It was a sunny day of winter with a sharp breeze blowing, just after
the birth of the New Year, that Howard and Maud left Windlow for
Cambridge. The weeks previous had been much clouded for Howard by
doubts and anxieties and a multiplicity of small business. Furnishing
even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity involved
intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things which it seemed
inconceivable that anyone should need. The very number and variety of
brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage on the love of cheap
beauty, so epigrammatically praised by Thucydides; he said with a groan
to Maud that it was indeed true that the Nineteenth Century would stand
out to all time as the period of the world's history in which more
useless things had been made than at any epoch before!
But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed to
slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at about
eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the library and
demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly, admiringly,
adoringly at his wife. She had regained a look of health and lightness
more marked than he had ever before seen in her. Her illness had proved
a rest, in spite of all the trouble she had passed through. Some new
beauty, the beauty of experience, had passed into her face without
making havoc of the youthful contours and the girlish freshness, and
the beautiful line of her cheek outlined upon the dark fur, with the
wide-open eye above it, came upon Howard with an almost tormenting
sense of loveliness, like a chord of far-off music. He flung down his
pen, and took his wife in his arms for an instant. "Yes," he said in
answer to her look, "it's all right, darling--I can manage anything
with you near me, looking like that--that's all I want!"
They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped grass and leafless
shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind. "How it blows!" said
Howard:
"''Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind, in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood!'
How beautiful that is--'the old wind, in the old anger!'--but it isn't
true, for all that. If one thing changes, everything changes; and the
wind has got to march on, like you and me: there's nothing pathetic
about it. The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!"
"Oh yes," said Maud; "one wastes pity. I was inclined myself to be
pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked into my
little old room. The furniture and books and pictures seemed to me to
reproach me with having deserted them; but, oh dear, what a fantastic,
foolish, anxious little wretch I was, with all my plans for uplifting
everyone! You don't know, dearest, you can't know, out of what a
stagnant little pool you fished me up!"
"And yet _I_ feel," said Howard, "as if it was you who had saved me
from a sort of death--what a charming picture! two people who can't
swim saving each other from drowning."
"Well, that's the way that things are done!" said Maud decisively.
They left the garden, and betook themselves to the pool; the waters
welled up, green and cold, from the depth, and hurried away down their
bare channel.
"This is the scene of my life," said Howard; "I WILL be sentimental
about this! This is where my ghost will walk, if anywhere; good
heavens, to think that it was not three years ago that I came here
first, and thought in a solemn way that it was going to have a strange
significance for me. 'Significance,' that is the mischief! But it is
all very well, now that every minute is full of happiness, to laugh at
the old fears--they were very real at the time,--'the old wind, in the
old anger'--one can't sit and dream, though it's pleasant, it's
pleasant."
"It was the only time in my life," said Maud, "when I was ever brave!
Why isn't one braver? It is agreeable at the time, and it is almost
overpaid!"
"It is like what a doctor told me once," said Howard, "that he had
never in his life seen a patient go to the operating table other than
calm and brave. Face to face with things one is all right; and yet one
never learns not to waste time in dreading them."
They went on in silence up the valley, Maud walking beside him with all
her old lightness. Howard thought he had never seen anything more
beautiful. They were out of the wind now, but could hear it hiss in the
grasses above them.
"What about Cambridge?" said Maud. "I think it will be rather fun. I
haven't wanted to go; but do you know, if someone came to me and said I
might just unpack everything, I should be dreadfully disappointed!"
"I believe I should be too," said Howard. "My only fear is that I shall
not be interested--I shall be always wanting to get back to you--and
yet how inexplicable that used to seem to me, that Dons who married
should really prefer to steal back home, instead of living the free and
joyous life of the sympathetic and bachelor; and even now it seems
difficult to suppose that other men can feel as I do about THEIR wives."
"Like the boy in Punch," said Maud, "who couldn't believe that the two
earwigs could care about each other."
A faint music of bells came to them on the wind. "Hark!" said Howard;
"the Sherborne chime! Do you remember when we first heard that? It gave
me a delightful sense of other people being busy when I was unoccupied.
To-day it seems as if it was warning me that I have got to be busy."
They turned at last and retraced their steps. Presently Howard said,
"There's just one more thing, child, I want to say. I haven't ever
spoken to you since about the vision--whatever it was--which you
described to me--the child and you. But I took you at your word!"
"Yes," said Maud, "I have always been glad that you did that!"
"But I have wanted to speak," said Howard, "simply because I did not
want you to think that it wasn't in my mind--that I had cast it all
lightly away. I haven't tried to force myself into any belief about
it--it's a mystery--but it has grown into my mind somehow, and become
real; and I do feel more and more that there is something very true and
great about it, linking us with a life beyond. It does seem to me life,
and not silence; love, and not emptiness. It has not come in between
us, as I feared it might--or rather it HAS come in between us, and
seems to be holding both our hands. I don't say that my reason tells me
this--but something has outrun my reason, and something stronger and
better than reason. It is near and dear: and, dearest, you will believe
me when I say that this isn't said to please you or to woo you--I
wouldn't do that! I am not in sight of the reality yet, as you have
been; but it IS a reality, and not a sweet dream."
Maud looked at him, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. "Ah, my
beloved," she said, "that is all and more than I had hoped. Let it just
stay there! I am not foolish about it, and indeed the further away that
it gets, the less I am sure what happened. I shall not want you to
speak of it: it isn't that it is too sacred--nothing is too sacred--but
it is just a fact I can't reckon with, like the fact of one's own birth
and death. All I just hoped was that you might not think it only a
girl's fancy; but indeed I should not have cared if you HAD thought
that. The TRUTH--that is what matters; and nothing that you or I or
anyone, in any passion of love or sorrow, can believe about the truth,
can alter it; the only thing is to try to see it all clearly, not to
give false reasons, not to let one's imagination go."
"Yes, yes," said Howard, "that's the secret of love and life and
everything; and yet it seems a hard thing to believe; because if it
were not for your illusions about me, for instance--if you could really
see me as I am--you couldn't feel as you do; one comes back to trusting
one's heart after all--that is the only power we have of reading the
writing on the wall. And yet that is not all; it IS possible to read
it, to spell it out; but it is the interpretation that one needs, and
for that one must trust love, and love only."
They went back to the house in a happy silence; but Maud slipped out
again, and went to the little churchyard. There behind the chancel, in
a corner of the buttress, was a little mound. Maud laid a single white
flower upon it. "No," she said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a
child, "no, my darling, I am not making any mistake. I don't think of
you as sleeping here, though I love the place where the little limbs
are laid. You are awake, alive, about your business, I don't doubt. I'd
have loved you, guarded you, helped you along; but you have made love
live for me, and that, and hope, are enough now for us both! I don't
claim you, sweet; I don't even ask you to remember and understand."