For over a year I was alone in the great empty château with my dreams.
I ate and slept, and took walks in the park and the country-lanes; I
comforted the ever-shrivelling Countess; I read incessantly. But I did
not live. The life of my soul was sometimes in the past, chiefly in
the future, in the present not at all. By deliberate endeavour I made
the present even less than it would have been, by encouraging myself
to experience no emotion except in my dreamings, to take no interest
in the small daily happenings (they were very small) of my Villebecq
daily life, to remember that for me Life would begin at the moment when
Vision and Reality became one. Till then the years were wasting. Time
marked time. (Perhaps the real horror of Eternity--Time marking time
for ever, with no Love beyond?)
In her reply to my birthday-letter Aunt Martha had omitted any
reference to Robbie. It was a cruel disappointment. Probably she knew
nothing, or had ignored or forgotten my query, thinking the postscript
merely the casual after-thought it pretended to be, hardly calling
for answer? Or perhaps, in a moment of intuition, such as might come
even to Aunt Martha once in a way, she had divined the truth, and had
deliberately omitted to reply?
After a while, the longing to get on the track of Robbie's this-world
whereabouts--to hasten his Second Coming--became unbearable, and on
Christmas Day 1869, being the Tenth Anniversary, I wrote to Aunt Martha
again. I made the most of "A Happy New Year," and of the anxiety which
I had for some months been beginning to feel as to my Grandmother's
health and as to whether I ought not soon to be coming back to
Devonshire once for all. Again, with beating heart, I penned the
carefully thought-out afterthought. "By-the-way, I fancy I asked you
once before, tho' can't remember your telling me anything on the point.
Do you ever have news of Robert Grove who lived with you ten years
ago, when I did? I sometimes think about him--he was a nice boy--and
sometimes wonder where he is or what he may be doing?"
Was it by malice or accident that she consigned her barren response to
the cry of my aching heart to a P.S. also? "You ask about Robert Grove:
I have heard nothing of him for years. He must be a young man of 21
now."
Wretched woman! Well, I could wait no longer, I would go home and find
him for myself. The main news in Aunt Martha's letter urged me to a
like resolve:--"Mother and Aunt," she said, "are both ageing. Although
Mother would never let you know it herself; also for fear of bringing
to an end your life abroad, which she knows has been abundantly blessed
to you--yet I know she would like you back."
I made up my mind at once--need for Robbie made the duty-call to my
Grandmother's side clear and insistent--and told the weeping Countess
within the hour.
Though her health was no better, Elise de Florian had at last decided
to come home. When I wrote and told her I was returning to England, she
replied that she would forward her plans and come back to Normandy at
once. For the first few months after her departure she had ignored my
existence except for formal courtesies in her infrequent letters to her
mother. Then, suddenly, she had begun to write, and soon the letters
were as friendly, as unhappy, and as passionate as the long talks in
the old days together. I forgave her before I was half-way through the
first letter, and had for some time been doing battle with Pride as to
whether I should tell her how much I wanted to see her again.
She returned with Gabrielle one bitter January morning. I kissed her
blue-pale forehead, and, as I gazed at the drawn ever-unloved face,
felt for a moment bitterly ashamed of Love's triumphant futures that I
hoped to garner in my own heart. That night I prayed God in His mercy
to send her what her heart cried out for, knowing all the while that
somehow God Himself could not grant my petition. I knew--understood
physically--that Elise was a woman damned into the world to excite no
supreme love in any heart; knew that if I were a man I could not love
her, knew that God had given her life without power to win the one good
this life can give.
Next morning she was too frail to rise. At first we were hopeful,
and put everything down to the fatigues of the long journey. As day
succeeded day, however, and she was each day wearier, neither we nor
she could elude the truth the doctor was whispering: that Mademoiselle
was in the last and rapid stages of a decline.
One night I was lying in bed reading by candle-light. The door softly
opened. My heart stopped. She stood there in a long white night-gown,
trembling in the cold air, bare-footed, ghastly pale. There was
something in the eyes that awed me.
"I am dying now," she said. Her voice was low, melodious, and as though
from far-away; from another place, another body, another soul. "Some
one must kiss me once--love me once, properly, before I go. Will you,
Mary?"
I had jumped out of bed. I wrapped my dressing-gown round her, and
supporting her cold and tottering body led her back to her own room,
and comforting her all the while got her back into bed, and slipped
down gently beside her.
I pressed her tenderly to me and told her a dozen foolish times that
she would soon be better.
"No"--she spoke in English as I did--"it is over. I wish it had been
over long ago. I had a heart that could have loved the world, but no
one loved me in return. I shall die a good Catholic, but religion has
never given me comfort--never what it has given you. I loved my little
sister: but it was all one-sided, and that is not Love at all. Love is
when the getting and the giving are equal, when the two bodies change
souls. There is only love. Poor little Suzanne, she could not help it.
I could never have seen in her eyes what I longed for her to see in
mine. Oh, the need for some one to love me; sometimes my poor heart
could have burst. I was not wanted in the world. I was--not--wanted."
The sentences came oddly, disjointedly, further and further apart.
For some moments she had not spoken. Then, suddenly, her arms tightened
round me in supreme yearning; she placed her lips hard upon mine in an
embrace of ultimate passionate sadness; her body trembled violently,
and then, in a swift second, was still.
The lips were cold. My arms were round a corpse. I freed myself, got
up, lit a candle.
The old misery had for ever left her eyes, which were happy, and full
of love. I closed them reverently, kissed each lid as I closed it, and
went out to awaken the household.