Look in my face! my name is Might-have-been;
I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
--DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.
It was Sunday afternoon. Mr. Tristram leaned on the stone balustrade
that bounded the long terrace at Wilderleigh. He was watching two
distant figures, followed by a black dot, stroll away across the park.
One of them seemed to drag himself unwillingly. Mr. Tristram
congratulated himself on the acumen which had led him to keep himself
concealed until Doll and Hugh had started for Beaumere.
Sybell had announced at luncheon, in the tone of one who observes a
religious rite, that she should rest till four o'clock, and would be
ready to sit for the portrait of her upper lip at that hour.
It was only half-past two now. Mr. Tristram had planted himself exactly
in front of Rachel's windows, with his back to the house. "She will keep
me waiting, but she will come out in time," he said to himself, nervous
and self-confident by turns, resting his head rather gracefully on his
hand. His knowledge of womankind supported him like a life-belt, but it
has been said that life-belts occasionally support their wearers
upsidedown. Theories have been known to exhibit the same spiteful
tendency towards those who place their trust in them.
"Of course, she has got to show me that she is offended with me," he
reflected, gazing steadily at the Welsh hills. "She would not have come
out if I had asked her, but she will certainly come as I did not. I will
give her half an hour."
Rachel, meanwhile, was looking fixedly at Mr. Tristram from her bedroom
window with that dispassionate scrutiny to avoid which the vainest would
do well to take refuge in noisome caves.
"I wonder," she said to herself, "whether Hester always saw him as I see
him now. I believe she did."
Rachel put on her hat and took up her gloves. "If this is really I, and
that is really he, I had better go down and get it over," she said to
herself.
Mr. Tristram had given her half an hour. She appeared in the low stone
doorway before the first five minutes of the allotted time had elapsed,
and he gave a genuine start of surprise as he heard her step on the
gravel. His respect for her fell somewhat at this alacrity.
"I have been waiting in the hope of seeing you," he said, after a
moment's hesitation. "I am anxious to have a serious conversation with
you."
"Certainly," she said.
They walked along the terrace, and presently found themselves in the
little coppice adjoining it. They sat down together on a wooden seat
round an old cedar, in the heart of the golden afternoon.
It was an afternoon the secret of which Autumn and Spring will never
tell to Winter and Summer, when the wildest dreams of love might come
true, when even the dead might come down and put warm lips to ours, and
we should feel no surprise.
A kingfisher flashed across the open on his way back to the brook near
at hand, fleeing from the still splendor of the sun-fired woods, where
he was but a courtier, to the little winding world of gray stones and
water, where he was a jewelled king.
When the kingfisher had left them _tête-à-tête_, Mr. Tristram found
himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he
had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties
which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."
Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that
sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the principal
feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.
Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said,
brokenly:
"Can you forgive me?"
What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of
ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in
trouble? Rachel softened instantly.
"I forgave you long ago," she said, gently.
Something indefinable in the clear, full gaze that met his daunted him.
He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing
in cold and darkness looking in through the windows of her untroubled
eyes at the warm, sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been
exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.
A single yellow leaf, crisped and hollowed to a fairy boat, came sailing
on an imperceptible current of air to rest on Rachel's knee.
"I was angry at first," she said, her voice falling across the silence
like another leaf. "And then, after a time, I forgave you. And later
still, much later, I found out that you had never injured me--that I had
nothing to forgive."
He did not understand, and as he did not understand he explained
volubly--for here he felt he was on sure ground--that, on the contrary,
she had much to forgive, that he had acted like an infernal blackguard,
that men were coarse brutes, not fit to kiss a good woman's
shoe-latchet, etc., etc. He identified his conduct with that of the
whole sex, without alluding to it as that of the individual Tristram. He
made it clear that he did not claim to have behaved better than most
men.
Rachel listened attentively. "And I actually loved him," she said to
herself.
"But the divine quality of woman is her power of forgiving. Her love
raises a man, transfigures him, ennobles his whole life," etc., etc.
"My love did not appear to have quite that effect upon you at the time,"
said Rachel, regretting the words the moment they were spoken.
Mr. Tristram felt relieved. Here at last; was the reproach he had been
expecting.
He assured her she did well to be angry. He accused himself once more.
He denounced the accursed morals of the day, above which he ought to
have risen, the morals, if she did but know it, of all unmarried men.
"That is a hit at Mr. Scarlett," she said, scornfully, to herself, and
then her cheek blanched as she remembered that Hugh was not exempt,
after all. She became suddenly tired, impatient; but she waited quietly
for the inevitable proposal.
Mr. Tristram, who had the gift of emphatic and facile utterance, which
the conventional consider to be the sign-manual of genius, had become so
entangled in the morals of the age that it took him some time to
extricate himself from the subject before he could pass on to plead, in
an impassioned manner, the cause of the man, unworthy though he might
be, who had long loved her, loved her now, and would always love her, in
this world and the next.
It was the longest proposal Rachel had ever had, and she had had many.
But if the proposal was long, the refusal was longer. Rachel, who had a
good memory, led up to it by opining that the artistic life made great
demands, that the true artist must live entirely for his art, that
domestic life might prove a hinderance. She had read somewhere that high
hopes fainted on warm hearthstones. Mr. Tristram demolished these
objections as ruthlessly as ducks peck their own ducklings if they have
not seen them for a day or two.
Even when she was forced to become more explicit, it was at first
impossible to Mr. Tristram to believe she would finally reject him. But
the knowledge, deep-rooted as a forest oak, that she had loved him
devotedly could not at last prevail against the odious conviction that
she was determined not to marry him.
"Then, in that case, you never loved me?"
"I do not love you now."
"You are determined not to marry?"
"On the contrary, I hope to do so."
Rachel's words took her by surprise. She had no idea till that moment
that she hoped anything of the kind.
"You prefer some one else. That is the real truth."
"I prefer several others."
Mr. Tristram looked suspiciously at her. Her answers did not tally with
his previous knowledge of her. Perhaps he forgot that he had set his
docile pupil rather a long holiday task to learn in his absence, and she
had learned it.
"You think you would be happier with some fortune-hunter of an
aristocrat than with a plain man of your own class, who, whatever his
faults may be, loves you for yourself."
Why is it that the word aristocrat as applied to a gentleman is as
offensive as that of flunkey applied to a footman?
Rachel drew herself up imperceptibly.
"That depends upon the fortune-hunter," she said, with that touch of
_hauteur_ which, when the vulgar have at last drawn it upon themselves
by the insolence which is the under side of their courtesy, always has
the same effect on them as a red rag on a bull.
In their own language they invariably "stand up to it." Mr. Tristram
stood up physically and mentally. He also raised his voice, causing two
rabbits to hurry back into their holes.
Women, he said, were incalculable. He would never believe in one again.
His disbelief in woman rose even to the rookery in the high elms close
at hand. That she, Rachel, whom he had always regarded as the first
among women, should be dazzled by the empty glamour of rank, now that
her fortune put such marriages within her reach, was incredible. He
should have repudiated such an idea with scorn, if he had not heard it
from her own lips. Well, he would leave her to the life she had chosen.
It only remained for him to thank her for stripping his last illusions
from him and to bid her good-bye.
"We shall never meet again," he said, holding her hand, and looking very
much the same without his illusions as he did when he had them on. He
had read somewhere a little poem about "A Woman's No," which at the last
moment meant "Yes." And then there was another which chronicled how,
after several stanzas of upbraiding, "we rushed into each other's arms."
Both recurred to him now. He had often thought how true they were.
"I do not think we shall meet again," said Rachel, who apparently had an
unpoetic nature; "but I am glad for my own sake that we have met this
once, and have had this conversation. I think we owed it to each other
and to our--former attachment."
"Well, good-bye." He still held her hand. If she was not careful she
would lose him.
"Good-bye."
"You understand it is for always?"
"I do."
He became suddenly livid. He loved her more than ever. Would she really
let him go?
"I am not the kind of man to be whistled back," he said, fiercely. It
was an appeal and a defiance, for he was just the kind of man, and they
both knew it.
"Of course not."
"That is your last word?"
"My last word."
He dropped her hand and half turned to go.
She made no sign.
Then he strode violently out of the wood without looking behind him. At
the little gate he stopped a moment, listening intently. No recalling
voice reached him. Poets did not know what they were talking about. With
a trembling hand he slammed the gate and departed.
Rachel remained a long time sitting on the wooden bench, so long that
the stooping sun found out the solemn, outstretched arms of the cedar,
and touched them till they gleamed green as a beetle's wing. Each little
twig and twiglet was made manifest, raw gold against the twilight that
lurked beneath the heavy boughs.
She sat so still that a squirrel came tiptoeing across the moss, and
struck tail momentarily to observe her. He looked critically at her,
first with one round eye, and then, turning his sleek head, with the
other, and decided that she was harmless.
Presently a robin dropped down close to her, flashing up his gray under
wing as he alighted, and then flew up into the cedar, and from its
sun-stirred depths said his say.
The robin never forgets. In the autumn afternoons, when the shadows are
lengthening, he sings sadness into your heart. If you are joyful shut
your ears against him, for you may keep peace, but never joy, while he
is singing. He knows all about it, "love's labor lost," the gray face of
young Love dead, the hard-wrought grave in the live rock where he is
buried. And he tells of it again and again and again, as if Love's sharp
sword had indeed reddened his little breast, until the heart aches to
hear him. But he tells also that consolation is folded not in
forgetfulness, but in remembrance. That is why he sings in the silence
of the autumn dawn, before Memory closes her eyes, and again near
sunset, when Memory wakes.
Still Rachel sat motionless.
She had labored with dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works
his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after
month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that
forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting; that it was not in her to
forget. The past had seemed to stretch its cruel, desecrating hand over
all the future, cutting her off from the possibility of love and
marriage, and from the children whom in dreams she held in her arms. As
she had said to Hester, she thought she "had nothing left to give."
But now the dead past had risen from its grave in her meeting with her
former lover, and in a moment, in two short days and wakeful nights, the
past relinquished its false claim upon her life. She saw that it was
false, that she had been frightened where no fear was, that her
deliverance lay in remembrance itself, not in the handcuffs with which
until now she had bound her deliverer.
Mr. Tristram had come back into her life, and with his own hands had
destroyed the overthrown image of himself, which lay like a barrier
across her heart. He had replaced it by an accurate presentment of
himself as he really was.
"Only that which is replaced is destroyed," and it is often our real
self in its native rags, and not, as we jealously imagine, another king
in richer purple who has replaced us in the throne-room of the heart
that loved us. To the end of life Rachel never forgot Mr. Tristram, any
more than the amber forgets its fly. But she was vaguely conscious as he
left her that he had set her free. She listened to his retreating step
hardly daring to breathe. It was too good to be true. At last there was
dead silence. No echo of a footfall. Quite gone. He had departed not
only out of her presence, but out of her life.
She breathed again. A tremor, like that which shakes the first green
leaf against the March sky, stole across her crushed heart, empty at
last, empty at last. She raised her hand timidly in the sunshine. She
was free. She looked round dazzled, bewildered. The little world of
sunshine and the turquoises of sky strewn among the golden net-work of
the trees smiled at her, as one who brings good tidings.
A certain familiar hold on life and nature, so old that it was almost
new, which she had forgotten, but which her former self used to feel,
came back suddenly upon her, like a lost friend from over-seas. Scales
seemed to fall from her eyes. The light was too much for her. She had
forgotten how beautiful the world was. Everything was possible.
Some, in the night of their desolation, can take comfort when they see
the morning-star shuddering white in the east, and can say, "Courage,
the day is at hand."
But others never realize that their night is over till the sun is up.
Rachel had sat in a long stupor. The message writ large for her comfort
in the stars that the night was surely waning had not reached her,
bowed, as she thought, beneath God's hand. And the sure return of the
sun at last came upon her like a miracle.