Comin' Thro' the Rye (Mathers)/Summer/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI.
His silver visage in the watery glass,
Decking with liquid light the bladed grass."
Nine o'clock is striking as I open my eyes, brightly, broadly awake, and rested. Sleep is a cunning fellow; he knows when his subjects have had enough of him, and when he strikes them with his fairy wand, crying, "Awake!" they only are wise who leap up and begin their day; it is the foolish ones, who do not know what is good for them, that turn away from the light, heavily courting the slumber that is not necessary, therefore will not refresh them.
Looking out of the window, I discover that the morning is perfect; never did nature wear a fairer robe than she has put on to-day, and I long to be out, assisting at her morning show, brushing the dew from her meadows with hurrying feet, smelling at her freshly opened buds and flowers, taking a long draught of her beautiful, vigorous, healthy life. I have some difficulty in getting my breakfast, to which is added one welcome and one unwelcome addition in the shape of a letter from Jack and another from George. I read Jack's, the other will keep. The dear boy is coming home for a few days the end of October; he is very busy, he says, and will be very glad to see me again.
Downstairs I meet nobody, save sleepy servants, who look, poor wretches! as though they had not been to bed at all. As I open the glass door of the drawing-room, a cold, sweet breath of the sea comes faintly up to meet me, and seems to die pleasantly on this warmer air that creeps about the sunny terrace and south side of the house. The trees are still bravely clad, although the finger of decay has touched their greenness here and there into flaming scarlet and vivid yellow; the birds are singing loudly and jubilantly enough, but somehow their notes do not seem to be as sweet and joyous as they were a little while ago. To them the summer meant warmth and comfort, the fruits of the earth fed them, the nights gave them shelter, but with the first breath of the frost-king they see hunger and cold stretching out before them, and the iron hardships of the long winter; at least, so their song seems to say to me as I listen. On the upper terraces, and in the glades that the sun's eye cannot reach, since the screen of leaves above is so thickly woven, the hour might be six o'clock in the morning, not ten, and there is as yet some of—
Was wont to swell with round and orient pearl."
And of the few scanty autumn flowers left I make myself a posy and fasten in my belt.
I wonder why one feels so much brisker, fresher, brighter, in time of autumn than in time of spring, which is so infinitely lovelier and more grateful to us? Somehow these trees, whose leaves are dying in such splendid livery of gold and sepia, crimson and brown, strike no pang to our hearts; they do not suggest unpleasant thoughts of our own decay; on the contrary, we walk erect and cheat ourselves with the vain belief that, though all things fade, yet do not we; or, at least, not now. How we cling to our little atom of life, that is so small and yet so huge, and, placed directly before our eyes as it is, assumes grand proportions that block out the far off and dimly seen plains of eternity—very misty, very vague, are they to our earthly, filmy eyes. Religion bids us hold ourselves ready to quit at any moment the world and everything we value and love; and human hearts, recoiling, are called craven and sinful, as though a child would go willingly from the warm arms of the mother it trusts, and is used to, into the unknown embrace of a veiled and shadowy stranger, that may be more tender, more loving, more satisfying, than the earthly mother; but, oh! the child cannot see its face, cannot hear its voice; it is all strange, and it turns back trembling to the face it knows, just as we who are grown up cling to life, with its sweetness and its its love and its suffering, and hug it to our breasts, our very own, and a most familiar friend. When my time for dying comes, and I know that surely—certainly it must come some day—that I shall lie straight and still, with blank eyes and heavy-shut lids, with ears into which no common call or every-day word can enter, I hope that all my dear ones, the few that I lay in my heart, will have gone before me; then, indeed, I shall not fear to die, for where they are there will be my home.
I have fallen on sad thoughts this bright morning. Am I not, indeed, becoming somewhat sentimental? a state of mind for which I have a most hearty contempt. I will go to the kitchen garden and search for figs and pears. I have eaten three treacly-sweet figs, and am considering the Marie Louise pears, when a voice behind me says, "Good morning!" I turn round, and there stands Paul Vasher. Is he shod with the shoes of silence, or does he wear goloshes? for I never heard him coming.
"Good morning!" I say, holding out my hand. "I thought you were still in bed or out shooting!"
"Luttrell is lazy this morning," he says, "and nobody would turn out. Have you breakfasted?"
"An hour ago," I answer, looking at my watch. "It seemed a crime to stay in on such a morning as this, so I got out as quickly as I could."
"I hope you slept well?"
"I always do, always, that is to say, when I have nothing on my mind."
"Well, I did not sleep at all."
"Why did you not?”
"I began to think, and then it was all over."
"About bills?"
"No," he says, smiling. "What made you think of bills, of all things?"
"Because they keep———" I am about to add, "mother awake,' when I stop short. "Is it not very odd," I continue, as we walk along between the cabbages, "how the merest trifles that we hardly notice by day assume gigantic proportions at night? Do you know that all the silly things I have said and done, and all the times I have made a fool of myself, rise up before me when I lie awake, and seem to pelt me? and when daylight comes they appear quite small again, and I recover my self-respect. Do you ever feel like that?"
"Often enough," he says, rather sadly. "Only the blows my sins deal me are somewhat heavier than those your little white misfortunes give you. I often think, though, that there is no exaggeration about those night thoughts; that things do but assume their real significance then; truer counsel comes to us in those silent hours than in the broad garish day, with its thousand sights and sounds, and words to come as a screen between us and our souls."
"Let us take comfort in that our consciences are active and healthy!" I say, laughing; "it is when people do not feel their shortcomings at all that they may be considered to be in a bad way, is it not? I suppose all eminently wicked folk have no conscience at all?"
"Nell," he says, looking down at me, "what a merry, heart whole laugh you have—any one could tell you had never lost yourself."
"Lost myself!" I repeat; "what is that?"
"Never been in love," he says, slowly, and with an odd hesitation in his voice, odd by reason of his being usually so self-contained, proud, and cold.
I turn away my head that he may not see how the colour goes out of my cheeks. I am glad he thinks me so safe and untouched. No woman should wear her heart upon her sleeve for every eye to look into. . . .
"Do people give up laughing when they fall in love?" I ask. "I should have thought it would be the very reason why they should be all the happier! My sisters never wore long faces when they were engaged. I do not think I ever saw any other lovers, unless indeed one can call Silvia and Sir George lovers."
"And are they not?"
"I don't know."
My thoughts go back to that moonlight night at Charteris four years ago, when a man and woman stood face to face, and wished each other a bitter, long farewell—ay, they were lovers; and a hot sharp pain runs through my heart that I know well enough is jealousy.
"Mr. Vasher," I say, stopping short, while the blood leaps into my face and mounts to my very brow, "I have something to tell you—something I ought to have told you long ago." He does not answer, but I see him draw in his breath and set his lips hard, and in his eyes there is a look of strong, eager expectation. "That night, at Charteris, when you had that interview with Silvia, I was hidden close to you, and saw and heard everything."
"Is that all?" he cries with a quick gesture of relief, and yet a certain shame in his face. "I thought you were going to tell me——— So you heard our farewells, Nell; were you sorry, or did you laugh?"
"It was nothing to laugh at," I say, seriously; "but I have always wanted to tell you. I felt such a sneak, but it was not my fault, and I thought I should vex you so by walking out in the middle. I wish I had never been there."
"Do you?" he says. Why?"
"Until then I had believed in love, and that it lasted. Now I know better; and that however hotly a man may worship a woman to-day, he forgets her to-morrow."
"Not if she is worthy," he says. Would you have him pour all his treasures into the sea? A man must be true to himself first, his love afterwards."
"And I cannot understand this distinction," I say, looking down at my flowers. "If I ever loved any one, and afterwards he proved unworthy, I should not let that turn me back. I should go on loving just the same."
"Because you have a sweet and unselfish nature, while I am selfish through and through," he says, slowly. "It is a cowardly thing, is it not, to be so careful to assure one's self against loss? But I have always felt that on the woman I married depended the making or marring of my life, and—still in my own interests of course—watched natures as narrowly and carefully as a man would look to the joints of his armour before going into a battle on the issue of which his life depended. Do you blame me that I will not sacrifice my life—I have only one, remember!—simply to gratify a woman's caprice? Can you show me a greater misery than to be bound to a person one can neither trust nor respect? With me worth ranks before beauty."
"I cannot argue," I say, slowly: "I can only feel; and it seems to me that lovers once, who love each other, should be lovers always; nothing but death ought to come between."
"Then Silvia and I should be lovers now?"
"If you had loved her really, I think you would be loving her still, faults and all."
"Faults?" he repeats. "You don't understand. What if I give you the key to the puzzle? What if I tell you why Silvia's beauty moves me no jot? Why it is as impossible to me to have any love for her as to breathe life into dry-as-dust bones? Shall I tell you a story? You may suppose it to be my own, or that of any one else, just as you please."
We have come to a gnarled old garden seat, that is set where the eye can view the garden and woods, and a glimpse of the sea below, and we sit down.
"Once," he says, leaning towards me and watching my face, "a man wandered over the world, searching in cultured gardens and wayside roads, at the gates of palaces and the doors of the poor, for a certain spotless, delicate flower. He saw many very like the particular blossom he was seeking, but there always some trifling flaw, or speck, or stain, and he passed them all by, for he said to himself, 'I know that this flower exists, for other men have found it, and why should not I?' And at last to him also came the happy hour, and he found it. Long and carefully he watched it, lest after all it should be no more perfect and faultless than the rest; but at last he put out his hand, and with a great rejoicing in his heart plucked it. It was but freshly in his hand, he had scarcely tasted of its sweetness, hardly felt his soul filled with its exceeding beauty, its petals had not withered with neglect or been scorched by the hot breath of passion, when a chance blow struck it, and lo! the dazzling whiteness fell from it like a veil, and there it lay, robbed of its deceitful mantle, lovely still, but speckled, tainted, soiled. No one but God knows what that man felt then. He had sought for it so long, exulted in it so deeply; he could have laid his life on its perfect purity and soillessness, and now, broken and shamed as it was, he loved it still, though he knew that he could never lay it in his breast, never wear it through life as his glory and pride; and therefore, though it nearly cleft his heart in twain to leave it, he cast it from him, and went his way alone.
"Not long afterwards, when he was in the very midst of his hard, fierce struggle to forget, he came by chance upon it, and though he knew its worthlessness, he longed after its beauty with a deep and passionate longing, that nearly overcame him; and after all, the speckled stains were faint and invisible to all eyes save his own; but his standard of purity was a high one, else had he not so long sought the one who should come up to it; and a second time he conquered this madness, and went his way. Years after, when he was no longer seeking either good or evil, when his old search after anything perfect seemed faint and far away, he chanced upon a little flower that grew up sweet, and sturdy, and honest, in its quiet corner, past which the world never ran. It was not so gorgeous and stately as the tall white flower, but it had a fair, winsome face, and its clean, fresh sweetness came more gratefully to the weary, jaded man, than had ever the voluptuous beauty of the other. And though his love of the first had long faded away, this fresher, healthier love took and cast out the last fragments of a lingering, haunting memory; and his heart was as empty of all feeling for it, as though he had never loved and regretted so bitterly. And so—he was mad, you will say, for had not his experience been disastrous enough?—he longed for this little flower with a keen intensity that he had never known for the other." He pauses, and down-dropping into the silence come the exquisite notes of a bird, who seems to be singing miles above us, oh, so sweetly! in at God's gate.
"Was he quite sure this time?" I ask, watching a little snowy sail that is scudding across the bit of jasper that shines through the trees. "Was he not afraid that this was a deception like the other?"
"He was not afraid of that; he knew its nature through and through, but sometimes he feared he was too late; that another man had set his mark on that flower, and that its treasures were not for him; at others, he felt sure it was his own, and, at last, he made up his mind that he would speak and find out the truth, and know."
A rabbit scampering suddenly out of the bushes behind us startles me so violently that I leap up, and out of my shallow pocket fall two letters, and lie at my feet. Paul stoops, picks them up, turns to give them to me, when something in my face seems to arrest his attention, and he looks from me to George's big, bold handwriting, and from the letter back to me.
Are either of these from your lover?" he asks, striking them with his fore-finger.
"Yes."
"And he writes to you; you write to him?"
'Yes." (I have written George three bald epistles since I came to Luttrell.)
He does not speak again immediately, but his glance falls upon me heavy as a blow. Ah, me! men are hard taskmasters. Do they love us women at all, save for their own pleasure? Are they not mercilessly cruel when we make them suffer passing pain or discomfort? I want to tell him that it is all a mistake; that if George is my lover, I am not his; but somehow the words refuse to utter themselves. . . .
"I have not told you the end of my story," says Paul Vasher; "will you care to hear it?"
"If you please."
"I don't know how it was I came to tell it you, unless indeed it were to convince you that I do not love Miss Fleming. The ending is simple enough; some tales do end happily, you know."
"And it did end happily?" I ask, very low, while the dread that has for the past minutes been creeping about my heart, trembles and dies.
"Yes; I will show her to you some day." Has the bird gone in at heaven's gate, or are my ears too deaf to hear him? What is this greyness that is creeping over land and sea? The little white sail has vanished, and the diamonds that broidered the ocean's breast have died dully out.
"I hope, sir," says a gentle voice, that sounds something like mine, " that you found her all you could wish."
Looking idly down at my lap, I see all my pretty flowers lying headless; did my fingers strip them from their stalks?
"It is cold," I say, shivering; "let us go in."
Side by side, down the green glade, we move in silence. "Oh, fool!" the trees seem to whisper as I pass. "Oh, fool!" cry the birds, in their mocking shrill voices. "Oh, fool!" cries louder and deeper my heavy, heavy heart. If I could only laugh aloud, jest, speak carelessly. . . . About fifty paces from our seat we meet Alice, fresh and fair and blooming as the morning itself. Alice is one of those few people who can look as well by daylight as waxlight. After the usual salutations—
"How pale you are!" she says to me. Why did you get up so early?"
"You forget how I danced last night," I say, turning aside to pick up my small nephew, who is rendered the freak of fortune as much by reason of the length of his swallow-tailed pelisse as by the unsteadiness of his legs. How she ever got him so far up is a mystery; how to get him down again, I find by experience, is a work of time and difficulty.
Alice and Paul are talking about the ball; she with much spirit, he with a listlessness that makes me look at him once with shrinking, perplexed eyes. For a man who is successful in his second courtship, he does not look happy; there is a chafed, disappointed expression upon his face.
"It seems to me," says Alice, "that you are two very lively people; have you been quarrelling?"
A timely upset of her son takes up my attention at this moment; but I hear Paul's answer plainly enough.
"Quarrelling, Mrs. Lovelace? I think not. I have been telling Miss Adair a story; that is all."
To Alice's sisterly looks and asides of inquiry I turn blind eyes and a blank countenance, and presently, having guided the cherub's steps past the gold and silver fish, whose watery abode he evinces a rooted determination to share, I get away, and upstairs to my own room, and lock the door. As I kneel down by my bedside, and press my knees hard against the floor, I do not say to myself that an exquisite hope that has sprung up, at unawares, in my heart is dead, slain by a sharp, swift death that, maybe, is more merciful than a haltering, lingering one. . . .
I am not conscious of thought, I only know that I thought myself rich, and that now my kingdom has passed away into other hands: my poor kingdom that was never anything but a fanciful one, and which I have seemed to see growing stately and beautiful day by day. . . . There are some miseries over which one may weep aloud with not only deep self-pity, but the pity of the world beside; there are others over which it is a shame to make one sigh, to drop one heavy tear, that can know of no relief, but must be carried about with us, a burning cross to lie on the naked, bleeding heart. . . .
"Luncheon is served," says Annette, entering half-an-hour later.
I have smoothed my untidy locks, put on fresh ribbons, rubbed my cheeks hard with a towel, and now I look no worse than any other country miss, who is not used to racketing, and who stood up for her first real ball, and danced twenty-one dances over-night.
"And now," I say to myself, as I go down the broad stairs—
False face must hide what the false heart doth know."
"I dare say George would say my heart was false."