Chapter VII: Part III: XXVI (1)

THE contrast in Gabriel’s life had grown the more vivid since the political assemblage at Rilchester and his ascension into oratorical fame. Materialism and idealism still fronted each other on the stage; the one heavy-browed and saturnine, the other with quivering hand unlifted to the heavens.

To the thinker who is no mere egotist the meaner excitations of life must inevitably seem as dust on the highway of progress. No man who realizes the dignity of manhood can be deeply discouraged by an ill-fitting coat, a lost seat on a municipal bench, or a spoiled dinner. Materialism is merely a symptom of psychical sterility. Those great with the instinct towards God touch the soil only with their sandals; their eyes are turned to the sky; their foreheads sweep the stars.

Struggle and suffering beget thought and true thought begets the consciousness of God. So had it been with Gabriel. Trouble had chastened him, had touched his eyes and given diviner vision. The ragged inanities of a mundane existence were falling like the threads of a rotten cloak. A deep loathing of minute nothings increased forcefully within him as day followed day. The things that men hold of value grew of less and less account to his soul. The numberless petty interests of a narrow social scheme had become peculiarly ridiculous and diminutive in his eyes. He was but working out in his own being the evolution of all history, moving through primitive phases, epicurean egotism, to that universality of the spirit that looks only to the future and embraces the supreme good of humanity as the active word of God.

He saw Joan often that month of May. The misgivings that had haunted him often had died to an infrequent whisper, and the fascination of the girl’s soul held him as in an Elysian dream. The hills and woods beyond Rilchester were solitary as Eden, and humanity rarely vexed them by intruding on this Arcady. Gabriel in his visionary state had put all mundane prudence from his ken. When near to Joan he felt that he had no foe in the wide world, that he hated no man, envied none. All was peace and a great calm as of beautiful purity and enduring love. For days he existed like a prophet in a desert, filled with a species of spiritual exaltation. It was an excellent mood enough, but one hardly suited to the cynicism of Saltire society. Such sentiments as inspired Gabriel’s brain spelled madness, or worse, to the discriminating glance of the multitude. It is unwise to go star-gazing amid the gutters of an unclean town.

With a simplicity that was even pathetic, these two children formulated the creed that was to stand to them for the governance of the future. Their favorite haunt that spring was the old Roman amphitheatre on the hills, an emerald hollow clasped in the shadows of antique trees. Hollies grew there, lustrous and luxuriant; pines and beeches and solemn yews. On one green slope a wild cherry showered snow upon the grass. Wood violets stare azure-eyed from banks that shone with gold. Where the eastern gate had once stood a great pine towered like an Eastern minaret, prayerful on the hills.

One morning Gabriel had received the letter he had long expected, a letter from Ophelia warning him of her early return to The Friary. It was a curt, cold document, much in contrast to the erotic vaporings he had received of yore. The same morning he had spread the letter before Joan in the Roman amphitheatre, and out of the largeness of her love she had found power to strengthen him for the months to come. It is no light task for a woman to advise a man against her own heart; yet it is a task in which heroic women have ever excelled.

“You believe in yourself once more,” she said to him, as he sat at her feet on the turf bank under the shadow of the trees.

“Perhaps,” he answered her; “you have reinspired me. I am prepared to face fate with greater equanimity, be it hard and unlovely.”

“Yet the gleam from afar, the divine aim, these are everywhere.”

“Yes, even in a diseased home.”

Joan had sat a long while in thought with that strange solemnity upon her face that made her womanliness so divine. Her eyes were like the eyes of one who has looked long at a picture afar off. There were pathetic lines about her mouth. She had spoken with Gabriel of his wife and home, spoken like the great-hearted woman that she was, strong words for others to the annihilation of self.

“When she comes back to you, dear—”

The man turned and looked at the face purposeful and pale in the deep shadows.

“Yes.”

“You will be yourself to her.”

“I will try.”

“She must love you,” said the girl, and was silent a moment as though communing with the deep cry of her own heart; “you must live your lives together for the best. As for me, I only want to help you to be happy.”

The man bent his head as though half shamed. His heart was less sacrificial than the girl’s. He had little hope in life outside the green circle of those dusky trees.

“I cannot stand between you, dear.”

“You will stand above us,” he said, hastily.

She sighed and was silent.

“Above us—ever. You have a great soul. God knows I shall need the thought of you to help me to play my part.”

“I may see you—sometimes?”

They looked in each other’s eyes with an involuntary tenderness that was pathetic in the extreme.

“Sometimes.”

“Oh yes; I could not bare to lose you always. You need not fear me, dear; I shall not weaken you. That which is in our hearts is not of earth but of heaven.”

“We have vowed our vow!”

“Nor shall we break it. You must be true to her, Gabriel, for she is your wife. I was half tempted once, but now my love is greater than to plot for self. We shall be together in spirit.”

“Always.”

She bent forward very slightly and looked into the man’s eyes with a gracious self-consciousness that made her face more luminous under her splendid hair.

“I want to help you to realize your ideals,” she said. “Can I do that?”

“Who else?”

“For the good of those unhappy ones whom women pity. You will hold the red wine of joy to the lips of the feeble; you will point to the golden cleft in the heavens. I have learned so much from you that I am no longer a mere egotist. I am ambitious for you, dear. I believe you have great work in the years to come.”

Gabriel did not look into her eyes. He was loath to confess, even to himself, that his strength was as nothing without hers, that even she thought too well of him. Yet for her sake and her pride in him he could play the man to the strain of her ideals. Had not Beatrice made Dante Dante? To have quailed and doubted would have shamed the great love that this woman had set like a sun in the firmament of life.

“For the thought of you,” he said, “I will do my duty. God help me to be worthy of your pride in this life. And after death—”

Her face grew radiant like the face of a saint to whom visions of splendor are unveiled in the infinite.

“After life—immortality!”

It was not long that year before Gabriel saw the slimed track of the beast, grass flattened by the belly of a creeping thing, toad’s eyes glinting yellow in the dusk. The truth was gradual but none the less sure. The suspicion deepened as the days went by; nor was he left long in the shallow waters of doubt.

One morning he had fancied himself followed by a man in the dress of a game-keeper. For the moment he had thought nothing of the incident. More sinister convictions were only established as he wandered out with Joan from the amphitheatre with its fringe of trees. He had seen a bearded face disappear behind a bush, like the face of a savage scout watching the march of a hostile host. Yet another evening a laboring fellow had shouldered by them in a narrow path through the woods with a rude stare at the girl’s face. Yet again Gabriel had seen the figure of a man squirming like a lizard into the undergrowth fringing a thicket not far from Zeus Gildersedge’s house. These signs were sinister enough to arouse the cynic in the man and to set the world-wise part of him thinking. To be watched, and for what purpose! This was a moral that did not need the fabulous phraseology of Æsop to hide its nakedness.

The climax came one gray evening when Gabriel was trudging home alone from the Rilchester hills. In a muddy lane overhung by tangled hedges he passed two farm youths who had been out setting snares for rabbits. They had been at work in a ditch on the edge of a wood, a wood through which Joan and Gabriel had passed. Hearing his footsteps in the lane, they had turned and stood aside to stare at him as he went by in the dusk. He had caught the coarse mirth on their faces as they elbowed each other and sniggered like a couple of city louts.

Gabriel had not taken ten steps before their voices followed him in a bucolic satire that made him redden to the ears. He had hurried on, shuddering like a lonely girl at the sound of a drunken man’s voice. To have turned on them would but have meant the greater ignominy. Moreover, he had strange fear in him for the moment, not mere physical terror, but that spiritual panic that freezes the soul. He had stumbled on with a loud laugh following him like the sound that bursts from an ale-house or a brothel.

That night Gabriel was like a man in great pain or as one who is near taking his own life. The savor of fleshliness was in his nostrils. He hated the world and was numb at heart.

XXVII

AS the child is nurtured in the world’s wisdom by the inconsistencies of its elders, so the dreamer is constrained by the baser instincts of humanity to recognize the ineffectualness of his own visions. The harp and the lyric strain suffice not for the strenuous life. Rather is the strong man’s song the song of the Norseman of old, the cry of the heart unto whom battle is glorious. The gilded harness and the flashing sword, these pertain to the spiritual vikings of history, giants renewing the world, causing evil to quake at the white gleam of their sails.

The man Gabriel had been wakened once again from dreams. He was no longer the transcendental lover, blind to the physical philosophy of the sage in the street. Yesterday earth had been to him a primitive Eden where no sin lurked in the glory of the opening year. All this was changed as with the stroke of a wand. Purgatory had displaced paradise. Where quiet valleys had stood bright with sunlight the man saw a deep abyss steeped in gloom. There the satyr ran squealing after his prey. Thence came the hot roar of the bacchanal, the canting of the hypocrite, the whine of the miser scrambling for blood-stained gold. The din that rose from the pit was as the hoarse discords of a great city. The breath of it ascended like heavy smoke from some smouldering Sodom.

The revulsion was all the more forceful for its severe and savage suddenness. It was enough for Gabriel to realize that he had sinned against that code of expediency that governs in large measure all social relationships. Empyrean sentiments appeared nebulous and flimsy beside the granite orthodoxy of the bourgeois world. It was of little solid advantage to turn from men to a higher judge for comfort and to fling a declaration of innocence in the face of illimitable ether. What though his thoughts were as white as the wing feathers of seraphs, these same thoughts would be trampled in the mire before the world would deign to surrender a verdict. It was the inevitable and mundane conclusion to which the man was brought in the argument. The social laws were based largely on physical considerations. Hence those who attempted to move in a higher sphere under the guidance of a more spiritual morality were doomed to misunderstanding and to speedy condemnation.

The result of this mental storm was that Gabriel found himself hounded back from the open day into the more populous thickets of discretion. Expediency compelled him to contradict in action his newly conceived creed, to abandon his progressive banner at the first brush with the past. Like a revolutionary leader backed by a myriad fine notions and a hundred peasants armed with rusty carbines, he found himself impotent before the massed armaments of social orthodoxy. He was muzzled and disarmed by a single consideration, the consideration of a woman’s honor. The world’s verdict and his own idealism were scaled one against the other. Had self only been in the balance the dial might have indicated the weightier worth of truth. As it was, he had too much heart to play a Roman rôle. The times were jointed up too fast for him to break them by the sacrifice of a woman’s name.

The truth was bitter to the man, but the cup had to be emptied none the less. He experienced a species of revengeful fear when he realized how the girl’s name might be tossed upon the tongues of the numberless most Christian ladies of the neighborhood. Impotent, he had watched his dream-world rush into an abyss. He had come near exposing the one woman in the world to the cultured ribaldry of a provincial society and the gibes of her sister women. It was, therefore, a conviction with him, born half of despair, that Joan’s life and his must diverge, never to meet again.

The man pitied himself most devoutly, for he was one of those sensitive beings who can make of misery a crown of thorns. Like a woman who had lost her lover, he hoarded his sorrow in his heart, treasuring it with a species of desperate exultation. He was even proud when he could not sleep and when his whole being sickened at the sight of food. There was a Promethean splendor in such torture, an immolation of the soul on the pyre of self-sacrifice.

To tell Joan Gildersedge the truth, that was the task forced upon the man by his own conscience, a task embittered by her innocence of heart. He began to despise himself vindictively for having brought so passionate and impotent a theme into the girl’s life. His very idealism had been ill-judged egotism, a selfish thirst quenchless and perilous to others. He knew in his heart that he was of more worth to Joan Gildersedge than any animate creature upon earth. Yet it was fated that he should disclose to her eyes the baser chicaneries of life—to tell her, in truth, that he had come near compromising her honor!

The memory of that day of confessions never surrendered its vividness to the touch of time. Gabriel had started early in the first flush of morning, bent on “nature studies,” as he would have had his neighbors believe. The earth was marvellously still, drowned in sunlight, an idyllic landscape such as would have glimmered from Da Vinci’s brain. The woods and hills seemed set in amber with a silver mist drawn like a gossamer veil over the green. Not a wind stirred. The sea was an uncut emerald; the sky a hollow sapphire touched with snow.

Howsoever, the man lagged upon the hills, moody and dejected. Of old he would have sped like a Greek youth through Arcady, but his heart was heavy that morning and the gods of the wilderness were mute and sad. Only the beauty of earth rose to him in mockery, the beauty of a gorgeous courtesan with a head of gold, scorning the visionary whose senses smelled of heaven. Anon the Burnt House trees stood before him in the streaming light, warm-bosomed and silent. Under the tiled roof the roses were already red upon the walls; the lilac and laburnum had fallen in the garden and the fruit trees had shed their bridal robes. Even the iron gate had a more dismal tone that morning as the man turned it back upon its rusty hinges. He walked up the drive slowly, half-hearted as a prodigal. He would have given much to have had other words under his tongue.

Joan Gildersedge was at the window of her room, a broad lattice under the tiles. She had been sitting in the shadow, with her hands idle in her lap, turning the pages of thought musingly. Gabriel saw her start up and wave to him from an aureole of jasmine and of roses. He stood before the porch and waited for the heavy door to open, feeling as though he held a naked poniard traitorously behind his back.

The girl came out to him with a calm, quick joy that made him start for breath. Her face was white, her hair coifed loosely, and there were shadows under her eyes. To Gabriel she had never seemed more beautiful as she stood before him in the sun.

“I am glad, I am glad,” she said.

“You are ill?”

“No, not ill, only tired.”

There was an unconscious spasm of joy in her voice, an uprising of gladness in her manner, that made Gabriel sick at heart. He divined what had been passing under that red-tiled roof, and that love was like the dawn to one weary of watching through the night. She hungered for such sympathy as she had often given to him in days of darkness and unrest. He knew himself suddenly for a broken reed, an empty chalice, a physician who could wound but could not heal.

“Take me into the garden,” he said; “is it your father?”

“Yes.”

“What can I say to you?”

“You understand; that is enough,” she answered. “He has had one of his evil times. How the hours have haunted me! I was longing for you, and like an echo you have answered me.”

They passed together towards the garden where the trimmed yews grew beside the tall acacia. The green cupolas were crowned with gold; the grass was a deep mist shot through with purple. Like rubies were the roses set upon enamelled screens of green.

Joan sat down on the rough seat under the yews. Her face with all its luminous spirituality remembered to Gabriel, Rossetti’s “Beata Beatrix,” womanhood glorified by pure loveliness of soul.

“Here is peace,” she said, with lids half closed, “sunlight and shadow mingled. Sit you down in the grass, Gabriel, and talk to me.”

The man hesitated, then obeyed her. His lips were mute for the moment, his courage cold.

Possibly her sensitive woman’s instinct like a mirror caught the gloom of the man’s mood. As she sat under the yews she opened her eyes wide and looked at him searchingly with that tender vigilance that was like the love-watch of an angel. No sunlight shone on Gabriel’s face, and his eyes were full of shadows.

He glanced up at her suddenly, the restless, wistful look of one in pain. Nor would his eyes abide hers; they were furtive, even sullen.

“Well, dear,” she said, again.

He plucked at the grass, but did not smile as was his wont.

“What is it, Gabriel?”

There was no fear in her voice, only a deep, strong tone of tenderness that made the man more miserable still.

“I have something to say to you,” was his retort.

“Your wife—”

“No, not of her.”

“Then?”

“It is of ourselves, and therefore the sadder.”

He sprang up suddenly and began to move up and down before her, like one who would rouse his courage and deaden the consciousness of pain. Joan watched him, half bemused, her fingers opening and closing upon the rough woodwork of the seat. The mood was not new to her; she remembered with what an intonation he had spoken to her nigh a year ago beside the ruined altar on the hills.

“Joan!”

“Yes, Gabriel.”

“I have been an utter fool. Oh, my God, how can I ask your pardon!”

She sat and gazed at him as in a kind of stupor, the sunlight pouring through upon her face and making it wondrous white in the shadows.

“What is it, Gabriel?” she said.

“Like a blind fool I have been leading you to the edge of a cliff.”

“I do not understand you, dear.”

He stopped before her with a great gesture of despair and the morose look of a man denouncing his own crime. He spoke hurriedly, as though eager to end the confession, and as though each word he spoke would wound.

“Understand that it was wrong of me to have come into your life again. I have been a dreamer, and have forgotten that the world is a mass of malice and of falsehood. Like a fool I have brought peril into your life. Now I am learning, for your sake, to fear the world.”

She started up suddenly, and came towards him very white and piteous. He had never seen fear on her face before.

“Gabriel!”

“God help me, dear; if I had only realized—”

“What is this horror?”

“Men begin to speak evil of us.”

“Evil of us?”

“Yes.”

“Impossible!”

“Too possible, thanks to my madness.”

“But we have done nothing!”

“Nothing. It is the world’s charity, the business of brutes to conceive evil.”

She stood motionless a moment and then started towards him with a sudden outburst of despair.

“Tell me the worst, Gabriel.”

“Thank God, the worst is not the worst in that sense.”

“Ah!”

“It is not too late; I am wise in time. It is we who must suffer, in our hearts, not in our names. Would to God I had not been such a fool as to make you love me.”

“Ah! say not that.”

“Can I forgive my manhood this?”

She grew calm quite suddenly, and went back to the seat under the yews, like a woman who recovers gradually her sanity of soul. She was silent awhile, looking into the long grass with wide, luminous eyes that seemed to search and compass the future. It was her ordeal of fire; like the true woman she was, she emerged scathless.

“Gabriel,” she said, presently.

He came two steps nearer, looking in her face as one who seeks inspiration.

“I understand you now. It was all so sudden and terrible; forgive me for seeming desperate.”

“Joan!”

She spoke very quietly, still looking at the grass.

“Promise me one thing,” she said.

“Tell it to me.”

“You will not grieve for my sake.”

He took a deep breath and hung his head.

“Promise me this,” she said, speaking more quickly—“ah! promise it me, for I would not change the past—no, not for my hope of heaven. It has taught me much—ah! how much you can never know. It has taught me the glory of being a woman. I can only bless you for it, my dearest, my dear—”

He stood before her, awed by a wonder that solemnized his whole being. He would have worshipped her save that his own shame forbade him. Only those who have beheld it can declare, the incomprehensible heroism of the love of a good woman.

“You shame me greatly,” was all he said.

Joan rose up suddenly and came very near to him.

“Gabriel, I honor you.”

“Honor me!”

“Have you not put your own heart under your feet?”

“And yours!”

Joy had kindled on her face. She was happy—nay, exultant in her rapture of self-negation.

“Have I not sworn to you,” she said, “that I would not have had it otherwise? This has been my great awakening. Can you not understand, dear, that it is even something to live for a memory? I am content to be brave, not only for our sake, but for hers.”

“The woman I married?”

“Your wife; she must never know of this; I have always remembered her honor. And I have held your heart, Gabriel; have I not?”

“Who else?”

“We can triumph over the world, even by our renunciation.”

A gradual melancholy descended upon the hearts of both. Over the trees the sky was a golden canopy; the grass stood a deep mist about the foxgloves’ purple towers. There were no tears in the eyes of heaven. Only the sun came streaming through the trees.

“It is better thus,” said the miser’s daughter, “for there will be no shadow between us—no reproach.”

“If I am ever a man,” he answered her, “you will have re-created me.”

“I will trust in your future.”

“Trust me, that I may trust myself.”

She came even nearer and stood very close to him, looking in his face. Her lips were parted, and there was such light in her eyes that she looked like one transfigured.

“Kiss me, Gabriel, but once.”

“Joan!”

“But once, the only time, and forever.”

“I should but wound you deeper.”

“No, no, on my lips—that I may remember it. Is it so great a thing to ask?”

Her hands went to his shoulders and he kissed her, holding her very close to him so that he felt the deep inrush of her breath. She lay in his arms a moment, looking in his face like one to whom death might seem sweet.

“Forgive me all this,” he said.

“Gabriel, what should I forgive?”

“My folly and my many weaknesses.”

“You are strong now; let me go; I cannot bear it further.”

She freed herself gently and stood aside from him, looking like a saint who had suffered and yet triumphed. When he had gone from her she sat down under the yews with the sunlight playing on her hair and her face white as ivory under the boughs. She remained motionless as some fair poem wrought in stone; only her eyes were alive with an infinite anguish that seemed to challenge heaven.

It was Gabriel, the man, not Joan Gildersedge, who wept that day as he went stumbling through the woods towards his home. Was this, then, the fate of his idealism, the rough breaking of a woman’s heart?

XXVIII

OPHELIA STRONG had abandoned St. Aylmers and descended unannounced upon Saltire with bag and baggage. The irrepressible Miss Saker accompanied her. Manifold confidences had of late passed between the two, confidences of a most intimate and interesting nature. Miss Saker, at her “dear friend’s” earnest desire, had accompanied her to Saltire to support her in the somewhat delicate dramaticisms that threatened the domestic peace.

Time, that green-eyed quipster, had set so cunningly the dial of circumstance that Ophelia’s return fell upon the day when Gabriel and Joan took leave of each other under the yews in Burnt House garden. It was late in the afternoon when Gabriel, parched and miserable, came up the road from Steelcross Bridge across the Mallan and saw a carriage swing into The Friary gate with a swirl of dust from the white highway. Two parasols, red and blue, flashed in the victoria, hiding the occupants as the carriage rounded the curve of the stone wall. The man’s conjectures, rife on the instant, suggested Judith and the Saltire equipage. As for his wife, her last letter had prophesied her advent as fixed for the second week in June. Tired and miserable as he was, he was in no mood for a social ordeal. At the lodge gate his gardener’s wife informed him with a courtesy that the young mistress had just driven up from the station.

No tidings could have been more leaden to the man’s mind, weighted as it was with a misery gotten of the tragic temper of the day. He passed up the drive unwillingly enough, heeding nothing, the banks of rhododendrons shining mauve and white and red. Entering upon the sleek stretch of lawn, with its standard roses hung with the lamps of June, its beds brilliant with geranium and lobelia, he found the carriage standing empty before the porch. James, the butler, was removing sundry wraps and parcels from the cushions. The man smiled in a peculiar, starched fashion when he saw his master, and jerked a grimace at the coachman, a grimace tipped with a coarse innuendo suited to the tongue of a pantry cynic.

Gabriel, entering the hall of his own home, saw his wife standing in the centre of a blood-red Oriental carpet, with the carved front of an antique cupboard for a background. She was wearing a large hat trimmed with white sea-bird’s wings and sky-blue silk; her dress of olive gray with green facings was moulded to her figure, throwing into evidence in the French fashion the fulness of her bust and the contour of her hips. Despite her journey, she appeared fresh as a pink azalea in bloom, boasting more color than of yore, plumper about the mouth. There was even a suspicion of pencilling about the finely arched brows and the too languorous lids. Possibly the first thing Gabriel noted about his wife was the petulant glint of her blue eyes, a feline gleam that he had grown familiar with of old.

His sensations were peculiarly incongruous for the moment. It was four months since they had met, and her sudden presence there that day quickened his moody discontent. Nor could he save his senses from being enveloped by the sheer loveliness of the woman, her sinuous, tiger-like perfection of body. She was one of those suggestive beings such as Parisian society might delight in. Contrasted with the spiritual image graven upon Gabriel’s brain, his wife seemed a mere voluptuary snatched from the canvas of a Rubens.

The greeting between man and wife was in every sense prophetic. Neither approached the other; they stood at a little distance, looking tentatively into each other’s eyes. There were sketches—blurs of color—upon the panelled walls. A suit of armor, grotesquely sullen, stood at the man’s right hand. The place was full of shadows, though the garden was gay without.

“This is a bolt from the blue,” said the man, with a strained yet niggardly enthusiasm. “I never thought I should find you here.”

“You had my telegram,” came the clear retort.

“No; I had turned out early and so missed it. I did not expect you till I saw your carriage.”

The woman’s face seemed to grow paler, giving her eyes a yet more sensuous brilliance.

“So it seems,” she said. “I hope you are not grievously disappointed.”

“You must be tired.”

“Don’t worry yourself on my account. James sent the carriage down to meet us. Ah, I have forgotten to introduce you to Miss Saker; she has come back with me for a fortnight. Mab, dear, my husband.”

It was like the wooden chatter of a pair of dolls, lacking warmth or the merest flicker of enthusiasm. The same spirit hovered in the air as of yore. Gabriel had been chilled and repelled from the first glance. Meanwhile a streak of green silk had risen from a neighboring settee; Miss Saker and the man had bowed to each other and extended listless hands. Miss Saker had been staring him over from his first entry, much as she would have scrutinized an interesting co-respondent bandying words with a barrister in the divorce court. Unfortunately he had disappointed Miss Saker’s malice, being not the Faustus she had expected, but rather a poor creature considered in the part of the melodramatic villain.

It was as sorry a clashing of moods as even a mediæval witch-damsel could have predestinated. Gabriel, after a stroll in the garden, followed his wife slowly up the oak staircase with its broad, shining steps and rich-wrought balustrade. His reason was too maimed for the moment to serve him with any warmth or virtue. He moved as one half-dazed, taking in the minutiæ of the scenes around him with that peculiar vividness that often accompanies pain. He marked how the lozenged panes in the blazoned windows gleamed with a singular and sensuous brilliance. How the dust danced golden in the slanting beams of the sun. How one of the old oil pictures, a coarse Flemish genre work, hung awry on the landing. He was in the act of levelling it when his wife came out from the “blue room,” closing the door with its painted panels carefully after her.

She stood there holding the handle of the door and looking at him with a peculiar expression of critical composure. The silver girdle about her waist glittered in the sun, and on her bosom she wore a cross set with garnets. Her eyes were unwaveringly bright and even more brilliantly blue than of yore.

Feeling for the moment more like a homeless child than a grown man, he yearned to be comforted even by this woman whom he had ceased to love. Was she not more to him than a sister! Indubitably beautiful as she stood before him, possibly some old tenderness not wholly selfish whimpered in his heart. The very touch of a human hand seemed precious in that hour of desolation and despair. Enigmatic though his sensations were, he yielded to them with the mute helplessness of one in pain.

“You are looking wondrous well, dear,” he said to her.

“Indeed!”

“I will ring to have our room set in order. Since you have been away from me I have been sleeping in my dressing-room.”

“My orders have been already given,” said the wife, with no softening of her mouth.

“Your pardon; I have grown such a bachelor in four months.”

“Probably.”

“It is good to have you back again.”

There was the slightest quivering of Ophelia’s lids. It was as though in this trite dramatic incident she was preparing to crush her husband’s sentiments. She kept her hand upon the handle of the door, stiffening herself upon her arm. Her eyes had grown peculiarly dull and sullen.

“I intend changing my régime,” she said.

“Of course, dear, if—”

“I am sleeping with Mabel in the ‘blue room.’”

It was a simple thrust enough, but deep in meaning. Ophelia watched the man’s face much as Cleopatra might have studied the face of a slave poisoned in a wanton thirst for knowledge. Her voice sounded strangely harsh and resonant, a discord the more telling upon the man’s hypersensitive brain.

“If you wish it so.”

“If I had not wished it,” she interjected, irritably, “I should have arranged otherwise. Order Thompson to bring me up some hot water when you go down-stairs. I can’t talk to you now; it always bores me to talk after travelling.”

XXIX

DINNER that evening proved a lugubrious and problematic meal. The conversation was interjectory and spasmodic, the topics comet-like in character, smiting vaguely through a void of silence. Gabriel attempted a hypocritic cheerfulness for the better masking of his own discomfort. His vivacity inspired no feminine response. He was compelled to undergo the ordeal of being studied in detail by his wife and her brown-haired friend. From the first handshake he had conceived a sincere disrelish for Miss Mabel Saker, and her critical silence that evening did not tend to dispossess him of his antipathy. He was not grieved when the white napkins were laid upon the table and the women carried their perfumed persons to the privacy of the drawing-room.

Miss Saker bared the keyboard of the piano and suffered her slim fingers to produce musical etchings in black and white. She was considered something of a wit in her own circle, her humor emulating the spangled, short-skirted brilliance of the variety stage. Miss Saker was in a mischievous mood that evening, and the starched artificiality of the dinner-hour emphasized the reaction.

Putting down sundry chords in the base with melodramatic thunder, she glanced over her shoulder with a theatrical frown.

“Tragedy, my dear—tragedy,” she said; “the man is in a deep, deceitful mood. He has something ponderous and painful upon his conscience.”

Ophelia turned herself in her lounge-chair and lay with one cheek on the cushion, a diamond crescent shining in her hair.

“He is too talkative,” she remarked.

“True, O queen. When a man talks thus”—and Miss Saker evolved a rackety and hysterical air—“you may bet your boots his nerves are on the tingle. He is hiding something under his coat.”

“It was easy to see that from the first,” remarked the wife.

“He went green when he saw us in the hall.”

“Rather a shock, perhaps. The man had been out all day; I can guess where.”

Meanwhile Gabriel had wandered to the garden, where the hand of evening was crushing the red juices of the sunset, staining the cloudy steps of heaven. The lawns were of green silk, the flowers thereon like color fallen from the pallet of day. The cypresses stood clothed with azure, the pines like Ethiop maidens wrapped in gossamer work of gold. In the thickets two thrushes were singing, flinging lyric rivalry over the dusky leaves.

The man plunged to the more lonely depths, a broad hollow where flowers and shrubs were tangled in a mist of green. He walked, inhaling the perfumed breath of the hour, with head thrown back, as one who watches the heavens. All the damsels of the night seemed to steal out of their chambers, dewy-lipped, ebon-tressed, with eyes liquid as moon-kissed water. Love! What was it? A vapor and a shade? An intangible essence dying on the lips when tasted, with an infinite regret!

He passed again from the swarthy shrubberies, and saw the windows of his own home yellow and tiger-eyed towards the night. Roses beckoned in the gloom. What were they to him? With the grass like velvet moss under his feet, he drew near to a window and listened. Music came from within, and laughter, facile and light. They were merry, these two, merry at his heart’s cost, and perhaps Gabriel guessed it. Their words were like falling water to him, confused and meaningless. Despite the pleading voice of his woman of dreams, he grew full of bitterness and keen irony of soul.

It had grown dark when he went in to them. A constrained quiet seemed to pervade the room even from the moment that his hand had touched the door. Books were forthcoming, cushions, and an occasional trite monosyllable that broke the silence. More than once a yawn arose behind the ivory screen of five white fingers. The man’s presence seemed to agree ill with the atmosphere. It was not long before the two oppressed ones arose and trailed languidly to bed.

Gabriel sat on over a paper-backed novel that he had found lying in a chair. _A Close Climax_ was its title, and from some casual introspection of its pages he surmised that it was gotten from the French, and not the more ideal for that same reason. He noted remarks concerning ladies’ underclothing, a perfervid scene in a fashionable Spanish beauty’s boudoir, sundry hints as to happiness, physical of course, and a frequent appeal to a sentiment named Love. The book did not hold much converse with him that evening. It abode on his knee more as a cynical fragment of realism. An instinctive and nameless fear of the future was the wraith that stood at his side that night.

The expression of the ensuing week was no less proud and icy. An intangible antagonism pervaded the home life of the place, freezing the fibres and sinews of truth, congealing such magnanimity as moved in the man’s blood. After the first three days he abandoned all attempts at conjuring his wife from her impregnable attitude of silence. She appeared unimpressionable as granite; her very beauty was the opalescent flash of sunlight upon ice. Moreover, the inevitable Miss Saker, like a watchful crow, was forever flapping on the horizon. On no single occasion did Gabriel succeed in obtaining any lengthy privacy with his wife. They seemed to exist on frigid society small-talk and on mundane inanities that gave no scope to the man’s conscience.

On the Wednesday after Ophelia Strong’s return the Gabingly folk with half the Saltire worthies descended upon The Friary for the purpose of courteous chatter. To Gabriel’s sensitive melancholy the house appeared converted into a sudden pandemonium of fashion. His political responsibilities hung like a girdle of thorns about his loins. Mr. Mince, with his usual oleaginous arrogance, deigned to dictate to him on the educational question and the rights of church schools. Later he was cornered by his father-in-law, who demanded, with superlative geniality: “Why the deuce, man, don’t you run over and see us oftener; my Blanche swears you’re turning into a damned political hermit, only bobbing up on state occasions.” The culminating irritation descended upon him in the person of his father, who indulged, for some fateful reason, in parental inquires as to his domestic happiness. The suggestion was the last bodkin prick, rankling in the man’s flesh. John Strong parted from his son that afternoon with a somewhat ruffled temper. Gabriel was more than ever an enigma to the paternal mind, and John Strong, like most Britishers, cordially detested anything he could not understand.

At the end of the aforesaid week Gabriel was like a man groping through a quagmire on a moonless night. The stagnant pools around him, symbolizing his own thoughts, gave back a distorted and sinister reflection of his misery. It was not in his nature to suspect the sincerity of his wife’s scorn. The mood was logical enough, condoned, indeed, by his own conscience. How much she knew or surmised he dared not imagine; it was sufficient for him to realize that some deep gulf lay between them. Harassed with loneliness, unable to thread the future or to pierce the past, he seemed surrounded by a deep and desolate wilderness where he heard the shriek of the lapwing, the beating of invisible wings, the hoarse chatter of dead and wind-shaken grass. Above lay the sky, the black bowl of fate, starless, limitless, and void.

XXX

IF sorrow and solitude go hand-in-hand, Joan Gildersedge indeed had wedded the twain. Her life for years had been but a November repression of the sunnier moods of childhood. The passionate red ore had been hoarded in the dark, not squandered easily or tossed to every beggarly cringe of chance. It was nature that had uncovered this same treasure. Her hand had sprinkled on the childish bosom the blood of a thousand roses. The flowers had touched her white feet with their dewy lips. Wondrous alchemy, indeed! The gold of heaven, the red blood of earth, the milk-white waxen flesh of the moor merged into one slim pillar of virgin loveliness!

It was this same intense virginity of soul that caused Joan to respond more deeply to the human refrain that had swept like strange music into her life. She had escaped the sentimentalisms, the erotic artificialities that mar so many women in the making. Vanity had no acknowledged niche within her heart. She was a spontaneous being, infinitely good by sheer beauty of instinct, unconsciously divine. She had never had the ego emphasized in its meaner characteristics by contact with individuals less generous than herself. Joan had served her father with a quiet patience, not from love, which was indeed impossible, but from a superabundant yet unconscious sense of duty. Her strength was a fine spiritual energy, not the mere forcefulness of the strenuous development of self, the arrogance of astute individualism insisting upon a recognition of rights from monads of like impulse.

It was this same bright sensitiveness of soul that rendered this single romance of hers the more tragic in its earlier season. Like some world-worn wanderer the man had parted the boughs of spring and fallen at her feet, weary of life, desirous only of some subtle Lethe. Her heart had gone out to him from the first hour, spontaneously and without forethought. She had ministered to him, giving him the waters of love for comfort, pointing him onward to a happier dawn.

Thus when she had constituted herself the priestess of the man’s ideals, her hidden oracle had condemned her to pronounce her own doom. That day under the yews her fine self-abnegation had lifted her to queen it over the pleadings of her own heart. For the man’s sake she had understood the strong need of heroism. The sacrificial fire had been quenched upon the altar. She had cast down her divining-rod, broken her magic ring in twain, and returned mutely to her pristine solitude.

What depths of gloom the renunciation meant to her she never comprehended till the first night came. Darkness, heavy, and without dawn! Never to behold the man’s face again; nay, what was more, never to feel her spirit mount with his into the azure of that sympathy that had made earth heaven! There seemed a crass cruelty in the event, an illogical malice that stunned her reason. Yet never in her heart did she blame Gabriel for aught he had made her suffer.

Three successive phases possessed her during those dark hours of anguish and deep bitterness.

For two days she was like a dumb, dazed thing, helpless, wide-eyed, infinitely silent. She went about her duties like one whose soul had been turned to stone. The dull pageant of life about her was a mere shadow show, dusky, nebulous, and unreal. She felt like one dead, standing beyond the tide of time, gazing back upon a paradisic past streaked with the mysterious purple of romance.

The third day she broke down utterly and became even as a child. Her inspired strength ebbed from her. She wept often in secret, and talked to herself like one half-crazed by sorrow. Often she would crush roses to her lips, bury her face in the green and quiet foliage of the trees, cling to some rugged trunk as a child to a mother’s bosom. Apathy had passed, and the flood-gates of grief were open. It was her first great sorrow, her first vision of the infinite pathos of life, the first unbending of her soul before the Eternal Being whose face shines forth on those who suffer. She grew comforted by her own sorrow. Many hours she spent wandering in the woods, or lying hid in the deep June grass, watching the blood ebb from her soul’s side. Then an invisible hand seemed to touch the wound and stanch the flow. Her old vitality returned, a calm and quiet melancholy tinged with a wistful wisdom. At night she would lie by the window in her cushioned chair and stare at the sky for hours together. No season of sleep was it, but a solemn vigil, even beneath the hill of Calvary.

The third phase succeeded a mysterious and more subtle mood in every sense. She remembered Gabriel’s kiss upon her lips. Her yearning for the love he had given her kindled and increased. It was a mute and piteous stretching forth of hands, a great cry of the heart, a thirst of the soul for the wine of life. A strange hope leaped up within her, a passionate prophecy of comradeship that was to be. She had a dream that they would bear much anguish together, face the world and its perils hand-in-hand. She could have rejoiced with pale Francesca at that season, drifting through woes that were divine, when the arms of a lover circled her soul.

Meanwhile, with Gabriel the car of life rumbled upon rugged highways. From mere scorn had arisen sardonic bickerings and the like. It was soon plain to the man that the two women, wife and friend, were in league for the tempting of his anger. It was even as though they had plotted to goad him to some incriminating act of violence. A campaign seemed to have been conceived against his patience.

Torch was set to tinder at last one evening after dinner. Whether there had been conspiracy in the event or no Gabriel could never tell. Cynicisms had been exchanged during the meal. After dessert Gabriel had retired straightway to the library, and Ophelia had followed him, pale and stiff about the lips, a woman bent on battle. She had come by some excuse for an attack upon the man, and her tongue soon set the scene ablaze. Hot words were exchanged, taunts, recriminations, and the like. As a climax the woman overturned a writing-table with a crash at her husband’s feet, flung defiance in his face, and left him.

Ophelia had compassed the necessary finale. As she passed back up the passage towards the hall, she tore her dress at the neck, and, taking the substance of her left arm between her teeth, she bruised the flesh till purple blood showed under the skin. Meeting no witnesses upon the way, she disordered her hair as she climbed the oak stairway, and beat her mouth with her fist so that her lips bled.

By some foreordained coincidence Miss Mabel Saker was looking over the contents of her jewel-case in the “blue bedroom.” Moreover, this particular room was set directly above the library, and any occupant thereof could hear in measure what passed below. Hence, when Ophelia Strong entered to her friend, that lady received her with a shocked pity that was zealously dramatic.

“Dear, what has happened?”

By way of retort Gabriel’s wife displayed to her indignant confidante her bruised arm and bleeding mouth.

“The cad; the mean coward!” was Miss Saker’s cry. “I heard him storming at you. How did it happen?”

“He lost his temper,” said the wife.

“By Jove, if I were only a man!”

“I feel faint, Mab.”

“The brute! Let me bathe your mouth.”

Angelic ministerings to misfortune ensued. Smelling-salts, eau-de-cologne, and much sympathy were forthcoming. Ophelia lay back in a lounge-chair breathing spasmodically, with certain hysteric symptoms, while Miss Saker hung over her and bathed her face.

Ophelia clasped her arm about her friend’s neck and drew her face down close to hers. Her disordered hair had fallen upon her shoulders, a pathetic web of gold.

“You will remember this, Mab,” she said, significantly.

“Should I forget it, dear! If James Maltravers only knew!”

The woman in the chair shuddered and hid her face in the other’s bosom.

“Can I stay here much longer?” she said.

“Good Heavens, no! He will be killing you next. There must be an end to this.”

It may easily be imagined that no apologies were forthcoming from Gabriel for the affair, seeing that he was ignorant of the incidents chronicled above. The quarrel in the library, a mere tumult of words, had arisen like a dust-storm in the desert, sudden and without warning. The man had lost his dignity for the moment under the lash of the woman’s tongue, though even his involuntary descent to her level had not justified, in his estimation, her exhibition of feline spite. He was utterly innocent of the suspicion that she had deliberately tricked him into a display of violence. She was too subtle for the man with her glittering cleverness, perilous as a Spanish dagger.

The following day Gabriel had political business in Rilchester and drove off early in his dog-cart, purposing to be home before the evening dinner-hour. Ophelia and Mabel Saker were breakfasting in the “blue room,” and Gabriel did not see his wife that morning. He was in a dismal mood enough, harassed by shapeless fancies, haunted by the pale face and the shimmering hair of the woman who held his heart. He had fathomed hour by hour the gulf of gloom she had left within his life. The world stood at June, the man’s mood at December.

It was even remarked that day by certain of his political confrères that he seemed depressed and burdened beyond his strength. He appeared, in fact, like a man overshadowed by some secret shame. His conversation had none of the subtle and half-cynical adroitness that had characterized it of old; it was limp and listless, a blunted weapon wielded by a weary hand. His intellect seemed out of gear, wayward, languid, masterless. Occasionally a sparkle of enthusiasm shone through the preoccupied mask of melancholy. It was the common dictum of his acquaintances that “young Strong was out of health.”

He drove homeward late in the afternoon, with the sky a peerless pavilion of gold above his head. A preternatural peace seemed to weigh upon the lids of the day. In the depths of her green valley the Mallan lay with her glittering coils torpid in the sun. The trees took no breath. The clouds stood statuesque upon the hills.

A prophetic sense of evil awoke in the man’s mind as he climbed the hill towards his home. He saw the gray chimneys rising above the green, the shrubberies dusky upon the hill-side, gardens gleaming like painted glass. The place looked peaceful as sleep, a home to love and to be loved in, a haunt for elfish children, a calm refuge from the world.