LOVE AND AN OLD MAID
I pray you be gentle with Dorothea. Find, if you can, something
admirable in this plain spinster keeping, at the age of thirty-seven,
a room in her breast adorned and ready for first love; find it pitiful,
if you must, that the blind boy should mistake his lodging; only do
not laugh, or your laughter may accuse you in the sequel.
She had a most simple heart. Wonder filled it as she rode home to
Bayfield, and by the bridge she reined up Mercury as if to take her
bearings in an unfamiliar country. At her feet rushed the Axe, swollen
by spring freshets; a bullfinch, wet from his bath, bobbed on the sand-
stone parapet, shook himself, and piped a note or two; away up the
stream, among the alders, birds were chasing and courting; from above
the Bayfield elms, out of spaces of blue, the larks' song fell like a
din of innumerable silver hammers. Either new sense had been given her,
or the rains had washed the landscape and restored obliterated lines,
colours, meanings. The very leaves by the roadside were fragrant as
flowers.
For the moment it sufficed to know that she was loved, and that she
loved. She was no fool. At the back of all her wonder lay the certainty
that in the world's eyes such love as hers was absurd; that it must end
where it began; that Raoul could never be hers, nor she escape from a
captivity as real as his. But, perhaps because she knew all this so
certainly, she could put it aside. This thing had come to her: this
happiness to which, alone, in darkness, depressed by every look into
the mirror, by every casual proof that her brothers and intimates
accepted the verdict as final, her soul had been loyal--a forgotten
servant of a neglectful lord. In the silence of her own room, in her
garden, in the quiet stir of household duties, and again during the
long evenings while she sat knitting by the fire and her brothers
talked, she had pondered much upon love and puzzled herself with many
questions. She had watched girls and their lovers, wives and their
husbands. Can love (she had asked) draw near and pass and go its way
unrecognised? She had conned the signs. Now the hour had come, and she
had needed none of her learning--eyes, hands, and voice, she had
known the authentic god.
And she knew that it was not absurd; she knew herself worthy of love's
belated condescension--not Raoul's; for the moment she scarcely
thought of Raoul; for the moment Raoul's image grew faint and
indefinite in the glory of being loved. Instinct, too, thrust it into
the background; for as Raoul grew definite so must his youth, his
circumstances, the world's laughter, the barriers never to be overcome.
But merely to be loved, and to rest in that knowledge awhile--here
were no barriers. The thing had happened: it was: nothing could forbid
or efface it.
Yet when she reached home, after forcing the astonished Mercury to
canter up the entire length of Bayfield hill, she must walk straight
to her room, and study her face in the glass.
"It has happened to you--to you! Why has it not transfigured you?--
but then people would guess. Your teeth stand out--well, not so very
prominently--but they stand out, and that is why foreigners laugh at
Englishwomen. Yes, it has happened to you; but why? how?"
It so happened that she must meet him the next day. Narcissus had
engaged him to make drawings of the Bayfield pavement, a new series to
supersede hers in an enlarged edition of the treatise. Every one of
the _tessellae_ was to be drawn to scale, and she must meet him
to-morrow in the library with her brother and receive instructions, for
she had promised to help in taking measurements.
When the time came, and she entered the library, she did not indeed
dare to lift her eyes. But Narcissus, already immersed in calculations,
scarcely looked up from his paper. "Ah, there you are! Have you brought
the India-ink?" he asked, and after a minute she marvelled at her own
self-possession. Even when he left them to work out the measurements
together (and it flashed upon her that henceforth they would often be
left together, her immunity being taken for granted), she kept her head
bowed over the papers and managed to control her voice to put one or
two ordinary questions--until the pencil dropped from her fingers and
she felt her hand imprisoned.
"Dorothea!"
"Oh, please, no!" she entreated hoarsely. "M. Raoul--!"
"Charles--" She attempted to draw her hand away; but, failing, lifted
her eyes for mercy. They were sick and troubled. "Charles," he insisted.
"Charles, then." She relented and he kissed her gaily. It was as if she
drank in the kiss and, the next moment, recoiled from it. He released
her hand and waited, watching her. She stood upright by the table, her
shoulder turned to him, her eyes gazing through the long window upon
the green stretch of lawn. She was trembling slightly.
"It--it hurts like a wound," she murmured, and her hand went up to her
breast. "But you must listen, please. You know--better than I--that
this is the end. Oh, yes"--as he would have interrupted--"it is
beautiful--for me. But I am old and you are a boy, and it is all quite
silly. Please listen: even apart from this, it would be quite silly and
could end nowhere."
He caught at her hand again, and she let it lie in his.
"Nowhere," she repeated, and, lifting her head, nodded twice. Her eyes
were brimming.
"But if you love me?" he began.
She waited a moment, but he did not finish. "Ah! there it is, you see:
you cannot finish. I was afraid to meet you to-day; but now I am glad,
because we can talk about it once and for all. Charles"--she hesitated
over the name--"dear, I have been thinking. Since we see this so
clearly, it can be no treachery to my brothers to let our love stand
where it does. At my age"--and Dorothea laughed nervously--"one is
more easily contented than at yours."
"I cannot bear your talking in this way."
"Oh yes, you can," she assured him with a practical little nod. "I
don't like it myself, but it has to be done. Now in the first place,
when we meet like this there must be no kissing." She blushed, while
her voice wavered again over the word; then, as again his hand closed
upon hers, she laughed. "Well--yes, you may kiss my hand. But I must
not have it on my conscience that I am hiding from Endymion and
Narcissus what they have a right to know. Of course they would be angry
if they knew that I--that I was fond of you at all; but they would
have no right, for they could not have forbidden or prevented it. Now
if our prospects were what folks would call happier, why then in
earnest of them you might kiss me, but then you would be bound to go to
my brothers and tell them. But since it can all come to nothing--"
A ghost of a smile finished the sentence.
"This war cannot last for ever."
"It seems to have lasted ever since I can remember. But what difference
could its ending make? Ah, yes, then I should lose you!" she cried in
dismay, but added with as sudden remorse: "Forgive my selfishness!"
"You are adorable," said he, and they laughed and picked up their
pencils.
Dorothea's casuistry might prove her ignorant of love and its perils,
as a child is of fire; but having, as she deemed, discovered the limits
of her duty and set up her terms with Raoul upon them, she soon
developed a wonderful cunning in the art of being loved. Her plainness
and the difference in their ages she took for granted, and subtly
persuaded Raoul to take for granted; she had no affectations, no
_minauderies_; by instinct she avoided setting up any illusion which he
could not share; unconsciously and naturally she rested her strength on
the maternal, protective side of love. Raoul came to her with his woes,
his difficulties, his quarrel against fate; and she talked them over
with him, and advised him almost as might a wise elder sister. She had
read the _Confessions_; and, in spite of the missing pages, with less
of fascination than disgust; yet had absorbed more than she knew. In
Raoul she recognised certain points of likeness to his great
countryman--points which had puzzled, her in the book. Now the book
helped her to treat them, though she was unaware of its help. Still
less aware was she of any likeness between her and Madame de Warens,
of whom (again in spite of the missing pages) she had a poor opinion.
The business of the drawings brought Raoul to Bayfield almost daily,
and, as she had foreseen, they were much alone.
After all, since it could end in nothing, the situation had its
advantages; no one in the household gave it a thought, apparently.
Dorothea was not altogether sure about Polly; once or twice she had
caught Polly eying her with an odd expression--once especially, when
she had looked up as the girl was plaiting her hair, and their eyes
met in the glass. And once again Dorothea had sent her to the library
with a note of instructions left that morning by Narcissus, and,
following a few minutes later, had found her standing and talking with
M. Raoul in an attitude which, without being familiar, was not quite
respectful.
"What was she saying?" her mistress asked, a moment or two later.
"Oh, nothing," he answered negligently. "I suppose that class of
person cannot be troubled to show respect to prisoners."
That evening Dorothea rated the girl soundly for her pertness. "And I
shall speak to Zeally," she threatened, "if anything of the kind
happens again. If Mr. Endymion is to let you two have a house when you
marry, and take in the Frenchmen as lodgers, he will want to know that
you treat them respectfully."
Polly wept, and was forgiven.
April, May, June, went by, and still Dorothea lived in her dream,
troubled only by dread of the day which must bring her lover's task to
an end, and, with it, his almost daily visits. Bit by bit she learned
his story. He told her of Arles, his birthplace, with its Roman masonry
and amphitheatre; of a turreted terraced chateau and a family of
aristocrats lording it among the vineyards; conspiring a little later
with other noble families, entertaining them at secret meetings of the
_Chiffonne_, where oaths were taken; later again, defending itself
behind barricades of paving-stones; last of all, marched or carried in
batches to the guillotine or the fusillade. He told of Avignon and its
Papal Castle overhanging the Rhone, the city where he had spent his
school days, and at the age of nine had seen Patriot L'Escuyer stabbed
to death in the Cordeliers' Church with women's scissors; had seen
Jourdan, the avenger, otherwise Coupe-tête, march flaming by at the
head of his brave _brigands d'Avignon_. He told of the sequel, the
hundred and thirty men, women and babes slaughtered in the dungeon of
the _Glacière_; of Choisi's Dragoons and Grenadiers at the gates, and
how, with roses scattered before them, they marched through the streets
to the Castle, entered the gateway and paused, brought to a stand by
the stench of putrefying flesh. He and his school mates had taken a
holiday--their master being in hiding--to see the bodies lifted out.
Also he had seen the search party ride out through the gates and return
again, bringing Jourdan, with feet strapped beneath his horse's belly.
He told of his journey to, Paris--his purpose to learn to paint (at
such a time!); of the great David, fat and wheezy, back at his easel,
panting from civil blood-shed; of the call to arms, his enlistment,
his first campaign of 1805; of the foggy morning of Austerlitz, his
wound, and he long hours he lay in the rear of a battery on the height
of Pratzen, writhing, watching the artillerymen at work and so on,
with stories of marching and fighting, nights slept out by him at full
length on the sodden turf beside his arms.
She had no history to tell him in exchange; she asked only to listen
and to comfort. Yet so cleverly he addressed his story that the longest
monologue became, by aid of a look or pressure of the hand, a
conversation in which she, his guardian angel, bore her part. Did he
talk of Avignon, for instance? It was the land of Laura and Petrarch,
and she, seated with half-closed eyes beneath the Bayfield elms, saw
the pair beside the waters of Vaucluse, saw the roses and orange-trees
and arid plains of Provence, and wondered at the trouble in their
spiritual love. She was not troubled; love as "a dureless content and
a trustless joy" lay outside of her knowledge, and she had no desire
to prove it. In this only she forgot the difference between Raoul's
age and hers.
The day came when his work was ended. They spent a great part of that
afternoon in the garden, now in the height of its midsummer glory.
Raoul was very silent.
"But this must not end. It cannot end so!" he groaned once or twice.
He never forgot for long his old spite against Time.
"It will never end for me," she murmured.
"Of what are you made, then, that you look forward to living on
shadows?--one would say, almost cheerfully! I believe you could be
happy if you never saw me again!"
"Even if that had to be," she answered gravely, "while I knew you
loved me I should never be quite unhappy. But you must find a way,
while you can, to come sometimes; yes, you must come."