AT LAST
The morning sunlight lay upon that wonderful fair garden of the villa.
The tall white lilies, the scarlet poppies, the clustering japonica, the
purple hyacinths, and the untrimmed brilliantly-flowering shrubs, lifted
their heads before its sweet, quickening warmth, and yielded up their
perfume to the still clear air. The languorous hour of noon was still
far off. It was the birth of a southern summer day, and everything was
fresh and pure, untainted by the burning, enervating heat which was soon
to dry up the sweetness from the earth, and the freshness from the
slightly moving breeze. Away on the brown hills, fading into a
transparent veil of blue, the bright dresses of the peasant women
stooping at their toil, the purple glory of the vineyards, and the deep,
quiet green of the olive groves--all these simple characteristics of the
pastoral landscape were like brilliant patches of coloring upon a
fitting background. Soon the haze of the noonday heat would hang upon
the earth, deadening the purity of its color, and making the air heavy
and oppressive with faint overladen perfumes. But as yet the sun lay low
in the heavens, and the earth beneath was like a fair still picture.
The heavy lumbering coach which connected the little town with the
outside world was drawn up at the gate of the villa, and twice the
quaintly sounding horn had broken the morning stillness. It was a moment
of farewell, a farewell not for days or for years, but forever.
Their words denied it, yet in their hearts was that certain conviction,
and much of that peculiar sadness which it could not fail to bring. Yet
she would not have them stay for the end. She had bidden them go, and
the hour had come.
Too weak to walk, or even sit upright, they had laid her upon a sofa in
front of the open windows, through which the perfume from the garden
below stole sweetly in on the bosom of the slowly stirring south wind.
On one side of her stood a tall mild-faced priest from the brotherhood
who had made their home in the valley below, on the other were Bernard
and his wife, her son and daughter.
There was no doubt that she was dying, that she was indeed very near
death. Yet she was sending them away from her. The brief while they
three had lived there together had been like a late autumn to her life,
which had blossomed forth with sweet moments of happiness such as she
had never dreamed of. And now her summons had come, and she was ready.
In her last moments she must return once more to that absolute
detachment from all save spiritual things in which for many years she
had lived, a saintly, blessed woman. So she had bidden them go, even her
son, even that fair sweet English girl who had been more than a daughter
to her. She had bidden them go. The last words had been spoken, for the
last time her trembling lips had been pressed to her son's. Yet they
lingered.
And there came of a sudden, floating through the window, the sweet slow
chiming of the matins bell from the monastery below. Almost it seemed
as though the soft delicate air through which it passed, the exquisite
beauty of the sloping landscape and old garden over which it traveled,
had had a rarefying influence upon the sound itself, and had mellowed
its tones into a strain of the most perfect music throbbing with harmony
and dying away in faint, delicious murmurs. They stood and listened to
it, and a sudden light swept into the pale face upon the couch. They all
looked at her in a sudden awe. The priest sank upon his knees by her
side, and prayed. Long desired, it had come at last at this most fitting
moment. The glory of death shone in her face, and the light of a coming
release flashed across her features. She died as few can die, as one who
sees descending from the clouds a long-promised happiness, and whose
heart and soul go forth to meet it with joy.
They stayed and buried her under a cypress tree, in a sunny corner of
the monastery churchyard, where a plain black cross marked her grave.
Then they turned their faces toward England.
* * * * *
And in England they were happy. For the first few years they chose to
live almost in retirement at their stately home, for with no desire for
notoriety, Sir Bernard Beaumerville found himself on his return from
abroad the most famous man in London. To escape from the lionizing that
threatened him, Helen and he shut themselves up at Beaumerville Court,
and steadfastly refused all invitations. Of their life there little need
be said, save that to each it was the perfect realization of dreams
which had once seemed too sweet to be possible.
And in the midst of it all he found time to write. From the quaint oak
library, where he had gone back into the old realms of thoughtland, he
sent out into the world a great work. Once more the columns of the daily
papers and the reviews were busy with his name, and for once all were
unanimous. All bowed down before his genius, and his name was written
into the history of his generation. Through a burning sea of trouble, of
intellectual disquiet and mental agony, he had emerged strengthened at
every point. Love had fulfilled upon him its great office. He was
humanized. The impersonality, which is the student's bane, which deepens
into misanthropy, cynicism, and pessimism, yielded before it. The voices
of his own children became dearer to him than the written thoughts of
dead men. It was the reassertion of nature, and it was well for him. So
was he saved, so was his genius unfettered from the cloying weight of
too much abstract thought, which at one time, save for his artistic
instincts, would have plunged him into the morass of pedantry and turned
his genius into a pillar of salt. A woman had saved him, and through the
long years of their life together he never forgot it.
THE END