So we must keep apart,
You there, I here,
With just the door ajar
That oceans are,
And prayer,
And that pale sustenance
Despair!
--EMILY DICKENSON.
It was a little after Christmas when Michael first began to take notice
of his surroundings once more. There was no love or tenderness that
Wentworth could have shown him which the grave young Italian doctor did
not lavish on him.
Little by little the mist in which Michael lay shifted and cleared, and
closed in on him again. But the times when it cleared became nearer
together. He felt that the great lethargy in which he lay would shift
when the mist shifted. Dimly, as if through innumerable veils, he was
aware that something indefinable but terrible crouched behind it. Days
passed. Blank days and blank nights. He had forgotten everything.
* * * * *
He had been lying awake a long time, years and years. The doctor had
been in to see him just before sunrise, had raised him, and made him
drink, and laid him back upon his pillow. And now he felt full of rest.
How clear everything was becoming. He raised his hand to his head. He
had not taken the trouble to do that before. He looked long at his
wasted hands laid on the coarse cotton sheeting. What were these marks
on the wrists? They seemed like an answer to a riddle of which he had
forgotten the question. If he only knew what those marks were he should
know numbers of other things as well. He raised his long right hand, and
held it close to his eyes.
These marks were bruises. A line of bruises went round the wrist. And
here over the bone was a scar. It was healed now, but it had been a deep
sore once.
_When?_
If only he could remember!
The mist in his mind cleared a little.
_Those bruises were made by chains._
A deadly faintness came over him.
* * * * *
Michael knew at last that he was in prison. The past filtered back into
his feeble mind drop by drop. He knew why he was there. He knew what he
had done to bring him there; he realised that he had been ill a long
time, many weeks. But there was still something sinister, mysterious,
crouching in the back of his mind.
The doctor sought to distract him, to rouse him. He was a botanist, and
he shewed Michael his collection of grasses. Michael did not want to
have the fatigue of looking at them, but he feigned an interest to
please the doctor. He gazed languidly at a spray, now dry and old. The
doctor explained to him that it was the sea lavender, which, in the
early autumn, had flushed the shallows of the lagoon with a delicate
grey lilac.
"I remember," said Michael, whitening.
It rushed back upon him, that time of waiting, marked by the flowering
and the fading of the sea lavender. The colour was seared upon his
brain.
"A hundred years it is lilac," he said, "and a hundred thousand years it
is a purple brown."
The doctor, bending lovingly over a specimen of a rare water plant,
looked up to see Michael's quivering face. He withdrew the book gently
and took it away.
Michael trembled exceedingly. He was on the verge of some abyss which he
should see clearly in another moment. The sea lavender grew on the very
edge of it. It yawned suddenly at his feet. The abyss was Fay's last
desertion. He looked down into it. It was quite dark.
* * * * *
A few days later the doctor brought another book. It was butterflies
this time. He saw that an increasing pressure was upon Michael's mind,
and he feared for his brain. He was too weak to read. He might perhaps
like to look at pictures.
The doctor opened the book at an attractive illustration of an immense
butterfly, with wings of iridescent blue and green. He could not stay,
but he left the cherished volume open on Michael's knee.
Michael turned his maimed mind slowly from the abyss into which it had
been looking ever since he had seen that sprig of sea lavender.
Yes. He knew that particular butterfly. He had seen them by thousands
once in a field in Corfu, long ago on an Easter holiday, when he had
been abroad with Wentworth. They had all glinted together in the
sunshine, wheeling together, sinking together, rising together like an
army of fairies.
How heavy the book was on his knee.
He had not the energy to turn another page. Yes, he must. The doctor
would be disappointed if he found the book open at the same place when
he came back. One leaf. Come! He owed it to his friend. Just one leaf.
Were there English butterflies here as well?
Yes. Here was a sheet of them.
He knew that little yellow one with red tips to its wings. It was common
enough in the south of England.
He looked idly at it.
And somewhere out of the past, far, far back from behind the crystal
screen of childhood, came a memory clear as a raindrop.
He remembered as a tiny child lying in the sun watching a butterfly like
that; watching it walk up and down on a twig of whortleberry, opening
and shutting its new-born wings. It was the first time he had noticed
how beautiful a butterfly's wings were. His baby hand went out towards
it. The baby creature did not fly, was not ready to fly. He grasped it,
and laughed as he felt it flutter, tickling his hot little palms, closed
over it. It gave him a new sense of power. Then he slowly pulled off its
wings, one by one, because they were so pretty.
He remembered it as if it were yesterday, and the sudden disgust and
almost fear with which he suddenly tossed away the little mutilated ugly
thing with struggling legs.
The cruelty of it filled him even now with shamed pain.
"It was not I who did it," he said to himself "I did not understand."
And a bandage was removed from his eyes, and he looked down, as we look
into still water, and he saw that Fay did not understand either. She had
put out her hand to take him. She had pulled his wings off him. She had
cast him aside. Perhaps she even felt horror of him now. But
nevertheless she had not done it on purpose, any more than he had done
it on purpose to that other poor creature of God. _She did not
understand._
Her fair, sweet face, which he had shuddered at as at a leper's, came
back to him, smiling at him with a soft reproach. Ah! It was a child's
face. That was the secret of it all. That was one of the reasons why he
had so worshipped it, that dear face. She had not meant to hurt him with
her pretty hand.
Later on, some day, not in this world perhaps, but some far-off day she
would come to herself, and, looking back, she would feel as he felt now
at the recollection of his infant cruelty, only a thousand times more
deeply. He hoped to God he might be near her when that time of grief
came, to comfort her, to assure her that the pain she had inflicted had
been nothing, nothing, that it did not hurt.
An overwhelming, healing compassion, such as he had never known in all
the years of his great tenderness for Fay, welled up within his arid
heart.
Michael's racked soul was steeped in a great peace and light!
Time and time again his love for Fay had been wounded nearly to the
death, and had been flung back bleeding upon himself. He had always
enfolded it, and withdrawn it, and cherished it anew in a safer place.
A love that has been thus withdrawn and protected does not die. It
shrinks home into the heart, that is all. Like a frightened child
against its mother, it presses close and closer against the Divine Love
that dwells within us, which gave it birth. At last the mother smiles,
and takes her foolish weeping child, born from her body, which has had
strength from her to wander away from her--back into her arms.