‘Yes, very, very pretty,’ said Gundred approvingly. ‘No sugar, thank
you.’
Delicately, with neatly-lifted little finger, she raised her cup and
sipped. From top to toe she was the fine flower of deportment, and
her manner exhaled a mild consciousness of being the perfect model of
decorum for the country neighbour on whom she was conferring the honour
of a call. The afternoon being brilliantly fine, Lady Adela had wished
to take her daughter-in-law to call on some intimate friends of hers,
proprietors of a celebrated view, who lived on the other side of the
lowland valley that stretched beneath the glen of Ivescar. Gundred was
happy in the opportunity of exacting provincial approval, and, against
everyone’s wishes, including his own, Kingston had insisted that he
and Isabel should join the polite pilgrimage. Accordingly the landau
had duly sallied forth with its burden of four, and after more than an
hour’s drive through the soft country beneath the hills, had brought
them to their destination. Now, on the famous terrace of Blakebank,
Gundred sat full in the light of her hostess’s admiration, consuming
cakes and tea with her usual crisp yet ethereal daintiness.
‘The lights on the hills!’ cried Mrs. Norreys ecstatically, anxious
that Mrs. Darnley should appreciate the full beauty of the prospect.
‘Delightfully pretty,’ replied Gundred, casting a comprehensive glance
across the world. ‘One quite envies you, Mrs. Norreys. We have no
view like this at Ivescar. A charming place to have tea, out on this
terrace. Oh, thank you. How greedy I am!--yes? But this air makes one
so famished, and these little cakes of yours, so delightful.’
With a sweet smile Gundred accepted a second cake, and devoted her
whole attention to its decent consumption.
In front of Blakebank the ground sloped away sharply to the river
far down below. Dense woodland filled the hollow in which the water
flowed, and rose again in a blue foaming mass on the farther side of
the valley. Thence the eye followed undulation after undulation of
meadow and copse, fields of soft green, plumed hedgerows, a placid
country full of opulent peace. The foreground of the picture was formed
by a strip of meadow beneath the terrace that dropped in a steep brow
towards the woods. Here the grass was hidden and gilded by a sheet of
buttercups, and the pure ardour of their gold was touched to a keener
fire by the shafts of sunlight that slanted across them. Beyond their
blaze lay the voluminous splendours of the woodland, dull and heavy in
sullen shadow. For the day had its sharp notes of contrast. The air
was leaden and lurid, dazzling, here and there, with a golden rain of
sunlight, and here and there, again, made sombre by thunderous masses
of cloud. Huge curling crags of purple and silver rolled and towered
above the world, and the sky was opalescent with a hundred shifting
colours. The landscape, drowsy and complacent, was transfigured into
something mystic and dreamy. From the poignant glory of gold in the
foreground the eye wandered on over the steamy blueness of the woods,
over the rippling waves of vaporous green and blue that filled the
valley, to where, seeming very far away across the glamour, the great
rampart of the hill-country lay high against the faint rosy lights of
the north. The lowering air, the sleepy, fantastic colours of the day,
seemed to remove things distant to another world, and the mountains,
dim, misty in shades of amethyst and azure, hardly appeared distinct
from the ranges of cloud amid which they faintly loomed. Far away, far
above the valleys, they lay in crests and billows of dreamland along
the border of a fairy world. Yet only six miles of comfortable peace
was all that lay between Gundred at her tea and those mysterious giants
in the haze.
Full in the middle of that walled horizon, isolated on all sides, rose
the mass of the Simonstone, unrolling his apathetic splendour on the
ranges of lesser hills that formed his throne. In steep, precipitous
slopes his lines dropped abruptly to the western valley; to eastward
they trailed away in long, placid curves. The ranges of white limestone
that formed his pedestal shone dimly pink across the distance, and the
towering bulk of the mountain was lucent as a carved sapphire from
crown to base. His sheer stern western cliff, his flat summit, loomed
disdainfully over the sleepy valleys at his feet; and his presence,
serene and enormous, ruled the whole country with the inevitable weight
of its majesty. Steep glens in the range divided him from the heights
to either side; he stood out the conspicuous tyrant of the horizon.
Away to the right, over a range of smaller fells, the leonine head of
Ravensber stood up in secondary authority, and above the western cleft
where Ivescar incongruously squatted in the undiscoverable distance,
rose the slouching back of Carnmor. But of the trinity that dominated
the hill-country, Ravensber and Carnmor, the lesser and the greater,
were both subordinate to the imperious sweep of the Simonstone. Here,
from the terrace of Blakebank, in the complete contemplation of his
grandeur, might be perceived the full grotesqueness of the insolence
that had planted Ivescar beneath the sombre glory of his shadow. From
that parvenu house itself the blatancy of the contrast was not so
evident; for Carnmor and the Simonstone were both shut out from view
by the amphitheatre of white cliffs that closed in the glen, and gave
support to their dominating mass. But to Blakebank, far away, the whole
supremacy of the hills lay revealed in all its greatness, and their
empire seemed, in the mysterious clouded lights of rose and blue,
to belong to a world that had no knowledge of man or his evanescent
doings. Gundred, meanwhile, having finished her tea, began to think
of departure. She set to work delicately drawing on her gloves and
preparing her farewells.
‘Such a long drive--yes?’ she said; ‘I am afraid we must really be
starting, Mrs. Norreys. My husband’s aunt is coming to us to-day, and
we ought to be home in time to receive her.’
The carriage was ordered, and the party stood exchanging compliments
and politenesses.
‘Such a delightful day,’ said Gundred, ‘and a drive home in the evening
so charming in weather like this--yes?’
‘You will have a lovely view of the hills as you go home,’ replied Mrs.
Norreys. ‘You will have them in front of you all the way. Do notice the
sunset-lights; too exquisite they are.’
Long habit had developed in Mrs. Norreys a proprietary manner when she
talked of the distant hills that made the attraction of her terrace.
She spoke of them as a successful actor-manager might speak of a scene
that his own great skill has contrived and arranged.
‘Charming, charming!’ answered Gundred, with the enthusiasm which
everyone thinks it a duty to manifest for landscape, though the true
intelligent passion is so rare and sacred.
Then the carriage was announced, and the party from Ivescar embarked on
their homeward voyage.
Kingston and Isabel had not contributed much to the gaiety of the
entertainment. They had been possessed with the delight that Gundred
had merely expressed. To them the beauty of the world as it lay
unfolded before them had been so vast and holy as to make all comment
obtrusive and irreverent. Kingston had felt the unspoken sympathy of
Isabel’s mood, and her silence had mitigated for a time the feverish
animosity with which he regarded her. As they drove home, there was
little conversation between the four. Now and then Lady Adela made
some remark on Mrs. Norreys’ kindness, her charm, the successful
blend of her tea. But even Gundred was feeling too serene for speech.
Everything combined to make her happy. Her gown was a perfect fit, the
evening was comfortable, and she was conscious of having given her
hostess a flawless model to copy--in manners, conversation, hair, and
hat. Of course she never doubted her faultlessness or felt a qualm,
but there were moments when its lovely perfection came upon her in a
compelling wave of pleasure. She sat in a rapture of satisfaction as
the carriage whirled her home through the quiet sunset. Tea and a good
digestion assisted the placidity of her mood, and the influences of the
atmosphere collaborated to make it complete. The twilight was pink and
sweet as Gundred’s own opinion of herself. Immovably tranquil, roseate
and mild, it had the fascination of a drowsy fairy tale. Cowslip and
bean and hawthorn sent her their tribute in wafts of fragrance. She
accepted everything as her due, and felt that all the world was showing
a very proper spirit in conspiring to do her honour.
So their road led them up and down the gentle slopes that filled the
valley with ripples of green. Sleepy old farmsteads they passed,
nestling in dense knots of verdure, and villages with their brilliant
little strips of garden. The day’s work was over, and in the clear air
rose the song of peace and rest. Only far above, over the nearing mass
of the mountains, rose stormy ranges of cloud, flushed and splendid in
purple and gold. And so at last they had done with the broad lowland,
and the road set itself to mount up towards the high glen of their
destination. Now the country changed. Below lay the wooded, feathery
richness of copse and hedgerow, meadow and pasture. Stone walls began
to replace the hedges, stiff wiry moor-grass the lush growth of the
valleys; the framework of the earth was near the surface; the soil
became a thin stretched skin, no longer a warm soft coat of flesh;
here and there the film broke, and the limestone bones protruded. So
the road wound its way to the upper levels, and climbed at last to the
glen between the hills. Far ahead of them it streamed away up towards
Ivescar--an undulating stripe of whiteness. Above, to their right,
rose, stiff and stark, a wall of white rock, shutting out from sight
the mountain above. To their left lay the narrow desolation of the
defile, a stream meandering among sparse meadows, with here and there
a bare barn or a farm surrounded by a few wind-tormented trees. And
beyond these again, towered the farther wall of the valley, another
escarpment of long limestone cliffs, which could be seen rising tier
upon tier to the first brown and violet slopes of Carnmor. The road,
hugging the western precipice, commanded a full view of the valley’s
eastern rampart, but of the cliffs overhead revealed only the first
and lowest range. This, in the sunset-light, was radiantly pink, but
the sheer rocks across the stream, cut off from the light, were grey
and grim, rising up in bank upon bank towards the moors above. No
colour touched them, no softness made them lovable. Their inhospitable,
irreconcilable sternness foreshadowed the abomination of desolation,
and gave the valley a stony, lifeless melancholy that recalled the
land that once flowed with milk and honey, but is now a wilderness of
sterile stone.
As the road led on up the narrowing pass, so the shadows deepened
across the way of the travellers. Suddenly, however, the western wall
of cliffs overhead, now no longer touched by the sun, dipped in an
abrupt cleft; and there, very far above them, hung the sheer western
face of Simonstone. Keen, precipitous, menacing, the mass of the
mountain impended suddenly over the valley, and the apparition was
almost terrifying in its unexpectedness. Another twenty yards, and the
lower ranges would once more conceal it from view; here, for a swift
moment, it revealed its over-lordship of the glen at its feet. Behind
and over its brow high volumes of cloud stood stationary, and in the
glow of evening the mountain and all the upper air was rich with a
glamour of amethyst and hot violet.
Gundred was dominated by this revelation, and her powers of expression
rose to the emergency.
‘Oh, look, how pretty!--yes?’ she cried, indicating the obvious with a
neat wave of her neat hand.
Never had her gift for inadequacy burst upon her husband in such a
terrifying flash. For a moment he could not speak.
‘Quite good,’ he answered at last, incapable of saying more to a woman
who would have been incapable of understanding it.
Isabel remained silent. Her eyes were fixed. Then she put out her hand
in an eager gesture to stop the carriage.
‘Stop them, Gundred,’ she cried; ‘I want to get out. I am going up
there into the glow and the glory. I am tired of this dull grey world.
Kingston, come with me. Let us go and be gods on the heights.’
Gundred saw consent in her husband’s eyes. The carriage was stopped.
‘Well, don’t be late for dinner, darlings,’ she conditioned. ‘Remember,
Aunt Minna will be arriving. Do you really think you will have time?’
‘What does time matter!’ exclaimed Isabel rebelliously. ‘There is no
such thing.’
Kingston would have liked to go alone. Gundred had just succeeded in
irritating him, he felt, to the last point of endurance. Her bland
impenetrability was nothing short of tragic. Nothing could ever teach
her what to say and what to leave unsaid, for nothing could teach
her to feel. She had the sublime elephantine tactlessness of perfect
self-satisfaction. Her husband, for one wild moment, wanted to get away
from it all--from Gundred, level, monotonous, stodgy, yet unsatisfying;
from the dear good old mother who did not count, who never could
count; from Isabel, tormenting, tantalizing, odious Isabel. To be
alone, up there in the radiance, far above the world of desire and
dissatisfactions--that would be, at least for half an hour, rest and
relief. But he was to have none; Isabel was to come, emphasizing at
every point the exasperating perfections, the exasperating limitations
of his wife. With her usual primitive clumsiness, so utterly at
variance with Gundred’s well-drilled movements, Isabel flounced out of
the carriage, alighting with a jumping flop that brought down a coil
of hair and a shower of pins. Kingston noticed that, as usual, her
placket was open. He waited in silence till she should have finished
her untidy adjustments.
Gundred repeated her injunction.
‘Aunt Minna will be so surprised if you are not there in time to
receive her,’ she said. ‘Do be certain that you have time, darling.’
Kingston forced himself to speak. ‘Ivescar is just over the hill,’ he
said. ‘We shall be there as soon as you. It will be a short cut--up one
side of the Simonstone, and down the other. Are you ready, Isabel?’
Yes, Isabel had finished tucking up her skirt. It was a skirt as
inadequate for visiting as for mountaineering. And now she had bunched
it up on one side to give her legs full play, and its effect was not
only incongruous, but lumpy and lopsided. However, for such matters
Isabel cared nothing. She was ready. Without another word, Kingston
turned aside and opened a gate. Together they passed through into the
field bordering the road, on their way to the copse above, that sloped
up to the limestone cliff, and so led on to the heights overhead.
Gundred watched them go. A faint, a very faint ripple of doubt trembled
across the calm waters of her self-complacency. She had the strangest,
the most ridiculous, the most unheard-of feeling that in some way she
had not been at the height of the situation. In some way, she had a dim
instinct of having failed. As the carriage drove on, she suddenly found
herself feeling a little lonely, a little cold.
Kingston and Isabel wrestled their way to the cliff’s top, and found
themselves on a flat floor of scar limestone that led straight away
to the long, swift slope of the mountain. As if arranged by mortal
hands, the blocks of white stone made a regular pavement, like the
wrecked foundation of some Cyclopean temple. Between each block was a
deep, dark rift, where ferns and lilies of the valley, and strange
flowers with white plumy spires flourished in the shelter where no
wind could ruffle them. Together the wanderers crossed the level,
leaping and balancing lightly from rock to rock. Then heather and
sedge began to break the even surface of the paving, and soon usurped
its place altogether. Thence, to the summit, was nothing but moor and
whortleberry, steep slopes of shale and grit. Kingston and Isabel
addressed themselves resolutely to the ascent. Steep and arduous as
it was, they had neither time for breath nor talking. They climbed
strenuously, silently, taking pride in each step that proved their
mastery over the earth by lifting them steadily higher, foot by foot,
on the flank of the mountain that had seemed at first too vast to be
conquered by any movements of so infinitesimal a creature as man.
Slowly but certainly they found themselves advancing up the stark
ladder of tussock and poised boulder. Each stone that they dislodged
rolled crashing into farther depths, and at last they found themselves
moving into the cold shadow of the clouds that evening seemed to be
drawing down upon the summit. The crown of the mountain was now beyond
their sight, cut off by the fierce angle of the slope; but they could
see that the upper air was still aglow with sunlight round it, though
the volumes of dark vapour seemed to be growing and darkening. Suddenly
the acclivity took a swifter line, then paused for a moment from its
labours. Surmounting it, they found that the ground lay for a few yards
in a gentler curve, and there beyond, straight above them, was the
summit, glorious and crimsoned. A last eager voiceless effort, and they
had attained it. Around them whistled and hurtled a sharp wind, and
before stretched away the round level plain of the hill’s crown.
It was with a sigh of relief that the climbers rested and faced round
to see the extent of their conquest. The whole world far beneath them
was misty, ardent, gorgeous in the glamour of evening. Kingston and
Isabel made their way to the ruins of the old cairn that had sent
northward the news of many centuries. Among the scattered, rough-hewn
boulders they settled themselves for an interval of repose in
achievement. Behind them rose the ruined wall of the beacon tower that
had talked, in its day, of Queen Jane and Queen Mary, of the Armada’s
coming, and the passing of the Tudors. Before them, unrolled at their
feet like a map, two thousand feet below, was all the splendour of
the earth, phantasmal and glorified--tiny towns, and the worm-like
track of great rivers, the minute tessellation of meadows, and the dim
velvet of wide forests. The whole air, before them and beneath, was
a-tremble with motes of gold. Gold filled and pervaded the atmosphere,
confounding detail in a haze of glitter, and softening the great
dazzling stretches of the western sea into an imperial harmony with the
golden heaven and the golden earth.
Kingston Darnley looked out across the glowing mystery beneath him.
Rest, profound and eternal, seemed to be enveloping him. In reality,
the very foundations of his nature were stirred and stirring.
Insensibly, through the heat and worry of the foregoing days, his life
had been growing ripe for a great upheaval. Slowly the tormenting
desires, the incessant, unacknowledged hunger, the uneasy, restless,
emotional uncertainty, the strenuous nourishment of artificial
feelings, had all combined to bring his restless unhappiness to a head.
Through unacknowledged storm and secret stress he had come at last
to that deceptive calm which precedes the breaking up of the soul’s
settled weather--the discharge of the soul’s accumulated electricity in
a devastating nerve-cyclone. To-day his endurance of himself and his
own forced contentment had touched its limit. Gundred had given him the
last least touch that was needed to destroy the perilous equilibrium
of his mood. Unconsciously he was waiting, in a breathless interval of
suspense, for the crash of thunder that was to precipitate the crisis,
and clear the air of all its unhealthy restraints.
Suddenly as he lay there, with Isabel silent and watchful at his side,
the glory of the world shivered coldly and vanished. A black shadow
swooped over the mountain-top, and soon only the uttermost distance
retained the glimmer of gold. Down, down upon the old cairn sank,
like the portcullis of a fairy castle, a heavy curtain of darkness,
shutting out all that was left of the gleaming distance. The cloud was
upon them. And, as their gaze was fixed on the gloom descending from
above, no less abruptly, no less silently, in grey coils and whirling
streamers the mist curled up at them from beneath, rippling and foaming
over the rim of the mountain, as a devouring wave sweeps round an islet
and over its crown. In an instant the world was blotted out by the
white darkness. Uniform, monotonous, it obliterated everything. Only
the old cairn and a few yards of ground around it could now be seen.
Kingston and Isabel were cut off from the earth, set alone as Deucalion
and Pyrrha in a new sphere, one solid point amid a vast ocean of
chaos....
‘So much for the glory of life,’ said Isabel.
Kingston rose. ‘I don’t like this,’ he replied. ‘It will be the very
mischief to get down again. Come and help me find a way.’
Together they moved away from the old cairn into the mist. As they
went it widened before them, revealing a few dim feet of distance,
then closed in again behind. Through the drifting pearly gloom objects
were strangely magnified, made mysterious, portentous; rocks became
monsters looming through the darkness, the level crown of the mountain,
shifting fantasy of vapour. The ground beneath their feet seemed to
swirl and shift with the movement of the fog, and, now that shape
and colour had vanished from the world, an enormous crushing silence
dominated the air. Faint and melting before their eyes stretched away
the few visible yards of the flat soil, covered with short sedges,
and, among the loose piles of grit, with a thick growth of little
mountain-sorrel, whose brilliant reds and yellows had been levelled
by the blank twilight into a sombre note, as of stale blood spilled
out among the stones. Then, beyond, the solid earth wavered away
into a phantom, revealing here and there a rock or a patch of grass,
uncertainly, evanescently, as a faint, half-guessed shape, as the mist
lightened or lowered.
So they wandered carefully on across the plane of the summit, till
suddenly, ahead of them, grim and mysterious, rose a long grey barrier
fading to right and left in the profundities of darkness. It was the
old boundary wall of the summit, built by Celtic kings in the lost ages
when the hill-top was the last great British outpost in the north.
Humped, shapeless, an indistinguishable mound of stone, the old wall
remained intact, running round the plateau in a solid ring, unbroken
except at the point where the beacon tower stood. Knowing that outside
its precinct cliffs and pitfalls awaited the unwary, Kingston and
Isabel turned, and set themselves to follow it on its circuit, hoping
to find an outlet or a path. At one point they came on a small stone
chamber built into its bulk, but no sign of gateway or track could
they discover. Now they were crossing a bare part of the summit, a
wilderness of rocky wreckage. Here and there, at short intervals, great
rings and semicircles of half-buried stone could be divined in the
level of the soil, foundation-lines to show where the huts and palaces
of the Celtic kings had stood. Now they were but dim ridges, grown with
dwarf sedge and sorrel, through which roughly burst the gritstone bones
of their fabric. Adventurous climbers of the mountain had had their fun
of the rocks that former occupants had made their houses and defence.
Often the flat, hewn blocks had been lugged from their places by modern
hands, to be arranged in some riddle or motto. One ambitious tourist
had perpetrated a great design. Kingston and Isabel came suddenly upon
it. It stretched bravely across the earth, a device of big boulders,
carefully arranged. ‘I love you,’ it said to them, in its audacious,
solid letters. ‘I’ and ‘you’ at either end of the legend faded away
into the white obscurity beyond, and at their feet lay ‘love,’
obtrusive, unconquerable, built of sound stones so square and firm as
to defy the enmities of time and weather.
‘I love you,’ read Isabel slowly.
Hitherto few words had passed. Words, in that blanched silence, seemed
futile and impertinent. There was in that vast loneliness of the mist
a sense of intimacy too close to be profaned by speech; man and woman
were alone, two halves of one primitive creature, in a primitive,
floating chaos, where nothing else, as yet, had taken shape. How could
such a drifting void hold anything so formal as speech? Speech belonged
to that forgotten world of things visible and tangible, that world
where other human beings lived, and there was light, sound, movement.
Here, in the level, immovable silence of the primeval twilight,
Kingston and Isabel found the intervening ages swept away.
They had gone back into the dim time before the dawn of the world, when
there was nothing more than this poised existence, vague, voiceless,
pervasive.
‘I love you,’ repeated Isabel, studying the tourist’s device--the
blatant modern cry breaking into the abysmal stillness of old chaos.
Kingston, with an effort, tore himself from the white mist of fantasy
that had closed in upon his mind. The gloom suddenly held dangers;
they loomed ahead. He had a dim sense that something unseen was moving
towards him out of the swirling uncertainties around.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘We shall have to stay here till the clouds
lift a bit. I simply can’t pretend to know my way. We should probably
wander half over the moors, and go on in a circle till we got
hopelessly lost or fell in a pothole. What a fool I was not to watch
the sky! However, if the worst comes to the worst, you can shelter in
that little shanty, and I don’t expect Gundred will be anxious; she
never is.’
‘Read what this creature has written,’ said Isabel. ‘It sounds better
in a man’s voice.’
Kingston looked down at the straggling stone letters at his foot. ‘I
love you,’ he read. Then he looked up at Isabel.
She was facing him. The motto lay between them. Her face, against the
luminous pallor of the mist, was burning, aglow, filled with a strange
triumphant challenge. Suddenly, with an appalling crash of thunder,
the fantastic world in which he had lived so long shattered and broke
about his head. He saw the call in her eyes, understood it, answered to
it, helplessly as a bound slave. This was the one woman in the world.
He had known her since the beginning of time, been with her since the
creation; now at last she threw aside her veils, and stood before him,
no longer a stranger, but the lost part of his own soul--that lost part
for which he had so long been vainly seeking. Now, in an instant, he
recognised the cause of all his enmity, his unrest, his gnawing hunger,
the incessant angry cravings which had tormented him. Hitherto he had
not seen the truth; he had guessed it. And those guesses, painful,
secret, stifled--they had engendered all the throbbing hostility, all
the restless enmity with which he had regarded this half-recognised
intruder into his life. Now he knew her, now his heart heard the lost
language for which it had pined, now his soul stood complete again in
the acquisition of its lost part.
Isabel saw that the answer to her call had come. At last she was known.
‘Old friend,’ she whispered, smiling into his eyes.
‘You--you,’ he stammered. ‘And I did not understand. It is You. I have
never seen you before, Isabel, and yet--and yet I have known you all my
life.’
Suddenly she was clothed in glorious beauty from head to foot. From
head to foot she was altogether splendid and desirable. Every inch of
her called aloud for his worship. As the sooty kitchen-maid of the tale
strips off her rags and stands revealed a King’s golden daughter, so
now the accidents of Isabel’s disguise, the untidy hair, the shapeless
clothes, all passed out of Kingston’s consciousness. Henceforth she
stood far above such peddling criticism. The rules of his ordinary
taste could never apply again to this recovered spirit out of the dead
ages. She was his--his right, his property, his existence. She was
altogether without fault or blemish, the completion of himself.
‘You are beautiful,’ he said in a low voice--‘you are beautiful, the
real Isabel. I never guessed what beauty was. It is you, Isabel. It has
always been you.’ Wonder at the miracle possessed him, tied his tongue,
gave him the pathetic little blundering gestures of the blind--of one
suddenly emerged from a lifetime’s black darkness into the blinding
glare of daylight.
‘You have come to me at last,’ smiled Isabel. ‘I wondered when you
would. You have been trying not to wake.’
‘I have been holding my eyelids down,’ he answered. ‘I have been making
myself blind. It has been hell; Isabel ... Isabel!’
‘Yes,’ she replied--‘yes. You have been denying me ... you have been
denying yourself. It is Peter’s crime. Of course it was hell. But now
you have confessed the truth--the truth which was from the beginning.’
He stared at her--the man made perfect in full self-realization--at
her, the woman, whole and entire in her reunion with himself. Soul
imperiously cried to soul, and body to body. She had the unimaginable
beauty of the thing created by its lover, loved by its creator. Every
line and curve of her was perfected handiwork of his own rapture. The
loveliness that he saw in her, his own heart, his own flaming fancy
had planted there, had fashioned and worshipped as the lover always
fashions the idol that he worships.
‘How is it,’ he said hoarsely--‘how is it you can be so beautiful,
Isabel? You are not beautiful. My eyes know you are not beautiful. And
yet my heart knows better. My heart knows there is nothing like your
beauty--nothing like it, Isabel, anywhere in the world. My soul is
twisted up in every part of you; there is something of me in every part
of you. Your hair, your skin, your eyes--they are me, Isabel; I have
given myself to make them. Can you understand it, Isabel? There isn’t
an inch of you in which the sinews and the nerves of myself have not
always been woven and twisted.’
‘Ah,’ she cried, answering his low tones with a deep burst of feeling.
‘We have been together through the worlds. We are not strangers.
That is what you mean. You have buried yourself in me, and I have
buried myself in you. We belong to each other. We have always belonged
together. There are only you and I in this white pale world. That is
what real lovers are. Alone--alone together for ever and ever and ever.
Nothing can ever break our solitude--nothing can put itself between
us--if only we are honest with ourselves.
‘Isabel, what does it mean--this that we feel? What is it that we are?’
he asked, whispering as if in the presence of a sacred mystery.
‘Ourself,’ she answered triumphantly--‘ourself, awake, brought to
life, welded together again. We have come out of a hundred ages. Do
you suppose that we come together now for the first time? How do we
know each other, then? This that we feel is the song of many dead souls
calling in each of us to the many dead souls that have loved us in the
other. We have been bound together since first we met in the far-away
distance of things. Love is that. Love is never a new thing. Love is
the oldest thing in the world. It has lived through a hundred thousand
deaths of the body, and gathered strength and knowledge at every stage
of its journey. It’s a jewel of a hundred thousand memories crushed
together and crystallized into a pure sparkle of lights. It’s a chain
of a hundred thousand links, each heavier than the last, and more
golden. Kingston, the chain is round us and round us. Tie it tighter,
tighter, for ever and ever. We will live everlastingly in this land of
splendid bondage.’
‘Isabel, what is it the wise people of the East say?’ answered
Kingston, in the stupefaction of ecstasy. ‘They pledge themselves to
one another for half a dozen lives or more. Isabel, that is what you
mean. You and I are both bound together. We’ll plight our troth again
now, far ahead into the future. For a score of existences, Isabel. Our
love was not born a minute ago; it will not die to-morrow. It goes on
and on, whatever bodies it takes to clothe itself. Our love is the only
thing of us that goes on. And nothing can destroy it. It is ourselves.
You are mine, Isabel, and I am yours--you are me, and I, you, not only
now, in these shapes of ours, but through half a hundred more that
are not yet born, Isabel. Isabel, what do words and talking matter?
We cannot get away from each other; we are the same person. Now and
always, Isabel. But we will never lose ourselves again; we must always
recognise each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘again and again and again. For ever and always. You
have been trying to cut me, Kingston--_me_! trying to cut yourself.’
‘You are chained to me, Isabel, and I to you! I will never break the
chain at my end; you must never try to break it at yours.’
‘No; we are always the same person henceforth. Why, there is no bond.
We are too close together now even to be bound.’
She stood gazing at him, her eyes, her pose, her manner inspired with
conquest. The blank, sickening ferocity of passion seized him as he
answered her look. It caught him by the throat, swept him away in a
rapture of agony. To crush that beauty of hers, to mangle it, strangle
it, absorb it utterly in himself, became at once the one blinding,
obliterating need that filled his whole consciousness. An insatiable
thirst of her loveliness possessed him. The keen, flame-like delirium
of his desire was a devastating pain. His whole being moaned with
the aching torment of it. The sight of her, the thought of her, went
through him, pierced him, rent his innermost heart in twain. The
drunken glory of suffering that held him on the wheel of knives was a
frenzy very different from that placid repletion which had been his
ideal--how long ago?--of the great ideal passion. Now at last he knew
what passion was--the parching, gorgeous misery of it, the straining,
leaping martyrdom. The ancient secret madness that once had dwelt in
the orderly rooms of his father’s heart now stirred again in the son’s,
and bled once more, under the wounds of ecstasy, as once, for a wild
hour, it had bled long since at the hands of that ill-fated, forgotten
woman whose place was now usurped by Isabel. Kingston, his calmer self
destroyed by the red intoxication, moved towards his fate, vaguely,
blindly.
‘Isabel--Isabel!’ he murmured with dry, cracking lips, groping hands
outstretched to take her.
And Isabel welcomed his coming as the crown of life. She threw his arms
wide and waited, glowing and transfigured.
The ghostly twilight of the mist was round her, behind her. The face it
revealed was fierce with joy, exquisite in its vividness. The dark hair
drifted round it, and the throat rose vivid and white from the low-cut
collar of her dress, thrown back splendidly, an ivory column. The neck
of her dress was fastened awry by a little brooch, whose diamonds
gleamed dully in the pale glooming.
And in an instant the man’s flaming drunkenness had passed--passed
utterly, in a spasm of torment almost beyond his bearing. As sometimes
we are torn painfully, violently from the gay madness of a happy
dream by the sound of a bell or some other noise that penetrates to
our consciousness from the outer world beyond our vision, so now, in
the crisis of his passion, the sight of his wife’s brooch at Isabel’s
throat recalled Kingston Darnley, with a jarring crash, to the horrible
realities of life. Isabel, characteristically buttonless and pinless,
had borrowed it from Gundred to make good the deficiencies of her
blouse. His arms fell, the light of his eyes grew dull, and died. His
body stood motionless, and his spirit went down into the abyss of hell.
Isabel saw the change, and at the sight her own glory sympathetically
faded. They had done with the heights. Now their feet were set on earth
again.
‘Isabel--Isabel!’ he repeated. But the flame of his utterance had died
down into a grey dreariness.
Isabel saw that her moment was passing. A horrible anxiety possessed
her. ‘What is it?’ she cried. ‘Kingston, what is it? What has come
between us?’
He pointed to the brooch. ‘Gundred,’ he answered--‘Gundred. We had
forgotten.’ He was suffering so acutely in the death of passion that
he could hardly make his words intelligible. The wrench was agonizing.
Passion was not dead, but his heart knew that it must die--that he
himself must be its executioner--must cast out the guest that was the
dearest part of himself--cast it out and cut the throat of it. He
desired still with all his soul, but knew that his desire must rest
for ever unfulfilled. He belonged to Gundred. He must face his own
responsibilities.
Isabel could not hear what he said. But she shivered in the cold that
had fallen upon them. Without words she understood what it was that had
cut down the flower of his rapture in a moment, what drawn sword it was
that had suddenly thrust itself between them. She stood withered and
stricken with the shock, grown suddenly pale and old.
Kingston was fighting down his pain, struggling with it, and gradually
bringing it into bounds. He was too clear-sighted to give himself any
hope. Had he been sprung of a more lawless stock, of men accustomed
to love where they chose, without consideration of morality, he might
have taken his pleasure as it came, and never given a thought to
self-reproach or duty. But as it was, bygone generations stirred again
in him, of men who had lived cleanly, decently, according to their
lights, avoiding the wild urgencies of passion. Law, custom, convention
had ingrained into them a respect for rule and restraint, and now their
latest descendant reaped in his own person the cruel reward of all
their virtues. To go further in the ghastly labyrinth was impossible.
Joy was unattainable. Only duty could be pursued. And for shirking that
there could be no excuse.
Without a word he turned and walked away from that ill-omened motto
on the hill-top. Vaguely, with hands thrust down into his pockets,
he wandered on, crushing down the misery, the angry clamours of his
nature, and steeling himself violently to the preservation of what
remained possible to him of decency. For the sake of Gundred, of
himself, of Isabel--for the sake of his love and hers, he must at least
live as clean as might be. The struggle was a martyrdom, though, the
shock of self-mutilation a grinding, lancinating anguish.
Isabel stood for a moment, then followed him across the flat ground.
She soon caught him up, and they advanced together in silence through
the driving mists. Suddenly, vague and ghostly, the old cairn rose
before them again, looming mountainous. When he had reached the stones
at its foot, Kingston threw himself down upon its steps with a heavy
gesture of lassitude. And still the silence ruled.
‘Isabel,’ he said at last, in a dull, tired voice--‘Isabel, you must
forgive me if you can. I have been a beast. I must have been off my
head. I feel as if I had been drunk, and was only just beginning to
come to. Whatever rot I talked you must try and forget it, Isabel. I
can’t make out what the devil can have come over me!’
The woman gave him an angry, challenging glance. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I
won’t forget it. You spoke the truth. Why are you beginning to tell the
old weary lies again? Surely we have got beyond that.’
Her words, her defiant tone, caught his attention.
‘You didn’t understand,’ he said. ‘I was a brute; there’s no more to
be said. Don’t try to say any more. Of course you can’t understand. My
God, what a damned muddle I have made of things!’
‘But of course I do understand, Kingston. Nothing can undo what you
have said. It didn’t need saying, and no amount of denials can ever
make it untrue.’
Kingston looked at her anxiously.
‘Isabel,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘Do you realize what you are
saying? I was fool enough to tell you----’
‘What we both knew before in our heart of hearts,’ she interrupted
passionately. ‘And now we know each other. Oh yes, I understand you.
All of a sudden you have been overcome by some absurd qualm--some whim
or other. You think we are to be separated by some ridiculous fad.’
Amazement held him. This time he fixed his eyes on her and spoke
slowly, laboriously, as one speaks English to someone who can only
understand a foreign language.
‘A fad!’ he repeated. ‘Hang it all, Isabel, is honour a fad, and
decency, and all the rest of it? One does what one can. Is it only a
whim?’
‘Yes,’ she answered violently. ‘It is only a whim. These artificial
scrupulosities of yours, they are just middle-class superstitions. You
belong to me, and I belong to you. We know that is true. Very well,
then; why should we deny in deed what we know to be true in fact. Oh, I
have no patience with such whims. Nothing can separate us; why should
we pretend to be separated by the fact that you have got what you call
a wife? I am your wife. You have no other. You can’t have another.
Your only duty is to me--to me and to yourself. All the rest is mere
romantic sentimental nonsense.’
His fastidiousness swung him back into a reaction of almost physical
repulsion as he contemplated her. The impossibility of making her
understand any honourable point of view was dreadful. He loathed her
with all his heart as she sat there trying to enforce her claim. And
yet he could not deny her claim, and, despite his shuddering disgust,
he loved her as much as ever, reluctantly, angrily, but with all the
secret unreasoned impulses of the bondage that held him.
‘Isabel,’ he said, with forced gentleness, ‘can’t you even try to
understand? I am sorry. Yes; it is true what you say. We belong to each
other. Nothing can alter that. But I have given my word to someone
else, and I must--don’t you see?--having struck the bargain, I must
keep it. Make it a little easy for me, Isabel, though God knows I don’t
deserve it. But one wants to keep one’s self as clean as one can.’
‘I won’t make it easy for you,’ cried the other, beginning to realize
that he had entrenched himself behind a wall of determination. ‘Clean?
You won’t keep yourself clean by playing the hypocrite with Gundred.’
‘Ah, God! Poor Gundred! It is a dirty game I have played with her all
along. And yet I never knew. Before God, I never understood. I meant
to deal fairly, and I will deal fairly, too, as fairly as I can. The
mistake was mine, and I’ll pay for it--pay for it all alone. Don’t you
see, whatever happens, she must not suffer, Isabel. She--she has given
me all she had to give. So much for so little, Isabel. I must never
let her guess that I haven’t an equal love to give in return.’
‘As if she will not guess it every day and hour of her life! Do you
suppose you can deceive her?’
‘At least, I can give her a decent show in the eyes of the world,’
replied Kingston, showing a really subtle knowledge of Gundred’s
temperament. ‘That will be better than nothing, any way. Oh, Isabel,
the whole affair is a damned horror. It’s all my fault. But we shan’t
make it any easier by letting ourselves go to pieces over it. The only
thing I can do now is to save myself from being any more of a brute
than I can help. Yes, I know we love each other; we shall always love
each other, worse luck. But we must spend the rest of our lives trying
to forget it. We must kill our knowledge, Isabel. It’s the best thing
we can do, damn it, for the best that is in us. I’ve made my mistake
and had my fling, and come my cropper; now I must stand the shot.’
‘It is not as if you could,’ cried Isabel--‘not as if you could pay
your debt by yourself. It falls on me, because I am a part of you. I
have to pay the heaviest price of all. I have done nothing; I have made
no mistake; and now I am to pay!’
He stared curiously at her excited face.
‘We pay together, then,’ he said slowly, ‘and we pay a heavy price to
keep our love for each other untarnished. That is what it comes to.
I’ll pay anything not to tarnish my love for you, Isabel, my opinion
of you. It is all I have left. I must save that at any costs. And save
a--well, a little rag of my own decency, too. You are asking me--I hate
saying it, but it is true--you are asking me to dishonour both of us
by dishonouring my wife. I rate our love and ourselves a little higher
than that, Isabel.’
‘Oh, you are bloodless!’ she answered passionately--‘a bloodless
prig! There is nothing of the man in you. Have you _nothing_ in your
veins--no warmth, no life at all--that you can go on talking these
frigid fancies of yours? Where do you come from--what are you? What
are you made of? Can you feed your passions with these romantic
metaphysics? What’ll they give you? Will they warm you when you are
cold--with Gundred? Will they feed you, when you are starved--by
Gundred? Will they give you company, when you are alone--with Gundred?
Talk of your honour and mine! Our love is our honour. There is nothing
else in the world. Gundred is nothing; there is no such thing as
Gundred. I have blotted her out of existence!’
Never had the pagan egoism of Isabel been more terrifying, more
repulsive. Through his love he hated her as he watched the cruel swift
sneer of her nostrils as she talked of his wife.
‘Have you no shred of pity?’ he asked quietly. ‘Think of Gundred. The
most damnable thing in the world has happened to her. She has given
herself--her whole self--and got nothing in exchange. Can’t you at
least let her have pity and respect? Poor little Gundred! I thought it
was a square bargain when I struck it. I thought I gave her all I had
to give. I swear I thought so. And yet all the time I belonged to you,
Isabel, and you to me. Don’t you see that the only thing we can do now
in common honesty is to spare Gundred all we can, and spare ourselves
the dishonour of cheating Gundred even more than we have already?’
But Isabel was beyond appeals, frankly barbarous and merciless.
‘Gundred took her risks. All women do when they marry,’ she said. ‘And
now she does not count any longer. What sort of man are you, to be
pining about Gundred when I am here by your side? Look at me--yes,
look, look--and see how long you can remember Gundred.’
She fixed his gaze with burning eyes. But he turned away his head and
refused to take up the challenge.
‘I suppose it is your right,’ he answered, ‘to make everything as hard
for me as you can. I deserve it, I know. Oh yes, you blot out all
thought of everything but you, as soon as I look at you. You are the
only thing I can see in the world. And I won’t look at you, Isabel.
It is no use. Must I tell you again? I won’t stain the love we have
for each other by any further treacheries towards the duty we owe to
each other and my wife. Oh, Isabel, if you would only believe me, it
is because I love you so awfully, so damnably, that I cannot look at
you, or touch you. I love you too much. I ache in all my bones with
the love of you, and I love you too much and too well to satisfy my
love. Oh, don’t you understand? We could never forgive ourselves, never
feel clean again. Our love would have been spoiled, made filthy and
horrible with deception and mean lies and beastliness. It’s a sort
of responsibility we have, to keep it clean. We can’t kill it; it is
there, it always will be there. But, at least, we can prevent it from
turning us black and rotten. I’d sell my life, Isabel, to have our love
free and honourable--I would, Isabel.’
Isabel laughed. ‘Oh, this dry and tedious discussion!’ she cried. ‘How
many men would hair-split and quibble like this? Thank God, I have
blood in my veins! My people never cared where or whom or why they
loved. They took their pleasure where they found it. They were above
all laws but their own desires. No silly conventions and superstitions
ruled them. They were big, passionate men and women, with life in their
veins, not sawdust.’
‘Do you care nothing, absolutely nothing,’ he asked, ‘for--well, for
feeling that you have behaved as cleanly as you can? Nothing for
consequences? Nothing for anything but the pleasure of the moment?’
‘It is in my blood,’ repeated Isabel arrogantly, investing the crude
horror of her selfishness with a certain barbaric grandeur. ‘You know
how I hate these huckstering considerations of yours. My self-respect
is involved in getting what I want. Defeat is my only shame. And
consequences--who cares for them? I know,’ she went on, giving the
quotation with proud defiance--‘“I know that about this time there is
a prophecy that a Queen of England is to be burned, but I care nothing
if I be she, so that I have and hold the love of the King.” The love of
my King I have and I hold; what does the rest signify? I told you Queen
Anne and I were cousins.’
‘How I wish,’ he said--‘oh, how I wish to God I could make you
understand what I feel. I feel the most contemptible beast on the
earth; you alone can help me to win back a little of what I have lost.
If only you would make it easier for me, Isabel--if only you would make
it easier for me, by believing how ghastly hard it is.’
‘Yes; hard, hard, hard,’ said Isabel--‘hard I believe it is,’ she
repeated, meeting the anguish and the struggle of his gaze. ‘And I
want to make it harder. I want to make it impossible. Find yourself,
Kingston--know yourself. Don’t go on tormenting us both with scruples
and neurotic nonsense.’
He rose and stared down at her with furious eyes. ‘You are pitiless,’
he said--‘altogether horrible and evil. There’s no decency or
civilization in you. You are as fierce as a savage. As I listen to you
I hate you; every fibre in me hates and dreads you.’
Isabel rose also and faced him. ‘And when you look at me?’ she asked.
‘When I look at you,’ he groaned--‘when I look at you, every fibre of
me longs for you and cries out for you. And yet I swear I hate you,
Isabel.’
‘Go on hating me, then, like that,’ answered Isabel triumphantly. ‘You
have conquered me now. I feel that I cannot get near you again. For I
know what that hatred means. And some day I shall win. I am bound to.
You belong to me. You _are_ me. You recognised that a few minutes ago.
But now you are a fool. You refuse your happiness. Well, one day I
shall bring you to it again.’
‘Let me go, Isabel,’ he pleaded. ‘Let us try to do the little best
we can, you and I. Don’t make our lives more difficult or shameful
than they need be. Oh yes, I know that you have everything in your
power--too well I know it.’
He spoke wearily in a low, broken voice that seemed to foreshadow the
end of his resistance. As his weakness grew manifest Isabel’s strength
grew greater.
‘There is no escape from me,’ she said. ‘Remember I am yourself. And
I shall always be there at your side, in your house, waiting, waiting
till you wake up again from this foolish dream.’
His struggle had suddenly collapsed into the helplessness of fatigue.
Even at this defiance of hers he made no sign of revolt. ‘Oh, God,’ he
said, ‘how can I get rid of you? What chance am I to have? But it is no
use talking. One can’t talk the same language as you--one can’t talk in
the same century. It is hopeless, I know. Your ideas are as savage as
Queen Isabel’s--you have got all that fearful barbarous selfishness of
hers, and one’s only chance of making you understand would be to talk
to you in the old French that she must have spoken.’ His voice trailed
off into silence.
Isabel drew closer to him, and laid her hands softly on his arm.
‘Kingston----’ she began.
He shook off her light touch, and looked her full in the face. His eyes
were blazing, and his manner had the restrained roughness of passion
held hard in leash.
‘Isabel,’ he said, ‘if you touch me, I swear to God I love you so much
that I shall kill you--here and now, with my naked hands.’
She believed him, and was exalted by triumph. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you do
love me. You are becoming a man at last. That would be a good death to
die.’
‘Body and soul of you,’ he went on fiercely, ‘hateful and glorious--I
might destroy them, mightn’t I, but never could I be rid of them. I
know there is no escape, Isabel. And now surely you can let me be. I am
bound to you now and for always. Isn’t that enough?’
Isabel smiled. ‘Enough,’ she cried. ‘It is everything; now or later,
what does it matter? I win. I win. Kingston,’ she added, dropping
indifferently from the heights of emotion to the plain lands of prose,
with something of that unconscious ease which one might have imagined
in the nature of a woman like Isabel the Queen, the very prose of whose
life was emotion, and whose emotion was so practical as to be daily
prose of her existence--‘ah, Kingston, I am tired. I am simply dropping
with weariness. Are we going to get down off this mountain to-night?
Because, if not, I must try to sleep in that hut we saw. And I know you
will not be able to run away from me.’
‘Sleep, by all means, if you can,’ he answered. ‘There is no going
down through this mist. Luckily the night will be fairly warm, and
by morning the clouds will have broken. But you will be hideously
uncomfortable, I am afraid.’
‘No,’ she replied; ‘I am naturally primitive. I have never minded
roughing it.’
Exhausted by their discord of wills, they now, by mutual consent,
talked coolly and indifferently, casting memory behind them.
Kingston helped Isabel to find the hut, and did what he could to make
it habitable. Then, leaving her to get what rest she might, he returned
to his thorny vigil under the old beacon. The air was motionless, and
not ungenial in its temperature. Enveloped above and below in blank
darkness, he had the sensation of being balanced softly in space. The
calm, after the ardent misery of their dialogue, was inexpressibly
refreshing. He abandoned himself to its placid influences, and instead
of devoting the night to a thrashing out of all the many difficulties
that threatened his relations with Gundred and with Isabel, he let it
drift him away into the domain of peace. He hardly knew how completely
exhausted he had been, and it was with the surprise which always
attends us when we find ourselves doing prosaic things that seem at
variance with the high dramatic moments of life they follow, that at
last he found himself floating quietly off in sleep.
Anguish was still there, deep down in his heart--a bruised feeling of
hunger and dissatisfaction, a great shame for himself, and a great pity
for his wife, as well as a firm resolve that she should not suffer.
But passion had dulled the edge of its own intensity; only dull aching
pains were left, rather than acute stabbing ones. Disappointment and
hopelessness possessed him in an inexorable but not agonizing grip. In
fact, he was too weary to feel the full weight of the yoke that was
laid upon him. Cradled in the great silence, his tired consciousness
sank at last to rest.