The morning of Marie's funeral was sunny but bitterly cold; it was one of
those days when autumn finally passes into winter, and the last memory of
the summer warmth vanishes from the air. It had been the saddest,
dreariest laying to rest. The widowed sister, of whom Marie had spoken in
her last hours, had been unable to come, and the two men had gone through
it all alone, helped only by the tearful, impulsive sympathy and the
practical energy of the maid who had been with Marie ever since her
marriage, and was as yet hardly capable of realising her mistress's
death.
It was she who, while they were away, had done her best to throw a little
air of comfort over the forsaken _salon_. She had kindled the fire,
watered the plants, and thrown open the windows to the sunshine, finding
in her toil and movement some little relief from her own heart-ache and
oppression. When Paul came back, and with numb, trembling fingers had
stripped himself of his scarf and his great-coat, he stepped over the
threshold into the _salon_, and it seemed to him as though the sunlight
and the open windows and the crackling blaze of the fire dealt him a
sudden blow. He walked up to the windows, and, shuddering, drew them down
and closed the blinds, Félicie watching him anxiously from the landing
through the half-open door. Then he had thrown himself into a chair; and
Kendal, coming softly upstairs after him, had gently closed the door from
the outside, said a kind word to Félicie, and himself slipped noiselessly
down again and out into the Champs Elysées. There he had paced up and
down for an hour or more under the trees, from which a few frosty leaves
were still hanging in the December air.
He himself had been so stunned and bewildered by the loss which had
fallen upon him, that, when he found himself alone and out of doors
again, he was for a while scarcely able to think consecutively about it.
He walked along conscious for some time of nothing but a sort of dumb
physical congeniality in the sunshine, in the clear blue and white of the
sky, in the cheerful distinctness and sharpness of every outline. And
then, little by little, the cheated grief reasserted itself, the numbed
senses woke into painful life, and he fell into broken musings on the
past, or into a bitter wonder over the precarious tenure by which men
hold those good things whereon, so long as they are still their own, they
are so quick to rear an edifice of optimist philosophy. A week before,
his sister's affection had been to him the one sufficient screen between
his own consciousness and the desolate threatening immensities of thought
and of existence. The screen had fallen, and the darkness seemed to be
rushing in upon him. And still, life had to be lived, work to be got
through, duties to be faced. How is it done? he kept vaguely wondering.
How is it that men live on to old age and see bond after bond broken, and
possession after possession swept away, and still find the years
tolerable and the sun pleasant, still cherish in themselves that
inexhaustible faith in an ideal something which supplies from century to
century the invincible motive power of the race?
Presently--by virtue of long critical and philosophical habit--his mind
brought itself to bear more and more steadily upon his own position; he
stepped back, as it were, from himself and became his own spectator. The
introspective temper was not common with him; his mind was naturally
turned outward--towards other people, towards books, towards intellectual
interests. But self-study had had its charm for him of late, and, amongst
other things, it was now plain to him that up to the moment of his first
meeting with Isabel Bretherton his life had been mostly that of an
onlooker--a bystander. Society, old and new, men and women of the past
and of the present, the speculative achievements of other times and of
his own,--these had constituted a sort of vast drama before his eyes,
which he had watched and studied with an ever-living curiosity. But his
interest in his particular _rôle_ had been comparatively weak, and in
analysing other individualities he had run some risk of losing his own.
Then love came by, and the half-dormant personality within him had been
seized upon and roused, little by little, into a glowing, although a
repressed and hidden energy. He had learnt in his own person what it
means to crave, to thirst, to want. And now, grief had followed and had
pinned him more closely than ever to his special little part in the human
spectacle. The old loftiness, the old placidity of mood, were gone. He
had loved, and lost, and despaired. Beside those great experiences how
trivial and evanescent seemed all the interests of the life that went
before them! He looked back over his intercourse with Isabel Bretherton,
and the points upon which it had turned seemed so remote from him, so
insignificant, that for the moment he could hardly realise them. The
artistic and aesthetic questions which had seemed to him so vital six
months before had faded almost out of view in the fierce neighbourhood of
sorrow and passion. His first relation to her had been that of one who
knows to one who is ignorant; but that puny link had dropped, and he was
going to meet her now, fresh from the presence of death, loving her as a
man loves a woman, and claiming from her nothing but pity for his grief,
balm for his wound,--the answer of human tenderness to human need.
How strange and sad that she should be still in ignorance of his loss and
hers! In the early morning after Marie's death, when he woke up from a
few heavy hours of sleep, his mind had been full of her. How was the news
to be broken to her? He himself did not feel that he could leave his
brother-in-law. There was a strong regard and sympathy between them; and
his presence in the house of mourning would undoubtedly be useful to Paul
for a while; besides, there were Marie's words--'Will you stay with him a
few days--after--?'--which were binding on him. He must write, then; but
it was only to be hoped that no newspaper would bring her the news before
his letter could reach.
However, as the day wore on, Paul came noiselessly out of the quiet room
where the white shrouded form seemed still to spread a tender presence
round it, and said to Eustace with dry, piteous lips:
'I have remembered Miss Bretherton; you must go to her to-morrow,
after--the funeral'
'I can't bear the thought of leaving you,' said Kendal, laying a
brotherly hand on his shoulder, 'Let me write to-day.'
Paul shook his head. 'She has been ill. Any way it will be a great shock;
but if you go it will be better.'
Kendal resisted a little more, but it seemed as if Marie's motherly
carefulness over the bright creature who had charmed her had passed into
Paul. He was saying what Marie would have said, taking thought as she
would have taken it for one she loved, and it was settled as he wished.
When his long pacing in the Champs Elysées was over Kendal went back to
find Paul busy with his wife's letters and trinkets, turning them over
With a look of shivering forlornness, as though the thought of the
uncompanioned lifetime to come were already closing upon him like some
deadly chill in the air. Beside him lay two miniature cases open; one of
them was the case which Eustace had received from his sister's hand on
the afternoon before her death, and both of them contained identical
portraits of Marie in her first brilliant womanhood.
'Do you remember them?' Paul said in his husky Voice, pointing them
out to him. 'They were done when you were at college and she was
twenty-three. Your mother had two taken--one for herself and one for your
old aunt Marion. Your mother left me hers when she died, and your aunt's
copy of it came back to us last year. Tell Miss Bretherton its history.
She will prize it. It is the best picture still.'
Kendal made a sign of assent and took the case. Paul rose and stood
beside him, mechanically spreading out his hands to the fire.
'To-morrow, as soon as you are gone, I shall go off to Italy. There are
some little places in the south near Naples that she was very fond of. I
shall stay about there for a while. As soon as I feel I can, I shall come
back to the Senate and my work. It is the only thing left me,--she was so
keen about it.' His voice sank into a whisper, and a long silence fell
upon them. Women in moments of sorrow have the outlet of tears and
caresses; men's great refuge is silence; but the silence may be charged
with sympathy and the comfort of a shared grief. It was so in this case.
The afternoon light was fading, and Kendal was about to rise and make
some necessary preparations for his journey, when Paul detained him,
looking up at him with sunken eyes which seemed to carry in them all the
history of the two nights just past. 'Will you ever ask her what Marie
wished?' The tone was the even and passionless tone of one who for the
moment feels none of the ordinary embarrassments of intercourse; Kendal
met it with the same directness.
'Some day I shall ask her, or at least I shall let her know; but it will
be no use.'
Paul shook his head, but whether in protest or agreement Kendal could
hardly tell. Then he went back to his task of sorting the letters, and
let the matter drop. It seemed as if he were scarcely capable of taking
an interest in it for its own sake, but simply as a wish, a charge of
Marie's.
Kendal parted from him in the evening with an aching heart, and was
haunted for hours by the memory of the desolate figure returning slowly
into the empty house, and by a sharp prevision of all the lonely nights
and the uncomforted morrows which lay before the stricken man.
But, as Paris receded farther and farther behind him, and the sea drew
nearer, and the shores of the country which held Isabel Bretherton, it
was but natural that even the grip upon him of this terrible and
startling calamity should relax a little, and that he should realise
himself as a man seeking the adored woman, his veins still beating with
the currents of youth, and the great unguessed future still before him.
He had left Marie in the grave, and his life would bear the scar of that
loss for ever. But Isabel Bretherton was still among the living, the
warm, the beautiful, and every mile brought him nearer to the electric
joy of her presence. He took a sad strange pleasure in making the
contrast between the one picture and the other as vivid as possible.
Death and silence on the one side--oh, how true and how irreparable! But
on the other, he forced on his imagination till it drew for him an
image of youth and beauty so glowing that it almost charmed the sting out
of his grief. The English paper which he succeeded in getting at Calais
contained the announcement: 'Miss Bretherton has, we are glad to say,
completely recovered from the effects of the fainting fit which so much
alarmed the audience at the _Calliope_ last week. She was able to play
_Elvira_ as usual last night, and was greeted by a large and sympathetic
house.' He read it, and turned the page hastily, as if what the paragraph
suggested was wholly distasteful to him. He refused altogether to think
of her as weak or suffering; he shrank from his own past misgivings, his
own prophecies about her. The world would be a mere dark prison-house if
her bright beauty were over-clouded! She was not made for death, and she
should stand to him as the image of all that escapes and resists and
defies that tyrant of our years, and pain, his instrument and herald.
He reached London in the midst of a rainy fog. The endless black streets
stretched before him in the dreary December morning like so many roads
into the nether regions; the gas-lamps scattered an unseasonable light
through the rain and fog; it was the quintessence of murky, cheerless
winter.
He reached his own rooms, and found his man up and waiting for him, and a
meal ready. It was but three days since he had been last there, the open
telegram was still lying on the table. One of his first acts was to put
it hastily out of sight. Over his breakfast he planned his embassy to
Miss Bretherton. The best time to find her alone, he imagined, would be
about mid-day, and in the interval he would put his books and papers to
rights. They lay scattered about--books, proofs, and manuscript. As his
orderly hands went to work upon them, he was conscious that he had never
been so remote from all that they represented. But his nature was
faithful and tenacious, and under the outward sense of detachment there
was an inward promise of return. 'I will come back to you,' seemed to be
the cry of his thought. 'You shall be my only friends. But first I must
see her, and all my heart is hers!'
The morning dragged away, and at half-past eleven he went out, carrying
the little case with him. As he stood outside the Bayswater house, in
which she had settled for the winter, he realised that he had never yet
been under her roof, never yet seen her at home. It was his own fault.
She had asked him in her gracious way, on the first night of _Elvira_, to
come and see her. But, instead of doing so, he had buried himself in his
Surrey lodging, striving to bring the sober and austere influences of the
country to bear upon the feverish indecision of his mood. Perhaps his
disappearance and silence had wounded her; after all, he knew that he
had some place in her thoughts.
The servant who opened the door demurred to his request to see Miss
Bretherton. 'The doctor says, sir, that at home she must keep quiet; she
has not seen any visitors just lately.' But Kendal persisted, and his
card was taken in, while he waited the result. The servant hurried along
the ground-floor passage, knocked at the door at the farther end, went in
for a moment, and came out beckoning to him. He obeyed with a beating
heart, and she threw open the door for him.
Inside stood Isabel Bretherton, with eager surprise and pleasure in her
whole attitude. She had just risen from her chair, and was coming
forward; a soft white cashmere shawl hung around her; her dress, of some
dark rich stuff, fell with the flowing, stately lines peculiar to it; her
face was slightly flushed, and the brilliancy of her colour, of her hair,
of her white, outstretched hand, seemed to Kendal to take all the chill
and gloom out of the winter air. She held some proof sheets of a new play
in her hand, and the rest lay piled beside her on a little table.
'How kind of you, Mr. Kendal,' she said, advancing with her quick
impulsive step towards him. 'I thought you had forgotten us, and I have
been wanting your advice so badly! I have just been complaining of you a
little in a letter to Madame de Châteauvieux! She--'
Then she suddenly stopped, checked and startled by his face. He was
always colourless and thin, but the two nights he had just passed through
had given him an expression of haggard exhaustion. His black eyes seemed
to have lost the keenness which was so remarkable in them, and his
prematurely gray hair gave him almost a look of age in spite of the
lightness and pliancy of the figure.
He came forward, and took her hand nervously and closely in his own.
'I have come to bring you sad news,' he said gently, and seeking
anxiously word by word how he might soften what, after all, could not be
softened. 'M. de Châteauvieux sent me to you at once, that you should
not hear in any other way. But it must be a shock to you--for you loved
her!'
'Oh!' she cried, interrupting him, speaking in short, gasping words, and
answering not so much his words as his look. 'She is ill--she is in
danger--something has happened?'
'I was summoned on Wednesday,' said Kendal, helpless after all in the
grip of the truth which would not be managed or controlled. 'When I got
there she had been two days ill, and there was no hope.'
He paused; her eyes of agonised questioning implored him to go on. 'I was
with her six hours--after I came she had no pain--it was quite peaceful,
and--she died in the evening.'
She had been watching him open-eyed, every vestige of colour fading from
cheek and lip; when he stopped, she gave a little cry. He let go her
hand, and she sank into a chair near, so white and breathless that he was
alarmed.
'Shall I get you water--shall I ring?' he asked after a moment or two,
bending over her.
'No,' she whispered with difficulty; 'let me alone--just for a minute.'
He left her side, and stood leaning against the mantelpiece, waiting
anxiously. She struggled against the physical oppression which had seized
upon her, and fought it down bravely. But he noticed with a pang now that
the flush was gone, that she looked fragile and worn, and, as his thought
went back for a moment to the Surrey Sunday and her young rounded beauty
among the spring green, he could have cried out in useless rebellion
against the unyielding physical conditions which press upon and imprison
the flame of life.
At last the faintness passed off, and she sat up, her hands clasped round
her knees, and the tears running fast over her cheeks. Her grief was like
herself--frank, simple, expressive.
'Will you tell me more about it? Oh, I cannot believe it! Why, only last
week when I was ill she talked of coming to me! I have just been writing
to her--there is my letter. I feel as if I could not bear it; she was
like a mother to me in Paris. Oh, if I could have seen her!'
'You were one of her chief thoughts at the last,' said Kendal, much
moved. And he went on to tell her the story of Marie's dying hours,
describing that gentle withdrawal from life with a manly tenderness of
feeling and a quick memory for all that could soften the impression of it
to the listener. And then he brought out the miniature and gave it to
her, and she accepted it with a fresh burst of sorrow, putting it to her
lips, studying it and weeping over it, with an absolute spontaneity and
self-abandonment which was lovely because it was so true.
'Oh, poor M. de Châteauvieux!' she cried after a long pause, looking up
to him. 'How will he live without her? He will feel himself so forsaken!'
'Yes,' said Kendal huskily; 'he will be very lonely, but--one must learn
to bear it.'
She gazed at him with quick startled sympathy, and all her womanly nature
seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes. It was as though
her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his
particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her. And then
she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting
between them. He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied
standard. His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for
his sister had touched and charmed her. But she had never been conscious
of any intimacy with him. Still less had she ever dreamt of sharing a
common grief with him, of weeping at his side. And the contrast between
her old relation with him and this new solemn experience, rushing in upon
her, filled her with emotion. The memory of the Nuneham day woke again in
her--of the shock between her nature and his, of her overwhelming sense
of the intellectual difference between them, and then of the thrill which
his verdict upon _Elvira_ had stirred in her. The relation which she had
regarded as a mere intellectual and friendly one, but which had been far
more real and important to her than even she herself had ever guessed,
seemed to have transformed itself since he had entered the room into
something close and personal. His last words had called up in her a sharp
impression of the man's inmost nature as it was, beneath the polished
scholarly surface. They had appealed to her on the simplest, commonest,
human ground; she felt them impulsively as a call from him to her, and
her own heart overflowed.
She rose, and went near to him, bending towards him like a spirit of
healing, her whole soul in her eyes 'Oh, I am so sorry for you!' she
exclaimed, and again the quick tears dropped. 'I know it is no common
loss to you. You were so much more to each other than brother and sister
often are. It is terrible for you.'
His whole man was stirred by her pity, by the eager expansiveness of her
sympathy.
'Say it again!' he murmured, as their eyes met; 'say it again. It is so
sweet--from you!'
There was a long pause; she stood as if fascinated, her hands falling
slowly beside her. Her gaze wavered till the eyelids fell, and she stood
absolutely motionless, the tears still on her cheek. The strange
intoxicating force of feeling, set in motion by sorrow and pity, and the
unsuspected influence of his love, was sweeping them out into deep
waters. She could hardly breathe, but as he watched her all the manhood
in him rose, and from the midst of grief put forward an imperious claim
to the beloved and beautiful woman before him. He came forward a step,
took the cold, unresisting hands, and, bending before her, pressed them
to his lips, while her bewildered eyes looked down upon him.
'Your pity is heavenly,' he said brokenly; 'but give me more, give me
more! I want your love!'
She gave a little start and cry, and, drawing away her hands from him,
sank back on her chair. Her thoughts went flying back to the past--to the
stretches of Surrey common, to the Nuneham woods, and all she had ever
seen or imagined of his feelings towards her. She had never, never
suspected him of loving her. She had sent him her friendly messages from
Venice in the simplest good faith; she had joined in his sister's
praises of him without a moment's self-consciousness. His approval of her
play in _Elvira_ had given her the same frank pleasure that a master's
good word gives to a pupil--and all the time he had loved her--loved her!
How strange! how incredible!
Kendal followed, bent over her, listened, but no word came. She was,
indeed, too bewildered and overwhelmed to speak. The old bitter fear and
certainty began to assert itself against the overmastering impulse which
had led him on.
'I have startled you--shocked you,' he cried. 'I ought not to have
spoken--and at such a time. It was your pity overcame me--your sweet
womanly kindness. I have loved you, I think, ever since that first
evening after the _White Lady_. At least, when I look back upon my
feeling, I see that it was love from the beginning. After that day at
Nuneham I knew that it was love; but I would not acknowledge it; I fought
against it. It seemed to me that you would never forget that I had been
harsh, that I had behaved rather like an enemy than a friend. But you did
forget--you showed me how noble a woman could be, and every day after we
parted in July I loved you more. I thought of you all the summer when I
was buried in the Country--my days and nights were full of you. Then when
your great success came--it was base of me--but all the time while I was
sending my congratulations to you through my sister at Venice, I was
really feeling that there was no more hope for me, and that some cruel
force was carrying you away from me. Then came _Elvira_--and I seemed to
give you up for ever.'
Her hands dropped from her face, and her great hazel eyes were fixed upon
him with that intent look he remembered long ago when she had asked him
for the 'truth' about herself and her position. But there was no pain in
it now; nothing but wonder and a sweet moved questioning.
'Why?' The word was just breathed through her parted lips.
Kendal heard it with a start--the little sound loosed his speech and made
him eloquent.
'Why? Because I thought you must inevitably be absorbed, swallowed up by
the great new future before you; because my own life looked so gray and
dull beside yours. I felt it impossible you should stoop from your height
to love me, to yield your bright self to me, to give me heart for heart.
So I went away that I might not trouble you. And then'--his voice sank
lower still--'came the summons to Paris, and Marie on her death-bed tried
to make me hope. And just now your pity drew the heart out of my lips.
Let me hear you forgive me.'
Every word had reached its mark. She had realized at last something of
the depth, the tenacity, the rich, illimitable promise of the passion
which she had roused. The tenderness of Marie seemed to encompass them,
and a sacred pathetic sense of death and loss drew them together. Her
respect, her reverence, her interest had been yielded long ago; did this
troubled yearning within mean something more, something infinitely
greater?
She raised herself suddenly, and, as he knelt beside her, he felt her
warm breath on his cheek, and a tear dropped on his hands, which her own
were blindly and timidly seeking.
'Oh!' she whispered, or rather sobbed, 'I never dreamt of it. I never
thought of anything like this. But--do not leave me again. I could not
bear it.'
Kendal bowed his head upon the hands nestling in his, and it seemed to
him as if life and time were suspended, as if he and she were standing
within the 'wind-warm space' of love, while death and sorrow and
parting--three grave and tender angels of benediction--kept watch and
ward without.
THE END