movement, and lowered her chin from its ineffable upward line. The
words I scarcely heard, though every fibre trembled with emotion at
her speech. I thought the voice, with the softening syllables dropping
into silence, more exquisite than any music dreamed of. Its tones
accompanied me as a murmur rather than the remembrance of actual
words in my walk up to the free bluff, whence I could look down on
the grey manor, and mixed with the resounding roar of ocean, as the
wind blew the melody of the waves shoreward. What was the distinction
of this woman who through all the days to come offered me rapture
and agony by noontide and by midnight? Not her beauty so much as her
essential difference from others. Not the gleaming gold of her hair,
but the solemn simplicity of her bearing in such accord with the vast
and unbroken solitude around her. Her voice I acknowledged without
shrinking or terror, as we accept all essential elements, to be
henceforth the dominant key of life for me, the note to sound my depths
and touch me at will as an impassive instrument. Was this woman free? I
asked myself, with a thrill of revolt, as I remembered her mention of
children. But no word of husband! This fact let in a ray of hope upon
my dread. I could never again belong to myself with the cheap security
of an hour ago, and what was there for me if there was no room for me
in the chambers of her heart?
At the cottage I found my host frying some salmon for supper. He
was a tall, bent peasant, meagre and pallid from much thinking and
under-feeding, with all the Celt’s quaint mixture of melancholy and
humour in his keen blue eyes and wrinkled smile. He did the honours
of his humble dwelling with stately courtesy, and was too proud and
well-bred to offer futile apologies for the poverty of his shepherd
fare and rude bed.
‘Your friend, sir, is not anything worse, I trust,’ he said. I gave
him the doctor’s report, and said it was now a case for complete rest
and care. I reddened with remorse, remembering how little I had been
thinking of Trueberry.
‘Ah, ’tis he that’s in excellent hands,’ said the peasant, turning the
salmon, and then dreamily rested his cheek against the closed hand that
held the fork, with his elbow supported on the other wrist.
‘May I not learn to whom we are indebted for so much kindness?’ I asked
tremulously.
‘Your friend, sir, is at the house of Lady Brases Fitzowen,’ he
answered, and I shrank beneath the sharp look he cast on me. ‘’Tis
herself, sure, we all love and delight in as if she was one of God’s
angels.’
This seemed to me in my exalted mood as such an obvious statement that
I received it with the same simplicity it had been uttered. Were we not
brother Celts,--albeit, I a Parisianised Breton, and he an illiterate
native of wild Kerry uplands? His tribute to the lady of my destiny
raced a flame through me like a delicious flattery.
‘I have seen her,’ I said, striving to command my voice in unconfessing
tones. ‘I can quite believe you. I should like to know something of
her, if you will not deem my curiosity an impertinence. She spoke of
her children. Does her husband live?’
‘He does,’ the peasant answered, I thought sullenly.
I caught a fork fiercely in my hand, and bent to trace figures with it
on the cloth, hoping thereby to shield my excessive pain from his sharp
scrutiny.
‘She did not mention him to me,’ I half cried.
‘’Tis natural. They’re no longer one.’
Oh, the warm revulsion, the wild joy in that queer reply. I read in it
the peasant’s definition of divorce. It sprang light and flame through
me, and heated senses benumbed a moment ago. It gave definiteness to
rash hope, and melted away all doubt and apprehension. Brases free
was to be wooed. Heaven knows conceit was never more eliminated from
self-judgment than then, but I felt the urgent claim of the rare
passion so instantaneously born. All my worth lay in the quality of
that love, and it was not such that any woman could reject without a
pang.
‘Then she is free,’ I said, and heard the thrill in my own voice.
‘Free!’ exclaimed the peasant, frowning. ‘That’s as may be. Them
Protestants believe such-like things, but we don’t, sir. However things
happen, we hold folk once married can only be freed by death. I take
it, sir, you come from foreign parts, though ’tis a wonder to me how
you have learnt the English tongue so well. May be, beyond in your
land, they’re like the Protestants, and play fast and loose with the
marriage tie.’
He laid the dish of salmon on the table, and disappeared outside. My
state of mixed emotions, of exasperated nerves, of pulses throbbing
against my consciousness like a discordant instrument, anger with that
prejudiced peasant predominating, reduced me to the level of savage
and child. The fellow in his implied abhorrence of divorce was so
aggravatingly phlegmatic, so heartlessly unconscious of all it might
mean for me. I did not knock him down or force him to eat his obnoxious
words, but sat still and endeavoured not to observe the rest of his
rational preparations for the evening meal. I was on fire for further
facts of the tale, but dared not question, in my uncontrollable
temper. When the peasant at length seated himself opposite me, with
a dish of salmon, smoking potatoes, and a bottle of potheen between
us, I was able to make a fair pretence of hunger. I had no difficulty
in praising the salmon and the big flowery potatoes, the best of the
world, and novelty supplied the needful sauce. The potheen was simply
barbarous, a suitable drink for Caliban or the Indian brave, and no
amount of water could soothe it to my French palate. But between lively
grimaces over it, I was enabled to ask, without self-betrayal--
‘Then, I suppose, Lady Fitzowen’s husband does not live at the manor?’
He looked at me gravely over his glass, and nodded.
‘They are divorced?’
‘Not quite as I should say. Separated, they call it.’
Here was a toppling down of the airiest edifice built of gossamer. I
could have cried out at the stab like any thwarted child. And yet the
barrier of a living husband, like an unclean skeleton, between us, made
that vision in the early twilight no less pure and spiritual than when
not seen across the tragic story, _married widowhood_. A widow, still
had sanctity lain upon my suit, where now reproach would lie as a pall.
Suppose my love drew hers, how should I live through terror of waking
some poisonous snake to her mortal injury, of the nameless dread of
slander to breathe its dark flame against her sinless brow? A shadow
upon such devotion as mine was an unacceptable desecration. Torture
itself prompted me to further questioning.
‘Was it she who sought separation?’
‘I believe it was her people, sir. He was a bad lot, they say, wild
after the women, and not over nice in his ways. She’s gentle now, but
she was proud and passionate as a girl, and she felt the shame of the
thing and ran. ’Tis a wonder the poor crathurs don’t oftener run, the
provocation thim fine gentlemen gives them. Anyway, her people settled
the matter, and she came to live here, ’tis now close on four years
ago. The second child was born here, God bless it, and we all love it
like our own.’
I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night.
One never wants for proof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and
injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by
marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the
musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter
not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a
sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally
mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out
for ever into her desperate loneliness. Joy seemed to me a miserable
mockery, the portion of trivial, contemptible humanity. The best proof
of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was
measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble
jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I
murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars
above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple
depths of sky.
I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among
the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning
gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. Tears were the
mark of the elect, and had given her eyes that penetrating, unjoyous
clearness of the stars, had given her beautiful lips their set line of
austere silence, had placed on that frail white brow the conquering
seal of valour and forbearance. A passion so remote from whimpering
sentiment as that which she had inspired, was one to take pride in, and
I cared not now whether grief or weal were my portion, for I, too, was
crowned, and, like her, stood apart.
I was glad to face the wide, empty moors by sunrise. The valley lay
below the brilliantly lit mountain shoulder, where scarcely a shadow
offered rest for the eyes. The Reeks opening out, peak upon peak,
glittering and wild, made a magnificent picture. Here a crescent of
shattered points, there a sunny tarn through the hollow of the cliff,
shot with amber rays; and downward, deep valley beyond deep valley,
dusk with foliage, and broken by zigzag pathways. I sat on the shelf of
a rock, whence I could perceive the glen and grey mass of the manor. An
eagle sweeping over the brow of the bluff, the shrill cry of curlews in
their undulary shoreward flight, presaging tempest, the thunder of the
Atlantic in the steady roll of its surges, were the sole sounds in my
majestic solitude.
I sat and dreamed, and filled in the unknown pages of that one volume
now for me, the life of an innocent and high-spirited girl, urged in
the passivity of an untroubled heart into an uncongenial marriage.
The thought that she might have loved a worthless husband was an
intolerable smart, and I rejected it for the more bearable belief
that she had entered bondage in a neutral condition, without any
apprehension of the warmer moments of life, unawakened to the imperious
claims of the heart.
And in dwelling bitterly on the penalties of such experience, the
illimitable price exacted for limitable error, I started to my feet
in angry denial that part of the price was the harsh sentence against
other choice. What did it matter if the world’s wisdom rebuked our
folly? What did it matter if the callous eye saw stain where I felt
glory? What did anything matter, so long as I had the will to leap all
barriers that lay between Brases and me? To pass through flame and
wave, so that she was on the other side of peril with outstretched
arms?
The manor, with its air of rude decay, was curious rather than
picturesque. It fronted a lawn that dropped into a thick plantation
of fir, along which ran a silver trout-stream. The gravelled walks
wandered away into the woodlands that waved in brilliant arches of
beech and larch by an upward slope to the horizon, where the spires of
pine scalloped the skyline. Trueberry was asleep, so I amused myself
by inspecting the portraits of the hall. They were all members of my
hostess’s family. That was obvious, even if the old butler had not
informed me of the fact. A fair lady in velvet and long ruffles looked
at me with her clear eyes, just so sweet, but bolder, and one tall girl
was so vividly like her that I greeted her with a flame of enamoured
recognition I would not dare bestow on the living woman. The same
gold-leaf of hair, the same exquisite intangibility of look, the same
wanness of cheek and ineffable upward line of chin and brow.
When at last I saw Trueberry, I found him coherent and eager for my
visit. He lay in a faded, heavily-curtained room, so old and dim that
the bright rays of morning penetrating through the crimson curtains
sparkled incongruously, and turned squares of the silk into blood-red.
Coming in from the sunlit air, its sombreness shot me blind, and I
could see nothing until I had blinked the sun out of my eyes.
‘What a dark room!’ I cried.
‘Oh, it’s a delightful room,’ said Trueberry dreamily, with the look of
a visionary. ‘I’m so glad I had that accident, and was carried in here.
Visions seem to start out of half-forgotten romances, and everything
is suggestive. It’s so dark and quaint and big. Just the room to be
ill in, and not mope. I like my condition, too, now that pain is on
the wane. Fact and fancy are so deliciously inextricable. I never know
what is really happening and what I am imagining. Last night I saw a
picture that seemed to be real, and was in perfect harmony with the
antique air of the room. A sort of Saint Elizabeth in a mediæval frame.
You know one’s ideal of St Elizabeth?’ he added, looking at me with
a little quizzical stir in his languid glance. ‘Sweet, serious, and
lovely, carrying roses from heaven, and smiling softly on children and
the sick. She smiled at me when she saw me staring.’
‘Your hostess?’ I asked, chill with apprehension.
‘I suppose so, if it wasn’t a dream. There’s fever in my blood still,
and at night the imagination is a terrible agent. Yet the picture
remains so distinct upon memory: the voice was so real, so musical, I
can hear it still.’
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, curious and alarmed.
‘I was trying to make out my surroundings in the dull lamplight, and
wondering where you were, when a curtain was lifted by the whitest hand
I have ever seen, and framed in the folds was a beautiful pale woman in
grey. She held a lamp high up, and the light caught and played over her
brilliant hair till it shone like living gold. I feared to wink lest
the vision should vanish. The light revealed the bust, while the folds
of the skirt fell into heavy shadow. It was the crimped white about
neck and wrists and the long queer sleeves that made me imagine fever
had evoked some recollection of Italian galleries--half Giotto, half
Botticelli: but she actually moved, and the unfathomable gravity of her
gaze held mine, and when she smiled, I ceased to feel pain.’
He spoke almost to himself, as if he had forgotten my presence, and
as I looked down at him, so drowsily contented, I saw the old tragic
monster lifting its terrible head between us. For the first time I was
conscious of a jealous pang in contemplation of his favour of person.
_Grands dieux!_ and I so fatally ugly! And if Trueberry had possessed
nothing but good looks, I had my brains and my reputation to balance
that advantage. But he was no mere hero of sentimental girlhood--he
was a handsome, high-bred gentleman, with all the finest qualities to
repay a noble woman’s love, with all the personal charm to captivate
a fastidious woman’s fancy. What had won my admiring friendship might
be trusted to win Brases’ responsive love:--his sincerity, a certain
picturesque dash that always made me think of Buckingham as described
by Dumas--Anne of Austria’s Buckingham. It breathed so essentially the
high air of romance, the chivalry, the ennobling sentimentality of
vigorous manhood. He was no troubadour, but as I have said, Buckingham
to the heels in modern raiment, unflinching before peril, of delightful
manners, faithful to friend, implacable to foe, brilliant, generous,
and full of romantic spirit. Such a woman as Brases I deemed above
susceptibility to a mere facile charm of manner, averse from so
vulgar a quality as fascination. But Trueberry did not fascinate: he
captivated. He carried sunshine with him to appeal to the austerest
temperament, and in some subtle way, without an effort, became a need.
A more attractive manliness was nowhere to be met, and if in friendship
I found him indispensable, what would he not be to the woman whose
heart he won?
Should I repeat the peasant’s talk? Better not. Silence between us was
best until speech could not be avoided. So I took an aching heart back
to the cottage, with a promise to return in the afternoon.
II
That afternoon, passing through the hall on my way to Trueberry’s
room, I was arrested upon no direct effort of will by the face of the
pale blonde girl, looking at me so vividly out of canvas through the
dear glance my own ached with longing to behold. Standing thus, my
ear detected with a thrill of recognition the light footfall behind
me. I turned, and the sight was water to a man fevered with thirst.
All morning I had wondered if a transient state of nerves might not
be accountable for an effect perhaps over-excited imagination had
exaggerated. But this second meeting was full confirmation of the
agonising power of Brases over me. I rejoiced in this added proof of my
servitude. Because of her presence, life revealed deeper meaning, earth
fresher hues. My heart fluttered on the topmost crest of emotion, and
tossed on a violent wave of joy. The awful quietude of our full long
gaze held me tranced in silence.
‘You found your friend better,’ she said, and her voice in that tense
moment was like the bursting of the surges upon their swell. My eyes
must have told it with fatal illumination, had hers not absently fallen
on a portrait. ‘I should gladly press you to stay here with him, but I
fear you would find it dull. The house, I know, is gloomy, and I see
no one. But if you can face the dulness for your friend’s sake, if it
would lessen your anxiety----’
‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason
repelled by the suggestion of Trueberry and myself together under her
roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of
trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’
What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate
refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of
the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven
to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was
surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the
delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance
she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still
depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined,
and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted
like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the
commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence.
But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning
solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this
keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, but not
penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her
untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would
ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses
quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of
comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the
little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my
immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and
air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it--I could not command
my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry
between Trueberry and me,--self at odds with the finest friendship that
ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow
for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will
gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.
I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the
reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes
burning darkly.
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.
‘Yes.’
The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his
visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a
surprised voice--
‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’
‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.
I sat down, and took up a volume of _The Ring and the Book_, which lay
on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.
‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he
shouted, as if a wound were pressed.
I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already,
when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble
of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in
a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly
delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.
‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning--
“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?
‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear,
fresh, expansive way. ‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife,
the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was
dreaming.’
I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my
eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in
spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:
‘And if they recognised in a critical flash
From the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,
His need of--say a woman to perish for,
The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,
Do no harm, save to himself--?’
Sully Prudhomme, I thought, would have expressed the idea more
exquisitely. I preferred the soft musical murmur of that unapproachable
little poem, the breathing soul of a tenderer chivalry:
‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,
Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,
Plus rien, même plus d’amitié
Je n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.
Mais elle est pâle, délicate,
Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.
Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,
Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.
Je sais comment sa main repousse,
Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,
Ne la faites jamais pleurer.
Je pourrais vivre avec l’idée
Qu’elle est chérie et possédée
Non par moi mais selon mon cœur.
Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,
Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’
But the virile sweep of the sentiment Browning revealed had something
of ocean’s strength and immensity that aroused the sea-born Breton
under the extraneous veneer of culture. A Parisian cannot escape the
charm of classic polish, but now and then with us the Celt runs riot,
and sentiment rebels against the leash of form.
Under the cynicism of the analytical novelist’s sacrifice,
renunciation, the conquering strife of passion over duty, noble
failure, the greatly borne martyrdom of humanity, are the things that
have ever appealed to me. I have always desired to love and be loved in
the cleansing fire of pain rather than in the facile yielding to the
senses. So that there really was no logical reason why I should whimper
and mope because Brases had not dropped into my arms by some magnetic
influence. And even if she chose elsewhere! So long as her choice was
justified by happiness, what need had I to complain? I murmured Sully
Prudhomme’s lines, of a more subtle beauty of feeling than Browning’s,
and Trueberry cocked a wistful brow.
‘Repeat them louder, they sound so beautiful,’ he urged, and I repeated
them.
‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’
he cried, with water in his eyes. ‘Could you picture yourself, Gontran,
saying that of the woman you loved to the man who had gained her!’
‘I hope so,’ I replied, smiling. ‘The bitter would be so sweet. And
then the magnificent retort upon broken hopes:
“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?
_Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur._”’
I spoke lightly, like the cynical boulevardier, while inwardly I was
bleeding. But Trueberry, bereft, by weakness and love, of all power of
scrutiny or penetration, saw nothing of my suffering. He was in the
absorbing paradise of a new-born claim, in the unconscious premonition
of response, and smiled vaguely at me, dear fellow, as if a strong but
agreeable opiate had drugged him.
Trueberry was so improved next morning that I found the children
playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling
age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so
well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick
brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while
the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple
pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your
heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.