Chapter XIV: Part 14

"Think of me always as happy," he said, "and think of me as of a man who is waiting in an antechamber, waiting to be summoned to a great Presence. At least that is how I feel myself, how strongly and certainly I cannot explain to you. Here am I in this beautiful and wonderful antechamber, the world which I love so, in which I have passed days and months of such extraordinary happiness. But at one end of the antechamber there is a curtain drawn, and behind that is the Presence. Soon I think it will be drawn back and I shall see what is behind it. I think it will be drawn soon, for--all this imagery is so clumsy for what is so simple--for lately the curtain has been stirred, so it seems to me, from the other side: it has been jerked so that often I have thought that each moment it was to be drawn away, whereas till lately it has always hung in heavy, motionless folds. And I am waiting in front of it, conscious still--oh, so fully conscious--of all the beautiful things I have loved, but looking at them no longer, for I can look nowhere but at the curtain which stirs and is twitched as if someone is on the point of drawing it back."

He paused a moment, but did not take his eyes off Philip, but continued looking at him very gravely, very affectionately.

"Of course I cannot help guessing what lies behind," he said, "and conjecturing and reasoning. It may be several things; at least it may appear under several forms, but of this I am certain, that it is God. And will there be a blinding flash of joy, which shows me that even the sorrow and the death which is everywhere is no less part of perfection than the joy and the life? Even now, as you know, in my puny little attempts to be happy in the way that Nature is happy, youth has come back to me in some extraordinary manner, and when I see what I shall see, will immortal life, lived here and now, be my portion? I don't know; I think it quite possible. And if that is so, if that is the initiation--ah, my God! that impulse of joy which I shall receive will spread from me like the circles in a pool when a stone is thrown into it."

He paused again, his smooth brown hands trembling a little.

"The Pan-pipes, too," he said--"they are never silent now: I hear them all the time, and I take that to mean that I am at last never unconscious of the hymn of life. I heard them at first, you know, just in snatches and broken stanzas, when I could screw myself up to the realisation of the song without end and without words that goes up from the earth day and night. Where does it come from? As I told Evelyn, I neither know nor care. Perhaps my brain conceives it, and sends the message to my ears, but it is really simpler to suppose that I hear it, just as you hear my voice talking to you now. For there is no question as to the fact of its existence; the hymn of praise does go on forever. So, perhaps, in my small way, I am complete, so to speak, with regard to that. Then--then there is another thing that may be behind the curtain. It may be that I shall be shown, and if I am shown this, it must be right and necessary--all the sorrow and pain and death that is in the world. I have turned my back on it; I have said it was not for me. But perhaps it will have to be for me. And that--to use a convenient phrase--will be to see Pan."

He paused on the word, then shook his hair back from his forehead, and got up.

"And now I have told you all," he said.

Philip got up, too, feeling somehow as if he had been mesmerised. He could remember all that Merivale had said; it was strangely vivid, but it had a dreamlike vividness about it; the fabric, the texture, the colour of it, for all its vividness, was unreal somehow, unearthly. But as to the reality of it and the truth of it, no question entered his head. He had never heard anything, no commonplace story or chronicle of indubitable events which was less fantastic. He looked out in silence a moment over the garden, and though half an hour ago he had been vaguely frightened at the thought of the mysterious and occult powers that keep watch over the world, yet now when they had been spoken of with such frankness, so that they seemed doubly as real as they had before, he was frightened no longer. It was, indeed, as Merivale had said; he had been afraid of fear.

It was already very late, and after a few trivial words he went indoors to go up to bed. As he got to the bottom of the stairs he looked back once, and saw his friend standing still on the verandah, with his face towards him. And as Philip turned, Merivale, standing under the lamp in his white shirt and flannels, with collar unfastened at the neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbow, smiled and nodded to him.

"Good night!" he said; "sleep well. I think you are learning how to do that again."

* * * * *

Philip began undressing as soon as he got to his room, feeling unaccountably tired and weary. His servant slept in a room just opposite him, and he hesitated for a moment as to whether he should tell him not to call him in the morning till he rang, for he had that heaviness of head which only satiety of sleep entirely removes. But it was already late, and the man had probably been in bed and asleep for some time. So he closed his door, drew the blind down over his window, and put out his light. His brain, for all the vividness of that evening's talk, seemed absolutely numb and empty, as if all memory were dead, and he fell asleep instantly.

He slept heavily for several hours, and then external sounds began to mingle themselves with his dreams, and he thought he was in a large, empty, brown-coloured hall lit by dim windows very high up, through which a faint, tired light was peering. But now and again the squares of these windows would be lit up for a moment vividly from outside, and as often as this happened some low, heavy, tremulous sound echoed in the vault above him like a bass bourdon note. He was conscious, too, that many unseen presences surrounded him; the hall was thick with them, and they were all saying: "Hush-sh-sh!" A sense of deadly oppression and coming calamity filled him, he was waiting for something, not knowing what it was. Then the coils of sleep began to be more loosened, and before long he awoke. His room looked out over the garden, and the "Hush-sh-sh" was but the rain that fell heavily on to the shrubs below his window. Then the light and the tremulous note were explained too, for suddenly the window started into brightness, and a couple of seconds after a sonorous roll of thunder followed. But the uneasiness of the dream had not passed: he still felt frightfully apprehensive. All desire for sleep, however, had left him, and for some half hour, perhaps, he lay still, listening to the windless rain, for the night was so still that his blind hung over the open window without tapping or stirring. Then with curious abruptness the rain ceased altogether and there was dead silence.

Then suddenly a frightful cry rent and shattered the stillness, and from outside a screaming, strangled voice called:

"Oh, my God!" it yelled. "Oh, Christ!"

For one moment Philip lay in the grip and paralysis of mortal fear, but the next he broke through it, and sprang out of bed, and, not pausing to light a candle, stumbled to the door. At the same moment his servant's door flew open, and he came out with a white, scared face. He carried a lighted candle.

"It was from the garden, sir," he said. "It was Mr. Merivale's voice."

Philip did not answer, but went quickly downstairs, followed by the man. The door into the verandah stood open, as usual, and he hurried out. There on the table were the cloth and the remains of dessert; his chair stood where he had sat all evening; Merivale's was pushed sideways. The moon was somewhere risen behind the clouds, for thick as they were, the darkness was not near pitch, and followed by the servant, the light of whose candle tossed weird, misshapen shadows about, Philip set his teeth and went down towards where the hammock was slung in which Merivale usually slept.

That strange, pungent smell, which he had noticed more than once before, was heavy in the air, and infinitely stronger and more biting than it had been. And for one moment his flesh crept so that he stopped, waiting for the man to come up with the light. He could not face what might be there alone.

A few yards further on they came in sight of the hammock. Something white, a flannelled figure, glimmered there, but, like some strange, irregular blot, something black concealed most of the occupant. Then that black thing, whatever it was, suddenly skipped into the air and ran with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds and tappings on the brick path of the pergola, down to the far end of the garden, where they lost sight of it. Then they came to the hammock.

Merivale was sitting up in it, bunched up together with his head drawn back, as if avoiding some deadly contact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, so that the gums showed, his eyes were wide-open, and terror incarnate sat there, and the pupils were contracted to a pin-point as if focussed on something but an inch or two from him. He was not dead, for his chest heaved with dreadful spasms of breathing, and Philip took him up and carried him away from that haunted place into the house, laying him on a rug in the passage.

But before they had got him there the breathing had ceased, the mouth and the eyes had closed, and what they looked on was just the figure of a boy whose mouth smiled, and who was sunk in happy, dreamless sleep.

There was nothing to be done. Philip knew that, but he sent his servant off at once to fetch a doctor from Brockenhurst, while he waited and watched by Merivale or what had been he. All terror and shrinking had utterly passed from that face, and Philip himself, in spite of the frightful, inexplicable thing that had happened, was not frightened either, but sat by him, feeling curiously calm and serene, hardly conscious even of sorrow or regret. Nor did he fear any incomer from the garden. For the curtain had been drawn, and the dead man had felt so sure that whatever form the revelation was to take, it would be God, that the assurance of his belief filled and quieted the man who watched by him.

His shirt was open at the neck, as Philip had seen him last, standing below the lamp on the verandah, and his sleeves were rolled back to above the elbow. And as Philip looked, he saw slowly appearing on the skin of his chest and the sunburnt arms curious marks, which became gradually clearer and more defined, marks pointed at one end, the print of some animal's hoofs, as if a monstrous goat had leaped and danced on him.

* * * * *

It was a week later, and Philip was seated alone with his mother in the small drawing-room of his house at Pangbourne which they generally used if there was no one with them. He had arrived home only just before dinner that night, and when it was over he had talked long to her, describing all that had happened during his stay with Merivale, all that had culminated in that night of terror about which even now he could hardly speak. The story had been a long one, sometimes he spoke freely, at other points there were silences, for the words would not come, and his choking throat and trembling lips had to be controlled before he could find utterance. For it concerned not Merivale only; and, indeed, friend of his heart as he had been, one who could never be replaced, Philip could scarcely think of his death as sad.

"For though," he said, "just for that moment when he cried on God's name and on the name of Christ, when that terror, whatever it was, came close to him, the flesh was weak, yet I know he was not afraid. He had told me so: his spirit was not afraid. And he so longed to see the curtain drawn."

The joy of getting Philip back again, the joy, too, of knowing that that black crust of hate and despair no longer shut him off from her, was so great, that Mrs. Home hardly regarded the anxiety she would otherwise have felt. For she had never seen Philip like this; what had happened had stirred him to the depths of his soul. Even the sudden and dreadful death of so old a friend she could not have imagined would have affected him so.

"Philip, dear," she said, "you are terribly excited and overwrought. Get yourself more in control, my darling."

He was quiet for a moment, and even lit a cigarette, but he threw it away again immediately.

"Ah, mother, when I have finished you will see," he said. "Let me go on."

He paused a moment, and the soft stroking of her hand on his calmed him.

"It was just dawn when Flynn came back with the doctor," he said; "a clear, dewy dawn, the sort of dawn Tom loved. The doctor needed but one glance, one touch. Then he said: 'Yes, he has been dead for more than an hour.' So I suppose I had sat there as long as that; I did not think it had been more than a minute or two. Then his eye fell on those marks and bruises I told you of, and he looked at them. He undressed him a little further: there were more of them. I needn't go into that, but you know what the surface of a lane looks like when a flock of sheep has passed?--it was like that.

"All this, of course, came out at the inquest, where I told all I knew, and Flynn corroborated it. I saw also what Tom had told me that afternoon, how a huge goat had sparred and gambolled round him as he came home across the forest. And the verdict, as you say, perhaps, was brought in, in accordance with that. The world will be quite satisfied. I am satisfied, too, but not in that way."

He was silent again a moment, and then went on.

"It all hangs together," he said; "the dear Hermit was not as all of us are: he could talk to birds and beasts, and the very peace of God encompassed him. He knew, in a way we don't, that all-embracing fatherhood. I learned slowly, these weeks I was with him, what the truth of that was to him. And he used often to speak, as you know, of the grim side of Nature, of the cruelty and death, which he had turned his face from, which he called Pan, who, as the myths have it, appeared in form like a goat, to see whom was death. We had been talking of it that night, we both heard curious tramplings in the bushes, and the pungent smell of a goat. Every sensible person, considering, too, that he had seen a big goat that afternoon, would come to the conclusion that, somehow or other the brute had found its way into the garden, and had sprung on him like a wild beast, and trampled him. Then, too, he was thinking about Pan; he might have imagined when the goat appeared, that this was what he in those imaginings, if you like, which were as real to him as the sun and moon, believed to be Pan, and that he died of fright. The jury took the view that some wild goat was the cause of his death: I daresay fifty juries would have done the same. But if you ask me whether I believe that a goat, a flesh and blood goat, killed him, why I laugh at you. For what goat was that? Who saw the goat except the Hermit?"

He paused again, and looked up at his mother with sudden solicitude.

"Ah, dear, you are crying," he said. "Shall I not go on?"

Again that gentle, loving stroking of his hand began.

"Ah, my son," she said.

Philip kissed the hand that stroked his. These lines were easy to read between.

But if he had more to tell his mother, she had something also to tell him that he did not know yet.

"You see, I saw such strange and impossible things there," he went on, "that nothing seems strange nor impossible. It was like an allegory: Tom himself was an allegory. The birds came to his bidding, the shy creatures of the forest were his friends. It was no miracle: it was but what we all could do, if we realised what he realised, and knew as he knew the brotherhood of all that lives. He put into practice the theory of Darwinism that no one in theory denies. The living things were his brothers and his cousins: they knew it, too. But from one huge fact, the fact of sorrow and pain, he turned aside, and, so I believe, it all came to him in a flash, making him perfect. And it came in material form, at least it was so material that it could bruise his flesh. It seems cruel; but--oh, mother, if you had seen his face afterwards, you would have known that the hand that made him suffer comforted him when he had learned what the suffering had to teach him. It could have been done, I must suppose, in no other way."

Then for a little the strong man was very weak, and he broke down and wept. But one who weeps while eyes so tender watch, weeps tears that are not bitter, or at least are sweetened, each one, as it falls. Then again he went on: much as he had told, there was all to tell yet, yet that all was but short--a few words were sufficient.

"And so my lesson came home to me," he said. "A month ago I said, as you know, 'I will hate, I will injure.' A fortnight ago I said, 'What good is that?' But now, when poor Tom, who was all kind and all gentle, had to be taught like that, with those battering hoofs, that pain must be and that one must accept it and sorrow, and not leave them out of life, now I say, 'Can I help? May not I bear a little of it?'"

He got up.

"You don't know me," he said. "I don't know myself. But I suppose this is how such a thing comes to one. I have been in an outer darkness: I have been black and bitter and all my life before that I was hard. That, I suppose, was needful for me. I don't think I am going to be a prig, but if that is so, perhaps it doesn't much matter. But I do know this, that I am sorry for poor things."

Mrs. Home said nothing for the moment; then she turned her eyes away as she spoke.

"You have not heard then, dear?" she said.

"I have heard nothing."

"It was in the paper this evening," she said. "I know no more than that. Evelyn was shot in the face yesterday."

Then her voice quivered.

"They think he will live," she said. "But they know he will be blind. Oh, Philip, think of Evelyn blind!"

TWENTIETH

The room where Madge had talked with her mother on the evening of her first day at Glen Callan was darkened, and only a faint, muffled light came in through the blinded windows. The clean, neat apparatus of nursing was there, a fire burned on the hearth, by which Madge sat, and on the bed lay a figure, the face of which was swathed in bandages. The whole of the upper part of it was thus covered, only the chin and mouth appeared, and round the mouth was the three days' beard of a young man.

It was a little after midday; the nurse had gone to her lunch, and had told Madge to ring for her if she wanted her. It was not the least likely: all was going as well as it apparently could, but while Evelyn was still feverish it was necessary to be on the guard for any one of a myriad dangers that might threaten him. There was the danger of blood-poisoning; there were the after-effects of the shock; other things also were possible. Madge had not inquired into it all; she knew only what it was right for her to know if she was in charge of the sick-room for an hour or two. If he got very restless, if he came to himself--for he was kept drowsy with drugs--and complained of pain, she was to ring the bell. But the nurse did not think that there was any real likelihood of any of these things happening.

They had carried him back over the wire bridge, above which the accident had happened, and now for nearly forty-eight hours he had lain where he lay now. By great good luck a surgeon of eminent skill had been staying in a house not very far off, and he had come over at once, in answer to this call, and done what had to be done. Madge had seen him afterwards, and very quietly, as Evelyn's wife, had asked to be told, frankly and fully, what had been necessary. Sir Francis Egmont, whose surgical skill was only equalled by his human kindness, had told her all.

"He won't die, my dear lady," he had said. "I feel sure of that. He will get over it, and live to be strong again. But--yes, you must be brave about it, and more than that, you must help him to be brave, poor fellow."

This happened in the sitting-room adjoining. Sir Francis took a turn up and down before he went on. Then he sat in a chair just opposite Madge, and took her hands in his. And his grey eyes looked at her from under the eyebrows, which were grey also.

"Yes, you have got to make him brave," he repeated, "and there is your work cut out for you in the world. You are young and strong, and your youth and strength have got their mission now. Don't label me an old preacher; old I am, but I don't preach, Mrs. Dundas, unless I am sure of my audience. And I am sure of you. Your husband will get well. But his face will be terribly disfigured. That must be. That could not be helped. And there is another thing. He will be blind. Yes, yes, take the truth of that now, for it is you who have to enable him to bear it. Blind! Ah, my dear girl--I call you that: you are so young, and I am so sorry!"

* * * * *

How it had happened hardly interested her. They had been walking in line, it appeared, on the steep hill-side, where she had seen them as she sat on the top of the cliff above the Bridge-pool. Then a hare had got up, and Lord Ellington had fired. The shot struck a rock not far in front, and of the whole charge some ten pellets had ricocheted back and hit Evelyn in the face. One eye was destroyed, the other was so injured that it had been found impossible to save it; other pellets had lodged in his face. All this--the manner of the accident--did not matter to Madge: the thing had happened, it was only wonderful that he was alive.

But the operation--what it was Madge did not inquire, for it would do no good--had satisfied the surgeon. He could not have expected better results, he would not have predicted results so good. With the unhesitating obedience to duty, which is the motto and watchword of his profession, he had stopped in Lady Dover's house, waiting till he could without misgiving or fear of after-results, leave the case. All yesterday he had been in and out of the sick-room, he had slept in the dressing-room last night, and had only left an hour or two before, when he could put his patient into the skilled hands of the nurse who had come from Inverness. He was a kind, shy man, and fumbled dreadfully in his pockets as Lady Dover saw him off.

"You will do me a great service, Lady Dover," he had said, "if you will convey somehow to Mrs. Dundas that her debt to me, whatever it is, is discharged. Discharged it is; to see a woman being brave is sufficient. Besides, I am on my holiday: I could not think of taking a fee. So if so absurd a notion occurs to her--ah, the motor is ready, I see, but if so absurd a thing occurs--you, my dear lady, will please exercise your tact, you will let her be under no obligation, please. A Daimler surely--beautiful machines, are they not--yes, just a little tact--I was in the house or something--I am sure you will manage it--besides, on my holiday. Yes, good-bye, good-bye. I think I have told the nurse everything, and the doctor from Inverness--dear me, his name has gone again, whom I am very pleased to have met, is, I am sure, most reliable. God bless my soul, poor Dundas, a rising painter too; well, I'm no judge. But it is pitiful, isn't it? Of course, if I am wanted again, I'll step over at once: Brora, you know, it's no trouble at all. And the poor fellow, too, who caused this accident; I'm sorry for him, too--nobody's fault. But tell him we'll pull Mr. Dundas through--oh, yes, we'll pull him through, and there's Braill's system and all afterwards. A brave woman, you know, Mrs. Dundas is; does one good, that sort of woman. Very brave. She'll need to be, poor thing, too. Good-bye, good-bye."

But Evelyn lay still, and there was no need for Madge to ring for the nurse. Sometimes he shifted his head from side to side, and occasionally he put a hand up to the bandage that covered his face, with little moans and sighs below his breath. Madge had been warned to be on the alert for this, and very gently, as often as he did this, she would take the feeble, wandering fingers in hers and lay his arm back again on the blanket. It was something even to have that to do, the slightest, most trivial act, was a relief from absolute inaction. Yet all the time she dreaded with ever-increasing shrinking of the heart the hour when she should have to act indeed, when her husband would come to, and begin to ask questions. No one but she, she was determined, should answer them; it was she who would tell him all that he had yet to learn. Would it kill him, she wondered, when he knew? Would he die simply because life was no longer desirable or possible? Blind! Madge could not fully grasp that herself yet, but she felt she must realise it, she must make haste to realise it before she was called upon to tell him. Lady Dover, her mother, Sir Francis, had all urged her to let him be told by someone else; but Madge would not hear of it; some wifely instinct was stronger than any reason that could be suggested.

There was another thing which she shrank from, too, though in part that would be spared Evelyn, the disfigurement about which Sir Francis had spoken. He had told her it would be terrible, and she had to get used to that in anticipation, so that when she saw it, she should not shrink, or let Evelyn guess. He would not be able to see it himself; as far as that went, it was merciful. All that splendid beauty, which she loved so, the brightness and the sunshine of his face, she would never see again. A few details about that the surgeon had told her; it was horrible. Her love for him, her love for his beauty were inseparable; she could not disentangle them, the latter was part of the whole. Yet though she knew that it was gone, it was impossible to imagine that the whole was diminished, though a part of it was withdrawn. But she had been warned how terrible the change would be, and what if involuntarily, without power of control, her flesh recoiled, her nerves shrank from him? Yet that was the one thing that must not be; all that she could do for him was to make him know and feel that in every way the completeness of her love for him was undiminished, and only that pity, the broad, sweet shining of pity, framed it as with a halo. She knew that this was true essentially and fundamentally, but she had to make it true not only in principle, but in the conduct of the little trivial deeds of life. She must act up to it always; his closeness, his bodily presence, must not be one whit less physically dear to her.

Blind! Ah, if she only could take that and bear it for him, how vastly easier even to her personally than that it should be borne by him! For it was from that, from the exquisite pleasures of the eye, that as from a fountain his gaiety, his joy of life, chiefly sprang. Of the five senses that one was to him more than all the rest put together; of the five chords that bound him to life and made the material world real the strongest had been severed, and the others in comparison were but as frayed strings. Any other loss would have been trivial compared with this, and how doubly, trebly trivial would the same loss have been to her. But that it should come to him! How could he bear it?

There was nothing to be reasoned about in all this: she had but to let thoughts like these just go round and round in her head, till she got more used to them. Round and round they went, yet at each recurrence each seemed not a whit less unendurable. She tried to imagine herself telling him; she went even over forms of words, choosing the speech that should tell it him most gently, and even while she spoke should make him, force him, to feel that by the very fact of her love the burden and the misery of it all was more hers to bear than his. Yet what were words, this mere formula, "It hurts me more than you?" That did not make it hurt him less. A pain that is shared by another is not diminished; there is double the pain to bear, a dreadful automatic multiplication of it alone takes place. It was all too crushingly recent yet for poor Madge to refrain from such a conclusion; it seemed to her as yet that this was a dark place into which the light of sympathy could not penetrate. She herself certainly was at present beyond its range; the kindness, the deep pity, which all felt for her did not reach her yet.

The nurse returned from her dinner, and with her came the Inverness doctor, a kind, rugged man. Bandages had to be changed, and fresh dressings to be put on, and Madge left the room for this, for she had been told that if she saw his face now she would be needlessly shocked. When the wounds healed, it would not be nearly so bad. So, though she would really have preferred to know worse than the worst, she yielded to this.

Madge went downstairs while this was going on, and found Lady Dover waiting in the hall. The rest of the party had all left yesterday, and though Lady Ellington had offered, and, indeed, really wished to remain, Madge had persuaded her to go; for the girl, out of the range of sympathy and pity at present, found the consolation that Lady Ellington tried to administer like a series of sharp raps on a sore place. Also Madge could not help reading into it a sort of tacit reproach for her having married him. The accident, indeed, seemed to have stained backwards in Lady Ellington's mind, and to have re-endowed the marriage itself with disaster.

But Lady Dover's touch was very different to her mother's; indeed it was because it did not seem to be a "touch" at all that Madge unconsciously answered to it.

"Ah, there you are, dear," she said; "I was expecting you. Will you not get on your hat, and come out for a little? It will do you good to get the air, and it is a lovely afternoon. I have never seen the lights and shadows more exquisite."

It was this that poor Madge wanted, though she did not know she wanted it, just the cool spring water, the wholesome white bread of a kind, natural woman. Sympathy was no good to her yet, consolation could not touch her, but just the quiet, patient kindness was bearable, it made the moment bearable from its very restfulness; the lights and the shadows were still there, Lady Dover still talked of them, and though she did not know it, it was this very fact that other lives went on as usual that secretly brought a certain comfort to Madge.

"Yes, I will come out," she said; "but I don't want a hat. I cannot go far, though."

"No, we will just take a turn or two up and down the terrace. We get the sun there, and it is sheltered from the wind, which is rather cold to-day."

Simple and unsophisticated as the spell was, if spell indeed there was, it worked magically on the poor girl, and for a little while that dreadful round of the impossible images which formed the panorama of her future ceased to turn in her head. Had Lady Dover's tone suggested sympathy, or, which would have been worse, spoken of the healing power of time, Madge could not have spoken. But now, when that incessant procession of the unthinkable future was stayed, she could focus her mind for a little on a practical question which must soon arise, and on which she wanted advice.

"I want your counsel," she said. "They are going to give Evelyn, the doctor told me, no more drugs, and by this evening he will be himself again, fully conscious. Now, unless I deceive him, unless I tell him that he is being kept for the present in absolute darkness, he must find out that--that he is blind. Soon, anyhow, he must know it. Is it any use, do you think, putting it off?"

Lady Dover did not, as Madge's mother would certainly have done, squeeze her hand and utter words of sympathy. She did not even look at Madge, but with those clear, level eyes looked straight in front of her while she considered this. Her first instinct was, as would have been the instinct of everyone, to say something sympathetic, but her wisdom--the existence of which Lady Ellington really did not believe in--gave her better counsel. For to be natural is not synonymous with doing the first thing that happens to come into one's head.

"That must be partly for Dr. Inglis to decide," she said; "but if he sanctions it, I should certainly say that you had better tell him at once. I think people get used to things better and more gradually while they are still weak and perhaps suffering, though Dr. Inglis said he thought he would have no pain, whereas the same thing is a greater shock if one is well; it hits harder then. He perhaps will half-guess for himself, too; all that would torture him. To know the worst, I think, is not so bad as to fear the worst."

They had reached the end of the terrace and looked out over the river a couple of hundred feet below. Just opposite them was the Bridge-pool, beyond which rose the steep moorland. Ever since it had happened, Madge had given no outward sign of her helpless, devouring anguish; she had been perfectly composed; there had been no tears, no raving cries. But now she turned quickly away.

"I can't bear to look at it," she said. "There was a piece of white heather, too, where he fell."

Lady Dover's sweet, rather Quakerish face did not change at all, her quiet wisdom still held sway.

"We are wrong, I think," she said, "to associate material things with great grief. One cannot always wholly help it, but I think one should try to discourage it in oneself. I remember so well walking on this terrace, Madge, just after my mother died. It was a day rather like this; there were the same exquisite lights on the hills. And I remember I tried consciously to dissociate them from my own grief. I think it was wise. I would do it again, at least, which, in one's own case, comes to the same thing."

She paused a moment; there was one thing she wanted to say, and she believed it might do Madge good to have it said. Deep and overwhelming as her grief was, Lady Dover knew well that anything that took her mind off herself was salutary.

"But sometimes, on the other hand," she went on, "we ought to remember those people who have been most associated with it. It does not do any good to anyone to shudder at the heather. But I think, dear, it would be kind if you just wrote a line to Lord Ellington. I think you have forgotten him, and what he must feel."

For the moment she doubted if she had done wisely, so bitter was Madge's reply.

"Ah, I can never forgive him!" she cried. "To think that but for him----" And she broke off with quivering lip.

Lady Dover did not reply at once, but the doubt did not gain ground.

"I think, dear, that that is better unsaid," she replied at length. "You do not really mean it either; your best self does not mean it."

Again she paused, for she did not think very quickly.

"And this, too," she said, "you must consider. How can you help Mr. Dundas not to feel bitter and resentful, for he has more direct cause to feel it than you, if you have that sort of thought in your heart? You will be unable to help him, in the one way in which you perhaps can, if you feel like that. Also, dear, supposing any one of us, Dover, I, Mr. Osborne, had to become either Mr. Dundas or Lord Ellington, do you think any of us could hesitate a moment? Do you not see that of all the people who have been made miserable by this terrible accident, which of them must be the most miserable?"

Then came the second outward sign from Madge. She took Lady Dover's hand in both of hers.

"Don't judge me too hardly," she said. "I spoke very hastily, very wrongly. I have been thinking of my own misery too much; I have not thought enough about poor Evelyn. But I did not know there was such sorrow in the world."

Lady Dover looked at her a moment, and drew her gently to a seat behind some bushes. And her own pretty, neat face was suddenly puckered up.

"Oh, Madge," she said, "just let yourself go for ten minutes, and cry, my dear, sob your heart out, as they say. Have a good cry, dear; it will do you good. It is not cowardly, that--it helps one, it softens one, and it makes one braver perhaps afterwards. Yes, dear, let it come."

And then the fountain of tears was unloosed, and those sobs, those deep sobs which come from the heart of living and suffering men and women, and are a sign and a proof, as it were, of their humanity, poured out. Madge had surrendered, she had ceased to hold herself aloof; brave she had been before, but brave in a sort of impenetrable armour of her own reserve. But now she cast it aside, and the womanhood which her love for Evelyn had begun to wake in her, came to itself and its own, more heroic than it had been before, because the armour was cast aside, and she stood defenceless, but fearless.

Before she went up again to Evelyn's room she wrote:

MY DEAR ELLINGTON,

I had no opportunity of speaking to you----

Then her pen paused; that was not quite honest, and she began again:

I ought to have just seen you before you went yesterday, and I must
ask your pardon that I did not. I just want to say this, that I am
more sorry for you than I can possibly tell you, and I ask you to
say to yourself, and to keep on saying to yourself, that it was in
no way your fault. Also perhaps you may like to know how entirely I
recognise that, and so, I know, will he.

You will wish, of course, to hear about him. He is going on very
well, though up to now they have kept him under morphia. He will be
quite blind, though. We must all try to make that affliction as
light as possible for him. And I want so much to make you promise
not to blame yourself. Please don't; there is no blame. It was
outside the control of any of us.

I will write again and tell you how he gets on.--Your affectionate
cousin,

MADGE DUNDAS.

Evelyn's room looked out on to the terrace, away from the direction of the wind, and the nurse had just gone to the window to open it further, for the room, warmed by the afternoon sun, was growing rather hot. But just then he stirred with a more direct and conscious movement than he had yet made, half-sat up in bed, and with both hands suddenly felt at the bandages that swathed the upper part of his face. Then he spoke in those quick, staccato tones that were so characteristic.

"What has happened?" he said. "Where am I? What's going on? Why can't I see? Madge----" And then he stopped suddenly.

She bit her lip for a moment, and just paused, summoning up her strength to bear what she knew was coming. Then she went quickly to the bedside and took his hand away from his face.

"Yes, dearest, I am here," she said. "Lie quiet, won't you, and we will talk."

The nurse had come back from the window, and also stood by the bed. Madge spoke to her quickly and low.

"Leave us, please, nurse," she said. "We have got to talk privately. I will call you if I want you."

She left the room; Evelyn had instinctively answered to Madge's voice, and had sunk back again on his pillows, and slowly in the long silence that followed, his mind began piecing things together, burrowing, groping, feeling for the things that had made their mark on his brain, but were remembered at present only dimly. The remembrance of some shock came first to him, and some sudden, stinging pain; next the smell of heather, warm and fragrant, and another bitter-tasting smell, the smell of blood. He put out his hand, and felt fumblingly over the clothes.

"Madge, are you still there?" he said quickly.

She took his hand.

"Yes, dear, sitting by you," she said. "I shall always be here whenever you want me."

Then came the staccato voice again.

"But why can't I see you?" he asked. "What's this over my face?"

Again she gently pulled back his other hand, which was feeling the bandages with quick, hovering movements like the antennæ of some insect.

"You were hurt, dear, you know," she said. "They had to bandage your face, over your forehead and your eyes."

Again there was silence; his mind was beginning to move more quickly, remembrance was pouring in from all sides.

"It was at Glen--Glen something, where we came by a night train, and you flirted with a valet," he said.

"Yes, dear, Glen Callan," said Madge quietly. But her eyes yearned and devoured him: all her heart was ready now, when the time came, to spring towards him, enfolding him with love.

But his voice was fretful rather and irritable, from shock and suffering.

"Yes, Glen Callan, of course," he said. "I said Glen Callan, didn't I? We are there, still, I suppose. Yes? And you went fishing in the morning, and I went shooting. Shooting?" he repeated.

All that Madge had ever felt before in her life grew dim in the intensity of this. The moment was close now, but somehow she no longer feared it. Fear could not live in these high altitudes: it died like some fever-germ.

"Yes, dear, you went shooting," she said. "We were to meet at lunch, you know. But just before lunch there was an accident. You were shot, shot in the face."

His hands grew restless again, and he shifted backwards and forwards in bed.

"Ah, yes," he said, "that is just what I could not remember. I was shot--yes, yes: I remember how it stung, but it didn't hurt very much. Then I fell down in the heather: I can't think why, but I stumbled--I couldn't see. I was bleeding, too; the heather was warm and sweet-smelling, but there was blood, too, that tasted so horrible--like--like blood, there is nothing--all over my face. And then--well, what then?"

"We brought you back, dear," said she, "and you had an operation. They had to extract the shot. It was all done very satisfactorily: you are going on very well."

Then all the nervous trembling in Evelyn's hands and the quick twitching of his body ceased, and he lay quite still a moment, gathering himself together to hear.

"Madge," he said, speaking more slowly, "will you please tell me all? I don't think you have told me all yet. I want to hear it, for I feel there is more yet. I was shot: that is all I know, and am lying here with a bandaged face. Well?"

Madge's voice did not falter; that love and pity which possessed her had for this moment anyhow complete mastery over the frailness and cowardice of the mere flesh. She just took hold of both his hands, clasping them tightly in her's, and spoke.

"You were shot all over the upper part of your face," she said. "You----"

But he interrupted her.

"Who shot me?" he asked.

"Guy Ellington," she said. "The shot ricocheted off a rock and hit you. It was not his fault."

"By Gad, poor devil!" said Evelyn.

"Yes, dear; I wrote to him just now, saying just that, how sorry I was for him and how sorry you would be when you knew. You--you were shot very badly, dear Evelyn. You were shot in the eyes, in both eyes----"

Again there was silence. Then he spoke hoarsely:

"Do you mean that, all that?" he said.

"Yes, dear; all that. And I had better say it. You are blind, Evelyn."

Then deep down from the very heart of her came the next words which spoke themselves.

"I wish I could have died instead," she said.

He lay long absolutely motionless; there was no quiver of any kind on the corners of his mouth to show that he even understood. But she knew he understood, it was because he understood that he lay like that.

At last he spoke again, and the sorrow and anguish in his voice was still comfort to her beyond all price.

"So I shall never see you again," he said.

Then she bent over the bed, and kissed him on the mouth.

"But never have I been so utterly yours as I am now!" she said, her voice still strong and unwavering. "And, oh, how it fed my heart to know what your first thought was, my darling. I think it would have broken if it had been anything else!"

TWENTY-FIRST

After dinner that night, before she went to bed, Madge looked into Evelyn's room several times and spoke to him gently. But on all these occasions he was lying quite still and he did not answer her; so, thinking he was asleep, she eventually retired to her own room just opposite, and went to bed. For the last two nights she had scarcely closed her eyes, but now, with the intense relief of knowing that Evelyn knew, of feeling, too, that he was bearing it with such wonderful quietness and composure, she fell asleep at once and slept long and well.

But her husband had not been asleep any of those times that she went into the room. He had never felt more awake in his life. But he had not answered her, because he had felt that he must be alone: just now nobody, not even she, could come near to him, for he had to go into the secret place of his soul, where only he himself might come. And as at the moment of death not even a man's nearest and dearest, she with whom he has been one flesh, may take a single step with the soul on its passage, but it has to go absolutely alone, so now none could go with Evelyn; for in these hours he had to die to practically all, Madge alone excepted, which the word "life" connoted to him. And having done that, he had to begin, to start living again. There Madge could help him, but for this death, this realisation of what had happened, this summing up of all that had been cut off, he had to be alone.

There was no comfort for him anywhere: nor at any future time could comfort come. There would be no "getting used" to it, every moment, every hour, that passed would but put another spadeful of earth on his coffin. There was no more night and morning for him. Sunset and sunrise spilt like crimson flames along the sky existed no more: the green light below forest trees was dead, the clusters of purple clematis in his unfinished picture had grown black, there was neither green nor red nor any colour left, it was all black. The forms of everything had gone, too; it was as if the world had been some exquisite piece of modelling clay, and that some gigantic hand had closed on it, reducing it to a shapeless lump: neither shape nor colour existed any more. People had gone, too, faces and eyes and limbs, the gentle swelling of a woman's breast, outline and profile and the warm, radiant tint of youth were gone, there was nothing left except voices. And voices without the sight of the mouth that spoke, of the shades of expression playing over the face, would be without significance: they would be dim and meaningless, they would not reach him in this desert of utter loneliness, where he would dwell forever out of sight of everything. And that was not all; that was not half. Of the world there was nothing left but voices, and of him what was left? Was he only a voice, too?

He was blind, that is to say, his eyes must have been practically destroyed. And the bandages extended, so he could feel, right up to his hair, and down to his upper lip. There were other injuries as well, then. What were they? How complete was the wreck? Above all, did Madge know, had she seen? If ever love had vibrated in a voice, it had in her's, but did she know, or had she only seen these bandages?