves of one primitive creature, in a primitive, floating chaos, where nothing else, as yet, had taken shape. How could such a drifting void hold anything so formal as speech? Speech belonged to that forgotten world of things visible and tangible, that world where other human beings lived, and there was light, sound, movement. Here, in the level, immovable silence of the primeval twilight, Kingston and Isabel found the intervening ages swept away.
They had gone back into the dim time before the dawn of the world, when there was nothing more than this poised existence, vague, voiceless, pervasive.
‘I love you,’ repeated Isabel, studying the tourist’s device—the blatant modern cry breaking into the abysmal stillness of old chaos.
Kingston, with an effort, tore himself from the white mist of fantasy that had closed in upon his mind. The gloom suddenly held dangers; they loomed ahead. He had a dim sense that something unseen was moving towards him out of the swirling uncertainties around.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We shall have to stay here till the clouds lift a bit. I simply can’t pretend to know my way. We should probably wander half over the moors, and go on in a circle till we got hopelessly lost or fell in a pothole. What a fool I was not to watch the sky! However, if the worst comes to the worst, you can shelter in that little shanty, and I don’t expect Gundred will be anxious; she never is.’
‘Read what this creature has written,’ said Isabel. ‘It sounds better in a man’s voice.’
Kingston looked down at the straggling stone letters at his foot. ‘I love you,’ he read. Then he looked up at Isabel.
She was facing him. The motto lay between them. Her face, against the luminous pallor of the mist, was burning, aglow, filled with a strange triumphant challenge. Suddenly, with an appalling crash of thunder, the fantastic world in which he had lived so long shattered and broke about his head. He saw the call in her eyes, understood it, answered to it, helplessly as a bound slave. This was the one woman in the world. He had known her since the beginning of time, been with her since the creation; now at last she threw aside her veils, and stood before him, no longer a stranger, but the lost part of his own soul—that lost part for which he had so long been vainly seeking. Now, in an instant, he recognised the cause of all his enmity, his unrest, his gnawing hunger, the incessantangry cravings which had tormented him. Hitherto he had not seen the truth; he had guessed it. And those guesses, painful, secret, stifled—they had engendered all the throbbing hostility, all the restless enmity with which he had regarded this half-recognised intruder into his life. Now he knew her, now his heart heard the lost language for which it had pined, now his soul stood complete again in the acquisition of its lost part.
Isabel saw that the answer to her call had come. At last she was known. ‘Old friend,’ she whispered, smiling into his eyes.
‘You—you,’ he stammered. ‘And I did not understand. It is You. I have never seen you before, Isabel, and yet—and yet I have known you all my life.’
Suddenly she was clothed in glorious beauty from head to foot. From head to foot she was altogether splendid and desirable. Every inch of her called aloud for his worship. As the sooty kitchen-maid of the tale strips off her rags and stands revealed a King’s golden daughter, so now the accidents of Isabel’s disguise, the untidy hair, the shapeless clothes, all passed out of Kingston’s consciousness. Henceforth she stood far above such peddling criticism. The rules of his ordinary taste could never apply again to this recovered spirit out of the dead ages. She was his—his right, his property, his existence. She was altogether without fault or blemish, the completion of himself.
‘You are beautiful,’ he said in a low voice—‘you are beautiful, the real Isabel. I never guessed what beauty was. It is you, Isabel. It has always been you.’ Wonder at the miracle possessed him, tied his tongue, gave him the pathetic little blundering gestures of the blind—of one suddenly emerged from a lifetime’s black darkness into the blinding glare of daylight.
‘You have come to me at last,’ smiled Isabel. ‘I wondered when you would. You have been trying not to wake.’
‘I have been holding my eyelids down,’ he answered. ‘I have been making myself blind. It has been hell; Isabel ... Isabel!’
‘Yes,’ she replied—‘yes. You have been denying me ... you have been denying yourself. It is Peter’s crime. Of course it was hell. But now you have confessed the truth—the truth which was from the beginning.’
He stared at her—the man made perfect in full self-realization—at her, the woman, whole and entire in her reunion with himself. Soul imperiously cried to soul, and body to body. She had the unimaginable beauty of the thing created by its lover, loved by its creator. Every line and curve of her was perfected handiwork of his own rapture. The loveliness that he saw in her, his own heart, his own flaming fancy had planted there, had fashioned and worshipped as the lover always fashions the idol that he worships.
‘How is it,’ he said hoarsely—‘how is it you can be so beautiful, Isabel? You are not beautiful. My eyes know you are not beautiful. And yet my heart knows better. My heart knows there is nothing like your beauty—nothing like it, Isabel, anywhere in the world. My soul is twisted up in every part of you; there is something of me in every part of you. Your hair, your skin, your eyes—they are me, Isabel; I have given myself to make them. Can you understand it, Isabel? There isn’t an inch of you in which the sinews and the nerves of myself have not always been woven and twisted.’
‘Ah,’ she cried, answering his low tones with a deep burst of feeling. ‘We have been together through the worlds. We are not strangers. That is what youmean. You have buried yourself in me, and I have buried myself in you. We belong to each other. We have always belonged together. There are only you and I in this white pale world. That is what real lovers are. Alone—alone together for ever and ever and ever. Nothing can ever break our solitude—nothing can put itself between us—if only we are honest with ourselves.
‘Isabel, what does it mean—this that we feel? What is it that we are?’ he asked, whispering as if in the presence of a sacred mystery.
‘Ourself,’ she answered triumphantly—‘ourself, awake, brought to life, welded together again. We have come out of a hundred ages. Do you suppose that we come together now for the first time? How do we know each other, then? This that we feel is the song of many dead souls calling in each of us to the many dead souls that have loved us in the other. We have been bound together since first we met in the far-away distance of things. Love is that. Love is never a new thing. Love is the oldest thing in the world. It has lived through a hundred thousand deaths of the body, and gathered strength and knowledge at every stage of its journey. It’s a jewel of a hundred thousand memories crushed together and crystallized into a pure sparkle of lights. It’s a chain of a hundred thousand links, each heavier than the last, and more golden. Kingston, the chain is round us and round us. Tie it tighter, tighter, for ever and ever. We will live everlastingly in this land of splendid bondage.’
‘Isabel, what is it the wise people of the East say?’ answered Kingston, in the stupefaction of ecstasy. ‘They pledge themselves to one another for half a dozen lives or more. Isabel, that is what you mean. You and I are both bound together. We’ll plight our troth again now, far ahead into the future. For a scoreof existences, Isabel. Our love was not born a minute ago; it will not die to-morrow. It goes on and on, whatever bodies it takes to clothe itself. Our love is the only thing of us that goes on. And nothing can destroy it. It is ourselves. You are mine, Isabel, and I am yours—you are me, and I, you, not only now, in these shapes of ours, but through half a hundred more that are not yet born, Isabel. Isabel, what do words and talking matter? We cannot get away from each other; we are the same person. Now and always, Isabel. But we will never lose ourselves again; we must always recognise each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘again and again and again. For ever and always. You have been trying to cut me, Kingston—me! trying to cut yourself.’
‘You are chained to me, Isabel, and I to you! I will never break the chain at my end; you must never try to break it at yours.’
‘No; we are always the same person henceforth. Why, there is no bond. We are too close together now even to be bound.’
She stood gazing at him, her eyes, her pose, her manner inspired with conquest. The blank, sickening ferocity of passion seized him as he answered her look. It caught him by the throat, swept him away in a rapture of agony. To crush that beauty of hers, to mangle it, strangle it, absorb it utterly in himself, became at once the one blinding, obliterating need that filled his whole consciousness. An insatiable thirst of her loveliness possessed him. The keen, flame-like delirium of his desire was a devastating pain. His whole being moaned with the aching torment of it. The sight of her, the thought of her, went through him, pierced him, rent his innermost heart in twain. The drunken glory of suffering that held him on the wheel of knives was a frenzy very different from that placidrepletion which had been his ideal—how long ago?—of the great ideal passion. Now at last he knew what passion was—the parching, gorgeous misery of it, the straining, leaping martyrdom. The ancient secret madness that once had dwelt in the orderly rooms of his father’s heart now stirred again in the son’s, and bled once more, under the wounds of ecstasy, as once, for a wild hour, it had bled long since at the hands of that ill-fated, forgotten woman whose place was now usurped by Isabel. Kingston, his calmer self destroyed by the red intoxication, moved towards his fate, vaguely, blindly.
‘Isabel—Isabel!’ he murmured with dry, cracking lips, groping hands outstretched to take her.
And Isabel welcomed his coming as the crown of life. She threw his arms wide and waited, glowing and transfigured.
The ghostly twilight of the mist was round her, behind her. The face it revealed was fierce with joy, exquisite in its vividness. The dark hair drifted round it, and the throat rose vivid and white from the low-cut collar of her dress, thrown back splendidly, an ivory column. The neck of her dress was fastened awry by a little brooch, whose diamonds gleamed dully in the pale glooming.
And in an instant the man’s flaming drunkenness had passed—passed utterly, in a spasm of torment almost beyond his bearing. As sometimes we are torn painfully, violently from the gay madness of a happy dream by the sound of a bell or some other noise that penetrates to our consciousness from the outer world beyond our vision, so now, in the crisis of his passion, the sight of his wife’s brooch at Isabel’s throat recalled Kingston Darnley, with a jarring crash, to the horrible realities of life. Isabel, characteristically buttonless and pinless, had borrowed it from Gundred to make good thedeficiencies of her blouse. His arms fell, the light of his eyes grew dull, and died. His body stood motionless, and his spirit went down into the abyss of hell.
Isabel saw the change, and at the sight her own glory sympathetically faded. They had done with the heights. Now their feet were set on earth again.
‘Isabel—Isabel!’ he repeated. But the flame of his utterance had died down into a grey dreariness.
Isabel saw that her moment was passing. A horrible anxiety possessed her. ‘What is it?’ she cried. ‘Kingston, what is it? What has come between us?’
He pointed to the brooch. ‘Gundred,’ he answered—‘Gundred. We had forgotten.’ He was suffering so acutely in the death of passion that he could hardly make his words intelligible. The wrench was agonizing. Passion was not dead, but his heart knew that it must die—that he himself must be its executioner—must cast out the guest that was the dearest part of himself—cast it out and cut the throat of it. He desired still with all his soul, but knew that his desire must rest for ever unfulfilled. He belonged to Gundred. He must face his own responsibilities.
Isabel could not hear what he said. But she shivered in the cold that had fallen upon them. Without words she understood what it was that had cut down the flower of his rapture in a moment, what drawn sword it was that had suddenly thrust itself between them. She stood withered and stricken with the shock, grown suddenly pale and old.
Kingston was fighting down his pain, struggling with it, and gradually bringing it into bounds. He was too clear-sighted to give himself any hope. Had he been sprung of a more lawless stock, of men accustomed to love where they chose, without consideration of morality, he might have taken his pleasure as it came, and never given a thought to self-reproach or duty. But asit was, bygone generations stirred again in him, of men who had lived cleanly, decently, according to their lights, avoiding the wild urgencies of passion. Law, custom, convention had ingrained into them a respect for rule and restraint, and now their latest descendant reaped in his own person the cruel reward of all their virtues. To go further in the ghastly labyrinth was impossible. Joy was unattainable. Only duty could be pursued. And for shirking that there could be no excuse.
Without a word he turned and walked away from that ill-omened motto on the hill-top. Vaguely, with hands thrust down into his pockets, he wandered on, crushing down the misery, the angry clamours of his nature, and steeling himself violently to the preservation of what remained possible to him of decency. For the sake of Gundred, of himself, of Isabel—for the sake of his love and hers, he must at least live as clean as might be. The struggle was a martyrdom, though, the shock of self-mutilation a grinding, lancinating anguish.
Isabel stood for a moment, then followed him across the flat ground. She soon caught him up, and they advanced together in silence through the driving mists. Suddenly, vague and ghostly, the old cairn rose before them again, looming mountainous. When he had reached the stones at its foot, Kingston threw himself down upon its steps with a heavy gesture of lassitude. And still the silence ruled.
‘Isabel,’ he said at last, in a dull, tired voice—‘Isabel, you must forgive me if you can. I have been a beast. I must have been off my head. I feel as if I had been drunk, and was only just beginning to come to. Whatever rot I talked you must try and forget it, Isabel. I can’t make out what the devil can have come over me!’
The woman gave him an angry, challenging glance. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I won’t forget it. You spoke the truth. Why are you beginning to tell the old weary lies again? Surely we have got beyond that.’
Her words, her defiant tone, caught his attention.
‘You didn’t understand,’ he said. ‘I was a brute; there’s no more to be said. Don’t try to say any more. Of course you can’t understand. My God, what a damned muddle I have made of things!’
‘But of course I do understand, Kingston. Nothing can undo what you have said. It didn’t need saying, and no amount of denials can ever make it untrue.’
Kingston looked at her anxiously.
‘Isabel,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘Do you realize what you are saying? I was fool enough to tell you——’
‘What we both knew before in our heart of hearts,’ she interrupted passionately. ‘And now we know each other. Oh yes, I understand you. All of a sudden you have been overcome by some absurd qualm—some whim or other. You think we are to be separated by some ridiculous fad.’
Amazement held him. This time he fixed his eyes on her and spoke slowly, laboriously, as one speaks English to someone who can only understand a foreign language.
‘A fad!’ he repeated. ‘Hang it all, Isabel, is honour a fad, and decency, and all the rest of it? One does what one can. Is it only a whim?’
‘Yes,’ she answered violently. ‘It is only a whim. These artificial scrupulosities of yours, they are just middle-class superstitions. You belong to me, and I belong to you. We know that is true. Very well, then; why should we deny in deed what we know to be true in fact. Oh, I have no patience with such whims. Nothing can separate us; why should wepretend to be separated by the fact that you have got what you call a wife? I am your wife. You have no other. You can’t have another. Your only duty is to me—to me and to yourself. All the rest is mere romantic sentimental nonsense.’
His fastidiousness swung him back into a reaction of almost physical repulsion as he contemplated her. The impossibility of making her understand any honourable point of view was dreadful. He loathed her with all his heart as she sat there trying to enforce her claim. And yet he could not deny her claim, and, despite his shuddering disgust, he loved her as much as ever, reluctantly, angrily, but with all the secret unreasoned impulses of the bondage that held him.
‘Isabel,’ he said, with forced gentleness, ‘can’t you even try to understand? I am sorry. Yes; it is true what you say. We belong to each other. Nothing can alter that. But I have given my word to someone else, and I must—don’t you see?—having struck the bargain, I must keep it. Make it a little easy for me, Isabel, though God knows I don’t deserve it. But one wants to keep one’s self as clean as one can.’
‘I won’t make it easy for you,’ cried the other, beginning to realize that he had entrenched himself behind a wall of determination. ‘Clean? You won’t keep yourself clean by playing the hypocrite with Gundred.’
‘Ah, God! Poor Gundred! It is a dirty game I have played with her all along. And yet I never knew. Before God, I never understood. I meant to deal fairly, and I will deal fairly, too, as fairly as I can. The mistake was mine, and I’ll pay for it—pay for it all alone. Don’t you see, whatever happens, she must not suffer, Isabel. She—she has given me all she had to give. So much for so little, Isabel. Imust never let her guess that I haven’t an equal love to give in return.’
‘As if she will not guess it every day and hour of her life! Do you suppose you can deceive her?’
‘At least, I can give her a decent show in the eyes of the world,’ replied Kingston, showing a really subtle knowledge of Gundred’s temperament. ‘That will be better than nothing, any way. Oh, Isabel, the whole affair is a damned horror. It’s all my fault. But we shan’t make it any easier by letting ourselves go to pieces over it. The only thing I can do now is to save myself from being any more of a brute than I can help. Yes, I know we love each other; we shall always love each other, worse luck. But we must spend the rest of our lives trying to forget it. We must kill our knowledge, Isabel. It’s the best thing we can do, damn it, for the best that is in us. I’ve made my mistake and had my fling, and come my cropper; now I must stand the shot.’
‘It is not as if you could,’ cried Isabel—‘not as if you could pay your debt by yourself. It falls on me, because I am a part of you. I have to pay the heaviest price of all. I have done nothing; I have made no mistake; and now I am to pay!’
He stared curiously at her excited face.
‘We pay together, then,’ he said slowly, ‘and we pay a heavy price to keep our love for each other untarnished. That is what it comes to. I’ll pay anything not to tarnish my love for you, Isabel, my opinion of you. It is all I have left. I must save that at any costs. And save a—well, a little rag of my own decency, too. You are asking me—I hate saying it, but it is true—you are asking me to dishonour both of us by dishonouring my wife. I rate our love and ourselves a little higher than that, Isabel.’
‘Oh, you are bloodless!’ she answered passionately—‘abloodless prig! There is nothing of the man in you. Have younothingin your veins—no warmth, no life at all—that you can go on talking these frigid fancies of yours? Where do you come from—what are you? What are you made of? Can you feed your passions with these romantic metaphysics? What’ll they give you? Will they warm you when you are cold—with Gundred? Will they feed you, when you are starved—by Gundred? Will they give you company, when you are alone—with Gundred? Talk of your honour and mine! Our love is our honour. There is nothing else in the world. Gundred is nothing; there is no such thing as Gundred. I have blotted her out of existence!’
Never had the pagan egoism of Isabel been more terrifying, more repulsive. Through his love he hated her as he watched the cruel swift sneer of her nostrils as she talked of his wife.
‘Have you no shred of pity?’ he asked quietly. ‘Think of Gundred. The most damnable thing in the world has happened to her. She has given herself—her whole self—and got nothing in exchange. Can’t you at least let her have pity and respect? Poor little Gundred! I thought it was a square bargain when I struck it. I thought I gave her all I had to give. I swear I thought so. And yet all the time I belonged to you, Isabel, and you to me. Don’t you see that the only thing we can do now in common honesty is to spare Gundred all we can, and spare ourselves the dishonour of cheating Gundred even more than we have already?’
But Isabel was beyond appeals, frankly barbarous and merciless. ‘Gundred took her risks. All women do when they marry,’ she said. ‘And now she does not count any longer. What sort of man are you, to be pining about Gundred when I am here by your side?Look at me—yes, look, look—and see how long you can remember Gundred.’
She fixed his gaze with burning eyes. But he turned away his head and refused to take up the challenge.
‘I suppose it is your right,’ he answered, ‘to make everything as hard for me as you can. I deserve it, I know. Oh yes, you blot out all thought of everything but you, as soon as I look at you. You are the only thing I can see in the world. And I won’t look at you, Isabel. It is no use. Must I tell you again? I won’t stain the love we have for each other by any further treacheries towards the duty we owe to each other and my wife. Oh, Isabel, if you would only believe me, it is because I love you so awfully, so damnably, that I cannot look at you, or touch you. I love you too much. I ache in all my bones with the love of you, and I love you too much and too well to satisfy my love. Oh, don’t you understand? We could never forgive ourselves, never feel clean again. Our love would have been spoiled, made filthy and horrible with deception and mean lies and beastliness. It’s a sort of responsibility we have, to keep it clean. We can’t kill it; it is there, it always will be there. But, at least, we can prevent it from turning us black and rotten. I’d sell my life, Isabel, to have our love free and honourable—I would, Isabel.’
Isabel laughed. ‘Oh, this dry and tedious discussion!’ she cried. ‘How many men would hair-split and quibble like this? Thank God, I have blood in my veins! My people never cared where or whom or why they loved. They took their pleasure where they found it. They were above all laws but their own desires. No silly conventions and superstitions ruled them. They were big, passionate men and women, with life in their veins, not sawdust.’
‘Do you care nothing, absolutely nothing,’ he asked, ‘for—well, for feeling that you have behaved as cleanly as you can? Nothing for consequences? Nothing for anything but the pleasure of the moment?’
‘It is in my blood,’ repeated Isabel arrogantly, investing the crude horror of her selfishness with a certain barbaric grandeur. ‘You know how I hate these huckstering considerations of yours. My self-respect is involved in getting what I want. Defeat is my only shame. And consequences—who cares for them? I know,’ she went on, giving the quotation with proud defiance—‘“I know that about this time there is a prophecy that a Queen of England is to be burned, but I care nothing if I be she, so that I have and hold the love of the King.” The love of my King I have and I hold; what does the rest signify? I told you Queen Anne and I were cousins.’
‘How I wish,’ he said—‘oh, how I wish to God I could make you understand what I feel. I feel the most contemptible beast on the earth; you alone can help me to win back a little of what I have lost. If only you would make it easier for me, Isabel—if only you would make it easier for me, by believing how ghastly hard it is.’
‘Yes; hard, hard, hard,’ said Isabel—‘hard I believe it is,’ she repeated, meeting the anguish and the struggle of his gaze. ‘And I want to make it harder. I want to make it impossible. Find yourself, Kingston—know yourself. Don’t go on tormenting us both with scruples and neurotic nonsense.’
He rose and stared down at her with furious eyes. ‘You are pitiless,’ he said—‘altogether horrible and evil. There’s no decency or civilization in you. You are as fierce as a savage. As I listen to you I hate you; every fibre in me hates and dreads you.’
Isabel rose also and faced him. ‘And when you look at me?’ she asked.
‘When I look at you,’ he groaned—‘when I look at you, every fibre of me longs for you and cries out for you. And yet I swear I hate you, Isabel.’
‘Go on hating me, then, like that,’ answered Isabel triumphantly. ‘You have conquered me now. I feel that I cannot get near you again. For I know what that hatred means. And some day I shall win. I am bound to. You belong to me. Youareme. You recognised that a few minutes ago. But now you are a fool. You refuse your happiness. Well, one day I shall bring you to it again.’
‘Let me go, Isabel,’ he pleaded. ‘Let us try to do the little best we can, you and I. Don’t make our lives more difficult or shameful than they need be. Oh yes, I know that you have everything in your power—too well I know it.’
He spoke wearily in a low, broken voice that seemed to foreshadow the end of his resistance. As his weakness grew manifest Isabel’s strength grew greater.
‘There is no escape from me,’ she said. ‘Remember I am yourself. And I shall always be there at your side, in your house, waiting, waiting till you wake up again from this foolish dream.’
His struggle had suddenly collapsed into the helplessness of fatigue. Even at this defiance of hers he made no sign of revolt. ‘Oh, God,’ he said, ‘how can I get rid of you? What chance am I to have? But it is no use talking. One can’t talk the same language as you—one can’t talk in the same century. It is hopeless, I know. Your ideas are as savage as Queen Isabel’s—you have got all that fearful barbarous selfishness of hers, and one’s only chance of making you understand would be to talk to you in the old French that she must have spoken.’ His voice trailed off into silence.
Isabel drew closer to him, and laid her hands softly on his arm. ‘Kingston——’ she began.
He shook off her light touch, and looked her full in the face. His eyes were blazing, and his manner had the restrained roughness of passion held hard in leash.
‘Isabel,’ he said, ‘if you touch me, I swear to God I love you so much that I shall kill you—here and now, with my naked hands.’
She believed him, and was exalted by triumph. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you do love me. You are becoming a man at last. That would be a good death to die.’
‘Body and soul of you,’ he went on fiercely, ‘hateful and glorious—I might destroy them, mightn’t I, but never could I be rid of them. I know there is no escape, Isabel. And now surely you can let me be. I am bound to you now and for always. Isn’t that enough?’
Isabel smiled. ‘Enough,’ she cried. ‘It is everything; now or later, what does it matter? I win. I win. Kingston,’ she added, dropping indifferently from the heights of emotion to the plain lands of prose, with something of that unconscious ease which one might have imagined in the nature of a woman like Isabel the Queen, the very prose of whose life was emotion, and whose emotion was so practical as to be daily prose of her existence—‘ah, Kingston, I am tired. I am simply dropping with weariness. Are we going to get down off this mountain to-night? Because, if not, I must try to sleep in that hut we saw. And I know you will not be able to run away from me.’
‘Sleep, by all means, if you can,’ he answered. ‘There is no going down through this mist. Luckily the night will be fairly warm, and by morning the clouds will have broken. But you will be hideously uncomfortable, I am afraid.’
‘No,’ she replied; ‘I am naturally primitive. I have never minded roughing it.’
Exhausted by their discord of wills, they now, by mutual consent, talked coolly and indifferently, casting memory behind them.
Kingston helped Isabel to find the hut, and did what he could to make it habitable. Then, leaving her to get what rest she might, he returned to his thorny vigil under the old beacon. The air was motionless, and not ungenial in its temperature. Enveloped above and below in blank darkness, he had the sensation of being balanced softly in space. The calm, after the ardent misery of their dialogue, was inexpressibly refreshing. He abandoned himself to its placid influences, and instead of devoting the night to a thrashing out of all the many difficulties that threatened his relations with Gundred and with Isabel, he let it drift him away into the domain of peace. He hardly knew how completely exhausted he had been, and it was with the surprise which always attends us when we find ourselves doing prosaic things that seem at variance with the high dramatic moments of life they follow, that at last he found himself floating quietly off in sleep.
Anguish was still there, deep down in his heart—a bruised feeling of hunger and dissatisfaction, a great shame for himself, and a great pity for his wife, as well as a firm resolve that she should not suffer. But passion had dulled the edge of its own intensity; only dull aching pains were left, rather than acute stabbing ones. Disappointment and hopelessness possessed him in an inexorable but not agonizing grip. In fact, he was too weary to feel the full weight of the yoke that was laid upon him. Cradled in the great silence, his tired consciousness sank at last to rest.