THIS SIDE OF THE HILLS
On this side of the hills, alas!
Unrest our spirit fills;
For gold, men give us stones and brass--
For asphodels, rank weeds and grass--
For jewels, bits of coloured glass--
On this side of the hills.
The end of July was approaching, and the season was drawing to a close.
Cecil Farquhar and Elisabeth had seen each other frequently since they
first met at the Academy _soirée_, and had fallen into the habit of
being much together; consequently the thought of parting was pleasant to
neither of them.
"How shall I manage to live without you?" asked Cecil one day, as they
were walking across the Park together. "I shall fall from my ideals when
I am away from your influence, and again become the grovelling worlding
that I was before I met you."
"But you mustn't do anything of the kind. I am not the keeper of your
conscience."
"But you are, and you must be. I feel a good man and a strong one when I
am with you, and as if all things were possible to me; and now that I
have once found you, I can not and will not let you go."
"You will have to let me go, Mr. Farquhar; for I go down to the Willows
at the end of the month, and mean to stay there for some time. I have
enjoyed my success immensely; but it has tired me rather, and made me
want to rest and be stupid again."
"But I can not spare you," persisted Cecil; and there was real feeling
in his voice. Elisabeth represented so much to him--wealth and power and
the development of his higher nature; and although, had she been a poor
woman, he would possibly never have cherished any intention of marrying
her, his wish to do so was not entirely sordid. There are so few wishes
in the hearts of any of us which are entirely sordid or entirely ideal;
yet we find it so difficult to allow for this in judging one another.
"Don't you understand," Farquhar went on, "all that you have been to me:
how you have awakened the best that is in me, and taught me to be
ashamed of the worst? And do you think that I shall now be content to
let you slip quietly out of my life, and to be the shallow, selfish,
worldly wretch I was before the Academy _soirée_? Not I."
Elisabeth was silent. She could not understand herself, and this want of
comprehension on her part annoyed and disappointed her. At last all her
girlish dreams had come true; here was the fairy prince for whom she had
waited for so long--a prince of the kingdom she loved above all others,
the kingdom of art; and he came to her in the spirit in which she had
always longed for him to come--the spirit of failure and of loneliness,
begging her to make up to him for all that he had hitherto missed in
life. Yet--to her surprise--his appeal found her cold and unresponsive,
as if he were calling out for help to another woman and not to her.
Cecil went on: "Elisabeth, won't you be my wife, and so make me into the
true artist which, with you to help me, I feel I am capable of becoming;
but of which, without you, I shall always fall short? You could do
anything with me--you know you could; you could make me into a great
artist and a good man, but without you I can be neither. Surely you will
not give me up now! You have opened to me the door of a paradise of
which I never dreamed before, and now don't shut it in my face."
"I don't want to shut it in your face," replied Elisabeth gently;
"surely you know me better than that. But I feel that you are expecting
more of me than I can ever fulfil, and that some day you will be sadly
disappointed in me."
"No, no; I never shall. It is not in you to disappoint anybody, you are
so strong and good and true. Tell me the truth: don't you feel that I am
as clay in your hands, and that you can do anything with me that you
choose?"
Elisabeth looked him full in the face with her clear gray eyes. "I feel
that I could do anything with you if only I loved you enough; but I also
feel that I don't love you, and that therefore I can do nothing with you
at all. I believe with you that a strong woman can be the making of a
man she loves; but she must love him first, or else all her strength
will be of no avail."
Farquhar's face fell. "I thought you did love me. You always seemed so
glad when I came and sorry when I left; and you enjoyed talking to me,
and we understood each other, and were happy together. Can you deny
that?"
"No; it is all true. I never enjoyed talking with anybody more than with
you; and I certainly never in my life met any one who understood my ways
of looking at things as thoroughly as you do, nor any one who entered so
completely into all my moods. As a friend you are most satisfactory to
me, as a comrade most delightful; but I can not help thinking that love
is something more than that."
"But it isn't," cried Cecil eagerly; "that is just where lots of women
make such a mistake. They wait and wait for love all their lives; and
find out too late that they passed him by years ago, without recognising
him, but called him by some wrong name, such as friendship and the
like."
"I wonder if you are right."
"I am sure that I am. Women who are at all romantic, have such
exaggerated ideas as to what love really is. Like the leper of old, they
ask for some great thing to work the wonderful miracle upon their lives;
and so they miss the simple way which would lead them to happiness."
Elisabeth felt troubled and perplexed. "I enjoy your society," she said,
"and I adore your genius, and I pity your loneliness, and I long to help
your weakness. Is this love, do you think?"
"Yes, yes; I am certain of it."
"I thought it would be different," said Elisabeth sadly; "I thought that
when it did come it would transform the whole world, just as religion
does, and that all things would become new. I thought it would turn out
to be the thing that we are longing for when the beauty of nature makes
us feel sad with a longing we know not for what. I thought it would
change life's dusty paths into golden pavements, and earth's commonest
bramble-bush into a magic briar-rose."
"And it hasn't?"
"No; everything is just the same as it was before I met you. As far as I
can see, there is no livelier emerald twinkling in the grass of the Park
than there ever is at the end of July, and no purer sapphire melting
into the Serpentine."
Cecil laughed lightly. "You are as absurdly romantic as a school-girl!
Surely people of our age ought to know better than still to believe in
fairyland; but, as I have told you before, you are dreadfully young for
your age in some things."
"I suppose I am. I still do believe in fairyland--at least I did until
ten minutes ago."
"I assure you there is no such place."
"Not for anybody?"
"Not for anybody over twenty-one."
"I wish there was," said Elisabeth with a sigh. "I should have liked to
believe it was there, even if I had never found it."
"Don't be silly, lady mine. You are so great and wise and clever that I
can not bear to hear you say foolish things. And I want us to talk about
how you are going to help me to be a great painter, and how we will sit
together as gods, and create new worlds. There is nothing that I can not
do with you to help me, Elisabeth. You must be good to me and hard upon
me at the same time. You must never let me be content with anything
short of my best, or willing to do second-rate work for the sake of
money; you must keep the sacredness of art ever before my eyes, but you
must also be very gentle to me when I am weary, and very tender to me
when I am sad; you must encourage me when my spirit fails me, and
comfort me when the world is harsh. All these things you can do, and you
are the only woman who can. Promise me, Elisabeth, that you will."
"I can not promise anything now. You must let me think it over for a
time. I am so puzzled by it all. I thought that when the right man came
and told a woman that he loved her, she would know at once that it was
for him--and for him only--that she had been waiting all her life; and
that she would never have another doubt upon the subject, but would feel
convinced that it was settled for all time and eternity. And this is so
different!"
Again Cecil laughed his light laugh. "I suppose girls sometimes feel
like that when they are very young; but not women of your age,
Elisabeth."
"Well, you must let me think about it. I can not make up my mind yet."
And for whole days and nights Elisabeth thought about it, and could come
to no definite conclusion.
There was no doubt in her mind that she liked Cecil Farquhar infinitely
better than she had liked any of the other men who had asked her to
marry them; also that no one could possibly be more companionable to her
than he was, or more sympathetic with and interested in her work--and
this is no small thing to the man or woman who possesses the creative
faculty. Then she was lonely in her greatness, and longed for
companionship; and Cecil had touched her in her tenderest point by his
constant appeals to her to help and comfort him. Nevertheless the fact
remained that, though he interested her, he did not touch her heart;
that remained a closed door to him. But supposing that her friends were
right, and that she was too cold by nature ever to feel the ecstasies
which transfigure life for some women, should she therefore shut herself
out from ordinary domestic joys and interests? Because she was incapable
of attaining to the ideal, must the commonplace pleasures of the real
also be denied her? If the best was not for her, would it not be wise to
accept the second-best, and extract as much happiness from it as
possible? Moreover, she knew that Cecil was right when he said that she
could make of him whatsoever she wished; and this was no slight
temptation to a woman who loved power as much as Elisabeth loved it.
There was also another consideration which had some weight with her; and
that was the impression, gradually gaining strength in her mind, that
Cecil Farquhar was George Farringdon's son. She could take no steps in
the way of proving this just then, as Christopher was away for his
holiday somewhere in the Black Forest, and nothing could be done without
him; but she intended, as soon as he returned, to tell him of her
suspicion, and to set him to discover whether or not Cecil was indeed
the lost heir. Although it never seriously occurred to Elisabeth to hold
her peace upon this matter and so keep her fortune to herself, she was
still human enough not altogether to despise a course of action which
enabled her to be rich and righteous at the same time, and to go on with
her old life at the Willows and her work among the people at the
Osierfield, even after George Farringdon's son had come into his own.
Although the balance of Elisabeth's judgment was upon the side of Cecil
Farquhar and his suit, she could not altogether stifle--try as she
might--her sense of disappointment at finding how grossly poets and
such people had exaggerated the truth in their description of the
feeling men call love. It was all so much less exalted and so much more
commonplace than she had expected. She had long ago come to the
conclusion--from comparisons between Christopher and the men who had
wanted to marry her--that a man's friendship is a better thing than a
man's love; but she had always clung to the belief that a woman's love
would prove a better thing than a woman's friendship: yet now she
herself was in love with Cecil--at least he said that she was, and she
was inclined to agree with him--and she was bound to admit that, as an
emotion, this fell far short of her old attachment to Cousin Anne or
Christopher or even Felicia. But that was because now she was getting
old, she supposed, and her heart had lost its early warmth and
freshness; and she experienced a weary ache of regret that Cecil had not
come across her path in those dear old days when she was still young
enough to make a fairyland for herself, and to abide therein for ever.
"The things that come too late are almost as bad as the things that
never come at all," she thought with a sigh; not knowing that there is
no such word as "too late" in God's Vocabulary.
At the end of the week she had made up her mind to marry Cecil Farquhar.
Women, after all, can not pick and choose what lives they shall lead;
they can only take such goods as the gods choose to provide, and make
the best of the same; and if they let the possible slip while they are
waiting for the impossible, they have only themselves to blame that they
extract no good at all out of life. So she wrote to Cecil, asking him to
come and see her the following day; and then she sat down and wondered
why women are allowed to see visions and to dream dreams, if the actual
is to fall so far short of the imaginary. Brick walls and cobbled
streets are all very well in their way; but they make but dreary
dwelling-places for those who have promised themselves cities where the
walls are of jasper and the pavements of gold. "If one is doomed to live
always on this side of the hills, it is a waste of time to think too
much about the life on the other side," Elisabeth reasoned with herself,
"and I have wasted a lot of time in this way; but I can not help
wondering why we are allowed to think such lovely thoughts, and to
believe in such beautiful things, if our dreams are never to come true,
but are only to spoil us for the realities of life. Now I must bury all
my dear, silly, childish idols, as Jacob did; and I will not have any
stone to mark the place, because I want to forget where it is."
Poor Elisabeth! The grave of what has been, may be kept green with
tears; but the grave of what never could have been, is best forgotten.
We may not hide away the dear old gnomes and pixies and fairies in
consecrated ground--that is reserved for what has once existed, and so
has the right to live again; but for what never existed we can find no
sepulchre, for it came out of nothingness, and to nothingness must it
return.
After Elisabeth had posted her letter to Cecil, and while she was still
musing over the problem as to whether life's fulfilment must always fall
short of its promise, the drawing-room door was thrown open and a
visitor announced. Elisabeth was tired and depressed, and did not feel
in the mood for keeping up her reputation for brilliancy; so it was
with a sigh of weariness that she rose to receive Quenelda Carson, a
struggling little artist whom she had known slightly for years. But her
interest was immediately aroused when she saw that Quenelda's usually
rosy face was white with anguish, and the girl's pretty eyes swollen
with many tears.
"What is the matter, dear?" asked Elisabeth, with that sound in her
voice which made all weak things turn to her. "You are in trouble, and
you must let me help you."
Quenelda broke out into bitter weeping. "Oh! give him back to me--give
him back to me," she cried; "you can never love him as I do, you are too
cold and proud and brilliant."
Elisabeth stood as if transfixed. "Whatever do you mean?"
"You have everything," Quenelda went on, in spite of the sobs which
shook her slender frame; "you had money and position to begin with, and
everybody thought well of you and admired you and made life easy for
you. And then you came out of your world into ours, and carried away the
prizes which we had been striving after for years, and beat us on our
own ground; but we weren't jealous of you--you know that we weren't; we
were glad of your success, and proud of you, and we admired your genius
as much as the outside world did, and never minded a bit that it was
greater than ours. But even then you were not content--you must have
everything, and leave us nothing, just to satisfy your pride. You are
like the rich man who had everything, and yet took from the poor man his
one ewe lamb; and I am sure that God--if there is a God--will punish you
as He punished that rich man."
Elisabeth turned rather pale; whatever had she done that any one dared
to say such things to her as this? "I still don't understand you," she
said.
"I never had anything nice in my life till I met him," the girl
continued incoherently--"I had always been poor and pinched and wretched
and second-rate; even my pictures were never first-rate, though I worked
and worked all I knew to make them so. And then I met Cecil Farquhar,
and I loved him, and everything became different, and I didn't mind
being second-rate if only he would care for me. And he did; and I
thought that I should always be as happy as I was then, and that nothing
would ever be able to hurt me any more. Oh! I was so happy--so
happy--and I was such a fool, I thought it would last forever! I worked
hard and saved every penny that I could, and so did he; and we should
have been married next year if you hadn't come and spoiled it all, and
taken him away from me. And what is it to you now that you have got him?
You are too proud and cold to love him, or anybody else, and he doesn't
care for you a millionth part as much as he cares for me; yet just
because you have money and fame he has left me for you. And I love him
so--I love him so!" Here Quenelda's sobs choked her utterance, and her
torrent of words was stopped by tears.
"Come and sit down beside me and tell me quietly what is the matter,"
said Elisabeth gently; "I can do nothing and understand nothing while
you go on like this. But you are wrong in supposing that I took your
lover from you purposely; I did not even know that he was a friend of
yours. He ought to have told me."
"No, no; he couldn't tell you. Don't you see that the temptation was
too strong for him? He cares so much for rank and money, and things like
that, my poor Cecil! And all his life he has had to do without them. So
when he met you, and realized that if he married you he would have all
the things he wanted most in the world, he couldn't resist it. The fault
was yours for tempting him, and letting him see that he could have you
for the asking; you knew him well enough to see how weak he was, and
what a hold worldly things had over him; and you ought to have allowed
for this in dealing with him."
A great wave of self-contempt swept over Elisabeth. She, who had prided
herself upon the fact that no man was strong enough to win her love, to
be accused of openly running after a man who did not care for her but
only for her money! It was unendurable, and stung her to the quick! And
yet, through all her indignation, she recognised the justice of her
punishment. She had not done what Quenelda had reproached her for doing,
it was true; but she had deliberately lowered her ideal: she had wearied
of striving after the best, and had decided that the second-best should
suffice her; and for this she was now being chastised. No men or women
who wilfully turn away from the ideal which God has set before them, and
make to themselves graven images of the things which they know to be
unworthy, can escape the punishment which is sure, sooner or later, to
follow their apostasy; and they do well to recognise this, ere they grow
weary of waiting for the revelation from Sinai, and begin to build
altars unto false gods. For now, as of old, the idols which they make
are ground into powder, and strawed upon the water, and given them to
drink; the cup has to be drained to the dregs, and it is exceeding
bitter.
"I still think he ought to have told me there was another woman,"
Elisabeth said.
"Not he. He knew well enough that your pride could not have endured the
thought of another woman, and that that would have spoiled his chance
with you forever. There always is another woman, you know; and you
women, who are too proud to endure the thought of her, have to be
deceived and blinded. And you have only yourselves to thank for it; if
you were a little more human and a little more tender, there would be no
necessity for deceiving you. Why, I should have loved him just the same
if there had been a hundred other women, so he always told me the truth;
but he lied to you, and it was your fault and not his that he was
obliged to lie."
Elisabeth shuddered. It was to help such a man as this that she had been
willing to sacrifice her youthful ideals and her girlish dreams. What a
fool she had been!
"If you do not believe me, here is his letter," Quenelda went on; "I
brought it on purpose for you to read, just to show you how little you
are to him. If you had loved him as I love him, I would have let you
keep him, because you could have given him so many of the things that he
thinks most about. But you don't. You are one of the cold, hard women,
who only care for people as long as they are good and do what you think
they ought to do; Cecil never could do what anybody thought he ought to
do for long, and then you would have despised him and grown tired of
him. But I go on loving him just the same, whatever he does; and that's
the sort of love that a man wants--at any rate, such a man as Cecil."
Elisabeth held out her hand for the letter; she felt that speech was of
no avail at such a crisis as this; and, as she read, every word burned
itself into her soul, and hurt her pride to the quick.
* * * * *
"DEAREST QUENELDA" (the letter ran, in the slightly affected handwriting
which Elisabeth had learned to know so well, and to welcome with so much
interest), "I have something to say to you which it cuts me to the heart
to say, but which has to be said at all costs. We must break off our
engagement at once; for the terrible truth has at last dawned upon me
that we can never afford to marry each other, and that therefore it is
only prolonging our agony to go on with it. You know me so well, dear
little girl, that you will quite understand how the thought of life-long
poverty has proved too much for me. I am not made of such coarse fibre
as most men--those men who can face squalor and privation, and lack all
the little accessories that make life endurable, without being any the
worse for it. I am too refined, too highly strung, too sensitive, to
enter upon such a weary struggle with circumstances as my marriage with
a woman as poor as myself would entail; therefore, my darling Quenelda,
much as I love you I feel it is my duty to renounce you; and as you grow
older and wiser you will see that I am right.
"Since I can not marry you whom I love, I have put romance and sentiment
forever out of my life; it is a bitter sacrifice for a man of my nature
to make, but it must be done; and I have decided to enter upon a
_mariage de convenance_ with Miss Farringdon, the Black Country
heiress. Of course I do not love her as I love you, my sweet--what man
could love a genius as he loves a beauty? And she is as cold as she is
clever. But I feel respect for her moral characteristics, and interest
in her mental ones; and, when youth and romance are over and done with,
that is all one need ask in a wife. As for her fortune, it will keep me
forever out of the reach of that poverty which has always so deleterious
an effect upon natures such as mine; and, being thus set above those
pecuniary anxieties which are the death of true art, I shall be able
fully to develop the power that is in me, and to do the work that I feel
myself called to do.
"Good-bye, my sweetest. I can not write any more; my heart is breaking.
How cruel it is that poverty should have power to separate forever such
true lovers as you and I!
"Your heartbroken
"CECIL."
Elisabeth gave back the letter to Quenelda. "Do you mean to tell me that
you don't despise the man who sent this?" she asked.
"No; because I love him, you see. You never did."
"You are right there. I never loved him. I tried to love him, but I
couldn't."
"I know you didn't. As I told you before, if you had loved him I would
have given him up to you."
Elisabeth looked at the girl before her with wonder. What a strange
thing this love was, which could make a woman forgive such a letter as
that, and still cling to the man who wrote it! So there was such a place
as fairyland after all, and poor little Quenelda had found it; while
she, Elisabeth, had never so much as peeped through the gate. It had
brought Quenelda much sorrow, it was true; but still it was good to have
been there; and a chilly feeling crept across Elisabeth's heart as she
realized how much she had missed in life.
"I think if one loved another person as much as that," she said to
herself, "one would understand a little of how God feels about us."
Aloud she said: "Dear, what do you want me to do? I will do anything in
the world that you wish."
Quenelda seized Elisabeth's hand and kissed it. "How good you are! And I
don't deserve it a bit, for I've been horrid to you and said vile
things."
There was a vast pity in Elisabeth's eyes. "I did you a great wrong,
poor child!" she said; "and I want to make every reparation in my
power."
"But you didn't know you were doing me a great wrong."
"No; but I knew that I was acting below my own ideals, and nobody can do
that without doing harm. Show me how I can give you help now? Shall I
tell Cecil Farquhar that I know all?"
"Oh! no; please not. He would never forgive me for having spoiled his
life, and taken away his chance of being rich." And Quenelda's tears
flowed afresh.
Elisabeth put her strong arm round the girl's slim waist. "Don't cry,
dear; I will make it all right. I will just tell him that I can't marry
him because I don't love him; and he need never know that I have heard
about you at all."
And Elisabeth continued to comfort Quenelda until the pale cheeks grew
pink again, and half the girl's beauty came back; and she went away at
last believing in Elisabeth's power of setting everything right again,
as one believes in one's mother's power of setting everything right
again when one is a child.
After she had gone, Elisabeth sat down and calmly looked facts in the
face; and the prospect was by no means an agreeable one. Of course there
was no question now of marrying Cecil Farquhar; and in the midst of her
confusion Elisabeth felt a distinct sense of relief that this at any
rate was impossible. She could still go on believing in fairyland, even
though she never found it; and it is always far better not to find a
place than to find there is no such place at all. But she would have to
give up the Willows and the Osierfield, and all the wealth and position
that these had brought her; and this was a bitter draught to drink.
Elisabeth felt no doubt in her own mind that Cecil was indeed George
Farringdon's son; she had guessed it when first he told her the story of
his birth, and subsequent conversations with him had only served to
confirm her in the belief; and it was this conviction which had
influenced her to some extent in her decision to accept him. But now
everything was changed. Cecil would rule at the Osierfield and Quenelda
at the Willows instead of herself, and those dearly loved places would
know her no more.
At this thought Elisabeth broke down. How she loved every stone of the
Black Country, and how closely all her childish fancies and girlish
dreams were bound up in it! Now the cloud of smoke would hang over
Sedgehill, and she would not be there to interpret its message; and the
sun would set beyond the distant mountains, and she would no longer
catch glimpses of the country over the hills. Even the rustic seat,
where she and Christopher had sat so often, would be hers no longer; and
he and she would never walk together in the woods as they had so often
walked as children. And as she cried softly to herself, with no one to
comfort her, the memory of Christopher swept over her, and with it all
the old anger against him. He would be glad to see her dethroned at
last, she supposed, as that was what he had striven for all those years
ago; but, perhaps, when he saw a stranger reigning at the Willows and
the Osierfield in her stead, he would be sorry to find the new
government so much less beneficial to the work-people than the old one
had been; for Elisabeth knew Cecil quite well enough to be aware that he
would spend all his money on himself and his own pleasures; and she
could not help indulging in an unholy hope that, whereas she had beaten
Christopher with whips, her successor would beat him with scorpions. In
fact she was almost glad, for the moment, that Farquhar was so unfit for
the position to which he was now called, when she realized how sorely
that unfitness would try Christopher.
"It will serve him right for leaving me and going off after George
Farringdon's son," she said to herself, "to discover how little worth
the finding George Farringdon's son really was! Christopher is so
self-centred, that a thing is never properly brought home to him until
it affects himself; no other person can ever convince him that he is in
the wrong. But this will affect himself; he will hate to serve under
such a man as Cecil; I know he will; because Cecil is just the type of
person that Christopher has always looked down upon, for Christopher is
a gentleman and Cecil is not. Perhaps when he finds out how inferior an
iron-master Cecil is to me, Christopher will wish that he had liked me
better and been kinder to me when he had a chance. I hope he will, and
that it will make him miserable; for those hard, self-righteous people
really deserve to be punished in the end." And Elisabeth derived so much
comfort from the prospect of Christopher's coming trials, that she
almost forgot her own.