But; strange to say, when the moment for the introduction arrived, and I
stood face to face with Miss Magendie, I felt an extraordinary shrinking
from her. I have never been able to understand it, but my blood ran
cold, and my pulses almost ceased to beat. I would have avoided her; an
instinct within me seemed suddenly to cry out against her. But it was
too late: the introduction was effected; her hand rested on my arm.
I was actually trembling. She did not appear to notice it. The band
played a valse, and the inexplicable horror that had seized me lost
itself in the gay music. It never returned until lately.
I seldom enjoyed a valse more. Our steps suited so perfectly, and her
obvious childish pleasure communicated itself to me. The spirit of youth
in her knocked on my rather jaded heart, and I opened to it. That was
beautiful and strange. I talked with her, and I felt myself younger,
ingenuous rather than cynical, inclined even to a radiant, though
foolish, optimism. She was very natural, very imperfect in worldly
education, full of fragmentary but decisive views on life, quite
unabashed in giving them forth, quite inconsiderate in summoning my
adherence to them.
And then, presently, as we sat in a dim corridor under a rosy hanging
lamp, in saying something she looked, with her great blue eyes, right
into my face. Some very faint recollection awoke and stirred in my mind.
“Surely,” I said hesitatingly--“surely I have seen you before? It seems
to me that I remember your eyes.”
As I spoke I was thinking hard, chasing the vagrant recollection that
eluded me.
She smiled.
“You don’t remember my face?”
“No, not at all.”
“Nor I yours. If we had seen each other, surely we should recollect it.”
Then she blushed, suddenly realizing that her words implied, perhaps,
more than she had meant. I did not pay the obvious compliment. Those
blue eyes and something in their expression moved me strangely; but I
could not tell why. When I said good-bye to her that night, I asked to
be allowed to call.
She assented.
That was the beginning of a very beautiful courtship, which gave a
colour to life, a music to existence, a meaning to every slightest
sensation.
And was it love that laid to sleep recollection, that sang a lullaby to
awakening horror, and strewed poppies over it till it sighed itself into
slumber? Was it love that drowned my mind in deep and charmed waters,
binding the strange powers that every mind possesses in flowery garlands
stronger than any fetters of iron? Was it love that, calling up dreams,
alienated my thoughts from their search after reality?
I hardly know. I only know that I grew to love Margot, and only looked
for love in her blue eyes, not for any deed of the past that might be
mirrored there.
And I made her love me.
She gave her child’s heart to my keeping with a perfect confidence
that only a perfect affection could engender. She did love me then. No
circumstances of to-day can break that fact under their hammers. She
did love me, and it is the knowledge that she did which gives so much of
fear to me now.
For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we
realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in
every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old,
crafty, secret murderer. How horrible!
And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human
envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may
become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.
Margot’s face is the same face now as it was when I married
her--scarcely older, certainly not less beautiful. Only the expression
of the eyes has changed.
For we were married. After a year of love-making, which never tired
either of us, we elected to bind ourselves, to fuse the two into one.
We went abroad for the honeymoon, and, instead of shortening it to the
fashionable fortnight, we travelled for nearly six months, and were
happy all the time.
Boredom never set in. Margot had a beautiful mind as well as a beautiful
face. She softened me through my affection. The current of my life began
to set in a different direction. I turned the pages of a book of pity
and of death more beautiful than that of Pierre Loti. I could hear at
last the great cry for sympathy, which is the music of this strange
suffering world, and, listening to it, in my heart there rang an echo.
The cruelty in my nature seemed to shrivel up. I was more gentle than I
had been, more gentle than I had thought I could ever be.
At last, in the late spring, we started for home. We stayed for a week
in London, and then we travelled north. Margot had never seen her
future home, had never even been in Cumberland before. She was full
of excitement and happiness, a veritable child in the ready and ardent
expression of her feelings. The station is several miles from the house,
and is on the edge of the sea. When the train pulled up at the wayside
platform the day drew towards sunset, and the flat levels of the beach
shone with a rich, liquid, amber light. In the distance the sea was
tossing and tumbling, whipped into foam by a fresh wind. The Isle of Man
lay far away, dark, mysterious, under a stack of bellying white clouds,
just beginning to be tinged with the faintest rose.
Margot found the scene beautiful, the wind life-giving, the flat
sand-banks, the shining levels, even the dry, spiky grass that fluttered
in the breeze, fascinating and refreshing.
“I feel near the heart of Nature in a place like this,” she said,
looking up at a seagull that hovered over the little platform, crying to
the wind on which it hung.
The train stole off along the edge of the sands, till we could see only
the white streamer of its smoke trailing towards the sun. We turned away
from the sea, got into the carriage that was waiting for us, and set
our faces inland. The ocean was blotted out by the low grass and
heather-covered banks that divided the fields. Presently we plunged into
woods. The road descended sharply. A village, an abruptly winding river
sprang into sight.
We were on my land. We passed the inn, the Rainwood Arms, named after
my grandfather’s family. The people whom we met stared curiously and
saluted in rustic fashion.
Margot was full of excitement and pleasure, and talked incessantly,
holding my hand tightly in hers and asking a thousand questions. Passing
through the village, we mounted a hill towards a thick grove of trees.
“The house stands among them,” I said, pointing.
She sprang up eagerly in the carriage to find it, but it was hidden.
We dashed through the gate into the momentary darkness of the drive,
emerged between great green lawns, and drew up before the big doorway of
the hall. I looked into her eyes, and said “Welcome!”
She only smiled in answer.
I would not let her enter the house immediately, but made her come with
me to the terrace above the river, to see the view over the Cumbrian
mountains and the moors of Eskdale.
The sky was very clear and pale, but over Styhead the clouds were
boiling up. The Screes that guard ebon Wastwater looked grim and sad.
Margot stood beside me on the terrace, but her chatter had been
succeeded by silence. And I, too, was silent for the moment, absorbed in
contemplation. But presently I turned to her, wishing to see how she was
impressed by her new domain.
She was not looking towards the river and the hills, but at the terrace
walk itself, the band of emerald turf that bordered it, the stone pots
full of flowers, the winding way that led into the shrubbery.
She was looking at these intently, and with a strangely puzzled, almost
startled expression.
“Hush! Don’t speak to me for a moment,” she said, as I opened my lips.
“Don’t; I want to---- How odd this is!”
And she gazed up at the windows of the house, at the creepers that
climbed its walls, at the sloping roof and the irregular chimney-stacks.
Her lips were slightly parted, and her eyes were full of an inward
expression that told me she was struggling with forgetfulness and
desired recollection.