'But we are tired. At Life's crude hands
We ask no gift she understands;
But kneel to him she hates to crave
The absolution of the grave.'
MATHILDE BLIND.
The laws of attraction remain a mystery. Their results we see. Glimpses
of their workings can occasionally be caught in their broken fragments.
But the curve by which the circle may be drawn is nowhere to be found
among those fragments. The first cause we cannot see. With sacrilegious
hands we may rend the veil of its temple in the sacred name of truth,
but we shall find nothing in its holy of holies save the bloodstains of
generations of sacrifices on its empty altar, and the place where the
ark has been.
Youth, beauty, wit--all these attract; but they are only the momentary
disciples of a great master, and their power is from him. In his name
they perform a few works, and cast out a few small devils.
But now and again a nature appears in our midst in the presence of which
youth sinks its voice, and beauty pales and hangs its head, and wit
bends its knee in reverence.
What talisman had Mr. Loftus brought into the world with him that
disinterested love and devotion should with one exception have followed
him all the days of his life? But whether it had been given to him at
his birth, or he had found it alone upon the hillside, or Sorrow, who
has many treasures in her lap, but will never give them to those who
turn from her, gave it to him when he kissed her hand--however this may
have been, he had it.
He had gone through his difficult life little realizing how much he owed
to the impersonal love and respect which he inspired in men and women,
as a beautiful woman seldom realizes how life has been coloured for her
by the colour of her hair and eyes.
His poetic exalted nature, with its tender affections, its deep
passions, with its refinement and its delicacy of feeling, too sensitive
to bear contact with this rough world, and yet not content to dwell
apart from awkward fellow-creatures who wounded when they touched it,
had leaned twice on the frail reed of personal love, and twice it had
pierced his hand. After the second time he withdrew his scarred hand in
silence, and journeyed on with it in his bosom.
In the days of his youth he had been swept into the vortex of a deep
passion which for the time engulfed his whole being. His early marriage
and his romantic love, and his young wife's desertion of him, consumed
like a rolling prairie-fire his early life. But he had emerged with the
mark of fire upon him, and had taken up life again, and had made a
career for himself in the world of politics.
And he had reached middle age, he was a grave man with gray in his hair,
before love came to him the second time. How he fared the second time no
man knew; but afterwards the love of woman, deep-rooted though it was,
died down in Mr. Loftus's heart. He went quietly on his way, but the way
wearied him. He confided in no one, for he was burdened with many
confidences, and those on whom others lean can seldom find a hand to
lean on in their greater weakness and their deeper troubles.
But his physical health wavered. At last his heart became affected, and
after a few warnings he was obliged to give up public life. He ceased to
be in authority, but he remained an authority, and so lived patiently on
from year to year on the verge of the grave, aware that at any moment
the next step might be across its brink.
He had spoken the bare truth to Sibyl when he told her that his life
hung by a thread. That this is so with all human life is a truism to
which we all agree, but which none of us believe. But in his case the
sword of Damocles was visible in the air above him. He never took for
granted, if he went out for a walk, that he should return; and on this
particular May afternoon, as he looked out from a friend's house in Park
Lane across the street to the twinkle of green and the coloured bands of
hyacinths beyond the railings, he locked his writing-table drawer from
force of long habit, and burned the letters he had just read as
carefully as if he were going on a long journey, instead of a short
stroll across the park to Lady Pierpoint's house in Kensington.
It was a heavy trouble that he had just locked into the writing-table
drawer--nothing less than the sale of Wilderleigh, which he and Doll,
after much laying together of the gray head and the brown one, had both
come to the conclusion could not be staved off any longer. For the
newly-imposed death-duties and the increasing pressure of taxation on
land, in the teeth of increasing agricultural depression, had been the
death-blow of Wilderleigh, as of so many other quiet country homes and
their owners. The new aristocracy of the ironmaster and the cheesemonger
and the brewer had come to the birth, and the old must give way before
the power of their money. Mr. Loftus accepted the inevitable, and
Wilderleigh was to be sold.
He did not know for certain where Lady Pierpoint was to be found, but he
would try the little house in Kensington. He had seen her driving alone
the previous day, and he knew that she had quite recently returned with
her daughter and niece from Egypt, where they had spent the winter
months. Something in the glimpse of her passing face yesterday had
awakened in him a vague suspicion that she was in trouble. She looked
older and grayer, and why was she alone?
He took up his hat and, entering the Park, struck across the grass in
the direction of the Albert Memorial, blinking in all its gilt in the
afternoon sun. The blent green and gray of a May day in London had
translated the prose of the Park into poetry. Here in the very heart of
the vast machine, Spring had ventured to alight for a moment,
undisturbed by the distant roar of dusty struggling life all round her.
The new leaves on the smoke-black branches of the trees were for a
moment green as those unfolding in country lanes. Smoke-black among the
silvery grass men lay strewn in the sunshine, looking like cast-off rags
flung down, outworn by humanity, whose great pulse was throbbing so near
at hand. Across the tender beauty of the young year fell the shadow of
crime and exhaustion, and 'the every-day tragedy of the cheapness of
man.'
The shadow fell on Mr. Loftus's mind, and he had well-nigh reached Lady
Pierpoint's door before his thoughts returned to her and to her niece,
Sibyl Carruthers.
'Pretty, delicate, impulsive creature, so generous, so ignorant, so full
of the ephemeral enthusiasms of youth which have no staying power. The
real enthusiasms of life are made of sterner stuff than she, poor child!
guesses. What will become of her? What man in the future will take her
ardent, fragile devotion, and hold it without breaking it, and bask in
the green springtide of her love without desecrating it, like those poor
outcasts in the Park?'
Lady Pierpoint was at home, and he was presently ushered into the
drawing-room, where she was sitting in her walking things. The room was
without flowers, without books, without any of the small landmarks of
occupation. It had evidently been arranged only for the briefest stay,
and had as little welcome in it as a narrow mind.
Lady Pierpoint, pouring tea out of a metal teapot into an enormous
teacup, looked also as if she were on the point of departure.
She greeted him cordially, and sent for another cup. A further glance
showed him that she looked worn and harassed. Her cheerful motherly
face was beginning to droop like a mastiff's at the corners of the
mouth, in the manner in which anxiety cruelly writes itself on plump
middle-aged faces.
'I am not really visible,' she said, smiling, as she handed him the
large cup which matched her own. 'I cannot bring forth butter in a
lordly dish, as you perceive, for everything is locked up. I am here
only for two days, cook-hunting.'
Mr. Loftus had intended to ask after Sibyl, but he asked after Peggy
instead.
'She is quite well,' said Lady Pierpoint. 'She is always well, I am
thankful to say. I have another Peggy coming out this year--Molly--perhaps
you remember her; but how to bring her to London this season I don't know.
I have hardly seen anything of her all last winter, poor child! as I was
in Egypt with Sibyl. I have only just returned to England.'
'And Miss Carruthers?' he said, examining his metal teaspoon; 'will not
she be in London with you this season, with your own daughters?'
'No,' said Lady Pierpoint, looking narrowly at him; 'Sibyl is ill. I
have been very anxious about her all the winter. I greatly fear that she
will sink into a decline. You know, her sister died of consumption a
year or two ago.'
Mr. Loftus looked blankly at Lady Pierpoint.
'Sibyl!' he said--'ill? Oh, surely there is some mistake? What do the
doctors say?'
'They all say the same thing,' said Lady Pierpoint, her lips quivering.
'She had a cough last winter, and she is naturally delicate, but there
is no actual disease as yet. But if she continues in this morbid state
of health--if she goes on as she is at present--they say it will end in
that.'
Mr. Loftus was silent.
Lady Pierpoint looked at his unconscious, saddened, world-weary face,
and clasped her hands tightly together.
'Mr. Loftus,' she said, 'I am going to put a great strain on our
friendship, and if I lose it, I must lose it. I have been thinking of
writing to you, but I could not. I had thought of asking you to come and
see me while I was alone here, but my courage failed me. But now that
you have come by what is called chance, I dare not be a coward any
longer. Sibyl has told me of what passed last summer between you and
her.'
A faint colour came into Mr. Loftus's pale face. He kept his eyes on the
floor.
'I think,' he said gently, but with a touch of reserve in his voice
which did not escape his companion, 'we must both forget that as
completely as she herself has probably already forgotten it.'
'She has not forgotten it,' said Lady Pierpoint, ignoring, though with a
pang, his evident wish to dismiss the subject. 'It is that which is
causing her ill-health. She can think of nothing else. Some of us,' she
said sadly, 'are so constituted that we can bear trouble and
disappointment--others can't. This poor child, who has cried for the
moon, is not mentally and physically strong enough to bear the
disappointment of being denied it. And the doctors say that her life is
dependent on her happiness.'
Mr. Loftus rose, and paced up and down the room. She dared not look at
him.
Presently he stopped, and, with his face turned away, said with emotion:
'But the moon is a dreary place if it is seen as it is, with its extinct
volcanoes and its ice-fields. Nothing lives there. The fire in it is
burnt out, and there is snow over the ashes. It is only in the eyes of a
child that the moon is bright. We elders know that it is dark and
desolate.'
Lady Pierpoint was awed. She had known Mr. Loftus for twenty years. He
had been kind to her in the early years of her widowhood, and in the
later ones had helped on her boys by his influence in high quarters. She
had often told him of her difficulties, but she had never till now heard
him speak of himself.
Her great admiration for him, which was of a humbler kind than Sibyl's,
led her to say: 'It is not only in the child's eyes that the moon is
bright.'
She might have added with truth that in her own middle-aged eyes it was
bright, too.
'I greatly honoured you when Sibyl told me about it,' she continued,
after a long pause. 'It is because I have entire trust in you that I
have told you the truth about this poor child, who is as dear to me as
my own, though I hope my own will face life more bravely. Should you,
after reflection, feel able to do her this--this--great kindness, I hope
you will come and stay with us at Abergower for Whitsuntide. But--I
shall not expect you, and I shall not mention to anyone that I have
asked you.'
She rose and held out her hand. She looked tired.
He held it a moment, and she endeavoured to read the grave, inscrutable
glance that met hers, but she could not.
'Thank you,' he said, and went away.
'How dare she think of him?' said Lady Pierpoint to herself.