'L'amour est une source naïve, partie de son lit de cresson, de
fleurs, de gravier, qui, rivière, qui, fleuve, change de nature
et d'aspect à chaque flot.'--DE BALZAC.
In England Spring is a poem. In the Highlands of Scotland she has the
intensity of a passion. The crags and steeps are possessed by her; they
stand transfigured like a stern man in the eyes of his bride. And here
in these solemn depths and lonely heights, as nowhere else, shy Spring
abandons herself, secure in the fastnesses where her every freak is
loved. She sets the broom ablaze among the gray rocks, yellow along the
river's edge, yet hardly yellower than the leaves on the young oak just
above. The larches hear her voice, and hundred by hundred peep over each
other's heads upon the hillside, all a-tremble with fairy green. The
shoots of the dwarf cherry, scattered wide upon the uplands, are pink
among the grass. The primroses are everywhere, though it is
Whitsuntide--behind the stones, among the broom, beside the little
tumbling streams, in every crevice, and on every foothold. The
mountain-ash holds its white blossoms aloft in its careful spreading
fingers. Even the silver birch forgets its sadness while spring reigns
in Scotland.
There are those to whom she speaks of love, but there are many more to
whom she whispers, 'Be comforted.' When hope leaves us, it is well to
go out into the woods and listen to what Spring has to say. Though life
is gray, the primroses are coming up all the same, and the young shafts
of the bluebell pierce the soft earth in spite of our heartache. A
hedge-sparrow has built him a house in the nearest tangle of white
hawthorn. There will be children's voices in it presently. Be comforted.
Hope is gone, but not lost. You shall meet her again in the faces of the
children, God's other primroses. She is not lost. She has only taken her
hand out of yours. Be comforted.
But Sibyl refused to be comforted. Her love for Mr. Loftus, if small
things may be called by large names, was the first violent emotion of a
feeble and impulsive mind in a feeble body, both swayed by veering
influences, both shaken by the changing currents of early womanhood, as
a silver birch is shaken with its leaves.
A woman with a deeper heart, and with a slight perception of Mr.
Loftus's character, would have reverently folded her devotion in her
heart and have gone on her way ennobled by it. But with Sibyl, to admire
anything was to wish to possess it; to tire of anything was to cast it
away.
Mr. Loftus was in her eyes without an equal in the world. Therefore--the
reasoning from her point of view was conclusive--she must marry him. She
had no knowledge, she had not even a glimpse, of the gulf of feeling,
far wider than the gulf of years, which separated him from her. She
imagined no one appreciated him, or entered into the dark places of his
mind, as she did. She mistook his patient comprehension of her trivial
aspirations, and his unfailing kindness to all young and crude ideas,
for the perfect sympathy of two kindred souls, and was wont to speak
mysteriously to Peggy of how minds that were really related drew each
other out and enriched each other.
It is always a dangerous experiment to awaken a sleeping soul to the
pageant of life. Mr. Loftus had endeavoured to do this for Sibyl,
consciously, gently, with great care, out of the mixed admiration and
pity with which she inspired him, in the hope that, in later years, when
her feet would be swept from under her, she might find something to
cling to, amid the wreck of happiness which his dispassionate gaze
foresaw that she would one day achieve out of her life.
He had run the risk which all who would fain help others must be content
to run--the risk that their work will be thrown away. He saw that the
little rock-pool which reflected his own face was shallow, but he had
not gauged the measure of its shallowness. His deep enthusiasms, tried
and tempered before she was born, weary now with his own weariness,
aroused hers as the Atlantic wave, sweeping up the rocks, just reaches
and arouses the rock-pool, and sends a flight of ripples over it, which,
if you look very close, break in mimic waves against the further edge.
And before the thunder of the wave is silent the pool is glass once
more.
On natures like these the only influence which can make any impression
is a personal one. It is overwhelming while it lasts; but it is the
teacher who is everything--the teaching is nothing. And when he is
removed, they passively drift under another personal influence, as under
another wave, and the work of the first, the foundation patiently and
lovingly built in its pretty yellow sand, is swept away, or remains in
futile fragments, as a mark of the folly of one who built on sand.
Certain strong, abiding principles Mr. Loftus had sought to instil into
Sibyl's mind. She had perceived their truth and beauty; but she cared
nothing for them in reality, and had fallen at the feet of the man who
had awakened those exquisite feelings in her.
And now either she would not, or could not, get up. She clung to her
imaginary passion with all the obstinacy which is inherent in weak
natures. The disappointment had undermined her delicately-poised
health. As she walked down towards the Spey alone on this particular
June afternoon, she looked more fragile and ethereal than ever. The
faint colour had gone from her cheek, and with it half her evanescent
prettiness had departed. Her slight, willowy figure seemed to have no
substance beneath the many folds of white material in which her
despairing dressmaker had draped her. With the suicidal recklessness of
youth, she made no attempt to turn her mind to other thoughts, but
pondered instead upon her trouble, with the unreasoning rebellion
against it with which, in early life, we all meet these friends in
disguise.
She picked her way down the steep hillside, through the wakened broom
and sleeping heather, and along the edge of the little oasis of
oatfield, where so many thousands of round, river-worn stones had been
gleaned into heaps, and where so many thousands still remained among the
springing corn. The long labour and the patience and the partial failure
which that little field meant, reclaimed from the heather, but not
wholly reclaimed from the stones, had often touched Lady Pierpoint, who
knew what labour was; but it did not appeal to Sibyl.
She sat down with a sigh on the river-bank, a forlorn white blot against
the crowded world of green, with Crack, her little Scotch terrier,
beside her, and looked listlessly across the sliding water, which ran
deep and brown as Crack's brown eyes, and loitered shallow and yellow as
a yellow sapphire among its clean gray stones and gleaming rocks. A pair
of oyster-catchers sped upstream, low over the water, swift as eye
could follow, with glad cries, like disembodied spirits that have found
wings at last and feel the first rapture of proving them.
'Happy birds!' said Sibyl to herself. 'They do not know what trouble
means.'
Crack, who had heard this sentiment, or something very like it, before,
stretched himself methodically, both front-legs together first, and then
the hind-legs one by one, and walked slowly down to the edge of the
water and sniffed sadly, as one who knows that search is vain among the
stones for a rat which is not there. Crack had a fixed melancholy which
nothing could dispel. His early life had been passed in the activity of
a camp, and his spirit seemed to have been permanently embittered by the
close contemplation of military character. He had been round the world.
He knew the principal smells of our Eastern empire, but no reminiscences
of his many travels served to brighten the gloomy tenor of his thoughts.
He was sad, disillusioned, still apt to hurry and shorten himself
through doors, and to retreat under sofas to brood over imaginary
wrongs. All games distressed him. He went indoors at once when the red
ball was produced which transformed Peter from an elegant poodle into a
bounding demon. But in spite of his melancholy he was liked. He went out
but little, but where he went he was welcomed. He was a gentleman and a
man of the world. No dog ever quarrelled with him. He met bristling
overtures with a mournful tact which turned growls into waggings of
tails. He himself was seldom seen to wag his tail, except in his sleep.
He returned from the water's edge and sat down on an outlying fold of
Sibyl's gown.
In the sunny stillness a wild-duck, with cautious, advanced neck, and a
little fleet of water-babies, paddled past, bobbing on the amber
shallows. Crack raised his ears and watched them. His feelings were so
entirely under control that he could scratch himself while observing an
object of interest; and he did so now. But he did not move from his seat
on Sibyl's gown. He was disillusioned about wild-ducks, who did not play
fair and stick to one element, but would take to their wings when hard
pressed in the water, like a woman who changes her ground when cornered
in argument.
Presently the afternoon sun shifted, and all the larches on the steep
hillside opposite and all the broom along the bank stooped to gaze at a
flickering fairyland of broom and larches in the wide water. The deep
valley of the river was drowned in light. Only the bank on which Sibyl
was sitting under the mountain-ash had fallen suddenly into shadow.
'Like my life,' she thought, and rose to go.
Who was this coming slowly towards her along the little path by the
water's edge?
She stood still, trembling, her hands pressed against her breast.
It was he. It was Mr. Loftus. He was looking for her. He was coming to
her. Joy and terror seized her.
He saw her standing motionless in her white gown under the white
blossom-laden tree. And as he drew near and took her nerveless hands in
silence, and looked into her face, he saw again in her deep eyes the
shy, imploring glance which had met him once before--the mute entreaty
of love to be suffered to live.
'Sibyl,' he said, and in his voice there was reverence as well as
tenderness--reverence for her untarnished youth, and tenderness for the
white flower of love which it had put forth, 'will you be my wife?'