Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard
and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly,
and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy
plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.
Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue
went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and
saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead
dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had
an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepened the grey of her eyes,
and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the
lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion.
I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than
homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’
To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped
I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took
Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her
invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick
and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand
with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and
stretched under her roof on my back.
She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and
elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came
deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression,
not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes,
of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly
unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable
tenderness of maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their
little arms about her neck, were her one joy.
‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of
others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’
Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I
like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my
esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic
gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had
never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which
reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where
she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until
she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me.
While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech,
Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other
surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.
It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with
the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical
grasp, and I toppled rudely over my airy ideal of renunciation and
self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my
gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend,
and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full
confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she
waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of
nature burst their barriers.
Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked
rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay,
and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking
a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He
directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent
his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a
stone.
‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of
life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis
among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the
praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of
me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work for you, counting the stars
be night, and crying for the moon be day.’
‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied,
ignoring his rebuke.
‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power
of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a
useless sort of thing.’
‘So it seems, viewed in any light--rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented
drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to
stay?’
‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your
company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away.
You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you.
But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis
surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’
His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and
touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.
‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself
has no business to go hankering after one as has known deception and
wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know.
Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to
run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and
’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on
us.’
‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said
dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel
lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the
winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’
I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight,
pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart,
or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I
was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much
better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with
jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered
nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal
feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude
of unacknowledged, unexacting devotion. I was a poor exasperated human
wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath
with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed
that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of
it. I had craved so little,--the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a
dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce
ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent
spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless
nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her
presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish,
of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.
Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had
been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to
manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into
insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went
into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my
peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity
and our intelligence.
III
Next morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound,
conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried
me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate
that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two
beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone,
and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective
bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting
environment.
We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was
abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from
a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a
rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke
at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked,
quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of
view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French,
and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I
shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with
the intoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but
everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard
life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his
captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way
at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed
anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for
a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but
Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer
adroitly changed the conversation.
When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again
provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air,
as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to
observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind
being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but
his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour.
Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me
for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the
divine and hidden.
They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady
Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged
to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its
fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own
lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them
softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile
stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.
‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her
acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as
when he first came.’
I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I
flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through
the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad
gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge
her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my
friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little
moment of her life unshared with him!
‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess
would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so
much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense
with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections
of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,--and strength to live
my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened,
and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and
happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children
come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers,
with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies
so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and
a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as
rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of
that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died
before hearing words so sad from her lips.
Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed
with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fell
in a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.
‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the
circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the
lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the
ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I
listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral
march of my dead youth.’
It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech
dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could
have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over
this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so
before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy
for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely
I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the
looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her,
but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet--and
yet----!
Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back.
She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset
hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity
of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did
that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my
heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started
up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey
glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky.
I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow,
unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If
they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to
look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death
were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’
I questioned the stars in my blind anguish to learn if there were
no resources in nature to wall in this terrible blank of being that
stretched so miserably, so limitlessly before me as a future without
Brases or Trueberry. Old interests, old tastes, old desires had
dropped from me, and I stood beggared of sum and aim of life.’
I was abroad upon the moors by sunrise, lessening my feeling of
personal diminution in the earth’s grandeur and the wavering immensity
of the Atlantic as it rolled under the lemon-tinted horizon. I took
my last look of forked mountains against the grey-shot blue of the
heaven, of shattered rocks, and sombre tarn seen through the opening of
a valley, and the distant plain, an inner sea of bracken and heather.
Ever the sound of water, of moaning wave, of mingling rill, of foaming
fall, the shrill cry of eagle and curlew, and the melody of the early
birds. An hour hence should find me trudging to Kilstern, away from the
wild beauty of this place--the home of Brases! On my way back, I met my
host, and mentioned my intention. ‘That’s as it should be,’ was all he
said.
His curt approval galled me, and to silence discourteous retort, I
flung myself over the stone ledge, and took the manor path like a
chased creature. With what unconscious accuracy of observation I noted
each leaf, each colour and form of a scene memory was destined to
retain for evermore! following with eager eyes the light as it made
its own short road of gold among the dense shadows, and these as they
picked out in blots the sunny spaces.
The hall door as usual was open, and in passing the portraits, I took
my last look of the boy with curls and ruffles, and beyond of the girl
with the proud fair face that might be a portrait of Brases in younger
days. I inspected it steadily, and traced where resemblance stopped in
the lack of the subtle stamp of the soul, the ennobling seal of grief.
It was a Brases who had never wept, never thought, a creature of mere
bodily beauty.
I found Trueberry walking up and down in restless expectation. I could
see that sight of me brought an uncontrollable smart of disappointment
to his eyelids, and his expressive mouth twitched like a child’s.
‘What’s the matter, Gontran?’ he asked, with an affectionate effort,
and placed one hand on my shoulder. ‘You look frightfully battered, my
poor fellow.’
‘Last night I meant to go away in silence,’ I said, not able to meet
his kind glance, ‘but to-day I decided I owed my friend a franker
course. Neither of us is responsible for the fact, but we must separate
now.’
‘You would desert me, Gontran--now!’ he cried, and the bitter tone of
his reproach fetched a sob to my throat.
‘I wish to God it should not be, that I had the unselfish courage to
stay and witness your happiness----’
‘Happiness!’ he shouted frantically. ‘My poor boy, I am more miserable
than yourself,’ he added, with a dejected movement.
‘Then you are deceiving yourself,’ I said, shrugging and turning
impatiently on my heel. ‘She loves you. I have seen it in her eyes,
felt it to the inmost fibres of consciousness in her voice.’
‘And if it were so!’ Trueberry cried, in a soft, fond tone of
interjection, that brought my fierce look back to his face. He called
himself miserable, but bliss sparkled out of the depths of his frank
eyes. He fronted daylight, the proud and conscious lover, and the
shadow upon his radiance was, after all, but a becoming tone to temper
fatuity to my amazed and acrid scrutiny. Without it, I might have
longed to strike him, in my state of moral degradation.
‘How much nearer am I to her for that?’ he went on, in reply to my
hateful look. ‘My dear friend, there is nothing for us both but to take
up our staff and knapsack, and trudge wearily out of this enchanted
valley into the busy garish world, carrying with us the remembrance of
an unstable and beautiful dream. We are equals in fortune, Gontran.’
‘Equals,’ I roared, goaded by the fiery bar of his speech. ‘What
equality exists between success and unsuccess? between the chosen and
the neglected? between heat and cold, sun and ice, glory and shame,
tears and laughter? The barrier to your happiness may be levelled by
fate at any moment. You have but to wait and watch the newspapers.
While I----’
‘Don’t be rough, old man. You would be sorrier than I if you hurt me
now, when I can ill bear more pain. For I am dismissed, sent away. Oh!’
He sat down and covered his face with both hands, and I, in awakened
wickedness of spirit, gloated over his convulsive wretchedness.
Suffering had blunted conscience, and the finer feelings, and left
me abjectly enslaved to all the baser sensations that assail weakened
humanity. In such moments, happily brief, the savage is uppermost,
whatever the training of the gentleman. The soul sleeps, and the body,
with all its frenzied needs and desires, stands naked, primitive,
elemental, the mere animal living through the senses. The handsome
sobbing creature had all, and I had nothing. Yet he dared to speak of
equality in misery between us.
‘Good-bye,’ I said, and moved to the door.
Trueberry sprang up, and clutched my arm. His dear, simple nature could
understand nothing of the vileness that the finer and more complex
order of being may contain. To him I was not an embittered rival, but a
cherished friend to whom he boyishly clung in his unbearable sorrow.
‘Must we separate, Gontran?’ he entreated. ‘Why, since we both go
to-day?’
The inalterable sweetness of his temper shook me on a crest of remorse,
and conquered assaulting vindictiveness. I felt so mean beside him that
I could have begged his pardon for unuttered insult. His superiority
more than justified Brases’ choice, though the dear fellow lacked my
brains, and my name commanded considerable stir.
I consented to go with him, and hurried back to the cottage, where
I found my host busy over my portmanteau. I told him my friend was
coming with me too, upon which he scrutinised my face mildly, and, I
thought, with satisfaction. He strapped the portmanteau, and remarked
in a dry tone: ‘That, too, is as it should be, and I am glad there
is no quarrel.’ Taking no note of my astonishment at his incredible
discernment, he added: ‘You’ll drink a last drop of the mountain dew to
your success and happiness in another spot, sir, where the girls, God
bless them! are fresh and pretty and plentiful as the flowers in May.’
He went into the kitchen, and I stood at the window watching light
chase shadow over the bold visage of a reek, and assured myself
gloomily that there were a thousand ways, after all, of threading a
path through despair. Whose life is crowned with happiness?--and hope
of it must come to an end sooner or later. Pleasure still remains when
we have shed the last tear, and whatever may be said to the contrary
in pessimistic moments, pleasure to the last peeps out at us through
the thorniest brambles, with its varied allurements. This I told
myself, and though I could think of no possible pleasure at the time,
or compensation for the miserable duty of facing life, I drearily
supposed I would come, like another, to find my round of petty joys and
mean delights. There was something to be done even by a fellow so sick
at heart as I: books to be written, books to be read, people to see,
and people to avoid, countries to travel in, and women to criticise.
My host stood at the top of the path, bareheaded, cheering me on with
his gracious ‘God speed ye, sir!’ until the bend of the hill hid his
honest friendly face from me. I sought Trueberry in his room, and saw
his gloves, and hat, and portmanteau on the table. I wandered about
the house, through unfamiliar chambers, till, on lifting a curtain, a
picture arrested me with a curdling thrill. The blood flowed from heart
to brain on a dizzy wave, where it surged, so that I had some knowledge
of the sensation of insanity. This explains my sin against honour in
standing there. I could not have left the spot by any imperative order
of conscience. I stood as immovable as a hypnotised figure. Like a
spectator of the drama, with feelings unconcerned, I was quick to note
the searching pathos and beauty of the picture.
They two stood together in the middle of the room, she with her hands
on his shoulders, he with an arm round her waist, holding one of her
little hands clasped above. The passionate gaze of both was matchless
in its eloquence. Both faces were white and luminous, as if touched
with a ray from heaven, anguish adequately mixed with transport. Such a
look from a woman’s eyes was surely worth dying for.
‘Brases, must I go away?’ Trueberry asked brokenly.
She moved a little in his embrace, and pressed her face against his
breast, then recovered herself, and said firmly--
‘You must, dear friend.’
‘Think of it, beloved,’ he cried, holding her closer to him. ‘Such
links as chain us. We two as one, is it not madness to dream of living
apart? Every beat of life within you, Brases, must cry out against this
parting. It is murder of our souls. Go, I may, but with you, Brases.’
‘Don’t make me go over it again,’ she pleaded, in a tired voice, ‘it
was so hard before. While a man lives who calls me wife, can I come to
you with a tarnished name?’
‘Tarnished!’ The smile he shed upon her was convincing enough to redeem
a fallen angel, it was so warm, and soft, and indulgent, with all
love’s sweetness and shelter. ‘The stain is on his name, and that you
would drop. The law will release you. Come, come. You cannot live alone
now, any more than I can. Think of what it means--craving light and
love and happiness, all within reach, and we dying apart on the brink.’
‘No, no, don’t tempt me. Your desire is my weakness. Your voice draws
my being from its roots, and my pulses beat to the rhythm of yours. See
how much I confess, and then be merciful, and go.’
‘Is it always right to follow our ideal of duty, when nature points
so clearly another way?’ he still urged. ‘What reason have we always
to regard our judgment as better than hers, since she is so big and
mighty, and we so small and helpless.’ He held her hand pressed against
his lips, and I could hear his murmuring speech through the trembling
fingers. ‘What is the past with such a present as ours, such a future
as we might have? My love would soon blot it from your memory. Trust
me, Brases, I too have my past with its burden of regrets I would fain
forget.’
‘Ah, had I met you before fatality crossed my path,’ she said, upon a
quick sob, ‘when my palm was as clean as a child’s, how my spirit would
have bounded to the wedding of yours! But that may never be now.’