Chapter XXVII: The Cry in the Garden

The clocks were pointing near to midnight; the village was long silent; the flurry of the day had subsided everywhere, and sleep and quiet had usurped throughout the palace the place of tumult. Only in that one remote corner above the terrace, where the bridal myrtles grew, was a shrouded light still burning, unquenchable, it seemed, as the steadfast spark that glows before a shrine. And there was the young wakeful postulant for Love’s service, awaiting, half rapt, half fearful, the mystic call.

Somewhere in the shadows there was a watch ticking. Its tiny pulse beat out the seconds in a fury to outstrip the lagging hours; for it had been worn near its mistress’s heart, and the throb of its hairspring had fallen into time with the fever of impatience it had touched there. But at length the end was in sight, and the round of long-drawn minutes rolled up to the starward-pointing hands. Isabella’s own hands were cold, as she lifted for the last time the little restless engine to consult it.

All day she had lived for this moment that was near. Truthful as she could not but be, her headache had served her for no guileful pretext; but it had served her nevertheless, since it was solitude she craved. She had some things to do--not many, but essential: to write a letter to her father was one of them. And she wrote it from her simple heart--a little plea so pathetic, so impossible, that it might well have wrung a colder breast than his. Perhaps it affected him when he came to read it; for he was not uncompassionate when the end was gained. But of that we have no knowledge.

There were some jewels she would take with her--indisputably her own. She would not come to her lover empty-handed, to be a burden on his charity. But the part of Jessica was impossible to her, and she robbed no one.

At this last she had only herself, for all vital purposes, to depend on. Fanchette, whom alone it had once been possible to take into her confidence--Fanchette, the fallen and unclean in her eyes, was no longer an auxiliary to be trusted with other than the material aids to these meetings. For the purer, finer sympathies she was necessarily disqualified. Isabella blamed herself for this judgment, for what was she herself better than Fanchette, save in the constitution of her passion? Yet surely that alone redeemed her; for love to her was nine-tenths a spiritual ecstasy, and only the little residue the mortal drug to achieve it. For all the best it meant to her, she could have been content to play St. Catherine to the pure divinity in love.

Well, we may doubt; but she was chaste, at least--chaste in the sense of utter truth to one supreme ideal. This man was her God, to whom she had given herself body and soul; and if earthly passion was a detail of that surrender, there is no use or profit in calculating its proportion to the whole.

Now, all things prepared, she set herself to abide, with what patience she might, the weariful interval. But first she took off her betrothal ring, and looking at it remorsefully a moment, placed it gently with the letter on her dressing-table. Often during the long day she would caress her basil, and speak to it as if it were a sentient thing, and chide it for its too tardy blossoming. It was not keeping faith, she said; for surely now the longed-for hour of their union was approaching, and yet its stubborn little twigs remained tight-closed. All day she would hear, faint and afar, the low thunder of life returning to deserted rooms and echoing corridors; and, listening, was conscious of an already strange sense of detachment from the world of her knowledge. She could think of it tenderly, kindly, but without one emotion of regret for its loss. There had never been that in common between them which a first glimpse of the eternal truth of things could not dissipate; and truth had come to her, when it did, in a transcendent form. Her soul stood on tiptoe, foreseeing only the moment when love was to call it to the starry altitudes.

Night, when it fell at last, came with a little moaning wind, which ever seemed to grow in fitful spasms as silence deep and deeper settled on the house. Listening, she seemed to hear without a sound of small voluble voices, and little footsteps running like pattering leaves, and giggling laughter that caught at her heart with fear. But it was nothing--only the mad spirits of the dark taking toll of the unrest which served to cover their antics. In the pauses of the wind they would all stop as still as mice; and then again, when the blast rose high, star its shrill volume with their bodiless cries.

They were nothing; but to over-tense nerves the voices of nothingness are the sounds most ill to endure. And so poor Isabel found them--terrifying, inscrutable, until she could bear to be alone no longer. Better the company of the restless night itself than this vigil of haunted loneliness behind enshrouding curtains. As the great castle clock chimed eleven, she left her upper chambers, and stole down soft-footed to the fateful room whence she was to make her flight.

She had only to wait and bide the moment--only to wait! But Fanchette had had her sure instructions, and what else was there for her herself to do? Only to wait. She extinguished the solitary light, and, putting aside the hangings, stood looking out into the darkness.

It was profound among the masses of the ilex trees; yet overhead there was still a cold shine of stars. The wind came on in heavy gusts, swaying the black-heaped shadows, so that they seemed to distort themselves, mouthing and mowing like chaotic giants. She did not dread them as she had the unreal voices, not even when their movement seemed momentarily to betray the presence of odd white-faced things crouched within their glooms. But these were tangible, at least--tricks of fancy that one could grapple and defy. Gradually all sense of them faded as she stood, and she lost herself in glowing dreams.

The striking of the third quarter brought her with a shock to herself. Even as the resonant jangle ceased on the instant, cut off by a swooping blast, she could have thought she heard through the tumult a faint sound of wrangling voices, very distant, inarticulate, not to be detached from the general confusion; but it ceased as the wind fell; and she told herself that her fancy had again deceived her. But not for long now. Her whole soul thrilled in the thought of the rapturous reality that second by second must be approaching to claim her for its own.

Suddenly an intense feeling of awe came over her--a thrill of hushed expectancy, as in that solemn moment of the Mass when the Host is elevated above the bowed and death-still congregation. Her eyes were on the velvet spaces--out of their silences dripped a sudden star, which, descending slowly, disappeared behind the trees.

And on the instant there came a woman’s scream, harrowing, heart-piercing, rending the darkness. Once, and fainter, it was repeated; and then the wind took up the tale of fear and swept it onwards into obliteration.

The watcher stood as if stricken into stone, all the blood in her body draining back upon her heart. No fancy--there could be none, in that horrible cry. Who had uttered it--and whence? It had come from the direction of the trees, down by the garden edge--O, God! O, God!--his time, his path!

She leapt as one from the brink of the grave, called back to the solace of some infinite pain. He was there; he needed her. Without an instant’s hesitation she climbed the little balcony, and falling anyhow upon the turf beneath, rose to her feet and ran. She ran down the terrace, across the sloping sward, a small white spectre against the towering blackness of the trees. Her feet sparkled in the inky pools; the wind charged at her, and tore loose a wild strand of hair; it was a figure to haunt those glades for evermore. She ran and ran, making straight in the direction of the sound. As she skirted the plantation edge, she seemed conscious of shadowy forms swiftly glimpsing and disappearing among the trees. She heeded nothing of them, of their flittings and sibilations. Real or unreal, of what importance were they any longer in this context of death? For it was death, and the end of all things. She never doubted it; it was in her soul as she ran. That scream had shattered at one blow the whole rainbow fabric of their love’s illusion. It could not be, it could never have been, by human consent. Only by way of this agony was it possible for the heaven of their dreams to come true. Down among the flowery paths she stopped suddenly, and fell upon her knees beside him.

He was lying crushed into the green border--there, in that very place where the love-in-a-mist was wont to grow so thickly. It was quiet in this sunken spot--no sound but the bubbling, it seemed, of a low spring. It came from his lungs, God pity her, and ran over his lips. “Beloved!” she sighed in a little voice; but all hopeless heart-break was in it.

With the intense vision of subconsciousness she could distinguish, as surely as if it were daylight, every detail of his face. His eyes were closed; but she knew he was not dead. Would he die without recognising her? She put an arm beneath his head and tried to lift it to her bosom.

“Not without one word!” she said, with a small wooing moan. “It is only you and I.”

And at that, struggling back from the shadows, he raised leaden lids, and knowing her, faintly smiled. She tore a handkerchief from her breast, a little perfumed scrap of lace and cambric, and with it tried to staunch the gushing life. And then she bent her face, to catch the gasping words:

“What is it, most dear, most dear?”

“Believe nothing--only my deathless love.”

“And mine--O, and mine!”

His left arm crooked feebly a moment, and then fell. A spasm of scorn twitched his dying features:

“In the back--there were three of them--and one a woman.”

Again the murmur tailed off and ceased. In a numb agony she spoke the name that was only hers. “Take me with you,” she whispered, with a quivering sigh: “O, take me, take me with you!”

And then suddenly and strongly he rose in her arms, and an unearthly light, great and triumphant, was in his eyes, and he spoke with a clear voice:

“Sweet--in the North--in the beautiful gardens--we shall meet in three----”

The blood rushed from his mouth; a slight convulsion shook him; he fell back. They found her--they, the shameful ones, when they slunk presently from their ghastly ambush--clinging insensible to the lifeless body.