The two were alone in the grassy courtyard of the ruined castle. The
rest of the picnic party had wandered away from them, or they from it.
Out of the green-grown mound of fallen masonry by the corner of the
chapel a great may-bush grew, silvered and pearled on every scented,
still spray. The sky was deep, clear, strong blue above, and against the
blue, the wallflowers shone bravely from the cracks and crevices of
ruined arch and wall and buttress.
"They shine like gold," she said. "I wish one could get at them!"
"Do you want some?" he said, and on the instant his hand had found a
strong jutting stone, his foot a firm ledge--and she saw his figure,
grey flannel against grey stone, go up the wall towards the yellow
flowers.
"Oh, don't!" she cried. "I don't _really_ want them--please not--I
wish--"
Then she stopped, because he was already some twelve feet from the
ground, and she knew that one should not speak to a man who is climbing
ruined walls. So she clasped her hands and waited, and her heart seemed
to go out like a candle in the wind, and to leave only a dark, empty,
sickening space where, a moment before, it had beat in anxious joy. For
she loved him, had loved him these two years, had loved him since the
day of their first meeting. And that was just as long as he had loved
her. But he had never told his love. There is a code of honour, right or
wrong, and it forbids a man with an income of a hundred and fifty a year
to speak of love to a girl who is reckoned an heiress. There are plenty
who transgress the code, but they are in all the other stories. He drove
his passion on the curb, and mastered it. Yet the questions--Does she
love me? Does she know I love her? Does she wonder why I don't speak?
and the counter-questions--Will she think I don't care? Doesn't she
perhaps care at all? Will she marry someone else before I've earned the
right to try to make her love me? afforded a see-saw of reflection,
agonising enough, for those small hours of wakefulness when we let our
emotions play the primitive games with us. But always the morning
brought strength to keep to his resolution. He saw her three times a
year, when Christmas, Easter, and Midsummer brought her to stay with an
aunt, brought him home to his people for holidays. And though he had
denied himself the joy of speaking in words, he had let his eyes speak
more than he knew. And now he had reached the wallflowers high up, and
was plucking them and throwing them down so that they fell in a wavering
bright shower round her feet. She did not pick them up. Her eyes were on
him; and the empty place where her heart used to be seemed to swell till
it almost choked her.
He was coming down now. He was only about twenty-five feet from the
ground. There was no sound at all but the grating of his feet as he set
them on the stones, and the movement, now and then, of a bird in the
ivy. Then came a rustle, a gritty clatter, loud falling stones: his foot
had slipped, and he had fallen. No--he was hanging by his hands above
the great refectory arch, and his body swung heavily with the impetus
of the checked fall. He was moving along now, slowly--hanging by his
hands; now he grasped an ivy root--another--and pulled himself up till
his knee was on the moulding of the arch. She would never have believed
anyone who had told her that only two minutes had been lived between the
moment of his stumble and the other moment when his foot touched the
grass and he came towards her among the fallen wallflowers. She was a
very nice girl and not at all forward, and I cannot understand or excuse
her conduct. She made two steps towards him with her hands held
out--caught him by the arms just above the elbow--shook him angrily, as
one shakes a naughty child--looked him once in the eyes and buried her
face in his neck--sobbing long, dry, breathless sobs.
Even then he tried to be strong.
"Don't!" he said tenderly, "don't worry. It's all right--I was a fool.
Pull yourself together--there's someone coming."
"I don't care," she said, for the touch of his cheek, pressed against
her hair, told her all that she wanted to know. "Let them come, I don't
care! Oh, how could you be so silly and horrid? Oh, thank God, thank
God! Oh, how could you?"
Of course, a really honourable young man would have got out of the
situation somehow. He didn't. He accepted it, with his arms round her
and his lips against the face where the tears now ran warm and salt. It
was one of the immortal moments.
The picture was charming, too--a picture to wring the heart of the
onlooker with envy, or sympathy, according to his nature. But there was
only one onlooker, a man of forty, or thereabouts, who paused for an
instant under the great gate of the castle and took in the full charm
and meaning of the scene. He turned away, and went back along the green
path with hell in his heart. The other two were in Paradise. The
Onlooker fell like the third in Eden--the serpent, in fact. Two miles
away he stopped and lit a pipe.
"It's got to be borne, I suppose," he said, "like all the rest of it.
_She's_ happy enough. I ought to be glad. Anyway, I can't stop it."
Perhaps he swore a little. If he did, the less precise and devotional
may pardon him. He had loved the Girl since her early teens, and it was
only yesterday's post that had brought him the appointment that one
might marry on. The appointment had come through her father, for whom
the Onlooker had fagged at Eton. He went back to London, hell burning
briskly. Moral maxims and ethereal ideas notwithstanding, it was
impossible for him to be glad that she was happy--like that.
* * * * *
The Lover who came to his love over strewn wallflowers desired always,
as has been seen, to act up to his moral ideas. So he took next day a
much earlier train than was at all pleasant, and called on her father to
explain his position and set forth his prospects. His coming was
heralded by a letter from her. One must not quote it--it is not proper
to read other people's letters, especially letters to a trusted father,
from a child, only and adored. Its effect may be indicated briefly. It
showed the father that the Girl's happiness had had two long years in
which to learn to grow round the thought of the young man, whom he now
faced for the first time. Odd, for to the father he seemed just like
other young men. It seemed to him that there were so many more of the
same pattern from whom she might have chosen. And many of them well off,
too. However, the letter lay in the prosperous pocket-book in the breast
of the father's frock-coat, and the Lover was received as though that
letter were a charm to ensure success. A faulty, or at least a
slow-working, charm, however, for the father did not lift a bag of gold
from his safe and say: "Take her, take this also--be happy"--he only
consented to a provisional engagement, took an earnest interest in the
young man's affairs, and offered to make his daughter an annual
allowance on her marriage.
"At my death she will have more," he said, "for, of course, I have
insured my life. You, of course, will insure yours."
"Of course I will," the Lover echoed warmly; "does it matter what
office?"
"Oh, any good office--the Influential, if you like. I'm a director, you
know."
The young man made a reverent note of the name, and the interview seemed
played out.
"It's a complicated nuisance," the father mused; "it isn't even as if I
knew anything of the chap. I oughtn't to have allowed the child to make
these long visits to her aunt. Or I ought to have gone with her. But I
never could stand my sister Fanny. Well, well," and he went back to his
work with the plain unvarnished heartache of the anxious father--not
romantic and pretty like the lover's pangs, but as uncomfortable as
toothache, all the same.
He had another caller that afternoon; he whom we know as the Onlooker
came to thank him for the influence that had got him the appointment as
doctor to the Influential Insurance Company.
The father opened his heart to the Onlooker--and the Onlooker had to
bear it. It was an hour full of poignant sentiments. The only definite
thought that came to the Onlooker was this--"I must hold my tongue. I
must hold my tongue." He held it.
Three days later he took up his new work. And the very first man who
came to him for medical examination was the man in whose arms he had
seen the girl he loved.
The Onlooker asked the first needful questions automatically. To himself
he was saying: "The situation is dramatically good; but I don't see how
to develop the action. It really is rather amusing that I--_I_ should
have to tap his beastly chest, and listen to his cursed lungs, and ask
sympathetic questions about his idiotic infant illnesses--one thing, he
ought to be able to remember those pretty vividly--the confounded pup."
The Onlooker had never done anything wronger than you have done, my good
reader, and he never expected to meet a giant temptation, any more than
you do. A man may go all his days and never meet Apollyon. On the other
hand, Apollyon may be waiting for one round the corner of the next
street. The devil was waiting for the Onlooker in the answers to his
careless questions--"Father alive? No? What did he die of?" For the
answer was "Heart," and in it the devil rose and showed the Onlooker the
really only true and artistic way to develop the action in this
situation, so dramatic in its possibilities. The illuminative flash of
temptation was so sudden, so brilliant, that the Doctor-Onlooker closed
his soul's eyes and yielded without even the least pretence of
resistance.
He took his stethoscope from the table, and he felt as though he had
picked up a knife to stab the other man in the back. As, in fact, he
had.
Ten minutes later, the stabbed man was reeling from the Onlooker's
consulting room. Mind and soul reeled, that is, but his body was stiffer
and straighter than usual. He walked with more than his ordinary
firmness of gait, as a man does who is just drunk enough to know that he
must try to look sober.
He walked down the street, certain words ringing in his ears--"Heart
affected--probably hereditary weakness. No office in the world would
insure you."
And so it was all over--the dreams, the hopes, the palpitating faith in
a beautiful future. His days might be long, they might be brief; but be
his life long or short, he must live it alone. He had a little fight
with himself as he went down Wimpole Street; then he hailed a hansom,
and went and told her father, who quite agreed with him that it was all
over. The father wondered at himself for being more sorry than glad.
Then the Lover went and told the Girl. He had told the father first to
insure himself against any chance of yielding to what he knew the Girl
would say. She said it, of course, with her dear arms round his neck.
"I won't give you up just because you're ill," she said; "why, you want
me more than ever!"
"But I may die at any moment."
"So may I! And you may live to be a hundred--I'll take my chance. Oh,
don't you see, too, that if there _is_ only a little time we ought to
spend it together?"
"It's impossible," he said, "it's no good. I must set my teeth and bear
it. And you--I hope it won't be as hard for you as it will for me."
"But you _can't_ give me up if I won't _be_ given up, can you?"
His smile struck her dumb. It was more convincing than his words.
"But why?" she said presently. "Why--why--_why_?"
"Because I won't; because it's wrong. My father ought never to have
married. He had no right to bring me into the world to suffer like this.
It's a crime. And I'll not be a criminal. Not even for you--not even for
you. You'll forgive me--won't you? I didn't know--and--oh, what's the
use of talking?"
Yet they talked for hours. Conventionally he should have torn himself
away, unable to bear the strain of his agony. As a matter of fact, he
sat by her holding her hand. It was for the last time--the last, last
time. There was really a third at that interview. The Onlooker had
imagination enough to see the scene between the parting lovers.
They parted.
And now the Onlooker dared not meet her--dared not call at the house as
he had used to do. At last--the father pressed him--he went. He met her.
And it was as though he had met the ghost of her whom he had loved. Her
eyes had blue marks under them, her chin had grown more pointed, her
nose sharper. There was a new line on her forehead, and her eyes had
changed.
Over the wine he heard from the father that she was pining for the
Lover who had inherited heart disease.
"I suppose it was you who saw him, by the way," said he, "a tall,
well-set-up young fellow--dark--not bad looking."
"I--I don't remember," lied the Onlooker, with the eyes of his memory on
the white face of the man he had stabbed.
Now the Lover and the Onlooker had each his own burden to bear. And the
Lover's was the easier. He worked still, though there was now nothing to
work for more; he worked as he had never worked in his life, because he
knew that if he did not take to work he should take to drink or worse
devils, and he set his teeth and swore that her Lover should not be
degraded. He knew that she loved him, and there was a kind of fierce
pain-pleasure--like that of scratching a sore--in the thought that she
was as wretched as he was, that, divided in all else, they were yet
united in their suffering. He thought it made him more miserable to know
of her misery. But it didn't. He never saw her, but he dreamed of her,
and sometimes the dreams got out of hand, and carried him a thousand
worlds from all that lay between them. Then he had to wake up. And that
was bad.
But the Onlooker was no dreamer, and he saw her about three times a
week. He saw how the light of life that his lying lips had blown out was
not to be rekindled by his or any man's breath. He saw her slenderness
turn to thinness, the pure, healthy pallor of her rounded cheek change
to a sickly white, covering a clear-cut mask of set endurance. And there
was no work that could shut out that sight--no temptation of the world,
the flesh, or the devil to give him even the relief of a fight. He had
no temptations; he had never had but the one. His soul was naked to the
bitter wind of the actual; and the days went by, went by, and every day
he knew more and more surely that he had lied and thrown away his soul,
and that the wages of sin were death, and no other thing whatever. And
gradually, little by little, the whole worth of life seemed to lie in
the faint, far chance of his being able to undo the one triumphantly
impulsive and unreasoning action of his life.
But there are some acts that there is no undoing. And the hell that had
burned in his heart so fiercely when he had seen her in the other man's
arms burned now with new bright lights and infernal flickering flame
tongues.
And at last, out of hell, the Onlooker reached out his hands and caught
at prayer. He caught at it as a drowning man catches at a white gleam in
the black of the surging sea about him--it may be a painted spar, it may
be empty foam. The Onlooker prayed.
And that very evening he ran up against the Lover at the Temple Station,
and he got into the same carriage with him.