AT REST
“Sound mournfully upon the winds and low;
For simple Isabel is soon to be
Among the dead ...”
She was married early in September. When she had been told that it
was to be, she had simply acquiesced, quite quietly, quite gravely.
“To make _him_ happy”--she had not forgotten the wistful words--almost
his last--and the withholding of the sign was proof that the sacred
injunction was not rescinded. If his dear ghost still held her to that
sacrifice, there must be reasons for it hidden among the inscrutable
silences. Perhaps that way alone lay the end she so wearied for. If
this poor residue from all which exalted life above its material
perishableness was enough for Joseph’s content, she valued it too
little to grudge it him. Let him be happy with it, if he would and
could.
And so she was married, quite quietly, as befitted her mourning, in
the ducal palace at Parma. The ceremony was performed by proxy, the
Prince of Liechtenstein representing his royal master, and immediately
following it the new archduchess set out for Vienna. It is enough for
our remaining purpose to record the whole-heartedness of her reception
there by that susceptible young man, her husband, who had only once
before in his life seen the face which was now to awaken in him the
liveliest emotions of love. Isabella much more than justified the
archduke’s earlier impression of her: he found her beautiful and
desirable beyond all expectation, and he laid his soul then and there
at her feet, with assurances of its eternal dedication to her love and
service.
Eternity was a big, sad word in that connection of expediency, and
tragic, because it could never be more than a one-sided compact. She
had nothing but a temporal gift to offer him in exchange for it, but
she lent to that what grace she could through the pathetic sweetness
of its giving. He deserved only kindness of her; _he_ had had no
voice, no hand, no knowledge, in the deed which had been his gain. And
what a little gain, after all! It seemed hardly worth all this
plotting, all this wreck of lives and ruin of souls to end on such a
paltry acquisition. It were as though a party of musicians had fought
for the possession of a delicate instrument, with which in the
meantime they had been belabouring one another.
It is said that on the bridal evening, when left alone together in
their room, the young wife turned to her husband with some expression
of this thought upon her lips. She had been looking from the window,
into the blown star-lit darknesses of a night such as that which had
imprinted for ever its death-shadow upon her soul, and the emotion of
that piteous memory was alive and terrible in her. She looked into his
face, an intense and appealing sadness in her own, and clasping her
hands as if in prayer, spoke to him:
“I will try to be to you a good wife, during the three years we shall
remain together.”
“How?” he answered, amazed: “what is this arbitrary limit?”
“I do not know,” she said, sighing: “only something tells me it will
not be longer.”
What had he to do, then, but, in his exultant happiness, laugh to
scorn her fears, take her to his impassioned arms, declare the
immortality of their union? She was overwrought, he said, oppressed by
fancies born of change and recent sorrow. In the creative fire of love
all those dismal spectres would pass consumed, leaving new life and
hope to spring from out their ashes.
She shook her head; but he would not be gainsaid. The confidence of
the autocrat was in him; he read in her mood nothing but the
diffidence of a young soul temporarily overweighted by its own
aggrandisement. There is no reason for supposing that he knew anything
whatever about the real state of affairs; there is every reason for
surmising that the truth would have been jealously withheld from him.
He never once, in after months, alluded to Tiretta, or appeared to
have kept in mind the part played by that romantic agent of his in the
sequence of events. It is possible that, even had a hint of the truth
been conveyed to him, he would have scorned to attach any consequence
to the story. The _cicisbeo_ of his day was almost as formal an
institution in society as her ladyship’s pet lap-dog or _confessore_;
sometimes, even, he was solemnly inducted in family conclave; and not
seldom he was quite the most harmless member of the domestic circle.
The first condescension of an archduke and destined emperor was
sufficient to sweep all such ephemeral fancies into oblivion.
Well, if princes must be princes in these matters, Joseph had got, let
it be admitted, the best that he deserved. I think so myself. I feel a
little impatient, I must confess, of that enamoured philosopher, who,
having sent as it were a professional appraiser to value his fancy,
could behave to her, when acquired, as if she were the prize of his
most single and determined devotion.
But he was really devoted to her--even passionately so; and if she
repaid him with duty rather than affection, he was not the man or the
philosopher to complain. He knew well enough that there must always be
something lacking in unions of policy, which nothing but a miracle of
chance could make soul-unions; and Joseph could not be unjust or
unreasonable--save, perhaps, when he regarded the quality of his own
reason and found it pre-eminent. So he was satisfied to remain the
positive pole of love to his wife’s negative.
For the rest, the young archduchess did all, or almost all, that was
expected of her. She was a dutiful wife, a gentle mistress, a timely
mother; and if the one babe she bore to her husband was of her own
sex, not her disinclination to oblige, but nature, was responsible for
the reservation.
Infanticide, by unsophisticated girls, is often due to terror and
repulsion over the totally unforeseen. On a higher plane we find the
fruit of lovelessness regarded by its bearer with cold alien eyes.
That is far too harsh a description of Isabella’s attitude towards her
little infant; yet the thing seemed oddly strange to her, something
queerly remote from her own knowledge and volition--a changeling, as
it were, that had been deposited by her while she slept. It attracted
her; she was curious about it; but in a detached way. It gratified her
most in its relation to the task she had set herself, and which was
now accomplished. She had given a potential heir to the throne; she
had made _him_ happy. Surely, now, she might look with confident eyes
to her release. This poor physical residue of her had played out its
part.
It had, in truth; and so we approach the end. There is no need to
linger over it, now the little ground is cleared, and the other actors
in the drama are put away like inessential shadows into the
background. It is the passion of the moonlit garden once more--the
rapture and the meeting.
It had been evident that the young wife was drooping; it had been
increasingly evident since the birth of her child. Always frail and
delicate, marriage, it seemed, had never with her, as with some
fragile constitutions, stayed the tendency to decline, but had rather
confirmed and increased it. Something was gone from her, indeed, which
no vital force of love could replace. She seemed to fade where she
stood, like a spent lily. As the months drew on she grew weaker and
still weaker. Her husband saw, but without understanding. It was a
transient indisposition in his eyes. Autocrats are incredulous of
death. One night at the opera she fainted. Some moment in it had
stabbed her with a too-poignant memory. There was consternation then;
but she rallied--yet never to the ground she had lost, and was still
steadily yielding. She grew to be the shadow of herself; yet not so
much the shadow as the phantasm. Her beauty did not go, nor her young
symmetry; only it was strangely refined, as if some light within shone
through dissolving walls.
And yet she was never but gentle and lovely-sweet with all; very
patient, uncomplaining, but always without merriment or laughter.
And so one day there dawned upon her the third anniversary of her
lover’s death.
On that day she would not look upon her basil. For a week past she had
put it aside where her eyes could not encounter it. There had been
signs, which yet the wild longing in her heart could not find courage
to verify. Now she dared not put them to the test; she dared not risk
the ruin of her hopes until the last possible moment of endurance.
It came with the dying day. In the last lingering hour of light she
hurried towards the spot. Something greeted her even in the instant of
her approach--something like a sweet hand held out. She gasped; she
gave one little cry of rapture so intense that God in His high place
must have wept to hear it. The little bush was mealed over with
fragrant flowers as thick as snow.
That night she was to sup with the archduke privately in the
Schönbrunn palace. As she came in to him, he seemed conscious of some
change in her which was like a startling revelation and recovery. It
was the nixie of the pool he saw again--girlish, radiant, captivating.
Her cheeks were like fresh roses; she sparkled over with merriment and
audacity. A little staggered at first, he rallied quickly to the
delight of the challenge, and responded buoyantly to her mood. He was
jubilant in what he believed to be the first definite sign of her
restored health. That, and not that alone. Was it conceivable that he
detected here a hint that she might come to be to him something that
she had never quite been yet--something which he only seemed now to
recognise for the first time as a fully achieved desire, a fully
satisfied hunger, a perfect realisation of a dream which had hitherto
lacked its best fulfilment? He thought he would sacrifice much
philosophy, much pride to ensure that gain. To be to her at last not
the husband but the lover! As soon as possible, that they might be
alone, he dismissed the attendants.
It was a lovely moon-drowned night. The long windows of the room
opened upon wide spaces of tranquil garden, whose trees and beds and
slender rosaries were but soft accents on the universal glow. All
liquid and milky-green, it might have been some under-world of strange
waters from which they looked up, to see the bright globe just misted
through that deep transparency. Somewhere a fountain falling, with a
little flop and tinkle, gave voice to the illusion. The dewy lawn
looked a though frosted over with moonbeams. It was a long fairy
track, fading into ineffable mysteries.
Isabella sat fronting her husband--fronting the open windows. She had
been talking to him, sweetly, remorsefully--as one, on the prick of
departure and longing for home, might talk to a generous host whom yet
one was already forgetting--when all in a moment she fell silent.
Something in her face startled and thrilled him. It seemed
transfigured, lit up with an immortal joy. The eyes were gazing, not
at him, but past him, out into the garden, as if along that luminous
track some vision were advancing into their ken. Suddenly and
soundlessly she rose, and, still fixedly gazing, went swiftly past him
out into the night. One faint movement he made to detain her, but
ineffectually. He was conscious of an inexplicable awe--a strange
paralysis of will and motion. And then he heard a cry--as it were a
cry of intense and loving rapture, and, instantly disenthralled by it,
he started to his feet and turned. She was running into the moonlight,
her arms held out as if in a very ecstasy of welcome--and yet there
was nothing there. But in the moment that he moved to pursue her,
actually as if she threw herself without stopping into some spirit’s
lovely keeping, she pitched and fell headlong.
When he reached her, she lay in that drowning tide of light like a
spent phantom of the mists. A smile of utter rest was on her lips. She
was dead.
“Fair Isabel: poor simple Isabel.”
THE END.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ ecstacy/ecstasy,
orange-grove/orange grove, etc.) have been preserved.
[End of text]