A LITTLE CLOUD.
Isabel was happy. He had returned; he had returned to her; never again
to leave her! Had he not said something to that effect? He had returned,
because he had found existence unendurable away from her presence. Mr.
Lansdell had told the Doctor's Wife all this, not once, but twenty
times; and she had listened, knowing that it was wicked to listen, and
yet powerless to shut her ears against the sweet insidious words. She
was beloved; for the first time in her life really, truly, sentimentally
beloved, like the heroine of a novel. She was beloved; despite of her
shabby dresses, her dowdy bonnets, her clumsy country-made boots. All at
once, in a moment, she was elevated into a queen, crowned with woman's
noblest diadem, the love of a poet. She was Beatrice, and Roland
Lansdell was Dante; or she was Leonora, and he was Tasso; she did not
particularly care which. Her ideas of the two poets and their loves were
almost as vague as the showman's notion of the rival warriors of
Waterloo. She was the shadowy love of the poet, the pensive impossible
love, who never could be more to him than a perpetual dream.
This was how Isabel Gilbert thought of the master of Mordred, who met
her so often now in the chill spring sunshine. There was a kind of
wickedness in these stolen meetings, no doubt, she thought; but her
wickedness was no greater than that of the beautiful princess who smiled
upon the Italian poet. In that serene region of romance, that mystic
fairy-land in which Isabel's fancies dwelt, sin, as the world
comprehends it, had no place. There was no such loathsome image in that
fair kingdom of fountains and flowers. It was very wrong to meet Mr.
Lansdell; but I doubt if the happiness of those meetings would have had
quite such an exquisite flavour to Isabel had that faint _soupçon_ of
wickedness been wanting.
Did Mrs. Gilbert ever think that the road which seemed so pleasant, the
blossoming pathway along which she wandered hand in hand with Roland
Lansdell, was all downhill, and that there was a black and hideous goal
hidden below in the farther-most valley? No; she was enraptured and
intoxicated by her present happiness, blinded by the glory of her
lover's face. It had been very difficult for her to realize the splendid
fact of his love and devotion; but once believing, she was ready to
believe for ever. She remembered a sweet sentimental legend of the
Rhineland: the story of a knight who, going away to the wars, was
reported as dead: whereon his lady-love, despairing, entered a convent,
and consecrated the sad remainder of her days to heaven. But by-and-by
the knight, who had not been killed, returned, and finding that his
promised bride was lost to him, devoted the remainder of _his_ days to
constancy and solitude; building for himself a hermitage upon a rock
high above the convent where his fair and faithful Hildegonde spent her
pure and pious days. And every morning with the earliest flush of light
in the low Eastern sky, and all day long, and when the evening-star rose
pale and silvery beneath the purpling heavens, the hermit of love sat at
the door of his cell gazing upon the humble casement behind which it
pleased him to fancy his pure mistress kneeling before her crucifix,
sometimes mingling his name with her prayers. And was not the name of
the knight Roland--_his_ name? It was such a love as this which Isabel
imagined she had won for herself. It is such a love as this which is the
dearest desire of womankind,--a beautiful, useless, romantic
devotion,--a wasted life of fond regretful worship. Poor weak
sentimental Mary of Scotland accepts Chastelar's poetic homage, and is
pleased to think that the poet's heart is breaking because of her grace
and loveliness, and would like it to go on breaking for ever. But the
love-sick poet grows weary of that distant worship, and would scale the
royal heavens to look nearer at the brightness of his star; whence come
confusions and troubles, and the amputation of that foolish
half-demented head.
So there was no thought of peril to herself or to others in Mrs.
Gilbert's mind when she stood on the bridge above the mill-stream
talking with Roland Lansdell. She had a vague idea that she was not
exactly doing her duty to her husband; but poor George's image only
receded farther and farther from her. Did she not still obey his
behests, and sit opposite to him at the little dinner-table, and pour
out his tea at breakfast, and assist him to put on his overcoat in the
passage before he went out? Could she do more for him than that? No; he
had himself rejected all further attention. She had tried to brush his
hat once in a sudden gush of dutiful feeling; but she had brushed the
nap the wrong way, and had incurred her husband's displeasure. She had
tried to read poetry to him, and he had yawned during her lecture. She
had put flowers on his dressing-table--white fragile-looking flowers--in
a tall slender vase with a tendril of convolvulus twined artfully round
the stem, like a garland about a classic column; and Mr. Gilbert had
objected to the perfumed blossoms as liable to generate carbonic-acid
gas. What could any one do for such a husband as this? The tender
sentimental raptures, the poetic emotions, the dim aspirations, which
Isabel revealed to Roland, would have been as unintelligible as the
Semitic languages to George. Why should she not bestow this other half
of her nature upon whom she chose? If she gave her duty and obedience to
Othello, surely Cassio might have all the poetry of her soul, which the
matter-of-fact Moor despised and rejected.
It was something after this wise that Isabel reasoned when she did
reason at all about her platonic attachment for Roland Lansdell. She was
very happy, lulled to rest by her own ignorance of all danger, rather
than by any deeply-studied design on the part of her lover. His manner
to her was more tender than a father's manner to his favourite
child,--more reverential than Raleigh's to Elizabeth of England,--but in
all this he had no thought of deception. The settled purpose in his mind
took a firmer root every day; and he fancied that Isabel understood him,
and knew that the great crisis of her life was fast approaching, and had
prepared herself to meet it.
One afternoon, late in the month, when the March winds were bleaker and
more pitiless than usual, Isabel went across the meadows where the
hedgerows were putting forth timid little buds to be nipped by the chill
breezes, and where here and there a violet made a tiny speck of purple
on the grassy bank. Mr. Lansdell was standing on the bridge when Isabel
approached the familiar trysting-place, and turned with a smile to greet
her. But although he smiled as he pressed the slender little hand that
almost always trembled in his own, the master of Mordred was not very
cheerful this afternoon. It was the day succeeding that on which Charles
Raymond had dined with him, and the influence of his kinsman's talk
still hung about him and oppressed him. He could not deny that there had
been truth and wisdom in his friend's earnest pleading; but he could not
abandon his purpose now. Long vacillating and irresolute, long doubtful
of himself and all the world, he was resolved at last, and obstinately
bent upon carrying out his resolution.
"I am going to London, Isabel," he said, after standing by Mrs. Gilbert
for some minutes, staring silently at the water; "I am going to London
to-morrow morning, Isabel." He always called her Isabel now, and
lingered with a kind of tenderness upon the name. Edith Dombey would
have brought confusion upon him for this presumption, no doubt, by one
bright glance of haughty reproof; but poor Isabel had found out long ago
that she in no way resembled Edith Dombey.
"Going to London!" cried the Doctor's Wife, piteously; "ah, I knew, I
knew that you would go away again, and I shall never see you any more."
She clasped her hands in her sudden terror, and looked at him with a
world of sorrow and reproach in her pale face. "I knew that it would be
so!" she repeated; "I dreamt the other night that you had gone away, and
I came here; and, oh, it seemed such a dreadful way to come, and I kept
taking the wrong turnings, and going through the wrong meadows; and when
I came, there was only some one--some stranger, who told me that you
were gone, and would never come back."
"But, Isabel--my love--my darling!--" the tender epithets did not
startle her; she was so absorbed by the fear of losing the god of her
idolatry,--"I am only going to town for a day or two to see my
lawyer--to make arrangements--arrangements of vital importance;--I
should be a scoundrel if I neglected them, or incurred the smallest
hazard by delaying them an hour. You don't understand these sort of
things, Isabel; but trust me, and believe that your welfare is dearer to
me than my own. I must go to town; but I shall only be gone a day or
two--two days at the most--perhaps only one. And when I come back,
Izzie, I shall have something to say to you--something very
serious--something that had better be said at once--something that
involves all the happiness of my future life. Will you meet me here two
days hence,--on Wednesday, at three o'clock? You will, won't you,
Isabel? I know I do wrong in exposing you to the degradation of these
stolen meetings. If I feel the shame so keenly, how much worse it must
be for you--my own dear girl--my sweet innocent darling. But this shall
be the last time, Isabel,--the last time I will ask you to incur any
humiliation for me. Henceforward we will hold our heads high, my love;
for at least there shall be no trickery or falsehood in our lives."
Mrs. Gilbert stared at Roland Lansdell in utter bewilderment. He had
spoken of shame and degradation, and had spoken in the tone of a man who
had suffered, and still suffered, very bitterly. This was all Isabel
could gather from her lover's speech, and she opened her eyes in blank
amazement as she attended to him. Why should he be ashamed, or
humiliated, or degraded? Was Dante degraded by his love for Beatrice?
was Waller degraded by his devotion to Saccharissa--for ever evidenced
by so many charming versicles, and never dropping down from the rosy
cloud-land of poetry into the matter-of-fact regions of prose? Degraded!
ashamed!--her face grew crimson all in a moment as these cruel words
stung her poor sentimental heart.
She wanted to run away all at once, and never see Mr. Lansdell again.
Her heart would break, as a matter of course; but how infinitely
preferable to shame would be a broken heart and early death with an
appropriate tombstone! The tears rolled down her flushed cheek, as she
turned away her face from Roland. She was almost stifled by mingled
grief and indignation.
"I did not think you were ashamed to meet me here sometimes," she sobbed
out; "you asked me to come. I did not think that you were humiliated by
talking to me--I----"
"Why, Izzie--Isabel darling!" cried Roland, "can you misunderstand me so
utterly? Ashamed to meet you--ashamed of your society! Can you doubt
what would have happened had I come home a year earlier than it was my
ill fortune to come? Can you doubt for a moment that I would have chosen
you for my wife out of all the women in the universe, and that my
highest pride would have been the right to call you by that dear name? I
was too late, Izzie, too late; too late to win that pure and perfect
happiness which would have made a new man of me, which would have
transformed me into a good and useful man, as I think. I suppose it is
always so; I suppose there is always one drop wanting in the cup of joy,
that one mystic drop which would change the commonplace potion into an
elixir. I came too late! Why should I have everything in this world? Why
should I have fifteen thousand a year, and Mordred Priory, and the right
to acknowledge the woman I love in the face of all creation, while there
are crippled wretches sweeping crossings for the sake of a daily crust,
and men and women wasting away in great prison-houses called Unions,
whose first law is the severance of every earthly tie? I came too late,
and I suppose it was natural that I should so come. Millions of
destinies have been blighted by as small a chance as that which has
blighted mine, I dare say. We must take our fate as we find it, Isabel;
and if we are true to each other, I hope and believe that it may be a
bright one even yet--even yet."
A woman of the world would have very quickly perceived that Mr.
Lansdell's discourse must have relation to more serious projects than
future meetings under Lord Thurston's oak, with interchange of divers
volumes of light literature. But Isabel Gilbert was not a woman of the
world. She had read novels while other people perused the Sunday papers;
and of the world out of a three-volume romance she had no more idea than
a baby. She believed in a phantasmal universe, created out of the pages
of poets and romancers; she knew that there were good people and bad
people--Ernest Maltraverses and Lumley Ferrerses, Walter Gays and
Carkers; but beyond this she had very little notion of mankind; and
having once placed Mr. Lansdell amongst the heroes, could not imagine
him to possess one attribute in common with the villains. If he seemed
intensely in earnest about these meetings under the oak, she was in
earnest too; and so had been the German knight, who devoted the greater
part of his life to watching the casement of his lady-love.
"I shall see you sometimes," she said, with timid hesitation,--"I shall
see you sometimes, shan't I, when you come home from town? Not often, of
course; I dare say it isn't right to come here often, away from George;
and the last time I kept him waiting for his dinner; but I told him
where I had been, and that I'd seen you, and he didn't mind a bit."
Roland Lansdell sighed.
"Ah, don't you understand, Isabel," he said, "that doubles our
degradation? It is for the very reason that he 'doesn't mind,' it is
precisely because he is so simple-hearted and trusting, that we ought
not to deceive the poor fellow any longer. That's the degradation,
Izzie; the deception, not the deed itself. A man meets his enemy in fair
fight and kills him, and nobody complains. The best man must always win,
I suppose; and if he wins by fair means, no one need grudge him his
victory. I mystify you, don't I, my darling, by all this rambling talk?
I shall speak plainer on Wednesday. And now let me take you homewards,"
added Mr. Lansdell, looking at his watch, "if you are to be at home at
five."
He knew the habits of the doctor's little household, and knew that five
o'clock was Mr. Gilbert's dinner-hour. There was no conversation of any
serious nature during the homeward walk--only dreamy talk about books
and poets and foreign lands. Mr. Lansdell told Isabel of bright spots in
Italy and Greece, wonderful villages upon the borders of blue lakes
deeply hidden among Alpine slopes, and snow-clad peaks like stationary
clouds--beautiful and picturesque regions which she must see by-and-by,
Roland added gaily.
But Mrs. Gilbert opened her eyes very wide and laughed aloud. How should
she ever see such places? she asked, smiling. George would never go
there; he would never be rich enough to go; nor would he care to go,
were he ever so rich.
And while she was speaking, Isabel thought that, after all, she cared
very little for those lovely lands; much as she had dreamed about them
and pined to see them, long ago in the Camberwell garden, on still
moonlight nights, when she used to stand on the little stone step
leading from the kitchen, with her arms resting on the water-butt, like
Juliet's on the balcony, and fancy it was Italy. Now she was quite
resigned to the idea of never leaving Graybridge-on-the-Wayverne. She
was content to live there all her life, as long as she could see Mr.
Lansdell now and then; so long as she could know that he was near her,
thinking of her and loving her, and that at any moment his dark face
might shine out of the dulness of her life. A perfect happiness had come
to her--the happiness of being beloved by the bright object of her
idolatry; nothing could add to that perfection; the cup was full to the
very brim, filled with an inexhaustible draught of joy and delight.
Mr. Lansdell stopped to shake hands with Isabel when they came to the
gate leading into the Graybridge road.
"Good-bye," he said softly: "good-bye, until Wednesday, Isabel.
Isabel--what a pretty name it is! You have no other Christian name?"
"Oh no."
"Only Isabel--Isabel Gilbert. Good-bye."
He opened the gate and stood watching the Doctor's Wife as she passed
out of the meadow, and walked at a rapid pace towards the town. A man
passed along the road as Mr. Lansdell stood there, and looked at him as
he went by, and then turned and looked after Isabel.
"Raymond is right, then," thought Roland; "they have begun to stare and
chatter already. Let them talk about me at their tea-tables, and
paragraph me in their newspapers, to their hearts' content! My soul is
as much above them as the eagle soaring sunward is above the sheep that
stare up at him from the valleys. I have set my foot upon the fiery
ploughshare, but my darling shall be carried across it scatheless, in
the strong arms of her lover."
Mrs. Gilbert went home to her husband, and sat opposite to him at dinner
as usual; but Roland's words, dimly as she had comprehended their
meaning, had in some manner influenced her, for she blushed when George
asked her where she had been that cold afternoon. Mr. Gilbert did not
see the blush, for he was carving the joint as he asked the question,
and indeed had asked it rather as a matter of form than otherwise. This
time Mrs. Gilbert did not tell her husband that she had met Roland
Lansdell. The words "shame and degradation" were ringing in her ears all
dinner-time. She had tasted, if ever so little, of the fruit of the
famous tree, and she found the flavour thereof very bitter. It must be
wrong to meet Roland under Lord Thurston's oak, since he said it was so;
and the meeting on Wednesday was to be the last; and yet their fate was
to be a happy one; had he not said so, in eloquently mysterious words,
whose full meaning poor Isabel was quite unable to fathom? She brooded
over what Mr. Lansdell said all that evening, and a dim sense of
impending trouble crept into her mind. He was going away for ever,
perhaps; and had only told her otherwise in order to lull her to rest
with vain hopes, and thus spare himself the trouble of her lamentations.
Or he was going to London to arrange for a speedy marriage with Lady
Gwendoline. Poor Isabel could not shake off her jealous fears of that
brilliant high-bred rival, whom Mr. Lansdell had once loved. Yes; he had
once loved Lady Gwendoline. Mr. Raymond had taken an opportunity of
telling Isabel all about the young man's early engagement to his cousin;
and he had added a hope that, after all, a marriage between the two
might yet be brought about; and had not the housekeeper at Mordred said
very much the same thing?
"He will marry Lady Gwendoline," Isabel thought, in a sudden access of
despair; "and that is what he is going to tell me on Wednesday. He was
different to-day from what he has been since he came back to Mordred.
And yet--and yet--" And yet what? Isabel tried in vain to fathom the
meaning of all Roland Lansdell's wild talk--now earnestly grave--now
suddenly reckless--one moment full of hope, and in the next tinctured
with despair. What was this simple young novel-reader to make of a man
of the world, who was eager to defy the world, and knew exactly what a
terrible world it was that he was about to outrage and defy?
Mrs. Gilbert lay awake all that night, thinking of the meeting by the
waterfall. Roland's talk had mystified and alarmed her. The ignorant
happiness, the unreflecting delight in her lover's presence, the daily
joy that in its fulness had no room for a thought of the morrow, had
vanished all at once like a burst of sunlight eclipsed by the darkening
clouds that presage a storm. Eve had listened to the first whispers of
the serpent, and Paradise was no longer entirely beautiful.