A LEGACY MORE PRECIOUS THAN GOLD
Meanwhile, Henry plodded away at Aunt Tipping's, working sometimes on a
volume of essays for the London publisher, and sometimes on his novel,
now and again writing a review, and earning an odd guinea for a poem;
and now and again indulging in a day of richly doing nothing. Otherwise,
one day was like another, with the many exceptions of the days on which
he saw Angel or Esther. With Ned, he spent many of his evenings; and he
soon formed the pleasant habit of dropping in on Gerard, last thing
before bed-time, for a smoke and half an hour's chat.
There is always a good deal of youth left in any one who genuinely loves
youth; and Gerard always spoke of his youth as Adam, in his declining
years, might have spoken of Paradise. For him life was just youth--and
the rest of it death.
"After thirty," he would say, "the happiest life is only history
repeating itself. I am no cynic,--far from it; but the worst of life is
the monotony of the bill of fare. To do a thing once, even twice, is
delightful--perhaps even a third time is successfully possible; but to
do it four times, is middle age. If you think of it, what is there to do
after thirty that one ought not to have achieved to perfection before?
You know the literary dictum, that the poet who hasn't written a
masterpiece before he is thirty will never write any after. Of course,
there are exceptions; I am speaking of the rule. In business, for
example, what future is there for the man who has not already a dashing
past at thirty? Of course, the bulk, the massive trunk and the
impressive foliage of his business, must come afterwards; but the tree
must have been firmly rooted and stoutly branched before then, and able
to go on growing on its own account. The work, in fact, must have
been done.
"Take perhaps the only thing really worth doing in life," and Gerard
perceptibly saddened. "That is, marrying a woman you love, or I
should say _the_ woman, for you only really _love_ one woman--I'm
old-fashioned enough to think that,--well, I say, marrying the woman you
love, and bringing into the world that miracle of miracles,--a child
that shall be something of you and all her: that certainly is something
to have done before thirty, and not to be repeated, perhaps, more than
once before or after. She will want a boy like you, and you will have a
girl like her. That you may easily accomplish before thirty. Afterwards,
however, if you go on repeating each other, what do you do but blur the
individuality of the original masterpieces--though," pursued Gerard,
laughing, always ready to forget his original argument in the
seductiveness of an unexpected development of it, "though, after all, I
admit, there might be a temptation sometimes to improve upon the
originals. 'Agnes, my dear,' we might say, 'I'm not quite satisfied yet
with the shade of Eva's hair. It's nearly yours, but not quite. It's an
improvement on Anna's, whose eyes now are exactly yours. Eva's,
unfortunately, are not so faithful. I'm afraid we'll have to try again.'
"No, but seriously," he once more began, "for a really vital and
successful life there is no adequate employment of the faculties after
thirty, except, of course, in the repetition of former successes. No; I
even withdraw that,--not the repetition, only the conservation, the
feeding, of former successes. The success is in the creation. When a
world is once created, any fool can keep it spinning.
"Man's life is at least thirty years too long. Two score years is more
than enough for us to say what we were sent here to say; and if you'll
consider those biographies in which you are most interested, the
biographies of great writers, you cannot but bear me out. What, for
instance, did Keats and Shelley and Burns and Byron lose by dying, all
of them long before they were forty,--Keats even long before he was
thirty; and what did Wordsworth and Coleridge gain by living so long
after? Wordsworth and Coleridge didn't even live to repeat themselves,
else, of course, one would have begged them to go on living for ever;
for some repetitions, it is admitted, are welcome,--for instance, won't
you have a little more whisky?"
Henry always agreed so completely with Gerard's talk, or at least so
delighted in it, that he had little scope of opportunity to say much
himself; and Gerard was too keen a talker to complain of a rapt
young listener.
"How old are you?" he said, presently.
"Twenty-two next month."
"Twenty-two! How wonderful to be twenty-two! Yet I don't suppose you've
realised it in the least. In your own view, you're an aged philosopher,
white with a past, and bowed down with the cares of a future. Just you
stay in bed all day to-morrow, and ponder on the wonderfulness of being
twenty-two!
"I'm forty-two. You're beginning--I'm done with. And yet, in some ways,
I believe I'm younger than you--though, perhaps, alas! what I consider
the youth in me is only the wish to be young again, the will to do and
enjoy, without the force and the appetite. But, by the way, when I say
I'm forty-two, I mean that I'm forty-two in the course of next week,
next Thursday, in fact, and if you'll do me that kindness, I should be
grateful if you would join me that evening in celebrating the melancholy
occasion. I've got a great mind to enlist your sympathy in a little
ancient history, if it won't be too great a tax upon your goodness; but
I'll think it over between now and then."
Gerard's birthday had come; and the ancient history he had spoken of
had proved to be a chapter of his own history, the beauty and sadness of
which had made an impression upon Henry, to be rendered ineffaceable a
very few days after in a sudden and terrible manner.
One early morning about four, just as it was growing light, he had
suddenly awakened with a strong feeling that some one was bending over
him. He opened his eyes, to see, as he thought, Gerard hastily leaving
his bedside.
"Gerard!" he cried, "what's the matter?" but the figure gave no answer,
faded away down the long room, and disappeared. Henry sat up in bed and
struck a light, his heart beating violently. But there was no one there,
and the door was closed. It had evidently been one of those dreams that
persist on the eye for a moment after waking. Yet it left him uneasy;
and presently he wondered if Gerard could be ill. He determined to see;
so, slipping on his dressing-gown, he crossed the landing to Gerard's
room, and, softly knocking, opened the door and put in his head.
"Gerard, old chap, are you all right?--Gerard--"
There was no answer, and the room seemed unaccountably still. He
listened for the sound of breathing, but he couldn't hear it.
"Gerard!" he cried, again louder, but there was still no answer; and
then, with the silence, a chill terror began to creep through his blood.
He had never yet seen death; and perhaps if he had the terror in his
thought would not have been lessened. With a heart that had almost
stopped beating, and knees that shook beneath him, he pushed open the
door and walked over to the bed. It was still too dark to see more than
outlines and masses of white and black; but even so he could see that
the stillness with which Gerard was lying was the stillness of death.
His next thought was to rouse Aunt Tipping; and together the two bent
over the dead face.
"Yes, he's gone," said Aunt Tipping; "poor gentlemen, how beautiful he
looks!" and they both gazed in silence upon the calm, smiling face.
"Well, he's better off," she said, presently, leaning over him, and
softly pressing down the lids of his eyes.
Henry involuntarily drew away.
"Dear lad, there's nothing to be frightened of," said his aunt. "He's
as harmless as a baby."
Then she took a handkerchief from a drawer, and spread it gently over
the dead man's face. To Aunt Tipping the dead were indeed as little
children, and inspired her with a strange motherly tenderness. Many had
been the tired silent ones whose eyes she had closed, and whose limbs
she had washed against their last resting place. They were so helpless
now; they could do nothing any more for themselves.
Later in the day, Henry came again and sat long by the dead man's side.
It seemed uncompanionable to have grown thus suddenly afraid of him, to
leave him thus alone in that still room. And as he sat and watched him,
he gave to his memory a solemn service of faithful thought. Thus it was
he went over again the words in which Gerard had made him the
depository, the legatee, of his most sacred possession.
Gerard had evidently had some presentiment of his approaching end.
"I am going," he had said, "to place the greatest confidence in you one
man can place in another, pay you the greatest compliment. I shall die
some day, and something tells me that that divine event is not very far
off. Now I have no one in the world who cares an old 'J' pen for me, and
a new one is perhaps about as much as I care for any one--with one
exception, and that is a woman whom I shall never see again. She is not
dead, but has been worse than dead for me these ten years. I am optimist
enough to believe that her old love for me still survives, making sweet
the secret places of her soul. Never once in all these years to have
doubted her love has been more than most marriages; but were I to live
for another ten years, and still another, I would believe in it still.
But the stars were against us. We met too late. We met when she had long
been engaged to a friend of her youth, a man noble and true, to whom she
owed much, and whom she felt it a kind of murder to desert. It was one
of those fallacious chivalries of feeling which are the danger of
sensitive and imaginative minds. Religion strengthened it, as it is so
apt to strengthen any form of self-destruction, short of technical
suicide. There was but a month to their marriage when we met. For us it
was a month of rapture and agonies, of heaven shot through with hell. I
saw further than she. I begged her at least to wait a year; but the
force of my appeal was weakened by scruples similar to her own. To rob
another of his happiness is an act from which we may well shrink, though
we can clearly see that the happiness was really destined for us, and
can never be his in any like degree. During this time I had received
from her many letters, letters such as a woman only writes in the
May-morning of her passion; and one day I received the last. There was
in it one sentence which when I read it I think my heart broke, 'Do you
believe,' it ran, 'in a love that can lie asleep, as in a trance, in
this world, to awaken again in another, a love that during centuries of
silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand years? If you
do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give you. I must
love you no more in this world.'
"Each morning as I have risen, and each night as I have turned to sleep,
those words have repeated themselves again and again in my heart, for
ten years. It was so I became the Ashton Gerard you know to-day. Since
that day, we have never met or written to each other. All I know is that
she is still alive, and still with him, and never would I disturb their
peace. When I die, I would not have her know it. If love _is_ immortal,
we shall meet again--when I am worthier to meet her. Such reunions are
either mere dreams, or they are realities to which the strongest forces
of the universe are pledged."
Henry's only comment had been to grip Gerard's hand, and give him the
sympathy of silence.
"Now," said Gerard, once more after a while, "it is about those letters
I want to speak to you. They are here," and he unlocked a drawer and
drew from it a little silver box. "I always keep them here. The key of
the drawer is on this ring, and this little gold key is the key of the
box itself. I tell you this, because I have what you may regard as a
strange request to make.
"I suppose most men would consider it their duty either to burn these
letters, or leave instructions for them to be buried with them. That is
a gruesome form of sentiment in which I have too much imagination to
indulge. Both my ideas of duty and sentiment take a different form. The
surname of the writer of these letters is nowhere revealed in them, nor
are there any references in them by which she could ever be identified.
Therefore the menace to her fair fame in their preservation is not a
question involved. Now when the simplest woman is in love, she writes
wonderfully; but when a woman of imagination and intellect is caught by
the fire of passion, she becomes a poet. Once in her life, every such
woman is an artist; once, for some one man's unworthy sake, she becomes
inspired, and out of the fulness of her heart writes him letters warm
and real as the love-cries of Sappho. Such are the letters in this
little box. They are the classic of a month's passion, written as no man
has ever yet been able to write his love. Do you think it strange then
that I should shrink from destroying them? I would as soon burn the
songs of Shelley. They are living things. Shall I selfishly bury the
beating heart of them in the silence of the grave?
"So, Mesurier," he continued, affectionately, "when I met you and
understood something of your nature, I thought that in you I had found
one who was worthy to guard this treasure for me, and perhaps pass it on
again to some other chosen spirit--so that these beautiful words of a
noble woman's heart shall not die--for when a man loves a woman,
Mesurier, as you yourself must know, he is insatiable to hear her
praise, and it is agony for him to think that her memory may suffer
extinction. Therefore, Mesurier,--Henry, let me call you,--I want to
give the memory of my love into your hands. I want you to love it for
me, when perhaps I can love it no more. I want you sometimes to open
this box, and read in these letters, as if they were your own; I want
you sometimes to speak softly the name of 'Helen,' when my lips can
speak it no more."
Such was the beautiful legacy of which Henry found himself the possessor
by Gerard's death. Early on that day he had remembered his promise to
his dead friend, and had found the silver box, and locked it away among
his own most sacred things. Some day, in an hour and place upon which
none might break, he would open the little box and read Helen's letters,
as Gerard had wished. Already one sentence was fixed unforgettably upon
his mind, and he said it over softly to himself as he sat by Gerard's
silent bed: "Do you believe in a love that can lie asleep, as in a
trance in this world, to awaken again in another,--a love that during
centuries of silence can still be true, and be love still in a thousand
years? If you do, go on loving me. For that is the only love I dare give
you; I must love you no more in this world."
Strange dreams of the indomitable dust! Already another man's love was
growing dear to him. Already his soul said the name of "Helen" softly
for Gerard's sake.