A POSTHUMOUS EXISTENCE
“And she forgot the stars, the moon, and sun,
And she forgot the blue above the trees,
And she forgot the dells where waters run,
And she forgot the chilly autumn breeze;
She had no knowledge when the day was done,
And the new moon she saw not: but in peace
Hung over her sweet basil ever more,
And moistened it with tears unto the core.”
In that strange long sleep of swoons and haunted wakings there was a
dream she had. Something had always troubled her--a sense of something
left undone, on the fulfilment of which a rapturous tryst depended. It
was associated with a promise, which yet was a promise conditional on
something to be performed. At first, in her half-lucid intervals, she
had been content to lie quite still and resigned, secure in the
thought that no more than the third day was needed to see her broken
heart made whole in the transport of a swift re-union; but the day
came and passed, and she was still lying unreleased in the quiet room.
Why was it so? She had made so sure of the promise, and yet the sign
had been withheld. Weak tears dropped from her eyes. If not three
days, then what? Soon it must be, in this state of bodily and mental
prostration into which she was fallen. But when? O, death had been
cruel to cut short and confound that message in the very moment of its
utterance! If only she could know, she could endure.
And then came the dream--or so it seemed. She thought that once, quite
suddenly and blissfully enlightened, she rose in the sweet clear
morning, when all her watchers were asleep, and, descending the stairs
softly, passed out into the gardens by way of a door that had been
strangely left unlocked. Then swiftly her bare feet were on the dewy
grass, and she was running. She ran down by the trees to that place of
delirious memory, and there were the crushed flowers and the trampled
ground to convince her of the truth of what had been. The spot, it
seemed, had been avoided since, and only a hurried attempt had been
made to obliterate the traces of the tragedy. But deep in the bushes
she saw half-hidden what she had come to seek--what she had never
doubted that she should find--a little blood-soaked handkerchief. She
had cast it from her when she had clasped him at the last.
Hurriedly she secured her prize, and, kissing it, hid it in her bosom.
The blood had dried upon it, and it left no mark upon her lips. She
turned and ran again.
She thought, then, that she was back undiscovered in her room; and
that she went to her basil pot, and with little labour coaxing the
sweet thing whole from its nest, laid the handkerchief in the void and
therein replaced the plant, burying her secret out of sight. And so,
dropping tears upon its leaves, she went again to lie in her bed,
trembling in a very ecstasy of reassurance. She had solved the
heart-haunting mystery. It would blossom now.
When they came to wait upon her she was asleep. She slept as she had
not done as yet. The burden of that riddle once lifted, nature must
have its way with her. When she awoke at last, it was to a sense of
peace such as she had not known for days.
She was convalescent. The grave physicians said so, congratulating her
discreetly on her recovery. From what? Something malarial, or tertian,
probably. Her constitution had been tried by the strain of recent
events--the obsequies, and so on. And so on. What did it matter if
they knew--if anybody knew? She was only in a fever to substantiate
her dream; and the moment she was left alone, she rose to do so.
She was very weak; her eyes were unearthly bright; there was a pain
upon her heart. Those were all very well, and dearly well, if only her
dream would yield the thing she prayed of it. When she was convinced
it was there, she wept for very joy. It was truly there, indeed--no
need to trouble how it was brought, whether in a dreaming or a waking
trance. The end was assured, and the promise would be fulfilled.
Thenceforth, physically, indeed, she was restored. The restfulness
engendered by that assurance helped her body’s healing. She felt it so
herself, but without uneasiness for the result. What was to be was
written, and no fretting could either alter or anticipate the end. In
the meantime, untrammelled by material pains and weaknesses, her
spirit was free to soar into those regions where life and love awaited
it. This lower state had ceased of any meaning for her; like the dying
poet of that other Isabella, she felt conscious somehow of leading a
posthumous existence--as if her real self were elsewhere, blissfully
sleeping out the hours, like the dead Adonis, until the appointed
moment when Love should wake it.
This sense of detachment was so absolute as to deceive her father into
a belief in her complete resignation to what had happened and was
destined to happen. She had been mad and was sane; but being so, he
had no desire to torture a point which, with her convalescence, had
ceased to be material. She awoke one morning to see him standing at
her bed-foot. He stood stiff-necked, immovable, searching her face
with his inquisitional Spanish eyes.
Presently he stirred, and coming round the bed, lifted the pale
slender hand that lay upon the coverlet, and, slipping a ring upon its
betrothal finger, stood, retaining his hold, silently looking down.
She smiled at him, then, and spoke, a little faintly:
“Si, mio padre. It shall remain there.”
No mention of the letter: none of the crisis that had produced it. The
act and the look were sufficient in themselves to cover the whole of
the situation--regret for a stern necessity, forgiveness for an
unspeakable offence, assurance that thenceforth all would be
overlooked and forgotten in the promise of reparation. He might have
gone then, satisfied; but in some redeeming impulse of emotion he put
the little fingers to his lips before he replaced them gently on the
coverlet. And, as he went, Isabella turned her face to the wall, and
wept. She felt no resentment towards him for what he had done, or
caused to be done, but only an infinite pity. He did not know; he
could never know. Her reparation was only nominal; for what had she to
give at last other than the mere mechanism of a being which his own
act had deprived of its essential meaning, and which must soon perish
for lack of that vitalising principle? Her soul was already with her
love; only her body remained for insensible submission to those brief
mortal uses which men might desire of it.
She came downstairs after that, and resumed her formal existence.
There was something gone from her, but it was of too subtle an essence
to affect the common mind with a sense of definite loss. What
suspicion of the truth was abroad she did not know or care to know.
She was like one regarding in herself the unfamiliar antics of a
stranger. They did not much concern or interest her, either
introspectively or in their visible relations to their surroundings.
But she was very sweet and gentle with all; for the habit of kindness
remained to the desolated heart, the scent of the roses still clung
round the broken vase. Only the old spirit of merriment seemed to have
deserted her for ever. No laugh was once again heard on her lips.
Regarding so little of the past, it was not strange that she never
referred to her vanished chief _femme de confiance_, or appeared to
notice that she was deprived of her services. It is even possible that
Fanchette might have resumed her place at her side without exciting
any repulsion in her. She seemed to bear no one a grudge for what had
been, or to discriminate between this and the other in the ruin which
had befallen her. She may have surmised who were the chief instruments
in that tragedy; she never betrayed by word or look her knowledge of
them. It was not their guilt which was the poignant thing; it was the
irreparable loss it had entailed on humanity. One did not condemn a
viper because it achieved its nature as much in biting the heel of a
saint as of a sinner. That all-sweet absence of the spirit of revenge;
that utter absorption in the effects of the deed and noble contempt
for its perpetrators, should have been felt by base minds as more
crushing than any retaliation. Perhaps it was. Neither la Coque nor
Mademoiselle Becquet was to be found at Colorno in these days.
And the mortal body of her tragedy? She never learnt or tried to learn
where they had laid it. What did it signify? That poor broken prison
was no more concerned now with the ideals which had once made it
animate and beautiful than was her own body with the little mortal
lusts and policies which contended over its brief possession. To all
that its life-tribute meant to her at last the basil contained the
clue.
It was there alone her real being centred and became volitional. Alone
with it, her soul seemed to return into her from the spaces where it
had hung aloof, and to become articulate with a remembered ecstasy.
She would dream with the green thing, and talk softly with it, as if
it were he himself, recalling a hundred little secrets of love and
loving converse. “She had no knowledge when the day was done,” but
only that the darkness meant the joyful nearing of her basil-time. And
always and for ever she prayed it wooingly to flower, growing more
pathetic in her sweet entreaties as the third month from that night
drew to its close. But still the stubborn sprays showed no sign of
breaking--not for all her tender plaints and bedewing tears.
Alas, it was not to be yet!