See where the child of heaven, with wingéd feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
_Prometheus Unbound._
Very often in life, when the way seems all prepared for joy, there comes
instead an unexpected time of sadness that makes all the preparation
seem useless and of no purpose. Those coloured threads, whose ends and
beginnings are not seen, weave this unexpected twist in the pattern, and
one knows the bitterness that asks secretly, What can be the use of
efforts thus rendered apparently null and void at a single stroke?
forgetting the roots of faith that are thereby strengthened, and
shutting the eyes to the glory of the whole pattern, which it is always
the endeavour of the imagination to body forth.
And so it seemed to Paul a few weeks later when he returned to England
from America, where he had been to settle up his affairs. For he had
decided to sever his connection with the Lumber Company, and to devote
his life henceforward to battling against the wrongs and sufferings of
childhood. The call had come to him with no uncertain voice. Nixie had
unintentionally sown the seeds; Joan had deliberately watered them; his
own liberated imagination girded its loins to go forth as a labourer to
the harvest.
Then, coming back with the joy of this approaching labour in his heart,
the veil of great sadness descended upon his newly-opening life and set
him in the midst of a dreadful void, a blank of pain and loneliness that
nothing seemed able to fill. Nixie went from him. The Hand that gilds
the stars, and touched her hair with the yellow of the sands, drew her
also away. Just when her gentle companionship had justified itself for
him as something ideally charming that should last always, a breath of
wintry wind passed down upon that grey house under the hill, and, lo,
she was gone—gone like the spirit of her little birch tree from the
cruelties of December.
He was in time to say good-bye—nothing more; in time to see the awful
shadow fall silently upon the wasted little face, and to feel the cold
of eternal winter creep into the thin hand that lay to the last within
his own. Not a single word did he utter as he sat there beside the bed,
choked to the brim with feelings that never yet have known the words to
clothe them. That cold entered his own heart too, and numbed it.
Nixie it was that spoke, though she, too, said little enough. The lips
moved feebly. He lowered his head to catch the last breath.
‘I shall come back,’ he heard faintly, ‘just as the trees do in the
spring!’
The voice was in his ear. It sank down inside him, entering his very
soul. For a moment it sang there—then ceased for ever. With eyes dry and
burning, he buried his head in the tangle of yellow hair upon the
pillow, and when a moment later he raised them again to speak the words
of comfort to his weeping sister, Nixie was no longer there to hear him
or to see.
‘I shall come back in the spring—just as the trees do.’
And so she died, leaving Paul behind in that sea of loneliness whose
waves drown year by year their thousands and tens of thousands—the vast
army that know not Faith. Her blue eyes, so swiftly fading, were on his
to the last. It seemed to him that for a moment he had seen God. And
perhaps he had; for Nixie assuredly was close to divine things, and he
most certainly was pure.
* * * * *
Sad things are best faced squarely, very squarely indeed; dealt with;
and then—deliberately forgotten. In this way their strength, and the
beauty that invariably lies within like a hidden kernel, may be
appropriated and their bitterness destroyed. But such platitudes are
easily said or written, and at first, when Nixie left him, Paul felt as
though the world lay for ever broken at his feet.
What this elfin child had done for him must appear to some exaggerated,
to many, incredible; for the relationship between them had somehow been
touched with the splendour and tenderness of a world unknown to the
majority. The delicate intimacy between their souls, as between souls of
a like age, is difficult to realise outside the region of fantasy. Yet
it had existed: in her with a simple, childlike joy that asked no
questions; in him, with an attempt at analysis that only made it closer
and more dear. What Paul had been to her was a secret she had taken away
with her; what she had been to him, however, was to remain a most
precious memory, and at the same time a source of strength and happiness
that was to prove eternal.
Not, however, in the manner that actually came about—and, at first, not
realised by him in any manner whatsoever.
For, at first, he found himself alone, horribly alone. What her little
mystical heart of poetry had taught him is hard to name. Expression, of
course, in its simpler form, and the joy of a sympathetic audience; but
more than that. In all fine women lies hidden ‘the child’—the simple
vision that pierces—and perhaps in Nixie he had divined, and ideally
reconstructed for himself, the ‘fine woman’! Who can say? A dream so
rich and tender can never be caught in a mere net of words. The truth
lay buried in the depths of his being, to strengthen and to bless; and
some few others may divine its presence there as well as himself
perhaps. The only thing he understood clearly at the moment was that he
had been robbed of an intimate little friend who had crept into every
corner of his heart, and that—he was most terribly alone.