FROM PRISON TO PARADISE.
Punctually at ten o'clock on the 29th of October a brougham drove up to
the gates of the prison in which Alan Walcott had spent his six months
of retreat from the world; and almost immediately Alan made his
appearance, leaning on the arm of a warder.
Lettice hurried to meet him, displacing the warder with a few words of
thanks, and repressing with an effort the painful throbbing of her heart
and throat. The sight of his shrunken form and hollow eyes, as he looked
at her with pathetic and childlike trust, for a moment took away all her
strength; but when his hand was laid upon her arm, and she accommodated
her steps to his slow and unsteady movements, he found in her no trace
of the weakness she had overcome.
It was clear that he had not yet made a good recovery from his fever.
Lettice's last little qualm of doubt as to the use or need for what she
had done disappeared as she saw this wreck of the man whom she
loved--whom she believed to be innocent of offense and persecuted by an
evil fate. What might have become of him if he had been left to crawl
out of his prison into the cold and censorious world, without a friend,
a hope, or an interest in life? What lowest depth of despair might he
not have touched if in such a plight as this he should be found and
tortured anew by his old enemy, whose cruelty was evidently not assuaged
by the sufferings she had heaped upon him? Who now would say that he had
no need of succor, that her service was unasked, unwarranted, unwomanly,
that the duty of a pure and delicate soul was to leave him either to his
own wife or to the tender mercies of strangers?
The carriage was piled with cushions and shawls, the day was bright and
warm, Lettice was full of light gossip and cheerfulness, and Alan had
reason to think that he had never had a more delightful drive.
"Where are you taking me?" he said, with a smile of restful gratitude,
which clearly implied, "I do not care where it is, so long as I am taken
by you!"
"You are going to a convalescent home, where you will be the only
patient. If you obey the rules, you may get well in a month, and the
first rule is that you are not to ask questions, or to think about
unpleasant things."
"Are you my nurse?"
"That is the first breach of rules! They are very strict at this home, I
can tell you!"
She spoke in a playful mood, but it left him with the impression that he
was really being taken to a "home" of some kind, where he was to be
nursed until he was well. He had no objection to make. He would have
gone anywhere with equal pleasure, if he could be sure that she would be
there to look after him. His one thought in prison, when he lay in the
grip of fever, was that he must surely die before his sentence had run
out. That was his hope and belief from day to day; and only when he
heard that Lettice had come and made inquiries about him, and promised
to fetch him as soon as he was released, did any real desire for life
return to him. Now, in her presence, he was so completely happy that he
forgot all his former sufferings and despair.
Weak as he was, he would have found words to tell her of his
gratitude--and of much more than gratitude; but this because of, not in
spite of, weakness--if she had not carefully checked him whenever he
tried to speak. Fortunately, it was not at all hard to check him. He was
infirm in mind as in body. Apart from the illness, which sapped his
energies and paralyzed his power of thought, he had never thrown off the
cloud of callous and despairing indifference which fell upon him after
the fatal scene in Surrey Street. Add to this that the surrender of his
independence to Lettice was in itself a pleasure to him, and we need not
wonder that her self-imposed task seemed to her fairly easy of
accomplishment.
At Bute Lodge they found everything very nice and comfortable. Mrs.
Jermy and Mrs. Beadon (as Milly was to be called), who had come earlier
in the morning with a cabful of yesterday's purchases, had carried out
Lettice's instructions to the letter. The best room in the house looked
out upon a delightful garden landscape--two borders, backed by
well-grown box and bay-trees, holly, Irish yews, and clambering roses,
with a lessening crowd of herbaceous plants in front, dwindling down to
an edge of brilliant annuals on either side; and between these a long
and level lawn, broken near the house by a lofty deodara, and ending in
a bowling-green, and a thickly-planted bank of laurels, beyond which lay
a far-off vista of drooping fruit-trees. The garden was reached through
a small conservatory built outside a French window at one end of the
room, and a low verandah ran along the remainder of the garden front.
Inside, all was as Lettice had planned it. A square writing table in
front of the window was covered with a dozen of the books which had made
most noise during the past season, with the November magazines, and the
weekly papers which Alan had been wont to read. Milly had cut them all
over night, and here they lay, with an easy-chair beside them, ready to
tempt the student when he felt inclined and able to read. That was not
just yet; but Alan saw the pile, and darted at his guardian angel
another look of gratitude from his lustrous, melancholy eyes.
"Why, here," he said, looking round the room and out upon the garden, "a
man must get well only too soon! I shall steadily refuse to mend."
"You will not be able to help yourself," said Lettice. "Now you are
going to be left alone----"
"Not alone!"
"For half an-hour at the very least. All this floor belongs to you, and
you are to have nothing to do with stairs. When you want anything you
are to ring this bell, and Milly, whom you saw when we came in, will
attend on you. Here, on this sideboard, are wine, and biscuits, and
jelly, and grapes. Sit down and let me give you a glass of wine. We will
have some lunch at one, tea at four, and dinner at seven--but you are to
be eating grapes and jelly in between. The doctor will come and see you
every morning."
"What doctor?"
"Why, the doctor of the Establishment, to be sure!"
"Oh, this is an Establishment?"
"Yes."
"It is more rational in its plan than some I have heard of, since it
takes in your nurse and your nurse's maid. Will this precious doctor
dine with us?"
"This precious! You are to have great faith in your doctor; but I am
sorry to say he will not be able to dine with us. He has other
occupations, you see; and for company I am afraid you will have to be
content with such as your nurse may be disposed to give you!"
Before he could say anything else, she had left the room.
He was alone--alone and happy.
Straight from prison to paradise. That was what the morning's work meant
for him, and he could not think with dry eyes of the peri who had
brought him there.
Oh, the bitterness of that dungeon torture, when his heart had been
branded with shame and seared with humiliation; when he had sworn that
life had no more hope or savor for him, and the coming out from his cell
had seemed, by anticipation, worse than the going in!
This was the coming out, and he was already radiant with happiness,
oblivious of suffering, hopeful of the future. It was enough, he would
not probe it, he would not peer into the dark corners of his prospect;
he would simply realize that his soul had been lost, that it had been
found by Lettice, and that it was hers by right of trover, as well as by
absolute surrender.
The mid-day sun shone in at his window and tempted him to the verandah
outside. Here he found one of those chairs, delightful to invalids and
lazy men, which are constructed of a few crossed pieces of wood and a
couple of yards of sacking, giving nearly all the luxury of a hammock
without its disturbing element of insecurity. And by its side,
wonderful, to relate, there was a box of cigarettes and some matches.
Since they were there, he might as well smoke one. His last smoke was
seven or eight months ago--quite long enough to give a special relish to
this particular roll of Turkish tobacco.
As he lay back in his hammock chair, and sent one ring chasing another
to the roof of the verandah, he heard a step on the gravel beneath him.
Lettice, with a basket in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other,
was collecting flowers and leaves for her vases. Unwilling to leave him
too much alone, until she saw how he would bear his solitude, she had
come out into the garden by a door at the other end of the house, and
presently, seeing him in the verandah, approached with a smile.
"Do I look as if I were making myself at home?" he said.
"Quite."
"As soon as I began to smoke, all kinds of things came crowding into my
mind."
"Not unpleasant things, I hope?" She said this quickly, being indeed
most afraid lest he should be tempted to dwell on the disagreeable past.
"No, almost all pleasant. And there are things I want to say to
you--that I must say to you, very soon. Do you think I can take for
granted all you have done, and all you are doing for me? Let me come
down and join you!"
"No!" she said, with a great deal of firmness in her gesture and tone.
"You must not do anything of the kind until the doctor has seen you; and
besides, we can speak very well here."
The verandah was only a few feet above the ground, so that Lettice's
head was almost on a level with his own.
"There is no difficulty about speaking," she went on, "but I want you to
let me have the first word, instead of the last. This is something I
wanted to say to you, but I did not know how to manage it before. It is
really very important that you should not fatigue or excite yourself by
talking, and the doctor will tell you so when he comes. Now if you think
that you have anything at all to thank me for, you will promise not to
speak to me on any personal matters, not even your own intentions for
the future, for one clear month from to-day! Don't say it is impossible,
because, you see, it is as much as my place (as nurse) is worth to
listen to you! If you will promise, I can stay; and if you will not
promise, I must go away."
"That is very hard!"
"But it is very necessary. You promise?"
"Have I any choice? I promise."
"Thank you!" She said this very earnestly, and looked him in the eyes
with a smile which was worth a faggot of promises.
"But you don't expect me to be deaf and dumb all the time?" said Alan.
"No, of course not! I have been told that you ought to be kept as
cheerful as possible, and I mean to do what I can to make you so. Do you
like to be read to!"
"Yes, very much."
"Then I will read to you as long as you please, and write your letters,
and--if there were any game----"
"Ah, now, if by good luck you knew chess?"
"I do know chess. I played my father nearly every evening at Angleford."
"What a charming discovery! And that reminds me of something. Is there
any reason why I should not write to Mr. Larmer? He has some belongings
of mine, for one thing, which I should like him to send me, including a
set of chess-men."
"No reason at all. But you ought not to write or talk of business, if
you can help it, until you are quite strong."
"Well, then, I won't. I will ask him to send what I want in a cab; and
then, when I am declared capable of managing my own affairs, I will go
into town and see him. But the fact is, that I really feel as well as
ever I did in my life!"
"You may feel it, but it is not the case."
And later in the day, Alan was obliged to confess that he had boasted
too soon, for there was a slight return of fever, and the doctor whom
Lettice had called in was more emphatic than she had been as to the
necessity for complete rest of mind and body.
So for the next week he was treated quite as an invalid, to his great
disgust. Then he fairly turned the corner, and things began to change
for the better again. Lettice read to him, talked, played chess, found
out his tastes in music and in art (tastes in some respects a little
primitive, but singularly fine and true, in spite of their want of
training), and played his favorite airs for him on the piano--some of
Mendelssohn's plaintive Lieder, the quainter and statelier measures of
Corelli and Scarlatti, snatches of Schumann and Grieg, and several older
and simpler melodies, for most of which he had to ask by humming a few
bars which had impressed themselves on his memory.
As the month wore itself out, the success of Lettice's experiment was in
a fair way of being justified. She had charmed the evil spirit of
despair from Alan's breast, and had won him back to manly resistance and
courageous effort. With returning bodily strength came a greater
robustness of mind, and a resolution--borrowed, perhaps, in the first
instance, from his companion--to be stronger than his persecutors, and
rise superior to his troubles.
In the conversations which grew out of their daily readings, Lettice was
careful to draw him as much as possible into literary discussions and
criticisms, and Alan found himself dwelling to an appreciative listener
on certain of his own ideas on poetic and dramatic methods. There is but
a step from methods to instances; and when Lettice came into his room
one morning--she never showed herself before mid-day--she saw with
delight on the paper before him an unmistakable stream of verses
meandering down the middle of the sheet.
He had set to work! Then he was saved--saved from himself, and from the
ghouls that harbor in a desolate and outraged mind.
If, beyond this, you ask me how she had gained her end, and done the
good thing on which she had set her heart, I cannot tell you, any more
than I could make plain the ways in which nature works to bring all her
great and marvelous mysteries to pass. Lettice's achievement, like her
resolution, argued both heart and intellect. Alan would not have yielded
to anyone else, and he yielded to her because he loved her with the
feelings and the understanding together. She had mastered his affections
and his intelligence at the same time: she left him to hunger and thirst
up to the moment of his abject abasement, and then she came unasked,
unhoped, from her towering height to his lowest deep, and gave
him--herself!
"Do you remember," he said to her once, when he had got her to talk of
her successful story, "that bit of Browning which you quote near the
end? Did you ever think that I could be infatuated enough to apply the
words to myself, and take comfort from them in my trouble?"
She blushed and trembled as he looked at her for an answer.
"I meant you to do it!".
"And I knew you meant it!" he said, not without a dangerous touch of
triumph in his voice. "If I were a little bolder than I am, I would
carry you to another page of the poet whom we love, and ask if you ever
remembered the words of Constance--words that you did not quote----"
Ten times more deeply she blushed at this, knowing almost by instinct
the lines of which he thought. Had he not asked her to read "In a
Balcony" to him the night before, and had she not found it impossible to
keep her voice from trembling when she read Constance's passionate
avowal of her love?
"I know the thriftier way
Of giving--haply, 'tis the wiser way;
Meaning to give a treasure, I might dole
Coin after coin out (each, as that were all,
With a new largess still at each despair),
And force you keep in sight the deed, preserve
Exhaustless till the end my part and yours,
My giving and your taking; both our joys
Dying together. Is it the wiser way?
I choose the simpler; I give all at once.
Know what you have to trust to trade upon!
Use it, abuse it--anything, but think
Hereafter, 'Had I known she loved me so,
And what my means, I might have thriven with it.'
This is your means. I give you all myself."
And in truth, that was the gift which Lettice offered to him--a gift of
herself without stint or grudging, a gift complete, open-handed, to be
measured by his acceptance, not limited by her reservation, Alan knew
it; knew that absolute generosity was the essence of her gift, and that
this woman, so far above him in courage, and self-command, and purity,
scorned to close her fingers on a single coin of the wealth which she
held out to him. And he, like Norbert, answered reverently: "I take you
and thank God."
For just because he knew it, and was penetrated to the core by her
munificence, he took the draught of love as from a sacred chalice, which
a meaner nature would have grasped as a festal goblet. He might have
grasped it thus, and the sacramental wine would have been a Circe's
potion, and Lettice would have given her gift in vain. But nature does
not so miscalculate her highest moods. "Spirits are not finely touched
but to fine issues." Lettice's giving was an act of faith, and her faith
was justified.
This was the true source of Alan's self-respect, and from self-respect
there came a strength greater and more enduring than he had ever known
before. Redeemed from the material baseness of his past when he changed
the prison cell for Lettice's ennobling presence, he was now saved from
the mental and moral feebleness to which he might have sunk by the
ordeal through which his soul had passed.
Lettice felt that her work was accomplished, and she was supremely
happy. When Clara Graham kept her promise, and came to see her
friend--though she had not been able to bring her husband with her--she
was struck by the blithe gaiety of Lettice's looks and words.
"There is no need to tell me that you are satisfied!" she said, kissing
the tender cheeks, and gazing with wistful earnestness into the eyes
that so frankly and bravely met her own.
"Satisfied?" Lettice answered, with something like a sigh. "I never
dreamed that satisfaction could be so complete."
When Alan came in, and Clara, who had expected to see a face lined and
marred with sorrow, found that he too had caught the radiance of
unblemished happiness, she felt that Lettice had not spent her strength
in vain. And she went home and renewed her efforts to make her husband
see things as she saw them, and to give Alan Walcott his countenance in
the literary world.
But that was a task of no slight difficulty. James Graham had always
believed Walcott guilty of a barbarous attack on his wife; he thought
that he had been lightly punished, and would not admit that he was to be
received when he came out of prison as though he had never been sent
there. When Clara told him of Lettice's audacity he was terribly
shocked--as indeed were all who heard the story--and his resentment
against Alan increased. The news that they were happy together did not
produce the good effect upon his temper which Clara thought it might
have done.
It was Lettice herself who tackled Mrs. Hartley. She wrote her a long
and candid letter, very apologetic as regarded her conduct in Italy, but
quite the opposite when she spoke of what she had done since she came
back to London. The answer was short, but much to the point.
"I thought you would write to me," Mrs. Hartley said, in her note. "I
should hardly have forgiven you if you had not. There is some of your
letter which I cannot understand, and some which I do not quite agree
with. But come and explain it to me. I am an old woman, and have no time
to be angry with those I love. Come on Thursday afternoon--alone--and we
will have a good talk."
So Lettice went, and made her peace with her old friend, and was
admitted to her favor again. But Alan was on probation still. The last
thing which he would have expected, or indeed desired, was that he
should be received and treated by his former acquaintance as though
nothing had happened since he was a welcome guest in their houses.
Especially as he and Lettice had not yet settled the question which all
their friends were asking: "How would it end?"