“What do you mean? How do you know?”
“By the token,” he said, “that he destined me to your fate, and I
answered with the better part of valour, which you will be wise to
imitate.”
“To-morrow,” I muttered; “we had already decided.”
“That is not all, nor enough,” he urged. “You may be Una, _with_ a
rhinoceros, and that is not enough. My lord rides a thunder-bolt. It
is not enough to flee him; you must vanish--be no more.”
Now all of a sudden--I know not how--his words seemed to wake me to
the fond illusion of my state. How, indeed, was I situated, with a
legless Caliban to show me how to run? I had been blinded, by Gogo’s
devotion, to the real nature of the presumption it had thought to
justify. What honest right had he to have undertaken so responsible a
deed, save he had provided for it to the last details? I felt suddenly
very naked and forlorn--shiftless and crying, like some poor exposed
child in the night. I clasped my fingers to the shadow, entreating it
in a broken voice--
“What am I to do? Advise me, help me!”
It moved upon me, soft, and swift, and irresistible. I felt my hands
imprisoned--seized as out of the grave into an assurance of human
warmth and sympathy.
“For what else am I here?” demanded the fervent voice. “Have I not the
prior claim? Have you never thought of me in all these years--of what
you might be now, save for my interference?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Indeed, indeed I am not one to forget.”
“Well,” he said, “I am just a vagabond at last, and desperate in
romance; and you--your reason is forfeit, if not your life. Be under
no delusion about it; nor about the real impotence of this good fellow
to save you. Come with me, then, while there is time, and be my little
sister. I am lonely in the deep woods.”
I did not move or speak, but I gazed up intently into the white bloom
of his face. The strangest thought was struggling for expression in
me--of some conscious gravitation, through all these years, towards an
affinity which had been shadowed out to me at that first and only
meeting. I felt no shyness, but only a restful confidence in his
company. Was not that strange? To be brother and sister, one and
indivisible in the candid sympathies of Nature. I recognised in a
moment that it was that ideal relationship which had always appealed
to me for the best and purest--that I could never be happy again
divorced from it.
Suddenly the tears were in my eyes.
“If I could truly be your little sister,” I said, “and keep house for
you, as Gretel did for the gentle shepherd who had plucked her when a
flower.”
He heaved a long sigh, full of rapture.
“Quick, then! let me pluck my flower,” says he, “and run.”
But now, at that, for some reason, a revulsion of feeling took me. I
sank down upon the ground away from him, and hid my face in my hands.
“No, no,” I cried--“not yet, not now. O, leave me, _please_!”
Perhaps he was wise to understand and temporise. Anyhow, he went,
though no farther than the door.
For a moment I hated myself; for a moment I felt the basest thing on
earth. What use to reflect that reason and kindness were on my side:
that, since I could not cure a poor fond fool, it were no mercy, but
the contrary, to submit him to the continued infection of my presence?
I said so to myself, and saying it, saw his face returning--full of
light and eagerness--to learn the damning truth! To be held accursed
in that great heart! I could not, I could not! Poor Gogo! Had he not
given up everything for me? I would not desert him. Why should he not
come too? But no: I saw in the same instant that that was impossible,
since he himself had no thought, no wish, to be my brother. And
perhaps, if I went, I should never see him again. Well, would not that
be the best for him? Let me nurse my grief eternal, so long as he
found _his_ cure in separation. It were better I should go. Freed of
this incubus, he would have no longer need to crouch and starve. The
world had no reason, so far as I knew, to identify him with my flight.
And now every hour he remained with me was an added peril to his
safety, his very existence!
Quite wild, I rose to my feet and went panting to the shadow.
“Take me away,” I said, “before he breaks my heart, returning.”
He took my hand tight in his, drew me under the starlight, and
together we fled down the hill and into the woods.
XVII.
I AM CONSIGNED TO A GREEN GRAVE
To you, my dear Alcide, conscience is, I know, a disease, and virtue
its relapse. I do not, then, ask your sympathy, but only your
commiseration in that long struggle with my better self in which I was
now to engage--a struggle which found me child, and left me woman--a
struggle through whose intermittent deliriums moved ever the sorrowful
figure of my poor lost Gogo.
Yet I must own that the oasis in which this destiny was to be
fulfilled figured for a period the greenest in all my desert career.
It was a dear time, in truth; a dear, abandoned, wonderful time, until
the inevitable disenchantment came. Alas! to take profit of your own
unselfishnesses is, with a stern Providence, to convert them into the
plainest of worldly transactions!
No word passed between me and my companion as we hurried, deeper and
deeper, into the fathomless woods. Sure of foot and, it seemed, of
destination, he drew me unresisting by cloudy deeps of foliage, by
starlit alleys, by ways so thronged and massed with trunks as to seem
impenetrable. Often I shrunk before some imaginary charge of shadows;
often cried out in the silent rush of woodland things across our path.
There was no wind that could reach and buffet those packed
desolations; no frost, save where in the clearings it could find space
to bloom. And these, for precaution’s sake, we avoided, lest our
footsteps should betray us. On and on we sped, till my heart was sick
in my breast, and I cried out to rest and die. But he would not let me
stop.
“Courage, little sister!” he cried; “we are within a cast of home.”
We mounted, after that, a long and gentle hill, from whose sides the
trees fell away, till, on the summit, there was none. But here, sunk
deep in the crest, was, as I could discern, an ancient gravel pit,
whose slopes were rough with brake and brush to a giddy distance down.
“Come,” he whispered, and clasped my hand secure.
We descended by a path, that was no path to me, and, at the bottom,
stooped under a very thicket of bush, and gained once more a sense of
space and movement, but so deadly close-shut that for a little I dared
not stir.
“Come,” whispered my companion again. “It is nothing but a cleft in
the hill, but so overgrown above that no mortal would guess it there.”
Still I dared not move. When suddenly I felt his arm about me, and his
lips on mine. Then I started to myself with a shock of anger.
“Is this to be a brother?” I cried.
“What else,” he murmured, “to give his little sister confidence.”
The low laugh with which he said it made my blood fire. I could have
struck him in my fury.
“Go on!” I said, in a repressed voice. “I have come so far; I must
follow, I suppose.”
“Will you not let me lead you?”
“No.”
“You may stumble in the dark.”
“Not to the fall you think.”
“I am sorry.”
“Very well. Go on.”
He went before, submissively. The gully cut straight, like a giant
furrow, through the hill. It was narrow and pitch-dark, sodden here
and there with dripping water, and always smelling like a vault. Not
once in its entire length, so far as I could see, did the dense mat of
overgrowth thin to that texture that a star of all the hosts above was
visible.
At last he stopped so suddenly that I near fell against him.
“Hush!” he whispered, “we are at the end. Can you see enough to follow
me?”
“Yes,” I said; “my eyes are opened now.”
He had hard work, I knew, to suppress a chuckle over my tragic tone.
“Well, keep them so,” said he; and, elbowing up a great pad of
foliage, beckoned to me to pass. I obeyed, holding my skirts from him,
and in a moment discovered myself in the open once more.
We had emerged, it seemed, high on the near perpendicular side of
another pit, or cutting. Right beneath us, shouldering the very steep
on which we were perched, was the thatched roof of a cottage, an open
skylight in the midst gaping at us scarce ten feet below. So close did
it invite us, in the bewildering starlight, that I was near springing,
on the thought, to gain its shelter. But my companion restrained me.
“Wait,” he whispered drily. “A little of your discretion, please.”
Doubtful of me, he let go his hold reluctantly, and stooping once more
under the curtain of foliage, dragged out a ladder, which was
concealed behind, and which he now, with infinite precaution, lowered
through the skylight till it rested.
“Now,” he said, “climb down, while I hold it firm.”
It was the rudest thing; just slats nailed across a pole--a ladder for
bears, not men. But I was young and lithe, and quickly was down and
through, and standing, trembling over this finish to my adventure, on
the floor of a little dark, invisible room. And so, before I had time
to collect myself, the other was descended in my footsteps, and the
ladder hauled in and laid along the wall, and a little silence ensued.
“Well,” said his voice at length, “you are safe at last, little
sister.”
Then, I don’t know how it was, the tears would come.
“Why, don’t you believe it?” he whispered, groping a step nearer.
“Have you given me reason to?” I answered, shrinking from his touch,
and gulping down my sobs.
He drew away at once.
“The best reason in the world,” he said coldly, “since I have placed
my life in your hands--since I leave you here the means to escape, if
you will, and curry favour by betraying me.”