“WAS ever grief like unto my grief!” has been the cry of each wrung
heart throughout all ages—the truth is, there is a dreary family
likeness among them all, and a horrible absence of originality.
In this particular Gwen Strange could score over the whole sad brood,
her grief was aloof, alone, it differed in every point from the kindly
race of men, it had no balm and less outlet, she could not cry nor
strive, she could not throw her whole soul against fate and fall back
with the pain dulled from sheer tiredness.
Every day with the little white mother lying cold on her bed, she still
walked in the sun on the south terrace, and cherished her child, but
virtue had gone out of her.
“She will kill me,” Mrs. Fellowes told her husband, “if she looks like
that long! she’s not tragic, not an atom, nor dramatic; I think she must
look like Dante did when he stood before the gates of Saint Ilario.”
“Yes, one hardly dares think of the girl, walking, and eating, and
sleeping; and she looks younger than ever I saw her. What is _he_ doing
now? I must go up soon.”
“Sitting holding her hand, except when he is told to come to his meals.
Of course, knowing the man, one could describe his grief to a T. It’s
just himself.”
“What will time do for the two, I wonder?”
“There is something gone from Gwen that no time will give back to her: I
wish, oh, I wish I knew how it was at the end. Did that woman go down
into the grave still seeking her lost motherhood? Oh, John, John, God in
Heaven help women! I wonder if He knew quite everything when He made us,
He is all masculine. I don’t think He altogether did or He would have
stayed His hand and have had mercy.”
“My little Ruth, my poor little wife, life even for us is hard!”
“But it is simpler, it is the complications which put barbs on our
arrows, the vague yearnings quivering in us ignorantly, not with the
knowledgeable, healthy hammer-strokes of men’s anguish; and our bodies
are nearer our souls. Think of Gwen with her unborn child under that
heartful of unnameable pain! John, it’s only three o’clock—will you
drive me into the town, the market is full on—I must see some women who
are too stolid for nerves—oh—the letters, and one from Humphrey! John,
he’s down with fever, and Brydon’s only half way through!
“‘Not a man-jack of the blacks—being mostly christianized—is worth his
salt, only for Tolly we’d cave in altogether, the fellow’s a brick, and
seems like developing the beginnings of an intellect, just in the nick
of time too; never in all my life was I so knocked into a cocked hat as
by this fever.’
“Look at the writing, John, it’s shocking.
“‘As for Brydon, he had a narrow squeak, he’s out of the bush now, but
as weak as a rat. On the whole the sand flies are worse than the fever.
Don’t dwell on this touch of fever to Gwen, it’s really of no
consequence, but it’s an awful nuisance on account of the delay. From
here we go on to a place about a hundred miles off, to where we have
traced Broad. Hitherto the blacks have been friendly but beyond the
hills I hear we are to look out for squalls. Don’t expect many letters
after this, as the modes of conveyance are very casual and
untrustworthy, neither can I count upon receiving our letters safely. I
will hurry there and back with all possible speed. I know you will
always see Gwen at least once a day.’
“See, John, I can hardly read it, what is it? Oh, ‘love for you’ and
something for the rector I can hardly read.”
“We will go in on our way to the market; the ponies are at the door.”
Gwen was in her boudoir when Mrs. Fellowes went to her. She was sitting
with a bundle of papers in her hand. She thrust them into a drawer, and
ran and as it were got into the other woman’s arms, and lay there with a
short audible movement of pain.
“Tell me just how you think my husband is,” she said. Mrs. Fellowes
started. “Ah, you’re afraid too!” cried Gwen.
“Gwen, I know really very little; those attacks are always very sharp,
hardly ever dangerous except with bad constitutions, John says—he has
been reading up a medical book about African fevers.”
“‘Bad constitutions and complications,’ the book says, I have it; and he
has a complication in some sort of sunstroke.”
“Gwen!”
“Yes,” she went on in a quiet level voice. “He missed the last mail by
some idiocy of the blacks, and he walked ten miles all through a swamp
to catch it, with the fever still on him; when he got home he was half
delirious. He lay and it seems turned his heart inside out, both audibly
and on paper, see, I have it all here in these sheets!” she said, with
bitter irony, catching her breath, as she took them out of the drawer.
“Gwen, my Gwen, what do you mean?”
“I mean he lay there and told out into words—blatant awful English
words—on to these sheets, how he loves me, me! but in words no other man
ever before used, or dared to use, or the soul of every loved woman
would have been annihilated long ago, they are not fitted to bear such
magnificent burdens!—He told, too, in precisely the same uncompromising
way what he wants of me, and what he considers I am capable of in this
line. Mrs. Fellowes, I know just exactly what it cost him to go away!
Nothing is hid. Then yesterday—”
She stood up rather wildly—
“Do you know that yesterday I learned in one choking gulp the grinding
truth of my mother’s poor tragedy of life, I learned too,” she said
slowly, throwing out her arms softly, with a pathetic gesture of appeal,
“all in one blinding second my own infinite love for her; but there was
no time to tell, she died first. I am crushed with knowledge, I am
spared nothing, and then—ah, sickness is degrading! Delilah’s shears are
nothing to it! To think that here in my hands I hold the whole
unsuppressed heart of a man!”
“But, Gwen, I cannot grasp it—how came you by all this knowledge?
Humphrey was too ill to write all that big bundle of sheets.”
“He wrote, as he spoke, in delirium, part of it is absolutely maniacal,
but my God! there is truth enough in it! I see Humphrey’s poor sick
naked soul in every line!”
She hid her face and moaned softly.
“But, love, I don’t understand—how came you by those sheets?”
“Brydon sent the letters. Poor boy, he wrote a little humble scrawl
himself, that has a touch of pathos in it.”
“I think Brydon was the more delirious of the two! What business has he
meddling in matters too big for him!”
“Oh, he’s young and very romantic, and—have you ever heard of that
picture he painted of me?”
“That sketch for your mother?” she said softly.
Gwen winced.
“No, oh no, one he came down and made of me the day I was married. It is
not me at all, it is a beautiful sexful mother-woman, it was to that
woman Humphrey wrote those things! I am the rival of my own picture.”
Mrs. Fellowes jumped up and knelt, weeping bitterly, at Gwen’s knees.
“Gwen, send for Humphrey, you are his first duty, he will come in spite
of that miserable missionary who never had any business venturing his
nose where no one wanted it—he will come to you at once!”
For a second Gwen stared frozenly at her then she drew herself a little
away.
“But why, why should I?” she asked. “Can you not see, my God! can you
not see that I am not ready for him?”
The cold gray of her face turned to a vivid red, and she got up hastily
and went to the window.