THE CRY IN THE GARDEN
The clocks were pointing near to midnight; the village was long
silent; the flurry of the day had subsided everywhere, and sleep and
quiet had usurped throughout the palace the place of tumult. Only in
that one remote corner above the terrace, where the bridal myrtles
grew, was a shrouded light still burning, unquenchable, it seemed, as
the steadfast spark that glows before a shrine. And there was the
young wakeful postulant for Love’s service, awaiting, half rapt, half
fearful, the mystic call.
Somewhere in the shadows there was a watch ticking. Its tiny pulse
beat out the seconds in a fury to outstrip the lagging hours; for it
had been worn near its mistress’s heart, and the throb of its
hairspring had fallen into time with the fever of impatience it had
touched there. But at length the end was in sight, and the round of
long-drawn minutes rolled up to the starward-pointing hands.
Isabella’s own hands were cold, as she lifted for the last time the
little restless engine to consult it.
All day she had lived for this moment that was near. Truthful as she
could not but be, her headache had served her for no guileful pretext;
but it had served her nevertheless, since it was solitude she craved.
She had some things to do--not many, but essential: to write a letter
to her father was one of them. And she wrote it from her simple
heart--a little plea so pathetic, so impossible, that it might well
have wrung a colder breast than his. Perhaps it affected him when he
came to read it; for he was not uncompassionate when the end was
gained. But of that we have no knowledge.
There were some jewels she would take with her--indisputably her own.
She would not come to her lover empty-handed, to be a burden on his
charity. But the part of Jessica was impossible to her, and she robbed
no one.
At this last she had only herself, for all vital purposes, to depend
on. Fanchette, whom alone it had once been possible to take into her
confidence--Fanchette, the fallen and unclean in her eyes, was no
longer an auxiliary to be trusted with other than the material aids to
these meetings. For the purer, finer sympathies she was necessarily
disqualified. Isabella blamed herself for this judgment, for what was
she herself better than Fanchette, save in the constitution of her
passion? Yet surely that alone redeemed her; for love to her was
nine-tenths a spiritual ecstasy, and only the little residue the
mortal drug to achieve it. For all the best it meant to her, she could
have been content to play St. Catherine to the pure divinity in love.
Well, we may doubt; but she was chaste, at least--chaste in the sense
of utter truth to one supreme ideal. This man was her God, to whom she
had given herself body and soul; and if earthly passion was a detail
of that surrender, there is no use or profit in calculating its
proportion to the whole.
Now, all things prepared, she set herself to abide, with what patience
she might, the weariful interval. But first she took off her betrothal
ring, and looking at it remorsefully a moment, placed it gently with
the letter on her dressing-table. Often during the long day she would
caress her basil, and speak to it as if it were a sentient thing, and
chide it for its too tardy blossoming. It was not keeping faith, she
said; for surely now the longed-for hour of their union was
approaching, and yet its stubborn little twigs remained tight-closed.
All day she would hear, faint and afar, the low thunder of life
returning to deserted rooms and echoing corridors; and, listening, was
conscious of an already strange sense of detachment from the world of
her knowledge. She could think of it tenderly, kindly, but without one
emotion of regret for its loss. There had never been that in common
between them which a first glimpse of the eternal truth of things
could not dissipate; and truth had come to her, when it did, in a
transcendent form. Her soul stood on tiptoe, foreseeing only the
moment when love was to call it to the starry altitudes.
Night, when it fell at last, came with a little moaning wind, which
ever seemed to grow in fitful spasms as silence deep and deeper
settled on the house. Listening, she seemed to hear without a sound of
small voluble voices, and little footsteps running like pattering
leaves, and giggling laughter that caught at her heart with fear. But
it was nothing--only the mad spirits of the dark taking toll of the
unrest which served to cover their antics. In the pauses of the wind
they would all stop as still as mice; and then again, when the blast
rose high, star its shrill volume with their bodiless cries.
They were nothing; but to over-tense nerves the voices of nothingness
are the sounds most ill to endure. And so poor Isabel found
them--terrifying, inscrutable, until she could bear to be alone no
longer. Better the company of the restless night itself than this
vigil of haunted loneliness behind enshrouding curtains. As the great
castle clock chimed eleven, she left her upper chambers, and stole
down soft-footed to the fateful room whence she was to make her
flight.
She had only to wait and bide the moment--only to wait! But Fanchette
had had her sure instructions, and what else was there for her herself
to do? Only to wait. She extinguished the solitary light, and, putting
aside the hangings, stood looking out into the darkness.
It was profound among the masses of the ilex trees; yet overhead there
was still a cold shine of stars. The wind came on in heavy gusts,
swaying the black-heaped shadows, so that they seemed to distort
themselves, mouthing and mowing like chaotic giants. She did not dread
them as she had the unreal voices, not even when their movement seemed
momentarily to betray the presence of odd white-faced things crouched
within their glooms. But these were tangible, at least--tricks of
fancy that one could grapple and defy. Gradually all sense of them
faded as she stood, and she lost herself in glowing dreams.
The striking of the third quarter brought her with a shock to herself.
Even as the resonant jangle ceased on the instant, cut off by a
swooping blast, she could have thought she heard through the tumult a
faint sound of wrangling voices, very distant, inarticulate, not to be
detached from the general confusion; but it ceased as the wind fell;
and she told herself that her fancy had again deceived her. But not
for long now. Her whole soul thrilled in the thought of the rapturous
reality that second by second must be approaching to claim her for its
own.
Suddenly an intense feeling of awe came over her--a thrill of hushed
expectancy, as in that solemn moment of the Mass when the Host is
elevated above the bowed and death-still congregation. Her eyes were
on the velvet spaces--out of their silences dripped a sudden star,
which, descending slowly, disappeared behind the trees.
And on the instant there came a woman’s scream, harrowing,
heart-piercing, rending the darkness. Once, and fainter, it was
repeated; and then the wind took up the tale of fear and swept it
onwards into obliteration.
The watcher stood as if stricken into stone, all the blood in her body
draining back upon her heart. No fancy--there could be none, in that
horrible cry. Who had uttered it--and whence? It had come from the
direction of the trees, down by the garden edge--O, God! O, God!--his
time, his path!
She leapt as one from the brink of the grave, called back to the
solace of some infinite pain. He was there; he needed her. Without an
instant’s hesitation she climbed the little balcony, and falling
anyhow upon the turf beneath, rose to her feet and ran. She ran down
the terrace, across the sloping sward, a small white spectre against
the towering blackness of the trees. Her feet sparkled in the inky
pools; the wind charged at her, and tore loose a wild strand of hair;
it was a figure to haunt those glades for evermore. She ran and ran,
making straight in the direction of the sound. As she skirted the
plantation edge, she seemed conscious of shadowy forms swiftly
glimpsing and disappearing among the trees. She heeded nothing of
them, of their flittings and sibilations. Real or unreal, of what
importance were they any longer in this context of death? For it was
death, and the end of all things. She never doubted it; it was in her
soul as she ran. That scream had shattered at one blow the whole
rainbow fabric of their love’s illusion. It could not be, it could
never have been, by human consent. Only by way of this agony was it
possible for the heaven of their dreams to come true. Down among the
flowery paths she stopped suddenly, and fell upon her knees beside
him.
He was lying crushed into the green border--there, in that very place
where the love-in-a-mist was wont to grow so thickly. It was quiet in
this sunken spot--no sound but the bubbling, it seemed, of a low
spring. It came from his lungs, God pity her, and ran over his lips.
“Beloved!” she sighed in a little voice; but all hopeless heart-break
was in it.
With the intense vision of subconsciousness she could distinguish, as
surely as if it were daylight, every detail of his face. His eyes were
closed; but she knew he was not dead. Would he die without recognising
her? She put an arm beneath his head and tried to lift it to her
bosom.
“Not without one word!” she said, with a small wooing moan. “It is
only you and I.”
And at that, struggling back from the shadows, he raised leaden lids,
and knowing her, faintly smiled. She tore a handkerchief from her
breast, a little perfumed scrap of lace and cambric, and with it tried
to staunch the gushing life. And then she bent her face, to catch the
gasping words:
“What is it, most dear, most dear?”
“Believe nothing--only my deathless love.”
“And mine--O, and mine!”
His left arm crooked feebly a moment, and then fell. A spasm of scorn
twitched his dying features:
“In the back--there were three of them--and one a woman.”
Again the murmur tailed off and ceased. In a numb agony she spoke the
name that was only hers. “Take me with you,” she whispered, with a
quivering sigh: “O, take me, take me with you!”
And then suddenly and strongly he rose in her arms, and an unearthly
light, great and triumphant, was in his eyes, and he spoke with a
clear voice:
“Sweet--in the North--in the beautiful gardens--we shall meet in
three----”
The blood rushed from his mouth; a slight convulsion shook him; he
fell back. They found her--they, the shameful ones, when they slunk
presently from their ghastly ambush--clinging insensible to the
lifeless body.