"We live together years and years,
And leave unsounded still
Each other's springs of hopes and fears,
Each other's depths of will."
LORD HOUGHTON.
But still more bewildering is the way in which we live years and years
with ourselves in an entire ignorance of the powers that lie dormant
beneath the surface of character. The day comes when vital forces of
which we know nothing arise within us, and break like glass the even
tenor of our lives. The quiet hours, the regulated thoughts, the
peaceful aspiration after things but little set above us, where are
they? The angel with the sword drives us out of our Eden to shiver in
the wilderness of an entirely changed existence, unrecognizable by
ourselves, though perhaps lived in the same external groove, the same
divisions of time, among the same faces as before.
Day succeeded day in Di's life, each day adding one more stone to the
prison in which it seemed as if an inexorable hand were walling her up.
"I will not give in. I will turn my mind to other things," she said to
herself. And--there were no other things. All lesser lights were blown
out. The heart, when it is swept into the grasp of a great love, is
ruthlessly torn from the hundred minute ties and interests that
heretofore held it to life. The little fibres and tendrils of affections
which have gradually grown round certain objects are snapped off from
the roots. They cease to exist. The pang of love is that there is no
escape from it. It has the same tension as sleeplessness.
Di struggled and was not defeated; but some victories are as sad as
defeats. During the struggle she lost something--what was it--that had
been to many her greatest charm? Women were unanimous in deploring how
she had "gone off." There was a thinness in her cheek, and a blue line
under her deep eyes. Her beauty remained, but it was not the same
beauty. Mrs. Courtenay noticed with a pang that she was growing like her
mother.
Easter came, and with it the wedding of Miss Crupps and the Honourable
Augustus Lumley, youngest son of Lord Mortgage. Miss Crupps' young heart
had long inclined towards Mr. Lumley; but on the occasion of seeing him
blacked as a Christy Minstrel, she had finally succumbed into a state
of giggling admiration, which plainly showed the state of her
affections. So he cut the word "yes" out of a newspaper, and told her
that was what she was to say to him, and amid a series of delighted
cackles they were engaged. Di went to the wedding, looking so pale that
it was whispered that Mr. Lumley and his tambourine had won her heart as
well as that of his adoring bride.
On a sunny afternoon shortly afterwards, Di was sitting alone indoors,
her grandmother having gone out driving with a friend. She told herself
that she ought to go out, but she remained sitting with her hands in her
lap. Every duty, every tiny decision, every small household matter, had
become of late an intolerable burden. Even to put a handful of flowers
into water required an effort of will which it was irksome to make.
She had stayed in to make an alteration in the gown she was to wear
that night at the Speaker's. As she looked at the card to make sure it
was the right evening, she remembered that it was at the Speaker's she
had first met John, just a year ago. One year. How absurd! Five, ten,
fifteen! She tried to recollect what her life could have been like
before he had come into it; but it seemed to start from that point, and
to have had no significance before.
"I must go out," she said again; and at that moment the door bell rang,
and although Mrs. Courtenay was out, some one was admitted. The door
opened, and Lord Hemsworth was announced.
There is, but men are fortunately not in a position to be aware of it, a
lamentable uniformity in their manner of opening up certain subjects. Di
knew in a moment from previous experience what he had come for. He
wondered, as he stumbled through a labyrinth of platitudes about the
weather, how he could broach the subject without alarming her. He did
not know that he had done so by his manner of coming into the room, and
that he had been refused before he had finished shaking hands.
Di was horribly sorry for him while he talked about--whatever he did
talk about. Neither noticed what it was at the time, or remembered it
afterwards. She was grateful to him for not alluding even in the most
distant manner to their last meeting. She remembered that she had clung
to him, and that he had called her by her Christian name, but she was
too callous to be ashamed at the recollection. It was as nothing
compared to another humiliation which had come upon her a little later.
"It is no good beating about the bush," said Lord Hemsworth at last,
after he had beaten it till there was, so to speak, nothing left of it.
"I have come up to London for one thing, and I have come here for one
thing, which is--to ask you to marry me. Don't speak--don't say anything
just for a moment," he continued hurriedly, raising his hand as if to
ward off a rebuff. "For God's sake don't stop me. I've kept it in so
long I must say it, and you must hear me."
She let him say it. And he got it out with stumbling and difficulty and
long gaps between--got out in shaking commonplaces a tithe of the love
he had for her. And all the time Di thought if it might only have been
some one else who was uttering those halting words! (I wonder how many
men have proposed and been accepted while the woman has said to herself,
"If it had only been some one else!")
Despair at his inability to express himself, and at her silence, seized
him: as if it mattered a pin how he expressed himself if she had been
willing to listen.
"If you understood," he said over and over again, with the monotonous
reiteration of a piano-tuner, "you would not refuse me. I know you are
going to, but if only you understood you would not. You would not have
the heart. It's--it's just everything to me." And Lord Hemsworth--oh,
bathos of modern life!--looked into his hat.
"Lord Hemsworth," said Di, "have I ever given you any encouragement?"
"None," he replied. "People might think you had, but you never did. I
knew better. I never misunderstood you. I know you don't care a straw
about me; but--oh, Di, you have not your equal in the world. There's no
woman to compare with you. I don't see how you could care for any one
like me. Of course you don't. I would not expect it. But if--if you
would only marry me--I would be content with very little. I've looked
at it all round. I would be content with--very little."
There was a long silence.
What woman whose love has been slighted can easily reject a great
devotion?
"I think," said Di, after several false starts to speak, "that if I only
considered myself I would marry you; but there is the happiness of one
other person to think of--_yours_."
"I can't have any apart from you."
"You would have none with me. If it is miserable to care for any one who
is indifferent, it would be a thousand times more miserable to be
married to that person."
"Not if it were you."
"Yes, if it were I."
"I would take the risk," said Lord Hemsworth, who held, in common with
most men, the rooted conviction that a woman will become attached to
any husband, however little she cares for her lover. It is precisely
this conviction which makes the average marriages of the present day
such mediocre affairs; which serves to place worldly or facile women, or
those whose affections have never been called out, at the head of so
many homes; as the mothers of the new generation from which we hope so
much.
"I would take any risk," repeated Lord Hemsworth, doggedly. "I would
rather be unhappy with you than happy with any one else."
"You think so now," said Di; "but the time would come when you would see
that I had cut you off from the best thing in the world--from the love
of a woman who would care for you as much as you do for me."
"I don't want her. I want you."
"I cannot marry you."
Lord Hemsworth clutched blindly at the arms of the chair.
"I would wait any time."
Di shook her head.
"Any time," he stammered. "Go away for a year, and--come back."
"It would be no good."
Then he lost his head.
"So long as you don't care for any one else," he said incoherently. "I
thought at the carnival--that is why I have kept out of the way--but I
met Tempest to-day at the Carlton, and--I asked him straight out, and he
said there was nothing between you and him. I suppose you have refused
him, like the rest of us. Oh, my God, Di, they say you have no heart!
But it isn't true, is it? Don't refuse me. Don't make me live without
you. I've tried for three months"--and Lord Hemsworth's face
worked--"and if you knew what it was like, you wouldn't send me back to
it."
Every vestige of colour had faded from Di's face at the mention of John.
"I don't care enough for you to marry you," she said, pitiless in her
great pity. "I wish I did, but--I don't."
"Do you care for any one else?"
Di saw that nothing short of the truth would wrest his persistence from
its object.
"Yes, I do," she said passionately, trembling from head to foot. "For
some one who does not care for me. You and I are both in the same
position. Do you see now how useless it is to talk of this any longer?"
Both had risen to their feet. Lord Hemsworth looked at Di's white
convulsed face, and his own became as ashen. He saw at last that he had
no more chance of marrying her than if she were lying at his feet in
her coffin. Constancy, which can compass many things, avails nought
sometimes.
"I beg your pardon," he said, holding out his hand to go.
"I think I ought to beg yours," she said brokenly, while their hands
clasped tightly each in each. "I never meant to make you as--unhappy
as--as I am myself, but yet I have."
They looked at each other with tears in their eyes.
"It does not matter," said Lord Hemsworth, hoarsely. "I shall be all
right--it's you--I think of. Don't stand--mustn't stand--you're too
tired. Good-bye."
* * * * *
Di flung herself down on her face on the sofa as the door closed. She
had forgotten Lord Hemsworth's existence the moment after he had left
the room. _John had told him that there was nothing between her and_
_himself._ John had told him that. John had said that. A cry escaped
her, and she strangled it in the cushion.
Hope does not always die when we imagine it does. It is subject to long
trances. The hope which she had thought dead was only giving up the
ghost now. "Chaque esperance est un oeuf d'ou peut sortir un serpent au
lieu d'une colombe." Out of that frail shell of a cherished hope lying
broken before her the serpent had crept at last. It moved, it grew
before her eyes.
"Slighted love is sair to bide."