attraction, psychical magnetism, and the like. Common-sense is the
thing. Consider women as so many nuts. Take any one, it doesn’t matter
much which, provided it is not worm-eaten. And if one particular nut has
a golden shell, nab it, my boy, and don’t talk about psychology.
Poetical impracticabilities have ruined plenty of clever men. So long as
a woman has a pretty face, a healthy body, and a fairly amiable mind,
don’t you grumble. Give her good pin-money and plenty of honest animal
affection and she’ll do. We’ve got to live in this world, not dream.”
VII
LOVELY were the Mallan valleys where the woods came down to drink of the
golden meads. The trees clambered up against the clouds, wild yet
imperturbable, silent yet steeped in mysterious music that spoke to the
soul. Larch and cedar, birch and pine, oak and mountain-ash stood as on
the slopes of a great amphitheatre and watched the Mallan moving to the
sea. Willows dipped their branches in the stream. Gnarled, cloven oaks
thrust their rough fists into the white bosoms of flowering thorns. The
Mallan banks were all of gold, of golden tissue spread upon green
velvet. Moon-faced daisies whitened the long, languorous grass where
wild sorrel shone like flame in the western sun. The blue bloom of
summer and a great stillness covered the woods.
The Mallan burned brilliant in the sun. Rippleless, it stretched a band
of blackened silver betwixt its sedges. A ring of eddies, a splash of
foam, or a golden gleam darting swift and evanescent through the crystal
darkness told of the life below. The blue-and-white mosaics of heaven
shone on its idle bosom. Dragon-flies, blue, green, and scarlet, skimmed
gossamer bright over rush and flag. Gnats played in the shallows and the
moorhen paddled in the shade.
Weary of whipping the irresponsive water, the girl kneeling in the grass
laid down her rod and glanced at her companion under the broad brim of
her rose-laden hat. A June splendor burned upon her face. Her light
summer dress of some greenish and opalescent fabric hung about her
figure with a cool luxuriousness, tinted as with the cold glimmer of a
fading west.
“No sport,” she cried to the man down stream, in her rich, full-throated
voice, a voice that seemed in keeping with the opulence of her beauty.
“None,” came the echo.
“I’m bored.”
“At fifty yards!”
Ophelia smiled. Her lips were long and pleasurable, and a physical and
sensuous magic seemed radiated from her figure. Her eyes fell into a
contemplative stare as she watched the man draw near, swinging his fly
to dry in the sun. He was bareheaded and his bronzed and handsome face
shone eager to the west. His eyes had a habit of kindling when their
glance lighted on the girl’s face. He was a clean-limbed man withal,
supple as a young ash, sanguine, keenly sensitive, a man such as women
love.
“No sport,” he said, smiling in the sun.
“An empty day, a wasted day. Am I a sentimentalist?”
The woman laughed a laugh that was peculiarly witching.
“We are both unimpeachable.”
“Such enthusiasts.”
“Model piscators, always gossiping, never keeping cover, missing rises,
letting our wits wander. Gabriel, you are making a horrible cockney of
me. I could not look my Scotch gillie in the face.”
An indefinite suggestiveness appeared even in these sparse, jesting
words. The trout silvering the Mallan’s shadows were poorly imperilled
by the girl and the man upon the bank. Too human a Providence interfered
with the genuine bigotry of sport. The fish, had they known it, were but
dumb players in the opening stagecraft of an eternal and stage-worn
play.
“We must catch something,” said the girl, decisively, plucking at the
grass that caressed her dress.
“Even though it be a cold.”
“Don’t be flippant.”
“Nay, I am serious for your sake.”
“That is very good of you.”
“I am a most serious Walton, a most complete angler.”
“For compliments.”
“I land too many as it is.”
The girl smoothed the creases from her skirt, Gabriel watching her hands
gliding over the green undulations with a pleasurable languor. Her hair,
full of light, curled over her ears and neck, and her shoulders were
peculiarly graceful, as she stood half stooping, her long lashes
sweeping her sunburned cheeks. A sudden upward glance and her eyes met
Gabriel’s. A passionate challenge flashed in the sun. Ophelia’s cheeks
kindled. Gabriel flushed an echo of red under his bronzed skin. They
were both silent awhile as in thought.
The girl stretched out her arms like Clytie appealing the setting sun. A
golden glow streamed above the woods; the scent of grass lay heavy on
the air; a great silence abode over the meadows.
“I am stiff and it is growing late.”
“You are tired?”
“No.”
“Shall I try one more cast?”
“Yes. I will watch you.”
A kingfisher flashed, a living sapphire, before their eyes. Gabriel drew
back behind the willows and walked on silently in the long grass. The
girl watched him awhile, and then followed, her green skirt sweeping the
golden flowers at her feet. She was as fair and perilous as La Belle
Dame Sans Merci, perilous with her proud eyes and her glimmering hair.
Gabriel had seen rings swaying on the still silver of the stream. He was
on his knees crawling towards the bank. Ophelia, poring over the
sensations of her own heart, had drawn near with an unconscious egotism
of desire. Not reasoning on the scene before her, she drew nearer still
with the western sunlight beating on her face. The man by the bank had
half risen from his crouching posture. A swing of the rod, a swishing of
tackle, a twinging start of pain. The silver trout had escaped
temptation through the flash of a woman’s arm.
Gabriel turned, dropped the rod, came to the girl with warm self-anger.
A blue dun-fly specked her green sleeve; her lips were parted over her
teeth; the fingers of her right hand gripped the twine. She tugged once
at it, winced, and smiled in the man’s face. Gabriel fumbled for a knife
and cut the line short.
“Clumsy beast that I am!”
“No,” she said, with a laugh, “better arm than cheek. There’s
philosophic vanity for you.”
“Shall we go back home at once? I will ride for Marjoy.”
“Nonsense. Take the hook out here.”
“I?”
“Yes.”
“I shall hurt you.”
“Nonsense. Cut the sleeve.”
He began at the wrist and slit the silk wellnigh to the shoulder with
his knife. The green folds fell away, baring the full, round arm white
and glimmering in the sunlight. A thin blood track rubied the skin below
the shoulder where the fly dipped its wings in the crimson stream.
Gabriel’s fingers quivered against the girl’s wrist. They looked into
each other’s eyes—a sudden, deep, and questioning look.
“Well?”
“Am I to take the thing out?”
A smile wandered over her lips. The man’s hands still touched her wrist.
“I have nerve. Push the barb through; the rest is easy.”
“I feel a brute.”
“Don’t be sentimental. I would rather you did it than any other man in
the world.”
The contradiction passed unheeded, for their eyes were still at gaze
into the opposing depths. They could hear each other breathing.
Gabriel’s fingers touched the girl’s arm. She shivered and laughed a
little, sucking in her breath betwixt her lips.
He steadied his hands against her arm. It was soon ended. A twist, a
quiver, a passionate fumbling of fingers, and the barb of steel was
tossed into the river.
“I have hurt you.”
Her eyes had grown dark with large and lustrous pupils; the sunlight
dusted amber in her hair.
“No.”
“Not a little?”
“Perhaps—a little.”
A streak of blood veined the white satin of her skin. The man went red
to the temples, bent suddenly, pressed his lips to the wound, and drew
back panting.
“Pardon me, I could not help it.”
“Nor I.”
She laughed very softly. Her hand still rested in his; her fingers were
as glowing metal in his palm.
“You rogue!”
“Let me bind it up.”
“You may.”
“Am I forgiven?”
She darted up her lips to his as he bound his handkerchief about her
arm. They stood staring in each other’s eyes, breathing hard, straining
towards each other. In another minute the girl was sitting amid the
feathery grass with the man’s head upon her knees.
VIII
UNDER the gloom of seven tall chestnut-trees stood the village school.
It was an antique building covered with roses and bounded towards the
church by an old-fashioned garden, where the massed scarlet of an array
of Oriental poppies contrasted with the white roses on the walls. It was
evening, and the western sun glittered on the casements through the
shimmering foliage of the trees. Children were playing over the graves
in the church-yard, youth mocking at death. By the lych-gate stood a
village Abraham cogitating over his evening pipe.
In the “club-room” of the school-house Mrs. Mince, in a magenta blouse
and a dark-blue skirt, was flicking the dust from the library shelves
with a red-and-white duster. Around her shone scriptural oleographs,
texts, and a goodly horde of irreproachable books. Over the fireplace
hung a scroll depicting Faith, Hope, and Charity footing it cheerily
over emerald grass. Some sylvan humorist had dowered Charity with a pair
of spectacles and a very obvious mustache.
Mrs. Mince was in the act of returning _Hints on Heaven_ to its niche
upon a shelf when the eldest Miss Snodley appeared before her, a
celestial vision, bearing work-bag and Bible. Miss Zinia Snodley was an
excessively thin little lady with prominent teeth, pince-nez, and a high
forehead. Her hair was dragged back tyrannically and fastened in a
diminutive and irritable bob at the back of her head. She had a habit of
tilting her sparrow’s beak of a nose in the air and of chirping volubly
with a species of declamatory splutter.
She thrust out a thin hand, its fingers primly extended and pressed into
line, and beamed excitably in the vicaress’s big and pallid face.
“Such news, my dear! I am quite out of breath hurrying here to tell you
all about it before the others came. Such news!”
Mrs. Mince sat down with some deliberation; she knew the length of Miss
Snodley’s despatches.
“Quite romantic,” spluttered Miss Zinia. “He proposed to her in the
Gabingly rose-garden, you know. I heard all about it—”
“About what?” interjected the vicaress.
“Young Strong’s engagement, my dear.”
Mrs. Mince held up her duster.
“Not to that woman!”
“There, I knew you would be amazed. They tell me Ophelia fainted;
frightful affectation in a great, strapping girl like that; but then, my
dear, those big creatures are always so emotional. I told my cousin
Herbert years ago that I would never marry, and the poor fellow got
engaged to a dissenter two months afterwards out of pique. Men are so
inferior in these days. And those Gusset girls are shocking; they remind
me of the pictures of that awful man Rossetti. You should have known my
grandfather; he was such a gentleman, and could quote Latin like a
native.”
Mrs. Mince adjusted the patent ventilator in the roof and remarked that
the room seemed “stuffy.”
“Of course I had foreseen the thing for weeks,” she said, with emphasis,
not desirous of appearing too markedly impressed. “I expected the affair
every day. Mr. Mince is very intimate with dear Lord Gerald.”
Mrs. Marjoy’s spectacles glittered in the doorway. The pair pounced upon
her, both speaking at once, as though eager to claim precedence in the
sensation. At the conclusion thereof Mrs. Marjoy displayed the
deficiencies in her dental array.
“A mere matter of decency,” she observed, with superlative sagacity.
“The Gusset girl had to avoid a scandal. These society women are
impossible. Ask my husband; he’s a man of the world.”
It was the evening of “The Guild” meeting, and the room was soon
surcharged with the matrons of Saltire. Their work-bags, pamphlets, and
gloves littered the deal table with its green baize cover. Unfortunately
these ladies were not unique, in that they were moved to be charitable
to other women’s reputations only by active moral endeavor.
Spontaneously invidious, they only transcended their natural impulse
towards mendacity by the power of spiritual pride. Venus ruled the room
that evening. Many minutes passed before Mrs. Mince could reclaim her
sisters from worldly discussion and direct their energies to the
prescribed philanthropies of the hour.
After the concluding prayer the members of the Saltire Christian Guild
again reverted with ardor to matrimonial topics. Mrs. Jumble, Saltire’s
intellectual luminary, discussed the problem with certain of her more
youthful disciples. Mrs. Jumble possessed a liking for epigrams; she
revered the Johnsonian spirit, and had embraced the dignity of a judge
summing up evidence. Moreover, her Roman nose lent color to the latter
illusion.
“Marriage, Miss Ginge,” she said, addressing that simpering young
lady—“marriage is a most serious and imposing circumstance, the
mingling of two individualities in the alembic of love. To be frank, I
consider Paul something of a pedant. He was a fanatic who did not
comprehend the full significance of woman in religious evolution. Now,
dear John would have made an admirable husband, so cultured, so
reposeful, so Victorian. Never marry a fanatic, my dear, even though he
be insane on the subject of potato-growing. Fanatics are unpleasant
persons to live with. As for the present example, after a thorough
sifting of individual eccentricities I should expect this alliance to
lead to prodigious domestic problems. The begetting of an unwieldy
family is the fundamental error of matrimony. Mr. Strong is a poet, I
believe. Tin trumpets and sonneteering do not harmonize kindly. Poets
and artists are generally undisciplined beings. I could quote you a
certain remark of Giotto’s; but you are over young, Miss Ginge, to
listen to realisms. Candidly, I foresee a fiasco in the approaching
marriage.”
There was one woman in Saltire who aspired to a higher philosophy than
that of a monthly nurse. To Judith Strong nothing was more repugnant
than the subjection of a brother’s character to the tyranny of trivial
tongues. For the prevalent physical estimate of marriage she had a
superlative loathing, nor did she love the rustic oracles and their
lore.
Judith Strong was one of those rare women blessed with superb instincts,
instincts angel-winged towards heaven. Her spiritual rosary was strung
with no sordid stones. Her aspirations were of the highest, her ideals
begotten of the blood of Christ. She had that power peculiar to women
who are great of soul, the power of seeing beyond the curtain of the
present and of gazing prophetic into eternal truth. Men might deceive
her; women never.
Now Ophelia Gusset was a physical being, a mere houri; a rampant,
worldly, yet lovely egotist. She believed in a life of sensations. While
fanatics struggled on cloud-solemn Sinai to take the tablets from the
Eternal Hands, this fair and complacent pagan garlanded the golden calf,
and stared into the mirror of pleasure to satiate her soul. Nor was it a
matter for amazement that Judith Strong thought of her future sister
with forebodings and repugnance.
There are men whose destinies are balanced upon a woman’s influence;
Gabriel Strong was such a man. His sister knew that he was too sensitive
to the sensuous waves of life, too easily intoxicated by poetic
exaltation of the senses. Like many imaginative men, his fancies,
wine-radiant bacchanals, overleaped his reason. Wisdom walked not at his
right hand, but pursued him afar off. A unique woman’s love, or a
Jesuitical discipline, were the two powers either of which could have
steeled his manhood. He needed some ineffably tender and all-wise
Beatrice to absorb his soul. As it was, he was to partner a crude
Cressida in the perilous path of spiritual evolution. When the mob
applauded and gabbled of gold and honor, Judith lifted the curtain
covering the hot egotism of this woman’s soul, and found no saving balm
there, but a scourge.
As for John Strong, his paternal satisfaction had waxed ecstatic over
the fulfilment of his prophecies. He beamed on all creation, even as a
man who had received a baronetcy, a seat in Parliament, or some Titanic
legacy. So beneficent and seraphic was his humor that Mr. Mince seized
the auspicious season, and ventured to persuade him to reseat Saltire
church and to retile the floor of the chancel.
Various preliminaries had been amicably settled. Lord Gerald Gusset was
a cheery, mellow, and casual being. He was nothing of a prig with regard
to his own nativity, and would welcome any man as a retainer, provided
he possessed money, passable manners, and a good tailor. The Saltire
alliance was no mere sentimental affair. John Strong had disbursed
generously to his son’s profit; had engaged to buy The Friary, an old
manor-house in the neighborhood, and to allow Gabriel five thousand a
year. There was to be no legal settlement in the affair. Lord Gerald and
John Strong gossiped amicably over their port, and discussed details
with a gentlemanly levity that suited the consideration of such sordid
trifles. John Strong was eager to promise; the lord not unwilling to
receive. Legalities were shouldered into dusty oblivion. John Strong
preferred a free hand, and was not above professing extreme generosity
in order to obtain an unfettered monopoly of his son’s future. Gabriel
was still to be his son, paid and pampered out of the paternal pocket.
IX
JUDITH’S brother had chosen to sink his deeper convictions and to
embrace expediency as his lawful spouse. A callow pessimism had
persuaded him to scoff at what he chose to denounce as “the mad posing
of hyper-æsthetical principles.” He loved Ophelia Gusset in a rich
physical fashion; the mediæval spirituality of the poets had cheated him
too long. He began to believe Dante a fool and Petrarch a person who had
sentimentally wasted his opportunities. Five thousand a year, a romantic
home, a superb and comely wife—these facts suggested compromises that
were not to be contemned. What could not money give him—Spanish
orange-groves, Italian cypress thickets, brilliant books, pictures,
opulence in mood and movement. Were there not thousands of unfortunates
scrambling in life’s gutters for bare bread! Pandering to that
glib-mouthed sophist known as “common-sense,” he abandoned certain
spiritual ideals as the mere excrescences of youth. Having kissed
expediency upon both cold cheeks, he was prepared for her to lead him
into her most splendid habitation.
Coincidence, predestination, or the voice of the subconscious soul! What
matters it which we accept, provided we recognize the intense motive
power a single circumstance may exert upon some individual atom. Gabriel
Strong, poling out his light “outrigger” from the Saltire Hall
boat-house, had no vision of judgment before his eyes. He bared his
elbows, swung out manfully, heard the ripples prattling at the prow. He
was a man who loved to possess his physical moments in solitude. The
quickened blood set streams of thought aspinning, the deeper breathing
etherealized the brain.
There had been heavy rain in the night, and blue shadows covered the
woods. A haze of heat shimmered above the mist-dimmed hills. Infinite
freshness breathed from the dew-brilliant meadows. May seemed to have
lifted once again her fair young face to the sun. A deep splendor shone
upon wood and meadow, a green radiance dappled over with gold. Earth
smiled through her tears; the shadowy trees shook pearls from their
stately towers.
“Young man, my ribbon.”
The hail came like elfin music from under the green canopy of a willow.
There was a suggestive beauty in the voice that had spoken. Gabriel,
dreamer of dreams, had imagined himself supreme in most egotistic
solitude. He “backed water” spontaneously. His sculls foamed in the
tide.
Philosophy or no philosophy, he saw a young girl standing above him on
the bank, with sudden sunlight streaming through her loosened hair. Her
face shone like ivory under the green foliage arching her head. The
water ran silver bright below the grass and water-weeds at her feet.
There was a strange queenliness in her manner as she looked down upon
him and pointed with one white hand at the rippling shallows.
“My ribbon.”
Gabriel colored with a curious spontaneity that was particularly boyish.
The girl stood above him like some golden child peering deep-eyed from
the green umbrage of romance. Her left hand was hooked in the unfastened
collar of her blouse. Her shapely throat showed to its ivory base
betwixt the golden curtaining of her hair.
“My ribbon,” she explained, with no lessening of her unmeditated
stateliness. “I have dropped it in the water. You will give it me.”
A sudden memory swept out from the shadows of days past. Gabriel had
seen that face, that cloud of hair, before. He remembered as in a
forsaken dream, the blue sea and yellow sand, the black cliffs
crescenting the still lagoon. A great silence seemed to fall within his
heart as of a forest awed by the full moon.
A band of light blue silk floated amid the green weeds. Gabriel reached
for it, pressed out the water with his fingers, stood up in the shallow
boat, and hesitated. The girl did not move from her grassy dais under
the willow. Her shadow fell athwart the water. When Gabriel looked at
her, her eyes were not on the ribbon but upon his face.
The coincidence decided him. He took the near scull from the swivel,
poled in, stepped into the bow as the stem brushed the bank, took the
painter, gripped a tuft of coarse grass, and scrambled ashore. He
twisted the rope round the straggling root of a willow and stood up.
“Thank you.”
The ribbon passed between them; their fingers touched. It was mere
mesmerism, nothing more. Gabriel felt stolid.
“I am afraid the color will run,” he remarked.
“Will it?”
“I am not an authority.”
She looked at him with a certain critical candor, and said nothing. The
man colored, though he considered himself a metaphysician.
She had a number of pins in a kerchief on the grass, and without more
ado she began calmly to bind her hair. The man could see that it was
damp and lustreless, not yet reburnished by the sun. The girl had been
bathing in the Mallan. The idea inspired him. It was so mediæval—nay,
classic.
“Do not let me waste your time.”
“I am not in a hurry,” he answered.
“You want to talk to me.”
“I?”
“You do not go.”
“Why should I?”
There was a curious and superb simplicity about her that confounded
custom. Gabriel had a glib tongue on most occasions. For the nonce he
discovered gaucherie in his constitution.
“You are fond of the river?” said the girl, smoothing the blue ribbon
between her fingers.
“I am fond of being alone.”
“So am I.”
“Do you mean that for a hint?”
“I am always alone. What should I hint at? I dislike obscurities.”
“I was only sensitive for your sake,” said the man, with a smile.
“That is chivalry, is it not?”
“Perhaps.”
“You may talk to me—if you like.”
Gabriel considered her with an elemental sense of awe. Her manner was so
essentially natural that he could imagine no flaw in her modesty. He had
had abundant experience of coquettes. The girl did not appeal to him as
such, rather as a Diana or a Belphœbe.
She sat down a short distance from him, and flicked her skirt over her
feet. She had bound back her hair over her neck in rich and ample
clusters. Her blouse was still open at the throat.
“Do you live here?”
“At Saltire. And you?”
“With my father, on the hills above Rilchester. Are you twenty yet?”
Gabriel smiled in such fashion that her eyes echoed his.
“I am older than you are,” he said.
“Much?”
“You are illogical; how should I know?”
“You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray
eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the
sun. What shall we talk about?”
“As we have begun.”
“Our ages?”
“Ourselves, rather.”
“I never talk about myself.”
“Why not?”
“I never have any one to talk to.”
The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with
intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen
from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He
faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood
seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise
philosophy; and he stood in the sun.
“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.
Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held
his.
“No.”
“You have friends?”
“None.”
“Strange.”
“Is it?”
“I imagine so. Even the most reserved being possesses some one he can
call a friend. Perhaps you are jealous of conferring the epithet.”
“What epithet?”
“Friend.”
“My father does not believe in friends.”
“No?”
“He says they are too expensive.”
Gabriel smiled, but the girl’s face was unceasingly solemn. Her
expression, indeed, appeared to partake of the perpetual seriousness of
an earnest nature. A calm, unconscious melancholy shone forth from her
mind like a glimmer of sunlight reflected from some golden shrine.
“Your father must be something of a cynic.”
“My father is poor.”
“Only in gold, perhaps.”
“In mind, too,” she said, with transcendent and ingenuous candor.
“But you love him?”
“I do not know,” she retorted, with a certain contemplative sincerity.
“I have only read of love. I know Britomart and Florimel. I do not think
Britomart would have loved my father.”
“Why not?”
“I do not know.”
“Perhaps I ought not to ask you.”
They lapsed suddenly into silence. The girl with the gray eyes was
looking afar into the shadows of the woods. The water murmured at their
feet, a calm, unceasing monologue like the soft prattle of a mother.
The silence proved but a prelude to one of the girl’s strange and
flashing interrogations of the enigmas of life.
“Do you believe in a God?” she said.
“You ask strange questions.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps because I never talk to any one. People only speak to me in
books. And one reads of so many gods—Zeus and Apollo, Allah and Christ,
Venus, and great Ormuzd. Some mysterious sorrow often seems to tantalize
my soul. All nature, the sea, the winds, yearn for something that can
never be, and my soul echoes them. I stretch out my hands blindly, as to
a dark sky. There should be power and light beyond, yet my heart gropes
under the dim stars. There is often great hunger in me, hunger that I
cannot satisfy. I yearn for something—what, I cannot tell. I wonder
what we live for?”
“Perhaps to die.”
“And then?”
“There men disagree.”
She mused a moment like a Cassandra.
“All men seem to disagree,” she said.
Probably another half-hour passed before the girl rose from the grass
with the consciousness of parting. Gabriel, soft-fibred pessimist, stood
beside her with an utter sense of unreality bearing upon his brain.
“Good-bye; I must go home.”
“And I, too.”
She flushed a very little and her eyes kindled.
“Do you know—” she began.
“Well?”
“I am feeling lonely for the first time in my life.”
Gabriel said nothing.
“You will tell me your name?”
“Yes. Gabriel Strong.”
“I like it.”
“And yours?”
“Joan Gildersedge.”
She made a step towards him suddenly and extended her hand.
“You may kiss it,” she said. “They did that in the old days.”
And then she left him.
But Gabriel rowed home slowly down the Mallan with his head bowed down
in thought. There were certain words of an old legend stirring in his
heart, and the girl’s eyes followed him.
“Now when Tristan and Iseult had drunk of the potion, Love, who never
resteth but besetteth all hearts, crept softly into the hearts of the
twain. But it was not wine that was therein, though like unto it, but
bitter pain and enduring sorrow of heart, of which the twain at last lay
dead.”
X
‟GABRIEL, dear,” said the Honorable Ophelia Gusset, looking up at her
fiancé from the blue shadows of her parasol, “you are very dull to-day;
I hope I am not boring you too utterly.”
The man standing by the garden-chair looked down at the face that belied
somewhat in its aggressive stare the mild method of the girl’s reproof.
“You are charming, and I—I am gauche.”
“But why?”
“These functions always make me melancholy. I begin moralizing the
moment I am one of a crowd, an egotistical habit of mine. Please ignore
my cynicism.”
“Cynicism, indeed!”
“Well, you see, dear, this sort of affair is such a revulsion. When one
has been elemental for an hour or two, these social inanities rather try
one’s patience. I detest turning myself into a species of orthodox
dummy, wound up to spout commonplaces to equally commonplace people.
Laugh me out of it with those eyes of yours.”
The girl’s mood was not all for peace on the instant. Where a woman does
not understand, she waxes querulous, especially if the enigma touches
her heart.
“You might be sympathetic enough to realize that you no longer have only
your own morbid humors to consider.”
“Pardon me, I am selfish.”
“So early?”
“You shall reform me.”
Ophelia flashed a queer look at him from her strangely magnetic eyes. A
sudden quick spasm of passion seemed to pass through both frames. The
electric sentiment met—and sparked desire. Gabriel colored under his
straw hat.
“You have wonderful eyes.”
“Have I? Well—”
“I suppose we cannot help it.”
“What does it matter?”
The man sighed.
“It will not be long,” he said.
“And yet—”
She laughed—a deep quaver of passion.
“I am much of an Eve,” she said. “If you have any pity, do get me an
ice.”
Mrs. Mince had prepared a garden-party at the Saltire vicarage, a
cosmopolitan affair that effectually repaid the neighborhood for
courtesies accorded during the year. It was one of those thoroughly
inane and tiresome functions where every individual seemed intent on
covering his or her identity with a facile and vapid mask. People smiled
upon one another with a suspicious reserve and insulted one another’s
immortality with that effete social patois that distinguishes such
gatherings. Women “my deared” plentifully and dissected one another’s
toilets. Men looked bored and bunched together in corners to talk with a
vicious and morose earnestness. It was a mock festival in the name of
pleasure, where the local culture displayed its rites for the
edification of the young.
“You should go out and get to know people,” ran John Strong’s favorite
dogma to his son. “Mix in society; it will give you ease, my boy, and
gentlemanly fluency in conversation.” Unfortunately ideas did not bloom
under the Saltire bonnets, and the higher culture was not to be culled
from the tents of propriety.
Mrs. Marjoy and Miss Zinia Snodley were partnering each other under the
shade of Mr. Mince’s walnut-tree. The doctor’s wife was dressed in
damask red, with a dowdy black hat perched ungracefully on her crisp,
black hair. Her gloves were grease-stained and her unbrushed jacket bore
a generous covering of dust and discarded hair. Mrs. Marjoy always
declared that really handsome women could wear anything, and that style
was a personal magnetism, and not the result of milliner’s craft. Mrs.
Marjoy lived up to the ideal with admirable sincerity. It cannot be said
that in the matter of personal proof she converted others. Mrs. Marjoy’s
art was crude and elemental; her friends designated it with the title of
slovenliness. They even whispered that Mrs. Marjoy might so far sink her
convictions as to manicure her nails.
Four ladies were amusing themselves at croquet on a neighboring lawn,
and the voices of tennis-players came from the vicarage meadow. The
tea-table had attracted quite a crowd of votaries, and Mr. Mince, with
his parsonic leer, was running about with dishes of cake and fruit. “He
is such a charming man!” to quote Miss Snodley. The day found Mrs.
Marjoy in one of her fervid moods. The doctor had been playing croquet
with pretty Mrs. Grandison, a dainty, warm-hearted creature, the wife of
an artist who had taken a cottage near Saltire for the summer. And Mrs.
Marjoy hated all pretty women, not through any realization of
inferiority, but with the zest of a being who believed herself entitled
to the Juno’s share of popular devotion. Mrs. Marjoy was a woman who
never looked in any other mirror save that of confident egotism. At that
very moment she was in the midst of a candid critique, while her husband
was smiling over his teacup into Mrs. Grandison’s gentle, blue eyes.
“Don’t you think that woman shockingly overdressed, Zinia?” she said.
“That is the worst of being an inferior person; a woman like that has to
rely wholly on her costumier. London people are so abominably
self-confident. That chit there might really have come from behind a
bar.”
“These affairs are always so mixed!” said Miss Snodley, with a simper.
“Poor, dear Mrs. Mince, she always will ask everybody. I believe in
lady-like selections. Look at her talking to Miss Ginge; she detests
that girl, but that shows what a thorough woman of the world she is. We
Christian ladies, my dear Zinia, have to suffer our social inferiors
with cultured resignation. I never hurt anybody’s feelings. It is really
an effort at times to be charitable and to do justice to one’s
neighbors. But that is the essence of Christianity, my dear. Hallo,
there’s young Strong and his mistress.”
Ophelia, with Gabriel at her side, moved across the lawn in the
direction of the rose-walk. The girl was superbly dressed and
indubitably lovely. She moved with her usual complacent hauteur, the
semi-languid and physical egotism that betrayed her fibre. Gabriel
appeared melancholy. They were both of them silent.
“Young Strong looks bored.”
“Poor fellow!”
“No good can come of such a scandalous intrigue,” said the doctor’s
wife. “It’s nothing more, my dear Zinia. They are going to live at The
Friary. Nice dance that woman’ll lead him. Serve the prig right. She’s
all vanity and lace.”
“Perhaps they will be happy,” said Miss Snodley, with a sigh.
“I believe marriage improves many women, and then—children. They must
make such a difference to a woman.”
Mrs. Marjoy twitched her shoulders.
“Don’t be sentimental, Zinia. I always try to eliminate my own
prejudices, but that Gusset girl is a regular harpy. Did you ever see a
really good woman dress like that? Ah, here’s James; my dear, you look
bored.”
The doctor tilted his Panama hat and smiled somewhat apologetically at
his wife.
“That awful dowdy has been exhausting you with her chatter.”
“Mrs. Grandison?”
“Of course.”
“Mrs. Grandison is really a charming little woman,” observed the doctor.
“We have been talking about children; she has two such quaint little
elves, and she adores them. They have not been spoiled.”
Mrs. Marjoy sniffed; her spectacles glittered.
“You are always admiring other people’s children, James.”
“Yes, my dear.”
“Are you aware of the fact that I have had no tea?”
The doctor displayed immediate concern.
“I will get you some at once.”
“Don’t trouble; it’s of no consequence.”
“But Miss Snodley—”
“Of course you will be delighted to wait on Miss Snodley. Bring us one
of those small tables. I’m not going to have crumbs all over my dress.”
Later in the afternoon, Gabriel, who had left Ophelia chatting with Sir
Mark Melluish, an amusing old ragamuffin who reminded one of a walking
edition of Punch, unearthed Dr. Marjoy from a pool of millinery and
engaged him with a casual friendliness in a thoroughly orthodox gossip.
The doctor knew most folk in the neighborhood; for bad debts had made
him vigilant. He was, in fact, the very species of person Gabriel
needed.
“By-the-way,” he remarked, after discussing the possibilities of a local
tennis tournament, “a friend of mine asked me whether I knew anything of
an eccentric old fellow living somewhere near here; a bit of a miser, I
believe. You are ubiquitous in these parts. I might inquire of you.”
The doctor appeared encouraged; he was in a limp and idealess mood;
domesticities had depressed him. It was a relief to talk to a keen,
kindly young fellow whose eyes were full of sunlight. They drew two
chairs under the shade of a lime. Gabriel produced cigars. The two men
exchanged a species of mischievous twinkle that was vastly human.
“Off duty, eh?”
“For half an hour.”
“Rum things, women. Take my tip—make ’em knuckle under early; now or
never. Are these Murias?”
“Yes.”
“Nicotina is never in a temper. Terrible thing being a doctor. These
functions make me sweat. We medicoes have to trot round and do the
affable shop-walker to the community. Good for the practice, you know.
By Jove, we have to salve every soul with blarney. It’s blarney,
blarney, blarney from morning till night. My tongue’s dry. Going to be
married soon?”
“In a month or two.”
“Fine woman your fiancée, fit to make every subaltern in the Rilchester
barracks envy you like the devil. Let me see, you wanted information.
What’s the person’s name?”
Gabriel appeared to flog his memory.
“I almost forget it. Gilder—Gildersleeve—Gildersedge. Ah, yes,
Gildersedge! Rather a miser, my friend said.”
The doctor withdrew his cigar from his lips.
“By George! yes. I know the old beggar—a regular Silas; lives in a
house smothered up in trees on the third hill beyond Rilchester—a
regular hermitage, like a house out of a novel. You can’t see it for
trees till you get well inside the gate. I attended there on one
solitary occasion. It was the servant. Res natura. I only got paid after
a lawyer’s letter. Never been there since.”
Gabriel appeared interested despite his affectation. He had turned the
doctor into good grazing land, and anecdotes bristled. Dr. Marjoy had
not lived fifteen years with his wife without assimilating some of her
linguistical propensities.
“I remember talking with Clissold, of the bank,” he said, “and he told
me that old Gildersedge’s figures totted up phenomenally. He’s worth two
Scrooges. And, by Jeremy! he has a daughter; I was forgetting that
daughter.”
Gabriel tilted his chair and surveyed the clouds.
“A pretty beauty, I suppose,” he said, with cynical facility. Dr.
Marjoy, on the contrary, leaned forward and appeared curiously in
earnest.
“I call it a damned sin,” he observed, oblivious for the moment of his
surroundings.
Gabriel stared.
“I remember that girl well. She is a splendid creature, and I wondered
how such an old slut had been able to create such an anomaly. Poor
little beggar, she had the airs of a convent child and a queen rolled
into one. And to think of that young thing being penned up with a
money-crusted sot and a beast of a servant!”
Gabriel’s chair tilted forward abruptly. He sat rigid and nearly bit
through his cigar.
“This sounds Russian.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Poor little woman! I suppose she’s only a child. Her surroundings must
mar her in the making.”
The doctor cogitated.
“I don’t know about that,” he said; “women are queer creatures. Rear one
in a regular moral hothouse, and she’ll turn out a scarlet devil. Bring
up another in a dirty back garden, and she’ll grow up a regular
snow-white seraph. I only saw that girl once, but I’ll swear there’s
real grit in her.”
“God grant it!”
And from that moment the two men seemed to become strangely solemn.
Gabriel left Saltire that afternoon in the Gabingly carriage. He was to
stay the night at the castle and to attend a flower-show next day under
the auspices of the Gussets. It had already been mooted by the two
parents that Gabriel should stand for the constituency at the next
election. Old Sir Hercules Dimsdale was a decadent politician and none
too eager to continue in the ruck of publicity. The Gusset influence was
powerful, and John Strong ambitious. He was too old, he declared, to
contest the seat himself; his pride should be perfected in his son.
The dust flew from the wake of the thoroughbreds that whirled the Gusset
escutcheon through the streets of Saltire. Ophelia lounged in one corner
of the landau, a mass of intricate millinery, her sunshade shadowing her
somewhat peevish face. Her sister sat upright in the corresponding
corner, with her hat awry and her hands ungloved. Gabriel faced them
both on the front seat.
Ophelia was out of temper with the world at large. The parched and dusty
weather suited neither her complexion nor her humor. Moreover, the Mince
function had been deplorably dull, and Gabriel less the beau chevalier
than usual.
“Thank Heaven, that’s over!” she observed; “a tea-and-shrimp affair.
Blanche, I believe you enjoyed yourself.”
The younger sister responded cheerily.
“Had some rattling tennis and a smack at Mrs. Marjoy. Really, old Mince
keeps his grass in better order than his parish.”
“Sir Mark Melluish was the only bearable person I could discover.
Gabriel, you must have lunched on suet-pudding. I never saw such a bored
creature.”
The man smiled philosophically.
“These functions always addle my brain. I am beginning to recover.”
“For Heaven’s sake, hurry up, then.”
“My poor boy,” said Blanche, with a sly twinkle, “see what you have
taken upon yourself. Awful responsibility being engaged. You must keep
up appearances till you’re married, and then you can be as rude as you
like. Only another month or so. Cheer up.”
Gabriel passed half an hour alone with Ophelia in the conservatory that
evening. Her humor had changed, and the man’s brain was full of the
fumes of her beauty ere she had ended. Gabriel’s window at Gabingly
looked southward over the woods towards the sea. A full moon swam in a
crystal sky that night, bathing the earth in mysterious splendor. A
transcendent calm seemed to have compassed the sun-wearied trees. The
world breathed anew under the benisons of the stars, and there was no
sound to shake the silver web of sleep.
Gabriel crouched in the window-seat and stared out into the night. The
glimmering spirelets of the forest thrust up multitudinous on the
hill-side. The dark swell of the moors ran dim and distant beyond the
far spirals of the Mallan. A great melancholy had fallen upon the man’s
soul. His face shone white in the light of the moon. The cool breeze
breathing from the sea seemed savored with a spiritual purity that
wounded hope.
Restless visions glimmered in his brain. He saw himself and his own
being circled in fire that fed upon his manhood. A girl’s face haunted
him; her voice played through the moonlight. He beheld a figure radiant
with a divine womanliness moving within the coil of sin and squalor, the
sordid earthliness of an unlovely life. Forgotten chivalry had stirred
his manhood like some ghostly trumpet-cry out of the past. He breathed
out aspirations to the stars, dreams fair and impossibly pathetic. Joan
Gildersedge! Joan Gildersedge! To dare, to suffer, to liberate, to love!
Life born of sacrifice! Divine passion instinct with the inevitable
yearnings of the soul!
The castle clock chimed midnight. In the echoing silence that ensued,
sundry quick-snapping chords struck from a mandolin startled his
abandonment. He stood up half wearily, passed a hand over his forehead,
stared into space. Again the summons sounded from a neighboring
casement. The man moved to and fro in the shadowy room like a soul that
paces the darkened chamber of the flesh. Pierced by a sudden flashing
pessimism, he moved to the door, opened it noiselessly, stepped out,
turned and withdrew the key. Moonlight flooded from a large lancet
window into the long gallery. And was this life! To sow unto corruption,
to surrender the spirit to the dominion of the senses! Gabriel
shuddered, but obeyed.
XI
FOR several days a morbid dejection had possessed the heavens, and
clouds pressed gray and ponderous from over the sea. Rain had fallen
perpetually, beating the beauty from the flowers, weighing down the
foliage. A chill atmosphere had swept like the breath of an ice giant
into the radiant loggias of summer. The wind never rested. It moaned and
imprecated, pleaded and besought, broke forth into wild gusts of
desperate blasphemy. The trees whispered together like shivering and
misty ghosts before the gates of death. Their dim arms gesticulated in
the rain. Their green bosoms stirred with a troubled breathing, impotent
and piteous.
Atmospheric conditions exert an undue influence over minds that have
wandered from the radiance of health into the twilight of morbidity. The
stanch, big-chested toiler takes the storm into his bosom and laughs
like a Norseman buffeting ice-brilliant seas. To those of feeble moral
vitality the drearier passages of life are packed with intangible
temptations and imagined possibilities for sin. The man whose heart is
warm and clean cares nothing for rough weather. It is the bleached
æsthetic who turns pessimist or sensualist to cheat his own shivering
and hungry soul. Give the world a Tolstoï, rugged viking struggling
giant-like towards the truth, rather than some De Musset or Baudelaire
hugging an impotent sexuality in the lap of a prostituted art. The world
needs prophets, not pessimists. Pessimism is the result of moral
dyspepsia. It is a nobler thing to lift some simple lamp of truth to
light the hearts of men than to build a brilliant philosophic system for
the entangling of the intellect.
Zeus Gildersedge had suffered for a week from an exaggerated
melancholia. Evil weather always appeared to irritate his opiated brain,
inspiring a more sinister barbarism, a more restless temper. No man can
quench utterly his primitive intuitions. When the wind howled Zeus
Gildersedge shivered, drew his ragged philosophy closer about his soul,
and warmed his marrow with a more generous share of wine. The wind woke
the coward in him, revealed that native superstition that is lodged deep
in every heart. Moreover, certain words that he had heard in the silence
of his own garden had haunted his brain like the emissaries of an
outraged God. He had been drinking heavily, and taking more opium than
even his Mithridatic body could tolerate. His hands trembled more; his
moods were violent and spasmodic; an unusual restlessness interfered
with his mechanical régime.
It was the evening of a gray and blustering day. The rain had ceased,
and streaks of silvery light were ribbing the clouds. A calm had fallen;
the wind breathed in infrequent stanzas, showering rattling moisture
from the leaves. A rich perfume refreshed the atmosphere, the scent of
foliage drenched yet shimmering in the awakening sun.
Joan Gildersedge came over the meadows from the sea. She loved rough
weather and the cold kisses of the rain upon her face. Her rough frieze
skirt hung drenched about her knees, and her hair was dark and wet with
the storm. A rich color had risen in her cheeks, scourged by the wet
west wind.
Joan looked long at the breaking sky before setting the iron gate
grating on its rusty hinges. The gravel drive was green with grass and
weeds. As she threaded its tangled shadows, the cypresses, stirred by
the wind, shook long showers of glittering dew. At one point a large
seringa overweighted by the storm bowed over to touch the trailing
branches of an untrimmed laurel. Joan had to bend beneath this rustic
yoke. A spray of green leaves brushed her lips, leaves pure and fresh as
the lips they had touched.
As she drew from the shadows of the shrubs sounds sinister in their
suggestiveness smote upon her ears. Two voices were in altercation—the
one shrill, strenuous, feminine, the other the untutored growl of a man
scorning compulsion. Joan Gildersedge stood still and listened. The
window of the dining-room stood open; she could hear plainly enough what
passed within.
“I tell you I sha’n’t,” said the woman’s voice, very rapidly. “Do yer
think I’m going to sell myself for fifteen pounds a year? You go and
cheat your grandmother. You’re drunk, Zeus Gildersedge, and what do I
care for an old sot of sixty. Am I to drudge and scrape and sell myself
here for nothing? I’ve had enough of it, I tell you. You give me that
key, old light of love, and I’ll help myself for once. Come along now,
or I’ll make no sport for you.”
The man’s voice retorted, thick and tangled, the expression of a clouded
and cunning intellect.
“You think I’m drunk, eh?”
“Half an’ half.”
“You’re a pretty beauty. Give you the key of my strong-box, eh? Nice
game, that. Pretty old gudgeon you think you’re talking to. I’m drunk,
am I? Not fuddled enough yet to be fooled by such as you.”
The woman’s voice rose shriller.
“You’re a man, you are. Take all and give nothing. Taunt me, would you?”
“Who’s to blame? Speak up.”
“That’s manly, that is. Put it all off your own shoulders; shove all the
blame on mine. You’re the saint, are you, and I the sinner? You owe me a
quarter’s wages. I’ll have that and more—fifty gold sovereigns, not a
farthing less. ’Ain’t I earned it by sacrificing my immortal soul to an
old scarecrow like you?”
“You have, you innocent.”
“Give me the key, then.”
An outbreak of blasphemy greeted the appeal. Zeus Gildersedge chuckled
and swore in alternation. He had lost every shred of that quality that
might have been christened by courtesy self-control.
“That’s right,” jeered the feminine voice, “cheat a woman and then laugh
over it. More drink! Whiskey—neat, too! Half a tumbler! Nice stuff for
a respectable man of sixty! You’ll be seeing devils in a jiffy.”
The clatter of glass sounded in the room. Joan Gildersedge slipped round
towards the porch under the shadows of the trees. She was pale, but very
bright and keen about the eyes. Her lips were compressed into a thin,
straight line. The look of childish repose had left her face as she
stood in the porch and listened.
Rebecca’s voice rose again, less shrewish, more persuasive.
“I reckon it’s no good ranting,” she said; “there’s only one thing as
will make you generous, and I suppose you know what that is!”
“I reckon I do,” came the thick and lethargic response. “Pour me out
some more whiskey, Becky.”
“You’ll have your own way, I suppose. Half a glass, not a drop more. Why
don’t you slip into one of your chuck-me-under-the-chin moods and give
me that key?”
Zeus Gildersedge’s voice seemed weaker; his voice had less edge than
before.
“You leave that key alone.”
“What go you’ve got for a man of sixty!”
“You know that, eh?”
“Don’t I. Look at me; what am I here for?”
They both laughed unrestrainedly. Joan, standing in the porch, with rain
dripping monotonously from the leaves, seemed to stiffen into stone. Her
hands gripped the trellis of the porch. She seemed to steady herself as
one who meets the onrush of some storm-driven billow or as a virgin
martyr facing the flames. In these few seconds the dream-cloak had been
shrivelled about her soul. She trod the furnace; fire licked her limbs.
The mordant realism of life burned at last before her reason.
“I’m damned sleepy,” said the man’s voice, ending in a prolonged yawn.
“That there whiskey’s heavy stuff.”
“Where’s Joan, eh?”
“Out still.”
“That girl’s a bit mad; you— It’s all right, Becky, keep your temper
straight; I’ll pay.”
There was an indefinite muttering in the room that Joan could not
unravel. She heard a sleepy chuckle, a series of yawns. Rebecca’s voice
reduced to an insinuating cadence.
“It’s time I cooked supper. Go to sleep, uncle, dear; there’s your
handkerchief to keep the flies off. Ta-ta! I’ll vanish.”
From Zeus Gildersedge there came no response. Silence followed, broken
by the drip of the rain and the sound of heavy breathing. A quarter of
an hour passed with preternatural slowness. Joan had been listening for
the noise of Rebecca’s footsteps in the hall, but had heard nothing. The
heavy oak door stood ajar. She pushed it open silently, slipped in, and
peered into the darkening room.
Zeus Gildersedge sat in his big chair, his head fallen back upon the
cushion as in deep sleep. Bending over him stood the woman Rebecca, with
her back turned towards the door. The woman had unbuttoned Zeus
Gildersedge’s flannel shirt at the neck, and her hand was groping in his
bosom. Even as Joan watched her Rebecca drew up a small key fastened
about the man’s neck by a long noose of twine. She cut the string with a
knife, turned suddenly, saw Joan standing in the doorway.
The servant’s brown eyes darkened and the sullen look on her sensual
face grew the more expressive. Her fingers closed and hid the key. She
made one step, stood motionless, her figure thrown into a hesitating
stoop. Before her stood Joan, tall, silent, and implacable, a pale and
purposeful Athene. There was a grim look in the girl’s gray eyes.
“Give me that key.”
Rebecca’s fingers closed the tighter. Her broad figure seemed to stiffen
with an obstinate insolence; her large, florid face was repulsively
confident.
“Give me that key.”
“Sha’n’t.”
“You will.”
“Master promised it me.”
“Don’t lie.”
“A liar, am I?”
It was done with a quietness that was peculiarly impressive. Joan
Gildersedge had advanced with her eyes fixed on the woman’s face. A
powerful purpose seemed concentrated in her every movement. She was half
a head taller than Rebecca; her strong, white hand fastened on the
woman’s wrist. She drew Rebecca’s hand towards her so steadily that an
observer would hardly have guessed that the woman’s muscles were rigidly
resistant.
“Open your hand.”
There was a moment’s obstinacy. The white hand tightened; the firm mouth
grew a shade paler; the gray eyes outstared the brown. It was a battle
of willpower, and the conclusion was inevitable. Rebecca’s fingers
unclosed upon the key.
“Take it, then.”
The two women still eyed each other—the one stern and keen as a white
frost, the other florid and furtive, subduedly vindictive.
“You’ll tell him?”
Joan nodded.
“Nice old gentleman, your father, when—”
The revulsion was instantaneous. Sudden color surged into the girl’s
face; her eyes flamed. Like a figure of divine vengeance she stood as at
the gate of Eden, hounding shame into the dark unknown.
“Woman—”
“Ah!”
“You have fouled a home. You are unclean. You go to-night.”
A sudden grim sympathy leaped lightning-like from face to face. Rebecca
cringed, gave back a step. The gray eyes scathed her with a scorn that
stripped her soul naked in the sun. She gave a hoarse cry, cowered back,
a woman scourged by a woman’s scorn.
“Miss Joan—”
“Don’t speak to me.”
Rebecca’s hands clutched her bosom. She still retreated, strove to
speak, but choked in her throat. Sudden elemental shame had stricken
her, shame shining from the divine cleanliness that drove her into the
dark.
“I’ll go. Don’t jeer; don’t look at me like that. Give me my money.”
“Your hire.”
The words stung like flame. The woman slunk away like a Judas, crept
into the hall silently, stooping and holding her throat. In the shadows
she turned with the snarl of a smitten brute.
“I’ll pay you for this.”
“Go.”
The woman disappeared. Joan heard footsteps on the stairs and the
slamming of an attic door. She bent over her father’s chair. He was
breathing heavily, stertorously, as under the influence of a narcotic or
a deadening dose of alcohol. She touched his shoulder, shook him, but he
never heeded her. She reknotted the twine about his neck, dropped the
key into his bosom, and refastened his shirt.
Joan stood at her full height for a moment with her hands over her eyes,
thinking. She had grown calm again after her passion, but the same
solemn resolve abode in her mind. Childhood had elapsed in an hour, a
brief sunset swallowed up in gloom. Henceforth the unknown stretched
forward streaked with the imagined amber of the dawn. A woman, she had
the woman’s part to play amid the stress of evil days.
Zeus Gildersedge was a spare man; his weight was inconsiderable. His
daughter put her arms about him, lifted him from the chair, and laid him
upon the tattered sofa. His head rolled heavy upon her shoulder; his
reeking breath beat upon her cheek. She shuddered and recoiled from him
with an invincible disrelish as he lay snoring and gulping in his sleep.
This sodden, greed-steeped piece of clay was her father.
Joan changed her drenched dress in her bedroom, looked into Rebecca’s
attic and found it empty. She descended to the kitchen. The door stood
wide and the place was empty; the fire had dwindled in the grate. A
square of paper scrawled over with ill-formed characters lay on the
table.
“Cook your own hash,” it ran. “I shall send my cousin Jim for my box
to-morrow. I’ve gone, and pretty glad to go, you bet.”
Joan crumpled the document and flicked it into the fire. She closed and
locked the kitchen door and made her supper off home-baked cake and
milk. It had grown dusk apace. She lit a candle, passed through the
hall, locking the door, and entered the dining-room again. Her father
still snored on the sofa. She set the candle on the table and seated
herself in the window-seat with the casement open.
A cleft in the agate foliage showed her the wizard west. The clouds had
broken, and great bars of light gleamed in the darkening sky. A purple
stairway seemed to ascend to a mysterious shrine shrouded in golden
vapor.
Rossetti should have painted her as she sat at the casement with the
failing light bathing her face. Her neck shone like alabaster. An
infinite wistfulness mingled with the awakened sense of womanhood that
burned in her eyes. Virgo Victrix! A fair soul set like a white rose in
the dusky tresses of the night!
Great loneliness possessed her in the empty house. Her thoughts were
shimmering in the sunshine by the green banks of a river. A willow
overarched her head. Through the void of solitude thought echoed thought
and soul answered soul. She imagined kisses on her lips. She imagined
the touch of a man’s hand.
Night came and the west faded. The solitary candle burned on, streaking
the gloom with its meagre flame. For hours the girl watched on wide-eyed
into the night, beside the inanimate carcass of her drunken sire. Ere
dawn came she had fallen asleep in the window-seat with her head
pillowed on her arm. And a smile played upon the lips of the woman who
dreamed a dream.
XII
A SPIRIT of unrest had fallen upon Gabriel Strong, a passionate
discontent crying like a wild, prophetic voice out of the future. He was
oppressed by numberless forebodings; his own heart piped dismally a
traitorous refrain. A flippant levity served to cheat the curiosity of
numberless excitable neighbors. Even John Strong believed his son to be
in most excellent fettle and thoroughly enamoured of so passionate a
bargain.
Judith, seraph of the pearly brow, had questioned her brother out of the
deep tenderness of her love for him. Evening stood golden-bosomed in the
west and a glimmering silence covered the world. The two were wandering
over the Saltire lawns, swaying slowly side by side under the black
arches of the yews and cedars.
Gabriel’s words had failed to satisfy the girl’s soul. Her doubts had
found an echo in his brain; his desire for sympathy quickened his
unrest. Stirred by the dogged melancholy that held him, she broke forth
into an appeal, ardent as her heart’s blood, wistful as the wild music
of a wind.
“For God’s sake, Gabriel,” she said, “play the man. What is the smart of
a month compared to the misery of years. If you perjure yourself, you
will do much to slay two souls.”
The man boasted an artificial strength that spoke with facile scorn.
“I am as happy as I can expect to be in this world,” he argued. “I have
given up heroics, and intend to see things as they are. It is an error
to meditate over one’s psychical inconsistencies. Always ask yourself
whether you are happy, and you are doomed to be miserable.”
Judith was not the woman to be deluded with sophistry. She had
convictions—convictions that could not live on air.
“You know very well whether you are happy or not,” she said.
“I have never arrived at any such conclusion since I began to think,
eight years ago.”
“A soul never attains to happiness by theorizing.”
“Possibly not. The mind of the thinker is always daring storm and
shipwreck. Mentally I am a species of Raleigh, ever promising myself an
El Dorado, a dream that other people always quash. I find my friends the
surest iconoclasts of my ideals.”
Judith halted under the great cedar; green grass stretched brilliant at
her feet; the western sunlight shone upon her face.
“Your very words betray you. You are flippant.”
“Men are often flippant when they are most in earnest,” he answered her.
“Little woman, you create moral problems unnecessarily.”
Judith withstood him, gracious and beautifully eager.
“I will ask you a simple question,” she said. “Would you be happier if
at this moment you were free?”
He hung his head and looked into the gloom of the trees.
“No one is free from the cradle. We are beset by eternal obligations.”
“You prevaricate.”
“Life is one long obligation. I only maintain the inevitable.”
“Gabriel, break off this alliance.”
The man laughed, half cynically, yet with a wistful scorn.
“There are many things you do not understand,” he said.
“Reconsider it.”
“I can reconsider nothing.”
Judith shook her head and looked long at him out of her large eyes.
“My heart tells me that all is not well with you,” she said.
Her brother gazed at her with a smile of melancholy tenderness.
“Judith,” he answered her, “why worry yourself over my future. A man may
often repent; he can rarely alter. By my own deeds I have made this
match inevitable. You can only pain me by suggesting impossibilities. I
have incurred a debt—a debt heavier than you can guess. I am happier in
doing my duty as a man of honor than I should be in playing the craven.
You have the truth.”
Judith hid her eyes from him under her lashes.
“This is a sad world,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
“Men pledge themselves to an error and spend their blood in justifying
it.”
“What of sincerity?”
“True sincerity never errs,” she said. “It looks ahead and deceives not
the future. The greatest strength is that which emancipates itself from
a moral lie.”
“Well and good,” he answered her; “but sheer egotism is unpardonable
under certain circumstances.”
“It is the false egotism that in the beginning shackles the true.”
“Then must the true try to remedy the false. We all err. Errors are the
illegitimate offspring of the soul; as their parents, we must maintain
them. They are ours and of us. The laws of society saddle us with the
responsibility. My dear girl, say no more.”
Thus ended Judith’s pleading with her brother ineffectually, though not
for lack of eloquence or ardor. Possibly the man knew himself a fool in
the deep recesses of his heart. When present in the flesh, his betrothed
overpowered him with her perilous splendor. She poured her sensuous
magic upon his soul, and, like Tannhäuser, he knelt before her impotent
and helpless. The hashish of her beauty had lulled his deeper self to
sleep.
Matters mundane were moving on apace. John Strong had draughted a
company of craftsmen into the antique rooms and galleries of The Friary.
Tapestries were being spread, walls garnished, friezes gilded, rich
fabrics wafted into its dusky rooms. The merchant’s coffers ran gold.
Truly the house was a haunt for lovers, consecrated by all the charters
of romance.
September waited to hear the bells of Saltire pealing for the pair.
Italy was to receive them, passionate pilgrims, treading the earth to
the tune of love. Ophelia, gracious maid, had wandered from Arcady to
the marts of the City of Lud to spend a novitiate amid fabrics from the
loom. Her large eyes sparkled amid the splendors of Bond Street, and
glib-tongued ’prentices bowed before her feet. She was very radiant,
very fair, very pleasurable. Many a delectable dandy coveted
unconsciously the lot of Gabriel Strong.
XIII
THE day before his journey to join the Gussets in London, Gabriel awoke
in one of his errant and aspiring moods. Finality had oppressed him of
late. The world seemed to have narrowed to the tangible prosaicisms of
excess. The cry of his old romanticism awoke within him that morning an
Arthurian spirit, the wistful questing after a mysterious unknown.
Beauty gleamed anew in the wild twilight of romance. The present cringed
in the dust.
Noon found him heading for the sea over the wooded hills that rolled
north to Rilchester. A brisk breeze tempered the summer heat and
reclaimed the hour from languor. Gabriel had certain Roman ruins as his
goal—a mouldering wall, some scattered capitols, broken strands of
stone, the flower-grown site of an old forum. Ruins accorded with the
spirit of romance, though sentiment is not always disinterested in the
consideration of things inanimate. Could Troy spare the glamour of a
Helen? On the hills above Rilchester dark trees held within their
shadows a house that was magical for elemental reasons. Perhaps Gabriel
could have gainsaid his soul the relics of an ancient empire. Instincts
more ancient perpetuated in him their power.
The woods had poured down to possess this city of the dead. Crumbling
flints showed amid the claws of some huge oak’s roots. The old walls
were bowered in green, mantled in ivy, plumed with gilliflower,
snap-dragon, and flowering grass. The forum, an open square closed with
grass banks, stood almost free of the trees. Its roadway and the
foundation of its shops still showed in the turf. Fragments of pillars
and pediments lay sunken in the sward. Flowers bloomed over the dead
pavements, a mist of daisies, harebells, and golden ragwort. On the
summit of the central mound stood the ruins of an altar, wreathed and
overrun by masses of purple nightshade. Southward the sea glimmered.
Around rolled the wooden hills, nebulous and haze-wrapped, guardians of
mystery.
Gabriel climbed the altar mound and sentinelled himself on the
mouldering stone. To the romantic mind a tender melancholy wraps the
infinite with all the idyllic colors of twilight. To the eye of the poet
seas are bluer, skies more splendid, moons more magical, roses more
ravishing to the soul. It is only the dullard who beholds in a cloud
nothing but visible vapor. Primeval man was more spiritual in many of
his notions than the commercial gentleman of to-day.
Hope is often father to the fact. Desire and dream of a thing, and in
some strange fashion the imagined fruit bends sudden to the hand.
Day-dreams are the first dawn-shafts of great minds. Those who live for
the present deserve nothing of the future. As for Gabriel, the stars
would have fallen in his lap if his dreams had gotten a proportionate
reward.
Thought-waves or no, there is some strong influence flowing from
importunate thought. Spiritual waves of desire move betwixt soul and
soul, drawing them imperceptibly towards each other. Love beacons unto
love, even over hill and sea. As water to the moon, so Joan Gildersedge
had been drawn from her home that day. Some vibrating lustre-light of
the soul had set her wandering on the hills above the sea. Even from
childhood she had haunted the gray ruins by the woods, weaving idyls out
of the past, listening like Joan of France to the mysterious utterances
of nature.
Thus it befell that morning that Gabriel, seated on the crumbling altar,
saw the figure of a girl moving in the shadows under the trees. She
moved slowly, with eyes downcast. Even in miniature her form had that
superb eloquence of grace that was more than Grecian, seeing that a more
than Grecian spirit abode there in the flesh.
Gabriel’s memory hailed her with that hurrying of the heart that comes
with the inspiration of the breath of life. His cheeks burned in the
sun. Fear touched him as with the finger of prophecy. Scoff who will,
there is a divine dread that seizes on strong men in the sanctuary of
passion. Even as the harp trembles as it bears the burden of some solemn
song, so the highly strung soul vibrates to melodies, perilous yet
divine. Only clay is passive and unfearful. The mere animal loves with
his loins, and is of the earth earthy. That man is indeed to be pitied
who has never felt the splendid awe that the pure loveliness of a woman
can inspire.
Gabriel left the mound, color in his cheeks and on his lips a half-shy
smile. If he had never believed in Schopenhauer, the faith of a
pessimist failed him ignominiously at that moment. He was mediæval to
the core. Nor did he believe Shakespeare to be a fool.
A warmer color had risen to Joan Gildersedge’s face. Her eyes had a
lustre in the sunlight, such a light that makes a woman a thousand times
more desirable than of yore.
“You are a long way from home,” she said, considering him with an
ingenuous gravity that was very magical, “and yet I had a presentiment
that I should meet you here to-day.”
“And so you came?”
“Yes.”
They turned back with spontaneous consent, climbed the mound together,
and seated themselves side by side upon the altar stone. The scene
seemed utterly natural, yet quick with a rare unreality that kindled
beauty. Joan unpinned her hat and laid it beside her. A great oak
overarched the mound and reared a shadowy canopy above them.
“It is nearly a month since we met,” she said.
Gabriel was staring over the sea. A wilderness of romance had risen
about his soul, a wild shadow-land drowned in moonlight, swept by a
complaining wind.
“It seems as yesterday,” he answered her.
“Strange that we should meet so.”
“Perhaps.”
She smiled, half mysteriously, yet with a frankness that imaged truth.
“I have passed through trouble since I spoke with you by the river,” she
said.
Gabriel listened in silence as she spoke to him of much that had passed
at the house amid the yews. The twain might have been in each other’s
hearts for years. When he questioned her at the end thereof she showed
him her hands, less white than of yore and roughened with toil.
“I am alone now,” she said.
“No one to help.”
“I do all for my father’s sake. It is better so. He is growing very
decrepit.”
“You must be utterly lonely.”
“I am—at times.”
“And yet you have no friends?”
“None.”
“It is over hard.”
She smiled, and there was a look of strange happiness upon her face.
Perhaps the man’s sympathy was more to her than either of them had
realized. Gabriel had forgotten for a moment the eternal bathos of
modernity.
“I would that I could help you,” he said.
Joan’s eyes were turned suddenly to his.
“You have helped me,” she answered.
“I?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You have often been in my thoughts,” she said. “Pardon me if I seem too
much a child. I have never been taught the shame of speaking what is
uppermost in my mind. I am vastly ignorant.”
“You are wiser than I am.”
“No.”
“Pardon me, the world has not stiffened you with its multitudinous
hypocrisies. We society fools are jointed up in false affectations. We
cannot live like honest human beings.”
“You do not seem false to me,” she said.
“God forbid!” he answered, with a sudden stirring of his conscience.
They were both silent a season. The girl’s words had rent the sky above
the man’s head. He was conscious of the perilous egotism that had taken
the guise of a darkling vision to lead him onward into a shadow-land of
desire.
“You should not dream too much,” he said.
His voice startled her; she looked him in the face, her instincts
probing his meaning.
“Why do you say that?” she said.
“By reason of a certain melancholy wisdom.”
“And yet—”
“I have been a dreamer,” he said, “but I have played the traitor to my
dreams. I suppose it was inevitable in a land such as this. One cannot
always stand with one’s back to the wall and fight orthodox dullards. I
have not the energy to exist as a living protest against Philistinism.
We men are often fools. Have you ever read of Tantalus?”
She pondered a moment and her face lightened.
“Tantalus?”
“The man in hades.”
“Who clutched at grapes when thirst tormented him, but was baffled
ever.”
“Even so.”
“Cursed by the gods.”
“I am Tantalus,” he said.
She looked into the woods, solemn as a prophetess lost in dreams. A
cloud had fallen upon Gabriel’s face. The girl felt its presence, though
she had not looked into his eyes again.
“I should not have imagined it,” she said; “you did not seem to me to be
unhappy.”
“Perhaps not.”
“I am sorry.”
“I do not deserve that you should be sorry for my sake.”
“I cannot think that.”
Gabriel mastered self with a grimness that would have served him well on
certain other occasions had he been more the man. In negative fashion
this girl gave him strength to adjudicate against his own dreams. She
inspired and condemned by the same pure ravishment of beauty.
“I would have you know,” he said, “that I am a man bound by chains of my
own forging. The blame is mine; I accept it. I may not say, ‘Lo, here is
my heart; I may surrender it into the hand of her whose head touches the
stars.’ My eyes must remain mute, my soul untongued. I am no longer
myself. Think over these words and you may understand in measure.”
Joan Gildersedge did not answer him for several minutes.
“I understand,” she said; “and yet you are not happy.”
“That is the mockery of life. Men think I have everything; I have
nothing.”
“Then we are both lonely.”
“Nor may we help each other.”
The sky had darkened; a cloud seemed to have dimmed the sun. A wind woke
restless in the woods and the flowers shivered in the waning sunlight.
Joan had risen from the altar. She held her hat in her hand, but did not
look at Gabriel as he stood in silence at her side.
“I wonder if I shall ever see you again,” she said.
The man had grown pale, and his eyes were stern, yet miserable.
“Perhaps,” he answered.
“I shall think of you.”
“And I also.”
“Good-bye.”
As by a sudden inspiration he kissed her hand as he had kissed it by the
Mallan water. When she had left him he remained by the crumbling altar,
with its screen of purple nightshade, staring out over the sea.
Man-wise, he would have given heaven to have left unsaid the words he
had spoken to the girl that day.
The same night he read a letter from Ophelia, a letter garrulous with
vapid passion, decreeing the day when they should wed. Gabriel sat by
the window as the dusk came down and watched the night embalm the world
in gloom. A sonnet fell from his lips as he brooded. He wrote it down, a
rough scrawl in the twilight.
“Shall I despair because the day is dead,
And all thy strange, sad witchery has passed
Into the gold of visions! Shall I cast
My soul to where the hands of Night outspread
Those cosmic epics, the emotions dread
Of panting planets and of stars aghast!
Shall I bemoan the raptures that outlast
The sun’s swift splendors that so soon are sped!
“Have I not felt the magic of thy hand,
And watched the sun make amber of thy hair!
Have I not touched thee! For thy laughter planned,
And delved thy glances with a grand despair!
Never near mine may thy pure bosom sleep.
Since thou art woe, then let me live to weep.”