“Maybe your first thought when I ask that question, will be—why should Iwantto tell you? But if I do tell you, then you will see why. We are strangers to each other, living thousands of miles apart, and we shall never meet; yet because you have written this book, I feel that you are my friend. You have helped me as no one else could. And I have no one else to help me at all—no one.
“Yes, I must tell you!—for in one way I and the girl in your story have lived through the same experience. Only there is one great difference between us. She didn’t love the man she married, and that hurt her, in thinking of him afterwards when he was dead. I loved the man I married so much that it is killing me because I didn’t tell him. There was a reason why I didn’t tell. It seemed then thatI could not. But oh, do you, who know so much, think he understands now, and does he still care, or is he too far away? Could he understand my having done a thing since he went, a thing that looks like disloyalty—treason—to his memory, though indeed it was not that. It was done to save a life. You will say, ‘This is a mad woman who asks me such questions.’ But I almost wish I were mad. If I were, I mightn’t realize how I suffer. Yours—Barbara Denin.”
He was stunned by the letter, and its revelation. She hadloved him.
CHAPTER IX
The thought filled the man’s soul and surrounded it as water fills and surrounds a ring fallen into the sea. Barbara had loved him. There was nothing in the world outside that thought.
At first, it caught him up to heaven, and then just as he saw the light, it flung him down to hell.
Fool that he had been, never to see the truth under her reserve, while seeing would have meant standing by her, keeping her forever! But he had let her go, and it was too late now, even for explanations. He had shut an iron door between them; and standing with her on the other side of that door was a man who called her his wife. There was the situation; and he, by his silence, had created it. He was condemned to perpetual silence; for it was the wildest, most hopeless mockery of all which brought to John Sanbourne a knowledge of Barbara’s love for John Denin.
Fate had been laughing at him while he wrote his book with a message of peace for her, laughing wicked and cruel laughter, because through the message he was to come into touch with Barbara and learn the tragic failure of his sacrifice. That seemed to Denin a vile trick for life to play upon a man, and whipped by the seven devils of thwarted love which had entered into him he cursed it; cursed life and fate, himself and Trevor d’Arcy, and was ready to deny Justice, even Justice blindfolded.
His heaven lasted for a moment at best. For many hours Cain and Abel in him fought each other in hell. But he had been down in depths well nigh as black, and had struggled out to the light. Remembering this, he struggled out once more, at last, and perceived that, somehow, to his own wondering surprise, he had stumbled up to a higher level and a stronger footing than before. Within distant sight he visioned those serene mountain tops where light is, the light that never shines on sea or land for those who have not suffered.
Only a short time ago he had begun daily to realizeand tell himself that strength and steadfastness alone really mattered; that suffering was but a flame which passed. This was still true, as true as it had ever been. A man could choose whether the flame should consume or purify him in its passing; and here and now the immediate hour of his choice was on the stroke. At the end of that day of turmoil, Denin seemed still to be looking down at himself, as a crouching prisoner in a dark underground cell. Yet he knew that he was his own prisoner, not really a helpless captive of the Fate he had cursed. Fate had no power after all to make men prisoners. It was their business to find this out, and to prove that they had only to release themselves, in order to be free. He felt this to be an abstract fact of life; and if he meant to live he must make it concrete.
The underground hole where he so miserably crouched was but the cellar of his darkest self. If he but thought so, he had strength enough in him to fight his way up into the high, bright tower which was also himself, a tower with a wide view on every side, over the sunlit mountains from whosepeaks he could already catch some glimmering vision.
Even the thought of the mountain tops—that they were there, shining, and always had been and always would be—made Denin lift his head and draw deep breaths into his lungs. That part of him which had yearned to write the book for Barbara and had conquered difficulties to write it, came like a strong brother to the rescue of a weak brother and pulled him up by main force out of the dark. He tried to reassure himself, over and over, that he need never again crawl back into the darkness. He had seen the view from the tower, and the tower was his to reach.
Denin had not worked out for his own guidance any clear-cut philosophy of life. He had just stumbled along with strength for his goal mark, trying now and then to recall some whisper or note of music he had caught from the other side before he came back. He had written down in his book, for Barbara, all that had been tangible under his pen. But now, knowing she had loved him, he saw how much more help she needed than he had given,and how much more—how very much more—he owed her.
Not that he had deliberately stood aside and left the girl unprotected. When in the German hospital he had drifted back to a knowledge of realities past and present, he had seen almost at once that, even if the news were unwelcome, he must not let his wife live in ignorance that she was still bound. It was only after hearing from Severne of Barbara’s marriage to d’Arcy, that he had said, “John Denin is dead and buried, and his ghost laid.” He had meant to make the supreme sacrifice for Barbara’s good, and there had been no shadow of doubt in his mind that he was right in making it. Now he asked himself if even then it might not have been best to let the truth come out. No one was to blame for the mistake in a dead man’s identity, nor for what had happened afterwards through that mistake. Barbara would have had a hard choice before her; yet she might, if she possessed strength and courage enough, have chosen from the two men who had come into her life, the one she loved. The wholeworld would have rung with the tragic story, but at the end Barbara might have lived down the tragedy. If he had been her choice, he would have helped her to live it down, by the gift of such love as no man had ever given to a woman.
As it was, he had dared to play the potter. He had taken the clay of Barbara’s destiny into his own awkward hands, to shape it as he thought best, and he had let the vase break in the furnace. He could never make it what, but for his meddling, it might have been; yet he must piece the delicate fragments together if he could, not caring for—not thinking of—his bleeding hands.
This, then, was the debt Denin owed to Barbara. And to pay it he saw that he must begin by remaking himself, before he could give her anything worth the having. He must become a thing of value, in order to be of value to her. Those faint whispers and snatches of music from the other side of the hidden river, which he had jumbled into “The War Wedding,” confusedly, hurriedly, fearing to lose their echoes, he must now carefully gather up againand sort out with method. He must dip into his brain where half-remembered thoughts seethed in solution. He must see the rainbow in every tear drop, and crystallize it into a jewel for Barbara. Thus developing himself, he might have some worthy offering for her at last.
He could not write that day, nor the next, for it seemed that the only things worth saying were the things which would not let themselves be said, things which swept through the background of his mind like a flight of chiming bells in the night, elusive as waiting souls for which no bodies have yet been made. But though he could not write, he called thoughts, which he had once seen and let go, to come again to him. He sent himself back along the road he had traveled beyond the milestones. He searched by the wayside for beautiful memories he had dropped there, and some of them he found grown up tall and white as lilies in moonlight. Whatever he found was for Barbara.
On the third night after the revelation, he had gathered something to give her, and strength enoughto feel sure he would not put into his letter the question which must not be asked: “What was the reason you couldn’t tell your husband that you loved him?”
Denin wrote with a typewriter, as he had written before, on blank paper with no address, because it was better for Barbara to come in touch with him only through his publishers. In that way, she would be spared any sense of constraint she might have to feel in knowing that he lived among her neighbors of long ago. She had given him her name frankly, and she might fear some inadvertent mention of it to people she had met as a child. If he were to be of real use to her, he thought, he must be known only as a distant Voice, an Ear, a Sympathy, almost impersonal outside his letters.
Denin wrote to her that he was sure, entirely sure, the man she loved was “not too far away to know.”
“You will only have to send him a thought, and it must reach him behind that very thin wall we call death. The way I imagine it, such a message goes where it’s directed, just as when we call ‘Central’through the telephone. They, whom we speak of as dead, have their own work to do and their own life to live, so perhaps they don’t think of us every moment. But surely we’ve only to call. They may not see us in the flesh, any more than we can see them in the spirit; but it came to me when I was very close to the other side, that our bodies don’t enclose us quite. We’re half-open jewel-boxes, that let out flashes of emerald, or sapphire, or diamond light, according to the strength of our vibrations—or aspirations, if you like (I begin to realize that these are much the same thing!). It is the flashes of light which are seen and recognized by the ones who have passed farther on. The lights are our images, as well as messages for them. But when I say ‘farther on,’ it’s only a figure of speech. They are not far off.
“We can see the rain. We can’t see the wind, even when it is so close we can lean on it like a wall. And so we can lean on their love, strong as a wall, stronger than anything visible to us, because love is the strongest thing there is. You see, life wouldn’tbe worth living for any of us—it wouldn’t have been worth creating—if the dead really died. The glory of the deathless dead lights our way, with the bright deeds they have done, till we come where we can see for ourselves that there’s no dividing line. ‘The milestones end.’ That’s all. They’re not needed any more.
“I heard other people talking of these things when I went where the milestones end. Since then I’ve wondered why I didn’t know the things before.Listen to your hopes, andyoucan know without waiting; because hope is the voice of instinctive knowledge, and soul-instinct is what we werebornknowing. Believe this, and you won’t have to stumble slowly up, as I did, with a hod full of old precepts on my back. You can plane down from the sky with your arms full of stars, and live with them, as I live with the flowers in my garden.
“The accident which put me into close touch with what we call ‘death,’ put me out of touch—mentally—with life on this side for a while. An operation brought me back. Just as, hovering between theknown and the unknown, I let my past drop, so on my return to it I had for a while no memories of the borderland. My brain busied itself picking up lost threads. I recalled the instant when I thought I was meeting death: a great shock when all supports fell away as from under a ship that is launched, and I plunged into measureless depths. Beyond that sensation, there was blankness. By and by glimpses of something bright came and went, oftenest in dreams. The effort to seize their meaning waked me with a start. It is only now that I am beginning to hold some of the best meanings, I think. I have come back with a little star-dust, even I; and by its glimmer, in good moments, I try to interpret my own dreams.
“If I read them rightly, I’ve told you only an old, old truth in saying that there should be no such word as death, or grief for it among the living. We’ve only to lift the veil of Death to see the face of Life—a wonderful, shining face with no pain in its smile. Looking into its eyes, what we do, instead of ‘dying,’ is to flow over our own narrow limitationsas growing vines flow over the high wall of a little garden. We escape out of bounds into the boundless and are part of it.
“Don’t, then, let the life of the man you have loved be darkened by feeling that he has darkened yours. Stand up, lift your head, and you’ll see how your sorrow will have to lie down at your feet as shadows lie.”
When Denin ended his letter, he found that in trying to help Barbara, he had helped and heartened himself. He had unfolded a flag and waved it to the sky.
He went out, though it was after midnight, and posted the letter. Later, he was able to sleep as he had not slept since the night he wrote the last words of his book. As usual he dreamed of Barbara, but this time it was a new dream. He saw himself painting her portrait; and when he waked in the sunrise he wondered why he had never tried to paint such a likeness from memory. He could see her as clearly before him as though she had come to the door, opened it, and looked at him.
The thought gave him something more to live for. He would do the picture, and so bring Barbara herself to the Mirador where, guessing nothing of the truth, she sent her thoughts to John Sanbourne.
CHAPTER X
It seemed to Denin that he knew the day and even the moment when his letter reached Barbara.
He was working on her portrait, to which he gave every instant of his spare time between dawn and dusk. A strange, elusive impression of a girl it was; a girl in white looking through a half-open door. She stood in shadow, but leaning forward a little so that her eyes and hair and a long fold of her dress caught the light. Denin’s portrait work before had been done with charcoal or colored chalk. Such mediums were too crude, however, for this labor of his love. He was trying pastels, and had expected to make many false starts and failures. But he had only to open the door to see the girl standing just outside, looking straight at him with smoke-blue eyes under level brows and warm shadow of copper-beech hair; so after all he could not go wrong with hiswork. He had but to paint what he saw, and the picture took life quickly, as his book had taken life, because it was easier to go on than to stop. One evening, he was straining his eyes for the last ray of daylight, when a blue flash seemed to leap from the eyes of the portrait. He could hardly believe that it was only an illusion of an overworked optic nerve. It was as if Barbara had somehow found out about the portrait, and compelled it to speak for her, to tell him something she wished to say.
“She has got the letter!” was the thought that compelled his mind to accept it. And then—“She will answer at once.”
The difference in time between Santa Barbara and Gorston Old Hall was about twelve hours; and fifteen days ago, he had posted his letter. It was just possible, even in war-time delays, that it had reached her, he calculated, as the eyes of the portrait held him spellbound.
When the picture was finished, he took its measurements and ordered a glass to protect the fragile colors, delicate as the microscopic plumes of a moth’swing. But he could not content himself with any design for a frame. He went to shop after shop, and even traveled as far as Los Angeles, in the hope of finding the right thing. But nothing was right as a frame for Barbara. The handsomer a frame was, the more conventional and banal it looked in Denin’s eyes, when he tried to associate it with her. At last he decided to carve out the frame with his own hands, from the beautiful fluted redwood of the great sequoias of California: wonderful, ruddy wood with an auburn sheen and a wave running through it like that of Barbara’s hair.
The idea seized him and brought extraordinary delight. He took three lessons from an astonished cabinet-maker of whom he was able to buy the redwood, and then with confidence and joy began his work. In two days it was finished, and the picture in place. It was almost as if he had built a house for Barbara, and she had come to live in it, and look out of the door at him.
The portrait was half life-size; and rimmed in its rich fluted setting of redwood a thousand years old,it was of exactly the right length and shape to hang on the door of child-Barbara’s bedroom—his bedroom now. It was for that place he had planned it, because in these days he had lost the unbroken privacy of his first weeks at the Mirador. John Sanbourne had been “discovered,” and without churlishness was unable to remain any longer a hermit. He went nowhere, except for the long, solitary walks he loved, and refused all invitations, but he could not lock his gate against the three or four kindly persons who ventured with the best intentions, to “dig him up” and “keep him from being lonely.” His memory-portrait of Barbara was too strikingly like her, in its strange impressionist way, not to be in danger of recognition by some old acquaintance of her childhood. Besides, a picture of his love, even if unrecognized, was far too sacred to be seen by stranger eyes. In Denin’s bedroom the smiling visitant was safe. No one but himself ever went there. And with the heavy frame firmly clamped to the door panels, the effect of the girl gazing out into the room was thrillingly intensified for Denin.Thus hung, the portrait was opposite his camp bed; and when he waked at sunrise, Barbara and he looked at each other.
The picture had been in its place for a day when her letter came, a very thick letter; and with the envelope uncut he went up to sit before her likeness and read what she had to say to John Sanbourne.
“You are a lifeline thrown to me!” he read. “I grasp it thankfully. I wonder if you will think me a silly, sentimental creature, if I tell you that even before I opened your letter a strong golden current seemed to come out through the envelope into my fingers, and up my arm? If you were just an ordinary friend, a man, living near me, I shouldn’t be able to say this to you, or tell you that I put your letter like a talisman inside my dress, so as to keep it near me, and not lose the sense of its influence after I had read it three times over. But toyouat your distance I can tell many things that are sacred, because I’m only a shadow to you, not a flesh-and-blood woman, with all my faults and foolishnesses under your eyes to be judged. I’m a shadow toyou, and I don’t mind being a shadow, because it gives me freedom and liberty. Yet I mustn’t abuse that liberty, and deceive you, my friend so far off—and so near. I’m afraid that I have deceived you already, and asked for your sympathy, your help, under false pretenses. Perhaps if you’d known the real truth about me and my life, you would have written me a terribly different letter. Whenever I am feeling the comfort of it most, suddenly that thought pierces through me, very cold and deadly, like a spear of ice. Iwantthe comfort—oh, how I want it!—and so, to make sure whether I have the right to take it or not, I am going to tell you everything. You will not be bored, or think me egotistic. I know you well enough, through your book and your letters, to be sure of that. When you have read this, you will be able to judge whether I can dare to claim the consolation you offer me, and whether I have a right to comfort myself with those thoughts, about the only man I have loved or shall ever love. Because, I have given another man a place in my outer life.
“What thought comes into your mind when you read those words—cold-hearted, horrible, disloyal words? Do you slam the door of your sympathy in my face, and turn me away? No, please, please don’t do that—anyhow don’t do it quite yet. Wait till I’ve explained as well as I can—if any explanation is possible.
“I want you to know all the truth and understand entirely, so I must even tell you a thing that seems absurd to tell. It would be absurd, if it were not for the thing’s consequences. When I was fourteen my mother and I came away from America, where we’d lived ever since I was born, came to live in Paris, though she is English by birth. A cousin of hers, an officer in the British army, was on leave from his regiment just then. He ran over to Paris, to amuse himself, not to see us; but as he knew we were there, he called. He was twenty-seven—thirteen years older than I—and I thought he was like all the heroes of all the novels I’d ever read, in the form of one perfectly handsome, perfectly fascinating man. He treated me like a child, andteased me a little about being a ‘flapper,’ but that only made me look up to him more, because he seemed so high above me, and wonderful and unattainable, like a prince.
“Perhaps he saw how I felt, and gloried in it as great fun. He gave me his picture in uniform, and I worshiped it humbly, as a little Eastern girl might worship an idol. Soon he went to India, but I saw him once again, nearly two years afterwards, when I was almost sixteen. I had never forgotten my ‘prince,’ and after he came back he flirted with me—rather cruelly, I think. When I realized—just as he was saying good-by, that he’d only been playing a little, it all but broke my heart—what I thought was my heart. I used actually toenjoybeing miserable, and telling myself I should never love again—just as if I’d been a grown-up woman. I was even angry with my frivolous self when I found that I was getting over it. For I did get over it very soon, and before I was seventeen I could look back and laugh at my childish silliness. That wasover five years ago, for I am twenty-two now; and all my real life has come since then.
“My mother and I were poor, until a little while ago. She is very good really and very charming, and absolutely unselfish, so I’m not picking flaws in her if I have to explain to you that she was selfish forme. Being English herself, she has always thought—in spite of marrying an American and going to live in America—that there’s nothing quite so good in the world as the best kind of English life. By the ‘best kind,’ she means life among the aristocracy, in country houses, and in London in the season. She made up her mind before I was eighteen that she wanted me some day to marry a man who could give me just that life. I used to laugh then, when she mapped out my future. It seemed only funny, not vulgar and horrid to talk about marrying some vague, imaginary man for his title and money; but when Mother took a house in London—a better house than we could afford—and went into debt to buy me heaps of lovely clothes, andfussed and schemed to get me presented and dragged into the ‘right set,’ I began to be ashamed.
“Before we had been in London very long I met a man who was different from any one I had ever seen before. From the first night, when we were introduced at a dance, I could think about no one else. I wish I could make you understand what he was like, for then you would see how a woman who cared about him could never stop caring, even when he was dead; for no other man could at all take his place. He wasn’t handsome, not even what people would call ‘good looking,’ I suppose, and he didn’t talk very much. But somehow, when he came into a room with lots of other men in it, all the rest simply ceased to count. He was very tall, and a great athlete. Maybe that was one thing that pleased a woman, for we do like strength—we can’t help it. But there was so much more about him, magnetic and sincere and splendid, which would somehow have made one feel that he was near, if one wereblind!He could do all the things other men do better than any of the others, yet he had thoughtssuch as none of the others had. One knew that a woman could have no moods or imaginings beyond his power to understand, if he cared enough, because he wasfine—‘fine’ in the French meaning of the word—as well as strong. I shall never forget the first time he looked at me. We had just been introduced. There was something wonderful about his eyes—I could hardly tell you what it was. But one suddenly felt caught and drawn into them, as into a vortex in deep, still water, clear and pure, though dark.
“I saw that he rather liked me, and even that meant a good deal from him, because he was a man’s man, and didn’t care much about laughing and talking with lots of girls. Perhaps he was shy of them. Mother saw, too, that he was interested; and that was what began all the trouble, because he was exactly what she had set her heart on for me. She wouldn’t leave him alone to make up his mind whether he really wanted to see more of me or not. She tried toforcehim to want me. She did all she could to bring us together. She left no stone unturned. Tome it was sickening. I don’t know whether he saw it or not, but I was so afraid he might, and be disgusted with us both, that it made me feel absolutely ill. I could never be at ease with him. It was hateful, hateful that he should think my mother and I were trying to ‘catch’ him, because of his title and money, and his beautiful old house which every one admired and talked about, and heaps of women wanted.
“After we had known him for awhile, mother hinted and hinted for us to be invited to stay at his place. It was almost like asking him to marry me—at least I felt it was. He was obliged to get up a house-party for us, so that we shouldn’t be alone, for he had no mother or aunt or any one to entertain for him. We and the others were invited for a week, but the day everybody was going on somewhere else, mother was taken ill, so she and I had to stay. I was sure she was pretending, though she wouldn’t confess, and I was almost wild with misery and shame, I loved him sodreadfully.
“For days mother kept her room, and when shecame down she seemed so weak, that of course he begged us not to think of going. A fortnight more passed like that. Then the first rumors of war began; and we were still with him when war was declared. That same day, out in a garden by a lake we both loved, he told me hecared, and asked if I would marry him before he went off to fight. If only I could have been sure that he did really care, and hadn’t been drawn on by things mother had said, I should have been divinely happy. But I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t at all sure. And the shame and suffering I felt, and the fear of showing that I adored the ground he walked on, when perhaps he was only being chivalrous to me, made me behave like abeast. I was just a sullen lump. I said yes, I would marry him, if he was quite, quite sure he wanted me to; and then mother came out of the house, and straight to us, as if she had known exactly what was going on and could hardly wait to make certain of him.
“He had to go so soon, to rejoin his old regiment, and leave for the front, that he got a special license,and we were married when we had been engaged just two days. If he did love me—and looking back I almost believe now that he did, for he was too true as well as strong to be ‘trapped’ by any woman—I must have hurt him by keeping him so at a distance. He couldn’t have understood, not even with the wonderful power he had of seeing deep into people, all the way through to their souls. But now I have explained to you about mother,youwill understand. We were hardly alone together, he and I, for more than five minutes at a time. I always made some excuse to escape. I was afraid if I were with him for long I should break down and be a fool. And I thought if he didn’t love me I should certainly disgust him by crying. Mother had told me often, when she was training me to ‘come out’ in society, that a man must love a womanverymuch, not to be irritated with her when she cries, and her face crinkles up and her nose gets red.
“After our wedding he was with me for about an hour, but mother was with us too, for half the time, and even when she left us alone in an ostentatioussort of way, I could think of nothing to say to him, nothing at all. There were a thousand things in my brain, will-o’-the-wisp things, but my tongue could not catch up with them. I let him go. And then it was too late.
“Three weeks afterwards, he died, saving the life of a friend. So now you see what your book meant to me, very specially, and why I begged you to tell me whether you had found out these wonderful things by going down close to death yourself. You know why it wasn’t enough even when you answered as you did at first. I longed to hear whether you thoughthewould know the truth about me. Your answer to that question is all I hoped for, and more. But I don’t deserve it, for I am married now to my cousin—the one I so childishly made an idol of when I was a little girl.
“You are shocked. You think of me with horror. You are sorry you have troubled with me at all. When you read at the beginning of this letter that I had given another man a ‘place in my life,’ you didn’t dream that I hadmarried him. Butso it is. Eight months after my love died, and my youth died with him, I was my cousin’s wife.
“I won’t tell you much about that. Only this: a month after I was a widow, this cousin came to England, wounded. My mother and I were helping the nurses as best we knew how, in the private hospital of a friend. My cousin arranged to be sent there. He wasn’t seriously hurt, and we saw something of him, of course. He was immensely changed from the old days. Because he might have been a stick or a stone instead of a man for all I cared, he was piqued, I suppose. He told mother that he meant to make me fall in love with him and marry him when the war was over. And when he had gone back to the front again, she repeated what he had said to me. You see, she didn’t know how I had lovedthe other, so she was surprised at the way I took the message. I couldn’t help showing that I was angry because he haddared. He wrote to me later, more than once, but I didn’t answer his letters.
“Months afterwards, he was horribly wounded.As he had no near relatives, he asked to have us sent for, to Boulogne. He was supposed to be dying, and we couldn’t refuse to go. We never thought of refusing. It seemed to do him good to see us, and he grew better. His one wish, he said, was to die in England. We brought him back—a dreadful journey. He grew worse again on the way, and we were obliged to stop at Folkestone for two weeks. Then we got him to London, to see a great specialist for spinal operations. The surgeon said that such an operation as would have to be made—if any—might kill, and could not cure. At best, if he lived, my cousin would be an invalid for the rest of his life. Still, without an operation, he must surely die. It would be just a question of a few weeks. My cousin had to be told this by some one, and the surgeon thought the news of such a verdict had better be broken to him by a person he cared for. Mother felt unable to bear the strain, after all she had gone through. She isn’t strong, and since last August she has changed very much. It seems as if, now that I’m ‘provided for’ (as she says), she hadlet herself go. That day, when she asked if I would tell my cousin what the surgeon said, I was frightened about her, she trembled so much and suddenly turned so deathly pale, with bluish lips, and blue circles round her eyes. Without an instant’s hesitation I promised to speak to my cousin. But I didn’t realize what the scene would be like, or I could hardly have faced it. In his weakness he broke down, as I never saw any one else break down. He said, if there was no hope of his being made into a man again, what good would it bring him to be cut up and hacked about by a surgeon? Besides, the specialist was the most expensive operator in England, and he couldn’t afford such a costly experiment. The simplest thing would be to put a revolver to his head, or take an overdose of some sleeping draft, and so to be out of his misery once and for all.
“I was unnerved, and begged him to keep up hope and courage—not to think about the money, but to let us lend it. My beloved one left everything to me; and I was sure, if he were alive, he would wishme to make that offer to a brother soldier. I felt, even while I was speaking, that ifIwere in my cousin’s place, I should refuse the operation because I’d rather die than live on as a helpless invalid, a burden to myself and others. But it wouldn’t have beenhumannot to encourage that poor sufferer to endure existence, if he could. So I tried my best, and I was very excited and worked up by the sight of his emotion. Suddenly he spoke again. He said that without an incentive to live, he wouldn’t trouble about the operation, and the only incentive he could possibly have would be my marrying him, before he went under the anesthetic. Besides, he couldn’t accept money from me, when he saw no way of repaying it, unless I were his wife. I would rather he had killed me than force me to make such a decision as that!
“Perhaps if I’d been calmer, I might have dared to refuse, realizing that his love of life was very strong indeed, and that when he had thought things over, he would surely consent to the operation without the horrible sacrifice he asked of me. But I wasat the point of breaking down, myself. I couldn’t see anything clearly. It seemed to me that I had to save a life, if it could be saved, at any cost. And then, my future mattered so little to me then. The thought in my mind at the time was, that to be the nurse of a broken soldier who’d given himself for his country, was at least a mission in life. As it was, I had none left. Also, it may be that deep down under my conscious thought was another: that according to the surgeon’s expert opinion, my cousin was most unlikely to live. Why not give him the incentive he asked for, to face the ordeal, and let him die happy—since that one thing seemed to mean happiness for him? Almost before I knew what I was doing, I promised. Then it was sprung upon me the next day, that if the operation were to be done at all, it must be done soon. I had to keep my word. And what followed was a nightmare: a second wedding by special license, a bedside marriage with a dying man, words of farewell, and the surgeon and anesthetist arriving in their white robes—like undertakers.
“When I heard that he had come through the operation with his life, I knew instantly what wicked hope must have been hiding in my heart. A sickening disappointment crept like poison through my blood. I had to do my duty, though, and live up to the obligations I’d undertaken so recklessly. After a few weeks, mother and I brought the invalid home—to the home my beloved one had given me! My life seems to have been one long series of mistakes, but I don’t think I’ve sinned enough to deserve the punishment I have to endure now. It is too much for me. How am I to bear it, and keep my soul’s honor? The memory of my love, his ways, and his looks follow me from room to room of his house, and walk with me by the dear lake, and in the garden paths. I might have found peace if I’d left myself a right to live with that memory. But I haven’t. I’ve put a man inhisplace, a man whose body is helpless as that of a little child, yet whose soul is a giant of hateful jealousy. He is jealous of the dead. I hadn’t guessed a man could be like that. I must tell you no more. I must try not tobe cruel or utterly disloyal both to living and dead—and to my own self-respect, such as I have left.
“I have kept my love’s name. I bargained for that, before I promised my cousin to marry him. It was the one possession I couldn’t consent to give up. If you will stand by me as my friend after all this that I’ve told you—if you can say that, in spite of everything, I have any right to the comfort you’ve given, address your next letter to Lady Denin.
“Yours gratefully, from the heart, whatever your decision may be. B. D.”
CHAPTER XI
If he would “stand by her, as her friend”?
Denin could not wait to write. He cabled recklessly. “You have done no wrong. Take all the comfort you need. What you suffer is not punishment. It is martyrdom.”
“God help her!” he prayed. “And let me help her, too—my Barbara!”
He thought of the girl yearningly, as of a tortured child with the heart of a woman. His pain was peace compared to hers; and it was he—the blind man he called “clear-seeing”—who had thrown her to the wolves. If he had not been too blind to see her love, he would have shown his for her as he had not dared to show it, that day in the old garden. Their marriage would have been a real marriage, binding Barbara so indissolubly to him that not to save a life could she have broken the bond. By this time, they would have been togetherin their home, and not his memory but himself would follow her through the rooms and by the dreamy lake at Gorston Old Hall. Yet even so, could he ever have known the girl from tip to tip of her soul’s wings, as he saw himself destined to know her now, with six thousand miles of sea and land and one man’s death and another man’s life between them? Would he have learned from her lips and eyes the delicate truth of an exquisite worship, as he had learned it to-day from her written tribute to a dead soldier?
“My God! She’s more mine than she could ever have been if I hadn’t died for her!” he heard himself think aloud. After all, life hadn’t been laughing behind his back, while he wrote the book for Barbara. Though Fate snatched her away from him with one hand, with the other it gave her back, irrevocably and forever. It seemed to Denin that, though nothing could bring them together in body, nothing could ever separate them in spirit.
When he wrote that same day, he assured her again, as he had assured her in his cable, that shehad a right to every one of the words of comfort he had sent. “And you have a right to lean on that unseen wall of love I told you about,” he repeated. “It is close to you, and meant to lean on. There can be no disloyalty to any one in resting against it. The love that exists for you on the other side of the Great Sea is too vast to be selfish. It asks nothing from you that you ought not to give. It only begs you to be happy, for there’s a kind of happiness without which we fall out of tune with the universe. Don’t say you can have no happiness of any kind. Don’t think it, or that it would be ‘wrong’ or light-minded to be happy if you could. You have seen life draped in black. But black is a concentration of all colors. No opal has such lights as a black opal. The great adventure of life is learning the terror and the beauty and the splendor of it all as one and inseparable.
“I have to confess that I’m no guide for you or any other. I am just groping my way up, out of my own dark places; but I believe that great secrets reveal themselves in flashes, just as—in some mysterious,inspired moments—a sunrise or a sunset tells you the truth of a thing you’ve been groping for years to find out. This obligation to your own soul (and Heaven knows how many others), the obligation ofhappiness—is one secret which has been opened for me by a magic key. That key is my strong wish to be of use to you. It helps me to feel that I may help you. Perhaps you’ll care to know that? And you can help me, and yourself, and the man who has passed on, by trying to gain the kind of happiness I speak of. It’s the kind that makes you one with the sunlight, a true note in the great music, ringing in tune with the universe.
“I wonder if you happen to remember about the music which the man in my book (the man who was passing) heard over the battlefield, the music of life for which the music of war and death was only the bass, the necessary undertone? I caught just a few snatches of that life music, but once heard it goes on echoing in the ears, teaching you the harmony of all things, if you listen deeply enough. Those young soldiers I tried to write about, who had thrownoff their bodies, and even their enmities, with the rags and dirt and blood they left on the battlefield—they were listening to the great music, and hearing in it the call to some special mission which only they were fitted to fulfil, going to it in the summer of their youth, before they had grown tired of anything. I do believe that was more than a dream of mine; that this torrent of splendid youth, this vast crowd of ardent souls suddenly rushed from one plane to another, has some wonderful work to do, which can be done only by souls who go out with the wine of courage on their lips. But we others, we have our mission too. We can’t perform it if we make false notes in the music for the passing souls to hear. And weshallmake false notes if we let our high vibrations drop down weakly to depression’s minor tones.
“Perhaps you’ll turn away from this idea of mine. But it’s one that interests me, as you know, because you’ve honored my little book by caring for it. In the dreams I had of things on the other side of sight and hearing, I thought that I saw the realmeaning of the war—the hidden cause of this landslide of civilization. I saw a whole nation scintillating with dull red vibrations of fear: fear of attack by other nations, fear of letting neighbors grow stronger than they. Then I saw the dull red glowing brighter with vibrations of anger, a furious desire to grow strong at the expense of others, and to kill and conquer at any cost. Beautiful blue vibrations of intellect, and clear green vibrations of hope and successful perseverance were lost, swallowed up by the all-pervading blood-red. I saw the heavy crimson flood spreading into and lowering the golden vibrations of other great peoples, who had not yet fallen; and in the strange dream of colors pulsing through the ether of earth and heaven, I realized the immensity of the fight; how it reached far beyond the forces we know, being in truth a battle between the light of cosmic day and the darkness of cosmic night. I saw that the danger was defeat of the golden vibrations by the red which would lower the life-force of the whole world; but something told me—some snatch of the great music which interpretssecrets—that progress is an integral, unalterable part of evolution; that evil, which is only negative good, can never conquer; and that the gold vibrations must win in the end. In the dream, that knowledge gave me rest. It seemed a pronouncement from the tribunal of the Power which causes all worlds and all beings to take form and exist by vibrations.
“That’s a long homily on my dreams and the theories I’m clumsily founding on them. But I am trying hard myself to vibrate and resound in tune, because each vibration and each note count quite as much as individual soldiers count in war. In this time of earth stress, and after, when civilization is remaking itself in men’s minds, with the loyal ‘spirit of the time’ we must allthink gold and blue, the gold of the sun by which our bodies live, blue of the sky when inspirations come. You’ll believe me a ‘mystic’ (whatever that misused word may mean!), but I’m only trying to see the Reality behind the Thing upon which I’ve harped to you already. We are needing to know the Reality as we never needed such knowledge before.
“Be happy then, in the way that unites you with everything in heaven and on earth, all the sweet, kind children of Nature close around you, so that you may learn the different languages of flowers from their perfumes, and what the trees say in the wind. You can’t feel alone in the world if the trees talk to you, and they will if you open your heart to them. You will get to know the oak language, the pine, the elm, the beech languages; and next you will learn how they and the sea and the rivers and brooks, and everything else that makes up the music of nature, give out the same message in a thousand different ways:Be happy.To be happy with your soul, no matter what has hurt your body and tried to spoil your life, is to be strong. Go into your garden, and walk by the lake you tell me of, and don’t be afraid to call the Memory you love to walk with you there or anywhere. The one you have loved understands all, and so there could never be even a question of forgiveness.”
Denin longed to add to his letter the request that she would write often; but he would not ask that ofBarbara. He must be ready to give all that she wanted, and beg for nothing in return. Perhaps if she found any small comfort in what he had written this time, she would be satisfied, and feel that nothing more was left to be said on either side. This possibility he tried to keep before his mind, and to think of even as a probability, in order to soften the blow of disappointment if he never heard again. But in his heart he knew that she would write. It seemed to him when he walked in the little garden of the Mirador, or stretched his long body on the warm grass under a big olive tree he loved, that he could hear her thoughts in the garden of Gorston Old Hall. With his ear close to the earth the message Barbara would send by and by seemed to come to him before it had left her mind and taken form on paper.
She answered his cable without waiting for the letter that followed.
“Thank you a thousand times,” she said. “I have always something new to thank you for. What should I have done if your book hadn’t come to me,and given me you for my friend? For a little while, I almost stopped believing in God, for life looked so cruel, not only to me but to every one—or nearly every one—I know, since the war began. Far and wide as I looked, I could find no mercy, no pity. How ungrateful I was, when all the time God was putting it into your mind to write that book, and sending your friendship to me when I needed it as one needs air to breathe!
“Do you know, you are teaching me tothink?I feel now as if I had never reallythoughtbefore. I just dreamed, or brooded. Ifhehad lived, I should have learned from him. That is, I should, if our souls hadn’t gone on forever being shy of one another. When I had him with me, I was too busy loving him and being afraid that he wouldn’t love me, to think about anything outside, though his mind had given my mind a great lift, even then. And another thing I want to tell you. Your way of thinking reminds me of him. I believe you must be a little like him—mentally, I mean. Believing this will make me trust and turn to you, as one whoknows the things I long to know. You have his name, too, ‘John.’ And I am going to sign my name always after this, not a mere impersonal initial.
“I am yours, oh, so gratefully, Barbara Denin.
“P.S. Strange, I didn’t notice at first where your cable was dated! I suppose, like the help you send me, it seemed just to come out of space! But reading the message again, I broke open the envelope I had already sealed, to tell you what a throb of the heart I had in seeing ‘Santa Barbara.’ Can it be that you live at Santa Barbara? I was christened after that dear old place, because I was born there, or very near. It’s good—it’swonderfulto have your words come to me fromhome.”
It was a direct question which she asked. Did he live at Santa Barbara? But Denin thought best not to answer it. She would forget, maybe, or would suppose that he had been staying for a short time in California. Each of his letters to her before, though posted not far from the Mirador itself, had been enclosed in an envelope to Eversedge Sibley. In all but one case, other letters to correspondents broughtthe author by his book had been sent off in the wrapper with Barbara’s. Denin had taken pains to settle the difficulty of writing to Gorston Old Hall in this way, in order that neither the name of the woman nor the name of the place should be remarked by Sibley. He kept this rule with the letter which followed Barbara’s question, but her next broke the plan in pieces. It crossed one from him, and was written after receiving his letter about the garden.
“Dear Friend,” she named him. “Before I say anything else—and I feel that there are a thousand things, each pressing forward to be said first—I must tell you what I have found out. I’ve learned that you are living in the house my father built for me. Of course that won’t be important to you. Why should it be so? I have to remind myself over and over that I am surely just one of many women who have written to you after reading your book; one of many women you are kind to, out of the goodness of your heart, and the knowledge that’s in it. Can knowledge be in aheart?Yes, yours is there, I think, even more than in your brain. I am nothing toyou except a poor drowning creature to whom you have held out a firm hand. But the drowning creature feels that your living in a place she knew and loved gives her a kind of personal right in you.
“I read this very morning in a London paper an extract from a New York one—an article about John Sanbourne. Perhaps you never even knew it was written? I’m sure you gave no permission to have it done. I think you would not like the way the man wrote about you; but I felt, in reading, that he tried hard to bring his work up to a high level and make it worthy of the subject. If you realized the good it has done me to know that you cared enough for my dear little Mirador to want it for your own, and to restore it from ruin, why, youcouldnot be so very angry with the newspaper man!
“That time in California, when I was a little girl, seemed a hundred years ago, or even in another state of existence, till I read the description of you in your garden—once my garden. Then that part of my life came back as if it were yesterday. I can see the big olive tree, which had been let grow as itliked, with all sorts of flowing, dancing gestures of its branches and twisting of its trunk, the way olives grow in Italy and the south of France. I used to call it my ‘silver fountain.’ And under it there was always a look of moonlight, even in the brightest noon. I do hope nothing has happened to the tree? Say kind things to the silver fountain from its little friend Barbara. Write me about it, and tell me, please, if it means anything fairylike to you as it did to me. But I know it must, because of what you say about your garden. How little I thought when the letter came four days ago, that my long-ago garden and your garden of now, were one and the same!
“That letter was more than a letter. It was a saving force. Because it was so much to me, and I wanted to think it all over and over, I couldn’t have dared to answer at once in any case. But it came on an anniversary, August 18th, the day of his passing. I can’t say or write the word ‘death,’ since I have begun to learn from you. It was always a dreadful word, like a bludgeon. But now it’s impossible.For me it has gone out of the language.
“As you walk in your little California garden of the Mirador, will it please you at all to know that you have given me back the joy of the English garden, the beautiful garden and the lake, and the sweet, old, history-haunted house whichheleft to be mine? Because you, who know so much, say that he understands and doesn’t even need to forgive me, I take your word. I am not afraid to walk with his memory now. I can speak to it as I shouldn’t have had the courage to with him, when he was here in the flesh. And because of your letter, August 18th was not a terrible day. It was more like the wedding day of two spirits than the anniversary of a great grief, and one of the spirits—mine—just released from prison. Not that it can stay out of prison forever. It’s too weak, yet, to feel its freedom for long at a time. I’ve had horrible hours, ever since that day. I shall have them often, I know, for the thing I have done has made daily life a torture. But at worst I can steal away by myself sometimes to read your letters over. They, and my new thoughts,will be for me the tonic of courage; and so I can go on from day to day, not looking too far ahead, into the dark.
“If I haven’t trespassed upon your time and imposed upon your great kindness too much already, will you write me little things about the Mirador and your life there? Will you, if you take photographs, send a snapshot of the wee house as it is now, and perhaps the silver fountain, to—Your grateful friend, Barbara Denin?
“P. S. You will think I am very old-fashioned and early Victorian about my postscripts, and I suppose I am, though I don’t remember tacking many onto other letters, only those to you. This one is just a thought put into my head by some of the last things you said. It is about the war, and it came to me in the garden on August 18th.
“In a world war like this, with all its anguish, can it be meant for the nations, each one that suffers and strives, to develop by and by a new individuality, a great unselfish, selfless Self? Can it be that the Power behind the worlds throws this one now intothe furnace because development must come for progress’ sake? When the earth was first created, every least thing that lived fought for itself, and there was no holding together in a large way, anywhere. When civilizations came, they brought no real improvement, for politics and greed divided nations against themselves as well as against each other. Is the true excuse for creation unity, with all the experience of ages to give it value? If it is so, and if each nation can attain to unity through sacrifice and heroism, won’t the next thing to follow be the unity of the whole world? Can this be coming to pass, slowly yet surely, not only with our grain of sand, but with all the worlds, while the Power who created watches through the cosmic days you spoke of? It would make one’s own tears of sorrow seem small, if one could believe this; and yet if we did not grudge the tears, they might count as pearls, poured into a golden cup, to brim it full of jewels worthy of God’s acceptance.
“Perhaps this isn’t much of a thought. But such as it is, there has been light in it for me, on darkdays. And as I owe it to you, I felt I should like to tell you about it. It is going to make me realize more than I could before, the brotherhood of all men in war time, even the ones we call the enemy. Why, I used to be stupid and unseeing as a mole! I hardly thought about common people, pasty-faced waiters and weedy under-gardeners and grocer’s boys, asmenat all. Now, out of every town and village they are marching with their faces turned to the front, brave and smiling. They are as glorious soldiers as any, and I pray for them as I would pray for my own brothers. Is that a step for me towards the great unity? I wonder—and hope.
“You see, I begin to warm myself at the fire your friendship has kindled. Each letter you write will be a fresh log piled on to feed the flame.”
CHAPTER XII
When Denin wrote again he ventured to give Barbara the name that she had given him, “Dear Friend.” And he enclosed photographs of the Mirador, with its flower-draped balcony, and of the “silver fountain.”
“What you say about my helping you is wonderful to hear, and makes me feel like a comet stuffed with stars,” he wrote. “It is a great honor for me that you care for my letters. It’s true, as you surmise, that others have written and do write to the author of ‘The War Wedding,’ and that is an honor too, in its way. But it’s an altogether different way. I can’t explain why. I won’t try to explain why the call you have sent half across the world is different from any other call. Yet I want you to believe that it is so, that I count it an immense privilege to write to you, and an immense delight to getyour answers. What you call your ‘gratitude’ is the highest compliment ever paid to me. In trying to study out your problems, I have solved some of my own. In advising you to be happy, I’ve found a certain happiness for myself; so you see that I have far more cause to be grateful to you than you could possibly have to me.
“For one thing—just a small instance—I had never taken a photograph in my life, until you asked me for snapshots of the Mirador garden. In order to make them for you myself, I learned how. Now I am deep in it. Do you remember the little room that is half underground, yet not quite a cellar? I’ve turned it into a dark room for developing my negatives. I was up all one night watching the birth of my first work. But I don’t tell you that to bid for thanks. I did it because I was too infatuated with the work itself to think of going to bed. These things I send are crude. I am going to try to become what they call—don’t they?—an ‘artist photographer.’ When I can give myself a medal for my achievements, I’ll take some better pictures foryou, of the house and garden, and of the Mission and other places in the neighborhood of your old home if you would like to have them. Of course it interests me immensely to know that you once lived here.”
The last sentence Denin added after a long moment of hesitation. It seemed brutal not to protest against that humble supposition of Barbara’s that her past ownership of the Mirador would be unimportant to him. But what he burned to say was so much more, that the few conventional words he dared to dole out looked churlish in black and white. Still, he had to let them stand.
After these letters, which crossed, the woman in England and the man in California caught the habit of writing to one another oftener than before—and differently. They did not wait for something definite to answer, for their thoughts so rushed to meet each other that it seemed as if they knew by wireless what was best to say each time. Often what they said might have read commonplacely to an outsider, for now they told each other the little thingsof every-day life. After her first outburst of confidence and confession, Barbara did not again for many weeks refer directly to Trevor d’Arcy. But Denin thought that he understood, and felt his veins fill full with a sudden jerk, as do those of a man electrocuted, when he read, “I am rather desperate to-day:” or, “To keep myself from going all to pieces, just now, I turned my thoughts off my own life, as you turn a tap, and sent them to your garden—my old garden of the Mirador. I strolled there with you, and you consoled me. It was evening. We were in the pergola (Father’s old head gardener used to call it the ‘paragolla’), and I forgot the iron grayness here that weighs down my spirit. Over you and me, as we talked, glittered my old, loved stars of California. And the pergola with its velvet drapery of leaves and flowers, and the three dark cypresses barring the sea view at one end, was like a corridor hung with illuminated tapestry ‘come alive.’ You can’t think how real it was for a few minutes, walking there and hearing your generous words of comfort, like magic balm on a wound thatonly magic balm could heal. I’ve decided that when things are very bad with me here, I’ll try that way of escape again. I will send my thoughts to the Mirador garden, and the comfort that nobody but you—who understand so marvelously—can even beaskedto give. Do you mind my flying to you? Will you ‘pretend’ too, sometimes in those starlit nights, that I have come to ask your advice and help? Will you feel as if I were actually there, and will you put the advice into words? Maybe they’ll reach me so. I do believe they will. And I am needing such words more than ever lately. I can hardly wait for them to come in letters. Though I have the ‘invisible wall of love’ to lean against, that you told me of (and Idolean hard!), there is an influence which tries always to drag me away from that dear support, making it seem not to belong to me after all. There’s a voice which tells me I was never really loved by the one whose memory I worship; that he asked me to marry him only because mother practically forced him to do so. This isn’t aninnervoice. It’s the voice of a personwhose jealousy and cruelty Imustforgive, or be as cruel myself. The voice says it has reason to be sure that all it tells me is true; that it’s useless for me to ask mother, because she would deny it; besides, she is too ill to be troubled or reproached about anything. You know, I have two invalids now, so I can’t do much for any one outside, except send money—hismoney, to the poor and the wounded.
“The terrible voice hammers constantly on my heart, and is breaking it to pieces, in spite of your help. For even you can’t help me there. How could you, when about that one thing—that principal thing of all, it seems now—you have no knowledge? You can’t know whetherheever loved me as a man loves one woman, or whether he was simply willing to spread his generous protection round me for the future, when he was going away to risk his life. It would have been like him to do that, I have to admit in some moods. And I hate the moods, and hate the voice for putting the idea—which mercifully hadn’t struck me before—into my head.I oughtn’t to hate the voice, because it may be that its wickedness—almost fiendish at times—is caused only by hopeless suffering. I strive to say to myself, as I think you would wish me to say, ‘Could a bird who had been blinded and thrown into a cage where it never saw sunshine, do better than croak, or peck the hand that tried to feed it?’
“I need to walk with you in your garden, you see! Send me kind thoughts from there, without waiting to write. Then, if I send you questions in the same way, I shall feel that you hear and answer. I shalllistenfor the answers. Tell me, first of all, do you, as a man, think another man would ask a girl to marry him just because she was poor and without prospects, and he was going away to face death? Of course it’s true that you can’t know, but what do you think? Remember, I’m not speaking of an ordinary man, but one almost too generous and chivalrous for these days. Do you think such an one might have done that?”
Denin wrote back, “I think no man would have done that. You need have no fear that you weremarried for any motive but love. A man—even such a man as you describe—must have argued that a young, attractive girl would have plenty of chances in life, at least as good as that which he could offer. She would have no need of his protection, and he would have no right to press it upon her, unless he gave all his love as well.”
This assurance Denin tried to send Barbara in the way she asked, as well as by the letter which would take weeks to reach its destination. He made of his ardent thought for her a carrier pigeon with golden wings, which could travel swiftly as the light. Thus he rushed to her the answers to many questions,—questions which seemed to come to him from far off, as he walked in the garden. He could hear her voice calling, when the wind came over the sea, from the east where England lay.
Denin had bought the Mirador and begun his life there, with some echo of Ernest Dowson’s words in his mind:
Now will I take me to a place of peace:
Forget my heart’s desire,
In solitude and prayer work out my soul’s release.
But his heart’s desire was with him, as it could have been nowhere else, so vividly, flamingly with him, that there could be no thought of finding peace. He no longer even wished for peace. He would not have exchanged a peace pure as the crystal stillness of a mountain lake, for the dear torture of seeing Barbara’s soul laid bare. He was never in a state calm enough to analyze his feelings. He could only feel. Yet the strangeness of his position and hers swept over him sometimes, as with a hot gust from the tropics. John Denin had had to die, in order to learn that his wife adored him. The price would not have been too big, if he alone had to pay, but she was paying too. He could not take the payment all upon himself; yet he could help to make it less of a strain for her, and all his life was poured into the giving of this help. Every thought, every heart-beat was for Barbara. He lived to give himself to her, and to take what she had for him in return. With each day that passed he realized how much more they were to each other at this vast distance—these two, parted forever—than most menand women living side by side in legal union. He knew that John Sanbourne was absolutely necessary to Barbara Denin, as she was to him; and all the incidents of their daily lives, big and small, though lived separately, drew them together when recounted, as pearls are drawn together on a lengthening string.
Now that the secret was out, and Lady Denin knew where John Sanbourne had made his home, without suspecting any hidden mystery in the coincidence, he was thankful that she had learned the truth. A barrier was down, and they seemed to gaze straight into each other’s eyes, across the space where it had been. In return for his snapshots of the Mirador and its garden, Barbara sent photographs taken by herself of Gorston Old Hall. One of these showed the lake, with a bow-windowed corner of the black and white house mirrored in it—the very spot where Sir John Denin had asked Barbara Fay to be his wife. “The place I love best,” she said. Though she did not say why, it thrilled him to guess. And in the same letter she sent faintlyfragrant specimens from the “Shakespeare border.”
How the sweetness of the dear old-fashioned things, whose very names distilled a perfume, floated back to Denin from the garden he had given to his love!
“My husband had the border planted,” Barbara explained. “Don’t you think it a delicious idea? Not a single flower or herb mentioned by Shakespeare has been forgotten, and you can hardly imagine what a noble company has been brought together. Once we walked in the garden, he and I, on a moonlight night, when a breeze came up and drove the evening mists slowly, slowly along the paths and borders like a procession of spirits in silver cloaks. We played that it had driven away the ghosts of Shakespeare’s people, kings and queens and knights and ladies called back to earth by the perfume—which, you say, is the voice—of those well-remembered flowers. That’s one of the memories I cherish now, when I walk past the Shakespeare borders in the moony dusk. And thanks to you—who have helped me literallyto move into mydreams and live there—I don’t seem to walk alone. For a few moments then, I am neither lonely nor sad. The moonlight still drips into my heart, like water into a fountain, as it dripped on that night I remember: and my thoughts lead me along a beautiful, mysterious road that nobody else can see—a road to wonderful things I’ve never known, but have always longed for, such a road as certain music seems to open out before you.”
The pressed leaves and petals in Barbara’s letter were those of pansies, rosemary, and rue: the dark blue pansies he had once thought like her eyes at night; rosemary for the never-absent remembrance of them; rue for an ever aching regret, because of what might have been and could not be.
She asked him to tell her what he had done inside as well as outside of the Mirador since he had taken it, and how he had furnished the rooms. This was a difficult question to answer, because Denin had surrounded himself with everything she had described in her old environment: white dimity curtains, rag-woven rugs of pale, intermingled tints, the “Mission”made chairs and tables, and copies of her old pictures on the walls. If he detailed his chosen surroundings, would not the added coincidence strike her as almost incredibly strange?
Denin ignored the request in his following letter, but Barbara repeated it in her next. “After all, it isn’t possible that she should suspect the truth,” he argued, and at last took what risk there was, rather than appear secretive. Not that therewasa risk, he assured himself over and over again; yet when a letter came which must be a reply to his, the man’s fingers trembled on the envelope. In a revealing flash like lightning which shows a chasm to a traveler by night, he glimpsed a hidden side of his own nature. He saw that it would be a disappointment, not a relief to him, if Barbara passed over his description of the new-born Mirador without stumbling on any vague suspicion. He realized that he must have been hoping for her to guess at the truth, and so break the thin crust of lava on that crater’s brink where they both stood, gathering flowers.
“Good God, I thought I had gained a littlestrength!” he said, and opened the letter quickly, though with all accustomed tenderness of touch. Then he tried to be glad, and remind himself that he had known it would be so, when he read that she wondered only, without suspecting.
“If I hadn’t been certain of it before,” she wrote, “I should believe now that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Itmustindeed be that our thoughts do travel far, and impress themselves upon the thoughts of others, for it can’t be a mere coincidence—as your taking the Mirador was—that you have made the place over again just as I had it. I must have gone there in a dream, and told you things in your sleep. Then you waked up, and supposed that the ideas were all your own original fancies. The strangest part is about the pictures.Ihad Rossetti’s ‘Annunciation’ in my bedroom. I chose it myself, because of the lilies, and the little flames on the angel’s feet. I chose ‘La Gioconda’ too, because it seemed to me that I should some day discover what made her smile so secret, yet so enchanting, just as if, couldone listen long enough, one might catch the tune in the music of a brook or river. I used to stand before the mirror of my dressing-table at the right of the big window, and practise smiling like her, but I could never manage it. I thought, if I could, when I grew up I should be able to make a man I loved fall in love with me, even if he didn’t care at first. Poor child Me! I remembered that wish, when I wanted the One Man to love me, and yet was too proud and ashamed to try and make him do it.