I
The moor was like an amethyst under a radiant August sky, and the air,
with its harmony of wind and sunlight, was like music.
Eppie walked beside him and Peter trotted before. The forms were
changed, but it might almost have been little Eppie, the boy Gavan, and
Robbie himself who went together through the heather. The form was
changed, but the sense of saneness so strong that it would have seemed
perfectly natural to pass an arm about a child Eppie’s neck and to talk
of the morning’s reading in the Odyssey.
Never had the feeling of reality been so vague or the dream sense been
so beautiful. His instinctive choice of this peace, instead of the
other, had been altogether justified. It was all like a delightful game
they had agreed to play, and the only rule of the game was to take each
other’s illusions for granted and, in so doing, to put them altogether
aside.
It was as if they went in a dream that tallied while, outside their
dream, the sad life of waking slept. It was all limpid, all effortless,
all clear sunlight and clear wind: limpid, like a happy dream, yet
deliciously muddled too, as a happy dream is often muddled, with its
mazed consciousness that, since it is a dream, ordinary impossibilities
may become quite possible, that one only has to direct a little the
turnings of the fairy-tale to have them lead one where one will, and yet
that to all strange happenings there hovers a background of
contradiction that makes them the more of an enchanted perplexity.
In the old white house the general and Miss Barbara would soon be
expecting them back to tea, both older, both vaguer, both, to Gavan’s
appreciation, more and more the tapestried figures, the background to
the young life that still moved, felt, thought in the foreground until
it, too, should sink and fade into a tapestry for other dramas, other
fairy-tales.
The general retold his favorite anecdotes with shorter intervals between
the tellings; cared more openly, with an innocent greediness, about the
exactitudes of his diet; was content to sit idly with an unremembering,
indifferent benignancy of gaze. All the sturdier significances of life
were fast slipping from him, all the old martial activities; it was like
seeing the undressing of a child, the laying aside of the toy trumpet
and the soldier’s kilt preparatory to bed. Miss Barbara was sweeter than
ever--a sweetness even less touched with variations than last year. And
she was sillier, poor old darling; her laugh had in it at moments the
tinkling, feeble foolishness of age.
Gavan saw it all imperturbably--how, in boyhood, the apprehension of it
would have cut into him!--and it all seemed really very good--as the
furniture to a fairy-tale; the sweet, dim, silly tapestry was part of
the peace. How Eppie saw it he didn’t know; he didn’t care; and she
seemed willing not to care, either, about what he saw or thought. Eppie
had for him in their fairy-tale all the unexacting loveliness of summer
nature, healing, sunny, smiling. He had been really ill, he knew that
now, and that the peace was in part the languor of convalescence, and,
for the sake of his recovery, she seemed to have become a part of
nature, to ask no questions and demand no dues.
To have her so near, so tender, so untroubling, was like holding in his
hands a soft, contented wild bird. He could, he thought, have held it
against his heart, and the heart would not have throbbed the faster.
There was nothing in her now of the young Valkyrie of mists and frosts,
shaking spears and facing tragedy with stern eyes. She threatened
nothing. She saw no tragedy. It was all again as if, in a bigger, more
beautiful way, she gave him milk to drink from a silver cup. Together
they drank, no potion, no enchanted, perilous potion, but, from the cup
of innocent summer days, the long, sweet dream of an Eternal Now.
To-day, for the first time, the hint of a cloud had crept into the sky.
“And to-morrow, Eppie, ends our tête-à-tête,” he said. “Or will Grainger
make as little of a third as the general and Miss Barbara?”
“He sha’n’t spoil things, if that’s what you mean,” said Eppie.
She wore a white dress and a white hat wreathed with green; the emerald
drops trembled in the shadow of her hair. She made him think of some
wandering princess in an Irish legend, with the white and green and the
tranquil shining of her eyes.
“Not our things, perhaps; but can’t he interfere with them? He will want
to talk with you about all the things we go on so happily without
talking of.”
“I’ll talk to him and go on happily with you.”
It was almost on his lips to ask her if she could marry Grainger and
still go on happily, like this, with him, Gavan. That it should have
seemed possible to ask it showed how far into fairy-land they had
wandered; but it was one of the turnings that one didn’t choose to take;
one was warned in one’s sleep of lurking dangers on that road. It might
lead one straight out of fairy-land, straight into uncomfortable waking.
“How happily we do go on, Eppie,” was what he did choose to say. “More
happily than ever before. What a contrast this--to East London.”
She glanced at him. “And to Surrey.”
“And to Surrey,” he accepted.
“Surrey was worse than East London,” she said.
“I didn’t know how much of a strain it had been until I got away from
it.”
“One saw it all in your face.”
“‘One’ meaning a clever Eppie, I suppose. But, yes, I had a bad moment
there.”
The memory of that heave of sod had no place in fairy-land, even less
place than the forecast of an Eppie married to Jim Grainger, and he
didn’t let his thought dwell on it even when he owned to the bad
moment, and he was thinking, really with amusement over her
unconsciousness, of the two means of escape from it that he had found to
his hand,--the pistol and her letter,--when she took up his words with a
quiet, “Yes, I knew you had.”
“Knew that I had had a strain, you mean?”
“No, had a bad moment,” she answered.
“You saw it in my face?”
“No. I knew. Before I saw you.”
He smiled at her. “You have a clairvoyant streak in your Scotch blood?”
She smiled back. “Probably. I knew, you see.”
Her assurance, with its calm over what it knew, really puzzled him.
“Well, what did you know?”
She had kept on quietly smiling while she looked at him, and, though she
now became grave, it was not as if for pain but for thankfulness. “It
was in the evening, the day after I wrote to you, the day your father
was buried. I went to my room to dress for dinner, my room next yours,
you know. And I was looking out,--at the pine-tree, the summer-house
where we played, and, in especial, I remember, at the white roses that I
could smell in the evening so distinctly,--when I knew, or saw, I don’t
know which, that you were in great suffering. It was most of all as if I
were in you, feeling it myself, rather than seeing or knowing. Then,”
her voice went on in its unshaken quiet, “I did seem to see--a grave;
not your father’s grave. You were seeing it, too,--a green grave. And
then I came back into myself and knew. You were in some way,--going. I
stood there and looked at the roses and seemed only to wait intensely,
to watch intensely. And after that came a great calm, and I knew that
you were not going.”
She quietly looked at him again,--her eyes had not been on him while she
spoke,--and, though he had paled a little, he looked as quietly back.
He found himself accepting, almost as a matter of course, this deep,
subconscious bond between them.
But in another moment, another realization came. He took her hand and
raised it to his lips.
“I always make you suffer.”
“No,” she answered, though she, now, was a little pale, “I didn’t
suffer. I was beyond, above all that. Whatever happened, we were really
safe. That was another thing I knew.”
He relinquished the kissed hand. “Dear Eppie, dear, dear Eppie, I am
glad that this happened.”
It had been, perhaps, to keep the dream safely around them that she had
shown him only the calm; for now she asked, and he felt the echo of that
suffering--that shared suffering--in it, “You had, then, chosen to go?”
Somehow he knew that they were safe in the littler sense, that she would
keep the dream unawakened, even if they spoke of the outside life.
“Yes,” he said, “you saw what was happening to me, Eppie. I had chosen
to go. But your letter came, and, instead, I chose to come to you.”
She asked no further question, walking beside him with all her
tranquillity.
But, to her, it was not in a second childhood, not in a fairy-tale, that
they went. She was tranquil, for him; a child, for him; healing,
unexacting nature, for him. But she knew she had not needed his
admission to know it, that it was life and death that went together.
Sometimes, as they walked, the whole glory of the day melted into a
phantasmagoria, unreal, specious, beside the intense reality of their
unspoken thoughts, his thoughts and hers; those thoughts that left them
only this little strip of fairy-land where they could meet in peace.
Thoughts only, not dislikes, not indifferences, sundered them. Their
natures, through all nature’s gamut, chimed; they looked upon each
other--when in fairy-land--with eyes of love. But above this accord was
a region where her human breath froze in an icy airlessness, where her
human flesh shattered itself against ghastly precipices. To see those
thoughts of Gavan’s was like having the lunar landscape suddenly glare
at one through a telescope. His thoughts and hers were as real as life
and death; they alone were real; only--and this was why, under its
burden, Eppie’s heart throbbed more deeply, more strongly,--only, life
conquered death. No, more still,--for so the strange evening vision had
borne its speechless, sightless witness,--life had already conquered
death. She had not needed him to tell her that, either.
And these days were life; not the dream he thought them, not the
fairy-tale, but balmy dawn stealing in, fresh, revivifying, upon his
long, arctic night; the flush of spring over the lunar landscape. So
she saw it with her eyes of faith.
The mother was strong in her. She could bide her time. She could see
death near him and, so that he should not see her fear, smile at him.
She could play games with him, and wait.
II
Jim Grainger arrived that evening, and Gavan was able to observe, at the
closest sort of quarters, his quondam rival.
His condition was so obvious that its very indifference to observation
took everybody into its confidence. Nobody counted with Mr. Grainger
except his cousin, and since he held open before her eyes--with angry
constancy, gloomy patience--the page of his devotion, the rest of the
company were almost forced to read with her. One couldn’t see Mr.
Grainger without seeing that page.
He held it open, but the period of construing had evidently passed. All
that there was to understand she understood long since, so that he was,
for the most part, silent.
In Eppie’s presence he would wander aimlessly about, look with an oddly
irate, unseeing eye at books or pictures, and fling himself into deep
chairs, where he sat, his arms folded in a sort of clutch, his head bent
forward, gazing at her with an air of dogged, somber resolve.
He was not by nature so taciturn. It was amusing to see the vehemence of
reaction that would overtake him in the smoking-room, where his
volubility became almost as overbearing and oppressive as his silences.
He was a man at once impatient and self-controlled. His face was all
made up of short, resolute lines. His nose, chopped off at the tip; his
lips, curled yet compressed; the energetic modeling of his brows with
their muscular protuberances; the clefted chin; the crest of chestnut
hair,--all expressed a wilful abruptness, an arrested force, the more
vehement for its repression.
And at present his appearance accurately expressed him as a determined
but exasperated lover.
“Of course,” Miss Barbara said, in whispered confidence to Gavan,
mingled pity and reprobation in her voice, “as her cousin he comes when
he wishes to do so. But she has refused him twice already--he told me so
himself; and, simply, he will not accept it. He only spoke of it once,
and it was quite distressing. It really grieved me to hear him. He said
that he would hang on till one or the other of them was dead.”
Grainger’s words in Miss Barbara’s voice were the more pathetic for
their incongruity.
“And you don’t think she will have him,--if he does hang on?” Gavan
asked.
Miss Barbara glanced at him with a soft, scared look, as though his
easy, colloquial question had turned a tawdry light on some tender,
twilight dreaming of her own.
He had wondered, anew of late, what Miss Barbara did think about him and
Eppie, and what she had thought he now saw in her eyes, that showed
their little shock, as at some rather graceless piece of pretence. He
was quite willing that she should think him pretending, and quite
willing that she should place him in Grainger’s hopeless category, if
future events would be most easily so interpreted for her; so that he
remained silent, as if over his relief, when she assured him, “Oh, I am
sure not. Eppie does not change her mind.”
Grainger’s presence, for all its ineffectuality, thus witnessed to by
Miss Barbara, was as menacing to peace and sunshine as a huge
thunder-cloud that suddenly heaves itself up from the horizon and hangs
over a darkened landscape. But Eppie ignored the thunder-cloud; and,
hanging over fairy-land, it became as merely decorative as an enchanted
giant tethered at a safe distance and almost amusing in his huge
helplessness.
Eppie continued to give most of her time to Gavan, coloring her manner
with something of a hospital nurse’s air of devotion to an obvious duty,
and leaving Grainger largely to the general’s care while she and Gavan
sat reading for hours in the shade of the birch-woods.
Grainger often came upon them so; Eppie in her white dress, her hat cast
aside, a book open upon her knees, and Gavan, in his white flannels,
lying beside her, frail and emaciated, not looking at her,--Grainger
seldom saw him look at her,--but down at the heather that he softly
pulled and wrenched at. They were as beautiful, seen thus together, as
any fairy-tale couple; flakes of gold wavering over their whiteness,
the golden day all about their illumined shade, and rivulets from the
sea of purple that surrounded them running in among the birches, making
purple pools and eddies.
Very beautiful, very strange, very pathetic, with all their serenity;
even the unimaginative Grainger so felt them when, emerging from the
gold and purple, he would pause before them, swinging his stick and
eying them oddly, like people in a fairy-tale upon whom some strange
enchantment rested. One might imagine--but Grainger’s imagination never
took him so far--that they would always sit there among the birches,
spellbound in their peace, their smiling, magic peace.
“Come and listen to Faust, Jim. We are polishing up our German,” Eppie
would cheerfully suggest; but Grainger, remarking that he had none to
polish, would pass on, carrying the memory of Gavan’s impassive, upward
glance at him and the meaning in Eppie’s eyes--eyes in which, yes, he
was sure of it, and it was there he felt the pathos, some consciousness
seemed at once to hide from and to challenge him.
“Is he ill, your young Palairet?” he asked her one day, when they were
alone together in the library. His rare references to his own emotions
made the old, cousinly intimacy a frequent meeting-ground.
He noticed that a faint color drifted into Eppie’s cheek when he named
Gavan.
“He is as old as you are, Jim,” she remarked.
“He looks like a person to be taken care of, all the same.”
“He has been ill. He took care of some one else, as it happens. He
nursed his father for months.”
“Um,” Grainger gave an inarticulate grunt, “just about what he’s fit
for, isn’t it? to help dying people out of the world.”
Eppie received this in silence, and he went on: “He looks rather like a
priest, or a poet--something decorative and useless.”
“Would you call Buddha decorative and useless?”
“After all, Palairet isn’t a Hindoo. One expects something more normal
from a white man.”
His odd penetration was hurting her, but she laughed at his complacent
Anglo-Saxondom. “If you want a white man, what do you make of the one
who wrote the Imitation?”
“Make of him? Nothing. Nor any one else, I fancy. What does your young
Palairet do?” Grainger brought the subject firmly back from her
digression.
Eppie was sitting in the window-seat, and, leaning her head back, framed
in an arabesque of creepers, she now owned, after a little pause, and as
if with a weariness of evasion she was willing to let him see as she
did: “Nothing, really.”
“Does he care about anything?” Grainger placed himself opposite her,
folding his arms with an air of determined inquiry.
And again Eppie owned, “He believes in nothing, so how can he care?”
“Believes in nothing? What do you mean by that?”
“Well,” with a real sense of amusement over the inner icy weight, she
was ready to put it in its crudest, most inclusive terms, “he doesn’t
believe in immortality.”
Grainger stared, taken aback by the ingenuous avowal.
“Immortality? No more do I,” he retorted.
“Oh, yes, you do,” said Eppie, looking not at him but out at the summer
sky. “You believe in life and so you do believe in immortality, even
though you don’t know that you do. You are, like most energetic people,
too much preoccupied with living to know what your life means, that’s
all.”
“My dear child,”--Grainger was fond of this form of appellation, an
outlet for the pent-up forces of his baffled tenderness,--“any one who
is alive finds life worth while without a Paradise to complete it, and
any one who isn’t a coward doesn’t turn from it because it’s also
unhappy.”
“If you think that Gavan does that you mistake the very essence of his
skepticism, or, if you like to call it so, of his faith. It’s not
because he finds it unhappy that he turns from it, but because he finds
it meaningless.”
“Meaningless?--a place where one can work, achieve, love, suffer?”
Grainger jerked out the words from an underlying growl of protest.
Eppie now looked from the sky to him, her unconscious ally. “Dear old
Jim, I like to hear you. You’ve got it, all. Every word you say implies
immortality. It’s all a question of being conscious of one’s real needs
and then of trusting them.”
“Life, here, now, could satisfy my needs,” he said.
She kept her eyes on his, at this, for a grave moment, letting it have
its full stress as she took it up with, “Could it? With death at the end
of it?” and without waiting for his answer she passed from the personal
moment. “You said that life was worth while, and you meant, I suppose,
that it was worth while because we were capable of making it good rather
than evil.”
“Well, of course,” said Grainger.
“And a real choice between good and evil is only possible to a real
identity, you’ll own?”
“If you are going to talk metaphysics I’ll cut and run, I warn you.
Socratic methods of tripping one up always infuriate me.”
“I’m only trying to talk common-sense.”
“Well, go on. I agree to what you say of a real identity. We’ve that, of
course.”
“Well, then, can an identity destroyed at death by the destruction of
the body be called real? It can’t, Jim. It’s either only a result of the
body, a merely materialistic phenomenon, or else it is a transient,
unreal aspect of some supremely real World-Self and its good and its
evil just as fated by that Self’s way of thinking it as the color of its
hair and eyes is fated by nature. And if that were so the sense of
freedom, of identity, that gives us our only sanction for goodness,
truth, and worth, would be a mere illusion.”
Her earnestness, as she worked it out for him, held his eyes more than
her words his thoughts. He was observing her with such a softening of
expression as rarely showed itself on his virile countenance.
“You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?” he said.
“I’ve tried to. Knowing Gavan has made me. It has converted me,” she
smiled.
“So that’s your conversion.”
“Oh, more than that. I know that I’m _in_ life; _for_ it, and that’s
more than all such reasoning.”
“And you believe that you’ll go on forever as you are now,” he said. His
eyes dwelt on her: “Young and beautiful.”
“_Forever_; what queer words we must use to try to express it. We are in
Forever now. It’s just that one casts in one’s lot, open-eyed, with
life.”
“And has Palairet cast in his with death?”
Again the change of color was in her cheek, but it was to pallor now.
“He thinks so.”
“And he doesn’t frighten you?”
She armed herself to smile over Gavan’s old question. “Why should he?”
Grainger left her for some moments of aimless, silent wandering. He came
back and paused again before her. He did not answer her.
“I throw in my lot with life, too, Eppie,” he said, “and I ask no more
of it than the here and the now of our human affair. But that I do ask
with all my might, and if might can give it to me, I’ll get it.”
She looked up at him gravely, without challenge, with a sympathy too
deep for pity.
“At all events,” he added slowly, “at all events, in so far, our lots
are cast together.”
“Yes,” she assented.
His eyes studied hers; his keen mind questioned itself: Could a woman
look so steadily, with such a clear, untroubled sympathy, upon such a
love as his, were there no great emotion within her, controlling her,
absorbing her, making her indifferent to all lesser appeals? Had this
negative, this aimless, this ambiguous man, captured, without any fight
for it, her strong, her reckless heart? So he questioned, while Eppie
still answered his gaze with eyes that showed him nothing but their
grave, deep friendship.
“So it’s a contest between life and death?” he said at last.
“Between me and Gavan you mean?”
The shield of their personal question had dropped from her again, and
the quick flush was in her cheek.
“Oh, I come into it, too,” he ventured.
“You don’t, in any way, depend on it, Jim.”
“So you say.” His eyes still mercilessly perused her. “That remains to
be seen. If you lose, perhaps I shall come into it.”
Eppie found no answer.
III
It was night, and Eppie, Gavan, and Jim Grainger were on the lawn before
the house waiting for a display of fireworks.
Grainger was feeling sore for his own shutting-out from the happy
child-world of games and confidences that the other two inhabited, for
it had been to Gavan that she had spoken of her love for fireworks and
he who had at once sent for them.
Grainger was sore and his heart heavy, and not only it seemed to him, on
his own account. Since the encounter in the library there had been a
veil between him and Eppie, and through it he seemed to see her face as
waiting the oncoming of some unknown fate. Grainger could not feel that
fate, whatever the form it took, as a happy one.
She stood between them now, in her white dress, wrapped around with a
long, white Chinese shawl, and the light from the open window behind
them fell upon her hair, her neck, her shoulders, and the shawl’s soft,
thick embroideries that were like frozen milk.
Gavan and Grainger leaned against the deep creepers of the old walls,
Gavan’s cigarette a steady little point of light, the glow of
Grainger’s pipe, as he puffed, coming and going in sharp pulses of
color.
Aunt Barbara sat within at the open window, and beyond the gates, at the
edge of the moor, the general and the gardener, dark figures fitfully
revealed by the light of lanterns, superintended the preparations.
The moment was like that in which one watches a poised orchestra, in
which one waits, tense and expectant, for the fall of the conductor’s
bâton and for the first, sweeping note.
It seemed to break upon the stillness, sound made visible, when the
herald rocket soared up from the dark earth, up to the sky of stars.
Bizarre, exquisite, glorious, it caught one’s breath with the swiftness,
the strength, the shining, of its long, exultant flight; its languor of
attainment; its curve and droop; the soft shock of its blossoming into
an unearthly metamorphosis of splendor far and high on the zenith.
The note was struck and after it the symphony followed.
Like a ravished Ganymede, the sense of sight soared amazed among
dazzling ecstasies of light and movement.
Thin ribbons of fire streaked the sky; radiant sheaves showered drops of
multitudinous gold; fierce constellations of color whirled themselves to
stillness on the night’s solemn permanence; a rain of stars drifted
wonderfully, with the softness of falling snow, down gulfs of space. And
then again the rockets, strong, suave, swift, and their blossoming
lassitude.
Eppie gazed, silent and motionless, her uplifted profile like a child’s
in its astonished joy. Once or twice she looked round at Gavan and at
Grainger,--always first at Gavan,--smiling, and speechless with delight.
Her folded arms had dropped to her sides and the shawl fell straightly
from her shoulders. She made one think of some young knight, transfixed
before a heavenly vision, a benediction of revealed beauty. The trivial
occasion lent itself to splendid analogies. The strange light from above
bathed her from head to foot in soft, intermittent, heavenly color.
Suddenly, in darkness, Grainger seized her hand. She had hardly felt the
pressure, short, sharp with all the exasperation of his worship, before
it was gone.
She did not turn to look at him. More than the unjustifiableness of the
action, its unexpectedness, she felt a pain, a perplexity, as for
something mocking, incongruous. And as if in instinctive seeking she
turned her eyes on Gavan and found that he was looking at her.
Was it, then, her eyes, seeking and perplexed, that compelled him; was
it his own enfranchised impulse; was it only a continuation of
fairy-land fitness, the child instinct of sharing in a unison of touch a
mutual wonder? In the fringes of her shawl his hand sought and found her
hand. Another rose of joy had expanded on the sky; and they stood so,
hand in hand, looking up.
Eppie looked up steadily; but now the outer vision was but a dim symbol,
a reflection, vaguely seen, of the inner vision that, in a miracle of
accomplished growth, broke upon her. She did not think or know. Her
heart seemed to dilate, to breathe itself away in long throbs, that
worshiped, that trembled, that prayed. Her strength was turned to
weakness and her weakness rose to strength, and, as she looked up at the
sky, the stars, the dream-like constellations that bloomed and drifted
away, universes made and unmade on the void, her mind, her heart, her
spirit were all one prayer and its strength and its humility were one.
She had known that she loved him, but not till now that she loved him
with a depth that passed beyond knowledge; she had known that he loved
her, but not till now had she felt that all that lived in him was hers
forever. His voice, his eyes, might hide, might deny, but the seeking,
instinctive hand confessed, dumbly, to all.
She had drawn him to her by her will; she had held him back from death
by her love. His beloved hand clasped hers; she would never let him go.
Looking up at the night, the stars, holding his hand, she gave herself
to the new life, to all that it might mean of woe and tragedy. Let it
lead her where it would, she was beside him forever.
Yet, though her spirit held the sky, the stars, her heart, suffocated
and appalled with love, seemed to lie at his feet, and the inarticulate
prayer, running through all, said only, over and over, “O God, God.”
Meanwhile Grainger leaned against the wall, puffing doggedly at his
pipe, unrepentant and unsatisfied.
“There, that is the end,” Miss Barbara sighed. “How very, very pretty.
But they have made me quite sleepy.”
A few fumes still smoldered at the edge of the moor, and the night, like
an obscure ocean, was engulfing the lights, the movements; after the
radiance the darkness was thick, oppressive.
Eppie knew, as Gavan released her hand, that his eyes again sought hers,
but she would not look at him. What could they say, here and now?
He went on into the house, and Grainger, lingering outside, detained her
on the steps. “You forgive me?” he said.
She had almost forgotten for what, but fixing her eyes and thoughts upon
him, she said, “Yes, Jim, of course.”
“I couldn’t stand it,--you were so lovely,” said Grainger; “I didn’t
know that I was such a sentimental brute. But I had no business not to
stand it. It’s my business in life to stand it.”
“I am so sorry, Jim,” Eppie murmured. “You know, I can do
nothing--except forgive you.”
“I am not ungrateful. I know how good it is of you to put up with me. Do
I bother you too much, Eppie?”
“No, Jim dear; you don’t.”
He stood aside for her to enter the house. He saw that, with all her
effort to be kind, her thought passed from him. Pausing to knock the
ashes of his pipe against the wall, he softly murmured, “Damn,” before
following her into the house.
Eppie, in her own room, put out her candle and went to the window.
Leaning out, she could see the soft maze of tree-tops emerge from the
dim abyss beneath. The boughs of the pine-tree made the starlit sky pale
with their blackness.
This was the window where she and Gavan had stood on the morning of
Robbie’s death. Here Gavan had shuddered, sobbing, in her arms. He had
suffered, he had been able to love and suffer then.
The long past went before her, this purpose in it all, her purpose; in
all the young, unconscious beginnings, in the reunion, in her growing
consciousness of something to oppose, to conquer, to save. And to-night
had consecrated her to that sacred trust. What lived in him was hers.
But could she keep him in life? The memory, a dark shadow, of the deep
indifference that she had seen in his contemplative eyes went with a
chill over her.
Leaning out, she conquered her own deep fear, looking up at the stars
and still praying, “O God, God.”
IV
She could not read his face next day. It showed a change, but the
significance of the change was hidden from her. He knew that she knew;
was that it? or did he think that they could still pretend at the
unchanged fairy-tale where one clasped hands simply, like children? Or
did he trust her to spare them both, now that she knew?
When they were alone, this, more than all, the pale, jaded face seemed
to tell her, it would be able to hide nothing; but its strength was in
evasion; he would not be alone with her.
All the morning he spent with the general and in the afternoon he went
away, a book under his arm, down to the burn.
From the library window Eppie watched him go. She could see for a long
time the flicker of his white figure among the distant birches.
She sat in a low chair in the deep embrasure of the window-seat, silent
and motionless. She felt, after the night’s revelation, an apathy,
mental and physical; a willing pause; a lull of the spirit, that rested
in its accepted fate, should it be joyful or tragic. The very fact of
such acceptance partook of both tragedy and joy.
Grainger was with her, walking, as usual, up and down the room, glancing
at her as he passed and repassed.
He felt, all about him, within and without, the pressure of some crisis;
and his ignorance, his intuitions, struggling within him, made a
consciousness, oddly mingled, of sharp pain, deep dread, and,
superficially, a suffocating irritation, continually rising and
continually repressed.
Eppie’s aspect intensified the mingled consciousness. Her figure, in its
thin dress of black and white, showed lassitude. With her head thrown
back against the chair, her hands, long, white, inert, lying along the
chair-arms, she looked out from the cool shadow of the room at the day,
fierce in its blue and gold, its sunlight and its wind.
He had seen Gavan pass, so strangely alone; he had watched her watching
of him. She was languid; but she was patient, she was strong. That was
part of the suffocation, that such strength, such patience, should be
devoted to ends so undeserving. More than by mere jealousy, though that
seethed in him, he was oppressed by the bitter sense of waste, of the
futile spending of noble capacity; for, more than all, she was piteous;
there came the part of pain and dread, the presage of doom that weighed
on his heart.
In her still figure, her steady look out at the empty, splendid vault of
blue, the monotonous purple stretches of the moor, his unesthetic,
accurate mind felt, with the sharp intuition that carried him so much
further than any conscious appreciation, a symbol of the human soul
contemplating the ominous enigma of its destiny. She made him dimly
think of some old picture he had seen, a saint, courageous, calm,
enraptured, in the luminous pause before a dark, accepted martyrdom. He
did violence to the simile, shaking it off vehemently, with a clutch at
the sane impatience of silly fancies.
Stopping abruptly before her, though hardly knowing for what end, he
found himself saying, and the decisive words, as he heard, rather than
thought them, had indeed the effect of shattering foolish visions, “I
shall go to-day, Eppie.”
In seeing her startled, pained, expostulatory, he saw her again, very
sanely, as an unfortunate woman bent on doing for herself and unable to
hide her situation from his keen-sightedness. For really he didn’t know
whether a hopeless love-affair or a hopeless marriage would the more
completely “do” for her.
“My dear Jim, why to-day?” Eppie asked in a tone of kindest protest.
He was glad to have drawn her down to the solid ground of his own
grievances. She hurt him less there.
“Why not to-day?” he retorted.
She replied that, if for no better reason, the weather was too lovely
not to be enjoyed by them all together.
“Thanks, but I don’t care about the weather. Nor do I care,” Grainger
went on, taking the sorry comfort that his own mere ill-temper afforded
him, “to watch other people’s enjoyment--of more than weather. I’m not
made of such selfless stuff as that.”
She understood, of course; perhaps she had all along understood what he
was feeling more clearly than clumsy he had, and she met all that was
beneath the mannerless words with her air of sad kindliness.
“You can share it, Jim.”
“No, I can’t share it. I share nothing--except the weather.”
She murmured, as she had the night before, that she was sorry, adding
that she must have failed; but he interrupted her with: “It’s not that.
You are all right. You give me all you can. It’s merely that you can’t
give me anything I want. I came to see if there was any chance for me,
and all I do see is that I may as well be off. I do myself no good by
staying on,--harm, rather; you may begin to resent my sulkiness and my
boorish relapses from even rudimentary good manners.”
“I have resented nothing, Jim. I can’t imagine ever resenting
anything--from you.”
“Ah, that’s just the worst of it,” Grainger muttered.
“For your own sake,” Eppie went on, “you are perhaps wise to go. I own
that I can’t see what happiness you can find in being with me, while you
feel as you do.”
“While I feel as I do,” he repeated, not ironically, but as if weighing
the words in a sort of wonder. “That ‘while’ is funny, Eppie. You are
right. I don’t find happiness, and I came to seek it.” The “while” had
cut deep. He paused, then added, eying her, “So I’ll go, and leave
Palairet to find the happiness.”
Eppie was silent. Paler than before, her eyes dropped, she seemed to
accept with a helpless magnanimity whatever he might choose to say. “You
find me impertinent,”--Grainger, standing before her, clutched his arms
across his chest and put his own thought of himself into the
words,--“brutal.”
Without looking up at him she answered: “I am so fond of you, so near
you, that I suppose I give you the right.”
The patient words, so unlike Eppie in their patience, the downcast eyes,
were a torch to his exasperation.
“I can take it, then--the right?” he said. “I am near enough to say the
truth and to ask it, Eppie?”
She rose and walked away from him.
With the sense of hot pursuit that sprang up in him he felt himself as
ruthless as a boy, pushing through the thickets of reticence, through
the very supplications of generosity, to the nest of her secret. It was
not joy he sought, but his own pain, and to see it clearly, finally. He
must see it. And when Eppie, her back to him, leaning her arm on the
mantel and looking down into the empty cavern of the great
chimney-place, answered, accepting all his implications, “Gavan hasn’t
found any happiness,” he said, “He finds all that he asks for.”
It was as if he had wrenched away the last bough from the nest, and the
words gave him, with their breathless determination, an ugly feeling of
cruel, breaking malignity.
Eppie’s face was still turned from him so that he could not see how she
bore the rifling, but in the same dulled and gentle voice she answered,
“He doesn’t ask what you do.”
At that Grainger’s deepest resentment broke out.
“Doesn’t ask your love? No, I suppose not. The man’s a mollusk,--a
wretched, diseased creature.”
He had struck at last a flash from her persistent gentleness. She faced
him, and he saw that she tried to smile over deep anger.
“You say that because Gavan is not in love with me? It is a sick fancy
that sees every man not in love with me as sick too.”
She had taken up a weapon at last, she really challenged him; and he
felt, full on that quivering nerve of dread, that she defended at once
herself and the man she loved from her own and from his unveiling.
It made a sort of rage rise in him.
“A man who cares for you,--a man who depends on you,--as he does,--a man
whom you care for,--so much,--is a bloodless vampire if he
doesn’t--respond.”
When he had driven the knife in like that, straight up to the hilt, he
hardly knew whether his anger or his adoration were the greater; for, as
if over a disabling wound, she bent her head in utter surrender, quite
still for a moment, and then saying only, while she looked at him as if
more sorry for him than for herself, “You hurt me, Jim.”
Tears of fury stood in his eyes. “You hurt, too. My love for you--a
disease. _My_ love, Eppie!”
“Forgive me.”
“Forgive you! I worship everything you say or do!”
“It was that it hurt too much to see--what you did, with your eyes.”
“Then--then--you don’t deny it,--if I have eyes to see, he too must
see--how much you care?”
“I don’t deny it.”
“And if I have courage enough to ask it, you have courage enough to
answer me? You love him, Eppie?”
He had come to her, his eyes threatening her, beseeching her, adoring
her, all at once. She saw it all--all that he felt, and the furious pity
that was deeper than his own deep pain. She could resent nothing, deny
nothing. As she had said, he was so near.
She put her hand on his shoulder, keeping him from her, yet accepting
him as near, and then all that she found to say--but it was in a voice
that brought a rapt pallor to his face--was, “Dear Jim.”
He understood her--all that she accepted, all that she avowed. Her hand
was that of a comrade in misfortune. She forgave brutality from a heart
as stricken as his. She forgave even his cruelly clear seeing of her own
desperate case--a seeing that had revealed to her that it was indeed
very desperate. But if she too was stricken, she too was resolute, and
she could do no more for him than look with him at the truth. Their
eyes recognized so many likenesses in each other.
He took the hand at last in both his own, looking down at it, pressing
it hard.
“Poor darling,” he said.
“No, Jim.”
“Yes; even if he loves you.”
“Even if he doesn’t love me--and he does love me in a strange, unwilling
way; but even if he doesn’t love me,--as you and I mean love,--I am not
piteous.”
“Even if he loves you, you are piteous.” All his savagery had fallen
from him. His quiet was like the slow dropping of tears.
“No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.”
“You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You, _you_, to sue to such a man.
He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be
like fighting for breath. If you marry him,--if you bring him to
it,--he’ll suffocate you.”
“No, Jim,” she repeated,--and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved
eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,--“I am the stronger.”
“In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill
you.”
“Even if he kills me he’ll not conquer me.”
He shook away the transcendentalism with a gentle impatience, “Much good
that would do to me, who would only know that you were gone. Oh,
Eppie!--“
He pressed and let fall her hand.
The words of the crisis were over. Anything else would be only, as it
were, the filling in of the grave.
He had walked away from her to the window, and said presently, while he
looked out: “And I thought that you were ambitious. I loved you for it,
too. I didn’t want a wife who would acquiesce in the common lot or make
a virtue of incapacity. I wanted a woman who would rather fail,
open-eyed, in a big venture than rest in security. You would have
buckled the sword on a man and told him that he must conquer high places
for you. You would have told him that he must crown you and make you
shine in the world’s eyes, as well as in his own. And I could do it. You
are so worthy of all the biggest opportunities and so unfit for little
places. It’s so stupid, you know,” he finished, “that you aren’t in love
with me.”
“It is stupid, I own it,” Eppie acquiesced.
He found a certain relief in following these bitterly comic aspects of
their case and presently took it up again with: “I am so utterly the man
for you and he is so utterly not the man. I don’t mean that I’m big
enough or enough worth your while, but at least I could give you
something, and I could fight for you. He won’t fight, for you, or for
anything.”
“I shall have to do all the fighting if I get him.”
“You want him so that you don’t mind anything else. I see that.”
“Exactly. For a long time I didn’t know how I loved him just because I
had always taken all that you are saying for granted, in the funniest,
most naïvely conceited way; I took it for granted that I was a very big
person and that the man I married must stand for big opportunities. Now,
you see,” she finished, “he is my big opportunity.”
He was accepting it all now with no protest. “Next to no money, I
suppose?” he questioned simply.
“Next to none, Jim.”
“It means obscurity, unless a man has ambition.”
“It means all the things I’ve always hated.” She smiled a little over
these strange old hatreds.
Again a silence fell, and it was again Grainger who broke it.
“You may as well let me have the last drop of gall,” he said. “Own that
if it hadn’t been for him you might have come to care for me.”
Still he did not look at her, and it was easier, so, to let him have the
last gulp.
“I probably should.”
He meditated the mixed flavor for some moments; pure gall would have
been easier to swallow. And he took refuge at last in school-boy
phraseology. “I should like to break all the furniture in the room.”
“I should like to break some, too,” she rejoined, but she laughed out
suddenly at this anticlimax, and, even before the unbroken heaviness of
the gaze now turned on her, that comic aspect of their talk, the dearly,
sanely comic, carried her laugh into a peal as boyish as his words.
Grainger still gazed at her. “I love that in you,” he said--“your laugh.
You could laugh at death.”
“Ah, Jim,” she said, smiling on, though with the laughter tears had come
to her eyes, “it’s a good deal more difficult to laugh at life,
sometimes. And we both have to do a lot of living before we can laugh at
death.”
“A lot of living,” he repeated. His stern, firm face had a queer grimace
of pain at the prospect of it, and again she put out her hand to him.
“Let me count for as much as I can, always,” she said. “You will always
count for so much with me.”
He had taken the hand, and he looked at her in a long silence that
promised, accepted, everything.
But an appeal, a demand, wistful yet insistent, came into his silence as
he looked--looked at the odd, pale, dear face, the tawny, russet hair,
the dear, deep eyes.
“I’m going now,” he said, holding to his breast the hand she had given
him. “And I will ask one thing of you--a thing I’ve never had and never
shall, I suppose, again.”
“What is it, Jim?” But before his look she almost guessed and the
guessing made her blanch.
“Let me take you in my arms and kiss you,” said Grainger.
“Ah, Jim!” Seeing herself as cruel, ungenerous, she yet, in a recoil of
her whole nature, seemed to snatch from him a treasure, unclaimed, but
no longer hers to give.
Grainger eyed her. “You could. You would--if it weren’t for him.”
“You understand that, too, Jim. I could and would.”
“He robs me of even that, then--your gift of courageous pity.”
His comprehension had arrested the recoil. And now the magnanimity she
felt in him, the tragic force of the love he had seen barred from her
forever, set free in her something greater than compassion and deeper
than little loyalties, deeper than the lesser aspects of her own deep
love. It was that love itself that seemed, with an expansion of power,
to encircle all life, all need, all sorrow, and to find joy in
sacrificing what was less to what was greater.
He saw the change that, in its illumined tenderness, shut away his
craving heart yet drew him near for the benison that it could grant, and
as she said to him, “No, Jim, he shall not rob you,” his arms went round
her.
She shut her eyes to the pain there must be in enduring his passion of
gratitude; but, though he held her close, kissing her cheeks, her brow,
her hair, it was with a surprising, an exquisite tenderness.
The pain that came for her was when,--pausing to gaze long into her
face, printing forever upon his mind the wonderful memory of what she
could look like, for him--he kissed her lips; it came in a pang of
personal longing; in a yearning, that rose and stifled her, for other
arms, other kisses; and, opening her eyes, she saw, an ironic answer to
the inner cry, Gavan’s face outside, turned upon her in an instant of
swift passing.
Grainger had not seen. He did not speak another word to her. The kiss
upon her lips had been in farewell. He had had his supreme moment. He
let her go and left her.
V
Gavan came up from the burn, restless and dissatisfied.
He had wanted solitude, escape; but when he was alone, and walking
beside the sun-dappled water, the loneliness weighed on him and he had
seemed to himself walking with his own ghost, looking into eyes familiar
yet alien, with curiosity and with fear. Was it he or that phantom of
the solitude who smiled the long, still smile of mockery?
How he wanted something and how he wanted not to want; to be freed from
the intolerable stirring and striving within him, as of a maimed thing,
with half-atrophied wings, that could never rise and fly to its goal. It
was last night that had wakened this turmoil, and as he walked his
thought turned and turned about those moments under the dazzling sky
when he had found her hand in the fringes of her shawl.
He knew that there had been a difference in the yielding of her hand, as
he had known, in his own helpless stretching out for it in the darkness,
another impulse than that of childlike tenderness. It had been as if
some deep, primeval will beneath his own had stretched his hand out,
searching in the dark; and with the strange blissfulness of so standing
with her beneath the stars, there came a strange, new fear, as though he
no longer knew himself and were become an automaton held by some
incalculable force.
Wandering through the woods in the hope of reëntering nature’s
beneficent impersonality, he felt no anodynes--only that striving and
stirring within him of maimed limbs and helpless wings.
There was no refuge in nature, and there was none in himself. The
thought of Eppie as refuge did not form itself, but it was again in
seeking, as if through darkness for he knew not what, that he turned to
the house. And then, on all his tangled mood, fell the vibrating shock
of that vision at the window.
With his quick looking away he did not know whether Eppie had seen him
see. He went on, knowing nothing definite, until, suddenly, as if some
fierce beast had seized him, he found himself struggling, choking, torn
by a hideous, elemental jealousy.
He stood still in the afternoon sunlight as he became aware of this
phenomenon in himself, his hands involuntarily clenched, staring as if
at a palpable enemy.
The savage, rudimentary man had sprung up in him. He hated Grainger. He
longed to beat him into the earth, to crush the breath out of him; and
for a moment, most horrible of all,--a moment that seemed to set fangs
in his throat,--he could not tell whether he more hated Eppie or more
desired to tear her from the rival, to seize her and bear her away, with
a passion untouched by any glamour.
And Gavan was conscious, through it all, that only inhuman heights made
possible such crumbling, crashing falls into savagedom; conscious that
Grainger could not have known such thoughts. They were as ugly as those
of a Saint Anthony. Wholesome manhood would recoil from their
debasement. He, too, recoiled, but the debasement was within him, he
could not flee from it. The moment of realization, helpless realization,
was long. Ultra-civilization stood and watched barbarian hordes swarm
over its devastated ruins. Then, with a feeling of horrible shame, a
shame that was almost a nausea, he went on into the house.
In his own room he sat down near the window, took his head in his hands,
the gesture adding poignancy to his humiliation, and gazed at the truth.
He had stripped himself of all illusion only to make himself the more
helpless before its lowest forms. More than the realized love was the
realized jealousy; more than the anguish at the thought of having lost
her was the rage of the dispossessed, unsatisfied brute. Such love
insulted the loved woman. He could not escape from it, but he could not
feel the added grace and piety that, alone, could make it tolerable.
From the fixed contemplation of his own sensations his mind dropped
presently to the relief of more endurable thoughts. To feel the mere
agony of loss was a dignifying and cleansing process. For, apparently,
he had lost her. It was strange, almost unthinkable, that it should be
so, and stranger the more he thought. He, who had never claimed, had no
right to feel a loss. But he had not known till now how deep was his
consciousness of their union.
She had long ago guessed the secret of the voiceless, ambiguous love
that could flutter only as far as pain, that could never rise to
rapture. She had guessed that behind its half-tortured, momentary smile
was the impersonal Buddha-gaze; and because she so understood its
inevitable doom she had guarded herself from its avowal--guarded herself
and him. He had trusted her not to forget the doom, and not to let him
forget it, for a moment. But all the time he had known that in her eyes
he was captive to some uncanny fate, and that could she release him from
his chains her love would answer his. He had been sure of it. Hence his
present perplexity.
Perplexity began to resolve itself into a theory of commonplace
expediency, and, feeling the irony of such resentment, he resented this
tame sequel to their mute relationship.
Unconsciously, he had assumed that had he been able to ask her to be his
wife she would have been able to consent. Her courage, in a sense, would
have been the reward of his weakness, for what he would see in himself
as weakness she would see as strength. Courage on her part it certainly
would have needed, for what a dubious offering would his have been:
glamour, at its best,--a helpless, drugged glamour,--and, at its worst,
the mere brute instinct that, blessedly, this winding path of thought
led him away from.
But she had probably come to despair of releasing him from chains, had
come to see clearly that at the end of every avenue she walked with him
the Buddha statue would be waiting in a serenity appalling and
permanent; and, finding last night the child friendship dangerously
threatened, discovering that the impossible love was dangerously real
and menaced both their lives, she had swiftly drawn back, she had
retreated to the obvious safeguards of an advantageous marriage. He
couldn’t but own that she was wise and right; more wise, more
right,--there was the odd part of it, the unadjusted bit where
perplexity stung him,--than he could have expected her to be. Ambition
and the common-sense that is the very staff of life counted for much, of
course; but he hadn’t expected them to count so soon, so punctually, as
it were.
Perhaps,--and his mind, disentangled from the personal clutch where such
an interpretation might have hurt or horrified, safe once more on its
Stylites pillar, dwelt quite calmly on this final aspect,--perhaps, with
her, too, sudden glamour and instinct had counted, answering the appeal
of Grainger’s passion. He suspected the whole fabric of the love between
men and women to be woven of these blind, helpless impulses,--impulses
that created their own objects. Her mind, with its recognition of
danger, had chosen Grainger as a fitting mate, and, in his arms, she had
felt that justification by the senses that people so funnily took for
the final sanctification of choice.
This monkish understanding of the snares of life was quite untouched by
monkish reprobation; even the sense of resentment had faded. And it
spoke much for the long training of his thought in the dissecting and
destroying of transitory desires that he was presently able to
contemplate his loss--as he still must absurdly term it--with an icy
tranquillity.
A breathlessness, as from some drastic surgical operation, was beneath
it, but that was of the nature of a mere physical symptom, destined to
readjust itself to lopped conditions; and with the full turning of his
mind from himself came the fuller realization of how well it was with
Eppie and a cold, acquiescent peace that, in his nature, was the
equivalent for an upwelling of religious gratitude, for her salvation.
But the stress of the whole strange seizure, wrench and renouncement had
told on him mentally and physically. Every atom of his being, as if from
some violent concussion, seemed altered, shifted.
The change was in his face when, in the closing dusk of the day, he went
down to the library. It was not steeled to the hearing of the news that
must await him: such tension of endurance had passed swiftly into his
habitual ease; but a look of death had crossed and marked it. It looked
like a still, drowned face, sinking under deep waters, and Eppie, in her
low chair near the window, where she had sat for many hours, saw in his
eyes the awful, passionless detachment from life.
After his pause at the unexpected sight of her, sitting there alone, a
pause in which she did not speak, although he saw that her eyes were on
him, he went on softly down the room, glancing out at each window as he
passed it; and he looked, as he went, like an evening moth, drifting,
aimless, uncanny.
Outside, the moor stretched like a heavily sighing ocean, desolate and
dark, to the horizon where, from behind the huge rim of the world, the
sun’s dim glow, a gloomy, ominous red, mounted far into the sky.
Within the room, a soft, magical color pervaded the dusk, touching
Eppie’s hair, her hands, the vague folds and fallings of her dress.
He waited for her to speak, though it seemed perfectly fitting that
neither should. In the silence, the sadness of this radiant gloom, they
needed no words to make more clear the accepted separation, and the
silence, the sadness, were like a bleeding to quiet, desired death.
The day was dying, and the instable, impossible love was dying, too.
She had let go, and he quietly sank.
But when she spoke her words were like sharp air cutting into drowned
lungs.
“I saw you pass this afternoon, Gavan.”
From the farthest window, where he had paused, he turned to her.
“Did you, Eppie?”
“Didn’t you see that I did?”
“I wasn’t sure.” He heard the flavor of helplessness in his own voice
and felt in her a hard hostility, pleased to play with his helplessness.
“Why did you not speak of what you saw?” Her anger against him was
almost like a palpable presence between them in the dark, glowing room.
He began to feel that through some ugly blunder he was very much at her
mercy, and that, for the first time, he should find little mercy in her;
and, for the first time, too, a quick hostility rose in him to answer
hers. It was as if he had tasted too deeply of release; all his strength
was with him to fight off the threat of the returning grasp.
“Why should I?” he asked, letting her see in his gaze at her that just
such a hard placidity would meet any interpretation she chose to give.
“Didn’t you care to understand?”
“I thought that I did understand.”
“What did you think, then?” Eppie asked.
He had to give her the helpless answer. “That you had accepted him.”
He knew, now, that she hadn’t, and that for him to have thought so was
to have cruelly wronged her; and she took it in a long silence, as
though she must give herself time to see it clearly, to adjust herself
to it and to all that it meant--in him, for her.
What it meant, in her and for him, was filling his thoughts with a dizzy
enough whirl of readjustment, and there mingled with it a strange
after-flavor of the jealousy, and of the resentment against her; for,
after all, though he had probably now an added reason for considering
himself a warped wretch, there had been some reason for his mistake: if
she hadn’t accepted him, why had he seen her so?
“Jim is gone,” she said at last.
“Because--It was unwillingly, then?”
The full flame of her scorn blazed out at that, but he felt, like an
echo of tears in himself, that she would have burst into tears of
wretchedness if she had not been able so to scorn him.
“Unwillingly! Why should you think him insolent and me helpless? Can
you conceive of nothing noble?” she said.
“I am sorry, Eppie. I have been stupid.”
“You have--more than stupid. He was going and he asked me for that. And
I gave it--proudly.”
“I am sorry,” Gavan repeated. “I see, of course. Of course it was
noble.”
“You should be more than sorry. You knew that I did not love him.”
“I am more than sorry. I am ashamed,” he answered gravely.
He had the dignity of full contrition; but under it, unshaken after all,
was the repudiation of the nearness that her explanation revealed. His
heart throbbed heavily, for he saw, as never before, how near it was;
yet he had never feared her less. He had learned too much that afternoon
to fear her. He was sure of his power to save her from what he had so
fully learned.
He looked away from her and for long out at the ebbing red, and it was
the unshaken resolve that spoke at last. “But all the same I am sorry
that it was only that. He would have made you happy.”
“You knew that I did not love him,” Eppie repeated.
“With time, as his wife, you might love him.” Facing her, now, folding
his arms, he leaned back against the mantel at his far end of the room.
“I know that I’ve seemed odiously to belittle and misunderstand you, and
I am ashamed, Eppie--more ashamed than you can guess; but, in another
way, it wasn’t so belittling, either. I thought you very wise and
courageous. I thought that you had determined to take the real thing
that life offered you and to turn your back, for once and for all,
on--on unreal things.” He stopped at that, as though to let it have its
full drop, and Eppie, her eyes still fixed on him from her distant
chair, made no answer and no sign of dissent.
As he spoke a queer, effervescent blitheness had come to him, a light
indifference to his own cruelty; and the hateful callousness of his
state gave him a pause of wonder and interest. However, he couldn’t help
it; it was the reaction, no doubt, from the deep disgust of his
abasement, and it helped him, as nothing else would have done,
thoroughly to accomplish his task.
“He can give you all the things you need,” he went on, echoing poor
Grainger’s _naïf_ summing up of his own advantages. “He has any amount
of money, and a very big future before him; and then, really above all,
you do care for him so much. You see the same things in life. You
believe in the same things; want the same things. If you would take him
he would never fail you in anything.”
Still her heavy silence was unbroken. He waited in vain for a sign from
her, and in the silence the vibration of her dumb agony seemed to reach
him, so that, with all the callousness, he had to conquer an impulse to
go to her and see if she wept. But when he said, “I wish you would take
him, Eppie,” and she at last answered him, there were no tears in her
voice.
“I will never take him.”
“Don’t say that,” he replied. “One changes.”
“Is that a taunt?”
“Not a taunt--a reminder.”
She rose and came to him, walking down the long room, past the somber
illuminations of the windows, straight to him. They stood face to face,
bathed in the unearthly light. All their deep antagonism was there
between them, almost a hatred, and the love that swords clashed over.
“You do not believe that of me,” she said.
He was ready and unfaltering, and was able to smile at her, a bright,
odd smile. “I believe it of any one.”
It was love that eyed him--love more stern, more relentless in its
silence than if she had spoken it, and never had she been so near as
when, sending her clarion of open warfare across the abyss, she said, “I
will never change--to you.”
The words, the look,--a look of solemn defiance,--shattered forever the
palace of pretence that they had dwelt in for so long. Till now, it
might have stood for them. In its rainbow chambers they might still have
smiled and sorrowed and eluded each other, only glanced through the
glittering casements at the dark realities outside; but when the word of
truth was spoken, casements, chambers, turrets, fell together and
reality rushed in. She had spoken the word. After that it was impossible
to pretend anything.
Gavan, among the wreck, had grown pale; but he kept his smile fixed,
even while he, too, spoke the new language of reality.
“I am afraid of you, then.”
“Of course you are afraid of me.”
Still he smiled. “I am afraid _for_ you.”
“Of course you are. You have your moments of humanity.”
“I have. And so I shall go to-morrow,” said Gavan.
She looked at him in silence, her face taking on its haggard,
unbeautiful aspect of strange, rocky endurance. And never had his mind
been more alert, more mocking, more aloof from any entanglement of
feeling than while he saw her love and his; saw her sorrow and his
sorrow--his strange, strange sorrow that, like a sick, helpless child,
longed, in its darkness, its loneliness, to hide its head on her breast
and to feel her arms go round it. Love and sorrow were far, far away--so
far that it was as if they had no part at all in himself, as if it were
not he that felt them.
“Are you so afraid as that?” Eppie asked.
“After last night?” he answered. “After what I felt when I saw you here,
with him? After this? Of course I am as afraid as that. I must flee--for
your life, Eppie. I am its shadow--its fatal shadow.”
“No, I am yours. Life is the shadow to you.”
“Well, on both sides, then, we must be afraid,” he assented.
She made no gesture, no appeal. Her face was like a rock. It was only
that deep endurance and, under it, that deep threat. Never, never would
she allure; never draw him to her; never build in her cathedral a
Venusberg for him. He must come to her. He must kneel, with her, before
her altar. He must worship, with her, her God of suffering and triumph.
And, the dying light making her face waver before his eyes with a
visionary strangeness, stern and angelic, he seemed to see, deep in her
eyes, the burning of high, sacramental candles.
That was the last he saw. In silence she turned and went. And what she
left with him was the sad, awed sense of beauty that he knew when
watching kneeling multitudes bowed before the great myth of the
Church,--in silence, beneath dim, soaring heights. He was near humanity
in such moments of self-losing, when the cruder myth of the great world,
built up by desire, slipped from it. And Eppie, in this symbolic seeing
of her, was nearer than when he desired or feared her. Beauty, supreme
and disenfranchising, he saw. He did not know what he felt.
Far away, on the horizon, in the gloomy waste of embers, the sun’s deep
core still burned, and in his heart was a deep fatigue, like the sky’s
slow smoldering to gray.
VI
Grainger had gone, and Gavan announced his departure for the next
morning. The situation was simplified, he felt, by Eppie’s somber
preoccupation. He was very willing that she should be seen as a gloomy
taker of scalps and that his own should be supposed to be hanging at her
girdle. The resultant muteness and melancholy in the general and Miss
Barbara were really a comfort. The dear old figures in the tapestry
seemed fading to-night into mere plaintive shadows, fixing eyes of sad
but unquestioning contemplation upon the latent tragedies of the
foreground figures.
It was a comfort to have the tapestry so reticent and so submissive,
but, all the same, it made the foreground tragedy, for his eyes,
painfully distinct. He could look at nothing else. Eppie seemed to
stand, with her broken and bleeding heart, in the very center of the
design. For the first time he saw what the design was--saw all of it,
from the dim reaches of the past, as working to this end.
The weaving of fate was accomplished. There she stood, suffering,
speechless, and he, looking at her, fatal shuttle of her doom that he
was, felt under all the ashes a dull throbbing.
After dinner he smoked a cigar with the general, who, tactfully, as to
one obviously maimed, spoke only of distant and impersonal matters.
Gavan left him over some papers in the quiet light of the smoking-room
and went to the library. Eppie, with her broken heart, was not there.
The night was very hot. By an open window Miss Barbara sat dozing, her
hands upturned with an appealing laxity on her knees, sad even in her
sleep.
Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those
last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to
see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a
slow, rising misery.
If he was to be spared the final wrench, he was also to be robbed of
something. He hadn’t known, till then, of how much. He hadn’t known,
while she stood there before him, this fully revealed Eppie, this Eppie
who loved far beyond his imagining, far beyond prudence, ambition, even
happiness, what it would be not to see her again, to part from her
speechlessly, and with a sort of enmity unresolved between them.
The cathedral simile was still with him, not in her interpretation of
it, as the consecration of human love, but in his own, as a place of
peace, where together they might still kneel in farewell.
But she barred him out from that; she wouldn’t accept such peace. He
could only submit and own that she was perhaps altogether right in
risking no more battles and in proudly denying to him the opportunity of
any reconciling. She was right to have it end there; but the core among
the embers ached.
He wandered out into the dark, vague night, sorrowfully restless.
It was not a radiant night. The trees and the long undulations of the
moorland melted into the sky, making all about a sea of enveloping
obscurity. The moor might have been the sky but for its starlessness;
and there were few stars to-night, and these, large and soft, seemed to
float like helpless expanded flowers on a still ocean.
A night for wandering griefs to hide in, to feel at one with, and, with
an instinct that knew that it sorrowed but hardly knew that it sought,
Gavan went on around the house, through the low door in the garden wall,
and into the garden.
Here all the warmth and perfume of the summer day seemed still to exhale
itself in a long sigh like that of a peaceful sleeper. Earth, trees,
fruit, and flowers gave out their drowsy balms. Veiled beauty, dreaming
life, were beneath, above, about him, and the high walls inclosed a
place of magic, a shadow paradise.
He walked on, past white phlox, white pansies, and white foxglove,
through the little trellis where white jasmine starred its festoons of
frail, melancholy foliage, and under the low boughs of the small,
gnarled fruit-trees. Near the summer-house he paused, looking in at the
darkness and seeing there the figures of the past--two children at play.
His heart ached on dully, the smoldering sorrow rising neither to
passionate regret nor to passionate longing, acquiescing in its own
sorrow that was part of the vision. Moved by that retrospect, he stepped
inside.
The sweet old odor, so well remembered, half musty, half fresh, of
cobwebbed wood, lichened along the lintels and doorway beams, assailed
him while he groped lightly around the walls, automatically reaching out
his hand to the doll’s locker, the little row of shelves, the low,
rustic bench and the table that, he remembered as it rocked slightly
under his touch, had always been unsteady. All were in their old,
accustomed places, and among them he saw himself a ghost, some
sightless, soundless creature hovering in the darkness.
The darkness and the familiar forms he evoked from it grew oppressive,
and he stepped out again into the night, where, by contrast with the
uncanny blindness, he found a new distinctness of form, almost of color,
and where a memory, old and deep, seemed to seize him with gentle,
compelling hands, in the fragrance of the white roses growing near the
summer-house. Wine-like and intoxicating, it filled the air with magic;
and he had gone but a few steps farther when, like a picture called up
by the enchantment, he saw the present, the future too, it seemed, and,
with a shock that for all its quiet violence was not unexpected, stood
still to gaze, to feel in the one moment of memory and forecast all his
life gathered into his contemplation.
Eppie sat on a low garden bench in the garden’s most hidden corner. With
the fresh keenness of sight he could see the clustering white roses on
the wall behind her, see against them the darkness of her hair, the
whiter whiteness of her dress, as she sat there with head a little bent,
looking down, the long white shawl folded about her.
It was no longer the Eppie of the past, not even the Eppie of the
present: the present was only that long pause. It was the future that
waited there, silent, motionless, almost as if asleep; waited for the
word and touch that would reveal it.
She had not heard his light step, and it seemed to be in the very
stillness of his pause that the sense of his presence came to her.
Raising her head she looked round at him.
He could only see the narrow oval of her face, but he felt her look; it
seized him, compelling as the fragrance had been--compelling but not
gentle. He felt it like firm hands upon him while he walked on slowly
toward her, and not until he was near her, not until he had sat down
beside her, did he see as well as feel her fixed and hostile gaze.
All swathed and infolded as she was, impalpable and unsubstantial in the
darkness, her warm and breathing loveliness was like the aroma of a
midnight flower. She was so beautiful sitting there, a blossoming of the
darkness, that her beauty seemed aware of itself and of its appeal; and
it was as if her soul, gazing at him, dominated the appeal; menaced him
should he yield to it; yet loved, ah, loved him with a love the greater
for the courage, the will, that could discipline it into this set, stern
stillness.
Yes, here was the future, and what was he to do with it? or, rather,
what was it to do with him? He was at her mercy.
He had leaned near her, his hand on the bench, to look into her eyes,
and in a shaken, supplicating voice he said, “Eppie, Eppie, what do you
want?”
Without change, looking deeply at him, she answered, “You.”
That crashed through him. He was lost, drowned, in the mere sense of
beauty--the beauty of the courage that could so speak and so hold him at
the point of a sword heroically drawn. And with the word the future
seized him. He hid his face upon her shoulder and his arms went round
her. Her breast heaved. For a moment she sat as if stricken with
astonishment. Then, but with sternness, as of a just and angry mother,
she clasped him, holding him closely but untenderly.
“I did not mean this,” she said.