"Good-bye. By the way, you haven't congratulated me yet."
"Congratulated you?"
"Yes, did I not tell you I am to marry Mr. Benoliel next month?"
And she turned away, and went up the garden slowly.
I asked my people, and they said it was true. Kate, my dear playfellow,
was to marry this Spaniard, rich, wilful, accustomed to win, polished in
manners and base in life. Why was she to marry him?
"No one knows," said my father, "but her father is talked about in the
city, and Benoliel, the Spaniard, is rich. Perhaps that's it."
That was it. She told me so when, after two weeks spent with her and
near her, I implored her to break so vile a chain and to come to me, who
loved her--whom she loved.
"You are quite right," she said calmly. We were sitting in the
window-seat of the oak parlour in her father's desolate old house. "I do
love you, and I shall marry Mr. Benoliel."
"Why?"
"Look around you and ask me why, if you can."
I looked around--on the shabby, bare room, with its faded hangings of
sage-green moreen, its threadbare carpet, its patched, washed-out chintz
chair-covers. I looked out through the square, latticed window at the
ragged, unkempt lawn, at her own gown--of poor material, though she wore
it as queens might desire to wear ermine--and I understood.
Kate is obstinate; it is her one fault; I knew how vain would be my
entreaties, yet I offered them; how unavailing my arguments, yet they
were set forth; how useless my love and my sorrow, yet I showed them to
her.
"No," she answered, but she flung her arms round my neck as she spoke,
and held me as one may hold one's best treasure. "No, no; you are poor,
and he is rich. You wouldn't have me break my father's heart: he's so
proud, and if he doesn't get some money next month, he will be ruined.
I'm not deceiving any one. Mr. Benoliel knows I don't care for him; and
if I marry him, he is going to advance my father a large sum of money.
Oh, I assure you that everything has been talked over and settled. There
is no going from it."
"Child! child!" I cried, "how calmly you speak of it! Don't you see that
you are selling your soul and throwing mine away?"
"Father Fabian says I am doing right," she answered, unclasping her
hands, but holding mine in them, and looking at me with those clear,
grey eyes of hers. "Are we to be unselfish in everything else, and in
love to think only of our own happiness? I love you, and I shall marry
him. Would you rather the positions were reversed?"
"Yes," I said, "for then I would make you love me."
"Perhaps _he_ will," she said bitterly. Even in that moment her mouth
trembled with the ghost of a smile. She always loved to tease. She goes
through more moods in a day than most other women in a year. Drowning
the smile came tears, but she controlled them, and she said--
"Good-bye; you see I am right, don't you? Oh, Jasper, I wish I hadn't
told you I loved you. It will only make you more unhappy."
"It makes my one happiness," I answered; "nothing can take that from me.
And that happiness _he_ will never have. Say again that you love me!"
"I love you! I love you! I love you!"
With further folly of tears and mad loving words we parted, and I bore
my heartache away, leaving her to bear hers into her new life.
And now she was to be married to-morrow, and I could not sleep.
When the darkness became unbearable I lighted a candle, and then lay
staring vacantly at the roses on the wall-paper, or following with my
eyes the lines and curves of the heavy mahogany furniture.
The solidity of my surroundings oppressed me. In the dull light the
wardrobe loomed like a hearse, and my violin case looked like a child's
coffin.
I reached a book and read till my eyes ached and the letters danced a
_pas fantastique_ up and down the page.
I got up and had ten minutes with the dumbbells. I sponged my face and
hands with cold water and tried again to sleep--vainly. I lay there,
miserably wide awake.
I tried to say poetry, the half-forgotten tasks of my school days even,
but through everything ran the refrain--
"Kate is to be married to-morrow, and not to me, not to me!"
I tried counting up to a thousand. I tried to imagine sheep in a lane,
and to count them as they jumped through a gap in an imaginary
hedge--all the time-honoured spells with which sleep is wooed--vainly.
Then the Waits came, and a torture to the nerves was superadded to the
torture of the heart. After fifteen minutes of carols every fibre of me
seemed vibrating in an agony of physical misery.
To banish the echo of "The Mistletoe Bough," I hummed softly to myself
a melody of Palestrina's, and felt more awake than ever.
Then the thing happened which nothing will ever explain. As I lay there
I heard, breaking through and gradually overpowering the air I was
suggesting, a harmony which I had never heard before, beautiful beyond
description, and as distinct and definite as any song man's ears have
ever listened to.
My first half-formed thought was, "more Waits," but the music was choral
music, true and sweet; with it mingled an organ's notes, and with every
note the music grew in volume. It is absurd to suggest that I dreamed
it, for, still hearing the music, I leaped out of bed and opened the
window. The music grew fainter. There was no one to be seen in the snowy
garden below. Shivering, I shut the window. The music grew more
distinct, and I became aware that I was listening to a mass--a funeral
mass, and one which I had never heard before. I lay in my bed and
followed the whole course of the office.
The music ceased.
I was sitting up in bed, my candle alight, and myself as wide awake as
ever, and more than ever possessed by the thought of _her_.
But with a difference. Before, I had only mourned the loss of her: now,
my thoughts of her were mingled with an indescribable dread. The sense
of death and decay that had come to me with that strange, beautiful
music, coloured all my thoughts. I was filled with fancies of hushed
houses, black garments, rooms where white flowers and white linen lay in
a deathly stillness. I heard echoes of tears, and of dim-voiced bells
tolling monotonously. I shivered, as it were on the brink of irreparable
woe, and in its contemplation I watched the dull dawn slowly overcome
the pale flame of my candle, now burnt down into its socket.
I felt that I must see Kate once again before she gave herself away.
Before ten o'clock I was in the oak parlour. She came to me. As she
entered the room, her pallor, her swollen eyelids and the misery in her
eyes wrung my heart as even that night of agony had not done. I
literally could not speak. I held out my hands.
Would she reproach me for coming to her again, for forcing upon her a
second time the anguish of parting?