PART II

I

He had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed.

It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him

northward on a dark October night.

A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had

lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his

legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his

ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck

in from the half-opened window.

Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious

characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had

been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but

unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut

of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now

by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more

emphatic, only, than they had been.

At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it

surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious.

The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a

certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the

fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed,

enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the

athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility.

No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt

a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening

to fixity.

To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands,

after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something

of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the

mere sense of comparison was arresting.

The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of

the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the

many hours of his lonely journey,--time and place were like empty

goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory.

Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back,

drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding

himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside

the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the

languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to

drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then

another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once

it had him, it carried him far.

It was, at the beginning, as far back as Eppie and childhood that it

carried him, to the sunny summer days and to the speechless parting of

the rainy autumn morning. And, with all that sense of change, he was

surprised to find how very much one thing had held firm. He had never

forgotten. He had kept the mute promise of that misty morning. How well

he had kept it he hadn’t known until he found the chain of memory hold

so firm as he pulled upon it. The promise had been made to himself as

well as to her, given in solemn hostage to his own childish fears. Even

then what an intuitive dread had been upon him of the impermanence of

things. But it wasn’t impermanent after all, that vision.

Dear little Eppie. It was astonishing now to find how well he

remembered, how clearly he could see, in looking back,--more clearly

than even his acute child’s perception had made evident to him,--what a

dear little Eppie she had been. She lived in his memory, and probably

nowhere else: in the present Eppie he didn’t fancy that he should find

much trace of the child Eppie, and it was sad, in its funny way, to

think that he, who had, with all his forebodings, so felt the need of a

promise, should so well remember her who, undoubtedly, had long ago

forgotten him. He took little interest in the present Eppie. But the

child wore perfectly with time.

Dear child Eppie and strange, distant boy, groping toward the present

Gavan; unhappy little boy, of deep, inarticulate, passionate affections

and of deep hopes and dreads. There they walked, knee-deep in heather;

he smelled it, the sun warm upon it, Eppie in her white,

Alice-in-Wonderland frock and her “striped” hair. And there went Robbie,

plunging through the heather before them.

Robbie. Eppie had been right, then. He had not forgotten him at all. He

and Eppie stood at the window looking out at the dawn; the scent of the

wet pine-tree was in the air, and their eyes were heavy with weeping.

How near they had been. Had any one, in all his life, ever been nearer

him than Eppie?

Curious, when he had so well kept the promise never to forget, that the

other promise, the promise to return, he had not been able to keep. In

making it, he had not imagined, even with his foreboding, what manacles

of routine and theory were to be locked upon him for the rest of his

boyhood. He had soon learned that protest, pleading, rebellion, were

equally vain, and that outward conformity was the preservative of inner

freedom. He could not jeopardize the purpose of his life--his mother’s

rescue--by a persistence that, in his uncle’s not unkind and not

unhumorous eyes, was merely foolish. He was forced to swallow his own

longings and to endure, as best he could, his pangs of fear lest Eppie

should think him slack, or even faithless. He submitted to the treadmill

of a highly organized education, that could spare no time for

insignificant summers in Scotland. Every moment in Gavan’s youth was to

be made significant by tangible achievement. The distilled knowledge of

the past, the intellectual trophies of civilization, were to be his; if

he didn’t want them, they, in the finished and effective figure of his

uncle, wanted him, and, in the sense of the fulfilment of his uncle’s

hopes, they got him.

During those years Gavan wrote to Eppie, tried to make her share with

him in all the lonely and rather abstract interests of his life. But he

found that the four years of difference, counting for nothing in the

actual intercourse of word and look, counted for everything against any

reality of intercourse in writing. Translated into that formality, the

childish affection became as unlike itself as a pressed flower is unlike

a fresh one. Eppie’s letters, punctual and very fond, were far more

immature than she herself. These letters gave accounts of animals,

walks, lessons, very bald and concise, and of the Grainger cousins and

their doings, and then of her new relation, cousin Alicia, whose

daughters, children of Eppie’s own age, soon seemed to poor Gavan, in

his distant prison, to fill his place. Eppie went away with these

cousins to Germany, where they all heard wonderful music, and after that

they came to Kirklands for the summer. Altogether, when Gavan’s

opportunity came and, with the dignity of seventeen to back his request,

he had his uncle’s consent to his spending of a month in Scotland, he

felt himself, even as he made it, rather silly in his determination to

cling at all costs to something precious but vanishing. Then it was that

Eppie had been swept away by the engulfing relative. At the very moment

of his own release, she was taken to the Continent for three years of

travel and study. The final effort of childhood to hold to its own

meaning was frustrated. The letters, after that, soon ceased. Silence

ended the first chapter.

Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like

the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was

done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed

and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years.

Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase

that sounded in every scene--that fear of life, that deep dread of its

evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that,

together, they had glanced at.

In that first chapter, whose page he had just turned, he had seen

himself as a very unhappy boy--unhappy from causes as apparent as a cage

about a pining bird. His youth had been weighted with an over-mature

understanding of wrong and sorrow. His childish faith in supreme good

had shaped itself to a conception of life as a place of probation where

oneself and, far worse, those one loved were burned continually in the

fiery furnace of inexplicable affliction. One couldn’t say what God

might not demand of one in the way of endurance. He had, helpless, seen

his fragile, shrinking mother hatefully bullied and abused or more

hatefully caressed. He had been parted from her to brood and tremble

over her distant fate. Loved things had died; loved things had all, it

seemed, been taken from him; the soulless machinery of his uncle’s

system had ground and polished at his stiffening heart. No wonder that

the boy of that first chapter had been very unhappy. But in the later

chapters, to which he had now come, the causes for unhappiness were not

so obvious, yet the gloom that overhung them deepened. He saw himself at

Eton in the hedged-round world of buoyant youth, standing apart,

preoccupied, indifferent. He had been oddly popular there. His

selflessness, his gentle candor, his capacity for a highly keyed

joy,--strung, though it was, over an incapacity for peace,--endeared

him; but even to his friends he remained a veiled and ambiguous

personality. He seemed to himself to stand on the confines of that

artificially happy domain, listening always for the sound of sorrow in

the greater world outside. History, growing before his growing mind,

loomed blood-stained, cruel, disastrous. The defeat of goodness, its

degradation by the triumphant forces of evil, haunted him. The

dependence of mind, of soul, on body opened new and ominous vistas. For

months he was pursued by morbid fears of what a jostled brain-cell or a

diseased body might do to one. One might become a fiend, it seemed, or

an imbecile, if one’s atoms were disarranged too much. Life was a tragic

duty,--he held to that blindly, fiercely at times; but what if life’s

chances made even goodness impossible? what if it were to rob one of

one’s very selfhood? It became to him a thing dangerous, uncertain, like

an insecurely chained wild beast that one must lie down with and rise

with and that might spring at one’s throat at any moment.

Under the pressure of this new knowledge, crude enough in its

materialistic forms, and keen, new thought, already subtle, already

passing from youthful crudity, the skeptical crash of his religious

faith came at last upon him. Religion had meant too much to him for its

loss to be the merely disturbing epoch of readjustment that it is in

much young development. He found himself in a reeling horror of darkness

where the only lights were the dim beacons of science and the fantastic

will-o’-the-wisps of estheticism. In the midst of the chaos he saw his

mother again. He dreaded the longed-for meeting. How could he see her

and hide from her the inner desolation? And when she came, at last,

after all these years, a desperate pity nerved him to act a part. She

was changed; the years had told on her more than even his imagination

had feared. She drooped like a tired, fading flower. She was fading,

that he saw at the first glance. Mentally as well as physically, there

was an air of withering about her, and the look of sorrow was stamped

ineffaceably upon her aging features. To know that he had lost his

faith, his hold on life, his trust in good, would have been, he thought,

to kill her. He kept from her a whisper of his desolation; and to a

fundamental skepticism like his, acting was facile. But when she was

gone, back to her parched life, he knew that to her, as well as to him,

something essential had lacked. Her love, again and again, must have

fluttered, however blindly, against that barrier between them. The years

of separation had been sad, but, in looking back at it, the summer of

meeting was saddest of all.

The experience put an edge to his hardening strength. He must fail her

in essentials; they could never meet in the blessed nearness of shared

hopes; but he wouldn’t fail her in all the lesser things of life. The

time of her deliverance was near. Love and beauty would soon be about

her. He worked at Oxford with the inner passion of a larger purpose than

mere scholarship that is the soul of true scholarship. He felt the

sharp, cold joy of high achievement, the Alpine, precipitous scaling of

the mind. And here he embarked upon the conscious quest for truth, his

skepticism grown to a doubt of its own premises.

Gavan looked quietly back upon the turmoil of that quest.

He watched himself in those young years pressing restlessly, eagerly,

pursued by the phantoms of death and nothingness, through spiral after

spiral of human thought: through Spinoza’s horror of the meaninglessness

of life and through Spinoza’s barren peace; through Kant’s skepticism

that would not let him rest in Kant’s super-rational assurance;

precipitated from Hegel’s dialectics--building their pyramid of paradox

to the apex of an impersonal Absolute--into Schopenhauer’s petulant

despair. And more and more clearly he saw, through all the forms of

thought, that the finite self dissolved like mist in the one

all-embracing, all-transcending Subject. Science, philosophy, religion,

seemed, in their final development, to merge in a Monism that conceived

reality as spirit, but as impersonal spirit, a conception that, if in

western thought it did not reduce to illusion every phase of

experience, yet reduced the finite self to a contradiction and its sense

of moral freedom, upon which were built all the valuations of life and

all its sanctions, to a self-deception. His own dual life deepened his

abiding intuition of unreality. There was the Gavan of the river, the

debate, the dinner, popular among his fellows, gentle, debonair; already

the man of the world through the fineness of his perception, his

instinct for the fitting, his perfection of mannerless manner that was

the flower of selflessness. And there was the Gavan of the inner

thought, fixed, always, in its knot of torturing perplexity. To the

inner Gavan, the Gavan of human relations was a wraith-like figure. Now

began for him the strange experience at which childish terrors had

hinted. It was in the exhaustions that followed a long wrench of

thought, or after an illness, a shock of sorrow that left one pulseless

and inert, that these pauses of an awful peace would come to him. One

faced, then, the dread vision, and it seized one, as when, in the deep

stillness of the night, the world drops from one and only a

consciousness, dispassionate and contemplative, seeing all life as

dream, remains. It was when life was thus stilled, its desires quenched

by weakness or great sorrow, that this peace stole into the empty

chambers, and whispered that all pain, all evil, all life were dreams

and that the dreams were made by the strife and restlessness of the

fragmentary self in its endless discord. See oneself as discord, as part

of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it,

and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire,

striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the

Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of

change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the

agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that

strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of

death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. To turn, with

an almost physical sickness of horror, from the hypnotic spell, to

forcibly forget thought, to clasp life about him like a loved

Nessus-robe, was a frequent solution during these years of struggle; to

reënter the place of joy and sorrow, taking it, so to speak, at its own

terms. But the specter was never far from the inner Gavan, who more and

more suspected that the longing for reality, for significance, that

flamed up in him with each renewal of personal force and energy, was the

mere result of life, not its sanction. And more and more, when, in such

renewals, his nature turned with a desperate trust to action, as a

possible test of worth, he saw that it was not action, not faith, that

created life and the trust in life, but life, the force and will

incarnated in one, that created faith and action. The very will to act

was the will to live, and the will to live was the will of the Whole

that the particular discord of one’s personal self should continue to

strive and suffer.

Life, indeed, clutched him, and that quite without any artificial effort

of his own, when his mother came home to England to die.

Gavan had just left Oxford. He was exquisitely equipped for the best

things of life, and, with the achievement, his long dependence on his

uncle suddenly ceased. An eccentric old cousin, a scholarly recluse, who

had taken a fancy to him, died, leaving him a small estate in Surrey and

fifteen hundred pounds a year.

With the good fortune came the bitter irony that turned it to dust and

ashes. All his life he had longed to help his mother, to smooth her

rough path and put power over fate into her hand. Now he could only help

her to die in peace.

He took her to the quiet old house, among its lawns, its hedges, its

high-walled gardens and deep woods. He gave her all that it was now too

late to give--beauty, ease, and love.

She was changed by disease, more changed than by life and sorrow;

gentle, very patient, but only by an effort showing her appreciation of

the loveliness, only by an effort answering his love.

Of all his fears the worst had been the fear that, with the conviction

of the worthlessness of life, the capacity for love had left him. Now,

as with intolerable anguish, her life ebbed from her, there was almost

relief in his own despair; in feeling it to the full; in seeing the

heartlessness of thought wither in the fierce flame of his agony.

It seemed to him that he had never before known what it was to love. It

was as if he were more her than himself. He relived her life and its

sorrows. He relived her miserable married years, the long loneliness,

parted from her child, her terror of the final parting, coming so

cruelly upon them; and he lived the pains of her dissolution. He

understood as he had never understood, all that she was and felt; he

yearned as he had never yearned, to hold and keep her with him in joy

and security; he suffered as he had never suffered.

Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about

the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind

rage of mere feeling--feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life.

And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a

martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from

before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to

lose her, he might not even have her to the end.

For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself,

her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for

many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an

automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the

first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the

son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a

sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her

life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would

turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if

already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life.

She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word

or look that brought them near.

Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor.

On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the

spring woods.

The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there

in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were

seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s

leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the

russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift,

aimless wandering, Gavan paused.

The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion

where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a

musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked

at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as

delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork

of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,--a little bird

just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,--he repeated,

“Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without

combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the

fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.

A dimness overtook him: as if the note, no longer keenly singing, sank

to an insect-like buzz, a chaos of minute, whirring vibrations that made

a queer, dizzy rhythm; and, in a daze of sudden indifference, both to

beauty and anguish, he seemed to see himself standing there, collapsed

against the tree, his frail figure outworn with misery,--to see himself,

and the trees, the pools of water, the drinking bird, and the snowy

flowers,--like a picture held before calm, dying eyes.

“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,--me, herself, life; that is

why she didn’t care any longer.”

He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew

clear--clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he

had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably,

so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was

relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he

thought on; “they are all of them right.”

With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life:

joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised

from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He

was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self

suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its

own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be

must always mean.

He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead

as she is,” he thought.

In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself

suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he

knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the

exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of

attitude,--not pitying it,--while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps

suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above

it all.”

The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was

never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness,

untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found

himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was

the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.

He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories

that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the

picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the

snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.

All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was

stilled forever.

II

Gavan did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He

pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls

of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his

passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of

life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his

experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him

deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker

and a tolerably interested observer of existence.

As he had ceased to have value for himself, so others had no value in

his eyes. Social effort and self-realization were, as ideals, equally

meaningless to him; and though pity was always with him, it was a pity

gentle and meditative, hopeless of alleviation: for suffering was life,

and to cure one, one must abolish the other. Material remedies seemed to

him worse than useless; they merely renewed the craving forces. The

Imitation of Christ was a fitter panacea than organized charities and

progressive legislation.

Physical pain in the helpless, the dumbly conscious, in children or

animals, hurt him and made him know that he, too, lived; and he would

spend himself to give relief to any suffering thing. He sought no

further in metaphysical systems; he desired no further insight. Now and

then, finding their pensive pastures pleasant, he would read some Hindoo

or medieval mystic; but ecstasies were as alien to him as materialism:

both were curious forms of self-deception--one the inflation of the

illusory self into the loss of any sense of relation, and the other the

self’s painful concentration into imbecilely selfish aims. The people

most pleasing to him were the people who, without self-doubt and without

self-consciousness, performed some inherited function in the state; the

simply great in life; or those who, by natural gift, the fortunately

finished, the inevitably distinguished, followed some beautifully

complex calling. The mediocre and the pretentious were unpleasing

phenomena, and the ideals of democracy mere barbarous nonsense.

His own pursuits were those of a fashionable and ambitious man, and, to

the casual observer, the utter absence of any of the pose of

disillusionized youth made all the more apparent what seemed to be a man

of the world cynicism. Those who knew him better found him charming and

perplexing. He seemed to have no barriers, yet one could not come near

him. His center receded before pursuit. And he was much pursued. He

aroused conjecture, interest, attachment. His exquisite head, the chill

sweetness of his manner, the strange, piercing charm of his smile, drew

eyes and hearts to him. Idly amused, he saw himself, all inert, boosted

from step to step, saw friends swarm about him and hardly an enemy’s

face.

It was rare for him to meet dislike. One young man, vaguely known at

Oxford, noticed with interest as a relative of Eppie’s, he had, indeed,

by merely being, it seemed, antagonized. Gavan had really felt something

of a shy, derivative affection for this Jim Grainger, a dogged, sullen,

strenuous youth; because of the dear old memory, he had made one or two

delicate, diffident approaches--approaches repulsed with bull-dog

defiance. Gavan, who understood most things, quite understood that to

the serious, the plain, the obviously laborious son of an impecunious

barrister, he might have given the impression, so funnily erroneous, of

a sauntering dilettantism, an aristocratic _flânerie_. At all events,

Grainger was intrenched in a resolute disapproval, colored, perhaps,

with some tinge of reminiscent childish jealousy. When their paths again

crossed in London and Gavan found his suavity encountered by an even

more scowling sarcasm, jealousy, of another type, was an obvious cause.

Grainger, scornful of social dexterities and weapons, had worked himself

to skin and bone in preparation for a career, and a career that he

intended to be of serious significance. And at its outset he found

himself in apparent competition with Gavan for a post that, significant

indeed to him, as the first rung on the political ladder, could only be

decorative to his rival--the post of secretary to a prominent

cabinet-minister. Grainger had his justified hopes, and he was, except

for outward graces, absolutely fitted for the place.

In his path he found the listless figure of the well-remembered and

heartily disliked Gavan--a gilded youth, pure and simple, and as such

being lifted, by all accounts, onto the coveted rung of the coveted

ladder. Gavan’s scholarly fitness for the post Grainger only half

credited. Of the sturdy professional class, with a streak of the easily

suspicious bourgeois about him, he was glad to believe tales of

drawing-room influence. He expressed himself with disgusted openness as

to the fatal effect of a type like Palairet’s on public life. Gavan

heard a little and guessed more. He found himself sympathizing with

Grainger; he had always liked him. With an effort that he had never used

on his own behalf, he managed to get him fitted into the pair of shoes

that were standing waiting for his own feet. It had been, indeed, though

in superficial ways, an affair of drawing-room influence. The wife of

the great statesman, as well as that high personage himself, was one of

Gavan’s devoted and baffled friends. She said that he made her think of

a half-frozen bird that one longed to take in one’s hands and warm, and

she hopefully communed with her husband as to the invigorating effect of

a career upon him. She suspected Gavan--his influence over her

husband--when she found that an alien candidate was being foisted upon

her.

“Grainger!” she exclaimed, vexed and incredulous. “Why Grainger? Why not

anybody as well as Grainger? Yes, I’ve seen the young man. He looks

like a pugilistic Broad-Church parson. All he wants is to climb and to

reform everything.”

“Exactly the type for British politics,” Gavan rejoined. “He is in

earnest about politics, and I’m not; you know I’m not.” His friend

helplessly owned that he was exasperating. Grainger, had he known to

whom he was indebted for his lift, would have felt, perhaps, a

heightened wrath against “drawing-room influence.”

Happily and justifiably unconscious, he proceeded to climb.

Meanwhile another pair of shoes was swiftly found for Gavan. He went out

to India as secretary to the viceroy.

Here, in the surroundings of his early youth, the second great moral

upheaval of his life came to him. Three years had passed since his

mother’s death. He was twenty-six years old.

During a long summer among the mountains of Simla, he met Alice Grafton.

She was married, a year older than himself, but a girl still in mind and

appearance--fragile, hesitant, exquisite. Gavan at his very first seeing

of her felt something knocking in his heart. It seemed like pity,

instinctive pity, the bond between him and life, and for some time he

deluded himself with this comparatively safe interpretation. He did not

quite know why he should pity Mrs. Grafton. That she should look like a

girl was hardly a reason, nor that her husband, large, masterful,

embossed with decorations, was uninteresting. She had been married to

him--by all accounts the phrase applied--at nineteen and could not find

him sympathetic; but, after all, many cheerful women were in that

situation. He was a kindly, an admiring husband, and her life was set in

luxurious beauty. Yet piteousness was there. She was all promise and

unfulfilment; and dimly, mutely, she seemed to feel that the promise

would never be fulfilled, as though a too-early primrose smiled

wistfully through a veil of ice. Should she never become consciously

unhappy that would be but another symptom of permanent immaturity.

Gavan rode with her and talked with her, and read with her in her fresh,

flower-filled drawing-room. Their tastes were not at all alike; but he

did not in the least mind that when she lifted her lovely eyes to him

over poor poetry; and when she played and sang to him her very

ineffectuality added a pathos, full of charm, to the obvious ballads

that she liked. It was sweet, too, and endearing, to watch her, by

degrees, molding her taste to his until it became a delightful and

intuitive echo.

He almost wondered if it was also in echo that she began to feel for

herself his own appreciation of her. Certainly she matured to

consciousness of lack. She began to confide; not with an open frankness,

but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She

shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful

husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was

horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for

help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes

and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing

little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of

the world. At first it appealed, and then it possessed him. He had

thought that what he felt for her was only pity. He had thought himself

too dead to all earthly pangs for the rudimentary one of love to reach

him. But when, one day, he found her weeping, alone, among her flowers,

he took her into his arms and the great illusion seized him once more.

It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter

of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This

human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only

reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed

and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self,

as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and

defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.

“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.

He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and

terror in the joy.

They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love

that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so

lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of

awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of

knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it

in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as

the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever.

That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.

Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through

the broken barriers of thought--jealousies and desires that showed him

his partaking of the common life of humanity.

Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet,

and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong,

instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience

from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but

it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.

It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or

conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as

dishonorable.

He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him.

They would go back to Europe; live in Italy--the land of happy outcasts

from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty

grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with

a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.

“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need

fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about

anything but you; I never will--ambition, country, family. Nothing

outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall

ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”

But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the

girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a

mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to

her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew

only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong.

Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things,

the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he

who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.

She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her

feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an

open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last,

since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her

sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”

He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation

that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me.

Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he

understood.

Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I

can’t. I can’t.”

She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave

me! You will not abandon me!”

“I cannot--stay with you.”

“You win my heart--humiliate me,--see that I’m yours--only yours,--and

then cast me off!”

“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to

let me take you with me?”

“A target for the world!”

“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all--all; but what else is

there--unless I leave you?”

She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only

answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to

stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the

ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue--I can’t do that;

it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”

“You despise me; you think me wicked--because I can’t have such horrible

courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody

more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like

that--cut off from everything--and not be degraded in the end.”

It was a new species of torture that now tore at Gavan’s heart and mind.

He saw too clearly the force of the arguments that underlay her specious

appeal--more clearly, far, than she could see. It was horribly true that

the life of happy outlawry he proposed might wither and debase more than

a conscious sin. The organized, crafty wisdom of life was on her side.

And on his was a mere matter of taste. He could find no sanction for his

resistance to her and to himself except in that instinctive recoil from

what he felt as dishonor. He was sacrificing them both to a silly,

subjective figment. The lurid realization, that burned and froze, went

through him, and with it the unanswerable necessity. He must, he must,

sacrifice them. And he must talk the language of right and wrong as

though he believed in it. He acted as if he did, yet nothing was further

from him than such belief; that was the strange agony that wrenched his

brain as he said: “You are blind, not wicked. Some day you will thank me

if I make it possible for you to let me go.” And, he too incredulous, he

cried, “Alice, Alice, will you really let me go without you?”

She would not consent to the final alternative, and the struggle lasted

for a week, through their daily meetings--the dream-like, deft meetings

under the eyes of others,--and while they rode alone over the

hills--long, sad rides, when both, often in a moody silence, showed at

once their hope and their resistance.

Her fear won at last. “And I can’t even pretend that it’s goodness,” she

said, her voice trembling with self-scorn. “You’ve abased me to the

dust, Gavan. Yes, it’s true, if you like--my fear is greater than my

love.” Irony, a half-felt anger, helped her to bear the blow, for, to

the end, she could not believe that he would find strength to leave her.

The parting came suddenly. Wringing her hands, looking hard into her

face, where he saw still a fawning hope and a half-stupefied despair, he

left her, and felt that he had torn his heart up by the very roots.

And he had sacrificed her and himself, to what? Gavan could ask himself

the question at leisure during the following year.

Yet, from the irrational sacrifice was born a timid, trembling trust, a

dim hope that the unbannered combat had not been in vain, that even the

blind holding to the ambiguous right might blossom in a better life for

her than if he had taken the joy held out to him. The trust was as

irrational as the sacrifice, but it was dear to him. He cherished it,

and it fluttered in him, sweet, intangible, during all the desolate

year. Then, at the year’s end, he met Alice, suddenly, unexpectedly, and

found her ominously changed. Her girlhood was gone. A hard, glittering

surface, competent, resourceful, hid something.

The strength of his renouncement was so rooted that he felt no personal

fear, and for her, too, he no longer felt fear in his nearness. What he

felt was a new pity--a pity suffocating and horrible. Whispers of

discreet scandal enlightened him. Alice was in no danger of what she

most shrank from--a public pillory; but she was among those of whom the

world whispers, with a half-condoning smile and shrug.

Gavan saw her riding one morning with a famous soldier, a Nietzschian

type of strength, splendor, and high indifference. And now he understood

all. He knew the man. He was one who would have stared light irony at

Gavan’s chivalrous willingness to sacrifice his life to a woman; to such

a charming triviality as an intrigue he would sacrifice just enough and

no more. He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from

any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.

A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once

again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed

to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the

miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was

meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.

She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone

with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair.

She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield

of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the

use of shields.

“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,--far worst,--I don’t love him; I never

loved him. It was simply--simply”--she could hardly speak--“that he

frightened and flattered me. It was vanity--recklessness--I don’t know

what it was.”

After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or

anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that

something quiet enveloped her.

She looked up to see his eyes far from her.

“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.

Once more he was looking at it all--all the cruel, the meaningless drama

in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought

had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no

trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained.

He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he

had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire,

only an immense, an indifferent pity.

“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me;

but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated

mechanically, gently stroking her hair--hair whose profuse, wonderful

gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.

“You forgive me--you do forgive me, Gavan?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear

Alice.”

“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I

haven’t lost that.”

He did not reply, looking away and lifting his hand from her hair.

The woman, leaning on his knees, felt a stealing sense of awe, worse

than any fear of his anger. And worse than a vehement disavowal of love,

worse than a spurning of her from him, were his words: “I want you not

to suffer, dear Alice; I want you to find peace.”

“Peace! What peace can I find?”

He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to

put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and

letting it all go.”

“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what

do you mean? If you would forgive me--really forgive me--and take me

now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have

found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you,

nothing else matters.”

He looked steadily at her, no longer touching her. “You have said what I

mean. You have found it out. The only thing to be afraid of is

ourselves. You will not see this man again? You will keep that promise

to me?”

“Any promise! Anything you ask! And, indeed, indeed, I could not see him

now,” she shuddered. “Gavan, you will take me away with you?”

He wondered at her that she did not see how far he was from her--how

far, and yet how one with her, how merged in her through his

comprehension of the essential unity that bound all life together, that

made her suffering part of him, even while he looked down upon it from

an almost musing height.

He felt unutterable gentleness and unutterable ruthlessness. “I don’t

mean that, Alice. You won’t lose yourself by clinging to me, by clinging

to what you want.”

“You don’t love me! Oh, you don’t love me! I have killed your love!” she

wailed out, rising to her feet, pierced by her full realization. She

stepped back from him to gaze at him with a sort of horror. “You talk as

if you had become a priest.”

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her--priestly indeed,

almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the

preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he

felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might

serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense

of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a

grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the

cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized

irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything

differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way--to go to

church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for

others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help

when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh,

you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it

from me! What is religion to me, what is anything--anything in the world

to me--if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I

can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives

wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was

never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of

appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more

human tone. “You are not wicked--no more--no less--than any one. I don’t

despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have

drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you

needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as

that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true--the

only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is

to--is to”--he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and

wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their

ever-verdant youth--“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the

dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand--“dear Alice.” And, with all the

delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a

steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable

soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly--or foolish--again.”

Her lover lost,--the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,”

told her how utterly lost,--a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went

through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to

sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a

creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps

in heaven--we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of

an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him,

when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first

that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;--that lasted

for a year;--and then, alas! alas!--but, after all, the smile and shrug

was the best philosophy,--that she rode once more with the Nietzschian

lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard--perhaps, at

any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the

man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he

might think: she really loved him now--the other; not as she had loved

Gavan,--that would always be first,--but very much; and she needed love,

she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved

her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not

believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she

was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the

intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be

seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an

open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s

own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly

after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set

her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by

promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to

England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor

reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out

for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,--there had been, for

him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had

spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic

effigy of the past--his father, poor and broken in health, the old

serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its

fangs drawn.

People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat.

Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him

most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on

some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a

historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of

queer little sects,--failures in the struggle for survival,--their

brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.

His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to

the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there

burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked

as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel

that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble,

flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to

work, as to all else.

* * * * *

GAVAN’S mind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over

the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a

passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the

mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his

mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the

old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair

and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they

might be together in heaven.

He had rarely known a greater lucidity than in those swift, lonely

hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past

accomplished and a future not yet begun--as though one should sunder

time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage,

and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal

moment.

This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full

view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again

turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was

something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s

face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she

would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt

sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose

memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that

his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory

would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain,

of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and

unfulfilled.

One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of

sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with

some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought

gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong

activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust

into an underground prison.

He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had

heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had

heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every

one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it

meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social

deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did

not care.

Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled

with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art

and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked

in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary

friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by

all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie

Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than

once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism,

and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in

sympathy.

This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown

into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She

had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son,

an officer in the Guards--a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last

type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not

stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a

reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her

clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsman had not even

prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen

in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into

stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an

ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her

broken heart--and she didn’t deny that it was broken--for a year or so

of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely

as possible,--it wasn’t a deep break after all,--and on the thrilling

occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was

magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that

the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity

for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and

discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect.

She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she

would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now--Eppie’s

was the publicity of popularity--of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger,

who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly

undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes.

All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative

could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by

misfortune and cured forever of folly.

So the talk went, and Gavan took such gabble with a large pinch of

ironic incredulity; but at the same time the gossip left its trail. The

impetuous and devastating young lady, with her assurance and her aim at

large successes, was to him a distasteful figure. There was pain in

linking it with little Eppie. It stood waiting in the wings and was

altogether novel and a little menacing to one’s peace of mind. He really

did not want to see Miss Gilford; she belonged to a modern type

intensely wearisome to him. But she was staying with her uncle and

aunt--only Miss Barbara was left--at Kirklands, and the general, after a

meeting in London, had written begging him to pay them all a visit, and,

since there had seemed no reason for not going, here he was.

Here he was, and round the corner of the wing the new Eppie stood

waiting. Poor little Eppie of childhood--she was lost forever.

But all the clearness of the night concentrated, at dawn, into that

vivid memory of the past where they had wandered together, sharing joy

and sorrow.

That was long, long over. To-morrow was already here, and to-morrow

belonged to the new Eppie.

III

Gavan spent the morning in Edinburgh, seeing an old relative, and

reached Kirklands at six.

It was a cold October evening, the moors like a dark, sullenly heaving

ocean and a heavy bar of sunset lying along the horizon.

The windows of the old white house mirrored the dying color, and here

and there the inner light of fire and candle seemed like laughter on a

grave face. With all its loneliness it was a happy-looking house; he

remembered that; and in the stillness of the vast moors and the coming

night it made him think of a warmly throbbing heart filling with courage

and significance a desolate life.

The general came from the long oak library, book in hand, to welcome

him. Gavan was almost automatically observant of physical processes and

noted now the pronounced limp, the touch of garrulity--symptoms of the

fine old organism’s placid disintegration. Life was leaving it

unreluctantly, and the mild indifference of age made his cordiality at

once warmer and more impersonal than of old.

As he led Gavan to his room, the room of boyhood, near Eppie’s,

overlooking the garden and the wooded hills, he told him that Eppie and

Miss Barbara were dressing and that he would have time for a talk with

them before dinner at eight.

“It’s changed since you were here, Gavan. Ah! time goes--it goes. Poor

Rachel! we lost her five years ago. If Eppie didn’t look after us so

well we should be lonely, Barbara and I. We seldom get away now. Too old

to care for change. But Eppie always gives us three or four months, and

a letter once a week while she’s away. She puts us first. This is home,

she says. She sees clever people at Alicia Waring’s, has the world at

her feet,--you’ve heard, no doubt,--but she loves Kirklands best. She

gardens with me--a great gardener Eppie, but she is good at anything she

sets herself to; she drives her aunt about, she reads to us and sings to

us,--you have heard of her singing, too,--keeps us in touch with life.

Eppie is a wonderful person for sharing happiness,” the general

monologued, looking about the fire-lit room; and Gavan felt that, from

this point of view, some of the little Eppie might still have survived.

“So you have given up the idea of the House?” the general went on.

“I’m no good at it,” said Gavan; “I’ve proved it.”

“Proved it? Nonsense. Wait till you are fifty before saying that. Why,

you’ve everything in your favor. You weren’t enough in earnest; that was

the trouble. You didn’t care enough; you played into your opponents’

hands. The British public doesn’t understand idealism or irony. Eppie

told us all about it.”

“Eppie? How did Eppie know?” He found himself using her little name as a

matter of course.

“She knows everything,” the general rejoined, with his air of happy,

derived complacency; “even when she’s not in England, she never loses

touch. Eppie is very much behind the scenes.”

The simile recalled to Gavan his own vision of the stage and the waiting

figure. “Even behind my scenes!” he ejaculated, smiling at so much

omniscience.

“From the moment you came into public life, yes.”

“And she knows why I failed at it? Idealism and irony?”

“That’s what she says; and I usually find Eppie right.” The general,

after the half-humorous declaration, had a pause, and before leaving his

guest, he added, “Right, except about her own affairs. She is a child

there yet.”

Eppie’s disaster must have been keenly felt and keenly resented at

Kirklands. The general made no further reference to it and Gavan asked

no question.

There was a fire, a lamp, and several clusters of candles in the long,

dark library when Gavan entered it an hour later, so that the darkness

was full of light; yet he had wandered slowly down its length, looking

about him at the faded tan, russet, and gilt of well-remembered books,

at the massive chairs and tables, all in their old places, all so

intimately familiar, before seeing that he was not alone in the room.

Some one in white was sitting, half submerged in a deep chair, behind

the table with its lamp--some one who had been watching him as he

wandered, and who now rose to meet him, taking him so unawares that she

startled him, all the light in the dim room seeming suddenly to center

upon her and she herself to throw everything, even his former thoughts

of her, into the background.

It was Eppie, of course, and all that he had heard of her, all that he

had conjectured, fell back before the impression that held him in a

moment, long, really dazzled, yet very acute.

Her face was narrow, pale, faintly freckled; the jaw long, the nose

high-bridged, the lips a little prominent; and, as he now saw, a clear

flush sprang easily to her cheeks. Eyes, lips, and hair were vivid with

color: the hair, with its remembered rivulets of russet and gold, piled

high on her head, framing the narrow face and the long throat; the eyes

gray or green or gold, like the depths of a mountain stream.

He had heard many analogies for the haunting and fugitive charm of Miss

Gifford’s face--a charm that could only, apparently, be caught with the

subtleties of antithesis. One appreciator had said that she was like an

angelic jockey; another, that with a statesman’s gaze she had a baby’s

smile; another, that she was a Flying Victory done by Velasquez. And

with his own dominant impression of strength, sweetness, and daring,

there crowded other similes. Her eyes had the steeplechaser’s hard,

smiling scrutiny of the next jump; the halloo of the hunt under a

morning sky was in them, the joyous shouts of Spartan boys at play; yet,

though eyes of heroism and laughter, they were eyes sad and almost

tragically benignant.

She was tall, with the spare lightness of a runner poised for a race,

and the firm, ample breast of a hardy nymph. She suggested these pagan,

outdoor similes while, at the same time, luxuriously feminine in her

more than fashionable aspect, the last touches of modernity were upon

her: her dress, the eighteenth-century, interpreted by Paris, her

decorations all discretion and distinction--a knot of silver-green at

her breast, an emerald ring on her finger, and emerald earrings, two

drops of smooth, green light, trembling in the shadows of her hair.

Altogether Gavan was able to grasp the impression even further, to

simplify it, to express at once its dazzled quality and its acuteness,

as various and almost violent, as if, suddenly, every instrument in an

orchestra were to strike one long, clear, vibrating note.

His gaze had been prolonged, and hers had answered it with as open an

intentness. And it was at last she who took both his hands, shook them a

little, holding them while, not shyly, but with that vivid flush on her

cheek, “_You_,” she said.

For she was startled, too. It _was_ he. She remembered, as if she had

seen them yesterday, his air of quick response, surface-shrinking, deep

composure, the old delicious smile, and the glance swiftly looking and

swiftly averted.

“And _you_,” Gavan repeated. “I haven’t changed so much, though,” he

said.

“And I have? Really much? Long skirts and turned up hair are a

transformation. It’s wonderful to see you, Gavan. It makes one get hold

of the past and of oneself in it.”

“Does it?”

“_Doesn’t_ it?” She let go his hands, and moving to the fire and

standing before it while she surveyed him, she went on, not waiting for

an answer:

“But I don’t suppose that you have my keenness of memory. It all rushes

back--our walks, our games, our lessons, the smell of the heather, the

very taste of the heather-honey we ate at tea, and all the things you

did and said and looked; your building the Petit Trianon, and your

playing dolls with me that day; your Agnes, in her pink dress, and my

Elspeth, whom I used to whip so.”

“I remember it all,” said Gavan, “and I remember how I broke poor

Elspeth.”

“Do you?”

“All of it: the attic windows and the pine-tree under them, and the

great white bird, and the dreadful, soft little thud on the garden

path.”

“Yes, I can see your face looking down. You were quite silent and

frozen. I screamed and screamed. Aunt Barbara thought that _you_ had

fallen at first from the way I screamed.”

“Poor little Eppie. Yes, I remember; it was horrid.”

Their eyes, smiling, quizzical, yet sad, watched, measured each other,

while they exchanged these trophies from the past. He had joined her

beside the fire, and, turning, she leaned her hands on the mantel and

looked into the flames. So looking, her face had its aspect of almost

tragic brooding. It was as if, Gavan thought, under the light memories,

all those visions of his night were there before her, as if,

astonishingly, and in almost uncanny measure, she shared them.

“And do you remember Robbie?” she asked presently.

“I was just thinking of Robbie,” Gavan answered. It was her face that

had brought back the old sorrow, and that memory, more than any, linked

them over all that was new and strange. They glanced at each other.

“I am so glad,” said Eppie.

“Because I remember?”

“Yes, that you haven’t forgotten. You said you would.”

“Did I?” he asked, though he quite remembered that, too.

“Yes; and I should have felt Robbie more dead if you had forgotten him.”

This was wonderfully not the Miss Gifford, and wonderfully the old

Eppie. She saw that thought, too, answering it with, “Things haven’t

really changed so much, have they? It’s all so very near--all of that.”

So near, that its sudden sharing was making Gavan a little

uncomfortable, with the discomfort of the night before justified,

intensified.

He hadn’t imagined such familiar closeness with a woman really unknown,

nor that, sweeping away all the formalities that might have grown up

between them, she should call him Gavan and make it natural for him to

call her Eppie. He didn’t really mind. It was amusing, charming perhaps,

perhaps even touching--yes, of course it was that; but she was rather

out of place: much nearer than where he had imagined she would be, on

the stage before him.

Passing to another memory, she now said, “I clung for years, you know,

to your promise to come back.”

“I couldn’t come--really and simply could not.”

“I never for a moment thought you could, any more than I thought you

could forget Robbie.”

“And when I could come, you were gone.”

“How miserable that made me! I was in Rome when I had the news from

Uncle Nigel.”

He felt bound fully to exonerate the past. “I had the life, during my

boyhood, of a sumptuous galley-slave. I had everything except liberty

and leisure. I was put into a system and left there until it had had its

will of me. And when I was free I imagined that you had forgotten all

about me. To a shy, warped boy, a grown-up Eppie was an alarming idea.”

“I never thought you had forgotten _me_!” said Eppie, smiling.

Again she actually disturbed him; but, lightly, he replied with the

truth, feeling a certain satisfaction in its lightness: “Never, never;

though, of course, you fell into a background. You can’t deny that _I_

did.”

“Oh, no, I don’t deny it.” Her smile met his, seemed placidly to

perceive its meaning. She did not for a moment imply, by her admissions,

any more than he did; the only question was, What did his admissions

imply?

She left them there, going on in an apparent sequence, “Have you heard

much about me, Gavan?”

“A good deal,” he owned.

“I ask because I want to pick up threads; I want to know how many

stitches are dropped, so to speak. Since you have heard, I want to know

just what; I often seem to leave reverberations behind me. Some rather

ugly ones, I fear. You heard, perhaps, that I was that rather ambiguous

being, the young woman of fashion, materialistic, ambitious, hard.” Her

gaze, with its cool scrutiny, was now upon him.

“Those are really too ugly names for what I heard. I gathered, on the

whole, that you were merely very vigorous and that you had more

opportunities than most people for vigor.”

“I’m glad that you saw it so; but all the same, the truth, at times,

hasn’t been beautiful. I have, often, been too indifferent toward people

who didn’t count for me, and too diplomatic toward those who did. You

see, Gavan,” she put it placidly before him, not at all as if drawing

near in confidence,--she was much further in her confidences than in her

memories,--but merely as if she unrolled a map before him so that he

might clearly see where, at present, they found themselves, “you see, I

am a nearly penniless girl--just enough to dress and go about. Of course

if I didn’t dress and didn’t go about I could keep body and soul

together; but to the shrewd eyes of the world, a girl living on her

friends, making capital of her personality, while she seeks a husband

who will give her the sort of place she wants--oh, yes, the world isn’t

so unfair, either, when one takes off the veils. And this girl, with the

personality that pays, was put early in a place from where she could see

all sorts of paths at once, see the world, in its ladder aspect, before

her--all the horridness of low rungs and all the satisfaction of high

ones. I have been tempted through complexity of understanding; perhaps I

still am. One wants the best; and when one doesn’t see clearly what the

best is, one is in danger of becoming ugly. But echoes are often

distorting.”

Miss Gifford was now very fully before him, as she had evidently

intended to be. It was as if she herself had drawn between them the

barrier of the footlights and as if, on her chosen stage, she swept a

really splendid curtsey. And this frank and panoplied young woman of the

world was far easier to deal with than the reminiscent Eppie. He could

comfortably smile and applaud from his stall, once more the mere

spectator--easiest of attitudes.

“The echoes, on the whole, were rather magnificent, as if an Amazon had

galloped across mountains and left them calling her prowess from peak to

peak.”

Her eyes, quickly on his, seemed to measure the conscious artificiality,

to compare it with what he had already, more helplessly, shown her. He

felt his rather silly deftness penetrated and that she guessed that the

mountain calls had not at all enchanted him. She owned to her own

acuteness in her next words:

“And you don’t like young ladies to gallop across mountains. Well, I

love galloping, though I’m sorry that I leave over-loud echoes. You, at

all events, are noiseless. You seem to have sailed over my head in an

air-boat. It was hard for me to keep any trace of you.”

“But I don’t at all mean that I dislike Amazons to have their rides.”

“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when

you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I

first came to London. I only heard of lofty things--scholarly

distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s

prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”

“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his

appropriate bouquet.

She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It

was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless

speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that

the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head

a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of

a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her--and more for him than for

herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to

accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had

not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had

perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she

wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of

herself at all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her

so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she,

more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made

him feel himself a blunderer.

But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech

that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are

loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars,

but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant,

elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of really _you_.

It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the

papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that

earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad,

because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”

He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over

his own blunder.

“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was

defeated,” he said.

“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”

“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”

“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by

merely stretching out your hand--they were under it, not over your head.

You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair

with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts,

suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she

leaned back in her chair, fixing him with that look of cheerful

hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type,

that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t

you?”

“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I

said--you didn’t care enough.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still

examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you,

a lot?”

“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged

him--gaily, not defiantly--to misunderstand her again.

“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.

“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I

believe that its grapes are worth while,--and by grapes I mean the

things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher

they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”

Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the

House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.

“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”

“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see

that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”

He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality;

looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had

crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-natured

gipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it

would have been neither.”

“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”

“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know.

Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”

Once more he was conscious of the discomfort, slight and stealing, as

though the gipsy knew too much already. But he protested, and with

sincerity: “If there is anything to find you will certainly find it. I

hope that you will find it worth your while. I hope that we shall be

great friends.”

She smiled up at him, clearly and quietly: “I have always been your

great friend.”

“Always? All this while?”

“All this while. Never mind if you haven’t felt it; I have. I will do

for both.”

Her smile, her look, made him finally and completely understand the

application of the well-worn word to her. She was charming. She could be

lavish, pour out unasked bounty upon one, and yet, in no way

undervaluing it, be full of delicacy, of humor, in her generosity.

“I thought I hadn’t any right to feel it,” said Gavan. “I thought you

would not have remembered.”

“Well, you will find out--I always remember, it’s my strong point,” said

Eppie.

IV

Next morning at breakfast he had quite a new impression of her.

Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified

complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the

windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to

rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.

Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general

finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon

and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her

high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in

her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more

affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and

gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation,

or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though

moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated;

over-expression had become automatic with her.

Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had had a walk, stooping to

kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same

office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an

Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat,

dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze

clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the

sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks,

morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now

that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested

sadness.

Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was

young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it

were.

There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its

sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine,

took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded

face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a

permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had

brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of

weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols.

Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.

While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the

general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in

the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the

attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the

light, the movement of their monotonous days. Not only did she bring

them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The

interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious

being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared

for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She

was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping

Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race.

Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so

significant symptom, the power of playfulness--the intellectual

detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness

scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and

audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread

to a strong hand.

Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured

to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and

thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local

drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black--with a blackness

beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished

some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her

doing it herself.

From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced

down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that,

meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an

irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under

a pot, all this, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have

become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”

“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics

did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a

topic.

“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said

Eppie.

“Gavan’s not of that weak-kneed persuasion.”

“Oh, he isn’t weak-kneed!” laughed Eppie.

She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters

after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until

later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy

hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room,

her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea.

She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in

the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night

before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or

distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now

she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look

to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the

hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary

group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so

wonderfully comprehended his fears.

She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of

hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her

pockets, her head unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and

he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches

upon the notes of the past rare things with her.

In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear

voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream

leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like

the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy.

“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles

along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her

face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match

his own appreciation.

“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.

Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look

different.”

“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a

kindly, diagnosing young doctor.

“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that

you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”

“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful

curiosity.

“I don’t know. I did. There,”--she paused to point,--“do you remember

the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller

now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one

think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?--with the beauty that it stays and

doesn’t pass. When I was a child--did I ever confide it to you?--my

dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me

up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that

one could have held on.”

“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”

“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate

thrill of it.”

“You are fond of thrills and perils.”

“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing--something

fundamental in us, I suppose.”

She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her

skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with

to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the

life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words

usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her

directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no

spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they

could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had

known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed,

being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still

engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed,

penetrated,--for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own

deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover

that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the

antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering.

Still, she should run, if possible, no such risk. They were to be

friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an

accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in

childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.

Meanwhile, unconscious, no doubt, of these barriers, Eppie walked beside

him and made him talk about himself. She knew, of course, of his

mother’s death; she did not speak of that: many barriers were her

own--she was capable of most delicate avoidances. But she asked after

his father. “He is still alive, I hear.”

“Yes, indeed, and gives me a good deal of his company.”

“Oh.” She was a little at a loss. He could guess at what she had heard

of his father. He went on, though choosing his words in a way that

showed a slight wincing behind his wish to be very frank and friendly

with her, for even yet his father made him wince, standing, as he did,

for the tragedy of his mother’s life: “He is very much alive for a

person so gone to pieces. But I can put up with him far more comfortably

than when he was less pitiable.”

“How much do you have to put up with him?” she asked, trying to image,

as he saw, his ménage in Surrey, in the house he had just been

describing to her, its old bricks all vague pinks and mauves, its

high-walled gardens clustering near it, its wonderful hedges, that, he

said, it ruined him to keep up to their reputation of exquisite

formality; and, within, its vast library--all the house a brain,

practically, the other rooms like mere places for life’s renewal before

centering in the intellectual workshop. She evidently found it difficult

to place, among the hedges, the lawns, the long walls of the library, a

father, gone to pieces perhaps, but displaying all the more helplessly

his general unworthiness. Even in lenient circles, Captain Palairet was

thought to have an undignified record.

“Oh, he is there for most of the time. He is there now,” said Gavan,

without pathos. “He has no money left, and now that I’ve a little I’m

the obvious thing to retire to.”

“I hope that it’s not very horrid for you.”

“I can’t say that it’s horrid at all. I don’t see much of him, and, in

many respects, he has remained, for the onlooker, rather a charming

creature. He gives me very little trouble--smokes, eats, plays

billiards. When we meet, we are very affable.”

Eppie did not say, “You tolerate him because he is piteous,” but he

imagined that she guessed it.

V

He was awakened early next morning by the sound of singing in the garden

below.

His windows were widely opened and a cold, pure air filled the room. He

lay dreamily listening for some moments before recognizing Eppie’s

voice--recognizing it, though he had never heard her sing.

Fresh and strong, it put a new vitality into the simple sadness of an

old Scotch ballad, as though in the very sorrow it found joy. It was not

an emotional voice. Clearly and firmly it sounded, and seemed a part of

the frosty, sunny morning, part of the sky that was like a great chalice

filled with light, of the whitened hills, the aromatic pine-woods, and

the distant, rushing burn. He had sprung up after the first dreamy

listening and looked out at it all, and at her walking through the

garden, her dog at her heels. She went out by the little gate sunken

deep in the wall, and disappeared in the woods; and still the voice

reached him, singing on, and at each repetition of the monotonous,

departing melody, a sadder, sweeter sense of pain strove in his heart.

He listened, looking down at the pine-tree beneath the window, at the

garden, the summer-house, the withered tangle of the rose upon the wall,

and up at the hilltop, at the crystalline sky; and such a sudden pang of

recollection pierced him that tears came to his eyes.

What was it that he remembered? or, rather, what did he not? Things deep

and things trivial, idle smiles, wrenching despairs, youth, sorrow,

laughter,--all the past was in the pang, all the future, too, it seemed,

and he could not have said whether his mother, Alice, Eppie with her

dolls, and little Robbie, or the clairvoyant intuition of a future

waiting for him here--whether presage or remembrance--were its greater

part.

Not until the voice had died, in faintest filaments of sound, far away

among the woods, did the pain fade, leaving him shaken. Such moods were

like dead things starting to life, and reminded him too vividly of the

fact that as long as one was alive, one was, indeed, in danger from

life; and though his thought was soon able to disentangle itself from

the knot of awakened emotions that had entwined it for a moment, a vague

sense of fear remained with him. Something had been demanded of

him--something that he had, involuntarily, found himself giving. This it

was to have still a young nature, sensitive to impressions. He

understood. Yet it was with a slight, a foolishly boyish reluctance, as

he told himself, that he went down some hours later to meet Eppie at

breakfast.

There was an unlooked-for refuge for him when he found her hardly

noticing him, and very angry over some village misdemeanor. The anger

held her far away. She dilated on the subject all during breakfast,

pouring forth her wrath, without excitement, but with a steady

vehemence. It was an affair of a public-house, and Eppie accused the

publican of enticing his clients to drink, of corrupting the village

sobriety, and she urged the general, as local magistrate, to take

immediate action, showing a very minute knowledge of the technicalities

of the case.

“My dear,” the general expostulated, “indeed I don’t think that the man

has done anything illegal; we are powerless about the license in such a

case. You must get more evidence.”

“I have any amount of evidence. The man is a public nuisance. Poor Mrs.

MacHendrie was crying to me about it this morning. Archie is hardly ever

sober now. I shall drive over to Carlowrie and see Sir Alec about it; as

the wretch’s landlord he can make it uncomfortable for him, and I’ll see

that he makes it as uncomfortable as possible.”

Laughingly, but slightly harassed, the general said: “You see, we have a

tyrant here. Eppie is really a bit too hard on the man. He is an

unpleasant fellow, I own, a most unpleasant manner--a beast, if you

will, but a legal beast.”

“The most unpleasant form of animal, isn’t it? It’s very good of Eppie

to care so much,” said Gavan.

“You don’t care, I suppose,” she said, turning her eyes on him, as

though she saw him for the first time that morning.

“I should feel more hopeless about it, perhaps.”

“Why, pray?”

“At all events, I shouldn’t be able to feel so much righteous

indignation.”

“Why not?”

“He is pretty much of a product, isn’t he?--not worse, I suppose, than

the men whose weakness enriches him. It’s a pity, of course, that one

can’t painlessly pinch such people out of existence, as one would

offensive insects.”

Eppie, across the table, eyed him, her anger quieted. “He is a product

of a good many things,” she said, now in her most reasonable manner,

“and he is going to be a product of some more before I’m done with

him,--a product of my hatred for him and his kind, for one thing. That

will be a new factor in his development. Gavan,” she smiled, “you and I

are going to quarrel.”

“Dear Eppie!” Miss Barbara interposed. “Gavan, you must not take her

seriously; she so often says extravagant things just to tease one.”

Really dismayed, alternately nodding and shaking her head in reassurance

and protest, she looked from one to the other. “And don’t, dear, say

such unchristian things of anybody. She is not so hard and unforgiving

as she sounds, Gavan.”

“Aunt Barbara! Aunt Barbara!” laughed Eppie, leaning her elbows on the

table, her eyes still on Gavan, “my hatred for Macdougall isn’t nearly

as unchristian as Gavan’s indifference. I don’t want to pinch him

painlessly out of life at all. I think that life has room for us both. I

want to have him whipped, or made uncomfortable in some way, until he

becomes less horrid.”

“Whipped, dear! People are never whipped nowadays! It was a very

barbarous punishment indeed, and, thank God, we have outgrown it. We

will outgrow it all some day. And as to any punishment, I don’t know, I

really don’t. Resist not evil,” Miss Barbara finished in a vague,

helpless murmur, uncertain as to what course would at once best apply to

Macdougall’s case and satisfy the needs of public sobriety.

“Perhaps one owes it to people to resist them,” Eppie answered.

“Oh, Eppie dear, if only you cared a little more for Maeterlinck!”

sighed Miss Barbara, the more complex readings of whose later years had

been somewhat incongruously adapted to her early simple faiths. “Do you

remember that beautiful thing he says,--and Gavan’s attitude reminds me

of it,--‘_Le sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes’?_”

“You will be quoting Tolstoi to me next, Aunt Barbara. I suspect that

such sages would interrupt a good deal more than dramas.”

“I hope that you care for Tolstoi, Gavan,” said Miss Barbara, not

forgetful of his boyish pieties. “Not the novels,--they are very, very

sad, and so long, and the characters have such a number of names it is

most confusing,--but the dear little books on religion. It is all there:

love of all men, and non-resistance of evil, and self-renunciation.”

“Yes,” Gavan assented, while Eppie looked rather gravely at him.

“How beautiful this world would be if we could see it so--no hatred, no

strife, no evil.”

Again Gavan assented with, “None.”

“None; and no life either,” Eppie finished for them.

She rose, thrusting her hands into alternate pockets looking for a

note-book, which she found and consulted. “I’m off for the fray, Uncle

Nigel, for hatred and strife. You and Gavan are going to shoot, so I’ll

bring you your lunch at the corner of the Carlowrie woods.”

“So that you and Gavan may continue your quarrel there. Very well. I

prefer listening.”

“Gavan understands that Eppie must not be taken seriously,” Miss Barbara

interposed; but Eppie rejoined, drawing on her gloves, “Indeed, I intend

to be taken seriously. I quarrel with people I like as well as with

those I hate.”

“You are going to be a factor in my development, too?” said Gavan.

“Of course, as you are in mine, as we all are in one another’s. We can’t

help that. And my attack on you shall be conscious.”

These open threats didn’t at all alarm him. It was what was unconscious

in her that stirred disquiet.

When Eppie had departed and the general had gone off to see to

preparations for the morning’s shoot, Miss Barbara, still sitting rather

wistfully behind her urn, said: “I hope, dear Gavan, that you will be

able to influence Eppie a little. I am so thankful to find you unchanged

about all the deeper things of life. You could help her, I am sure. She

needs guidance. She is so loving, so clever, a joy to Nigel and to me;

but she is very headstrong, very reckless and wilful,--a will in

subjection to nothing but her own sense of right. It’s not that she is

altogether irreligious,--thank Heaven for that,--but she hasn’t any of

the happiness of religion. There is no happiness, is there, Gavan--I

feel sure that you see it as I do,--but in having our lives stayed on

the Eternal?”

Gavan, as it was very easy to do, assented again.

He spent the morning with the general in shooting over the rather scant

covers, and at two, in a sheltered bend of the woods, where the sunlight

lay still and bright, Eppie joined them, bringing the lunch-basket in

her dog-cart.

She was in a very good humor, and while, sitting above them, she

dispensed rations, announced to her uncle the result of her visit to Sir

Alec.

“He thinks he can turn him out if any flagrant ease of drunkenness

occurs again. We talked over the conditions of his lease.”

“Carston, I am sure, doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about it.”

“Of course not; but he cares that I care.”

“You see, Gavan, by what strings the world is pulled. Carston hasn’t two

ideas in his head.”

“Luckily I am here to use his empty head to advantage. I wheedled Lady

Carston, too,--the bad influence Macdougall had on church-going. Lady

Carston’s one idea, Gavan, is the keeping of the Sabbath. Altogether it

was an excellent morning’s work.” Eppie was cheerful and triumphant. She

was eating from a plate on her knees and drinking milk out of a little

silver cup. “Do you think me a tiresome, managing busybody, Gavan?” She

smiled down at him, and her lashes catching the sunlight, an odd, misty

glitter half veiled her eyes. “You look,” she added, “as you used to

look when you were a little boy. The years collapsed just then.”

He was conscious that, under her sudden glance, he had, indeed, looked

shy. It was not her light question, but the strange depth of her

half-closed eyes.

“I find a great deal of the old Eppie in you: I remember that you used

to want to bully the village people for their good.”

“I’m still a bully, I think, but a more discreet one. Won’t you have

some milk, Gavan? You used to love milk when you were a little boy. Have

you outgrown that?”

“Not at all. I should still love some; but don’t rob yourself.”

“There ‘s heaps here. I’ve no spare glass. Do you mind?” She held out to

him the silver cup, turning its untouched edge to him, something

maternal in the gesture, in the down-looking of her sun-dazed eyes.

He felt himself foolishly flushing while he drank the milk; and when,

really seized by a silly childish shyness, he protested that he wanted

no more, she placidly, with an emphasizing of her air of sweet,

comprehending authority, said, “Oh, but you must; it holds almost

nothing.”

For the second time that day, as he obediently took from her hand the

innocent little cup, Gavan had the unreasoning impulse of tears.

The sunny afternoon was silent. Overhead, the sky had its chalice look,

clear, benignant, brimmed with light. The general, the lolling dogs,

were part of the background, with the heather and the wood of larches,

the finely falling sprays delicately blurred upon the sky.

It was again something sweet, sweet, simple and profound, that brought

again that pang of presage and of pain. But the pain was like a joy, and

the tears like tears of happiness in the sunny stillness, where her firm

and gentle hand gave him milk in a silver cup.

The actual physical sensation of a rising saltness was an alarm signal

that, with a swift reversal of mental wheels, brought a revulsion of

consciousness. He saw himself threatened once more by nature’s

enchantments: wily nature, luring one always back to life with looks

from comrade eyes, touches from comrade fingers, pastoral drinks all

seeming innocence, and embracing sunlight. Wily Circe. With a long

breath, the mirage was seen as mirage and the moment’s dangerous

blossoming withered as if dust had been strewn over it.

VI

To see his own susceptibility so plainly was, he told himself, to be

safe from it; not safe from its pang, perhaps, but safe from its power,

and that was the essential thing.

It was not to Eppie, as he further assured himself, that he was

susceptible. Eppie stood for life, personified its appeals; he could

feel, yet be unmoved, by all life’s blandishments.

Meanwhile on a very different plane--the after all remote plane of

mental encounters and skirmishes--he felt, with relief, that he was

entirely master of his own meaning. There were many of these skirmishes,

and though he did not believe any of them planned, believe that she was

carrying out her threat of conscious attack, he was aware that she was

alert and inquisitive, and dexterously quick at taking any occasion that

offered for further penetration.

The first of these occasions was on Sunday evening when, after tea and

in the gloaming, they sat together in the deep window-seat of one of the

library windows and listened to Miss Barbara softly touching the chords

of a hymn on the plaintive old piano and softly singing--a most

unobtrusive accompaniment, at her distance and with her softness, for

any talk or any thoughts of theirs. They had talked very little,

watching the sunset burn itself out over the frosty moorland, and Gavan

presently, while he listened, closed his eyes and leaned his head back

upon the oak recess. Eppie, looking now from the sunset to him, observed

him with an open, musing curiosity. His head, leaning back in the dusk,

was like the ivory carving of a dead saint--a saint young, beautiful, at

peace after long sorrow. Peace; that was the quality that his whole

being expressed, though, with opened eyes, his face had the more human

look of patience, verging now and then on a quiet dejection that would

overspread his features like a veil. In boyhood, the peace, the placid

dejection, had not been there; his face then had shown the tension of

struggle and endurance.

“Till in the ocean of thy love

We lose ourselves in heaven above,”

Miss Barbara quavered, and Gavan, opening his eyes at the closing

cadence, found Eppie’s bent upon him. He smiled, and looked still more,

she thought, the sad saint, all benediction and indifference, and an

impulse of antagonism to such sainthood made her say, though smiling

back, “How I dislike those words.”

“Do you?” said Gavan.

“Hate them? Why, dear child?” asked Miss Barbara, who had heard through

the sigh of her held-down pedal.

“I don’t want to lose myself,” said Eppie. “But I didn’t mean that I

wanted you to stop, Aunt Barbara. Do go on. I love to hear you sing,

however much I disapprove of the words.”

But Miss Barbara, clasping and unclasping her hands a little nervously,

and evidently finding the moment too propitious to be passed over,

backed as she was by an ally, rose and came to them.

“That is the very point you are so mistaken about, dear. It’s the self,

you know, that keeps us from love.”

“It’s the self that makes love possible,” said Eppie, taking her hand

and looking up at her. “Do you want to lose me, Aunt Barbara? If you

lose yourself you will have to lose me too, you know.”

Miss Barbara stood perplexed but not at all convinced by these

subtleties, turning mild eyes of query upon Gavan and evidently

expecting him to furnish the obvious retort.

“We will all be at one with God,” she reverently said at length, finding

that her ally left the defense to her.

Eppie met this large retort cheerfully. “You can’t love God unless you

have a self to love him with. I know what you mean, and perhaps I agree

with what you really mean; but I want to correct your Buddhistic

tendencies and to keep you a good Christian.”

“I humbly hope I’m that. You shouldn’t jest on such subjects, Eppie

dear.”

“I’m not one bit jesting,” Eppie protested. And now Gavan asked, while

Miss Barbara looked gratefully at him, sure of his backing, though she

might not quite be able to understand his methods, “Are they such

different creeds?”

Still holding her aunt’s hand and still looking up into her face, Eppie

answered: “One is despair of life, the other trust in life. One takes

all meaning out of life and the other fills it with meaning. The secret

of one is to lose life, and the secret of the other to gain it. There is

all the difference in the world between them; all the difference between

life and death.”

“As interpreted by Western youth and vigor, yes; but what of the

mystics? I suppose you would call them Christians?”

“Yes, dear, they are Christians. What of them?” Miss Barbara echoed,

though slightly perturbed by this alliance with heathendom.

“Buddhists, not Christians,” Eppie retorted.

“That’s what I mean; in essentials they are the same creed: the

differences are only the differences of the races or individuals who

hold them.”

At this Miss Barbara’s free hand began to flutter and protest. “Oh, but,

Gavan dear, there I’m quite sure that you are wrong. Buddhism is, I

don’t doubt, a very noble religion, but it’s not the true one. Indeed

they are not the same, Gavan, though Christianity, of course, is founded

on the renunciation of self. ‘Lose your life to gain it,’ Eppie dear.”

“Yes, to gain it, that’s just the point. One renounces, and one wins a

realer self.”

“What is real? What is life?” Gavan asked, really curious to hear her

definition.

She only needed a moment to find it, and, with her answer, gave him her

first glance during their battledore colloquy with innocent Aunt Barbara

as the shuttlecock. “Selves and love.”

“Well, of course, dear,” Miss Barbara cried. “That’s what heaven will

be. All love and peace and rest.”

“But you have left out the selves; you won’t get love without them. And

as for rest and peace--Love is made by difference, so that as long as

there is love there must be restlessness.”

“Isn’t it made by sameness?” Gavan asked.

“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what

one could complete; or so it seems to me.”

“And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?”

Her eyes met his thought fearlessly.

“That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of

cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.”

“Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?”

“Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator.

And restlessness need not mean suffering. A symphony is all

restlessness--a restlessness made by difference in harmony; forgive the

well-worn metaphor, but it is a good one. And, suppose that it did mean

suffering, all of it. Isn’t it worth it?” Her eyes measured him, not in

challenge, but quietly.

“What a lover of life you are,” he said. It was like seeing him go into

his house and, not hastily, but very firmly, shut the door. And as if,

rather rudely, she hurled a stone at the shut door, she asked, “Do you

love anything?”

He smiled. “Please don’t quarrel with me.”

“I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,”

Eppie declared.

She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might

accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as

they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm

afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo

it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely

a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window.

She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a

little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a

tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at

their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer.

Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of

people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s

mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see--any faith that

takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you

about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile

condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of

such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a

proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy,

and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything

that gives a final satisfaction.”

She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her

assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she

tossed.

“You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.

“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is

standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a

blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and

of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a

bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all

appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march

across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether

you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to

your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever

you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply

to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about

him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I

myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other

hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an

Overman--in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and

will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.”

Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance.

“Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often.

But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and

come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little

rudimentary Overdogs.”