'Yes,' I said, 'I know it. I should explain perhaps--my excuse for
troubling you was not merely historic curiosity. I have more personal
associations with this room. I spent some charming hours in it a great
many years ago--' and for the moment I had forgotten that I was
nearly fifty.
'Ah,' he said, with interest, 'you know the late people, the
Fontaines.'
'No,' I said, 'I am afraid I have never heard of them. I am very
ancient. In my time it belonged to the Savaresse family.'
'So I have heard,' he said, 'but that was long ago. I have only had it
a few years. Fontaine my landlord bought it from them. Did you know M.
le Comte!'
'No,' I answered, 'Madame la Comtesse. She was left a widow very
shortly after her marriage. I never knew M. le Comte.'
My host shrugged his shoulders.
'From all accounts,' he said, 'you did not lose very much.'
'It was an unhappy marriage,' I remarked, vaguely, 'most unhappy. Her
second marriage promised greater felicity.'
Mr. Venables looked at me curiously.
'I understood,' he began, but he broke off abruptly. 'I did not know
Madame de Savaresse married again.'
His tone had suddenly changed, it had grown less cordial, and we
parted shortly afterwards with a certain constraint. And as I walked
home pensively curious, his interrupted sentence puzzled me. Does he
look upon me as an impostor, a vulgar gossip-monger? What has he
heard, what does he know of her? Does he know anything? I cannot help
believing so. I almost wish I had asked him definitely, but he would
have misunderstood my motives. Yet, even so, I wish I had asked him.
_6th October._
I am still living constantly in the past, and the fantastic feeling,
whenever I enter a church or turn a corner that I shall meet Lorimer
again, has grown into a settled conviction. Yes, I shall meet him, and
in Bruges.... It is strange how an episode which one has thrust away
out of sight and forgotten for years will be started back into renewed
life by the merest trifle. And for the last week it has all been as
vivid as if it happened yesterday. To-night I have been putting
questions to myself--so far with no very satisfactory answer. _Was_ it
a boyish infatuation after all? Has it passed away as utterly as I
believed? I can see her face now as I sit by the fire with the finest
precision of detail. I can hear her voice, that soft, low voice, which
was none the less sweet for its modulation of sadness. I think there
are no women like her now-a-days--none, none! _Did_ she marry Lorimer?
and if not--? It seems strange now that we should have both been so
attracted, and yet not strange when one considers it. At least we were
never jealous of one another. How the details rush back upon one! I
think we must have fallen in love with her at the same moment--for we
were together when we saw her for the first time, we were together
when we went first to call on her in the Rue d'Alva--I doubt if we
ever saw her except together. It was soon after we began to get
intimate that she wore white again. She told us that we had given her
back her youth. She joined our sketching expeditions with the most
supreme contempt for _les convenances_; when she was not fluttering
round, passing from Lorimer's canvas to mine with her sweetly
inconsequent criticism, she sat in the long grass and read to
us--André Chénier and Lamartine. In the evening we went to see her;
she denied herself to the rest of the world, and we sat for hours in
that ancient room in the delicious twilight, while she sang to us--she
sang divinely--little French _chansons_, gay and sad, and snatches of
_operette_. How we adored her! I think she knew from the first how it
would be and postponed it as long as she could. But at last she saw
that it was inevitable.... I remember the last evening that we were
there--remember--shall I ever forget it? We had stayed beyond our
usual hour and when we rose to go we all of us knew that those
pleasant irresponsible evenings had come to an end. And both Lorimer
and I stood for a moment on the threshold before we said good-night,
feeling I suppose that one of us was there for the last time.
And how graceful, how gracious she was as she held out one little
white hand to Lorimer and one to me. 'Good-night, dear friends,' she
said, 'I like you both so much--so much. Believe me, I am grateful to
you both--for having given me back my faith in life, in friendship,
believe that, will you not, _mes amis_?' Then for just one delirious
moment her eyes met mine and it seemed to me--ah, well, after all it
was Lorimer she loved.
_7th October._
It seems a Quixotic piece of folly now, our proposal we would neither
take advantage of the other, but we both of us _must_ speak. We wrote
to her at the same time and likely enough, in the same words, we
posted our letters by the same post. To-day I had the curiosity to
take out her answer to me from my desk, and I read it quite calmly and
dispassionately, the poor yellow letter with the faded ink, which
wrote 'Finis' to my youth and made a man of me.
'_Pauvre cher Ami_,' she wrote to me, and when I had read that, for
the first time in my life and the only time Lorimer's superiority was
bitter to me. The rest I deciphered through scalding tears.
'_Pauvre cher Ami_, I am very sorry for you, and yet I think you
should have guessed and have spared yourself this pain, and me too a
little. No, my friend, that which you ask of me is impossible. You are
my dear friend, but it is your brother whom I love--your brother, for
are you not as brothers, and I cannot break your beautiful friendship.
No, that must not be. See, I ask one favour of you--I have written
also to him, only one little word "Viens,"--but will you not go to him
and tell him for me? Ah, my brother, my heart bleeds for you. I too
have suffered in my time. You will go away now, yes, that is best, but
you will return when this fancy of yours has passed. Ah forgive
me--that I am happy--forgive us, forgive me. Let us still be friends.
Adieu! Au revoir.
'Thy Sister,
DELPHINE.'
I suppose it was about an hour later that I took out my letter to
Lorimer. I told him as I told myself, that it was the fortune of war,
that she had chosen the better man, but I could not bear to stay and
see their happiness. I was in London before the evening. I wanted
work, hard, grinding work, I was tired of being a briefless barrister,
and as it happened, an Indian opening offered itself at the very
moment when I had decided that Europe had become impossible to me. I
accepted it, and so those two happy ones passed out of my life.
Twenty years ago! and in spite of his promise he has never written
from that day till this, not so much as a line to tell me of his
marriage. I made a vow then that I would get over my folly, and it
seemed to me that my vow was kept. And yet here to-day, in Bruges, I
am asking myself whether after all it has been such a great success,
whether sooner or later one does not have to pay for having been hard
and strong, for refusing to suffer.... I must leave this place, it is
too full of Madame de Savaresse.... Is it curiosity which is torturing
me? I _must_ find Lorimer. If he married her, why has he been so
persistently silent? If he did not marry her, what in Heaven's name
does it mean? These are vexing questions.
_10th October._
In the Church of the Dames Rouges, I met to-day my old friend
Sebastian Lorimer. Strange! Strange! He was greatly altered, I wonder
almost that I recognised him. I had strolled into the church for
benediction, for the first time since I have been back here, and when
the service was over and I swung back the heavy door, with the
exquisite music of the 'O Salutaris,' sung by those buried women
behind the screen still echoing in my ear, I paused a moment to let a
man pass by me. It was Lorimer, he looked wild and worn; it was no
more than the ghost of my old friend. I was shocked and startled by
his manner. We shook hands quite impassively as if we had parted
yesterday. He talked in a rambling way as we walked towards my hotel,
of the singing of the nuns, of the numerous religious processions, of
the blessed doctrine of the intercession of saints. The old melodious
voice was unchanged, but it was pitched in the singularly low key
which I have noticed some foreign priests acquire who live much in
churches. I gather that he has become a Catholic. I do not know what
intangible instinct, or it may be fear, prevented me from putting to
him the vital question which has so perplexed me. It is astonishing
how his face has changed, what an extraordinary restlessness his
speech and eye have acquired. It never was so of old. My first
impression was that he was suffering from some acute form of nervous
disorder, but before I left him a more unpleasant suspicion was
gradually forced upon me. I cannot help thinking that there is more
than a touch of insanity in my old friend. I tried from time to time
to bring him down to personal topics, but he eluded them dexterously,
and it was only for a moment or so that I could keep him away from the
all absorbing subject of the Catholic Church, which seems in some of
its more sombre aspects to exercise an extraordinary fascination over
him. I asked him if he often visited Bruges.
He looked up at me with a curious expression of surprise.
'I live here,' he said, 'almost always.' I have done so for years....'
Presently he added hurriedly, 'You have come back. I thought you would
come back, but you have been gone a long time--oh, a long time! It
seems years since we met. Do you remember--?' He checked himself; then
he added in a low whisper, 'We all come back, we all come back.'
He uttered a quaint, short laugh.
'One can be near--very near, even if one can never be quite close.'
He tells me that he still paints, and that the Academy, to which he
sends a picture yearly, has recently elected him an Associate. But his
art does not seem to absorb him as it did of old, and he speaks of his
success drily and as a matter of very secondary importance. He refused
to dine with me, alleging an engagement, but that so hesitatingly and
with such vagueness that I could perceive it was the merest pretext.
His manner was so strange and remote that I did not venture to press
him. I think he is unhappily conscious of his own frequent
incoherencies and at moments there are quite painful pauses when he is
obviously struggling with dumb piteousness to be lucid, to collect
himself and pick up certain lost threads in his memory. He is coming
to see me this evening, at his own suggestion, and I am waiting for
him now with a strange terror oppressing me. I cannot help thinking
that he possesses the key to all that has so puzzled me, and that
to-night he will endeavour to speak.
_11th October._
Poor Lorimer! I have hardly yet got over the shock which his visit
last night caused me, and the amazement with which I heard and read
between the lines of his strange confession. His once clear reason is,
I fear, hopelessly obscured, and how much of his story is
hallucination, I cannot say. His notions of time and place are quite
confused, and out of his rambling statement I can only be sure of one
fact. It seems that he has done me a great wrong, an irreparable
wrong, which he has since bitterly repented.
And in the light of this poor wretch's story, a great misunderstanding
is rolled away, and I am left with the conviction that the last twenty
years have been after all a huge blunder, an irrevocable and miserable
mistake. Through my own rash precipitancy and Lorimer's weak
treachery, a trivial mischance that a single word would have
rectified, has been prolonged beyond hope of redress. It seems that
after all it was not Lorimer whom she chose. Madame de Savaresse
writing to us both twenty years ago, made a vital and yet not
inexplicable mistake. She confused her envelopes, and the letter which
I received was never meant for me, although it was couched in such
ambiguous terms that until to-day the possibility of this error never
dawned on me. And my letter, the one little word of which she spoke,
was sent to Lorimer. Poor wretch! he did me a vital injury--yes, I can
say that now--a vital injury, but on the whole I pity him. To have
been suddenly dashed down from the pinnacles of happiness, it must
have been a cruel blow. He tells me that when he saw her that
afternoon and found out his mistake, he had no thought except to
recall me. He actually came to London for that purpose, vowed to her
solemnly that he would bring me back; it was only in England, that, to
use his own distraught phrase, the Devil entered into possession of
him. His half-insane ramblings gave me a very vivid idea of that
fortnight during which he lay hid in London, trembling like a guilty
thing, fearful at every moment that he might run across me and yet
half longing for the meeting with the irresoluteness of the weak
nature, which can conceive and to a certain extent execute a
_lâcheté_, yet which would always gladly yield to circumstance and let
chance or fate decide the issue. And to the very last Lorimer was
wavering--had almost sought me out, and thrown himself on my mercy,
when the news came that I had sailed.
Destiny who has no weak scruples, had stepped in and sealed Delphine's
mistake for all time, after her grim fashion. When he went back to
Bruges, and saw Madame de Savaresse, I think she must have partly
guessed his baseness. Lorimer was not strong enough to be a successful
hypocrite, and that meeting, I gather, was also their final parting.
She must have said things to him in her beautiful quiet voice which he
has never forgotten. He went away and each day he was going to write
to me, and each day he deferred it, and then he took up the _Times_
one morning and read the announcement of my marriage. After that it
seemed to him that he could only be silent....
Did _she_ know of it too? Did she suffer or did she understand? Poor
woman! poor woman! I wonder if she consoled herself, as I did, and if
so how she looks back on her success? I wonder whether she is happy,
whether she is dead? I suppose these are questions which will remain
unanswered. And yet when Lorimer left me at a late hour last night, it
seemed to me that the air was full of unspoken words. Does he know
anything of her now! I have a right to ask him these things. And
to-morrow I am to meet him, he made the request most strangely--at the
same place where we fell in with each other to-day--until to-morrow
then!
_12th October._
I have just left Sebastian Lorimer at the Church of the Dames Rouges.
I hope I was not cruel, but there are some things which one can
neither forget nor forgive, and it seemed to me that when I knew the
full measure of the ruin he had wrought, my pity for him withered
away. 'I hope, Lorimer,' I said, 'that we may never meet again.' And,
honestly, I cannot forgive him. If she had been happy, if she had let
time deal gently with her--ah yes, even if she were dead--it might be
easier. But that this living entombment, this hopeless death in life
should befall her, she so magnificently fitted for life's finer
offices, ah, the pity of it, the pity of it!... But let me set down
the whole sad story as it dawned upon me this afternoon in that
unearthly church. I was later than the hour appointed; vespers were
over and a server, taper in hand, was gradually transforming the gloom
of the high altar into a blaze of light. With a strange sense of
completion I took my place next to the chair by which Lorimer, with
bowed head, was kneeling, his eyes fixed with a strange intentness on
the screen which separated the outer worshippers from the chapel or
gallery which was set apart for the nuns. His lips moved from time to
time spasmodically, in prayer or ejaculation: then as the jubilant
organ burst out, and the officiating priest in his dalmatic of cloth
of gold passed from the sacristy and genuflected at the altar, he
seemed to be listening in a very passion of attention. But as the
incense began to fill the air, and the Litany of Loreto smote on my
ear to some sorrowful, undulating Gregorian, I lost thought of the
wretched man beside me; I forgot the miserable mistake that he had
perpetuated, and I was once more back in the past--with
Delphine--kneeling by her side. Strophe by strophe that perfect litany
rose and was lost in a cloud of incense, in the mazy arches of the
roof.
'Janua cœli,
Stella matutina,
Salus infirmorum, Ora pro nobis!'
In strophe and antistrophe: the melancholy, nasal intonation of the
priest died away, and the exquisite women's voices in the gallery took
it up with exultation, and yet with something like a sob--a sob of
limitation.
'Refugium peccatorum,
Consolatrix afflictorum,
Auxilium Christianorum, Ora pro nobis!'
And so on through all the exquisite changes of the hymn, until the
time of the music changed, and the priest intoned the closing line.
'Ora pro nobis, Sancta Dei Genetrix!'
and the voices in the gallery answered:
'Ut digni efficiamur promissionibus Christi.'
There was one voice which rose above all the others, a voice of
marvellous sweetness and power, which from the first moment had caused
me a curious thrill. And presently Lorimer bent down and whispered to
me: 'So near,' he murmured, 'and yet so far away--so near, and yet
never quite close!'
But before he had spoken I had read in his rigid face, in his eyes
fixed with such a passion of regret on the screen, why we were
there--whose voice it was we had listened to.
I rose and went out of the church quietly and hastily; I felt that to
stay there one moment longer would be suffocation.... Poor woman! so
this is how she sought consolation, in religion! Well, there are
different ways for different persons--and for me--what is there left
for me? Oh, many things, no doubt, many things. Still, for once and
for the last time, let me set myself down as a dreary fraud. I never
forgot her, not for one hour or day, not even when it seemed to me
that I had forgotten her most, not even when I married. No woman ever
represented to me the same idea as Madame de Savaresse. No woman's
voice was ever sweet to me after hers, the touch of no woman's hand
ever made my heart beat one moment quicker for pleasure or for pain,
since I pressed hers for the last time on that fateful evening twenty
years ago. Even so--!...
When the service was over and the people had streamed out and
dispersed, I went back for the last time into the quiet church. A
white robed server was extinguishing the last candle on the altar;
only the one red light perpetually vigilant before the sanctuary, made
more visible the deep shadows everywhere.
Lorimer was still kneeling with bowed head in his place. Presently he
rose and came towards me. 'She was there--Delphine--you heard her. Ah,
Dion, she loves you, she always loves you, you are avenged.'
I gather that for years he has spent hours daily in this church, to be
near her, and hear her voice, the magnificent voice rising above all
the other voices in the chants of her religion. But he will never see
her, for is she not of the Dames Rouges! And I remember now all the
stories of the Order, of its strictness, its austerity, its perfect
isolation. And chiefly, I remember how they say that only twice after
one of these nuns has taken her vows is she seen of any one except
those of her community; once, when she enters the Order, the door of
the convent is thrown back and she is seen for a single moment in the
scarlet habit of the Order, by the world, by all who care to gaze; and
once more, at the last, when clad in the same coarse red garb, they
bear her out quietly, in her coffin, into the church.
And of this last meeting, Lorimer, I gather, is always restlessly
expectant, his whole life concentrated, as it were, in a very passion
of waiting for a moment which will surely come. His theory, I confess,
escapes me, nor can I guess how far a certain feverish remorse, an
intention of expiation may be set as a guiding spring in his unhinged
mind, and account, at least in part, for the fantastic attitude which
he must have adopted for many years. If I cannot forgive him, at least
I bear him no malice, and for the rest, our paths will hardly cross
again. One takes up one's life and expiates its errors, each after
one's several fashion--and my way is not Lorimer's. And now that it is
all so clear, there is nothing to keep me here any longer, nothing to
bring me back again. For it seemed to me to-day, strangely enough, as
though a certain candle of hope, of promise, of pleasant
possibilities, which had flickered with more or less light for so many
years, had suddenly gone out and left me alone in utter darkness, as
the knowledge was borne in upon me that henceforth Madame de Savaresse
had passed altogether and finally out of my life.
And so to-morrow--Brussels!