THE NAIAD.
At length Cosmo was able to go out, and Joan did not let him go by
himself. For several days he walked only a very little, but sat a
good deal in the sun, and rapidly recovered strength. At last, one
glorious morning of summer, they went out together, intending to
have a real little walk.
Lady Joan had first made sure that her brother was occupied in his
laboratory, but still she dared not lead her patient to any part of
the garden or grounds ever visited by him. She took him, therefore,
through walks, some of them wide, and bordered with stately trees,
but all grown with weeds and moss, to the deserted portion with
which he had already made a passing acquaintance. There all lay
careless of the present, hopeless of the future, and hardly
dreaming of the past. It was long since foot of lady had pressed
these ancient paths, long since laugh or merry speech had been
heard in them. Nothing is lovelier than the result of the
half-neglect which often falls upon portions of great grounds, when
the owner’s fancy has changed, and his care has turned to some
newer and more favoured spot; when there is moss on the walks, but
the weeds are few and fine; when the trees stand in their old
honour, yet no branch is permitted to obstruct a path; when flowers
have ceased to be sown or planted, but those that bloom are not
disregarded; while yet it is only through some stately door that
admission is gained, and no chance foot is free to stray in. But
here it was altogether different. That stage of neglect was long
past. The place was ragged, dirty, overgrown. There was between the
picture I have drawn and this reality, all the painful difference
between stately and beautiful matronhood, and the old age that, no
longer capable of ministering to its own decencies, has grown
careless of them.
“At this time of the day there is plenty of sun here,” said his
nurse, in a tone that seemed to savour of apology.
“I think,” said Cosmo, “the gardener told me some parts of the
grounds were better kept than this.”
“Yes,” answered Joan, “but none of them are anything like what they
should be. My brother is so poor.”
“I don’t believe you know what it is to be poor,” said Cosmo.
“Oh, don’t I!” returned Joan with a sigh. “You see Constantine
requires for his experiments all the little money the trustees
allow.”
[Illustration: LADY JOAN AND COSMO IN THE GARDEN.]
“I know this part,” said Cosmo. “I made acquaintance with it the
last thing as I was growing ill. It looks to me so melancholy! If I
were here, I should never rest till I had with my own hands got it
into some sort of order.”
“Are you as strong as you used to be, Cosmo--I mean when you are
well?” asked Joan, willing to change the direction of the
conversation.
“A good deal stronger, I hope,” answered Cosmo. “But I am glad it
is not just this moment, for then I should have no right to be
leaning on you, Joan.”
“Do you like to lean on me, Cosmo?”
“Indeed I do; I am proud of it!--But tell me why you don’t take me
to a more cheerful part.”
She made him no answer. He looked in her face. It was very pale,
and tears were in her eyes.
“Must I tell you, Cosmo?” she said.
“No, certainly, if you would rather not.”
“But you might think it something wrong.”
“I should never imagine you doing anything wrong, Joan.”
“Then I must tell you, lest it should be wrong.--My brother does not
know that you are here.”
Now Cosmo had never imagined that Lord Mergwain did not know he was
at the castle. It was true he had not come to see him, but nothing
was simpler if Lord Mergwain desired to see Cosmo as little as
Cosmo desired, from his recollection of him at Castle Warlock, to
see Lord Mergwain. It almost took from him what little breath he
had to learn that he had been all this time in a man’s house
without his knowledge. No doubt, in good sense and justice, the
house was Joan’s too, however little the male aristocracy may be
inclined to admit such a statement of rights, but there must be
some one at the head of things, and, however ill he might occupy
it, that place was naturally his lordship’s, and he had at least a
right to know who was in the house. Huge discomfort thereupon
invaded Cosmo, and a restless desire to be out of the place. His
silence frightened Joan.
“Are you very angry with me, Cosmo,” she said.
“Angry! No, Joan! How could I be angry with you? Only it makes me
feel myself where I have no business to be--rather like a thief in
fact.”
“Oh, I am so sorry! But what could I do? You don’t know my brother,
or you would not wonder. He seems to have a kind of hatred to your
family!--I do not in the least know why. Could my father have said
anything about you that he misunderstood?--But no, that could not
be!--And yet my father did say he knew your house many years
before!”
“I don’t care how Lord Mergwain regards me,” said Cosmo; “what
angers me is that he should behave so to you that you dare not tell
him a thing. Now I _am_ sorry I came without writing to you first!--I
don’t know though!--and I can’t say I am sorry I was taken ill, for
all the trouble I have been to you; I should never have known
otherwise how beautiful and good you are.”
“I’m not good! and I’m not beautiful!” cried Joan, and burst into
tears of humiliation and sore-heartedness. What a contrast was
their house and its hospitality, she thought, to those in which
Cosmo lived one heart and one soul with his father!
“But,” she resumed the next moment, wiping away her tears, “you
must not think I have no right to do anything for you. My father
left all his personal property to me, and I know there was money in
his bureau, saved up for me--I _know_ it; and I know too that my
brother took it! I said never a word about it to him or any
one--never mentioned the subject before; but I can’t have you
feeling as if you had been taking what I had no right to give!”
They had come to the dry fountain, with its great cracked basin, in
the centre of which stood the parched naiad, pouring an endless
nothing from her inverted vase. Forsaken and sad she looked. All
the world had changed save her, and left her a memorial of former
thoughts, vanished ways, and forgotten things: she, alas! could not
alter, must be still the same, the changeless centre of change. All
the winters would beat upon her, all the summers would burn her;
but never more would the glad water pour plashing from her dusty
urn! never more would the birds make showers with their beating
wings in her cool basin! The dead leaves would keep falling year
after year to their rest, but she could not fall--must, through the
slow ages, stand, until storm and sunshine had wasted her atom by
atom away.
On the broad rim of the basin they sat down. Cosmo turned towards
the naiad, such thoughts as I have written throbbing in his brain
like the electric light in an exhausted receiver, Joan with her
back to the figure, and her eyes on the ground, thinking Cosmo
brooded vexed on his newly discovered position. It was a sad
picture. The two were as the type of Nature and Art, the married
pair, here at strife--still together, but only the more
apart--Oberon and Titania, with ruin all about them. Through the
straggling branches appeared the tottering dial of Time where not a
sun-ray could reach it; for Time himself may well go to sleep where
progress is but disintegration. Time himself is nothing, does
nothing; he is but the medium in which the forces work. Time no
more cures our ills, than space unites our souls, because they
cross it to mingle.
Had Cosmo suspected Joan’s thought, he would have spoken; but the
urn of the naiad had brought back to him his young thoughts and
imaginations concerning the hidden source of the torrent that
rushed for ever along the base of Castle Warlock: the dry urn was
to him the end of all life that knows not its source--therefore,
when the water of its consciousness fails, cannot go back to the
changeless, ever renewing life, and unite itself afresh with the
self-existent, parent spring. A moment more and he began to tell
Joan what he was thinking--gave her the whole metaphysical history
of the development in him of the idea of life in connection with
the torrent and its origin ever receding, like a decoy-hope that
entices us to the truth, until at length he saw in God the one only
origin, the fountain of fountains, the Father of all lights--that
is, of all things, and all true thoughts.
“If there were such an urn as that,” he said, pointing to the
naiad’s, “ever renewing the water inside it without pipe or spring,
there would be what we call a miracle, because, unable to follow
the appearance farther back, we should cease thought, and wonder
only in the presence of the making God. And such an urn would be a
true picture of the heart of God, ever sending forth life of
itself, and of its own will, into the consciousness of us receiving
the same.”
He grew eloquent, and talked as even Joan had never heard him
before. And she understood him, for the lonely desire after life
had wrought, making her capable. She felt more than ever that he
was a messenger to her from a higher region, that he had come to
make it possible for her to live, to enlarge her being, that it
might no more be but the half life of mere desire after something
unknown and never to be attained.
Suddenly, with that inexplicable breach in the chain of association
over which the electric thought seems to leap, as over a mighty
void of spiritual space, Cosmo remembered that he had not yet sent
the woman whose generous trust had saved him from long pangs of
hunger, the price of her loaf. He turned quickly to Joan: was not
this a fresh chance of putting trust in her? What so precious thing
between two lives as faith? It is even a new creation in the midst
of the old. Would he not be wrong to ask it from another? And ask
it he must; for there was the poor woman, on whom he had no claim
of individual, developed friendship, in want of her money! Would he
not feel that Joan wronged him, if she asked some one else for any
help he could give her? He told her therefore the whole story of
his adventures on his way to her, and ending said,
“Lend me a half-sovereign--please--to put in a letter for the first
woman. I will find something for the girl afterwards.”
Joan burst into tears. It was some time before she could speak, but
at last she told him plainly that she had no money, and dared not
ask her brother, because he would want to know first what she meant
to do with it.
“Is it possible?” cried Cosmo. “Why, my father would never ask me
what I wanted a little money for!”
“And you would be sure to tell him without his asking!” returned
Joan. “But I dare not tell Constantine. Last week I could have
asked him, because then, for your sake, I would have told a lie;
but I dare not do that now.”
She did not tell him she gave her last penny to a beggar on the
road the day he came, or that she often went for months without a
coin in her pocket.
Cosmo was so indignant he could not speak; neither must he give
shape in her hearing to what he thought of her brother. She looked
anxiously in his face.
“Dear Cosmo,” she said, “do not be angry with me. I will borrow the
money from the housekeeper. I have never done such a thing, but for
your sake I will. You shall send it to-morrow.”
“No, no, dearest Joan!” cried Cosmo. “I will not hear of such a
thing. I should be worse than Lord Mergwain to lay a feather on the
burden he makes you carry.”
“I shouldn’t mind it _much_. It would be sweet to hurt my pride for
your sake.”
“Joan, if you do,” said Cosmo, “I will not touch it. Don’t trouble
your dear heart about it. God is taking care of the woman as well
as of us. I will send it afterwards.”
They sat silent--Cosmo thinking how he was to escape from this
poverty-stricken grandeur to his own humble heaven--as poor, no
doubt, but full of the dignity lacking here. He knew the state of
things at home too well to imagine his father could send him the
sum necessary without borrowing it, and he knew also how painful
that would be to him who had been so long a borrower ever
struggling to pay.
Joan’s eyes were red with weeping when at length she looked
pitifully in his face. Like a child he put both his arms about her,
seeking to comfort her. Sudden as a flash came a voice, calling her
name in loud, and as it seemed to Cosmo, angry tones. She turned
white as the marble on which they sat, and cast a look of agonized
terror on Cosmo.
“It is Constantine!” said her lips, but hardly her voice.
The blood rushed in full tide from Cosmo’s heart, as it had not for
many a day, and coloured all his thin face. He drew himself up, and
rose with the look of one ready for love’s sake to meet danger
joyously. But Joan threw her arms round him now, and held him.
“No, no!” she said; “--this way! this way!” and letting him go,
darted into the pathless shrubbery, sure he would follow her.
Cosmo hated turning his back on any person or thing, but the danger
here was to Joan, and he must do as pleased her. He followed
instantly.