not realize the menace, and the Doctor evidently meant that we should
not. He was in gayer spirits than he had been since the days of the
great discussions, and after the few facts he had brought back were
given us, he kept the talk on other matters, until the Sculptor, who
had been lying back in his chair, blowing smoke rings in the air,
stretched himself into his most graceful position, and called
attention even to his pose, before he threw his cigarette far from him
with a fine gesture, settled his handsome head into his clasped hands,
and began:
* * * * *
I had been ten years abroad.
In all that time I had been idle, prosperous, and wretched.
Every time Fate wrenched my heart with one of her long thin pitiless
hands, she recompensed me with what the world calls "good luck."
Every hope I had cherished failed me. Every faith I had harbored
deserted me. Every venture in which neither heart nor soul was
concerned flourished and flaunted its success in the face of the
world, where I was considered a very fortunate man.
In the ten years of my exile I had travelled much, had been in contact
with all kinds of people, had served some, and tried in vain to be
concerned for them while I served. If it had been my fate to make no
friends, it was within my choice to be never alone.
I had that in my memory which I hoarded, and yet with which I would
not allow myself to be deliberately alone. The most terrible hours of
my life were those when, toward morning, the rest of the world--all
the world save me--having no past to escape, no enticing phantom to
flee, went peacefully off to bed, and I was left alone in the night to
drug memory, fight off thought, outwit imagination by any means that I
might--and some of them were desperate enough.
Ten years had passed thus.
Another tenth of August had come round!
Only a man who has but one anniversary in his life, the backward and
forward shadows of which make an unbroken circle over the whole year,
can appreciate my existence. One cannot escape such a date. You may
never speak of it. You may forswear calendars, abjure newspapers,
refuse to date a letter; you may even lose days in a drunken stupor.
Still there is that in your heart and your brain which keeps the
reckoning. The hour will strike, in spite of you, when the day comes
round on the dial of the year.
I had been living for some time in a city far distant from my native
land. Half the world stretched on either side between me and the spot
I tried to forget, and which floated forever, like a vision, between
me and reality.
I had remained longer than usual in this city, for the simple reason
that it was the hot season, and while the natives could stand it by
day, visitors, unused to the heat, were forced to sleep by day and
wander abroad by night, a condition that made it possible for me to
feel my fellowmen about me nearly the entire twenty-four hours.
It was night.
I was sitting alone on the balcony of my room, looking down on to the
crowded bridges of the city where throngs were passing, and filled my
eyes and mind.
It was the very hour at which I had last seen her. There was no clock
in sight--I always guarded against that in selecting my room. I had
long ceased to carry a watch.
Yet I knew the hour.
I had been sitting there for hours watching the crowd. I had not been
drinking. I had long ago abandoned that. No stimulant could blur the
fixed regret, no narcotic numb my full sense of it. Sleep, whether I
rose to it, or fell to it--only brought me dreams of her. Desperate
nourishing of a great misery, in a nature that resented it, even while
cherishing it, had made me a conscious monomaniac. Fate had thwarted
me, and distorted me. I had become jealous and morbid, bitterly
reviling my hurt, but violently preventing its healing.
There was a moon--just as there had been that night, only now it fell
on a many bridged river across which were ghostly cypress trees,
rising along the hillside to a strangely outlined church behind ruined
fortifications. I was wondering, against my will, at what hour that
moon rose over the distant New England village, which came before me
in a vision that wiped out the wooded heights of reality.
Suddenly all the pain dropped away from me.
I drew a long breath in amazement.
Where was the weight under which I had staggered, mentally, all these
years? Whence came the peace that had so suddenly descended upon me?
In an instant it had passed, and I could only remember my bitter mood
of ten years as if it had been a dream that I had lived so long
unconsoled by that great healer, Time.
As the torturing jealousy dropped from me, a gentle sadness took its
place. In an instant my mind was made up. I would go back.
This idea, which had never come to me in ten years, seemed now
perfectly natural. I would return at once to that far off village
where, for a brief hour, I had dwelt in a "Fool's Paradise," through
which my way had lain but a brief span, and where I had passed, like
the fabled bird, that "floats through Heaven, but cannot light."
* * * * *
I remember but little of the journey home, save that it was long, and
that I slept much. But whether it was months or years I never knew. I
seemed to be making up what I had lost in ten years. Time occupied
itself in restoring the balance I had taken so much pains to upset.
It was night when I reached the place at last.
I found it as I had left it. Had a magic sleep settled there it could
not have been less changed.
I was recognized in the small bare office of the one tavern. I felt
that my sudden appearance surprised no one. But I did not wonder why.
Oddly enough, I never asked a question. I had not even questioned
myself as to what I expected to find. Years afterward I was convinced,
in reviewing the matter, that my soul had known from the first.
I dined alone, quite calmly, after which I stepped out into the
starlight. I turned up the hill, and struck into the familiar road I
had so often travelled in the old days. It led toward the river, and
along the steep bank of the rapid noisy stream. The chill wind of an
early autumn night moaned sadly in the tall trees, and the dead leaves
under my feet rustled a sad accompaniment to my thoughts, which at
last, unhooded, flew back to the past.
Below rushed the river, whose torrent had ever been an accompaniment
to all my recollections of her--as inseparable from them as the color
of her eyes, or the tones of her voice.
I could not but contrast my present calm with the mad humor in which I
had last rushed down the slope I was so quietly climbing. As I went
forward, I began to ask myself, "Why?" I could not answer that, but I
began to hurry.
Suddenly I stopped.
The moon had emerged above the trees on the opposite side of the
river. It struck and illumined something white above me. I was
standing exactly where I had stood on that fatal tenth of August, so
many years before.
I came to my senses as if by an electric shock.
At last everything was clear to me. At last I understood whence had
gone all my vanity and jealousy. At last I understood the spell of
peace that had settled on me in that moonlit tenth of August, in that
far off city.
My burden had passed through the Valley of the Shadow of Death with
her--for I was standing at the door of her tomb!
I did not question. I knew, I comprehended.
In no other way could I have found such calm.
Though I flung myself on the shining marble steps that led in the
moonlight up to the top of the knoll where the tomb stood, I had no
tears to shed.
The present floated still further away.
Even the rush of the torrent died out of my ears.
Once more it seemed to me that lovely day in May when we three had
marched, shoulder to shoulder, down the city street--that spring day
in the early sixties, when the North was sending her flower to fight
for a united country.
Again I felt the warm sunshine on my head.
Once more I heard the ringing cheers, saw the floating flags, and the
faces of women who wept as well as women who smiled in the throngs
that lined the street.
Just as in all my life it had been his emotions and his enthusiasms
that led me, it was his excitement that impelled me forward at this
moment. His was the hand that in my school days, at college, in our
Bohemian days abroad, had swept my responsive nature as a master hand
strikes a harp, and made harmonies or discords at his will--or, I
should say, according to his mood.
I used to think in those days that he never willfully wronged any one,
but I had to own also that he never deliberately sacrificed himself
for any one. And, if I were the victim of his temperament, he was no
less so. But he was an artist. I was not. All things either good or
bad were merely material to him. With me it was different.
He and I were alone in the world. But beside us marched, that May
morning, with the glory of youth on his handsome but weak face, one
whose "baptism of fire" was to make him a hero, who had else been
remembered a coward.
The story of the girl he had wronged, and fear of whom had even
reconciled his family to his enlisting, was common property, and had
been for several seasons. There was a child, too, a little daughter,
fondly loved, but unacknowledged, the fame of whose childish beauty
many a heedless voice had already sung.
He, poor youngster, looked on his all that morning.
Once more I saw the flag draped house where his mother waved a brave
farewell to him.
But there was another later picture in my mind. Again I heard the
blare of the band before us as it flung its satire of "The Girl I Left
Behind Me," into the spring air. I saw once more in my mind the child,
with her floating red gold curls, raised above the crowd on the
shoulders of tall men. Her eyes were too young for tears--and for that
matter, tears came to her but seldom in later years--and the lips that
shouted "bood-bye" smiled, unconscious of bravery, as she swung her
hat with its symbolic colors above her shining head.
That was the picture that three of us carried to the front.
We left him--all his errors redeemed by a noble death--with his face
turned up to the stars, as silent, as mysterious as they, after our
first battle.
From the horrors of that night we two came away bound by an oath to
care for that child.
* * * * *
Again my memory shifted to the days that found her a woman. Fair,
beautiful, dainty, her father's daughter in looks, but inheriting from
a rare mother a peculiar strength of character, a moral force rarely
found with such a temperament and such beauty.
We had aided to raise her as became the child of her father, whose
story she knew as soon as she was able to understand, but she knew it
from the lips of the brave mother, who cherished his memory. Until she
was a woman grown it was I, however, who, of her two self-appointed
guardians, had watched over her. Children did not interest him.
He had married some years before that time, married well with an eye
to a calm comfortable future, as became an artist who could not be
hampered by the need of money.
Indeed, it was not until he knew that I was to marry her that he
really looked at her.
And I, with all my experience of him, simply because I was never able
to understand the dual nature, failed at that fatal hour when we stood
together beside our protégée to apply to the situation the knowledge
that years of experience should have taught me.
I was so bound up in my own feelings that I failed to remember that,
until then, I had never had a great emotion that his nature had not
acted as a lens in the kindling.
Then, too, there was a dense sense of the conventional--a logical
enough birthright--in my make-up. I, who had known him so long, so
well, seemed, nevertheless, when he married, to have fancied there was
some hocus-pocus in the ceremony, which should make a definite change
in a man's character, as well as a presumable change in his way of
life.
It must have been that there, in the open, at the foot of the knoll, I
slept, as one does the first night after a long awaited death, when
the relief that pain is passed, and suspense ended, deadens grief.
She was no longer in this world of torture. That helped me.
* * * * *
The next I knew, it was the sun, and not the moon which was shining on
me.
The wind had stilled its sobbing in the trees.
Only the rushing of the river sounded in my ears.
I rose slowly, and mounted the steps.
A tiny white marble mosque of wonderful beauty--for he who erected it
was one of the world's great artists, whose works will live to glorify
his name and his art when all his follies shall have been
forgotten--stood in a court paved with marble.
It was encircled with a low coping of the whitest of stone. Over this
low wall vines were already growing, and the woodbine that was mingled
with it was stained with those glorious tints in which Nature says to
life, "Even death is beautiful."
The wide bronze doors on either side were open.
I accepted the fact without even wondering why--or asking myself who,
in opening them, had discovered my presence!
I entered.
For a brief time I stood once more within the room where she lay.
An awful peace fell on my soul, as if her soul had whispered in the
words we had so often read together:
"I lie so composedly
Now in my bed--"
I knew at last, as I gazed, that all her life, and all mine, as well,
had been to his profit. That out of this, too, he had wrought some of
his greatness.
The interior of the vault was of red marble, and, such of chiselling
as there was done, seemed wonderful to me even in my frame of mind. I
took it all in, through unwilling, though fascinated eyes.
I have never seen it since. I can never forget it.
Yet art is, and always has been, so much to me, that I could not help,
even in my strangely wrought-up mental condition, comprehending and
admiring his scheme and the masterly manner in which he had worked it
out.
At my feet, as I stood on the threshold, was an elaborate scroll
engraved on the stone and surrounded with a wreath of leaves, that
vied with the tombs of the old world. As I gazed at it, and read the
gothic letters in which it was set forth that this monument was
erected in adoration of this woman, how well I remembered the day when
we had crouched together over those stones in the crypt at Certosa, to
admire the chiselling of Donatello which had inspired this.
There was a space left for the signature of the artist, which would, I
knew, some day be written there boldly enough!
In the centre stood the sarcophagus.
I felt its presence, though my eyes avoided it.
Above, on the wall, were the words borne along by carved angels:
"My love she sleeps: Oh, may her sleep
As it was lasting, so be deep."
And I seemed to hear her voice intone the words as I had heard them
from her lips so many times.
And then my eyes fell--on her! Aye! On her, stretched at full length
in her warm and glorious tomb. For above her mortal remains slept her
effigy wrought with all the skill of a great art.
I had feared to look upon it, but having looked, I felt that I could
never tear myself away from its peace and loveliness.
The long folds of the drapery fell straight from the small, round
throat to the tiny unshod feet, and so wonderfully was it wrought,
that it seemed as if the living beautiful flesh of the slender body
was still quick beneath it. The exquisite hands that I knew so
well--so delicate, and yet so strong--were gently crossed upon her
breast, and her arms held a long stemmed lily, emblem of purity, and
it looked to me there like a martyr's palm.
Perhaps it was the pale reflection from the red walls, but the figure
seemed too real to be mere stone!
I forgot the irony of the fact that I was merely seeing her through
his eyes--the eyes of the man who had robbed me. I felt only her
presence. I fell on my knees. I flung my arms across the beautiful
form--no colder to my embrace than had been the living woman! As I
recoiled from the death-like touch, my eyes fell on the words carved
on the face of the sarcophagus, and once more, it was like the voice
that was hushed in my ears.
"I pray to God that she may lie
Forever with unopened eye
While the dim sheeted ghosts go by."
"Amen," I said, with all my heart, to the words he had carved above
her, for what, after the fever of such a life, could be so welcome to
her as dreamless, eternal silence, in which there would be no more
passion, no more struggling, no more love?
And, if I wished with all my soul, that the great surprise of death
might, for her, have been peace and silence, did I not bar myself as
well as him from the hope of Heaven?
How long I stood there, with hungry eyes devouring the marble effigy
of her I so loved--now tortured by its fidelity, now punished by its
coldness--I never knew.
Sometimes I noticed the changing of the light, the shifting of the
shadows, as the sun swung steadily upward, but it was a subconscious
observation which did not recall me to myself and the present.
Back, back turned my thoughts to the past.
Here, where she now lay in her gorgeous tomb, had then stood an arbor,
and below had roared the rushing river.
It was the night of our wedding.
Then, as now, on this very spot, I had looked down on that fair pale
face, and then it had given me back a gaze as lifeless as this.
I had missed my bride from the little throng in the quaint house
beyond. I had stolen out to seek her. Instinctively I had turned to
the old arbor above the river, where her hours of meditation had
always been passed.
It was there I had found her as a child, when I came to bring her
father's dying message. It was there I had asked her to become my
wife. It was there we three had first stood together.
For a week before the wedding she had been in a strange mood,
tearless, but nervous, and sad! Still, it had not seemed to me an
unnatural mood in such a woman, on the eve of her marriage.
Fate is ironical.
I remembered that I was serenely happy as I sped up the hill in search
of her, and so sure that I knew where to find her. Light scudding
clouds crossed the track of the moon, which, with a broadly smiling
face, rolled up the heavens at a spinning pace, now appearing, now
disappearing behind the flying clouds.
I was humming gaily as I strode along the narrow path. Nothing tugged
at my heart strings to warn me of approaching sorrow. There was no
signal in all nature to prepare me for the end in a complete shipwreck
of all my dreams. The peace about me gave no hint of its cynicism.
Nothing, either within or without, hinted that my hours of happiness
and content were running out rapidly to the last sand!
I had reached the shallow steps that led up the knoll to the arbor!
At that moment the clouds were swept off from the face of the moon,
and the white light fell full on her.
But she was not alone. She rested in the arms of my friend, as, God
help me, she had never rested in mine--in an abandon that was only too
eloquent.
What was said?
Who but God knows that now?
What do men like us, who have thought themselves one in all things,
until one love rends them asunder, say at such a time? As for me, I
cannot recall a word!
I did not even see his face.
I think he saw mine no more.
We seemed to see into the soul of each other, through the very heart
of that frail woman between us, that slender creature in the bridal
dress, who sank down before us, as if the colliding passions of two
strong men had killed her.
It was he who raised her up. His hands placed her in my arms. No need
to say that she was blameless. I knew all that.
It was only Fate after all, that I blamed, yet the fatalist is human.
He suffers in living like other men--sometimes more, because he
refuses to struggle in the clutches of Chance!
As I gazed down into her white face, I heard the steps of my friend,
even above the roaring of the river, as he strode down the hillside,
out of my life! And I know not even to-day which was the bitterest
grief, the loss of my faith in being loved, or the passing from my
heart of that man!
Of the pain of the night that followed, only the silence and our own
hearts knew.
Love and passion are so twinned in some hours of life that one cannot
distinguish in himself the one from the other.
Into my keeping "to have and to hold," the law had given this
beautiful woman, "until death should us part." I loved her! But, out
of her heart, at once stronger and weaker than mine, my friend had
barred me.
It is not in hours like these, that all men can be sane.
I thought of what might have been, if they had not met that night, and
my ignoble side craved ignorance of that Chance, or the brutality to
ignore it.
I looked down into that cold face as I laid her from the arms that had
borne her down the hill--laid her on what was to have been her nuptial
couch--and closed the door between us and all the world.
We were together--alone--at last!
I had dreamed of this hour. Here was its realization. I watched the
misery of remembrance dawn slowly on her white face. I pitied her as I
gazed at her, yet my whole being cried out in rage at its own pity. On
her trembling lips I seemed to see his kisses. In her frightened eyes
I saw his image. The shudder that shook her whole body as her eyes
held mine, confessed him--and that confession kept me at bay.
All that night I sat beside her.
What mad words I uttered a merciful nature never let me recall.
In the chill dawn I fled from her presence.
The width of the world had lain between us, me--and this woman whom I
had worshipped, of whom a consuming jealousy had made ten years of my
life a mad fever, which only her death had cured. Saner men have
protested against the same situation that ruined me--and yet, even in
my reasoning moments, like this, I knew that to have rebelled would
have been to have forced a tragic climax before the hour at which Fate
had fixed it.
* * * * *
When something--I know not what--recalled me again to the present, I
found that I had sat by her a day, as, on our last meeting, I watched
out the night. The sun, which had sent its almost level rays in at the
east door of the tomb when I entered, was now shining in brilliant
almost level rays in at the west.
The day was passing.
A shadow fell from the opposite door. I became suddenly conscious of
his presence, and, once more, across her body, I looked into my
friend's eyes.
Between us, as on that dreadful night, she was stretched!
But she was at peace.
Our colliding emotions might rend us, they could never again tear at
her gentle heart. That was at rest.
Over her we stood once more, as if years had not passed--years of
silence.
Above the woman we had both loved, we two, who had stood shoulder to
shoulder in battle, been one in thought and ambition until passion
rent us asunder, met as we parted, but she was at peace!
We had severed without farewells.
We met without greetings.
We stood in silence until he waved me to a broad seat behind me, and
sank into a similar niche opposite.
We sat in the shadow.
She lay between us in the level light of the setting sun, which fell
across her from the wide portal, and once more our eyes met on her
face, but they would not disturb her calm.
His influence was once more upon me.
In the silence--for it was some time before he spoke, and I was
dumb--my accursed eye for detail had taken in the change in him. Yet I
fancied I was not looking at him. I noted that he had aged--that this
was one of the periods in him which I knew so well--when a passion
for work was on him, and the fever and fervor of creation trained him
down like a race-horse, all spirit and force. I noted that he still
wore the velveteens and the broad hat and loose open collar of his
student days.
Sitting on either side of the tomb he had built to enshrine her, on
carved marble seats such as Tuscan poets sat on, in the old days, to
sing to fair women, with our gaze focussed on the long white form
between us--ah, between us indeed!--his voice broke the long silence.
He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and the broad brim of his
soft hat swept the marble floor with a gentle rhythmic swish, as it
swung idly from his loosened grasp. I heard it as an accompaniment to
his voice.
His eyes never once strayed from her face.
"You think you are to be pitied," he said. "You are wrong! No one who
has not sinned against another needs pity. I meant you no harm.
Fate--my temperament, your immobility, the very gifts that have made
me what I am were to blame--if blame there were. Every one of us must
live out his life, according to his nature. I, as well as you!