MIZPAH.
What was there in that telegram to cause Hugh Paull misgiving?
Ostensibly, but little. Many things could have occurred, simple in
themselves, to give Mercedes an excuse to summon him. That she would
take advantage of an excuse to shorten their separation, he well knew.
As he turned over and re-read the telegram, he chided himself for the
chill sense of impending trouble which was unnerving him; but his
efforts came to nothing. He started for London at once, in irrepressible
perturbation of mind.
Arrived home, the commonplace aspect of the familiar old house somewhat
relieved him of his mental oppression. The housekeeper had had notice of
his return in a week or ten days, and charwomen were about; there was a
clatter of pails and the homely sound of busy brooms and
scrubbing-brushes.
He spent the hours till Mercedes should arrive in superintending the
arrangement of the library, and pretending to dine. His study lamp
smoked. Just as he and the housekeeper had succeeded in coaxing it to
burn with its wonted urbanity, one quarter chimed from the nearest
church clock-tower.
A quarter-past nine! In a quarter-of-an-hour _she_ would be here—and the
big, dingy room seemed to him full of the ill-savoured fumes of lamp
oil. He dismissed the housekeeper, who knew he expected a patient, and
threw open the windows.
It was a clear night. The stars shone, brilliant specks in the
dark-blue. He leaned out of the window, listening for the roll of
wheels—for that peal of the hall bell which he longed for, yet dreaded.
He would always long for her presence with an intense longing: yet this
longing would be tempered by the dread that he would betray himself in
some unguarded moment, would betray the passionate character of his
love.
He mentally forecast the interview. Leaning out in the sharpened
autumnal air, he braced himself to endure: to keep himself at a
completely respectful distance from the woman whose soul he believed to
be the soul of his lost wife, and part of his own soul, but whose
physical being belonged to the lazy voluptuary, the Prince Andriocchi.
“It is hard,” he told himself. “Oh, God! Thou alone knowest _how_ hard!”
The wild apostrophe brought a calm, a sudden peace—as if indeed his
guardian angel had laid its holy hand upon his heated head; and as he
took courage from the sense of occult help in his sore need, the clock
slowly, warningly—it seemed to him with some knowledge of what was to
come—chimed the half-hour.
Would she come? What was it all about? Perhaps the next few minutes’
silence and suspense were the worst of his life. Often afterwards,
looking back into his past with a shudder, he thought so.
Yet the ring of the bell, sudden, impetuous, when it did come, was
horrible. The sound of _her_ voice, the slow footsteps along the hall—he
clenched his hands as he listened, and cold drops of sweat were on his
brow.
He went slowly to the door and opened it—for his limbs were stiff and
heavy, disobedient to his will. Had he expected to see her also
unnerved, trembling? He did not know—but the calm with which she entered
was a shock to him.
“Please—shut—lock the door,” she said quietly, but with a desperate
calm—imperiously, but in a tone of voice in which command was mingled
with respect. “I have come,” she said, throwing aside her cloak and
seating herself by the table, “to tell you, my friend, what will cause
you grief, what will make you angry. But I must tell you, for your sake,
and for mine.”
He stood, facing her, wondering at the extraordinary change in her, in
her whole outward self. Her lovely face was pale and delicately
beautiful as ever; but there was a new sternness about her sweet mouth,
a look of absolute will in her dark, lustrous eyes which completely
altered her. The clinging, tender girl had given place to the determined
woman.
“What—is it?” he asked. “What has happened?”
“I—will tell you,” she began, evidently nerving herself for some
disclosure, “just as it happened. You know that the prince”—(a look of
pain contracted her features, and she blushed slightly as she said the
word)—“my husband—liked the Pinewood. You know”—(she stopped and looked
pleadingly up into his face)—“he liked you, liked our—friendship.”
Some warning of what was to come arose in his mind. Ah! at last some
good-natured friend—some meddler—had stepped in between him and his
long-waited-for happiness in life.
“Go on,” he said, in a hard tone, turning away from her.
“The prince knows you, and he knows me,” she went on, proudly. “Well, I
must tell you what happened. Last night, we—the prince, the count, and
myself—we went to the new play. The prince did not like it, and went
away to his club. I was sitting, not talking, the count was silent also,
when I heard the voices of men (it was between the acts) in the next
box. They spoke of you—and of me. What they said, was an infamy. Ah! do
not look so, monsieur. You and I, we have a champion. The count, he did
hear it also, and his anger against these men was great. He at once took
me away down the staircase, procured my carriage, and I came back to my
house. He told me he would avenge my honour—your honour. At eleven
o’clock he came in. He told me he had challenged the man who said that
infamy; that to-day they would fight, not here in England, but in
France; and he said good-bye.... This” (she drew a case from her bosom),
“this is the name of the man who separates us, monsieur, for I also have
come to say good-bye. To-morrow I go home with the prince to Spain.”
It was so abrupt, her calm yet confused statements were so unexpected,
that for a moment Hugh’s head swam, he had to steady himself by placing
his hand on the back of a chair. Then he took a slip of paper that she
held out to him, and holding it near the lamp, saw in her handwriting—
“_Colonel Roderick Pym._”
As he gazed upon that familiar, distasteful name, he seemed to have
known all along that this must come, this moment, this interview; that
this was what had cast a shadow on their relations, and that this was
_the end_.
“Once,” he said, half to himself, half to her—it seemed to him as if her
mind ought to recognise his thoughts without the outward expression of
words,—“once I robbed this man of someone he loved; and now he robs me
of _you_!”
As he sighed out that last word he recollected. Perhaps at that moment
Roderick Pym was dead, his revenge had cost him his life; for the count
would be a dangerous antagonist, he was a skilled swordsman and a dead
shot.
“How, when do they fight?” he asked breathlessly, with the instinct to
stay that duel at any cost.
“Fight!” she spoke almost indignantly. “Do you think I would let the
good count kill himself for me—even for _you_?” Tears stood in her eyes.
“I knelt and prayed him,” she said. “I begged him, but he would not hear
me. He said: ‘Would you have me be a coward?’ Then at last he said to
me: ‘If you will promise me that to-morrow you will go home to Spain
with the prince, and will never see or speak to _him_ again, I too will
go with you, and will sacrifice my _honneur_.’” She paused and hung her
head. “So, as I have promised, I have come to say good-bye,” she
faltered.
Yes; he had known this all along, he felt he had. This was the end—the
end of a promised passionate joy—the end of delights of eye and ear—of
heart, soul, mind, body—all!
“Yes,” he said, meekly bowing his head, “I understand. We part; it is
all over for ever.”
“Oh no!” she cried, with sudden life, and her face was alight with love
and hope, “only for here! You know—who should know better than you?—how
short is this life, you who always see the dead and dying! Is it death,
that which we call death?” she asked him, passionately. “Do you think
it? Do you not rather think that _this_ is dying, this living in a place
where you must not love, where people hate and torture each other, and
happiness cannot be, for no one will let another one be happy?”
He went to her and took her slender, cold hands in his—for the last
time.
“It does not matter,” he said, bitterly, yet feeling, with a strange
joy, that this sacrifice of love ennobled their love, raised it from a
common thing to divinity. “No one can separate us after death, if God
wills us to be soul to soul—one for ever.”
A strange expression flitted across her face. For one instant it seemed
to him that this was not Mercedes, but Lilia. Then came the memory of
that awful death-bed, when Lilia defied the will of her Creator, and
would have forced him, her husband, to die with her, and he contrasted
that hour of rebellion with this hour of humble renunciation.
“This is _her soul_,” he thought, in mingled awe and gratitude.
“Roderick would have caused our misery; instead, he has saved us from an
evil life together for here, in this painful world, to be united in
eternity.”
This was his actual death, he felt, as he silently gazed into her eyes,
this parting. Physical death, after this, would be nothing—would,
indeed, be welcome.
For a moment he thought to take her, just this once, into his arms: to
let her heart beat against his breast, to feel her lips upon his mouth;
but before the thought was really born in his mind he killed it and
flung it from him.
“Risk eternity for a moment?” he said to himself. “No!”
He dropped her hands and smiled at her, the smile she might have seen
with the eyes of her soul upon the face of her angel guardian.
“There is no more for us to say _now_,” he said, “but to pray for each
other. By-and-by we shall have time to see what this means—this you and
I being but one soul.”
She rose and kept her eyes steadily fixed upon him. Then she slowly
walked to the door. How slowly she passed from the room he never knew.
Their eyes dwelt upon each other, and till she was gone he felt that
never, even in infinite glory, could they be more really wedded than
now.
The door was half open. The room was empty, save for himself and the
shadows. The hall-door was gently shut. He heard the sound of
carriage-wheels. All was over!
He sat down stupefied. This dead future which loomed blankly before him
was stupefying—a dense blackness, a hopeless nothingness.
The hours passed. The lamp flickered and went out. Still he sat there
gazing at vacancy, his mind groping about in this dreary cloud of
fathomless misery.
He thought nothing tangible, felt neither cold nor fatigue. At last he
began to wonder vaguely whether this was all that really existed—this
dull, senseless apathy.
As he began to wonder, his attention was attracted by a brilliant speck
of light at his feet. Tiny at first, it seemed to grow larger and
brighter as he looked. A mere pin’s-point of light at first, in a few
minutes it was a disc of some size. Then he saw an object he knew well—a
steel urn at the end of his library fender.
With a flush of pain, he was alive again; alive, conscious of anguish,
of separation from her, his darling, his adored. He seemed to see her
retreating from him, steadily, hopelessly.
With a cry, he sprang up. That light was a mocking sunbeam. He saw it
now, creeping in between the shutters. He went to the window, he flung
open the shutters and defied the day, or would have defied it.
But he was face to face with the glory of the sunrise. The whole sky was
golden, and crimson clouds floated upward, stately attendants upon the
magnificence of the young day. Soft, white rounded masses were like
smiles upon the clear blue sky: all meant life and hope and love.
And as he gazed he felt abashed at his own littleness. What was he but a
speck upon the bosom of the earth? That little steel urn was greater in
the shine of the world’s sun than was he in the Light that streams from
the Eternal.
“I must reach it,” he told himself. “I must be more than a speck of
dust. What is suffering, what is dull commonplace, but the ladder by
which we climb to immortality?”
That was his crucial hour, the bridge over which he passed from unrest
to peace.
None who knew him ever guessed the secret motives of his afterlife. They
thought him more energetic, larger-minded, gentler, and more
sympathetic. But he was envied as a man who seemed to have fathomed the
mystery of “peace on earth.”
He died suddenly. A month before his death he received a letter from a
Spanish priest, who informed him of the death of the Princess
Andriocchi, and enclosed him a sealed envelope addressed to him in
Mercedes’ handwriting. He recognised the writing at once, though in
character it was larger and firmer.
It contained a slip of paper, on which was inscribed one word—“_Come!_”
That word seemed to pierce his heart like an arrow. From that day his
strength waned, his health failed. His household were hardly astonished
when, one morning, he was found sitting in his chair by the library
window, the early sunlight hovering about his dead, smiling face.
He passed away, smiling—a joyful smile that none had ever seen upon his
face before.
THE END.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. P. 240, changed “If tell Helven this,” to “If I tell Helven this”.
2. Silently corrected obvious typographical errors and variations in
spelling.
3. Retained archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as printed.
4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.