Through all creation went the divine breath of renunciation. Joy for the
birth of Christ rang on; and motionless, wordless, Diadyomene hearkened,
released from the magic of the sea.
Dawned a vision remote, but strangely distinct, of a small life
comprehending two dear figures--one most dear; and thereto a small,
beautiful pain responded. A tale flashed across and across, gaining
coherence, giving it: the tale of a loved and lost child, long years ago
lost to the sea; loved still. Perfect grew the interweaving; the
substance of the two became one.
Joy for the birth of Christ was abroad, thrilling all planes of existence
with the divine breath of renunciation. In the soul of Diadyomene, waked
from its long trance, love was alive; a finite, individual love, chief
centred on one dearest to remembrance. The beautiful pain grew large, and
the cold heart that the sea-life had filled and satisfied was yearning
for share in another life long forgone. A small divine instinct,
following ignorantly in the wake of that great celestial love that
hundreds of years ago stooped to the sorrow of life, urged her to
renounce the ample strengths and joys of the sea, and to satisfy a
piteous want, were it by repression of energies, by eschewing full
flavours of sense, by the draining of her young life. The soul of true
womanhood in this child for the cherishing of her mother's waxed mature.
Motionless, wordless, she hearkened while separate bells cadenced; when
again they fell to their wonted unison, the sea-bred woman knew that a
soul was hers, and that it claimed dominion.
'We beseech, we beseech, we beseech: Lord God for my unbaptized! Dear
Christ for Christian's Diadyomene! Blessed Trinity and all Saints for a
nameless soul in sore need!'
Diadyomene flung out vacant arms, and moaned a dear name, for years
unuttered. Across the long interval of sea-life her spirit leaned to own
the filial heart of childhood. Clear to her as yesterday came back that
broken fragment of earlier life,--bright, partial, inadequate, quaintly
minute, as impression had gone into a happy, foolish infant. Not a
memory had traversed the ground since to blur a detail, though now the
adult faculties could apprehend distortion, the beautiful vagarious
distortion that can live in a brain over toddling feet.
Recent song caught colour; reflected it.
'As a woman the breath to be rendered song, As a child the life that will
last so long.'
From deep roots under dense forgetfulness, the song had drawn up truth to
blossom in perfect form. Before the eager wonder of the child, the sea
had revealed its secret of men shapes, who had beckoned, and laughed, and
tempted her with promise and play, till she stretched out her arms to
their glee, till she ran in their circles, till, breathless, she thirsted
and drank of their offering, and so passed.
So tempered was her cold sea body that no ice-wind ever started a shiver.
Now one came, for the mother might not recognise her child, for the child
might be grown unworthy of her mother's love.
There was one to succour: Christian. What had she done? There was one to
blast her, too foul for any love: Christian.
Her hideous doings rushed back upon her with conviction of guilt; an old
sense revived; she shrank and cowered, bowed to the ground by an agony of
shame.
Lo! the moon bared her face and looked.
Diadyomene rose to her knees; with a steady will she rose to her feet and
went to suffer her full penalties.
Her portion of shame was dreadful to bear; her bold avowal of love for
Christian, her atrocious wording of hate intervolved to double disgrace.
Then neither passion had been entirely feigned; now she knew that love
swayed her alone, turning her to a worship of the man. No bitterer
penance could she conceive than with confession to him to strip heart and
soul naked as her body; this only could extend it: should his large
generosity keep under his loathing and contempt, and order him to deal
gently for her help according to pity. No way could he remit her dues.
As she went to meet his face, she lifted her gaze up the slant moonbeams,
looking piteous, despairing appeal for darkness to come back and cover
her. Wisps of cloud made only a poor pretence. She met the tide
unhindered, and stood; she looked, no man was there; she wailed
'Christian, Christian,' and no voice answered. With relief for the
lengthened shadows below the rocks, she made for the very spot where he
had knelt; it was far overpassed by the tide. Ankle deep she trod: knee
deep. She sets her foot upon a man's hand, leaps, stumbles on his body to
a fall: Christian dead lies under her embrace.
Supreme justice had measured her due.
The placid clay had returned to an old allegiance, and weltered with the
tide according to the joint ordering of earth and moon. The living
creature would not acknowledge that right dominion, most desperately
would withstand it. She stooped her shoulder beneath the low head, and
heaved it up above the tide: the air did but insist that it lay
dead-still. With all her slender feminine strength put out for speed, she
girthed, she held, she upbore the inert weight afloat for moonlighted
shallows. There her knee up-staying, her frantic hands prevailing over
the prone figure, the dead face fell revealed. No hope could appeal
against that witness.
A strange grey had replaced the ruddy tan of life, darker than the usual
pallor of the dead. That, and the slack jaw, and the fixed, half-shut
eyes, a new and terrible aspect gave to the head, dear and sacred above
all on earth to the stricken creature beholding.
For a long moment appalled she gazed, knowing yet but one fathom of her
misery: just her loss, her mere great loss past repair. Then moaning
feebly, her arms went round again to draw it close. Her smooth palms
gliding over the body told of flawed surfaces, bidding her eyes leave the
face to read new scores: on the breast a deep rent, on the shoulder
another, and further more and more wherever a hand went. Along one arm
she stretched hers, and lifted it up to the light of the moon. Beside the
tense, slender limb, gleaming white, that other showed massive, inert,
grey-hued, with darker breaks. The hand hanging heavy was a dark horror
to see.
Shadows invaded, for the moon was foundering on the rocks.
Across her shoulders she drew the heavy burden, strove to rise upright to
bear it, tottered, fell, and then dragged on with elbows and knees as the
waves resigned to her the full load. Heavy knees furrowed the sand beside
hers, heavy arms trailed; the awful, cold face drooped and swayed from
her shoulder as she moved; now and again it touched her cheek.
Withdrawn from the fatal sea, what gain had she? The last spark of life
was long extinct, and she knew it; yet a folly very human set her
seeking Christian's self in the shell that was left, scanning it,
handling it, calling upon deaf ears, drawing the wet head against her
breast. Cold, cold was her breast; the sea-magic had bred out all heat
from her heart.
She pressed the dripping hair; she stooped and kissed her dead lover on
the lips. It was then her iniquity struck home with merciless rigour
complete. 'I will lay my face down against yours, and out of very pure
hate will kiss you once. Even in the death-agony I mean you to know my
fingers in your hair.'
The wretched soul writhed as the hideous words rose up against her to
damn. They were alive with every tone and laugh; they would live stinging
and eating out her heart until she died.
And after death?
'Christian! Christian!'
The agonised cry now was no effort to waken deaf ears; it called after
Christian himself, gone past reach of her remorse into unknown night.
Gone deliberately, to be finally quit of so abhorred a creature? In mute
witness the quiet body lay to vindicate Christian: too broken it was, too
darkly grey for any death self-willed.
Then she could look upon the blank face no more, for the moon passed
quite away. Then the stretching tide came lapping and fawning, soon to
sway the dead weight she held. She was not worthy to look upon clay so
sacred, she was not worthy to touch it, she who in wanton moods had
inclined to a splendid male, nor recognised in him a nobler version of
love. No spark of profane passion could remain after she had kissed the
cold, dead face.
The dreadful cry of a soul's despair broke the vacant air with the name
of Christian. Many times his name, and no other word. The desolation of
great agony was hers: no creature of the sea could bring her any comfort
now; no creature under heaven; for the one on earth to whom her child's
heart yearned was the one on earth she least dared face with her awful
load of guilt.
Nothing could atone for what she had done: life could never give scope,
nor death. Were this that she held Christian himself, able to see and
hear, her passionate remorse could conceive no dearer impossibility than
at his feet to fall, with supplication, with absolute confession
delivering the love and worship of her heart before him: to be spurned by
his inevitable hate. The inexorable indifference of the dead was a
juster, a more terrible, recompense.
Yet a more terrible conception woke from a growing discernment of
Christian's utter abstraction from the mortal shape, that so long had
represented him to her, and so well. This his body had ceased from
suffering and endurance, yet the very self of Christian might bear with
him unassuaged the wounds and aches her malice had compassed. Hate would
heal, would sear, at least; but oh! if he had not quit him of a tyrannous
love, then bruised and bleeding he carried with him still a living pain
of her infliction. She dared not confidently reckon her vileness against
the capacity of his extravagant love. She dared not. Her full punishment
reached home to her at last.
Her ignorant mortal senses strained to pierce the impenetrable mystery
that had wrapt Christian to an infinite remoteness. For his relief, not
for her own, would she present to him her agonies of love and remorse:
him stanched, averse: him bleeding, tender; to gratify, to satisfy, to
plenish any want.
Tempests of despair raged through that undisciplined soul. Every hope was
cut off, every joy was extinct. The sweet attraction of loving service,
the pride and glory of despotic rule, were not for her, an exile from the
one, and from the other abdicating. In all the world there was no place
for her but this, between sea and land, with a hold on a dead illusion of
Christian, with vain, frantic crying after his reality.
She did not know, whelmed in gulfs of sin and grief and despair, she did
not know how divine a dawn brooded over the waste. From the long-lost
past clear echoes swept of childish prayers, to blend as an undercurrent
with that message her lover had so tried to deliver, that she had
repelled as hideous and grotesque. She used no conscious memory, nor
followed any coherent thought, but, consonant with the first instinct of
her fresh awakened soul, that longing for her mother's sake to make
renunciation, consonant with Christian's finished achievement--his
striving, suffering, enduring even death for her unworthy sake--was this
incoherent impression of a divinity vastly, vaguely suffering in
exemplary extreme out of great compassion and love to mankind, thence
accrediting suffering as the divinest force that can move the world. Her
also it had vanquished.
The tide had turned; it pressed her gently to resume her old way to the
deeps. The drift of another tide took her.
Out of her futile striving for direct communion with Christian grew a
sense that the sole possibility left to her was to yield body and soul to
his will in strict possession, and to follow that guidance. In her great
misery and helpless desolation a how and a whither with quailing beset
her going. Lo! the first step was sure, because it entailed a
heartrending renunciation.
Ah! desperately dear was this, Christian's body, to her mortal
apprehension of him. She held it very closely with an access of love and
worship such as appertains to vacant shrines. O woe to part from it, to
lay it aside and leave it to final obliteration!
Suddenly she wept. This near, definite distress, so humanly common, broke
up the fountain of her tears so many a year sealed. To a creature long of
the cold sea breeding tears were scalding to the heart.
Moaning, weeping, yet a little while she failed to forgo that embrace of
pure worship and untainted love. Worthy of reverence that piece of clay
was, for its loyal alliance with a high soul; wonderful as a noble and
true representative; very sacred from the record of devotion scored
deep, so fatally deep.
She wept, she wept as though weeping could cease from her never. Could
the deep draught of sea-magic in tears be distilled, void of it should
she be long before daybreak come.
The shallowing run of the tide drove her to resign the dead weight that
exceeded her strength to uphold. Weeping, heartwrung, she bent her to
replace her own will by Christian's! So first she gave away the dead body
to final peace, and laid it down for ever in its destined sepulchre, and
thereafter went alone into unfamiliar darkness to grope blind among
strange worlds for the ways of Christian's countenance.
We beseech, we beseech, we beseech: Lord God for my unbaptized! Dear
Christ for Christian's Diadyomene! Blessed Trinity and all Saints for a
nameless soul in sore need!