Time goes by. Since Joshua, God-bidden, commanded sun and moon to stand
still, who has been able to stop it?
Gerard still remains at Blessington--remains, despite the six-o'clock
dinners; despite the inarticulate and inharmonious mumblings with
which old Blessington takes away the appetites of such as feast with
him; despite the utter failure of his endeavours to draw from the mind
of his betrothed any ideas but such as _Le Follet_ and _Le Journal
des Demoiselles_ had just put into it. Latterly he has abandoned the
attempt, has taken to reading the _Times_, _Field_, anything in the
evening, instead; has even, in his despair--modern works of fiction
being, as I have before observed, unknown at Blessington--waded through
two chapters and a half of "Pamela," which Esther had inadvertently
left on the table. Sometimes, to his own surprise, he catches himself
wishing that his wedding-day were over. "When we are married, we need
never speak to one another," he reflects. "Thank God, we shall not be
so poor as to be obliged to keep together from economy; a dinner of
herbs and hatred, or, worse still, indifference therewith, _would_
be hard to digest; she may go her way, and I mine. I will get up a
great stock of beads, and looking-glasses, and red calico, and make an
expedition to Central Africa; learn some euphonious African tongue, all
made up of Ms and Ns; and carefully abstain from engaging in arguments
upon the immortality of the soul with intelligent natives."
Now and again conscience's voice thunders at him in the recesses of his
soul: "You are paltering with temptation. Arise!--flee!--begone!" But
he, strong in the innocence of his acts and words, replies doughtily:
"Temptation is there none for me here. The occupations of my life are
such as they would be at home; I am struggling to know and like better
her with whom my life is to be passed. As to that other woman, I see
her rarely, speak to her never, look at her as seldom as it is possible
to me."
And, in the meantime, that other woman droops like an unwatered flower,
day by day. When the mainspring of a watch is broken, must it not stop?
If hope, the mainspring of life, be broken, must not life stop--not all
at once, as the watch does, but by gentle yet sure degrees? A slow fire
burns in the child's veins; before this man had come, she had peace--a
sad stagnant peace, indeed, but still peace. _Now_ she lives in a state
of perpetual concealed excitement. True, they meet but rarely, speak to
each other never; but the same roof covers them both. From her outlook
in the China Gallery, she can watch his going forth in the morning,
his coming back at evening. At breakfast and dinner he sits opposite
to her; she can study his face, with stealthy care, lest she may be
observed, while he drives heavily through slow trite talk with her that
fills the place in his life that, for a golden day, from one sundown
to another, was Esther's. Sometimes they meet upon the stairs; her
black dress lightly touches him, as they pass one another dumbly. At
night she lies awake, waiting to catch the sound of his footfall in the
gallery past her door; has to wait long hours often; for he, unknowing
that any one takes note of his vigils, sits in the smoking-room far
into the small hours, puffing out of his well-coloured meerschaum
great volumes of smoke--wishing, not seldom, I think, that he could
puff away Constance, his beloved, into smoke volumes and thin air.
Fed by no kindly words, nourished only upon neglect and cold looks,
Esther's love for Gerard yet strikes out great roots downwards--shoots
forth strong branches upwards. A tree of far statelier growth it stands
than in the days when the soft gales and gentle streams of answering
love fanned and watered it. Who cares for what they can have? Who
cries for the moon? It is the intermediate something--the something
that lies just a handbreadth beyond the utmost stretch of our most
painfully-strained arms, that we eat out our hearts in longing for.
Esther never goes beyond the park palings now, deterred by the fear of
being waylaid by Linley. She need not have been alarmed. As long as she
came naturally in his way, he was delighted to see her: as we stoop and
pick gladly the fruit that drops off the tree at our feet. He had even,
on a day when the frost forbade hunting, and when he had got tired of
skating, taken the unwonted trouble of riding over to Blessington, to
warm himself at the fire of those great black eyes, that have still
for him the charm of novelty upon them; but women, many and fair, came
too readily to his hand to make him very keen in the chase of any one
individual woman. In former generations men used to be the pursuers,
women the pursued. In this generation we, who have set right most
things, have set right this also. _Now_, the hares pursue the harriers,
the foxes the hounds, and the doves swoop upon the falcons.
During these latter evenings Mr Blessington has been very alert and
wakeful--has insisted on being read to from tea to bed-time--a liberal
hour. But, however hoarse and voiceless the young reader may be, Gerard
never now comes to the rescue, never interferes, though the frequent
teasing cough of the "damnable flirt" goes through his heart like a
sword. With steady certainty, through frost and thaw, rain and shine,
through all the alternations of an English winter, the young girl's
health declines. To all but herself is this fact evident, and she,
unaccustomed to illness--never having seen the signs of premature decay
in others--thinks it is but a little weariness, a little languor, a
nothing. It will pass when the swooned world revives into spring and
the buttercups come.
Sunday is here again, the initial letter in the week's alphabet:
"The Sundays of man's life,
Threaded together on Time's string,
Make bracelets to adorn the wife
Of the eternal glorious King."
Ah me! the languid, yawning Sundays of most of us will make but sorry
bracelets for any one, methinks. Sunday--the day on which the Shelford
shopboys and shopgirls walk about gloriously apparelled, arm-in-arm,
man and maid, filling their lungs with country air,--day on which the
gentlefolks, such as are men of them, debarred from horse and hound and
cue, smoke a cigar or two more than usual over the instructive pages of
Messieurs De Kock, Sue, Balzac, etc.; while such as are women, being for
the most part piously disposed, hold Goulburn's "Thoughts on Personal
Religion," or Hannay's "Last Day of Our Lord's Passion," open on their
velvet laps, and kill a reputation between each paragraph.
On this especial Sunday Esther has risen, feeling feebler, more
nerveless than usual. Something in the influence of the weather--soft,
sodden, sunless--weighs upon her with untold oppression. She would fain
not go to church, remain at home, and lie on her bed; but this cannot
be. Foremost in importance, in indispensability, among her duties
are these Sunday ones. If the weather be tolerable, Mr. Blessington
is always scrupulously punctual in attending Divine worship. Leaning
on his valet's arm, he totters up the church, in his old tail-coat,
tightly buttoned over his sunken chest, and, arrived at the Blessington
pew, is deposited in a little nook thereof, partitioned (in some quirk
of his, while he could yet see) from the rest. In this nook there is
room for two people--to wit, for Mr. Blessington, and for the happy
person who is to guide his devotions. And to conduct Mr. Blessington's
prayers and praises is, I assure you, no sinecure. Almost entirely
deaf, almost entirely blind, he is yet resolute to take a part in
the services by no means less prominent than the clerk's. It is,
therefore, his attendant's duty to shout the responses in his ear, in
order to give him some clue to the portion of the ritual which has
been arrived at and to check him with elbowings and nudgings, when
his aberrations from the right path become so flagrantly noticeable
as to distract the attention of the other worshippers. But too often,
however, the attempts at repression on the part of the acolyte are so
much labour lost. In the region of darkness and silence in which his
infirmities have placed him, the old man frequently becomes impatient
of the slow progress of the service as notified to him by the roars
of his companion. Not seldom he proclaims, in a voice distinctly
audible throughout the building, the point at which, according to
his reckoning, priest and people should have arrived. "And with thy
spirit," cries the squire, with unction in his deep, tremulous bass,
while the sleek young rector's gentle "The Lord be with you" does not
follow till five minutes later. In the Creed there is but one course
to pursue: to start him, if possible, fair--happy, indeed, if he does
not insist on turning to the altar somewhere towards the close of
the second lesson or beginning of the Jubilate,--to start him fair,
I say, and then in despair, give him his head. Fervently, loudly,
rapidly, he announces his belief in the articles of the Christian
faith, while parson, clerk, and congregation toil after him in vain.
Occasionally--especially at such portions of the service as refer to
our need of forgiveness, our sinfulness, our mortality,--he breaks out
into senile tears; too deaf to hear his own penitent sobs, he has no
idea of the loudness with which they reverberate through the church.
Strangers, hearing, perk their heads up above their pews, and then
fling them down again on their pocket-handkerchiefs convulsed with
inextinguishable laughter; but the greater part of the assemblage are
used to these spasms of grotesque devotion--it is only "t'oud squoire."
Esther always draws a long breath of relief when
"Lord, have mercy upon us!
Christ, have mercy upon us!
Lord, have mercy upon us!"
has been safely tided over without any unusually noisy burst of
lamentation.
On the Sunday I speak of "t'oud squoire's" prayers were more unruly
than usual. Whether it was that Esther's weakened voice was unable
to guide them into the right channel, or to whatever other cause
assignable, certain it is that his vagaries were more painfully
evident--ludicrously to the congregation, distressingly to his
family--than on any former Sunday within the memory of man. Many heads
turn towards the Blessington pew; even the rector--meekest among
M.A.s--looks now and again with gentle reproach at the old man, who
is, with such aggressive loudness, usurping his office of leading the
devotions of his flock. A proud woman is Esther Craven when the Liturgy
comes to a close. In the sermon there are, thank God, no responses for
the congregation to make; it is not even customary to cry, "Hear,
hear!" "Hallelujah!" "More power to you!" at intervals. In the sermon,
therefore, the old gentleman composes himself to sleep, and there is
peace.
The Blessington pulpit is to-day occupied by a stranger--a Boanerges,
or Son of Thunder, in the shape of a muscular, half-educated, fluent
Irishman--a divine who would fain _flog_ his hearers to heaven, show
them the way upwards by the light of hell's flambeaux--one of that
too numerous class who revel in disgusting descriptions, and similes
drawn from our mortality. It is impossible to help listening to him,
and difficult to help being sick. Esther listens, trembling, while he
descants with minute relish on "the worm that never dies." The worm
that never dies! Surely, a terrible picture enough, in its simple
bareness, without enlargement thereupon! With imagination rendered
more vivid, and reason weakened by sickness, the unhappy girl pictures
that worm gnawing at her brother's heart--gnawing, crawling, torturing
eternally. She covers her face with her hands; it is too horrible! A
sort of sick feeling comes over her--a giddy faintness. If she can
but reach the open air! She rises unsteadily, opens the pew-door, and
walks as in a mist down the aisle, between the two rows of questioning
faces, and so out. As she passes through the church-door she staggers
slightly, and catches at the wall for support. Gerard, watching
her anxiously, sees her unsteady gait, and the involuntary gesture
of reaching out for some stay for her tottering figure. Instantly,
without giving thought to the light in which his beloved may regard his
proceeding, he, rising, quickly follows the young girl. She has just
managed to reach a flat tombstone, and there sits, with her face turned
thirstily westwards, whence a small soft wind blows fitfully.
"You are ill," he says, bending solicitously over her, and laying
aside in that compassionate moment the armour of his coldness.
She does not answer for awhile; then, drawing a long breath, and trying
to smile: "The church was so close," she says, sighingly; "and that
smell of escaped gas always makes me feel faint, and--and" (with a
shudder)--"that dreadful man--with his metaphors all taken from the
charnelhouse!"
"I wish he were there himself, with all my heart," answers Gerard,
devoutly; "he might there frame metaphors to his taste at his leisure."
"And it is so terrible to think that it is all _true_, isn't it?" she
says, fixing her great awestruck eyes upon, his face, as if trying to
find comfort and reassurance there; "that the reality exceeds even
his revolting word-painting; that we _shall_ be _loathsome_, all of
us!--you and I and everybody--young and old, beautiful and ugly! How
_could_ God be so cruel as to let us know it beforehand?"
"Knowing it beforehand is better than knowing it at the time, which, at
least, we are spared," replies St. John, composedly.
"But are we?" she cries, eagerly: "that is the question! Latterly I
have been beset by a fearful idea that death is but a long catalepsy.
In a catalepsy, you know, a person seems utterly without consciousness
or volition; breath is suspended, and all the vital functions; and yet
he feels and sees and hears more acutely than when in strong health.
Why may not death, too, be a catalepsy?"
"Absurd!" he says. "My poor child, it is thoughts like these, gone
wild, that fill madhouses. According to your theory, at what point
of time does your catalepsy end? When we are dissolved into minutest
particles of dust does each atom still feel and suffer?"
"My theory, as you call it, will not hold water, I know," she answers
gravely, "but it does not haunt me any the less. There are times when
one cannot reason--one can only _fear_."
"You should not give way to these morbid fancies," he says, chidingly;
"they are making you ill."
"Am I ill, do you think? Do I look ill?" she asks, with startled
eagerness.
The havoc worked in face and figure by the last few months is too
directly under his eyes for him to answer anything but truthfully.
"Very ill."
"You don't think I'm going to _die?_" she says, lowering her voice, and
laying her hand on his arm, while her great feverish eyes burn into his
very soul. "People are not any the more likely to die for being thin
and weak, are they? Creaky doors hang the longest."
"Die!--God forbid!" he replies, trying to speak lightly. "Let us banish
death from our talk. I suppose it is this place of tombs that has made
him take such a leading part in it. Come, you are not at all fit to go
back into church, and I am not anxious to hear the tail-end of that
wormy discourse. The smell of brimstone is quite strong enough in my
nostrils already. Let us go home!"
So they return to the house, and he still shows no inclination to leave
her. He draws a chair for her near an open window, and stands with his
hand resting on the back. It is almost like the old times--the old
times that he thinks of,
"As dead men of good days,
Ere the wrong side of death was theirs, when God
Was friends with them."
Something in the recollection of those days makes soft his voice, which
is not wont to be soft. "You are not fit for this life," he says,
stooping down his face towards her small wan one. "It requires a tough
seasoned woman, in middle life. Tell me why you have undertaken it?
Why are you not--not married?"
She turns away, crimsoning painfully. "Because no one has asked me, I
suppose," she answers, trying to speak banteringly.
"But you were engaged when--when we parted?"
"Yes."
"And you are not now?"
With ungovernable, unaccountable impatience, he awaits the slow brief
answer.
"No."
"Had he then--h'm! h'm!--_discovered_ anything?" Gerard asks, finding
some difficulty in framing the question politely.
She fires up quickly. "_Discovered_ anything!" she repeats,
indignantly. "Do you think it is impossible for me to be honest even
_once_ in my life? I told him myself."
"_You_ broke it off, then?"
"No, I didn't."
"_He_ did?"
"Yes."
"Poor fellow! he had good cause to be angry," says St. John; the old
bitterness surging back upon him, as he reflects on the cowardly
duplicity that had made waste two honest lives.
"But he was _not_ angry," she cries, eagerly: "he was grieved--oh, _so_
grieved! Shall I ever forgive myself when I think of how he looked when
I told him?" (her eyes gazing out abstractedly at the "Rape of the
Sabines," as her thoughts fly back to that quarried nook on the bleak
autumnal hillside, where she had broken a brave man's heart). "But he
was not angry. Oh, no! he never thought of himself! he thought only
about me! Ah! _that was_ love!"
"He would not marry you, however?" says St. John, exasperated at these
laudations, which he imagines levelled as reproaches against himself.
"No," she answered quietly, "you are right; he would not marry me,
though I begged him. But that was for my sake, too--not his own; he
told me that he could not make me happy, for that I did not love him.
He was wrong, though. I did love him--I love him now. If I did not love
the one friend I have in all this great empty world, what should I be
made of?" she concludes, while the tears come into her eyes.
"You have a great capacity for loving," says St. John, who, though
not usually an ungenerous fellow, is maddened by the expressions of
affection, the tears and regretful looks bestowed upon his rival. "I
envy, though I despair of emulating you."
"Men have but _one_ way of loving," she answers, gently; "women have
several. I love him as the one completely unselfish being I ever met.
I agree with you, that the way of loving you mean comes but once in a
lifetime."
At her words, and the fidelity to himself which they so innocently
imply, a fierce bright joy upleaps in his heart--a joy that clamours
for utterance in violent fond words, in the wild closeness of forbidden
embraces; but honour, that strong gaoler that keeps so many under lock
and key, keeps him too.
"For Love himself took part against himself
To warn us off; and Duty, loved of love--
Oh! this world's curse, beloved but hated--came,
Like death, betwixt thy dear embrace and mine,
And crying, 'Who is this? Behold thy bride!'
She push'd me from thee."
He only holds out his hand to her. "Esther, let us be friends. I am
tired of this silence and estrangement; let there be peace between us!"
"I have always wished for it," she answers meekly, laying her little
trembling hand in his--"you know I have; but let us be at peace
_apart_, and not _together_; that will be better. How long," she asks,
impulsively, lifting quivering red lips and dew-soft eyes to his--"how
long--how much longer--do you mean to stay here?"
"Why do you ask?" he says, in a troubled voice, hurt pride and hot
passion struggling together. "Surely in this great wide house there is
room for you and me; I am not much in your way, surely?"
"You are," she answers, feverishly--"you are in my way; you would be,
in the widest house that ever was built. Every day I long more and more
to be a great way off from you. I think I could breathe better if I
were."
He does not answer: leaning still over her in a dumb agonised yearning,
that--with the chains of another still dragging about him--may not be
outspoken.
"That day we met upon the stairs," she continues, eyes and cheeks
aflame and lustrous with the consuming fire within her, "you promised
me you would avail yourself of the first opportunity to leave this
place; a month or more is gone since then. Surely the most exacting
mistress could spare you for awhile now? Why have you broken your word,
then? Why are you here?"
He is silent for a few moments, questioning his own soul--questioning
that conscience whose monitions he has hitherto so stoutly resisted.
Then he speaks, a flush of shame making red his bronzed cheek: "Because
I have been dishonest to myself and to you. This place has had an
attraction for me which I see now it would not have had had _she_ only
been here. I linger about it as a man lingers about the churchyard
where his one hope lies buried."
"Don't linger any longer, then," she cries, passionately, taking his
hand between both hers; "don't be dishonest any more! Tell _yourself_
the truth, if you tell no one else, and go _at once_, before it is too
late; for if you won't, _I_ must!"
She is weeping freely as she speaks; her tears drop hot and slow, one
after another, upon his hand.
He flings himself on his knees beside her, his mastery over himself
reeling in the strong rush of long-pent passion.
"You tell me to go," he says, in a voice choked and altered with
emotion, "and in the very act of telling me you cry. Which am I to
believe, your words or your tears?"
"My words," she answers, trying to speak collectedly, and by gaining
calmness herself to bring it back to him. "I have been dishonourable
once--you know it; don't let me have the remorse of thinking that I
made an honourable man palter with temptation--made him sully his
honour for me. If _I_ am the inducement that keeps you here, _go; for
my sake, go!_ I say it a hundred times; promise me you will go--_soon,
this week._ Let me hear you swear it; you will not break your oath, I
know!"
He is silent; hesitating to take that step of irrevocable
banishment--banishment from the woman that he cast away in righteous
wrath, and in whose frail life his own now seems to be bound up.
"Swear!" she says again, earnestly, with a resolute look in her soft
face. "I beg it of you as a favour; for if you won't, though my only
chance of daily bread lies here, I must go to-night."
The determination in her voice recalls him to his senses. "I will not
drive you to such extremities," he says, coldly. "Give me only till
to-morrow morning--twenty-four hours cannot make much difference to
you, and a man going to be hanged likes to have a little respite--give
me till to-morrow, and I will swear whatever you wish."
"That is right," she answers, trying to smile through her tears. "Some
day you will thank me; you will say, 'She was a bad girl, but she did
me one good turn!'"
The people are flocking out of church; the squire, in a low
pony-chaise, driven by a groom as old and toothless as himself, and
drawn by a pony (considering the comparative ages of horses and men)
also nearly as old, is bowling gently up the drive.
"I must go," Esther says, rising hastily; "Mrs. Blessington hates red
eyes as she hates a black dress, and for the same reason!"