Chapter VI: The Lust of Renunciation

O purblind race of miserable men,
How many among us at this very hour
Do forge a life-long trouble for ourselves
By taking true for false or false for true!
—TENNYSON (_Geraint and Enid_).

Ellinor went straight from the dining-room to seek her father in his peaceful retreat. Courage failed her to face the company any longer that night; she had, moreover, a longing to be with one who at least would not misunderstand her.

But, on the very threshold, her heart sank. It hardly needed Barnaby’s warning clutch at her gown from where he sat like a statue of watchfulness, just inside the door, his shake of the head and mysterious finger on lip to show her that her coming was inopportune. The very atmosphere of the room forbade interruption. The air seemed full of floating thoughts, of whispering voices and stealthy vapours; of these singular aromas that to her were like the letters of a strange language which she had hardly yet learned to spell. Up to the vaulted roof the whole space was humming with mysterious activity; a thousand energies were in being around some secret work. And there, master-brain and centre power, her father, seated at his table, like a mimic creator evolving a world of his own out of the forces of his chaos!

She came forward a step or two. His underlip was moving rapidly; and broken, unintelligible words dropped from time to time among the whispering vapour-voices all about him, like stones into a singing fountain. Now he lifted his blue eyes, stared straight at her—and saw her not!

Once or twice before she had known him in this state of mental isolation; she was aware that his brain was wound up to an extraordinary pitch, and that to interfere with its operations or endeavour now to bring its thoughts into another current would be at once useless to herself and cruel to him.

Alas! He had been at his mysterious drugs again—those unknown powers that were beginning to fill her with secret terrors. She had more than once implored him to deal no more with them; but she might as well have implored a Napoleon to desist from planning conquest as the old chemist from experimenting upon himself or others.

She turned, and looked questioningly at Barnaby, who, by some strange dog-like intuition, never failed to remain within sight of his master at such moments. And the lad’s expressive pantomime convinced her that her surmises were right. With a new anxiety added to her burden, she withdrew.

As she stood a moment outside the door, in deep despondency, she heard footfalls coming rapidly down the long passage which led from the tower-wing to the main body of the house. Her heart leaped: her heart would always echo to the sound of that step, as an untouched lute will answer to the call of its own harmony. It was David!

His brow uplifted, his gaze fixed, he came swiftly out of the shadow into the little circle of light; passed her so closely as nearly to brush her with his sleeve and crossed into the darkness again. And she heard the beat of his foot on the tower stairs in the distance, mount, mount, and die away. As little as her father, had he been aware of her presence!

She pressed her hands against her breast; and the taste of the tears she would not shed lay bitter on her tongue, the grip of the sob she would not utter left strangling pain in her throat. Poor all-human thing, with all her human passions, human longings, human weakness, what was she to do between these two visionaries!

Then, in the natural revolt of youth repressed, she came to a sudden resolution. Her father was old; and, besides, he had drugged himself to-night till nothing lived in him but the mind. But David was young, young like herself! What was to hinder from following him again to his altitude; from calling upon him, by all the blood of her beating heart to the blood of his own, to come back from that spirit-world where she could not stand beside him—back to her level, where only a little while ago he had found a green and flowering resting-place? Then she would let him look into her soul. Then, with a tender hand, she would take that mask from his face. Then the hideous incomprehensible shadow that had come between them would fly before the light of truth, and (even to herself she could hardly formulate the sweetness of that hope into words) before the revelation of Love!

She caught up her heavy satin train and her gossamer muslins and ran, as if flying from her own hesitation, up the great stone stairs without a pause to listen to the beating of her heart, across the threshold of that room where, upon that first evening of tender memory, she had tripped and been caught against his breast.

He was not in the observatory. She sought the platform. She had known that she would find him there: and there indeed he stood, even as pictured in her mind, with folded arms and looking up at the sky. She looked up also, and was jealously glad, in her woman’s heart, that, so radiant was the summer moon to-night, those shining rivals of hers were but few and faint to the eye.

She laid her hand upon his arm; he turned, without a word, stared a second:

“Ellinor!”

She had meant to call him back to earth, but not like this! Here was again the incomprehensible look that had rested upon her at dinner, but with an added fierceness of anger so foreign to all she had known of him that she felt as if it slashed her.

“Oh, what has happened? David, what have I done?”

She clasped and wrung her hands. On her heat of pleading his answer fell like ice.

“Done?” he echoed, with that pale smile that seemed to mock at itself; “done, my fair cousin? Nothing in truth that anyone—I least of all—could find fault with. It would be as wise to chide the winds for shifting from north to south as to hold a woman responsible for her own nature.”

His light tones was in startling contrast with the flame of his eye. All unaware of any incident of the day that could have afforded ground for this change, she found as yet no clue in his words to guide her.

“David, David—what is it?” she cried again.

In the anguish of her desire to break down the barrier between them, to get close to his soul again, she stepped towards him, hardly noticing that he drew back from her until he was brought up by the parapet of the platform. When he could retreat no further, he threw out his hand with a forbidding gesture.

She stood obedient but bewildered, as a child that is threatened though it knows not why. The winds of the summer night played with the tendrils of her hair and softly blew the fair white fabric of her gown closer against her, while the tide of moon rays, pouring over her bare shoulders and arms, glorifying the smooth skin with a radiant gleam as of mother-of-pearl, flashed back in scintillations from the burnished embroideries of her robes; so that, with the heaving of her breast and the tremor which shook her whole frame, she seemed to be enveloped with running silver fires.

Something—a passion, a mad desire—flickered into the man’s face, as if, for an instant, a hidden fire had leapt up. The next instant this was succeeded by the former cruel gaze of contempt and anger, the more intense because so icily controlled. Once more measuring her from head to foot, he murmured, with an extraordinary bitterness of accent:

“Are all women either fools or wantons?”

One moment indeed she swayed as if she would have fallen; but instantly she recovered herself, and, with a movement, full of pride and dignity, stooped to gather the folds of her heavy train into her hands and fling them across those shoulders and arms she had so innocently left bare to walk in beauty before him. That the man she loved could have looked, could have spoken such insult, oh, no hand could ever draw the blade from out her heart! There would it remain and rust till she died. Her cheeks—nothing but death indeed would ever cool them again, she thought. And no waters, no snow, no fire would cleanse her white garments from the mud he had just cast at them.

She turned upon him, her arms folded under the swathes of satin.

They were no longer master of the place and voluntary servant; no longer rich lord of the land and recipient of his bounty; no longer the protector and the protected—no longer even the secretly beloved and the loving—they were man and woman upon the equality in which Nature had placed them in their young life. Man and woman, alone in the night, under the great open sky, the wide star-pointed heaven, high-uplifted above the land, far apart from any living creature, unrestrained by any convention, any extraneous touch; face to face, so utterly man and woman alone on this high peak of passion, that it almost seemed as if their bodily envelope must fall away also and leave naked soul to naked soul. And yet, such lonely things has God made us in spirit, He who nevertheless said: “It is not good for man to be alone,” that when two souls meet in conflict and there is no tender hand touch, no meeting of lip to lip to draw the two together without words (we are always so betrayed by the treachery of word!) the difference in each soul is so essential that it seems as if nothing could ever bring them into union again. And there are battles in life which the soul traverses as utterly single as that final battle of all which each one of us is doomed to fight alone.

“David!” cried Ellinor, “explain!”

It was a command, enforced by eye and tone. So had Ellinor never looked before upon David; so had her voice never rung in his ear.

“Explain!” he echoed. “Of what value can the opinions of this poor fool among men, this recluse, this dreamer be to you, what consequences can you attach to them? Go back to the gay circle to which your nature belongs! There is your centre. Have I not seen it this month? Did I not see it to-day—to-night? What have we really in common, you and I?”

A glimmer of comprehension began to dawn upon Ellinor’s mind. But, sweetly stirring as it might have been at another moment to know David jealous, his mistrust came too closely upon his offence to avail. It was but added fuel to her wrath.

“How unjust!” she cried. “How ungenerous, how untrue!”

His haggard eye rested upon her with a sudden doubt of himself. Yet it was but as the pause before the widening rent in the breach—the pressure of the pent-up feelings on their unnatural height was too much now for the already weakened defences. The torrents were loose! He began, in hoarse, rapid, whispering voice:

“Oh, how you must laugh—you women that make us dance like puppets as you hold the strings!”

Then, suddenly, as with a crash and almost a cry, came the first leap of the flood.

“Why do you seek me? Could you not be content to have brought into my peace—God knows how hardly won!—this disturbance, this trouble, this disillusion? Have you not shown me once again that no woman, however kind, can be true; however fair but must be false; however straight-limbed, but must be tortuous of mind; however sweet to draw a man to her but must be black at heart! Is not that enough? I had gone back to my stars, back to all they mean to me; they had called me from among that ignoble crew where you—oh, incredible! seem to have found yourself so well! I had gone back to them, to their serenity, to their high communion.... Why did you call me down? Take your false troubling beauty from this my own peace ground!”

“But David! But, dear cousin, what insanity is this?”

“No,” he cried, with outflung hands beating back the sudden tender relaxation in her voice, the loosening movement of her folded arms under their mantle. “No,” he repeated loudly and harshly. “Once deceived where I most loved! Again deceived where I most trusted! Deceived again where nature, common blood, and family honour, should have most bound to faithfulness—it is enough! I have done with life. I will never again risk my hard-won peace of mind—life’s most precious possession—upon the frail stake of another’s loyalty. I have no friend, I have no sister. Ellinor, I will love no woman!”

His loud voice suddenly sank; and towards the last sentences, with a falling of her high spirit of anger, she saw him resume the old unnatural look, the old passionless tone of detachment and renunciation. The phrase with which he concluded rang in her ears more like a knell of all her secret hopes than the conventional offence.

“Oh,” said she, and the clear sweet note was shot through with a tremor of pain, “neither friend nor kin nor love? It is a hard sentence, David! Is it not as bad to mistrust truth as to break troth?”

But though her words were gentle she felt herself more aloof as she spoke than at any moment of their interview. Their two souls were drawing away from each other in the storm as the same wind and the same waves may part consorting vessels.

She moved, as to leave him, when he arrested her.

“You know the story of my life,” said he. “Stay, Ellinor, the night is mild.”

He put out his hand; but hesitated, and did not touch her. The frenzy of passion had left him, with that sudden change of mood that marks the fevered brain. She sat down on the parapet without a word. The night was mild, as he had said; yet, even under her improvised mantle she was cold—cold to the soul.

Now he had sealed the vial of her love. And, unless his hand knew the cunning of it and could break it open again, sealed it must remain till death. Had he but looked upon her first as now, but spoken as now, how different she might have made it! But even with his eyes upon her once more kind, and his voice in her ear once more gentle; with his hand trembling upon the stone of the bench, but a tiny span from hers; with the atmosphere of his presence enfolding her, she felt that they were still drifting apart further and further across the waste of waters.

“What have I said to you to-night?” he asked, and drew his hand across his brow. “Forgive me, you have always been very good to me. I owe you a great deal.”

She smiled with a welling bitterness.

“If you speak of owing,” she said, “I owe you the very bread I eat.” “And never felt it till to-night,” she added in her heart, but could not speak those words aloud because, in spite of everything, she loved him with that woman’s love that is kept tender by the mother instinct.—She could not hurt him who had hurt her so much.

His troubled gaze on her widened and then became abstracted.

“I have become a creature of the night,” said he, almost as if to himself. “For, by the light of day I cast such shadows as I go, that nothing, I think, could prosper near me. Always I have paid such toll for every good that it had been better I had never known it. The old curse is still upon me. Even for the comfort of your smile, Ellinor, I have had to pay.”

She drew a breath as if she would speak, but closed her lips proudly again. She could not plead for his happiness, for now that meant pleading for herself.

“Let me tell you,” said he once more, “what life has done to me.”

“I am listening,” she replied coldly, after a pause.

“Thank you—you are always patient with me. It is the last time that I shall ever bring a human being into my confidence, but I think you have a right to know, Ellinor, why I have been so moved to-day; to know how it is that events have once more shown me my own unfitness to mix with my fellow-creatures.”

He paused a second, then went on, resentment once more threatening in his voice like distant thunder.

“I cannot do with the meanness, the small duplicities, the little treacheries. Oh, God, duplicity is never small, and to me there is no little treachery. Ellinor, let but the tiniest rift be sprung in the crystal, and its note can never ring pure again. Oh, Ellinor, had you forgotten that?”

He stared at her with a new passion of reproach. But she sat, marble-still, with downcast lids: a cold white thing in the moonlight. And that passion of his that might just then have broken into tenderness, like a wave upon a gentle beach, recoiled upon itself as it met the barrier of her high hard pride.

He rose, thrust his nervous hands through his hair, pulling the heavy locks back from his brow. Then he began to speak very rapidly; sometimes turning towards her, as if his emotion must find an object; sometimes in lower tones, as if communing with himself; sometimes again throwing his words, as it were, into space. And thus he made his indictment against the mysterious powers that had ruled his fate.