Chapter IX: Part III: I (2)

In his own room he sat down near the window, took his head in his hands, the gesture adding poignancy to his humiliation, and gazed at the truth. He had stripped himself of all illusion only to make himself the more helpless before its lowest forms. More than the realized love was the realized jealousy; more than the anguish at the thought of having lost her was the rage of the dispossessed, unsatisfied brute. Such love insulted the loved woman. He could not escape from it, but he could not feel the added grace and piety that, alone, could make it tolerable. From the fixed contemplation of his own sensations his mind dropped presently to the relief of more endurable thoughts. To feel the mere agony of loss was a dignifying and cleansing process. For, apparently, he had lost her. It was strange, almost unthinkable, that it should be so, and stranger the more he thought. He, who had never claimed, had no right to feel a loss. But he had not known till now how deep was his consciousness of their union.

She had long ago guessed the secret of the voiceless, ambiguous love that could flutter only as far as pain, that could never rise to rapture. She had guessed that behind its half-tortured, momentary smile was the impersonal Buddha-gaze; and because she so understood its inevitable doom she had guarded herself from its avowal--guarded herself and him. He had trusted her not to forget the doom, and not to let him forget it, for a moment. But all the time he had known that in her eyes he was captive to some uncanny fate, and that could she release him from his chains her love would answer his. He had been sure of it. Hence his present perplexity.

Perplexity began to resolve itself into a theory of commonplace expediency, and, feeling the irony of such resentment, he resented this tame sequel to their mute relationship.

Unconsciously, he had assumed that had he been able to ask her to be his wife she would have been able to consent. Her courage, in a sense, would have been the reward of his weakness, for what he would see in himself as weakness she would see as strength. Courage on her part it certainly would have needed, for what a dubious offering would his have been: glamour, at its best,--a helpless, drugged glamour,--and, at its worst, the mere brute instinct that, blessedly, this winding path of thought led him away from.

But she had probably come to despair of releasing him from chains, had come to see clearly that at the end of every avenue she walked with him the Buddha statue would be waiting in a serenity appalling and permanent; and, finding last night the child friendship dangerously threatened, discovering that the impossible love was dangerously real and menaced both their lives, she had swiftly drawn back, she had retreated to the obvious safeguards of an advantageous marriage. He couldn’t but own that she was wise and right; more wise, more right,--there was the odd part of it, the unadjusted bit where perplexity stung him,--than he could have expected her to be. Ambition and the common-sense that is the very staff of life counted for much, of course; but he hadn’t expected them to count so soon, so punctually, as it were.

Perhaps,--and his mind, disentangled from the personal clutch where such an interpretation might have hurt or horrified, safe once more on its Stylites pillar, dwelt quite calmly on this final aspect,--perhaps, with her, too, sudden glamour and instinct had counted, answering the appeal of Grainger’s passion. He suspected the whole fabric of the love between men and women to be woven of these blind, helpless impulses,--impulses that created their own objects. Her mind, with its recognition of danger, had chosen Grainger as a fitting mate, and, in his arms, she had felt that justification by the senses that people so funnily took for the final sanctification of choice.

This monkish understanding of the snares of life was quite untouched by monkish reprobation; even the sense of resentment had faded. And it spoke much for the long training of his thought in the dissecting and destroying of transitory desires that he was presently able to contemplate his loss--as he still must absurdly term it--with an icy tranquillity.

A breathlessness, as from some drastic surgical operation, was beneath it, but that was of the nature of a mere physical symptom, destined to readjust itself to lopped conditions; and with the full turning of his mind from himself came the fuller realization of how well it was with Eppie and a cold, acquiescent peace that, in his nature, was the equivalent for an upwelling of religious gratitude, for her salvation.

But the stress of the whole strange seizure, wrench and renouncement had told on him mentally and physically. Every atom of his being, as if from some violent concussion, seemed altered, shifted.

The change was in his face when, in the closing dusk of the day, he went down to the library. It was not steeled to the hearing of the news that must await him: such tension of endurance had passed swiftly into his habitual ease; but a look of death had crossed and marked it. It looked like a still, drowned face, sinking under deep waters, and Eppie, in her low chair near the window, where she had sat for many hours, saw in his eyes the awful, passionless detachment from life.

After his pause at the unexpected sight of her, sitting there alone, a pause in which she did not speak, although he saw that her eyes were on him, he went on softly down the room, glancing out at each window as he passed it; and he looked, as he went, like an evening moth, drifting, aimless, uncanny.

Outside, the moor stretched like a heavily sighing ocean, desolate and dark, to the horizon where, from behind the huge rim of the world, the sun’s dim glow, a gloomy, ominous red, mounted far into the sky.

Within the room, a soft, magical color pervaded the dusk, touching Eppie’s hair, her hands, the vague folds and fallings of her dress.

He waited for her to speak, though it seemed perfectly fitting that neither should. In the silence, the sadness of this radiant gloom, they needed no words to make more clear the accepted separation, and the silence, the sadness, were like a bleeding to quiet, desired death.

The day was dying, and the instable, impossible love was dying, too.

She had let go, and he quietly sank.

But when she spoke her words were like sharp air cutting into drowned lungs.

“I saw you pass this afternoon, Gavan.”

From the farthest window, where he had paused, he turned to her.

“Did you, Eppie?”

“Didn’t you see that I did?”

“I wasn’t sure.” He heard the flavor of helplessness in his own voice and felt in her a hard hostility, pleased to play with his helplessness.

“Why did you not speak of what you saw?” Her anger against him was almost like a palpable presence between them in the dark, glowing room. He began to feel that through some ugly blunder he was very much at her mercy, and that, for the first time, he should find little mercy in her; and, for the first time, too, a quick hostility rose in him to answer hers. It was as if he had tasted too deeply of release; all his strength was with him to fight off the threat of the returning grasp.

“Why should I?” he asked, letting her see in his gaze at her that just such a hard placidity would meet any interpretation she chose to give.

“Didn’t you care to understand?”

“I thought that I did understand.”

“What did you think, then?” Eppie asked.

He had to give her the helpless answer. “That you had accepted him.”

He knew, now, that she hadn’t, and that for him to have thought so was to have cruelly wronged her; and she took it in a long silence, as though she must give herself time to see it clearly, to adjust herself to it and to all that it meant--in him, for her.

What it meant, in her and for him, was filling his thoughts with a dizzy enough whirl of readjustment, and there mingled with it a strange after-flavor of the jealousy, and of the resentment against her; for, after all, though he had probably now an added reason for considering himself a warped wretch, there had been some reason for his mistake: if she hadn’t accepted him, why had he seen her so?

“Jim is gone,” she said at last.

“Because--It was unwillingly, then?”

The full flame of her scorn blazed out at that, but he felt, like an echo of tears in himself, that she would have burst into tears of wretchedness if she had not been able so to scorn him.

“Unwillingly! Why should you think him insolent and me helpless? Can you conceive of nothing noble?” she said.

“I am sorry, Eppie. I have been stupid.”

“You have--more than stupid. He was going and he asked me for that. And I gave it--proudly.”

“I am sorry,” Gavan repeated. “I see, of course. Of course it was noble.”

“You should be more than sorry. You knew that I did not love him.”

“I am more than sorry. I am ashamed,” he answered gravely.

He had the dignity of full contrition; but under it, unshaken after all, was the repudiation of the nearness that her explanation revealed. His heart throbbed heavily, for he saw, as never before, how near it was; yet he had never feared her less. He had learned too much that afternoon to fear her. He was sure of his power to save her from what he had so fully learned.

He looked away from her and for long out at the ebbing red, and it was the unshaken resolve that spoke at last. “But all the same I am sorry that it was only that. He would have made you happy.”

“You knew that I did not love him,” Eppie repeated.

“With time, as his wife, you might love him.” Facing her, now, folding his arms, he leaned back against the mantel at his far end of the room. “I know that I’ve seemed odiously to belittle and misunderstand you, and I am ashamed, Eppie--more ashamed than you can guess; but, in another way, it wasn’t so belittling, either. I thought you very wise and courageous. I thought that you had determined to take the real thing that life offered you and to turn your back, for once and for all, on--on unreal things.” He stopped at that, as though to let it have its full drop, and Eppie, her eyes still fixed on him from her distant chair, made no answer and no sign of dissent.

As he spoke a queer, effervescent blitheness had come to him, a light indifference to his own cruelty; and the hateful callousness of his state gave him a pause of wonder and interest. However, he couldn’t help it; it was the reaction, no doubt, from the deep disgust of his abasement, and it helped him, as nothing else would have done, thoroughly to accomplish his task.

“He can give you all the things you need,” he went on, echoing poor Grainger’s _naïf_ summing up of his own advantages. “He has any amount of money, and a very big future before him; and then, really above all, you do care for him so much. You see the same things in life. You believe in the same things; want the same things. If you would take him he would never fail you in anything.”

Still her heavy silence was unbroken. He waited in vain for a sign from her, and in the silence the vibration of her dumb agony seemed to reach him, so that, with all the callousness, he had to conquer an impulse to go to her and see if she wept. But when he said, “I wish you would take him, Eppie,” and she at last answered him, there were no tears in her voice.

“I will never take him.”

“Don’t say that,” he replied. “One changes.”

“Is that a taunt?”

“Not a taunt--a reminder.”

She rose and came to him, walking down the long room, past the somber illuminations of the windows, straight to him. They stood face to face, bathed in the unearthly light. All their deep antagonism was there between them, almost a hatred, and the love that swords clashed over.

“You do not believe that of me,” she said.

He was ready and unfaltering, and was able to smile at her, a bright, odd smile. “I believe it of any one.”

It was love that eyed him--love more stern, more relentless in its silence than if she had spoken it, and never had she been so near as when, sending her clarion of open warfare across the abyss, she said, “I will never change--to you.”

The words, the look,--a look of solemn defiance,--shattered forever the palace of pretence that they had dwelt in for so long. Till now, it might have stood for them. In its rainbow chambers they might still have smiled and sorrowed and eluded each other, only glanced through the glittering casements at the dark realities outside; but when the word of truth was spoken, casements, chambers, turrets, fell together and reality rushed in. She had spoken the word. After that it was impossible to pretend anything.

Gavan, among the wreck, had grown pale; but he kept his smile fixed, even while he, too, spoke the new language of reality.

“I am afraid of you, then.”

“Of course you are afraid of me.”

Still he smiled. “I am afraid _for_ you.”

“Of course you are. You have your moments of humanity.”

“I have. And so I shall go to-morrow,” said Gavan.

She looked at him in silence, her face taking on its haggard, unbeautiful aspect of strange, rocky endurance. And never had his mind been more alert, more mocking, more aloof from any entanglement of feeling than while he saw her love and his; saw her sorrow and his sorrow--his strange, strange sorrow that, like a sick, helpless child, longed, in its darkness, its loneliness, to hide its head on her breast and to feel her arms go round it. Love and sorrow were far, far away--so far that it was as if they had no part at all in himself, as if it were not he that felt them.

“Are you so afraid as that?” Eppie asked.

“After last night?” he answered. “After what I felt when I saw you here, with him? After this? Of course I am as afraid as that. I must flee--for your life, Eppie. I am its shadow--its fatal shadow.”

“No, I am yours. Life is the shadow to you.”

“Well, on both sides, then, we must be afraid,” he assented.

She made no gesture, no appeal. Her face was like a rock. It was only that deep endurance and, under it, that deep threat. Never, never would she allure; never draw him to her; never build in her cathedral a Venusberg for him. He must come to her. He must kneel, with her, before her altar. He must worship, with her, her God of suffering and triumph. And, the dying light making her face waver before his eyes with a visionary strangeness, stern and angelic, he seemed to see, deep in her eyes, the burning of high, sacramental candles.

That was the last he saw. In silence she turned and went. And what she left with him was the sad, awed sense of beauty that he knew when watching kneeling multitudes bowed before the great myth of the Church,--in silence, beneath dim, soaring heights. He was near humanity in such moments of self-losing, when the cruder myth of the great world, built up by desire, slipped from it. And Eppie, in this symbolic seeing of her, was nearer than when he desired or feared her. Beauty, supreme and disenfranchising, he saw. He did not know what he felt.

Far away, on the horizon, in the gloomy waste of embers, the sun’s deep core still burned, and in his heart was a deep fatigue, like the sky’s slow smoldering to gray.

VI

Grainger had gone, and Gavan announced his departure for the next morning. The situation was simplified, he felt, by Eppie’s somber preoccupation. He was very willing that she should be seen as a gloomy taker of scalps and that his own should be supposed to be hanging at her girdle. The resultant muteness and melancholy in the general and Miss Barbara were really a comfort. The dear old figures in the tapestry seemed fading to-night into mere plaintive shadows, fixing eyes of sad but unquestioning contemplation upon the latent tragedies of the foreground figures.

It was a comfort to have the tapestry so reticent and so submissive, but, all the same, it made the foreground tragedy, for his eyes, painfully distinct. He could look at nothing else. Eppie seemed to stand, with her broken and bleeding heart, in the very center of the design. For the first time he saw what the design was--saw all of it, from the dim reaches of the past, as working to this end.

The weaving of fate was accomplished. There she stood, suffering, speechless, and he, looking at her, fatal shuttle of her doom that he was, felt under all the ashes a dull throbbing.

After dinner he smoked a cigar with the general, who, tactfully, as to one obviously maimed, spoke only of distant and impersonal matters. Gavan left him over some papers in the quiet light of the smoking-room and went to the library. Eppie, with her broken heart, was not there. The night was very hot. By an open window Miss Barbara sat dozing, her hands upturned with an appealing laxity on her knees, sad even in her sleep.

Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a slow, rising misery.

If he was to be spared the final wrench, he was also to be robbed of something. He hadn’t known, till then, of how much. He hadn’t known, while she stood there before him, this fully revealed Eppie, this Eppie who loved far beyond his imagining, far beyond prudence, ambition, even happiness, what it would be not to see her again, to part from her speechlessly, and with a sort of enmity unresolved between them.

The cathedral simile was still with him, not in her interpretation of it, as the consecration of human love, but in his own, as a place of peace, where together they might still kneel in farewell.

But she barred him out from that; she wouldn’t accept such peace. He could only submit and own that she was perhaps altogether right in risking no more battles and in proudly denying to him the opportunity of any reconciling. She was right to have it end there; but the core among the embers ached.

He wandered out into the dark, vague night, sorrowfully restless.

It was not a radiant night. The trees and the long undulations of the moorland melted into the sky, making all about a sea of enveloping obscurity. The moor might have been the sky but for its starlessness; and there were few stars to-night, and these, large and soft, seemed to float like helpless expanded flowers on a still ocean.

A night for wandering griefs to hide in, to feel at one with, and, with an instinct that knew that it sorrowed but hardly knew that it sought, Gavan went on around the house, through the low door in the garden wall, and into the garden.

Here all the warmth and perfume of the summer day seemed still to exhale itself in a long sigh like that of a peaceful sleeper. Earth, trees, fruit, and flowers gave out their drowsy balms. Veiled beauty, dreaming life, were beneath, above, about him, and the high walls inclosed a place of magic, a shadow paradise.

He walked on, past white phlox, white pansies, and white foxglove, through the little trellis where white jasmine starred its festoons of frail, melancholy foliage, and under the low boughs of the small, gnarled fruit-trees. Near the summer-house he paused, looking in at the darkness and seeing there the figures of the past--two children at play. His heart ached on dully, the smoldering sorrow rising neither to passionate regret nor to passionate longing, acquiescing in its own sorrow that was part of the vision. Moved by that retrospect, he stepped inside.

The sweet old odor, so well remembered, half musty, half fresh, of cobwebbed wood, lichened along the lintels and doorway beams, assailed him while he groped lightly around the walls, automatically reaching out his hand to the doll’s locker, the little row of shelves, the low, rustic bench and the table that, he remembered as it rocked slightly under his touch, had always been unsteady. All were in their old, accustomed places, and among them he saw himself a ghost, some sightless, soundless creature hovering in the darkness.

The darkness and the familiar forms he evoked from it grew oppressive, and he stepped out again into the night, where, by contrast with the uncanny blindness, he found a new distinctness of form, almost of color, and where a memory, old and deep, seemed to seize him with gentle, compelling hands, in the fragrance of the white roses growing near the summer-house. Wine-like and intoxicating, it filled the air with magic; and he had gone but a few steps farther when, like a picture called up by the enchantment, he saw the present, the future too, it seemed, and, with a shock that for all its quiet violence was not unexpected, stood still to gaze, to feel in the one moment of memory and forecast all his life gathered into his contemplation.

Eppie sat on a low garden bench in the garden’s most hidden corner. With the fresh keenness of sight he could see the clustering white roses on the wall behind her, see against them the darkness of her hair, the whiter whiteness of her dress, as she sat there with head a little bent, looking down, the long white shawl folded about her.

It was no longer the Eppie of the past, not even the Eppie of the present: the present was only that long pause. It was the future that waited there, silent, motionless, almost as if asleep; waited for the word and touch that would reveal it.

She had not heard his light step, and it seemed to be in the very stillness of his pause that the sense of his presence came to her. Raising her head she looked round at him.

He could only see the narrow oval of her face, but he felt her look; it seized him, compelling as the fragrance had been--compelling but not gentle. He felt it like firm hands upon him while he walked on slowly toward her, and not until he was near her, not until he had sat down beside her, did he see as well as feel her fixed and hostile gaze.

All swathed and infolded as she was, impalpable and unsubstantial in the darkness, her warm and breathing loveliness was like the aroma of a midnight flower. She was so beautiful sitting there, a blossoming of the darkness, that her beauty seemed aware of itself and of its appeal; and it was as if her soul, gazing at him, dominated the appeal; menaced him should he yield to it; yet loved, ah, loved him with a love the greater for the courage, the will, that could discipline it into this set, stern stillness.

Yes, here was the future, and what was he to do with it? or, rather, what was it to do with him? He was at her mercy.

He had leaned near her, his hand on the bench, to look into her eyes, and in a shaken, supplicating voice he said, “Eppie, Eppie, what do you want?”

Without change, looking deeply at him, she answered, “You.”

That crashed through him. He was lost, drowned, in the mere sense of beauty--the beauty of the courage that could so speak and so hold him at the point of a sword heroically drawn. And with the word the future seized him. He hid his face upon her shoulder and his arms went round her. Her breast heaved. For a moment she sat as if stricken with astonishment. Then, but with sternness, as of a just and angry mother, she clasped him, holding him closely but untenderly.

“I did not mean this,” she said.

“No; but you _are_ it,” Gavan murmured.

She held him in the stern, untender clasp, her head drawn back from him, while, slowly, seeking her words over the tumult she subdued, she said: “It’s _you_ I want--not your unwilling longing, not your unwilling love. I want you so that I can be really myself; I want you so that you can be really yourself.”

He strained her to him, hiding his face on her breast.

“Can’t you live? Can’t you be--if I help you?” she asked him.

For a long time he was silent, only pressing closely to her as though to hide himself from her questions--from his own thoughts.

He said at last: “I can’t think, Eppie. Your words go like birds over my head. Your suffering, my longing, hurt me; but it’s like the memory of a hurt. I am apart from it, even while I feel it. Even while I love you--oh, Eppie! Eppie!--I don’t care. But when we are like this--at last like this--I am caught back into it all, all that I thought I’d got over forever, this afternoon,--all the dreadful dream--the beautiful dream. It’s for this I’ve longed--you have known it: to hold you, to feel your breath on me, to dream with you. How beautiful you are, how sweet! Kiss me, Eppie,--darling, darling Eppie!”

“I will not kiss you. It would be real to me.”

He had raised his head and was seeing now the suffering of her shadowy eyes, the shadowy lips she refused him tragically compressed lest they should tremble. Behind her pale head and its heavy cloud of hair were the white roses giving out--how his mind reeled with the memory of it--the old, sweet, wine-like fragrance.

He closed his eyes to the vision, bending his lips to her hand, saying: “Yes, that’s why I wanted to spare you--wanted to run away.”

In the little distance now of his drawing from her, even while he still held her, his cheek on her hand, she could speak more easily.

“It is that that enrages me,--your mystic sickness. I am awake, but you aren’t even dreaming. You are drugged--drugged with thought not strong enough to find its real end. You have paralyzed yourself. No argument could cure you. No thought could cure you. Only life could cure you. You must get life, and to get it you must want it.”

“I don’t want it. I can’t want it. I only want you,” said Gavan, with such a different echo.

She understood, more fully than he, perhaps, the helpless words.

Above his bowed head, her face set, she looked out into the night. Her mind measured, coldly it seemed to her, the strength of her own faith and of his negation.

Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had its proud recoil from the abasement--oh, she saw it all!--that his limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to their reality. Life was her ally. She must put her trust in life. She consecrated herself to it anew. Let it lead her where it would.

The long moment of steady forecast had, after its agony of shame and fear, its triumph over both.

He felt the deep sigh that lifted her breast--it was almost a sob; but now her arms took him closely, gently, to her and her voice had the steadfastness, no longer of rejection, but of acceptance.

“Gavan, dream with me, then; that’s better than being drugged. Perhaps you will wake some day. There, I kiss you.”

She said it, and with the words his lips were on hers.

In the long moment of their embrace he had a strange intuition. Something was accomplished; some destiny that had led them to this hour was satisfied and would have no more to do with them. He seemed almost to hear this thought of finality, like the far, distant throbbing of a funeral bell, though the tolling only shut them the more closely into the silence of the wonderful moment.

Drugged? No, he was not drugged. But was she really dragging him down again, poor child, into her own place of dreams?

After the ecstasy, in the darkness of her breast and arms, he knew again the horrible surge of suffering that life had always meant to him. He saw, as though through deep waters, the love, the strife, the clinging to all that went; he saw the withering of dreams, and death, and the implacable, devouring thought that underlay all life and found its joy in the rending sorrow of the tragedy it triumphed over.

It was like a wave catching him, sucking him down into a gulf of blackness. The dizziness of the whirlpool reeled its descending spiral through his brain. Eppie was the sweet, the magical, the sinister mermaid; she held him, triumphing, and he clung to her, helpless; while, like the music of rushing waters, the horror and enchantment of life rang in his ears. But the horror grew and grew. The music rang on to a multitudinous world-cry of despair,--the cry of all the torments of the world turning on their rack of consciousness,--and, in a crash of unendurable anguish, came the thought of what it all would mean; what it all might mean now--now--unless he could save her; for he guessed that her faith, put to the test, might accept any risk, might pay any price, to keep him. And the anguish was for her.

He started from her, putting away her arms, yet pinioning her, holding her from him with a fierceness of final challenge and looking in the darkness into her darker eyes.

“Suppose I do,” he said. “Suppose I marry you,”--for he must show her that some tests she should not be put to. “Suppose I take you and reëenter the dream. Look at it, Eppie. Look at your life with me. It won’t stay like this, you know. Look far, far ahead.”

“I do,” she said.

“No, no. You don’t. You can’t. It would, for a year, perhaps, perhaps only for a day, be dream and ecstasy,--ah, Eppie, don’t imagine that I don’t know what it would be,--the beauty, the joy, the forgetfulness, a radiant mist hanging over an abyss. Your will could keep me in it--for a year, perhaps. But then, the inevitable fading. See what comes. Eppie, don’t you know, don’t you feel, that I’m dead--dead?”

“No; not while you suffer. You are suffering now--for me.”

“The shadow of a shadow. It will pass. No, don’t speak; wait; as you said, we can’t argue, we can’t, now, go into the reasons of it. As you said, thought can’t cure me; it’s probably something far deeper than our little thought: it’s probably the aspect we are fated to be by that one reality that makes and unmakes our dreams. And I’m not of the robust Western stuff that can work in its dream,--create more dream, and find it worth while. I’ve not enough life in me to create the illusion of realities to strive for. Action, to me, brings no proof of life’s reality; it’s merely a symptom of life, its result, not its cause or its sanction. And the power of action is dead in me because the desire of life is dead,--unless you are there to infect me with it.”

“I am here, Gavan.”

“Yes, you are,--can I forget it? And I’m yours--while you want me. But, Eppie, look at it; look at it straight. See the death that I will bring into the very heart of your life. See the children we may have; see what they would mean to you, and what they would mean to me: Transient appearances; creatures lovely and pathetic, perhaps, but empty of all the significance that you would find in them. I would have no love for our children, Eppie, as you understand love. We will grow old, and all the glamour will go--all the passion that holds us together now. I will be kind--and sorry; but you will know that, beside you, I watch you fading into listlessness, indifference, death, and know that even if I am to weep over you, dead, I will feel only that you have escaped forever, from me, from consciousness, from life. Eppie, don’t delude yourself with one ray of hope. To me your faith is a mirage. And it all comes to that. Have you faith enough to foresee all the horror of emptiness that you’ll find in me for the sake of one year of ecstasy?”

She had not moved while he spoke--spoke with a passion, a vehemence, that was like a sudden rushing into flame of a forest fire. There was something lurid and terrible in such passion, such vehemence, from him. It shook him as the forest is shaken and was like the ruinous force of the flames. She sat, while he held her, looking at it, as he had told her, “straight.” She knew that she looked at everything. Her eyes went back to his eyes as she gave him her answer.

“Not for the sake of the year of ecstasy; in spite of it.”

“For what, then?” he asked, stammering suddenly.

Her eyes, with their look of dedication, held him fast.

“For the sake of life--the long life--together; the life without the glamour, when my faith may altogether infect you.”

“You believe, Eppie, that you are so much stronger than I?”

“It’s not that I’m strong; but life is stronger than anything; life is the only reality. I am on the winning side.”

“So you will hope?”

“Hope! Of course I hope. You could never make me stop hoping--not even if you broke my heart. You may call it a mirage if you like--that’s only a word. I’ll fill your trance with my mirage, I’ll flood your whiteness with my color, and, God grant, you will feel life and know that you are at last awake. You are right--life _is_ endless contest, endless pain; it’s only at that price that we can have it; but you will know that it’s worth the price. I see it all, Gavan, and I accept. I accept not only the certainty of my own suffering, but the certainty of yours.”

Through the night they gazed at each other, his infinite sadness, her infinite valor. Their faces were like strange, beautiful dreams--dreams holding in their dimness such deep, such vivid significance. They more saw the significance--that sadness, that valor--than its embodiment in eyes and lips.

It was finally with a sense of realization so keen that it trembled on the border of oblivion, of the fainting from over-consciousness, that Gavan once more laid his head upon her breast. He, too, accepting, held her close,--held her and all that she signified, while, leaning above him, her cheek against his hair, she said in a voice that over its depth upon depth of steadiness trembled at last a little: “I see it all. Imagine what a faith it is that is willing to make the thing it loves most in the whole world suffer--suffer horribly--so that it may live.”

He gave a long sigh. At its height emotion dissolved into a rapt contemplation. “How beautiful,” he said.

“Beautiful?” she repeated, with almost a gentle mockery for the word. “Well, begin with beauty if you will. You will find that--and more besides--as an end of it all.”

VII

She left him in the garden. They had talked quietly, of the past, of their childhood, and, as quietly, of the future--their immediate marriage and departure for long, wonderful voyages together. His head lay on her breast, and often, while they spoke of that life together, of the homecoming to Cheylesford Lodge and when he heard her voice tremble a little, he kissed the dear hand he held.

When she rose at last and stood before him, he said, still holding her hands, that he would sit on there in the darkness and think of her.

She felt the languor of his voice and told him that he was very tired and would do much better to go to bed and forget about her till morning; but, looking up at her, he shook his head, smiling: “I couldn’t sleep.”

So she left him; but, before she went, after the last gazing pause in which there seemed now no discord, no strife, nothing to hide or to threaten, she had suddenly put her arms around his neck, bending to him and murmuring, “Oh, I love you.”

“I seem to have loved you forever, Eppie,” he said.

But, once more, in all the strange oblivion of his acceptance, there had been for him in their kiss and their embrace the undertone of anguish, the distant tolling--as if for something accomplished, over forever--of a funeral bell.

He watched her figure--white was not the word for it in this midnight world--pass away into the darkness. And, as she disappeared, the bell seemed still to toll, “Gone. Gone. Gone.”

So he was alone.

He was alone. The hours went by and he still sat there. The white roses near him, they, too, only a strange blossoming of darkness, symbolized, in their almost aching sweetness, the departed presence. He breathed in their fragrance; and, as he listened to his own quiet breaths, they seemed those of the night made conscious in him. The roses remembered for him; the night breathed through him; it was an interchange, a mingling. Above were the deep vaults of heaven, the profundities of distance, the appalling vastness, strewn with its dust of stars. And it, too, was with him, in him, as the roses were, as his own breath came and went.

The veils had now lifted from the night and it was radiant, all its stars visible; and veil after veil seemed drifting from before his soul.

A cool, light breeze stirred his hair.

Closing his eyes, at last, his thought plunged, as his sight had plunged, into gulf under gulf of vacancy.

After the unutterable fatigue, like the sinking under anæsthesia, of his final yielding, he could not know what was happening to him, nor care. It had often happened before, only never quite like this. It was, once more, the great peace, lapping wave after wave, slow, sliding, immeasurable waves, through and through him; dissolving thought and feeling; dissolving all discord, all pain, all joy and beauty.

The hours went by, and, as they went, Eppie’s face, like a drift of stars, sank, sank into the gulf. What had he said to her? what promised? Only the fragrance of the roses seemed to remember, nothing in himself. For what had he wanted? He wanted nothing now. Her will, her life, had seized him; but no, no, no,--the hours quietly, in their passing seemed to say it,--they had not kept him. He had at last, after a lifelong resistance, abandoned himself to her, and the abandonment had been the final step toward complete enfranchisement. For, with no effort now of his own at escape, no will at all to be free, he had left her far behind him, as if through the waters of the whirlpool his soul, like a light bubble, had softly, surely, risen to the air. It had lost itself, and her.

He thought of her, but now with no fear, no anguish. A vast indifference filled him. It was no longer a question of tearing himself from her, no longer a question of saving himself and her. There was no question, nor any one to save. He was gone away, from her, from everything.

When the dawn slowly stole into the garden, so that the ghosts of day began to take shape and color, Gavan rose among them. The earth was damp with dew; his hair and clothes were damp. Overhead the sky was white, and the hills upon it showed a flat, shadowless green. Between the night’s enchantments of stillness, starriness, veiled, dreaming beauty and the sunlit, voluble enchantments of the day,--songs and flights of birds, ripple and shine of water, the fugitive, changing color of land and sky,--this hour was poor, bare, monotonous. There wasn’t a ray of enchantment in it. It was like bleak canvas scenery waiting for the footlights and a decorated stage.

Gavan looked before him, down the garden path, shivering a little. He was cold, and the sensation brought him back to the old fact of life, that, after all, was there as long as one saw it. The coming of the light seemed to retwist once more his own palely tinted prism of personality, and with the cold, with the conscious looking back at the night and forward to the day, came a long, dull ache of sadness. It was more physical than mental; hunger and chill played their part in it, he knew, while, as the prism twined its colors, the fatiguing faculty of analysis once more built up the world of change and diversity. He looked up at the pale walls of the old house, laced with their pattern of creepers. The pine-tree lay like an inky shadow across it, and, among the branches, were the windows of Eppie’s room, the window where he and she had stood together on the morning of Robbie’s death--a white, dew-drenched morning like this. There she slept, dear, beautiful, the shadow of life. And here he stood, still living, after all, in their mutual mirage; still to hurt her. He didn’t think of her face, her voice, her aspect. The only image that came was of a shadow--something darkly beautiful that entranced and suffocated, something that, enveloping one, shut out peace and vacancy.

His cold hands thrust into his pockets, he stood thinking for a moment, of how he would have to hurt her, and of how much less it was to be than if what they had seen in the night’s glamour had been possible.

He wondered why the mere fact of the night’s revelation--all those passing-bell hours--had made it so impossible for him to go on, by sheer force of will, with the play. Why couldn’t he, for her sake, act the lifelong part? In her arms he would know again the moments of glamour. But, at the mere question, a sickness shuddered through him. He saw now, clearly, what stood in the way: suffering, hideous suffering, for both of them--permanent, all-pervading suffering. The night had proved too irrevocably that any union between them was only momentary, only a seeming, and with her, feeling her faith, her hope, her love, he could know nothing but the undurable discord of their united and warring notes.

Could life and death be made one flesh?

The horror of the thought spurred him from his rigor of contemplation. That, at least, had been spared her. Destiny, then, had not meant for them that final, tragic consummation.

He threaded his way rapidly among the paths, the flower-beds, under the low boughs of the old fruit-trees. She had left the little door near the morning-room open for him, and through it he entered the still house.

It wasn’t escape, now, from her, but from that pressing horror, as of something, that, unless he hastened, might still overtake them both. Yet outside her door he paused, bent his head, listened with a strange curiosity, helpless before the nearness of that loved, that dreaded being, the warring note that he sought yet fled from.

She slept. Not a sound stirred in the room.

He closed his eyes, seeing, with a vividness that was almost a hallucination, her face, her wonderful face, asleep, with the dark rivers of her hair flowing about it.

And, fixed as he was in his frozen certainty of truth, he felt, once more like the striking of a hand across a harp, a longing, wild and passionate, to enter, to take her, sleeping, in his arms, to see her eyes open on him; to hide himself in life, as in the darkness of her breast and arms, and to forget forever the piercing of inexorable thought.

He found that his hand was on the lock and that he was violently trembling.

It was inexorable thought, the knowledge of the horror that would await them, that conquered the leap of blind instinct.

Half an hour later a thin, intense light rimmed all the eastern hills, and a cold, clear cheerfulness spread over the earth. The moors were purple and the sky overhead palely, immaculately blue. About the tall lime-trees the rooks circled, cawing, and a skylark sang far and high, a floating atom of ecstasy.

And in the clearness Gavan’s figure showed, walking rapidly away from the white house, down the road that led through the heather and past the birch-woods, walking away from it forever.

VIII

Grainger stood in Eppie’s little sitting-room, confronting, as Gavan had confronted the spring before, Miss Allen’s placidly sewing figure.

The flowers against which her uneventful head now bent were autumnal. Thickly growing Michaelmas daisies, white and purple, screened the lower section of the square outside. Above were the shabby tree-tops, that seemed heavily painted upon an equally solid sky. The square was dusty, the trees were dusty, the very blue of the sky looked grimed with dust.

The hot air; the still flowers, not stirred by a breath of breeze; Miss Allen’s figure, motionless but for its monotonously moving hand, were harmonious in their quiet, and in contrast to them Grainger’s pervasive, restless, irritable presence was like a loud, incessant jangling.

He walked back and forth; he picked up the photographs on the mantel-shelf, the books on the table, flinging them down in a succession of impatient claps. He threw himself heavily into chairs,--so heavily that Miss Allen glanced round, alarmed for the security of the furniture,--and he asked her half a dozen times if Miss Gifford would be in at five.

“She is seldom late,” or, “I expect her then,” Miss Allen would answer in the tone of mild severity that one might employ toward an unseemly child over whom one had no authority.

But though there was severity in Miss Allen’s voice, the acute glances that she stole at the clamorous guest were not unsympathetic. She placed him. She pitied and she rather admired him. Even while emphasizing the dismay of her involuntary starts when the table rattled and the chairs groaned, she felt a satisfaction in these symptoms of passion; for that she was in the presence of a passion, a hopeless and rather magnificent passion, she made no doubt. She associated such passions with Eppie,--it was trailing such clouds of glory that she descended upon the arid life of the little square,--and none had so demonstrated itself, none had so performed its part for her benefit. She was sorry that it was hopeless; but she was glad that it was there, in all its Promethean wrathfulness, for her to observe. Miss Allen felt pretty sure that this was the nearest experience of passion she would ever know.

“In at five, as a rule, you say?” Grainger repeated for the fourth time, springing from the chair where, with folded arms, he had sat for a few moments scowling unseeingly at the pansies.

He stationed himself now beside her and, over her head, stared out at the square. It was at once alarming and delightful,--as if the Titan with his attendant vulture had risen from his rock to join her.

“You’ve no idea from which direction she is coming?”

“None,” said Miss Allen, decisively but not unkindly. “It’s really no good for you to think of going out to meet her. She is doing a lot of different things this afternoon and might come from any direction. You would almost certainly miss her.” And she went on, unemphatically, but, for all the colorless quality of her voice, so significantly that Grainger, realizing for the first time the presence of an understanding sympathy, darted a quick look at her. “She gets in at five, just as I go out. She knows that I depend on her to be here by then.”

So she would not be in the way, this little individual. She made him think, now that he looked at her more attentively, as she sat there with her trimly, accurately moving hand, of a beaver he had once seen swiftly and automatically feeding itself; her sleek head, her large, smooth front teeth, were like a beaver’s. It was really very decent of her to see that he wanted her out of the way; so decent that, conscious of the link it had made between them, he said presently, abruptly and rather roughly, “How is she?”

“Well, of course she has not recovered,” said Miss Allen.

“Recovered? But she wasn’t actually ill.” Grainger had a retorting air.

“No; I suppose not. It was nervous prostration, I suppose--if that’s not an illness.”

“This isn’t the place for her to recover from nervous prostration in.” He seemed to fasten an accusation, but Miss Allen understood perfectly.

“Of course not. I’ve tried to make her see that. But,”--she was making now quite a chain of links,--“she feels she must work, must lose herself in something. Of course she overdoes it. She overdoes everything.”

“Overwork, do you think? The cause, I mean?”

Grainger jerked this out, keeping his eyes on the square.

Miss Allen, not in any discreet hesitation, but in sincere uncertainty, paused over her answer.

“It couldn’t be, quite. She was well enough when she went away in the summer, though she really isn’t at all strong,--not nearly so strong as she looks. She broke down, you know, at her uncle’s, in Scotland”; and Miss Allen added, in a low-pitched and obviously confidential voice, “I think it was some shock that nobody knows anything about.”

Grainger stood still for some moments, and then plunging back into the little room, he crossed and re-crossed it with rapid strides. Her guessing and his knowledge came too near.

Only after a long pause did Miss Allen say, “She’s really frightfully changed.” The clock was on the stroke. Rising, gathering up her work, dropping, with neat little clicks, her scissors, her thimble, into her work-box, she added, and she fixed her eyes on him for a moment as she spoke, “Do, if you can, make her--“

“Well, what? Go away?” he demanded. “I’ve no authority--none. Her people ought to kidnap her. That’s what I’d do. Lift her out of this hole.”

Miss Allen’s eyes dwelt on his while she nerved herself to a height of adventurous courage that, in looking back at it, amazed her. “Here she is,” she said, and almost whispering, “Well, kidnap her, then. That’s what she needs--some one stronger than herself to kidnap her.”

She slid her hand through his, a panic of shyness overtaking her, and darted out, followed by the flutter of a long, white strip of muslin.

Grainger stood looking at the open door, through which in a moment Eppie entered.

His first feeling was one of relief. He did not, in that first moment, see that she was “frightfully changed.” Even her voice seemed the same, as she said with all the frank kindness of her welcome and surprise, “Why, Jim, this is good of you,” and all her tact was there, too, giving him an impression of the resource and flexibility of happy vitality, in her ignoring by glance or tone of their parting.

She wore, on the hot autumn day, a white linen frock, the loose bodice belted with green, a knot of green at her throat, and, under the white and green of her little hat, her face showed color and its dear smile.

Relief was so great, indeed, that Grainger found himself almost clinging to her hand in his sudden thankfulness.

“You’re not so ill, then,” he brought out. “I heard it--that you had broken down--and I came back. I was in the Dolomites. I hadn’t had news of you since I left.”