“Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than

the sky?” He did smile now.

“Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up

their meaning.”

She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to

Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up,

Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan.

Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but

a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on

his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome

Hindoos--aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?”

He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way,

with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as

if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of

his thought--implications that he suspected her of already pretty

sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such

thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how

seriously she might be forced to take them.

VII

For the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound

pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite

willing,--somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,--to help her in her

crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of

evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general,

to the rather alarmed quarry himself,--not unwilling to come to

terms,--but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense

to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than

her own not altogether temperate zeal.

She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout

all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what

that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant--mere kindliness,

and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody.

It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an

incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into

something more ambiguous--an incident that gave margins for

possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to

fear.

They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one

of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the

apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him

home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his

head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been

brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were

crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was

lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though

scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat

upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky,

in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s

degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean

monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages;

above it was the blank, hard sky.

Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future,

as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the

wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both

heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a

chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth,

the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched

him and the toadstool made him shrink.

“There, there, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie was pleading, “come awa

hame, do.”

Archie was declaiming on some wrong he had suffered and threatened to do

for an enemy.

That these flowers and toadstools were of vital significance to Eppie,

Gavan realized as she left him in the middle of the street and strode to

the center of the group. It fell aside for her air of facile, friendly

authority, and in answer to her decisive, “What’s the matter?” one of

the apathetic onlookers explained in his deliberate Scotch: “It’s nobbut

Archie, Miss Eppie; he’s swearin’ he’ll na go hame na sleep gin he’s

lickit Tam Donel’. He’s a wee bit the waur for the drink and Tam’ll soon

be alang, and the dei’ll be in it gar his gudewife gets him ben.”

“Well, she must get him ben,” said Eppie, her eye measuring Archie, who

shook a menacing fist in the direction of his expected antagonist.

“We must get him home between us, Mrs. MacHendrie. He’ll think better of

it in the morning.”

“Fech, an’ it’s that I’m aye tellin’ him, Miss Eppie; it’s the mornin’

he’ll hae the sair head. Ay, Miss Eppie, he’s an awfu’ chiel when he’s a

wee bittie fou.” Mrs. MacHendrie put the fringe of her shawl to her

eyes.

Archie’s low thunder had continued during this dialogue without a pause,

and Eppie now addressed herself to him in authoritative tones. “Come on,

Archie. Go home and get a sleep, at all events, before you fight Tom.”

“It’s that I’m aye tellin’ you, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie wept.

Archie now brought his eye round to the speakers and observed them in an

ominous silence, his thoughts turned from more distant grievances. From

his wife his eye traveled back to Eppie, who met it with a firm

severity.

“Damn ye for an interferin’ fishwife!” suddenly and with startling force

he burst out. “Ye’re no but a meddlesome besom. Awa wi’ ye!” and from

this broadside he swung round to his wife with uplifted fists. Flinging

herself between them, Eppie found herself swept aside. Gavan was in the

midst of the sudden uproar. Like a David before Goliath, he confronted

Archie with a quelling eye. Mrs. MacHendrie had slipped into the dusk,

and the bald, ugly light now fell on Gavan’s contrasting head.

“_Un sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes_,” flashed in Eppie’s mind.

But on this occasion, the sage had to do more than pass--was forced,

indeed, to provide the drama. He was speaking in a voice so

dispassionately firm that had Archie been a little less drunk or a

little less sober it must have exerted an almost hypnotic effect upon

him. But the command to go home reached a brain inflamed and hardly

dazed. Goliath fell upon David, and Eppie, with a curious mingling of

exultation and panic, saw the two men locked in an animal struggle. For

a moment Gavan’s cool alertness and scientific resource were overborne

by sheer brute force; in another he had recovered himself, and Archie’s

face streamed suddenly with blood. Another blow, couched like a lance,

it seemed, was in readiness, wary and direct, when Mrs. MacHendrie, from

behind, seized Gavan around the neck and, with a shrill scream, hung to

him and dragged him back. Helpless and enmeshed, he received a savage

blow from her husband, and, still held in the wife’s strangling clutch,

he and she reeled back together. At this flagrant violation of fair play

the onlookers interposed. Archie was dragged off, and Eppie, catching

Gavan as he staggered free of his encumbrance, turned, while she held

him by the shoulders, fiercely on Mrs. MacHendrie. “You well deserve

every thrashing you get,” she said, her voice stilled by the very force

of its intense anger.

Mrs. MacHendrie had covered her face with her shawl. “My mon was a’

bluid,” she sobbed. “I couldna stan’ an’ see him done to death.”

“Of course you couldn’t; it was most natural of you,” said Gavan. The

blood trickled over his brow and cheek as, gently freeing himself from

Eppie, he straightened his collar and looked at Mrs. MacHendrie with

sympathetic curiosity.

“Natural!” said Eppie. “It was dastardly. You deserve every thrashing

you get. I hope no one will interfere for you next time.”

“My dear Eppie!” Gavan murmured, while Mrs. MacHendrie continued to weep

humbly.

“Why shouldn’t I say it? I am disgusted with her.” Eppie turned almost

as fierce a stillness of look and tone upon him as upon Mrs. MacHendrie.

“Let me tie up your head, Gavan. Yes, indeed, you are covered with

blood. I suppose you never thought, Mrs. MacHendrie, that your husband

might kill Mr. Palairet.” She passed her handkerchief around Gavan’s

forehead as she spoke, knotting it with fingers at once tender and

vindictive.

“I canna say, Miss Eppie,” came Mrs. MacHendrie’s muffled voice from

the shawl. “The wan’s my ain mon. It juist cam’ ower me, seein’ him a’

bluid.”

“Well, you have the satisfaction now of seeing Mr. Palairet a’ bluid.”

Eppie tied her knots, and Gavan, submitting a bowed head to her

ministrations, still kept his look of cogitating pity upon Mrs.

MacHendrie. “You see how your husband has wounded him,” Eppie went on;

“the handkerchief is red already. Come on, Gavan; lean on me, please.

Let her get her husband home now as best she can.”

But Gavan ignored his angry champion. Mrs. MacHendrie’s sorrow, most

evidently, interested him more than Eppie’s indignation. He went to her,

putting down the hand that held the shawl to the poor, disfigured,

tallow face, and made her look at him, while he said with a gentle

reasonableness: “Don’t mind what Miss Gifford says; she is angry on my

account and doesn’t really mean to be so hard on you. I’m not at all

badly hurt,--I can perfectly stand alone, Eppie,--and I’m sorry I had to

hurt your husband. It was perfectly natural, what you did. Don’t cry;

please don’t cry.” He smiled at her, comforted her, encouraged her.

“They are taking your husband home, you see; he is going quite quietly.

And now we will take you home. Take my arm. You are the worst off of us

all, Mrs. MacHendrie.”

Eppie, in silence, stalked beside him while he led Mrs. MacHendrie,

dazed and submissive, up the village street. A neighbor’s wife was in

kindly waiting and Archie already slumbering heavily on his bed. Eppie

suspected, as they went, that she saw a gold piece slipped from Gavan’s

hand to Mrs. MacHendrie’s.

“Poor thing,” he said, when they were once more climbing the steep

street, “I ‘m afraid I only made things worse for her”; and laughing a

little, irrepressibly, he looked round at Eppie from under his oddly

becoming bandage. “My dear Eppie, what a perfect brute you were to her!”

“My dear Gavan, I can’t feel pity for such a fool. Oh, yes I can, but I

don’t want to. Please remember that I, too, have impulses, and that I

saw you ‘a’ bluid.’”

“Well, then, I’m the brute for scolding you, and you are another poor

thing.”

“Are you incapable of righteous indignation, Gavan?”

“Surely I showed enough to please you in my treatment of Archie.”

“You showed none. You looked supremely indifferent as to whether he

killed you or you him.”

“Oh, I think I was quite anxious to do for him.”

They were past the village now and upon the country road, and in the

darkness their contrasting voices rang oddly--hers deep with its

resentful affection, his light with its amusement. It was as if the

little drama, that he had made instead of interrupting, struck his sense

of the ridiculous. Yet, angry with him as she was, a thrill of

exultation remained, for Eppie, in the thought of his calm, deliberate

face, beautiful before its foe, and with blood upon it.

VIII

Gavan’s hurt soon healed, though it made him languid for a day or

two--days of semi-invalidism, the unemphatic hours, seemingly so

colorless, when she read to him or merely sat silently at hand occupied

with her letters or a book, drawing still closer their odd intimacy; it

could hardly be called sudden, for it had merely skipped intervening

years, and it couldn’t be called a proved intimacy, the intervening

years were too full, too many for that. But they were very near in their

almost solitude--a solitude surrounded by gentle reminders of the closer

past, reminders, in the case of living personalities, who seemed to find

the intimacy altogether natural and needing no comment. What the general

and Miss Barbara might really be thinking was a wonder that at moments

occupied both Gavan and Eppie’s ruminations; but it wasn’t a wonder that

needed to go far or deep. What they thought, the dear old people, made

very little difference--not even the difference of awkwardness or

self-consciousness under too cogitating eyes. Even if they thought the

crude and obvious thing it didn’t matter, they would so peacefully

relapse from their false inference once time had set it straight for

them. Eppie couldn’t quite have told herself why its obviousness was so

crude; in all her former experience such obviousness had never been so

almost funnily out of the question. But Gavan made so many things almost

funnily out of the question.

It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew

intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him

about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale,

peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s

heart--the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as

great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence--to the

downlooking face of an imaged saint.

No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of

silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory

penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his

sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of

that that one was able to say anything one liked.

At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to

smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was

because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he

was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him,

for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and,

above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out--and she

mustn’t--through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into

life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to

listen, that he listened lovingly,--just as he had listened lovingly to

Mrs. MacHendrie,--she knew.

One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon

the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all

about the wretched drama of her love-affair.

She had never spoken of it to a human being.

It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still,

with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there

pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had

ever seen them.

She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting

before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had

appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would

have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the

man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost

any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it,

with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its

despair.

“But that wasn’t the worst,” said Eppie; “that very baseness had its

pathos. Worst of all were my mean regrets. I had sacrificed my ambitions

for him; I had refused a man who would have given me the life I wanted,

a high place in the world, a great name, power, wide issues,--and I love

high places, Gavan, I love power. When I refused him, he too married

some one else, and it was after that that my crash came. Love and faith

were thrown back at me, and I hadn’t in it all even my dignity. I was

torn by mingled despairs. I loathed myself. Oh, it was too horrible!”

His utter lack of sympathetic emotion, even when she spoke with the

indignant tears on her cheeks, made it all the easier to say these

fundamental things, and more than ever like the saint of ebony and ivory

in the pale church was his head against the great wash of mist about

them.

“And now it has all dropped from you,” he said.

“Yes, all--the love, the regret certainly, even the shame. The ambition,

certainly not; but in that ugly form of a loveless marriage it’s no

longer a possible temptation for me. My disappointment hasn’t driven me

to worldly materialism. It’s a sane thing in nature, that outgrowing of

griefs, though it’s bad for one’s pride to see them fade and one’s heart

mend, solidly mend, once more.”

“They do go, when one really sees them.”

“Some do.”

“All, when one really sees them,” he repeated unemphatically. “I know

all about it, Eppie. I’ve been through the fire, too. Now that it’s

gone, you see that it’s only a dream, that love, don’t you?”

Eppie gazed before her into the mist, narrowing her eyes as though she

concentrated her thoughts upon his exact meaning, and she received his

casual confidence with some moments of silence.

“That would imply that seeing destroyed feeling, wouldn’t it?” she said

at last. “I see that _such_ love is a dream, if you will; but dreams may

be mirrors of life, not delusions; hints of an awakened reality.”

He showed only his unmoved face. This talk, so impersonal, with all its

revealment of human pathos and weakness, so much a picture that they

both looked at it together,--a picture of outlived woe,--claimed no more

than his contemplation; but when her voice seemed to grope toward him,

questioning in its very clearness of declaration, he felt again the

flitting fear that he had already recognized, not as danger, but as

discomfort. It flitted only, hardly stirred the calm he showed her, as

the wings of a flying bird just skim and ruffle the surface of still,

deep waters. That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its

shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water--he saw and knew it as

the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the

will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in

striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of

this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its

plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave.

He said nothing after her last words.

“You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?”

“Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the

transitory is to suffer.”

“On that plan one ends with nothingness.”

“Do you think so?”

“Do _you_ think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with

the question, fixed hard on his face.

He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had

struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety--in deadly

earnest. There was the click of steel in the question.

He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her

persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her

faith some injury.

“I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all

that very well the other evening; so why go into it?”

“You think that our human identity is unreal--an appearance?”

“Most certainly.”

“And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred

and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come

and all selfish effort cease?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you see that what that results in is the Hindoo thing, the

abolishing of consciousness, the abolishing of life--of individual

life?”

“Yes, I see that,” Gavan smiled, “but I’m a little surprised to see that

you do. So many people are like Aunt Barbara.”

But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be

lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely

an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On

his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from

the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is

never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious

choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of

revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only

leave one with emptiness.”

Above all, as she had said, he saw it; and now he was silent, seeking

words that might rid him of pursuit, yet not infect her.

She had stopped short before his silence. Smiling, now, on the

background of mist, her eyes, her lips, her poise challenged him,

incredulous, actually amused. “Don’t you think that _I_ have an

identity?” she asked.

He was willing at that to face her, for he saw suddenly and clearly,--it

seemed to radiate from her in the smile, the look,--that he, apparently,

couldn’t hurt her. She was too full of life to be in any danger from

him, and perhaps the only way of ending pursuit was to fling wide the

doors and, since she had said the word, show her the emptiness within.

“You force me to talk cheap metaphysics to you, Eppie, but I’ll try to

say what I do think,” he said. “I believe that the illusion of a

separate identity, self-directing and permanent, is the deepest and most

tenacious of all illusions--the illusion that makes the wheels go round,

the common illusion that makes the common mirage. The abolishing of the

identity, of the self, is the final word of science, and of philosophy,

and of religion, too. The determinism of science, the ecstatic immediacy

of the mystic consciousness, the monistic systems of the Absolutists,

all tend toward the final discovery that,--now I’m going to be very glib

indeed,--but one must use the technical jargon,--that under all the

transitory appearance is a unity in which, for which, diversity

vanishes.”

Eppie no longer smiled. She had walked on while he spoke, her eyes on

him, no longer amused or incredulous, with an air now of almost stern

security.

“Odd,” she said presently, “that such a perverse and meaningless Whole

should be made up of such significant fragments.”

“Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible

meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so

unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the

kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be

what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely:

Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in

it--discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary

parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to

think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting

to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of

this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing

the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality

sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite

unconscious,--or so some people who think a great deal about it

say,--we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal,

and are satisfied.”

“You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady

voice.

“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”

“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But

if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real

than that nothingness--for to us such a reality would be nothingness.

And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since,

for us, there is no other.”

“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He

looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie.

“Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.”

“Yet you want it, always.”

“Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life

in being very unhappy--that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve

not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.”

“Probably because you still expect to get what you want.”

“Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile.

And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more

closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness.

“Poor Gavan,” she said.

He just hesitated. “Why?”

“Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it,

love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the

babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I

suspected it of such a character. And I see life--“ She paused here,

looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew

long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her

downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of

trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted

to know, but because her words were always less to him than her

silences.

Eppie, unconscious, was finding words.

“As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like

the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like

the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such

unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come;

through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one

goes.”

Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision,

she saw tears in his.

For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in

her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then,

looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had

meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best

to live with.”

He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not

pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered

mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty,

alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor

chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”

She was walking now, a little ahead of him, down the thread-like path

that wound among phantom bracken. The islet of space where they could

see seemed like a tiny ship gliding forward with them into a white,

boundless ocean. Such, thought Gavan, was human life.

In a long silence he felt that her mood had changed. Over her shoulder

she looked round at him at last with her eyes of the spiritual

steeplechaser. “It’s war to the knife, Gavan.”

She hurt him in saying it. “You only have the knife,” he answered, and

his gentleness might have reproached the sudden challenge.

“You have poison.”

“I never put it to your lips, dear.”

She saw his pain. “Oh, don’t be afraid for me,” she said. “I drink your

poison, and it is a tonic, a wine, that fills me with greater ardor for

the fight.”

IX

They were on the path that led to the deeply sunken garden gate, and

they had not spoken another word while they followed it, while they

stooped a little under the tangle of ivy that drooped from the stone

lintel, while they went past the summer-house and on between the rows of

withered plants and the empty, wintry spaces of the garden; only when

they were nearly at the house, under the great pine-tree, did Eppie

cheerfully surmise that they would be exactly on time for tea, and by

her manner imply that tea was far more present to her thoughts than

daggers or poison.

He felt that in some sense matters had been left in the lurch. He didn’t

quite know where he stood for her with his disastrous darkness about

him--whether she had really taken up a weapon for open warfare or

whether she hadn’t wisely fallen back upon the mere pleasantness of

friendly intercourse, turning her eyes away from his accompanying gloom.

He was glad to find her alone that evening after dinner when he had left

the general in the smoking-room over a review and a cigar. Miss Barbara

had gone early to bed, so that Eppie, in her white dress, as on the

night of his arrival, had the dark brightness of the firelit room all to

herself. He was glad, because the sense of uncertainty needed defining,

and uncertainty, since that last moment of trembling, had been so acute

that any sort of definition would be a relief.

An evening alone with her, now that they were really on the plane of

mutual understanding, would put his vague fears to the test. He would

learn whether they must be fled from or whether, as mere superficial

tremors, tricks of the emotions, they could not be outfaced smilingly.

He really didn’t want to run away, especially not until he clearly knew

from what he ran.

Eppie sat before the fire on the low settle, laying down a book as he

came in. In her aspect of exquisite worldliness, the white dress

displaying her arms and shoulders with fashionable frankness, she struck

him anew as being her most perfectly armed and panoplied self. Out on

the windy hillside or singing among the woods, nature seemed partially

to absorb and possess her, so that she became a part of the winds and

woods; but indoors, finished and fine from head to foot, her mastered

conventionality made her the more emphatically personal. She embodied

civilization in her dress, her smile, her speech, her very being; the

loose coils of her hair and the cut of her satin shoe were both

significant of choice, of distinctive simplicity; and the very bareness

of her shoulders--Gavan gave an amused thought to the ferociously

sensitive Tolstoi--symbolized the armor of the world-lover, the

world-user. It was she who possessed the charms and weapons of the

civilization that crumbled to dust in the hand of the Russian mystic. He

could see her confronting the ascetic’s eye with the challenge of her

radiant and righteous self-assurance. Her whole aspect rebuilt that

shattered world, its pomp and vanity, perhaps, its towering scale of

values; each tier narrowing in its elimination of the lower, cruder,

less conscious, more usual; each pinnacle a finely fretted flowering of

the rare; a dazzling palace of foam. She embodied all that; but, more

than all for Gavan, she embodied the deep currents of trust that flowed

beneath the foam.

Her look welcomed him, though without a smile, as he drew a deep chair

to the fire and sat down near her, and for a little while they said

nothing, he watching her and she with gravely downcast eyes.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked at last.

“Of you, of course,” she answered. “About our talk this afternoon; we

haven’t finished it yet.”

She, too, then, had felt uncertainty that needed relief.

“Are you sharpening your knife?”

She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I

like to you?”

“Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.”

“No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have

been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted

your mind; it has been so joyless.”

“Does that make it unusual?”

“You must love life before you can know it.”

“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy,

Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly

personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.”

“Of all mere thought, yes.”

She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder

over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be

shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story;

give me yours. Tell me about your life.”

He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful

in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t

she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be

only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would

be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life--it

would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that

would have its sweetness and its balm.

But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal

self-expression.

Eppie lent him a hand.

“Begin with when you left me.”

“What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.”

“No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved

your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions

to you?”

She saw facts clearly and terribly. She was really inside the doors at

last, and though it would be all the easier to make her understand the

facts she saw, Gavan paled a little before the sudden, swift presence.

For, yes, God was gone, and yes,--worse, far worse, as he knew she felt

it,--his mother, too--except as that ghost, that pang of memory.

She saw his pallor and helped him again, to the first and easier avowal.

“How did you lose your faith? What happened to you when you left me?”

“It’s a commonplace enough story, that.”

“Of course it is. But when loss of faith becomes permanent and

permanently means a loss of feeling, it’s not so commonplace.”

“Oh, I think it is--more commonplace than people know, in temperaments

as unvital and as logical as mine.”

“You are not unvital.”

“My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.”

“That is because you are strong--terribly strong. It’s not that your

vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.”

“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”

But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her

as he looked, he contemplated its vista.

It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of

the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending

listener,--to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes

the picture that he saw.

His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her

true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that

made it possible to tell her all.

The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly

sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the

capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to

the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and

her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit

them the more deeply into the listening mind.

But, in the days that followed the death,--days ghost-like, yet

sharp,--he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of

stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything

had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about

that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see

it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else--the pale,

high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that

hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke--sunken,

long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers

lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet

beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow,

he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who,

before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with

color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.

After that there wasn’t much left to explain, it seemed--except Alice,

that last convulsive effort of life to seize and keep him; and that

didn’t take long--made, as it were, a little allegory, with nameless

abstractions to symbolize the old drama of the soul entrameled and

finally set free again. The experience of the spring woods had really

been the decisive one. He came back to that again, at the end of his

story. “It’s really, that experience, what in another kind of

temperament is called conversion.”

Her eyes had looked away from him at last. “No,” she said, “conversion

is something that gives life.”

“No,” he rejoined, “it’s something that lifts one above it.”

The fundamental contest spoke again, and after that they were both

silent. He, too, had looked away from her when the story was over, and

he knew, from her deep, slow breathing, that the story had meant a great

deal to her. It was not a laboring breath, nor broken by pain to sighs;

but it seemed, in its steady rhythm, to accept and then to conquer what

he had put before her. That he should so hear it, not looking at her,

filled the silence with more than words; and, as in the afternoon, he

sought the relief of words.

“So you see,” he said, in his lighter voice, “thorns and precipices and

terrors dissolve like dreams.” She had seen everything and he was

ushering her out. But his eyes now met hers, looking across the little

space at him.

“And I? Do I, too, dissolve like a dream?” she said.

His smile now was lighter than his voice had been. “Absolutely. Though I

own that you are a highly colored phantom. Your color is very vivid

indeed. Sometimes it almost masters my thought.”

He had not, in his mere wish for ease, quite known what he meant to say,

and now her look did not show him any deepened consciousness; but,

suddenly, he felt that under his lightness and her quiet the current ran

deeply.

“I master your thought?” she repeated. “Doesn’t that make you distrust

thought sometimes?”

“No,” he laughed. “It makes me distrust you, dear Eppie.”

There were all sorts of things before them now. What they were he really

didn’t know; perhaps she didn’t, either. At all events he kept his eyes

off them, and shaking his crossed foot a little, he still looked at her,

smiling.

“Why?” she asked.

He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t

imply more than he could face.

“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your

will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl

on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it

would need my own will, blind again, for that.”

Her eyes had met his so steadily that he had imagined only contemplation

or perhaps that maternal severity behind the steadiness. But the way in

which they received these last tossed pebbles of metaphor showed him

unrealized profundities. They deepened, they darkened, they widened on

him. They seemed to engulf him in a sudden abyss of pain. And pain in

her was indeed a color that could infect him.

“How horrible you are, Gavan,” she said, and her voice went with the

words and with the look.

“Eppie!” he exclaimed on a tense, indrawn breath, as if over the sudden

stab of a knife. “Have I hurt you?”

Her eyes turned from him. “Not what you say, or do. What you are.”

“You didn’t see, before, what I am?”

“Never--like this.”

He leaned toward her. “Dear Eppie, why do you make me talk? Let me be

still. I only ask to be still.”

“You are worse still. Don’t you think I see what stillness means?”

She had pushed her low seat from him,--for he stretched his hands to her

with his supplication,--and, rising to her feet, stepping back, she

stood before the fire, somberly looking down at him.

Gavan, too, rose. Compunction, supplication, a twist of perplexity and

suffering, made him careless of discretion. Face to face, laying his

hands on her shoulders, he said: “Don’t let me frighten you. It would be

horrible if I could convince you, shatter you.”

Standing erect under his hands, she looked hard into his face.

“You could frighten me, horribly; but you couldn’t shatter me. You are

ambiguous, veiled, all in mists. I am as clear, as sharp--.”

Her dauntlessness, the old defiance, were a relief--a really delicious

relief. He was able to smile at her, a smile that pled for reassurance.

“How can I frighten you, then?”

Her somber gaze did not soften. “Your mists come round me, chill,

suffocating. They corrode my clearness.”

“No; no; it’s you who come into them. Don’t. Don’t. Keep away from me.”

“I’m not so afraid of you as that,” she answered.

His hands were still on her shoulders and their eyes on each other--his

with their appealing, uncertain smile, and hers unmoved, unsmiling; and

suddenly that sense of danger came upon him: as if, in the mist, he felt

upon him the breathing, warm, sweet, ominous, of some unseen creature.

And in the fear was a strange delight, and like a hand drawn, with slow,

deep pressure, across a harp, the nearness drew across his heart,

stirring its one sad note--its dumb, its aching note--to a sudden

ascending murmur of melody.

He was caught swiftly from this inner tumult by its reflection in her

face. She flushed, deeply, painfully. She drew back sharply, pushing

his hands from her.

Gavan sought his own equilibrium in an ignoring of that undercurrent.

“Now you are not frightened; but why are you angry?” he asked.

For a moment she did not speak.

“Eppie, I am so sorry. What is it? You are really angry, Eppie!”

Then, after that pause of speechlessness, she found words.

“If I think of you as mist you must not think of me as glamour.” This

she gave him straight.

Only after disengaging her train from the settle, from his feet, after

wheeling aside his chair to make a clear passage for her departure, did

she add: “I have read your priggish Schopenhauer.”

She gave him no time for reply or protestation. Quite mistress of

herself, leaving him with all the awkwardness of the situation--if he

chose to consider it awkward--upon his hands, very fully the finished

mondaine and very beautifully the fearless and assured nymph of the

hillside, she went to the piano, turned and rejected, in looking over

it, some music, and sitting down, striking a long, full chord, she began

to sing, in her voice of frosty dawn, the old Scotch ballad.

He might go or listen as he liked. She had put him away, him and his

mists, his ambiguous hold upon her, his ambiguous look at her. She sang

to please herself as much as when she had gone up through the woodlands.

And if the note of anger still thrilled in her voice she turned it to

the uses of her song and made a higher triumph of sadness.

She was still singing when the general came in.

* * * * *

SHE had been quite right; she had seen with her perfect sharpness and

clearness indeed, and no wonder that she had been angry. He himself saw

clearly, directly the hand was off the harp. It was laughably simple. He

was a man, she a woman; they were both young and she was beautiful. That

summed it up, sufficiently and brutally; and no wonder, again, that she

had felt such summing an offense. It wasn’t in the light of such

summings that she regarded herself.

With him she had never, for a moment, made use of glamour. His was the

rudimentary impulse, and Gavan’s sensitive cheek echoed her flush when

he thought of it. Never again, he promised himself, after this full

comprehension of it, should such an impulse dim their friendship. He

would make it up to her by helping her to forget it.

But for all that, it was with the strangest mixture of relief and dismay

that he found upon the breakfast-table next morning an urgent summons

for his return home. It was the affable little rector of the parish in

Surrey who wrote to tell him of his father’s sudden breakdown,--softening

of the brain. When Eppie appeared, a little grave, but all clear

composure, he was able to show her the letter and to tell her of his

immediate departure with a composure as assured as her own, but he

wondered, while he spoke, if to her also the parting would mean any form

of relief. At all events, for her, it couldn’t mean any form of wrench.

Looking in swift glances at her face, while she questioned him about his

father, suggested trains and nurses, and gave practical advice for his

journey, he was conscious that the relief was the result of a pretty

severe strain, and that though it was relieved it hadn’t stopped aching.

The very fact that Eppie’s narrow face, the hair brushed back from brow

and temples, showed, in the clear morning light, more of its oddity than

its beauty, made its charm cling the more closely. Her eyes looked

small, her features irregular; he saw the cliff-like modeling of her

temples, the cheeks, a little flat, pale, freckled; the long, queer

lines of her chin. Bare, exposed, without a flicker of sunlight on her

delicate analogies of ruggedness, of weather-beaten strength, she might

almost have been called ugly; and, with every glance, he was feeling her

as sweetness, sweetness deep and reticent, embodied.

The general and Miss Barbara were late. She poured out his coffee, saw

him embarked on a sturdy breakfast, insisted, now with the irradiating

smile that in a moment made her lovely, that he should eat a great deal

before his journey, made him think anew of that maternal quality in

her,--the tolerance, the tenderness. And in the ambiguous relief came

the sharpened dismay of seeing how great was the cause for it.

He wanted to say a word, only one, about their little drama of last

night, but the time didn’t really seem to come for it; perhaps she saw

that it shouldn’t come. But on the old stone steps with their yellow

lichen spots, his farewells over to the uncle and aunt, and he and Eppie

standing out there in a momentary solitude, she said, shaking his hand,

“Friends, you know. Look me up when you are next in London.” She had her

one word to say, and she had said it when and how she wished. It wasn’t

anything so crude as reassurance; it was rather a sunny assurance, in

which she wished him to share, that none was needed.

He looked, like the boy of years ago, a real depth of gratitude into her

eyes. She had given him his chance.

“I’ll never frighten you again; I’ll never displease you again.”

“I know you won’t. I won’t let you,” Eppie smiled.

“I wish I were more worth your while--worth your being kind to me.”

“You think you are still--gloomy, tiresome, self-centered?”

“That defines it well enough.”

“Well, you serve my purpose,” said Eppie, “and that is to have you for

my friend.”

She seemed in this parting to have effaced all memory of glamour, but

Gavan knew that the deeper one was with him.

It was with him, even while, in the long journey South, he was able to

unwrap film after film of the mirage from its central core of reality,

to see Eppie, in all her loveliness, in all her noblest aspects, as a

sort of incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He could

laugh over the grotesque analogy; it proved to him how far from life he

was when its symbol could show in such unflattering terms, and yet it

hurt him that he could find it in himself so to symbolize her. It was

just because she was so lovely, so noble, that he must--he must--. For,

under all, was the wrench that would take time to stop aching.

X

Captain Palairet had gone to pieces and was now as unpleasant an object

as for years he had been a pleasant one.

Gavan’s atrophied selfishness felt only a slight shrinking from the

revolting aspects of dissolution, and his father’s condition rather

interested him. The captain’s childish clinging to his son was like an

animal instinct suddenly asserting itself, an almost vegetable instinct,

so little more than mere instinct was it. It affected Gavan much as the

suddenly contracting tentacles of a sea-anemone upon his finger might

have done. He was not at all touched; but he felt the claim of a

possible pang of loneliness and desolation in the dimness of decay, and,

methodically, with all the appearances of a solicitous kindness, he

responded to the claim.

The man, immersed in his rudimentary universe of sense, showed a host of

atavistic fears; fears of the dark, of strange faces, fears of sudden

noises or of long stillness. He often wept, leaning his swollen face on

Gavan’s shoulder, filled with an abject self-pity.

“You know how I love you, Gavan,” he would again and again repeat, his

lax lips fumbling with the words, “always loved you, ever since you were

a little fellow--out in India, you know. I and your dear mother loved

you better than life,” and, wagging his head, he would repeat, “better

than life,” and break into sobs--sobs that ceased when the nurse brought

him his wine-jelly. Then it might be again the tone of feeble whining.

“It doesn’t taste right, Gavan. Can’t you make it taste right? Do you

want to starve me between you all?”

Gavan, with scientific scrutiny, diagnosed and observed while he soothed

him or engaged his vagrant mind in games.

In his intervals of leisure he pursued his own work, and rode and walked

with all his usual tempered athleticism. He did not feel the days as a

strain, hardly as disagreeable; he was indifferent or interested. At the

worst he was bored. The undercurrent of pity he was accustomed to living

with.

Only at night, in hours of rest, he would sink into a half-dazed

disgust, find himself on edge, nearly worn out. So the winter passed.

He was playing draughts with his father on a day in earliest spring,

when he was told that Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford were below.

Gavan was feeling dull and jaded. The conducting of the game needed a

monotonous patience and tact. The captain would now pick up a draught

and gaze curiously at it for long periods of time, now move in a

direction contrary to all the rules of the game and to his own

advantage. When such mistakes were pointed out to him he would either

apologize humbly or break into sudden peevish wrath. To-day he was in a

peculiarly excitable condition and had more than once wept.

Gavan, after the servant’s announcement, holding a quietly expectant

draught in his thin, poised fingers, looked hard at the board that still

waited for his father’s move. He then felt that a deep flush had mounted

to his face.

In spite of the one or two laconic letters that they had interchanged,

Eppie had been relegated for many months to her dream-place--a dream, in

spite of its high coloring, more distant than this nearer dream of ugly

illness. It was painful to look back at the queer turmoil she had roused

in him during the autumnal fortnight, and more painful to realize, as in

his sudden panic of reluctance now, that, though a dream, she was an

abiding and constant one.

Mrs. Arley he knew, and her motor-car had recently made her a next-door

neighbor in spite of the thirty miles between them. She was a friend

with whom Eppie had before stayed on the other side of the county.

Nothing could be more natural than that she and Eppie should drop in

upon a solitude that must, to their eyes, have all the finished elements

of pathos. Yet he was a little vexed by the intrusion, as well as

reluctant to meet it.

His father broke into vehement protest when he heard that he was to be

abandoned at an unusual hour, and it needed some time for Gavan and the

nurse to quiet him. Twenty minutes had passed before he could go down to

his guests, and he surmised that they would feel in this delay yet

further grounds for pity.

They were in the hall, before a roaring fire, Eppie standing with her

back to it, in a familiar attitude, though her long, caped cloak and

hooded motoring-cap, the folds of gray silk gathered under her chin and

narrowly framing her face, gave her an unfamiliar aspect. Her eyes met

his as he turned the spacious staircase and came down to them, and he

felt that they watched his every movement and noted every trace in him

of fatigue and dejection.

Mrs. Arley, fluent, flexible, amazingly pretty, for all the light

powdering and wrinkling of her fifty years, came rustling forward.

“Eppie is staying with me for the week-end,--I wrench her from her slums

now and then,--and we wanted to hear how you are, to see how you are.

You look dreadfully fagged; doesn’t he, Eppie? How is your father?”

Eppie gave him her hand in silence.

“My father will never be any better, you know,” he said. “As for me, I’m

all right. I should have come over to see you before this, and looked

you up, too, Eppie, but I can’t get away for more than an hour or so at

a time.”

He led them into the library while he spoke,--Mrs. Arley exclaiming that

such devotion was dear and good of him,--and Eppie looked gravely round

at the room that he had described to her as the room that he really

passed his life in. The great spaces of ranged books framed for her, he

knew, pictures of his own existence. He knew, too, that her gravity was

the involuntary result of the impression that he made upon her. She was

sorry for him. Poor Eppie, their relationship since childhood seemed to

have consisted in that--in the sense of her pursuing pity and in his

retreat before it, for her sake. He retreated now, as he knew, in his

determination to show her that pity was misplaced, uncalled for.

Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner

that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for

lunch--an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been

expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and

shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that

discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s

interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh,

were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if

Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if,

in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent

of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations.

Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but

he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s,

when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small

old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well.

In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her

veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person

whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly

for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken

assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up

her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table,

examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced,

stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant

new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the

future.

The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn,

centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring

flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and

laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on

the sky.

Eppie from her seat at the table faced the sky, the trees, the lawn.

What a beautiful place, she was thinking. A place for life, sheltered,

embowered. How she would have loved, as a child, those delicious

rivulets of green that ran into the thick mysteries of shadow. How she

would have loved to play dolls on a hot summer afternoon in the shade of

the great yew-tree that stretched its dark branches half across the sky.

The house, the garden, made her think of children; she saw white

pinafores and golden heads glancing in and out among the trees and

shrubs, and the vision of young life, blossoming, growing in security

and sunlight, filled her thought with its pictured songs of innocence,

while, at the same time, under the vision, she was feeling it all--all

the beauty and sheltered sweetness--as dreadful in its emptiness, its

worse than emptiness: a casket holding a death’s-head. She came back

with something of a start to hear her work in the slums enthusiastically

described by Mrs. Arley. “I thought it was only in novels that children

clung to the heroine’s skirts. I never believed they clung in real life

until seeing Eppie with her ragamuffins; they adore her.”

This remark, to whose truth she assented by a vague smile, gave Eppie’s

thoughts a further push that sent them seeing herself among the golden

heads and white pinafores on the lawn at Cheylesford Lodge; and though

the vision maintained its loving aunt relationship of the slums, there

was now a throb and flutter in it, as though she held under her hand a

strange wild bird that only her own will not to look kept hidden.

These dreams were followed by a nightmare little episode.

In the library, again, the talk was still an airy dialogue, Eppie, her

eyes on the flames as she drank her coffee, still maintaining her

ruminating silence. In the midst of her thoughts and their chatter, the

door opened suddenly and Captain Palairet appeared on the threshold.

His head neatly brushed, a sumptuous dressing-gown of padded and

embroidered silk girt about him, he stood there with moist eyes and

lips, faintly and incessantly shaking through all his frame, a troubling

and startling figure.

Gavan had been wondering all through the visit how his father was

bearing the abandonment, and his appearance, he saw now, must have been

the triumphant fruit of contest with the nurse whose face of helpless

disapprobation hovered outside.

Gavan went to his side, and, leaning on his son’s arm, the captain said

that he had come to pay his respects to Mrs. Arley and to Miss Gifford.

Taking Mrs. Arley’s hand, he earnestly reiterated his pleasure in

welcoming her to his home.

“Gavan’s in fact, you know; but he’s a good son. Not very much in

common, perhaps: Gavan was always a book-worm, a fellow of fads and

theories; I love a broad life, men and things. No, not much in common,

except our love for his mother, my dear, dead wife; that brought us

together. We shook hands over her grave, so to speak,” said the captain,

but without his usual sentiment. An air of jaunty cheerfulness pervaded

his manner. “She is buried near here, you know. You may have seen the

grave. A very pretty stone; very pretty indeed. Gavan chose it. I was in

India at the time. A great blow to me. I never recovered from it. I

forget, for the moment, what the text is; but it’s very pretty; very

appropriate. I knew I could trust Gavan to do everything properly.”

Gavan’s face had kept its pallid calm.

“You will tire yourself, father,” he said. “Let me take you up-stairs

now. Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford will excuse us.”

The captain resisted his attempt to turn him to the door.

“Miss Gifford. Yes, Miss Gifford,” he repeated, turning to where Eppie

stood attentively watching father and son, “But I want to see Miss

Elspeth Gifford. It was that I came for.” He took her hand and his

wrecked and restless eyes went over her face. “So this is Miss Elspeth

Gifford.”

“You have heard of me?” Eppie’s composure was as successful as Gavan’s

own and lent to the scene a certain matter-of-fact convention.

The captain bowed low. “Heard of you? Yes. I have often heard of you. I

am glad, glad and proud, to meet at last so much goodness and wit and

beauty. You have a name in the world, Miss Gifford. Yes, indeed, I have

heard of you.” Suddenly, while he held her hand and gazed at her, his

look changed. Tears filled his eyes; a muscle in his lip began to shake;

a flush of maudlin indignation purpled his face.

“And you are the girl my son jilted! And you come to our house! It’s a

noble action. It’s a generous action. It’s worthy of you, my dear.” He

tightly squeezed her hand, Gavan’s attempt--and now no gentle one--to

draw him away only making his clutch the more determined.

“No, Gavan, I will not go. I will speak my mind. This is my hour. The

time has come for me to speak my mind. Let’s have the truth; truth at

all costs is my motto. A noble and generous action. But, my dear,” he

leaned his head toward her and spoke in a loud whisper, “you’re well rid

of him, you know--well rid of him. Don’t try to patch it up. Don’t come

in that hope. So like a woman--I know, I know. But give it up; that’s my

advice. Give it up. He’s a poor fellow--a very poor fellow. He wouldn’t

make you happy; just take that from me--a friend, a true friend. He

wouldn’t make any woman happy. He’s a poor creature, and a false

creature, and I’ll say this,” the captain, now trembling violently,

burst into tears: “if he has been a false lover to you he has been a bad

son to me.”

With both hands, sobbing, he clung to her, while, with a look of sick

distress, Gavan tried, not too violently, to draw him from his hold on

her.

Eppie had not flushed. “Don’t mind,” she said, glancing at the helpless

son, “he has mixed it up, you see.” And, bending on the captain eyes

severe in kindly intention, like the eyes of a nurse firmly

administering a potion, “You are mistaken about Gavan. It was another

man who jilted me. Now let him take you up-stairs. You are ill.”

But the captain still clung, she, erect in her spare young strength,

showing no shrinking of repulsion. “No, no,” he said; “you always try to

shield him. A woman’s way. He won your heart, and then he broke it, as

he has mine. He has no heart, or he’d take you now. Give it up. Don’t

come after him. Sir, how dare you! I won’t submit to this. How dare you,

Sir!” Gavan had wrenched him away, and in a flare of silly passion he

struck at him again and again, like a furious child. It was a wrestle

with the animal, the vegetable thing, the pinioning of vicious

tentacles. Mrs. Arley fluttered in helpless consternation, while Eppie,

firm and adequate, assisted Gavan in securing the wildly striking hands.

Caught, held, haled toward the door, the captain became, with amazing

rapidity, all smiles and placidity.

“Gently, gently, my dear boy. This is unseemly, you know, very childish

indeed. Temper! Temper! You get it from me, no doubt--though your mother

could be very spiteful at moments. I’ll come now. I’ve said my say. Well

rid of him, my dear, well rid of him,” he nodded from the door.

“Eppie! My dear!” cried Mrs. Arley, when father and son had disappeared.

“How unutterably hateful. I am more sorry for him than for you, Eppie.

His face!”

Eppie was shrugging up her shoulders and straightening herself as though

the captain’s grasp still threatened her.

“Hateful indeed; but trivial. Gavan understands that I understand. We

must make him feel that it’s nothing.”

“He’s quite mad, horrible old man.”

“Not quite; more uncomfortably muddled than mad. We must make him see

that we think nothing of it,” Eppie repeated. She turned to Gavan, who

entered as she spoke, still with his sick flush and showing a speechless

inability to frame apologies.

“This is what it is to have echoes, Gavan,” she said. “My little

misfortunes have reached your father’s ears.” She went to him, she took

his hand, she smiled at him, all her radiance recovered, a garment of

warmth and ease to cover the shivering the captain’s words might have

made. “Please don’t mind. I wasn’t a bit bothered, really.”

He could almost have wept for the relief of her smile, her sanity. The

linking of their names in such an unthinkable connection had given him

the nausea qualm of a terrifying obsession. He could find now only trite

words in which to tell her that she was very kind and that he was more

sorry than he could say.

“But you mustn’t be. It was such an obvious muddle for a twisted mind.

He knew,” said Eppie, still smiling with the healing radiance, “that I

had been jilted, and he knew that I was very fond of you, and he put

together the one and one make two that happened to be before him.” She

saw that his distress had been far greater than her own, that she now

gave him relief.

Afterward, as she and Mrs. Arley sped away, her own reaction from the

healing attitude showed in a rather grim silence. She leaned back in the

swift, keen air, her arms folded in the fullness of her capes.

But Mrs. Arley could not repress her own accumulations of feeling. “My

dear Eppie,” she said, her hand on her shoulder, and with an almost more

than maternal lack of reticence, “I want you to marry him. Don’t glare

Medusa at me. I hate tact and silences. Heaven knows I would have

scouted the idea of such a match for you before seeing him to-day. But

my hard old heart is touched. He is such a dear; so lonely. It’s a nice

little place, too, and there is some money. Jim Grainger is too

drab-colored a person for you,--all his force, all his sheckles, can’t

gild him,--and Kenneth Langley is penniless. This dear creature is not a

bit drab and not quite penniless. And you are big enough to marry a man

who needs you rather than one you need. _Will_ you think of it, Eppie?”

“Grace, you are worse than Captain Palairet,” said Eppie, whose eyes

were firmly fixed on the neat leather back of the chauffeur in front of

them.

“Don’t be cross, Eppie. Why should you mind my prattle?”

“Because I care for him so much.”

“Well, that’s what I say.”

“No; not as I mean it.”

“_He_ of course cares, as I mean it.”

Eppie did not pause over this.

“It’s something different, quite different, from anything else in the

world. It can’t be talked about like that. Please, Grace, never, never

be like Captain Palairet again. _You_ haven’t softening of the brain. I

shall lose Gavan if my friends and his father have such delusions too

openly.”

XI

Gavan went down the noisy, dirty thoroughfare, looking for the turning

which would lead him, so the last policeman consulted said, to Eppie’s

little square.

It was a May day, suddenly clear after rain, liquid mud below, and above

a sharply blue sky, looking its relentless contrast at the reeking,

sordid streets, the ugly, hurrying life of the wide thoroughfare.

All along the gutter was a vociferous fringe of dripping fruit-and

food-barrows, these more haphazard conveniences faced by a line of

gaudy, glaring shops.

The blue above was laced with a tangle of tram-wires and cut with the

jagged line of chimney-pots.

The roaring trams, the glaring shops, seemed part of a cruel machinery

creative of life, and the grim air of permanence, the width and solidity

of the great thoroughfare, were more oppressive to Gavan’s nerves, its

ugliness fiercer, more menacing, than the narrower meanness of the

streets where life seemed to huddle with more despondency.

In one of these he found that he had, apparently, lost his way.

A random turn brought him to a squalid court with sloping, wet pavement

and open doors disgorging, from inner darkness, swarms of children. They

ran; tottered on infantile, bandy legs; locked in scuffling groups,

screaming shrilly, or squatted on the ground, absorbed in some game.

Gavan surveyed them vaguely as he wandered seeking an outlet. His eye

showed neither shrinking nor tenderness, rather a bleak, hard, unmoved

pity, like that of the sky above. He was as alien from that swarming,

vivid life as the sky; but, worn as he was with months of nervous

overstrain, he felt rising within him now and then a faint sense of

nausea such as one might feel in contemplating a writhing clot of

maggots.

He threaded his way among them all, and at a corner of the court found a

narrow exit. This covered passage led, apparently, to another and fouler

court, and emerging from it, coming suddenly face to face with him, was

Eppie. She was as startling, seen here, as “a lily in the mouth of

Tartarus,” and he had a shock of delight in her mere aspect. For Eppie

was as exquisite as a flower. Her garments had in no way adapted

themselves to mud and misery. Her rough dress of Japanese blue showed at

the open neck of its jacket a white linen blouse; her short, kilted

skirt swung with the grace of petals; her little upturned cap of blue

made her look like a Rosalind ready for a background of woodland glade,

streams, and herds of deer.

And here she stood, under that cruel sky, among the unimaginable

ugliness of this City of Dreadful Night.

In her great surprise she did not smile, saying, as she gave him her

hand, “Gavan! by all that’s wonderful!”

“You asked me to come and see you when I was next in London.”

“So I did.”

“So here I am. I had a day off by chance; some business that had to be

seen to.”

“And your father?”

“Slowly going.”

“And you have come down here, for how long?”

“For as long as you’ll keep me. I needn’t go back till night.”

Her eye now wandered away from him to the maggots, one of whom, Gavan

observed, had attached itself to her skirt, while a sufficiently dense

crowd surrounded them, staring.

“You have a glimpse of our children,” said Eppie, surveying them with,

not exactly a maternal, but, as it were, a fraternal eye of affectionate

familiarity.

“What’s that, Annie?” in answer to a husky whisper. “Do I expect you

to-night? Rather! Is that the doll, Ada? Well, I can’t say that you’ve

kept it very tidy. Where’s its pinafore?” She took the soiled object

held up to her and examined its garments. “Where’s its petticoat?”

“Please, Miss, Hemly took them.”

“Took them away from you?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“For her own doll, I suppose.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Eppie cogitated. “I’ll speak to Emily about it presently. You shall have

them back.”

“Please, Miss, I called her a thief.”

“You spoke the truth. How are you, Billy? You look decidedly better.

Gavan, my hands are full for the next hour or so and I can’t even offer

to take you with me, for I’m going to sick people. But I shall be back

and through with all my work by tea-time, if you don’t mind going to my

place and waiting. You’ll find Maude Allen there. She lives down here,

and with me when I am here. She is a nice girl, though she will talk

your head off.”

“How do I find her? I don’t mind waiting.”

“You follow this to the end, take the first turning to the right, and

that will bring you to my place. I’ll meet you there at five.”

Gavan, thus directed, made his way to the dingy little house occupied by

the group of energetic women whom Eppie joined yearly for her three

months of--dissipation? he asked himself, amused by her variegated

vigor.

The dingy little house looked on a dingy little square--shell of former

respectable affluence from which the higher form of life had shriveled.

The sooty trees were thickly powdered with young green, and uneven

patches of rough, unkempt grass showed behind broken iron railings. A

cat’s-meat man called his dangling wares along the street, and Gavan,

noticing a thin and furtive cat, that stole from a window-ledge, stopped

him and bought a large three-penny-worth, upon which he left the cat

regaling itself with an odd, fastidious ferocity.

He entered another world when he entered Eppie’s sitting-room. Here was

life at its most austerely sweet. Books lined the walls, bowls of

primroses and delicate Japanese bronzes set above their shelves;

chintz-covered chairs were drawn before the fire; the latest reviews lay

on a table, and on the piano stood open music; there were wide windows

in the little room, and crocuses, growing in flat, earthenware dishes,

blew out their narrow chalices against the sunlit muslin curtains.

Miss Allen sat sewing near the crocuses, and, shy and voluble, rose to

greet him. She was evidently accustomed to Eppie’s guests--accustomed,

too, perhaps, to taking them off her hands, for though she was shy her

volubility showed a familiarity with the situation. She was almost as

funny a contrast to Eppie as the slum children had been an ugly one. She

wore a spare, drab-colored skirt and a cotton shirt, its high, hard

collar girt about by a red tie that revealed bone buttons before and

behind. Her sleek, fair hair, relentlessly drawn back, looked like a

varnish laid upon her head. Her features, at once acute and kindly, were

sharp and pink.

She was sewing on solid and distressingly ugly materials.

“Yes, I am usually at home. Miss Gifford is the head and I am the hands,

you see,” she smiled, casting quick, upward glances at the long, pale

young man in his chair near the fire. “Miss Henderson, Miss Grey, and I

live here all year round, and I do so look forward to Miss Gifford’s

coming. Oh, yes, it’s a most interesting life. Do you do anything of the

sort? Are you going to take up a club? Perhaps you are going into the

Church?”

Miss Allen asked her swift succession of questions as if in a mild

desperateness.

Gavan admitted that his interest was wholly in Miss Gifford.

“She _is_ interesting,” Miss Allen, all comprehension, agreed. “So many

people find her inspiring. Do you know Mr. Grainger, the M.P.? He comes

here constantly. He is a cousin, you know. He has known her, of course,

ever since she was a child. I think it’s very probable that she

influences his political life--oh, quite in a right sense, I mean. He is

such a conscientious man--everybody says that. And then she isn’t at all

eccentric, you know, as so many fashionable women who come down here

are; they do give one so much trouble when they are like that,--all

sorts of fads that one has to manage to get on with. She isn’t at all

faddish. And she isn’t sentimental, either. I think the sentimental ones

are worst--for the people, especially, giving them all sorts of foolish

ideas. And it’s not that she doesn’t _care_. She cares such a lot.

That’s the secret of her not getting discouraged, you see. She never

loses her spirit.”

“Is it such discouraging work?” Gavan questioned from his chair. With

his legs crossed, his hat and stick held on his knee, he surveyed Miss

Allen and the crocuses.

“Well, not to me,” she answered; “but that’s very different, for I have

religious faith. Miss Gifford hasn’t that, so of course she must care a

great deal to make up for it. When one hasn’t a firm faith it is far

more difficult, I always think, to see any hope in it all. I think she

would find it far easier if she had that. She can’t resign herself to

things. She is rather hot-tempered at times,” Miss Allen added, with one

of her sharp, shy glances.

Gavan, amused by the idea that Eppie lacked religious faith, inquired

whether the settlement were religious in intention, and Miss Allen

sighed a little in answering no,--Miss Grey, indeed, was a Positivist.

“But we Anglicans are very broad, you know,” she said. “I can work in

perfectly with them all--better with Miss Grey and Miss Gifford than

with Miss Henderson, who is very, very Low. Miss Gifford goes in more

for social conditions and organization--trades-unions, all that sort of

thing; that’s where she finds Mr. Grainger so much of a help, I think.”

And he gathered from Miss Allen’s further conversation, from its very

manner of vague though admiring protest, a clearer conception of Eppie’s

importance down here. To Miss Allen, she evidently embodied a splendid,

pagan force, ambiguous in its splendor. He saw her slightly shrinking

vision of an intent combatant; no loving sister of charity, but a young

Bellona, the latest weapons of sociological warfare in her hands, its

latest battle-cry on her lips. And all for what? thought Gavan, while,

with a sense of contrasting approval, he looked at Miss Allen’s tidy

little head against the sunlit crocuses and watched the harmless

occupation of her hands. All for life, more life; the rousing of desire;

the struggling to higher forms of consciousness. She was in it, the

strife, the struggle. He had seen on her face to-day, with all its

surprise, perhaps its gladness, that alien look of grave preoccupation

that passed from him to the destinies she touched. In thinking of it all

he felt particularly at peace, though there was the irony of his

assurance that Eppie’s efforts among this suffering life where he found

her only resulted in a fiercer hold on suffering. Physical degradation

and its resultant moral apathy were by no means the most unendurable of

human calamities. Miss Allen’s anodynes--the mere practical petting,

soothing, telling of pretty tales--were, in their very short-sightedness,

more fitted to the case.

Miss Allen little thought to what a context her harmless prattle was

being adjusted. She would have been paralyzed with horror could she have

known that to the gentle young man, sitting there so unalarmingly, she

herself was only a rather simple symptom of life that he was quietly

studying. In so far from suspecting, her shyness went from her; he was

so unalarming--differing in this from so many people--that she found it

easy to talk to him. And she still had a happy little hope of a closer

community of interest than he had owned to. He looked, she thought, very

High Church. Perhaps he was in the last stages of conversion.

She had talked on for nearly an hour when another visitor was announced.

This proved to be a young man slightly known to Gavan, a graceful,

mellifluous youth, whose artificiality of manner and great personal

beauty suggested a mingling of absinthe and honey. People had rather

bracketed Gavan and Basil Mayburn together; one could easily deal with

both as lumped in the same category,--charming drifters, softly

disdainful of worldly aims and efforts. Mayburn himself took sympathy

for granted, though disconcerted at times by finding his grasp of the

older man to be on a sliding, slippery surface. Palairet had, to be

sure, altogether the proper appreciations of art and literature, the

rhythm of highly evolved human intercourse; the aroma distilled for the

esthete from the vast tragic comedy of life; so that he had never quite

satisfied himself as to why he could get no nearer on this common

footing. Palairet was always charming, always interested, always

courteous; but one’s hold did slip.

And to Gavan, Basil Mayburn, with his fluent ecstasies, seemed a

sojourner in a funny half-way house. To Mayburn the hallucination of

life was worth while esthetically. His own initial appeal to life had

been too fundamentally spiritual for the beautiful to be more to him

than a second-rate illusion.

Miss Allen greeted Mr. Mayburn with a coolness that at once

discriminated for Gavan between her instinctive liking for himself and

her shrinking from a man who perplexed and displeased her.

Mayburn was all glad sweetness: delighted to see Miss Allen; delighted

to see Palairet; delighted to wait in their company for the delightful

Miss Gifford; and, turning to Miss Allen, he went on to say, as a thing

that would engage her sympathies, that he had just come from a service

at the Oratory.

“I often go there,” he said; “one gets, as nowhere else that I know of

in London, the quintessence of aspiration--the age-long yearning of the

world. How are your schemes for having that little church built down

here succeeding? I do so believe in it. Don’t let any ugly sect steal a

march on you.”

Miss Allen primly replied that the plans for the church were prospering;

and adding that Miss Gifford would be here in a moment and that she must

leave them, she gathered up her work and departed with some emphasis.

“Nice, dear little creature, that,” said Mayburn, “though she does so

dislike me. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I never quite know how

far her Anglicanism goes; such a pity that it doesn’t go a little

further and carry her into a nunnery of the Catholic Church. She is the

nun type. She ought to be done up in their delicious costume; it would

lend her the flavor she lacks so distressingly now. Did you notice her

collar and her hair? Astonishing the way that Eppie makes use of all

these funny, _guindée_ creatures whom she gets hold of down here. Have

you ever seen Miss Grey?--dogmatic, utilitarian, strangely ugly Miss

Grey, another nun type corrupted by our silly modern conditions. She

reeks of Comte and looks like a don. And all the rest of them,--the

solemn humanitarians, the frothy socialists, the worldly, benign old

ecclesiastics,--Eppie works them all; she has a genius for

administration. It’s an art in her. It almost consoles one for seeing

her wasted down here for so much of the year.”

“Why wasted?” Gavan queried. “She enjoys it.”

“Exactly. That’s the alleviation. Wasted for us, I mean. You have known

her for a long time, haven’t you, Palairet?”

Gavan, irked by the question and by the familiarity of Mayburn’s

references to their absent hostess, answered dryly that he had known

Miss Gifford since childhood; and Mayburn, all tact, passed at once to

less personal topics, inquiring with a new earnestness whether Palairet

had seen Selby’s Goya, and expatiating on its exquisite horror until the

turning of a key in the hall-door, quick steps on the stairs leading up

past the sitting-room, announced Eppie’s arrival.

She was with them in a moment, cap and jacket doffed, her muddy shoes

changed for slender patent-leather, fresh in her white blouse. She

greeted Mayburn, turning to Gavan with, “I’m so glad you waited. You

shall both have tea directly.”

With all her crisp kindliness, Gavan fancied a change in her since the

greeting of an hour and a half before. Things hadn’t gone well with her.

And he could flatter himself, also, with the suspicion that she was

vexed at finding their tête-à-tête interrupted.

Mayburn loitered about the room after her while she straightened the

shade on the student’s lamp, just brought in, and made the tea, telling

her about people, about what was going on in the only world that

counted, telling her about Chrissie Bentworth’s astounding elopement,

and, finally, about the Goya. “You really must see it soon,” he assured

her.

Eppie, adjusting the flame of her kettle, said that she didn’t want to

see it.

“You don’t care for Goya, dear lady?”

“Not just now.”

“Well, of course I don’t mean just now. I mean after you have burned out

this particular flame. But, really, it’s a sensation before you and you

mustn’t miss having it. An exquisite thing. Horror made beautiful.”

“I don’t want to see it made beautiful,” Eppie, with cheerful rudeness,

objected.

“Now that,” said Mayburn, drawing up to the tea-table with an

appreciative glance for the simple but inviting fare spread upon

it--“now that is just where I always must argue with you. Don’t you

agree with me, Palairet, that life is beautiful--that it’s only in terms

of beauty that it has significance?”

“If you happen to see it so,” Gavan ambiguously assented.

“Exactly; I accept your amendment--if you happen to have the good

fortune to see it so; if you have the faculty that gives the vision; if,

like Siegfried, the revealing dragon’s-blood has touched your lips.

Eppie has the gift and shouldn’t wilfully atrophy it. She shouldn’t

refuse to share the vision of the Supreme Artist, to whom all horror and

tragedy are parts of the picture that his eternal joy contemplates; she

should not refuse to listen with the ear of the Supreme Musician, to

whom all the discords that each one of us is, before we taste the

dragon’s-blood,--for what is man but a dissonance, as our admirable

Nietzsche says,--to whom all these discords melt into the perfect

phrase. All art, all truth is there. I’m rather dithyrambic, but, in

your more reticent way, you agree with me, don’t you, Palairet?”

Eppie’s eye, during this speech, had turned with observant irony upon

Gavan.

“How do you like your echo, Gavan?” she inquired, and she answered for

him: “Of course he agrees, but in slightly different terms. He doesn’t

care a fig about the symphony or about the Eternal Goya. There isn’t a

touch of the ‘lyric rapture’ about him. Now pray don’t ask him to define

his own conceptions, and drink your tea. And don’t say one word to me,

either, about your gigantic, Bohemian deity. You have spoken of

Nietzsche, and I know too well what you are coming to: the Apollonian

spirit of the world of Appearances in which the Dionysiac spirit of

Things-in-Themselves mirrors its vital ecstasy. Spare me, I’m not at all

in the humor to see horror in terms of loveliness.”

“_Ay de mi!_” Mayburn murmured, “you make me feel that I’m still a

dissonance when you talk like this.”

“A very wholesome realization.”

“You are cross with life to-day, and therefore with me, its poor little

appreciator.”

“I’m never cross with life.”

“Only with me, then?”

“Only with you, to-day.”

Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with

Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he

appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup with the business-like

air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside

trivialities.

Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious

of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in

the Eternal Goya.

“Don’t, don’t, I pray of you, let him take the color out of life for

you,” Mayburn pleaded, turning from this rebuff, tea-cup in hand, to

Eppie; and Eppie, with a rather grim smile, again full of reminiscences

for Gavan, declared that neither of them could take anything out of it

for her.

She kept, after that, the talk in pleasant enough shallows; but Mayburn

fancied, more than once, that he heard the grating of his keel on an

unpropitious shore. Eppie didn’t want him to-day, that was becoming

evident; she wasn’t going to push him off into decorative sailing. And

presently, wondering a little if his tact had already been too long at

fault, wondering anew about the degree of intimacy between the childhood

friends, who had, evidently, secrets in which he did not share, he

gracefully departed.

Eppie leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and closed her eyes as

though to give herself the relief of a long silence.

Her hair softly silhouetted against the green shade and the flickering

illumination of the firelight upon her, her passive face showed a stern

wistfulness. Things had gone wrong with her.

Looking at her, Gavan’s memory went back to the last time they had been

together, alone, in firelight, to his impulse and her startlingly acute

interpretation of it. Her very aspect now, her closed eyes and folded

arms, seemed to show him how completely she disowned, for both of them,

even the memory of such an unfitting episode. More keenly than ever he

recognized the fineness in her, the generosity, the willingness to

outlive trifles, to put them away forever; and the contagion of her

somber peace enveloped him.

She remarked presently, not opening her eyes: “I should like to make a

bon-fire of all the pictures in the world, all the etchings, the

carvings, the tapestries, the bric-à-brac in general,--and Basil

Mayburn, in sackcloth and ashes, should light it.”

“What puritanic savagery, Eppie!”

“I prefer the savage puritan to the Basil Mayburn type; at least I do

just now.”

“What’s the matter?” Gavan asked, after a little pause.

“Do I show it so evidently?” she asked, with a faint smile. “Everything

is the matter.”

“What, in particular, has gone wrong?”

Eppie did not reply at first, and he guessed that she chose only to show

him a lesser trouble when she said, “I’ve had a great quarrel with Miss

Grey, for one thing.”

“The positivistic lady?”

“Yes; did Maude tell you that? She really is a very first-rate

person--and runs this place; but I lost my temper with her--a stupid

thing to do, and not suddenly, either, which made it the less

excusable.”

“Are your theories so different that you came to a clash?”

“Of course they are different, though it was apparently only over a

matter of practical administration that we fought.” Eppie drew a long

breath, opening her eyes. “I shall stay on here this spring--I usually

go to my cousin Alicia for the season. But one can’t expect things to go

as one wants them unless one keeps one’s hand on the engine most of the

time. She has almost a right to consider me a meddling outsider, I

suppose. I shall stay on till the end of the summer.”

“And smash Miss Grey?”

Eppie, aware of his amusement, turned an unresentful glance upon him.

“No, don’t think me merely brutally dominant. I really like her. I only

want to use her to the best advantage.”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Not brutally dominant, I know; but I’m

sorry for Miss Grey.”

“Miss Grey can well take care of herself, I assure you.”

“What else has gone wrong?”

Again Eppie chose something less wrong to show him. “The factory where

some of my club-girls work has shut down half of its machinery. There

will be a great deal of suffering. And we have pulled them above a

flippant acceptance of state relief.”

“And because you have pulled them up, they are to suffer more?”

“Exactly, if you choose to put it so,” said Eppie.

He saw that she had determined that he should not frighten her again,

or, at all events, that he should never see it if he did frighten her;

and he had himself determined that his mist should never again close

round her. She should not see, even if she guessed at it pretty clearly,

the interpretation that he put upon the afternoon’s frictions and

failures, and, on the plane of a matter-of-fact agreement as to

practice, he drew her on to talk of her factory-girls, of the standards

of wages, the organization of woman’s labor, so that she presently said,

“What a pleasure it is to hear you talking sense, Gavan!”

“You have heard me talk a great deal of nonsense, I’m sure.”

“A great deal. Worse than Basil Mayburn’s.”

“I saw too clearly to-day the sorry figure I must have cut in your eyes.

I have learned to hold my tongue. When one can only say things that

sound particularly silly that is an obvious duty.”

“I am glad to hear you use the word, my dear Gavan; use it, even though

it means nothing to you. _Glissez mortel, n’appuyez pas_ should be your

motto for a time; then, after some wholesome skating about on what seems

the deceptive, glittering surface of things you will find, perhaps, that

it isn’t an abyss the ice stretches over, but a firm meadow, the ice

melted off it and no more need of skates.”

He was quite willing that she should so see his case; he was easier to

live with, no doubt, on this assumption of his curability.

Eppie, still leaning back, still with folded arms, had once more closed

her eyes, involuntarily sighing, as though under her own words the

haunting echo of the abyss had sounded for her.

She had not yet shown him what the real trouble was, and he asked her

now, in this second lull of their talk, “What else is there besides the

factory-girls and Miss Grey?”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You guess that there is

something else.”

“I can see it.”

“And you are sorry?”

“Sorry, dear Eppie? Of course.”

“It’s a child, a cripple,” said Eppie. “It had been ill for a long time,

but we thought that we could save it. It died this morning. I didn’t

know. I didn’t get there in time. I only found out after leaving you

this afternoon. And it cried for me.” She had turned her head from him

as it leaned against the chair, but he saw the tears slowly rolling down

her cheeks.

“I am so sorry, dear Eppie,” he said.

“The most darling child, Gavan.” His grave pity had brought him near and

it gave her relief to speak. “It had such a wistful, dear little face. I

used to spend hours with it; I never cared for any child so much. What I

can’t bear is to think that it cried for me.” Her voice broke. Without a

trace, now, of impulse or glamour, he took her hand, repeating his

helpless phrase of sympathy. Yes, he thought, while she wept, here was

the fatal flaw in any Tolstoian half-way house that promised peace. Love

for others didn’t help their suffering; suffering with them didn’t stop

it. Here was the brute fact of life that to all peace-mongers sternly

said, Where there is love there is no peace.

It was only after her hand had long lain in his fraternal clasp that she

drew it away, drying her tears and trying to smile her thanks at him.

Looking before her into the fire, and back into a retrospect of sadness,

she said: “How often you and I meet death together, Gavan. The poor

monkey, and Bobbie, and Elspeth even, ought to count.”

“You must think of me and death together,” he said.

He felt in a moment that the words had for her some significance that he

had not intended. In her silence was a shock, and in her voice, when she

spoke, a startled thing determinedly quieted.

“Not more than you must think of me and it together.”

“You and death, dear Eppie! You are its very antithesis!”

She did not look at him, and he could not see her eyes, but he knew,

with the almost uncanny intuition that he so often had in regard to her,

that a rising strength, a strength that threatened something, strove

with a sudden terror.

“Life conquers death,” she said at last.

He armed himself with lightness. “Of course, dear Eppie,” he said; “of

course it does; always and always. The poor baby dies, and--I wonder how

many other babies are being born at this moment? Conquers death? I

should think it did!”

“I did not mean in that way,” she answered. She had risen, and, looking

at the clock, seemed to show him that their time was over. “But we won’t

discuss life and death now,” she said.

“You mean that it’s late and that I must go?” he smiled.

“Perhaps I mean only that I don’t want to discuss,” she smiled back.

“Though--yes, indeed, it is late; almost seven. I have a great many

things to do this evening, so that I must rest before dinner, and let

you go.”

“I may come again?”

“Whenever you will. Thank you for being so kind to-day.”

“Kind, dear Eppie?”

“For being sorry, I mean.”

“Who but a brute would not have been?”

“And you are not a brute.”

The shaded light cast soft upward shadows on her face, revealing sweet

oddities of expression. In their shadow he could not fathom her eyes;

but a tenderness, peaceful, benignant, even a recovered gaiety, hovered

on her brow, her upper lip, her cheeks. It was like a reflection of

sunlight in a deep pool, this dim smiling of gratitude and gaiety.

He had a queer feeling, and a profounder one than in their former moment

when she had repudiated his helpless emotion, that she spared him, that

she restrained some force that might break upon this fraternal nearness.

For an instant he wondered if he wanted to be spared, and with the

wonder was once more the wrench at leaving her there, alone, in her

fire-lit room. But it was her strength that carried them over all these

dubious undercurrents, and he so relied on it that, holding her hand in

good-by, he said, “I will come soon. I like it here.”

“And you are coming to Kirklands this summer. Uncle expects it. You

mustn’t disappoint him, and me. I shall be there for a month.”

“I’ll come.”

“Jim Grainger will be there, too. You remember Jim. You can fight with

him from morning till night, but you and I will fight about nothing,

absolutely nothing, Gavan. We will--_glisser_. We will talk about Goya!

We will be perfectly comfortable.”

He really believed that they might be, so happily convincing was her

tone.

“Grainger is a great chum of yours, isn’t he?” he asked.

“You remember, he and his brother were old playmates; Clarence has

turned out a poor creature; he’s a nobody in the church. I’m very fond

of Jim. And I admire him tremendously. He is the conquering type, you

know--the type that tries for the high grapes.”

“You won’t set him at me, to mangle me for your recreation?”

“Do I seem such a pitiless person?”

“Oh, it would be for my good, of course.”

“You may come with no fear of manglings. You sha’n’t be worried or

reformed.”

They had spoken as if the captain were non-existent, but Gavan put the

only qualifying touch to his assurance of seeing her at Kirklands. “I’ll

come--if I can get there by then.”

XII

But he did not go to her again in the slums. The final phases of his

father’s long illness kept him in Surrey, and he found, on thinking it

over, that he was content to rest in the peace of that last seeing of

her.

It was clear to him that, were it not for that paralysis of the heart

and will, he would have been her lover. Like a veiled, exquisite

picture, the impossible love was with him always; he could lift the veil

and look upon it with calmness. That he owed something of this calmness

to Eppie he well knew. She loved him,--that, too, was evident,--but as a

sister might love, perhaps as a mother might. He was her child, her sick

child or brother, and he smiled over the simile, well content, and with

an odd sense of safety in his assurance. Peace was to be their final

word, and in the long months of a still, hot summer, this soft,

persistent note of peace was with him and filled a lassitude greater

than any he had known.

Monotonously the days went by like darkly freighted boats on a sultry

sea--low-lying boats, sliding with the current under sleepy sails.

He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange,

sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)--with his

mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the

sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final

insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current,

so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain

through him.

In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came--trivial,

yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s

eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his

wasted hand for his,--Gavan held it to the end--was the reminiscence of

the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had

drooped and died at Kirklands.

On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the

lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer

exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery

work--toward that same end,--the end of the monkey, of his father, his

mother,--was profoundly disgusting.

It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had

overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods,

wheel against a sunset sky.

Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked

a drawer of the writing-table beside him and taken out a case of

pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final

and only logical move of stopping itself.

He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he

felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment

life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final

clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing

that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and,

indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies

about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the

creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it

life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his

one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the

final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him

still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on

for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear

as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a

lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on

their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one

would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind

dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical

conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn

on his pillow and fall asleep.

Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped

through the emptiness of thought. He was aware, while he watched the

visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid

figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid

humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life

were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.

He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his

father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside

his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous

sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly

stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the

horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new

grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with

its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.

And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it

stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,--all

sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had

hated,--struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under

heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented

resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a

drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the

pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,--this dream where such

resurrections were possible.

He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to

whether head or heart were the surer exit, when a quiet step at the

door arrested him.

“Shall I bring the lamps, sir?” asked Howson’s quiet voice.

Gavan could but admire his own deftness in tossing a newspaper over the

pistol. He found himself perfectly prepared to keep up the last

appearances. He said that he didn’t want the lamps yet and that Howson

could leave the curtains undrawn. “It’s sultry this evening,” he added.

“It is, sir; I expect we’ll have thunder in the night,” said Howson,

whose voice partook of the day’s decorous gloom. He had brought in the

evening mail and laid the letters and newspapers beside Gavan, slightly

pushing aside the covered pistol to make room for them, an action that

Gavan observed with some intentness. But Howson saw nothing.

Left alone again, Gavan, not moving in his chair, glanced at the letters

and papers neatly piled beside his elbow.

After the rending agony of that moment of hideous realization, when, in

every fiber, he had felt his own woeful humanity, an odd sleepiness

almost overcame him.

He felt much more like going to sleep than killing himself, and,

yawning, stretching, he shivered a little from sheer fatigue.

The edge of the newspaper that covered the pistol was weighted down by

the pile of papers, and in putting out his hand for it, automatically,

he pushed the letters aside, then, yawning again, picked them up instead

of the pistol. He glanced over the envelops, not opening them,--the

last hand at cards, that could hold no trumps for him. It was with as

mechanical an interest as that of the condemned criminal who, on the way

to the scaffold, turns his head to look at some unfamiliar sight. But at

the last letter he paused. The post-mark was Scotch; the writing was

Eppie’s.

He might have considered at that moment that the shock he felt was a

warning that life was by no means done with him, and that his way of

safety lay in swift retreat.

But after the wrench of agony and the succeeding sliding languor, he did

not consider anything. It was like a purely physical sensation, what he

felt, as he held the letter and looked at Eppie’s writing. Soft,

recurrent thrills went through him, as though a living, vibrating thing

were in his hands. Eppie; Kirklands; the heather under a summer sky. Was

it desire, or a will-less drifting with a new current that the new

vision brought? He could not have told.

He opened the letter and read Eppie’s matter-of-fact yet delicate

sympathy.

He must be worn out. She begged him to remember his promise and to come

to them at once.

At once, thought Gavan. It must be that, indeed, or not at all. He

glanced at the clock. He could really go at once. He could catch the

London train, the night express for Scotland, and he could be at

Kirklands at noon next day. He rose and rang the bell, looking out at

the darker pink of the sky, where the rooks no longer wheeled, until

Howson appeared.

“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” He found himself repeating

the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.”

Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only

natural.

Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols

with a short, decisive snap--a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in

which his mind was steeped.

The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the

heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose.

Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that

he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding?

He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet

to watch. Of that he was sure.