CHAPTER XXIX.

Three years later George Wood was sitting alone on a winter’s afternoon in the library where Thomas Craik had once given him his views on life in general and on ambition in particular. It was already almost dark, for the days were very short, and two lamps shed a soft light from above upon the broad polished table.

The man’s face had changed during the years that hadpassed since he had found himself free from his engagement to marry his cousin. The angular head had grown more massive, the shadows about the eyes and temples had deepened, the complexion was paler and less youthful, the expression more determined than ever, and yet more kind and less scornful. In those years he had seen much and had accomplished much, and he had learned to know at last what it meant to feel with the heart, instead of with the sensibilities, human or artistic. His money had not spoiled him. On the contrary, the absence of all preoccupations in the matter of his material welfare, had left the man himself free to think, to act and to feel according to his natural instincts.

At the present moment he was absorbed in thought. The familiar sheet of paper lay before him, and he held his pen in his hand, but the point had long been dry, and had long ceased to move over the smooth surface. There was a number at the top of the page, and a dozen lines had been written, continuing a conversation that had gone before. But the imaginary person had broken off in the middle of his saying, and in the theatre of the writer’s fancy the stage of his own life had suddenly appeared, and his own self was among the players, acting the acts and speaking the speeches of long ago, while the owner of the old self watched and listened to the piece with fascinated interest, commenting critically upon what passed before his eyes, and upon the words that rang through the waking dream. The habit of expression was so strong that his own thoughts took shape as though he were writing them down.

“They have played the parts of the three fates in my life,” he said to himself. “Constance was my Clotho, Mamie was my Lachesis—Grace is my Atropos. I was not so heartless in those first days, as I have sometimes fancied that I was. I loved my Clotho, after a young fashion. She took me out of darkness and chaos and made me an active, real being. When I see how wretchedly unhappy I used to be, and when I think howshe first showed me that I was able to do something in the world, it does not seem strange that I should have worshipped her as a sort of goddess. If things had gone otherwise, if she had taken me instead of refusing me on that first of May, if I had married her, we might have been very happy together, for a time, perhaps for always. But we were unlike in the wrong way; our points of difference did not complement each other. She has married Dr. Drinkwater, the Reverend Doctor Drinkwater, a good man twenty years older than herself, and she seems perfectly contented. The test of fitness lies in reversing the order of events. If to-day her good husband were to die, could I take his place in her love or estimation? Certainly not. If Grace had married the clergyman, could Constance have been to me what Grace is, could I have loved her as I love this woman who will never love me? Assuredly not; the thing is impossible. I loved Constance with one half of myself, and as far as I went I was in earnest. Perhaps it was the higher, more intellectual part of me, for I did not love her because she was a woman, but because she was unlike all other women—in other words, a sort of angel. Angels may have loved women in the days of the giants, but no man can love an angel as a woman ought to be loved. As for me, my ears are wearied by too much angelic music, the harmonies are too thin and delicate, the notes lack character, the melodies all end in one close. I used to think that there was no such thing as friendship. I have changed my mind. Constance is a very good friend to me, and I to her, though neither of us can understand the other’s life any longer, as we understood each other when she took up the distaff of my life and first set the spindle whirling.

“Was I heartless with poor Mamie? I suppose I was, because I made her believe for a while that I loved her. Let us be honest. I felt something, I made myself believe that I felt something which was like love. It was of the baser kind. It was the temptation of theeye, the fascination of a magnetic vitality, the flattery of my vanity in seeing myself so loved. I lived for months in an enchanted palace in an enchanted garden, where she was the enchantress. Everything contributed to awaken in me the joy of mere life, the belief that reality was better than romance, and that, in love, it was better to receive than to give. I was like a man in a badly conceived novel, with whom everything rests on a false basis, in which the scenery is false, the passion is false, and the belief in the future is most false of all. And how commonplace it all seems, as I look back upon it. I do not remember to have once felt a pain like a knife just under the heart, in all that time, though my blood ran fast enough sometimes. And it all went on so smoothly as Lachesis let the thread spin through her pretty fingers. Who would have believed that a man could be at once so fooled and so loved? I was sorry that I could not love her, even after we knew all that her mother had done. I remember that I began a book on that very day. Heartless of me, was it not? If she had been Grace I should never have written again. But she was only Lachesis; the thread turned under her hand, and spun on in spite of her, and in spite of itself—to its end.

“Grace is the end. There can be no loving after this. My father tells me that I am working too hard and that I am growing prematurely old. It is not the work that does it. It is something that wears out the life from the core. And yet I would not be without it. There is that thrust again, that says I am not deceiving myself. Grace holds the thread and will neither cut it, nor let it run on through her fingers. Heaven knows, I am not a sentimental man! But for the physical pain I feel when I think of losing her, I should laugh at myself and let her slip down to the middle distance of other memories, not quite out of sight, nor yet quite out of mind, but wholly out of my heart. I have tried it many a time, but the trouble grows instead of wearing out. Ihave tried wandering about the earth in most known and unknown directions. It never did me any good. I wonder whether she knows! After all it will be four years next summer since poor John Bond was drowned, and everybody says she has forgotten him. But she is not a woman who forgets, any more than she is one to waste her life in a perpetual mourning. To speak may be to cut the thread. That would be the end, indeed! I should see her after that, of course, but it would never be the same again. She would know my secret then and all would be over, the hours together, the talks, the touch of hands that means so much to me and so little to her. And yet, to know—to know at last the end of it all—and the great ‘perhaps’ the great ‘if’—if she should! But there is no ‘perhaps,’ and there can be no ‘if.’ She is my fate, and it is my fate that there should be no end to this, but the end of life itself. Better so. Better to have loved ever so unhappily, than to have been married to any of the Constances or the Mamies of this world! Heigho—I suppose people think that there is nothing I cannot have for my money! Nothing? There is all that could make life worth living, and which millions cannot buy!”

The curtain fell before the little stage, and the eyes of the lonely man closed with an expression of intense pain, as he let his forehead rest in the palm of his hand.

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