Chapter VII: Part II: I (5)

“I did not mean in that way,” she answered. She had risen, and, looking at the clock, seemed to show him that their time was over. “But we won’t discuss life and death now,” she said.

“You mean that it’s late and that I must go?” he smiled.

“Perhaps I mean only that I don’t want to discuss,” she smiled back. “Though--yes, indeed, it is late; almost seven. I have a great many things to do this evening, so that I must rest before dinner, and let you go.”

“I may come again?”

“Whenever you will. Thank you for being so kind to-day.”

“Kind, dear Eppie?”

“For being sorry, I mean.”

“Who but a brute would not have been?”

“And you are not a brute.”

The shaded light cast soft upward shadows on her face, revealing sweet oddities of expression. In their shadow he could not fathom her eyes; but a tenderness, peaceful, benignant, even a recovered gaiety, hovered on her brow, her upper lip, her cheeks. It was like a reflection of sunlight in a deep pool, this dim smiling of gratitude and gaiety.

He had a queer feeling, and a profounder one than in their former moment when she had repudiated his helpless emotion, that she spared him, that she restrained some force that might break upon this fraternal nearness. For an instant he wondered if he wanted to be spared, and with the wonder was once more the wrench at leaving her there, alone, in her fire-lit room. But it was her strength that carried them over all these dubious undercurrents, and he so relied on it that, holding her hand in good-by, he said, “I will come soon. I like it here.”

“And you are coming to Kirklands this summer. Uncle expects it. You mustn’t disappoint him, and me. I shall be there for a month.”

“I’ll come.”

“Jim Grainger will be there, too. You remember Jim. You can fight with him from morning till night, but you and I will fight about nothing, absolutely nothing, Gavan. We will--_glisser_. We will talk about Goya! We will be perfectly comfortable.”

He really believed that they might be, so happily convincing was her tone.

“Grainger is a great chum of yours, isn’t he?” he asked.

“You remember, he and his brother were old playmates; Clarence has turned out a poor creature; he’s a nobody in the church. I’m very fond of Jim. And I admire him tremendously. He is the conquering type, you know--the type that tries for the high grapes.”

“You won’t set him at me, to mangle me for your recreation?”

“Do I seem such a pitiless person?”

“Oh, it would be for my good, of course.”

“You may come with no fear of manglings. You sha’n’t be worried or reformed.”

They had spoken as if the captain were non-existent, but Gavan put the only qualifying touch to his assurance of seeing her at Kirklands. “I’ll come--if I can get there by then.”

XII

But he did not go to her again in the slums. The final phases of his father’s long illness kept him in Surrey, and he found, on thinking it over, that he was content to rest in the peace of that last seeing of her.

It was clear to him that, were it not for that paralysis of the heart and will, he would have been her lover. Like a veiled, exquisite picture, the impossible love was with him always; he could lift the veil and look upon it with calmness. That he owed something of this calmness to Eppie he well knew. She loved him,--that, too, was evident,--but as a sister might love, perhaps as a mother might. He was her child, her sick child or brother, and he smiled over the simile, well content, and with an odd sense of safety in his assurance. Peace was to be their final word, and in the long months of a still, hot summer, this soft, persistent note of peace was with him and filled a lassitude greater than any he had known.

Monotonously the days went by like darkly freighted boats on a sultry sea--low-lying boats, sliding with the current under sleepy sails.

He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange, sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)--with his mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current, so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain through him.

In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came--trivial, yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his wasted hand for his,--Gavan held it to the end--was the reminiscence of the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had drooped and died at Kirklands.

On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery work--toward that same end,--the end of the monkey, of his father, his mother,--was profoundly disgusting.

It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods, wheel against a sunset sky.

Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked a drawer of the writing-table beside him and taken out a case of pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final and only logical move of stopping itself.

He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and, indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn on his pillow and fall asleep.

Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped through the emptiness of thought. He was aware, while he watched the visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.

He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.

And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,--all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,--struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,--this dream where such resurrections were possible.

He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to whether head or heart were the surer exit, when a quiet step at the door arrested him.

“Shall I bring the lamps, sir?” asked Howson’s quiet voice.

Gavan could but admire his own deftness in tossing a newspaper over the pistol. He found himself perfectly prepared to keep up the last appearances. He said that he didn’t want the lamps yet and that Howson could leave the curtains undrawn. “It’s sultry this evening,” he added.

“It is, sir; I expect we’ll have thunder in the night,” said Howson, whose voice partook of the day’s decorous gloom. He had brought in the evening mail and laid the letters and newspapers beside Gavan, slightly pushing aside the covered pistol to make room for them, an action that Gavan observed with some intentness. But Howson saw nothing.

Left alone again, Gavan, not moving in his chair, glanced at the letters and papers neatly piled beside his elbow.

After the rending agony of that moment of hideous realization, when, in every fiber, he had felt his own woeful humanity, an odd sleepiness almost overcame him.

He felt much more like going to sleep than killing himself, and, yawning, stretching, he shivered a little from sheer fatigue.

The edge of the newspaper that covered the pistol was weighted down by the pile of papers, and in putting out his hand for it, automatically, he pushed the letters aside, then, yawning again, picked them up instead of the pistol. He glanced over the envelops, not opening them,--the last hand at cards, that could hold no trumps for him. It was with as mechanical an interest as that of the condemned criminal who, on the way to the scaffold, turns his head to look at some unfamiliar sight. But at the last letter he paused. The post-mark was Scotch; the writing was Eppie’s.

He might have considered at that moment that the shock he felt was a warning that life was by no means done with him, and that his way of safety lay in swift retreat.

But after the wrench of agony and the succeeding sliding languor, he did not consider anything. It was like a purely physical sensation, what he felt, as he held the letter and looked at Eppie’s writing. Soft, recurrent thrills went through him, as though a living, vibrating thing were in his hands. Eppie; Kirklands; the heather under a summer sky. Was it desire, or a will-less drifting with a new current that the new vision brought? He could not have told.

He opened the letter and read Eppie’s matter-of-fact yet delicate sympathy.

He must be worn out. She begged him to remember his promise and to come to them at once.

At once, thought Gavan. It must be that, indeed, or not at all. He glanced at the clock. He could really go at once. He could catch the London train, the night express for Scotland, and he could be at Kirklands at noon next day. He rose and rang the bell, looking out at the darker pink of the sky, where the rooks no longer wheeled, until Howson appeared.

“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” He found himself repeating the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.”

Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only natural.

Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols with a short, decisive snap--a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in which his mind was steeped.

The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose. Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding? He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet to watch. Of that he was sure.