thought, as he turned English verse into indifferent alcaics, that
this classical work could only lead, was only educative, could never
be considered as an end. But he came to no final decision until he
had spent nearly a month in a rapid survey of those note-books. They
startled him; the minute accuracy and patience shown in the collection
of evidence were only what he expected from such a man as Meyner, but
the brilliant audacity of his theories, the almost savage independence
of an original mind, looked far different when plainly stated in black
and white, than when they had fallen humbly and almost hesitatingly
from the man’s own lips. The romantic side in Maurice’s character was
touched most by what was worst in Meyner’s books; the finished and
unprejudiced scholar would have shaken his head over much that looked
like vain imagining, that was extravagant, and, so far, unsupported.
Maurice was younger; Meyner’s fierce opposition of an accepted view
attracted him, and awoke his pugnacity. He would linger over page
after page of what seemed to him splendid conjecture, of what might
have seemed to others very useless stuff, and say to himself: “If
only one could prove that this _is_ so, instead of longing that it
_may_ be so!” The air of conviction with which Meyner wrote down his
own views on his own subject gained immeasurably in Maurice’s eyes
from the personal knowledge which Maurice had of Meyner’s perpetual
tendency to undervalue himself, and to distrust himself in all other
matters. Even with these views in his mind, he had expected no great
results; he had been too honest to support them with any evidence that
was not thoroughly tested. They seemed to Maurice to be the guess of
genius; the air of conviction had for him the strange attraction of
a religious, not wholly rational, faith. He decided to abandon his
University career, and to devote his time to a further prosecution of
Meyner’s investigations.
His guardian, who was also his uncle, made very little opposition.
Maurice had given so much evidence that he was stable. He had an
unusually large allowance for a young man at Cambridge, and yet he had
not run into debt. At Cambridge the wealthy are the most in debt,
because they have most credit and most temptations. As a matter of
fact, Maurice never had considered the financial side of anything;
it had simply happened that he had never wanted more than he could
well afford. But this weighed very much in Maurice’s favour with his
guardian. He felt that his nephew was a man who understood value, and
could be trusted. The property to which Maurice would succeed, when he
came of age, made it unnecessary for him to adopt any profession; nor
did it bring with it any of those special responsibilities for which a
special training is supposed to be necessary.
Maurice, therefore, spent the next two years abroad, for the most part
in Paris. He had carried with him an introduction to a physician at one
of the Paris hospitals, who sympathised with him in his work, and was
able to be of great assistance to him. In this man he gained a friend;
in other respects these were years, it seemed to him, of disillusion.
One by one the great, beautiful theories had to go; a tiny meagre fact
would start up, a fact that meant but little to the ordinary observer,
and it would be strong enough to overthrow years of work, and send
the conjecture on which they were founded to some limbo for lost
absurdities. He had long ago been aghast when he had tried to realise
how vast is the amount of the things that no man knows. And now for
“knows” he put “can know.”
Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie had also been abroad, but he had seen them
very seldom in those two years. Marjorie seemed to be slowly changing;
he was no longer the recipient of childish confidences. She was grave
and more beautiful, perhaps, than she had been; and she was also more
quiet and reserved; she was friendly with him, up to a limit; she told
him news, of a kind; she sympathised with his disappointments in his
work, within decent bounds. At the end of the second year, when Mrs.
Meyner and Marjorie were staying for a few days in Paris, and Maurice
was at last awakening to the fact that he could not expect childish
confidences from one who was no longer a child, Marjorie told him some
news which surprised him.
“Aunt Julia has changed very much. I like her now.”
“She must certainly have changed then,” said Maurice smiling.
“I don’t mean,” Marjorie explained, “that she is different to other
people--only to mamma and myself. Her servants are in terror of her,
and her tenants hate her, and so on; but she has been really kind to
me. I think she likes me. We were staying with her a few weeks ago.
You’ll be surprised to hear that she likes you too.”
“Of course,” said Maurice, “it is surprising that any one likes me, as
you say.”
“I don’t think I said that. She told me quite suddenly once that she
liked Maurice Grey, because he was the cleverest man she knew in one
respect. Mamma suggested that it was because you understood her. ‘No,
my dear,’ said Aunt Julia, ‘the village people do that, because I
speak plainly, and they try to pay me back again for it. He always
misunderstood me. I like him. He will not do much, because he can’t
concentrate himself on one thing; but I like Maurice Grey all the
same.’”
Marjorie did not repeat any more of Aunt Julia’s conversation; but the
old lady had gone on to say that Maurice, however, would probably
concentrate himself on one person. She added, in her point-blank way,
that she intended him ultimately to marry Marjorie. She did not appear
to think that Marjorie, or Maurice, or Mrs. Meyner, could have a voice
in the matter; the marriage was one of the things that the perverse old
woman had made up her mind to arrange.
“I’m glad that dear old lady likes me,” said Maurice. “I always liked
her--I really did. She was full of such striking and impressive
contrasts--the soft, purring voice and the ill-tempered words--her
gentle, peaceful face and her fearful pugnacity. And I like her more
because she has been good to you, you say.”
“Did you ever,” asked Marjorie, hurriedly going to another subject,
“find out anything new about the intelligence of the brute creation?”
“I think I used to tell some lies about a favourite terrier of mine
once, and made myself believe them. No, Marjorie, that has not been my
line. It has been quite enough to find out that I and you, and all the
rest of us, have got no intelligence worth mentioning, none that will
do a thousandth part of what we want it to do. What made you ask that?”
“I was thinking about that beetle you found on the common when you were
stopping with us once, and about the dream I had.”
“Ah! I remember that.”
“I never found the dead beetle, although I hunted everywhere for it,
and I never remembered what it told me about you.”
“I did not tell you at the time, Marjorie, but I had a dream about
the beetle that same night. It came to me that night and told me
everything I wanted to know--the things I have been working at for the
last two years. Of course, they were all gone when I awoke, but I can
remember it saying that I should know them all one day. I am afraid
that dead beetle lied.”
“Maurice,” said Marjorie suddenly, “sometimes a thought flashes across
my mind that in a minute I may be dead. I don’t know even what life
and death mean; yet I have to live and die. There are stars above me,
but I do not know why they are there. There are beasts, and birds, and
insects everywhere, and I do not know how important they are. I feel
lost and horrible. No, I feel like a prisoner beating against an iron
wall. For a few moments it is torture to be like that; I should kill
myself or go mad if it went on. But it always passes away, and three
minutes afterwards I am wondering if I will do my hair a different
way----”
“Don’t!” murmured Maurice, softly.
“Or I can be really angry because my maid knocks something over, or
does something clumsy; when one speaks of it, it seems absurd enough.
Speaking spoils everything. Lovers--in books, I mean--talk the worst
nonsense, and yet that nonsense is the expression of a very fine
thing. I do not think that silence is enough appreciated. I want, for
instance, to let you know what I am thinking. Well, when I put the
thought into words, I lose some of it, or add something to it, or I
alter it by an accident with the tone of my voice. Now if I could just
look at you and you at me, and we could understand one another exactly
through silence, it would be splendid.”
Maurice agreed with her. After two years of disappointment silence
seemed to him almost the only thing left. There was, however, one
thing even more consolatory. About a year after this conversation with
Marjorie the two met once more, and Maurice put his failures behind him
and told Marjorie that he loved her. So they both spoke the nonsense
which they deprecated. We all believe that in affairs of the heart
we are not as the others, and we are all mistaken. With him there
was an iteration of “I love you,” with a deep tremble in the voice;
and with her there was a sighing echo of the same words, coming up
between blushes. The expression of the feeling was almost ludicrous;
the feeling itself was so sacred that the lightest touch of thought
seemed to soil it, and a writer, after turning over his vocabulary in
disgust, can find nothing explanatory which at all matches it. But when
it took place, it seemed to Maurice the only important thing that ever
had happened to him; the psychological studies, which had brought him
so much disappointment, appeared in a new light as a plaything that had
seemed to amuse him until love came.
This did not happen at Paris. Maurice had returned to England, and
all of them--Mrs. Meyner, Marjorie, and Maurice--were staying in Aunt
Julia’s house. It was a lonely old house, much too big for that one
wicked old lady; it stood outside a North Yorkshire village, just
where a grand, dignified old hill drew back its skirts, with a sharp
sweep, from contamination with human dwelling-places. Aunt Julia owned
quarries at the foot of the hill, and got therefrom more money than
was good for her. The time was December, and the moors looked bleak
and cold. But it was a comfortable house. Aunt Julia had devoted her
many years to the study of comfort--her own comfort. “There is nothing
to shoot,” she explained to Maurice, “except my tenants down in the
village. You can shoot them, if you like. There’s the library, though,
which is good, and you can smoke anywhere you like----”
“But you used to hate smoking?” said Maurice.
“My dear Maurice, there are two of me, and you used to know the wrong
one. Down in the village they mostly know the wrong one, and they call
her, I am told, the hell-cat, which is rude of them. Yes, you can smoke
anywhere. If you and Marjorie want to go out of the house--which is a
thing I never do in December--I believe there are some horses round
at the back. If there is anything wrong about the horses, or Pilkin,
or anything that is his, just tell me, and I will say a word or two.
I believe the man presumes on my ignorance. You can go and see my
quarries, or my cottages; but you had better not go to the cottages,
because they have no drains. I should like to give them some drains,
but the tenants won’t let me. They are poor people, and a strong smell
makes a difference to their colourless existence.”
So Maurice did a certain amount of reading, riding, and smoking.
But, of course, Marjorie made for him the chief charm of the house.
Mrs. Meyner had willingly consented to the engagement; even if she
had desired to oppose it, her more strenuous half-sister would have
reasoned her out of it; or, to use her own gentle euphemism, would have
said a word or two. The days passed quietly enough. To Maurice they
were a pleasant rest after his three years of wasted laboriousness.
“Marjorie,” he said to her one afternoon, when they had wandered over
the dignified hill, and as they came back saw the bare boughs of the
trees in the plantation black against a red blot of sunset, “Marjorie,
I have done with all questions. I am here, and you are here, and that
is enough for me. I am going to live and love, and enjoy. Blessed be
my fate that has saved me from the sordid worry of life. (Just wait
a second, will you? can’t get a match to light in this wind.) We
will make a beautiful house, with beautiful things in it, with good
books on shelves, and good wine in the cellar, and a good cook in the
kitchen. And no one shall enter into that house who is not either very
beautiful, or very clever, or too good for this world.”
“But I shall be so lonely there without you,” said Marjorie, gently,
with her sparkling eyes looking groundwards.
Maurice laughed. “Ah, Marjorie, you and I will be one, and you are more
beautiful, and clever, and better than any one in the world. That is
how I shall have a right to come into my own beautiful house. We will
trouble ourselves with no theories about anything. We will not get
excited about anything; an excited man always has been, or will be,
dull. We will make life one long, gentle enjoyment.”
He spoke half in jest and half in earnest, telling his soul of
beautiful things laid up in that house for many years; bidding himself
to eat, and drink, and enjoy judiciously.
Perhaps it was because Marjorie at that moment looked towards the
sunset. It seemed so far away from her, and yet so desirable. She had
the fancy, common among children and poets, that the dying light looked
the gate of some wonderful place to be seen hereafter.
“Maurice, Maurice!” she cried. “Look at that. I have the lost,
prisoned feeling again when I look at it. It is too far away.”
That night ended all. There were beautiful things to come, so it seemed
to both of them, such poetry and love as never had been before; and all
was stopped by an accident, one commonplace accident, almost too poor
to be put into a story.
Marjorie had been subdued, almost depressed; she had talked but little
at dinner or afterwards. Mrs. Meyner and Marjorie both went to bed
rather early. Maurice, restless from his love-passion, had gone to walk
and smoke for an hour on the fell-side. Aunt Julia sat before the fire
in the drawing-room, waiting for Maurice to return, reading a favourite
chapter of Gibbon.
For some time one would have said that Marjorie was sleeping quietly
and peacefully. Then suddenly she sat up in bed, her eyes still closed.
She began talking in her sleep. “Tell me! Come back again and tell me.
I _will_ know. I am on the verge, and--and----.” She stopped talking;
quickly she moved from the bed to the dressing-table, and her fingers
fumbled impatiently with the opening of her dressing-case. She had
drawn up the blind, and the moonlight shone straight upon her. Her lips
were still moving, but no sound came. She opened the dressing-case and
took from it a glass jar which was filled with old dead rose leaves.
She had filled it herself long before, when she was a child. She
unscrewed the silver top, and began to take out the rose leaves very
carefully. At the bottom of the jar she found the thing for which she
had been looking, and laid it on the palm of her little white hand. It
was the withered body of a large dead beetle.
For a moment she stood thus. And then she drew a long breath, and
opened her eyes wide. She was awake, and she had remembered the
horrible thing which she had heard in a dream and had forgotten.
Quivering and almost breathless she hurried from the room, just as she
was.
Aunt Julia had good nerves, but she was a little startled when the
door of the drawing-room was flung open, and she saw, standing in the
doorway, the figure of Marjorie, white-robed, bare-footed, with both
hands stretched out, and struggling in vain, as it seemed, to speak.
“Marjorie! What is it?” cried Aunt Julia in a shaking voice.
She found words at last.
“Maurice is dead--dead! He fell--I saw him fall--over there, against
the plantation, down into the quarry. He is dead!”
There followed a burst of hysterical laughter, more bitter than any
tears, and then she fainted away.
* * * * *
Aunt Julia stood in the porch, looking out. She was white to the lips.
By the moonlight she could see the procession coming nearer--two men
carrying lanterns, four men carrying a hurdle with a burden upon it,
covered up altogether because it was broken and ghastly.
LONDON: PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
STAMFORD STREET AND CHARING CROSS.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.