Chapter VI: Part 6

Now, possession of the devil is a very real thing, and though I hold that in the majority of cases--they occur to each one of us every day--the best thing to do is to run away if you possibly can, not stop and argue, there are occasions, and this seemed to me to be one, where you cannot run away, for you are with your back to the wall, and have to fight. So I fought, and I am glad to be able to say that the devil was sorry he spoke. For, as always, he is a very shallow fellow, and though with his loud words--the gale to help him outside--he had seemed very convincing for the moment, I think I never heard a sorrier argument than his. He suggests, so I take it, the repeal of all moral laws: the binding force of them is to vanish. What will happen then? The child crossing the street will be driven over by the first carriage, and left to lie there with broken limbs till the next ends its torture. I shall go out of my house to-morrow and be clubbed by two men, who will rob me, who in turn will be clubbed and robbed by three. In ten days--I wager my immortal soul on this--the kingdoms of the world will be entirely in the hands of a dozen men, all strong, all fearing each other, and desiring to get rid of each other. For reasons of self-preservation they will sign a contract that they will not kill, injure, or rob each other. Moral law has therefore begun again, for it is necessary for the preservation of human life. Next day they will sign another contract to protect their women and children, and before the year is out they will have found it necessary to have in force every human moral law that exists to-day. If it were not so, those laws could never have existed. Once more the spirit of good triumphs over the spirit of evil. God does not punish us; it is our own punishment which we inflict on ourselves each time that we, in ever so slight a degree, do anything which tends towards that chaos which must exist without morality.

* * * * *

The gale has blown itself tired, and now, as I stand on the doorstep about midnight, looking out, an extraordinary peace prevails. The moon is high in heaven, bare of clouds, and the air is utterly calm and windless. It seemed to me impossible only a few hours ago that so serene a tranquillity should succeed the wild riot of to-day. And steadfast remain the stars; they have not, as seemed almost inevitable, been blown, like those heaps of dead leaves, about the floor of the skies, so that one quarter was bare, while in another the Pleiades had been blown against the Twins, and Orion sat on Cassiopeia’s chair.

* * * * *

The morning of the 27th was of the same pellucid serenity as the midnight before. The trees were much barer than they had been twenty-four hours before, and the inimitable tracery of the branches against the sky was outlined with the precision of the South. The sun was extraordinarily warm, and I sat out for an hour in the morning to the chuckling of birds in the bushes and an unread paper. Then in the afternoon I went to the cathedral for the evening service.

* * * * *

It has happened. For years past, as you know, I have felt certain it would happen on this day, and when it happened I knew it could not have been otherwise. Thus:

The service was at half-past three, and I got to the cathedral, I suppose, some five minutes before it began, and was given a stall on the south side. Through the windows behind me the sun streamed low--nearly level--for it was not far from its setting, and I lived over again a certain October 27, years ago, when I got home too late, and knew that one of the sweetest and dearest souls that ever lived on earth had gone home. It was just such a day as this, bright and unclouded, and even then, on the day itself, I felt it wholly impossible to be sad. It was all right with the world, then as always, and God, as always, was in His heaven. We walked all together--those of us who were left--through the woods, and it was right and meet that the sun shone, and that we recalled and spoke of her merriness, and were ourselves merry with the memory. Then my two strange meetings with Margery, also on this day, intertwined themselves with the other: it was a day of home-coming.

At this point I became aware that I could not have been attending to the service, for automatically, with the rest of the congregation, I rose from my knees for the Psalms. No chant was played over, but a long pedal note from the organ vibrated in the carved stalls, and at the first chord the choir began. And they sang, ‘When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, then were we like unto them that dreamed.’ I did not need to open the big Prayer-Book, and for the first time I looked up.

Opposite me stood--Margery. And the sunlight was round her head.

It could not be Margery, for she is dead. Only when I looked up my brain said ‘Margery.’

NOVEMBER

When the service was over, I waited by the west front watching the congregation stream out of the gray gloom inside into the primrose-coloured lights of sunset. There were two big collies sitting patiently side by side on the edge of the grass, looking with liquid, eager eyes at the people coming out. Suddenly two tails began to thump ecstatically, but neither dog moved. It was She--I think I knew from their eagerness it could be none else. With a smile lurking in her eyes, she walked to them, and from where I was I could hear her say, ‘Dear angels! come along,’ and two tawny streaks fled over the grass.

I waited a little, then followed her. She turned southwards out of the Close, over the bridge, below which the big trout lie, and into the path through the water-meadows, the two tawny streaks cutting figures like a swallow’s flight up and down the road, running at top speed just for the joy of the life that was in them. And once clear of the town, she looked furtively round, saw only one wayfarer a hundred yards behind, and ran too. The wayfarer quickened his pace, ready to drop into a sedate walk if she looked round. Then on the edge of the water she found a stick, and, whistling to the dogs, threw it clean across the river, and a double plunge and splash of flying spray followed it. Then the streaks swam back, each holding an end of the beloved stick, dropped it at her feet, and, one on each side of her, shook themselves, so that she was between the waters, and I heard a faint scream of dismay and then a laugh. My house stands in the road close beyond the end of the meadows, but she went on, and still I followed, past the group of labourers’ cottages, where lights were already springing up beneath the dark thatch, and out on to the main-road. And at that moment I guessed where she would go. Yes, to that house--no other--the house where Margery lived, the house which was the scene of my dark dreams in August last. The collies rudely pushed their way in before her, after the manner of their impulsive kind, and the door was shut.

I was dining that evening with some people in the town, and met there an old friend of mine who lives a mile or two from here, who has usually some fault to find with me. She had this evening.

‘You are a perfect disgrace,’ she said. ‘We consider you an old inhabitant of the town, and yet when new and charming people come you cannot find the civility even to leave a card.’

‘I am sorry,’ said I penitently. ‘Who are they? You know, I have been away.’

‘Well, they are coming here to-night,’ she said.

‘My dear lady, _who_ are coming here to-night?’

Then the door opened, and they came, father and daughter.

This afternoon I went up the dark road of my dreams to call. She had said they would not be in till nearly six, and it was already deep dusk when I reached the house, which stood a black blot against the gray sky. But the window over the porch was lit and open, and the blind drawn down over it, and from inside came a voice singing. I was admitted, but the hall was dark, and as the servant was feeling for the button of the electric light, a step passed along the passage at the head of the stairs and began to descend, and it was a step that caught my ear with a strangely familiar sound. Then halfway down, even at the moment the light was turned up, it paused, and a voice said, ‘Oh! is there somebody?’ and in the sudden blaze I saw her, and the passages were dark no longer.

‘Ah, it’s you,’ she said; ‘how nice of you to come! Oh, I’ve left the dogs shut up. Please go into the drawing-room; I’ll be there in a moment.’

So I turned up the hall, to the right, and through the little sitting-room into the drawing-room beyond. She came in a moment afterwards.

‘How did you know where the drawing-room was?’ she said. ‘Isn’t it the most inconveniently built house you ever saw?’

‘The most,’ said I; ‘but I know it well. There was a great friend of mine who used to live here----’

She looked up suddenly.

‘Dick, do you mean,’ she asked, ‘who was killed in South Africa? He was a distant cousin of mine.’

‘Then his wife was, too?’ said I.

‘Yes, I believe so. Why?’

‘It partly accounts for it.’

‘Accounts for what?’ she said.

‘That you are absolutely the living image of her.’

She laughed again.

‘Oh dear! it is a terrible responsibility to be like an old acquaintance of somebody’s. I shall have to live up to her. I do hope she wasn’t very nice. It will be so difficult for me if she was.’

‘She and Dick were the greatest friends I ever had,’ said I.

Those beautiful gray eyes grew serious.

‘Ah, how dreadful for you!’ she said. ‘It was all very sudden, was it not? The child, too!’

‘Yes, very sudden. I had been dining with her here, and she had gone upstairs when the telegram came. She heard the ring, and leaned over the banisters above the hall, and knew. Then the child was born. She died just at day-break next morning. She asked me, I remember, to pull up the blind, and said, “Let in the morning.” That was all.’

‘Ah, poor thing--poor thing!’ she said. Then she looked up at me: ‘Poor thing!’ she repeated.

The tea was brought in, and before many minutes her father came in also. They are coming to lunch to-morrow.

That night I was out to dinner, but came home early and sat for a long time in front of the fire, with work calling on me to do it, but simply incapable. What a strange, inexplicable coincidence it all is! How I long for, and dread, and love, and fear, the thought of these days that are coming! Surely this is meant to mean something! Think of the millions of little events and decisions which have gone to make up this particular conjuncture. Is it possible that they were all done in haphazard? Or is it another teasing problem that has been set me on the curious chequer-board of life, ending in my checkmate? just a piece of ingenious manœuvring of the pieces, all leading to nothing? I cannot believe that. Yet if it is not that, if love is the answer to it all....

I love to be with her, and since that afternoon in the cathedral I have thought of nothing but her. But love her? I know it is not that--yet. It is, that, by this curious trick which Nature has played, I feel--I am cheated into feeling--that Margery is here with me again. It is as if there had been made an image of Margery, like in every respect, not only in externals, in voice, appearance, gesture, but in the deeper things as well--in her gaiety, her tenderness, and in that quick sympathy which sprang into being at the moment the call was made. Yet God never makes facsimiles; she, too, is a living soul, of her own identity, and none other’s. Or--the wildest impossibilities riot in my brain to-night--is this some wraith of my Margery--Dick’s Margery--sent, God knows from where, to comfort me or to drive me insane? Was there in my love for Margery, after she was Dick’s wife, something which was evil, which kept suggesting, ‘If this had been otherwise--if Dick died?’... Yes, there was that. Day after day there was that. I tried to fight it--indeed I tried. But I did not conquer it for a whole year. But in June, on the last evening of all, when she spoke to me in the garden of the dear event that was coming, it dropped dead, or so I hoped and believed. Yet for a whole year I let it live: is God going to punish me for that by these cruel means? To make me love again, and again go hungry?

It cannot be; again and again I tell myself it cannot be. But so I told myself when the telegram of Dick’s death came, and in spite of all my telling it was true, and the tears of the whole world could not wash out a word of it. But if once more I am to go unrequited, I do not see how I can bear it. It would be wiser to see no more of this incarnation of Margery. At present I love seeing her, because--because that pressed and withered flower I always carry with me has, so to speak, blushed again with the hues of life, and a living fragrance breathes from it. But Helen--I think I have not mentioned her name before--this incarnation of Margery, is also a living woman, with an identity of her own. How if from loving her of whom she so sweetly and poignantly reminds me I pass to loving the woman herself? And if she does not care?

No, I will see her no more. My life is my own, and I will not risk that great stake again. I know the unutterable sweetness of loving. I know, too, the unutterable emptiness of love unrequited, even though from her who loved me not I had such a wealth of tender and womanly affection. I know also how good the world is, how full and brimming with things that are lovely and of good report. For two years, in spite of what went before, God knows how much happiness I have been allowed to enjoy, how rich I have been, levying my tax of joy on all created things, finding music in all the strings of human emotions except one only--love, definite love for one woman. It is strange if I cannot be content without it. True, often and often I have felt, and shall feel again, that this would crown all the rest; but if I again do my part in it, let myself love this girl, and nothing comes of it, how well I know with what a sense of dejection and impotence I shall have to begin again from the beginning, picking up the scattered pieces of the structure known as ‘I,’ fitting them together till some sort of coherent entity, a person of some kind, again pursues some sort of reasonable way through the world! And I distrust my own power of picking myself up again; I am afraid that this time I should let the pieces lie about, shrug shoulders at them, and drift, fossilize, vegetate, what you will.

Bitterness as black as sin and salt as the Dead Sea rises in my throat. What would I not give to see a mother with her child--my child--at her breast? How unspeakably I long for that! Was it my fault that Margery loved Dick, not me? Very good, it was my fault. I have borne the punishment, and I bear it now, and I shall always bear it; and I will try to avoid the possibility of being punished for another such fault.

* * * * *

So I fall back again on my life of little things. I will read the whole of Shakespeare through by next March; I will know a little more about gardening by next spring; I will try to keep my temper; I will try to do a little honest work at a book I am engaged on; I will try, dancing here with the rest of the human race, like a swarm of flies in the sunlight, or, if you will, like worms in the dust, not to sting and wriggle; and I will try not to behave again as I behaved this morning, in this manner, to wit:

A small boy ‘does’ the shoes, boots, and knives of this establishment. He is blessed with sky-scraping spirits and a piercing whistle. He likes taking the boots up to my bedroom, because he slides down the banisters afterwards. I have frequently told him not to. This morning he whistled so loudly and continuously that I told myself it disturbed me, though, as a matter of fact, it did not, and I knew it. But without effort almost I worked myself into a fume of nagging ill-temper over it. Shortly after I heard him taking the boots up to my bedroom, and deliberately, like a spy, went to the door of the room where I was working, and held it ajar so that I might catch him sliding down the banisters. I was gorgeously successful, stood before him as he landed at the bottom with a face of April, and looked at him with an odious and baleful countenance till April fled. I wrung from him the admission that he had often been told not to do this, and assured him that if he could not remember it was perfectly easy for me to find someone who could. Then I went back to work again with a sort of fiendish pleasure at having spoiled somebody’s happiness, though it was only a boot-boy’s. There was no more whistling from downstairs, and I congratulated myself on having secured tranquillity also at one fell swoop.

But after awhile the fiend within me, satiated, I suppose, by its brilliant achievement, dozed a little, and I felt simply sick at heart. Here was the worm in the dust stinging in its tiny, infinitesimal way, but with what infinity of malice! I would have given a great deal to have heard that shrill, unmelodious whistle strike up again, but it did not. Dead silence all morning. Then at lunch--coals of fire on my head--the knives winked with resplendence and cut like razors. Yet by the silly nature of things I cannot go into the boot-place and say I am sorry. I had told him again and again not to slide down the banisters--I had indeed. But if he does not whistle to-morrow morning I shall have to raise his wages.

That is another thing, then, I propose to cease doing by next March--that is to say, to cease transgressing against the supreme and perfect law of kindness and gentleness. I do not mean that I will have any sliding down the banisters, for I will not; but, on the other hand, I will not have myself, especially in little things, behaving like a cross-grained fiend. I could have stopped the banisters business without that, while, on the other hand, it would have been infinitely better all round that he should have continued to slide down the banister from morn till eve, than that I should have wished and intended (and succeeded therein) to spoil a child’s happiness, if only for a morning, though it was in consequence of a direct act of disobedience, which I am perfectly right in resenting. And this is the supreme and perfect law of kindness.

* * * * *

It seems as if these golden days of sparkling sunshine and nights of clear frost will never end, but rise and still rise as out of some great well of light. Never do I remember such a November--windless, exquisite, so that the glory of scarlet leaf, usually so swiftly gone and evanescent, scattered into ruin by an hour’s wind, still flames in this long-drawn sunset of the year. Prey as I always am to the exaltations and depressions of the weather, it seems to me that I am living in some fairy story, as if the wicked witch who squirts the fogs and damps over the world was dead, and the good fairy of clear skies, though she cannot put the clock of the months back to summer, had allowed the seasons to stand still at this beautiful moment, to make up to us a little for all that we have suffered at the hands of the wicked witch. Everything has paused, and in those affairs which chiefly concern me there is a pause too--exquisite, golden. How the pause will end I cannot tell--in sounding ruin of rain, or the bursting of spring instead of the clasp of winter. All I know is that before long I shall find that the pause is over, and on that day I shall be sitting in fallen darkness, idly fingering in the palpable dusk the broken fragments of myself that lie round me; or even in this November I shall go out into the fields and find that, instead of the icy hand of winter gripping them, it will be spring instead. For the winter will be passed, and the flowers appear on the earth; the time of singing birds is come. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

Yes, it is even so, and I, who, a few nights ago only, determined to keep aloof from all possibility of this, preferring to stifle and drown the best of one’s nature, for fear of being thrown out of gear as regards the second best, am led captive, glorying in the chain which, please God, I shall never be able to break. How witless and impotent is man, how futile and unreasonable all his reasonings, when love, like dawn, lights with rosy feet on his dark horizons, and the morning mists of all the schemes he has made, all rules and designs of life, vanish and have never been.

For what was I trying to do? To turn this garden of the Lord into a desert, to withdraw light from the day, love from life; when, had I known, it is love which turns the desert into the garden, into the home of one’s soul.

‘And thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness,
The wilderness were Paradise enow.’

How did it happen? How did it happen? Ah, it is because we do not know that it is so exquisite.

But the manner of it was this:

They came, as you know, to lunch some three days ago, and I dined there next day, though I had made up my mind, as you also know, not to see her again. That was my plan, and the sweet rain of blows battered it down and crushed it with supreme and certain suddenness. One moment--it was after dinner, I remember, and we were playing cards--I was looking at her, seeing in every line of her face that friend whom I had lost, and the next she looked up, and in her eye there sat, not Margery nor another, but Helen, wraith no longer, but herself. And as at that moment, now three years ago, when Margery, with the sun kindling her hair, said, ‘It’s going in; what a darling!’ even so now I surrendered; I gave up all I had or was. The moment was to me so tremendous that I felt as if the whole world must know it. But even she did not know it, for she smiled and said, ‘I think there must be another in,’ and played the thirteenth card, losing the game for herself and me.

Is it not prosaic that I remember that? Yes, if you wish, but it is just that prosaicness which makes the romance of life, the intertwining of the common little everyday affairs with the great lords of romance, Love and Death, who by their presence lift life entire into their domain, so that nothing is common or commonplace.

That night, as I walked home, it seemed to me that never before had Margery been so close to me. Do you know how sometimes you can almost _hear_ a voice you are familiar with, so that it seems as if the person to whom it belongs had just spoken? It was so with me. Each moment it seemed as if she had just said something to me, and I waited and waited for what she should say next. Each moment I expected to see her walking by me, her arm in mine, as we had walked together in the garden the evening before she died. She knew, I must believe, what had happened, and, like the dear friend she always was, she came to tell me, as far as the laws of her world permitted, that she was glad. Yet some immense but subtle change had come over our relations; less dear she could not be, but I no longer ached for her. And that, too, I think she knew, and at that also she was glad.

Again that night I sat long by the fire, where those visions and inhuman schemes of self-isolation and petty mediocrity had beset me a few evenings ago. How infinitesimal had been their scope, and, thank God, how futile they proved! Like some timid child, my soul had sat shivering on the brink of the great ocean of human life, not daring to put out, distrusting the frail vessel which should carry it towards the golden island which no man can reach unless he adventures. Even then the golden gleam shone on me; I saw the bright shining of those shores, and turned my face earthwards, saying that it was good to play with the shells and seaweed on the beach. Every day those waters which divide us from the golden island are thick with sails; every day hundreds of happy adventurers land on its shores; every day, too, hundreds are shipwrecked. But for me the wind beckons, my vessel flaps its sail, and though I do not cast away the shells and seaweeds I have gathered, I put them in my locker and think no more of them just now. The tide favours: my vessel tugs its chain, and I put out.

DECEMBER

Snow over all, and it is summer. Frost binds the icy fields, and in my heart every nightingale in the world makes melody. The bare trees are hung with icicles, and a shrill wind whistles through them; yet to me they are the green habitations of mating birds, and in the hedgerows, with their mask of snow where the wind has drifted it, are the nests of the hedge-sparrows with the blue eggs that reflect the skies of April. December! Was there ever such a December? All the honey of the summer, all the warmth of the long days, all the mellow autumn, all the promise of spring, is gathered here into one sheaf--the sheaf that we put in the chancel at the harvest festival, symbol of offering, symbol of the fruitful, kindly earth offering in kind to the Lord of the harvest.

Did you see the sun to-day about eleven in the morning come suddenly out through parted clouds and shine on the great fields of virgin snow? He came on purpose to see me. Did you see the maddened whirl of the snow-flakes in the afternoon flying in eddies through the air? They were dancing together at my party. I engaged them to dance. They did it well, did they not? Did you hear the cathedral bells ringing this afternoon, sounding dim and deep through the snow? They were also my guests. Everything in the world to-day was my guest, and stars were ranged on my ceiling, and the Pleiades lay in my hand, and close by my heart there lay the moon, and it was not cold, as it looks, but warm.

Day after day and all day, night after night and all night, I have dreamed of the moon, loving it, desiring it. And last night I dreamed that I cast a slender silver thread into the sky, which caught the moon, and I drew it closer and closer to myself, till it rested on my heart. And it was not the moon at all, but the heart of a woman, beating full and strong. And the wonder of it is that the moon is mine. You shall see it sometimes, you other people on the earth, but all the time it is mine. I know, too, the other side of it, when we are alone together. You cannot see that, and you will never see it. The moon says it is all for me.

To-day the moon had to be away all day, but the silver thread was between us (it leads to the other side of the moon), so I scarcely envied the folks in London, who would see her face merely. Yet all day I fevered for evening, and as evening approached my fever abated not. But you came back, my moon, and we were together again. Other people were there, and for them, as for me, melody after melody flowed from the sweet stress of your fingers. They heard only, but I knew, and to me the sound revealed not the poor clay that wrote those exquisite notes, but you who played them. Your soul it was, not Schubert’s, that shone in the symphony that shall never be finished; your soul, not Beethoven’s, was passion and pathos--you, not he, turned night into a flame, and in that flame I burned and was consumed, happy as the gods are happy, and happier because I was not content. I shall never be content.

Oh, my own who did this, thanks is no word between you and me. Do we thank the star that shines in the dark-blue velvet of the skies? We gaze only, and are drawn thither. For we thank a giver for a human gift; it is in silence that we give thanks for the things that are divine. Oh, I try to speak of what cannot be spoken! Who shall set words to your music?

Let me picture you again, with face half turned from where I sat, tuning the keys which I thought so rebellious into a rain of enchanted harmony. Rebellious, too, was your hair, rising upward in waves of smouldering gold from your face. And through Schubert you spoke to me, he but the medium or the alphabet of your thought, and I was almost jealous of the dead because he touched the tips of your fingers. Then from the trim garden at Leipsic spoke that sweet formal soul, a message of congratulation to me, or so I took it, and Beethoven with fuller voice said the same, and from frozen Poland and from wind-beaten Majorca came another smile. And when those sweet words were done, came other sweet words without interpreter; and the room was emptied and the larger lights were quenched, and only on the walls leaped the shadows and the shine of the flames that plunged on the hearth. Once by night the Temple was bright to the prophet with the glory of the Lord, and the hot coal from the altar opened and inspired his lips. With what new vision and eyes enlightened must he have looked on the world after that night when God revealed Himself. And by this revelation which has come to me all things are made new, winter is turned to spring, the lonely places are desert no more, and the whole world is in flower with the royal purple of the blossoms of Love.

And now that I know it was inevitable from the first, I can hardly believe that it was I who only a few weeks ago made plans to force myself from the possibility. It was ordained from the beginning, and the patient march of the centuries, every step, every year, was bringing us together; myriads of subtle influences conspired to work it, and how excellent is the miracle they have made! Sunlight and wind, and the love and sorrow and joy of a thousand generations, have made the body and soul of this girl; for me was she predestined, and for me has the whole creation laboured. Blindly but inevitably it wrought, even as the shell deep in some blue cave of the ocean thinks only that some piece of grit has got between its iridescent valves, yet all the time it is busy making the pearl that shall lie on the neck of some queen yet unborn.

An immense silence and whiteness lies over the whole earth. Snow fell a week ago, then came several nights of frost, and to-day again a fresh mantle of white was laid down. All roughnesses and inequalities are smoothed away. The whole land lies in delicate curves, swelling and subsiding in gradations too fine to follow. With bar and chevron, and a million devices of this celestial heraldry, trees and palings are outlined and emblazoned, and in the graveyard opposite the tombstones are capped with whiteness. From eaves and gutters hang the festooned icicles, and most people find it cheerless weather. But not so we, for between us, with the aid of a prodigiously stupid carpenter, we have designed and executed a toboggan, which is the chariot of love, and on the steep down-sides (attended by the puzzled collies, who cannot understand how it is that snowballs, which so closely resemble tennis-balls, vanish in the retrieving) we spend vivifying afternoons. The toboggan has a decided bias, and it is only a question of time before it gets broadside to the slope of the hill, ejecting its passengers. That is the moment for which the collies (Huz and Buz) are waiting, and they fly after us and lick our faces before we can regain our feet, to congratulate us on the success of this excellent new game. Indeed, the ‘Alliance of Laughter’ is in league again, but below the laughter is love, which penetrates to the centre of the world and rises to the heaven of heavens. Then we tramp back, towing the slewing toboggan uphill, and getting our heels kicked by it downhill to the muffled town at dusk, and the long evenings begin.

I have told her all about Margery, as was only natural, but it was no news to her. She had guessed it, with woman’s intuition, to which lightning is a snail, on the day when I told her how like she was to Margery. I had said ‘She was my best friend’ in a voice, it appears, that was the most obvious self-betrayal. I have told her, too, the grim determination I had made not to see her any more. That, it appears on the same authority, was harmless though silly, since it was utterly out of my power to do anything of the kind. I couldn’t have done it: that was all. I, of course, argued that I could; so she said, ‘Well, do it now, then. It is not too late.’

But when I told her about Margery, she did not laugh, but she answered:

‘I wanted so to comfort you. And I saw at first that you looked at me and thought of her. Then, by degrees, I wanted to take her place. And by degrees you let me have a place of my own. You looked at me and thought of me. That was one evening we played cards here.’

‘You saw that?’ I asked.

‘How could a girl avoid seeing it, when all the time she----’

‘What?’

‘Nothing--at least, not much.’

‘What, then?’

She came a little closer in the gleam of the firelight.

‘When all the time she longed to see it,’ she whispered.

‘And is that not much? Is there anything in the world bigger than that?’

‘No; it is bigger than the world.’

Oh, I am loved--I am loved!

* * * * *

It is Christmas Eve, and she has just gone home with her father, and outside in the moonlight the waits are singing. I know that they are not in tune, and that _qua_ singing it is a deplorable performance, but there is such a singing in my heart that I do not hear the false notes, and the thrill of Christmas, too, is upon me. I have never quite got over (and I hope I never shall) the childish awe and mystery in hearing the voices from the night, being awakened by the sounds, and being carried, wrapped up in blankets, to the window, where I could see dim forms outside black against the snow. I did not know in those earliest years who they were. It was Christmas, and there were mysterious beings singing in the night. On no other night were they there, for they were of the family, I must suppose, of Father Christmas and Santa Claus and the fairy Abracadabra, to whose awful presence--she appeared to be about nine feet high--we had been introduced, not without delightful inward quailings, before we went to bed. She brought with her a vessel of the shape certainly of a clothes-basket, but as it was of solid gold it could not have been a clothes-basket. And inside were exactly those things for which we each of us had pined and audibly hungered. Such a clever fairy! She never made a mistake or confused my wants with those of my brothers; so probably she was omniscient as well as beneficent. And my good fairies have been just as clever ever since. They never make mistakes, and now they have given me the best gift of all. So, listening to the singing in the night now, the years slip back, the child within me stirs and awakens, and out of the rose-coloured mists of early years that queer little figure, wrapped in blankets and carried to the window, looks wonderingly at me and smiles because I am happy. Abracadabra, too, is with me to-night, not nine feet high any longer, nor girt about with delicious terrors for me, but still my dear fairy, who never fails me. You should have seen her meeting with Helen; the two who are dearest to me out of all the world, saw each other and loved each other on the moment, and Helen ran to her and called her ‘mother.’

The singing in the night is long since silent; midnight has struck, and the house is very still in this first hour of Christmas Day. All afternoon, following the custom I have known from childhood, we made wreaths of evergreens for decoration of the doors, and the holly berries glow red in the dark green of the ivy. The scraps we burned on the hearth, and the green leaves are still crackling and popping, and the room is aromatic with the smell of them--the smell, so it always seemed to me, of Christmas. Outside the same wonderful windless frost still binds the earth, and in the dryness of the air the stars are visible nearly down to the horizon, and the sheets of snow sparkle dimly in the soft twilight of them. Yet I still linger here, finishing the few words that remain to be written of this little book of months, which tells of happenings so tremendous and momentous to me, so infinitesimal to the world at large. It is a very inconsecutive performance, I know, very often dealing with interests so minute that, even as I write them, the time when what one writes assumes its greatest importance to one’s self, I know I am risking boredom for somebody. But the remedy for such boredom is so simple: one has only to shut the book.

How well I remember the first day of the year, a morning of fog, with fugitive gleams of sun, type of the inscrutable young year, which now is flaming to its close in a glory of rose-coloured sunset! All I ever desired, all that I scarcely dared to desire, is mine, and yet this is only the promise of what shall be. The love which is mine is like a golden thread passing through the scattered beads of my days, threading them into a necklace which I place round her neck, so that it lies on her heart, and day and night moves to its beating, and rises and falls with her breath. O my beloved, whether you sleep or wake, it is there; it is yours. Do you remember a day or two ago how, quite suddenly, your eyes filled with tears, and when I asked you what that meant, you said, ‘It is only because it is us, just you and I’? Even so.

THE END

BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD

* * * * *

DONOVAN PASHA

BY SIR GILBERT PARKER

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Daily Chronicle.=--‘In this characteristic and powerful volume of short stories, Sir Gilbert Parker exemplifies the truth of the old adage, _Ex Africa semper aliquid novi_, by the remarkable vividness and force with which he impresses upon us many and strange diversities of British activity in foreign parts. It is a weird picture of change moving across the face of the unchangeable that is presented in these glittering and motley pages. These short stories are powerful, various, and invigorating. The book is full of life--real, vital, burning life--and the characters that people it are rich in variety and suggestion.’

THE RIGHT OF WAY

BY SIR GILBERT PARKER

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Outlook.=--‘_The Right of Way_ is the right stuff--romance the royal. It is dramatic. It abounds in good things. Its inspiration is heroic. It is a powerful and moving novel, in which strong and natural situations abound.’

=The Standard.=--‘The story deals with those strong passions and intense emotions that do not depend for their interest on the framework and setting in which they are presented. Nowhere else has the author worked with a surer touch or more careful craftsmanship. He has painted on larger canvasses, but not with so much precision of line, so much restraint, and such just harmony of tint; nor does he elsewhere exhibit an equal command of unforced pathos and genuine tragedy. The story is full of dramatic incident, ingeniously contrived.’

=The St. James’s Gazette.=--‘A fine book, stirring, dramatic, fascinating.

THE LANE THAT HAD NO TURNING

BY SIR GILBERT PARKER

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘Not even in _The Seats of the Mighty_ does Mr. Parker suggest such an impression of his strength as in the story which gives its title to the book. Strong and yet natural situations follow in rapid succession. In Madelinette Mr. Parker has idealized the noblest of women.’

=Literature.=--‘The short story is very seldom wrought to perfection in England, but Mr. Gilbert Parker establishes once more his claim to be one of the very few writers who make that particular literary form a thing of art. These stories are full of poetry, pathos, and dramatic force, and show a peculiar power of realising the possibilities of the short story.’

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

* * * * *

THE ETERNAL CITY

BY HALL CAINE

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Daily Telegraph.=--‘Mr. Hall Caine has produced a remarkable novel.’

=The St. James’s Gazette.=--‘It is interesting, characteristic, and highly dramatic, and not too long. It is a stirring, warm-blooded story that one is sorry to have finished.’

=The Daily News.=--‘Mr. Hall Caine has written a book that will strike the popular imagination.... He introduces no subtleties into his politics. Above all, he makes his human interest clear, strong, and intelligible.’

=The Liverpool Daily Post.=--‘Hall Caine’s _Eternal City_ is a great novel, revealing the author at the very zenith of his gift.... The book’s greatest wealth is its wealth of contagious and engrossing emotion. It is a triumph of imagination, of power over the feelings, as it is of dexterously used observation of an historic and most interesting and deeply agitated people....’

=The Daily Mail.=--‘He has written a vivid story, characterised by that keen eye for dramatic situations which has given him fame. There is little doubt that its popularity will rival that of its predecessors.’

=The Liverpool Courier.=--‘_The Eternal City_, daring in its conception, and still more audacious in its execution, dealing not with a century ago or a decade back, but with to-day, referring to positions (if not to persons) that stand out prominent in the world’s life, the present moment is the flood which must carry it to success.... Of its intrinsic worth there can be no doubt. It is the best that Mr. Caine has yet produced.’

=The Scotsman.=--‘It may be asserted with confidence that no living author than Mr. Caine could have produced this work. It may be doubted whether any author who has lived for many generations past could have produced it. The novel stands out as a purely exceptional work.... The verdict must be that it is masterly in its conception and in its treatment.... Mr. Caine has produced a really fine work, a work that will carry on his reputation to a higher point than it has yet attained.’

THE CHRISTIAN

BY HALL CAINE

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Sketch.=--‘It quivers and palpitates with passion, for even Mr. Caine’s bitterest detractors cannot deny that he is the possessor of that rarest of all gifts, genius.’

=The Standard.=--‘The book has humour, it has pathos, it is full of colour and movement. It abounds in passages of terse, bold, animated descriptions.... There is, above all, the fascination of a skilful narrative.’

=The Speaker.=--‘It is a notable book, written in the heart’s blood of the author, and palpitating with the passionate enthusiasm that has inspired it. A book that is good to read, and that cannot fail to produce an impression on its readers.’

=The Scotsman.=--‘The tale will enthral the reader by its natural power and beauty. The spell it casts is instantaneous, but it also gathers strength from chapter to chapter, until we are swept irresistibly along by the impetuous current of passion and action.’

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

* * * * *

THE MANXMAN

BY HALL CAINE

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘With the exception of _The Scapegoat_, this is unquestionably the finest and most dramatic of Mr. Hall Caine’s novels.... _The Manxman_ goes very straight to the roots of human passion and emotion. It is a remarkable book, throbbing with human interest.’

=The Queen.=--‘_The Manxman_ is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable books of the century. It will be read and re-read, and take its place in the literary inheritance of the English-speaking nations.’

=The St. James’s Gazette.=--‘_The Manxman_ is a contribution to literature, and the most fastidious critic would give in exchange for it a wilderness of that deciduous trash which our publishers call fiction.... It is not possible to part from _The Manxman_ with anything but a warm tribute of approval.’--EDMUND GOSSE.

THE BONDMAN

BY HALL CAINE

With a Photogravure Portrait of the Author.

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=Mr. Gladstone.=--‘_The Bondman_ is a work of which I recognise the freshness, vigour, and sustained interest, no less than its integrity of aim.’

=The Times.=--‘It is impossible to deny originality and rude power to this saga, impossible not to admire its forceful directness, and the colossal grandeur of its leading characters.’

=The Academy.=--‘The language of _The Bondman_ is full of nervous, graphic, and poetical English; its interest never flags, and its situations and descriptions are magnificent. It is a splendid novel.’

=The Speaker.=--‘This is the best book that Mr. Hall Caine has yet written, and it reaches a level to which fiction very rarely attains.... We are, in fact, so loth to let such good work be degraded by the title of “novel” that we are almost tempted to consider its claim to rank as a prose epic.’

THE SCAPEGOAT

BY HALL CAINE

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘In our judgment it excels in dramatic force all the Author’s previous efforts. For grace and touching pathos Naomi is a character which any romancist in the world might be proud to have created, and the tale of her parents’ despair and hopes, and of her own development, confers upon _The Scapegoat_ a distinction which is matchless of its kind.’

=The Guardian.=--‘Mr. Hall Caine is undoubtedly master of a style which is peculiarly his own. He is in a way a Rembrandt among novelists.’

=The Athenæum.=--‘It is a delightful story to read.’

=The Academy.=--‘Israel ben Oliel is the third of a series of the most profoundly conceived characters in modern fiction.’

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

* * * * *

SCARLET AND HYSSOP

BY E. F. BENSON

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Standard.=--‘It is astonishingly up-to-date: it brims over with chatter, with Saturday to Monday parties, with bridge, flirtation, motor-cars, semi-detached husbands and wives, and the Boer war,--in fact with everything in which London society of to-day interests itself. An admirable picture, witty, cynical, and amusing. It is full of brilliant things.’

=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘Scathing in satire and relentless in exposure. The interest never flags for a moment. There are many pages of witty dialogue. _Scarlet and Hyssop_ must be accounted a really brilliant piece of work, unsurpassed by anything Mr. Benson has given us.’

THE LUCK OF THE VAILS

BY E. F. BENSON

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘One might begin to read _The Luck of the Vails_ lying back in a comfortable chair, and chuckling over the natural talk of Mr. Benson’s pleasant people. But after an hour or so, assuming that it is a hot day, and that you turn the leaves without great energy, you find yourself sitting up and gripping the arms of the chair, and glancing uneasily over your shoulder at the sound of a step upon the gravel. For this is a really thrilling and exciting tale of crime and mystery that Mr. Benson has written. It is readable all through and full of entertainment.’

THE PRINCESS SOPHIA

BY E. F. BENSON

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Athenæum.=--‘There is brilliance, lightness of touch. The dialogue is neat and brisk, and the miniature Court and its courtiers are amusingly treated.’

=Literature.=--‘Told with verve and wit. If the novel is to amuse we cannot recommend a more agreeable companion than Mr. Benson’s brilliant friend _The Princess Sophia_.’

=The Westminster Gazette.=--‘A gay and spirited performance, and the Princess herself a clever picture. It is lively reading, and the characters bubble along in true Bensonian fashion.’

MAMMON & CO.

BY E. F. BENSON

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Daily Telegraph.=--‘Bright, piquant, and entertaining from beginning to end, full of humorous sayings and witty things spoken by men and women who are merry and captivating. There is little to find fault with. It is a very clever, smart novel, wherein lies a little lesson and much entertainment.’

=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘Mr. Benson’s new story is in his happier and clever style. Happily, also, the liveliness does not tire. The _repartee_ and rattle of the “smart set” are the genuine thing, and his own pretty conceits and happy little audacities of turn are not too forced.’

LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN, 21 BEDFORD STREET, W.C.

* * * * *

THE WINDS OF THE WORLD

BY THE DUCHESS OF SUTHERLAND

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘They are extremely varied in conception, and show much dramatic skill.’

=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘A series of stories which are excellent. They are fresh and original in conception, and full of dramatic incidents; and they arc still more remarkable for their freshness as studies of character.’

THE MYSTERY OF THE SEA

BY BRAM STOKER

_In One Volume, price 6s._

=The Times.=--‘A good rattling story of buried treasure from the Great Armada; of second-sight and ancient Pagan mysteries; of sea caves and storms; of haughty Spaniards; of subterranean passages and ruined chapels.’

=Punch.=--‘A rattling story which sometimes recalls _Monte Cristo_, anon _Treasure Island_. The wild scenery by day and night Mr. Stoker describes with loving touch and master hand. There is in the book the rare quality of adventure that enthralls the boys and pleases their parents.’

=The Pall Mall Gazette.=--‘There is a spaciousness about Mr. Stoker’s work which not infrequently reminds us of the great masters. To any one who loves an enthralling tale, told with unflagging zest and good spirits, we recommend _The Mystery of the Sea_.’

THE SHEEPSTEALERS

BY VIOLET JACOB

_In One Volume, price 6s._