Chapter X: Part III: I (3)

“So ill! Nonsense,” said Eppie, giving his hand a reassuring shake and releasing her own to pull off her soft, loose gloves. “It was a breakdown I had, but nothing serious. I believe it to have been an attack of biliousness, myself. People don’t like to own to liver when they can claim graceful maladies like nervous prostration,--so it was called. But liver, only, I fear it was. And I’m all right now, thank goodness, for I loathe being ill and am a horrid patient.”

She had taken off her hat, pushing back her hair from her forehead and sinking into a chair that was against the light. The Michaelmas daisies made a background for the bronze and white of her head, for, as she rested, the color that her surprise and her swift walking had given her died. She was glad to rest, her smile said that, and he saw, indeed, that she was utterly tired.

Suddenly, as he looked at her, seeing the great fatigue, seeing the pallor, seeing the smile only stay as if with determination, the truth of Miss Allen’s description was revealed to him. She was frightfully changed. Her smile, her courage, made him think of a _danse macabre_. The rhythm, the gaiety of life were there, but life itself was gone.

The revelation came to him, but he felt himself clutch it silently, and he let her go on talking.

She went on, indeed, very volubly, talking of her breakdown, of how good the general and her aunt had been to her, and of how getting back to her work had picked her up directly.

“I think I’ll finally pitch my tent here,” she went on. “The interest grows all the time,--and the ties, the responsibility. One can’t do things by half measures; you know that, thorough person that you are. I mustn’t waste my mite of income by gadding about. I’m going to chuck all the rest and give myself altogether to this.”

“You used to think that the rest helped you in this,” said Grainger.

“To a certain extent it did, and will, for I’ve had so much that it will last me for a long time.”

“You intend to live permanently down here?”

“I shall have my holidays, and I shall run up to civilization for a dinner or two now and then. It’s not that I’ve any illusions about my usefulness or importance. It’s that all this is so useful to me. It’s something I can do with all my might and main, and I’ve such masses of energy you know, Jim, that need employment. And then, though of course one works at the wrong side of the tapestry and has to trust that the pattern is coming right, I do believe that, to a certain extent, it does need me.”

He leaned back in his chair opposite her, listening to the voice that rattled on so cheerfully. With his head bent, he kept that old gaze upon her and clutched the clearer and clearer revelation: Eppie--Eppie in torment; Eppie shattered;--Eppie--why, it was as if she sat there before him smiling and rattling over a huge hole in her chest. And, finally, the consciousness of the falsity in her own tone made her falter a little. She couldn’t continue so glibly while his eyes were saying to her: “Yes; I see, I see. You are wounded to death.” But if she faltered it was only, in the pause, to look about for another shield.

“And you?” she said. “Have you done a great deal of climbing? Tell me about yourself, dear Jim.”

It was a dangerous note to strike and the “dear Jim” gave away her sense of insecurity. It was almost an appeal to him not to see, or, at all events, not to tell her that he saw.

“Don’t talk about me,” he said very rudely. She knew the significance of his rudeness.

“Let us talk of whatever you will.”

“Of you, then. Don’t try to shut me out, Eppie.”

“Am I shutting you out?”

“You are trying to. You have succeeded with the rest, I suppose; but, as of course you know, you can’t succeed with me. I know too much. I care too much.”

His rough, tense voice beat down her barriers. She sat silent, oddly smiling.

He rose and came to her and stood above her, pressing the tips of his fingers heavily down upon her shoulder.

“You must tell me. I must know. I won’t stand not knowing.”

Motionless, without looking up at him, she still smiled before her.

“That--that coward has broken your heart,” he said. There were tears in his voice, and, looking up now, the smile stiffened to a resolute grimace, she saw them running down his cheeks. But her own face did not soften. With a glib dryness she answered:

“Yes, Jim; that’s it.”

“Oh--“ It was a long growl over her head.

She had looked away again, and continued in the same crisp voice: “I’d lie if I could, you may be sure. But you put it so, you look so, that I can’t. I’m at your mercy. You know what I feel, so I can’t hide it from you. I hate any one, even you, to know what I feel. Help me to hide it.”

“What has he done?” Grainger asked on the muffled, growling note.

“Gavan? Done? He’s done nothing.”

“But something happened. You aren’t where you were when I left you. You weren’t breaking down then.”

“Hope deferred, Jim--“

“It’s not that. Don’t fence, to shield him. It’s not hope deferred. It’s hope dead. Something happened. What was it?”

“All that happened was that he went, when I thought that he was going to stay, forever.”

“He went, knowing--“

“That I loved him? Yes; I told him.”

“And he told you that he didn’t love you?”

“No, there you were wrong. He told me that he did. But he saw what you saw. So what would you have asked of him?”

“Saw what I saw? What do you mean?”

“That he would suffocate me. That he was the negation of everything I believed in.”

“You mean to tell me,” said Grainger, his fingers still pressing down upon her shoulder, “that it all came out,--that you had it there between you,--and then that he ran away?”

“From the fear of hurting my life. Yes.”

“From the fear of life itself, you mean.”

“If that was it, wasn’t it enough?”

“The coward. The mean, bloodless coward,” said Jim Grainger.

“I let you say it because I understand; it’s your relief. But he is not a coward. He is only--a saint. A saint without a saint’s perquisites. A Spinoza without a God. An imitator of Christ without a Christ. I have been thinking, thinking it all out, seeing it all, ever since.”

“Spinoza! What has he to do with it! Don’t talk rot, dear child, to comfort yourself.”

“Be patient, Jim. Perhaps I can help you. It calms one when one understands. I have been reading up all the symptoms. Listen to this, if you think that Spinoza has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, he knew all about it and would have seen very much as Gavan does.”

She took up one of the books that had been so frequently flung down by Grainger in his waiting and turned its pages while he watched her with the enduring look of a mother who humors a sick child’s foolish fancies.

“Listen to Spinoza, Jim,” she said, and he obediently bent his lowering gaze to the task. “‘When a thing is not loved, no strife arises about it; there is no pang if it perishes, no envy if another bears it away, no fear, no hate; yes, in a word, no tumult of soul. These things all come from loving that which perishes.’ And now the Imitation: ‘What canst thou see anywhere which can continue long under the sun? Thou believest, perchance, that thou shalt be satisfied, but thou wilt never be able to attain unto this. If thou shouldst see all things before thee at once, what would it be but a vain vision?’ And this: ‘Trust not thy feeling, for that which is now will be quickly changed into somewhat else.’”

Her voice, as she read on to him,--and from page to page she went, plucking for him, it seemed, their cold, white blossoms, fit flowers to lay on the grave of love,--had lost the light dryness as of withered leaves rustling. It seemed now gravely to understand, to acquiesce. A chill went over the man, as though, under his hand, he felt her, too, sliding from warm life into that place of shadows where she must be to be near the one she loved.

“Shut the books, for God’s sake, Eppie,” he said. “Don’t tell me that you’ve come to see as he has.”

She looked up at him, and now, in the dear, deep eyes, he saw all the old Eppie, the Eppie of life and battle.

“Can you think it, Jim? It’s because I see so clearly what he sees that I hate it and repudiate it and fight it with every atom of my being. It’s that hatred, that repudiation, that fight, that is life. I believe in it, I’m for it, as I never believed before, as I never was before.”

He was answering her look, seeing her as life’s wounded champion, standing, shot through, on the ramparts of her beleaguered city. She would shake her banner high in the air as she fell. The pity, the fury, the love of his eyes dwelt on her.

And suddenly, under that look, her eyes closed. She shrank together in her chair; she bowed down her head upon her knees, covering her face.

“Oh, Jim,” she said, “my heart is broken.”

He knew that he had brought her to this, that never before an onlooker had she so fallen into her own misery. He had forced her to show the final truth that, though she held the banner, she was shot through and through. And he could do nothing but stand on above her, his face set to a flintier, sharper endurance, as he heard the great sobs shake her.

He left her presently and walked up and down the room while she wept, crouched over upon her knees. It was not for long. The tempest passed, and, when she sat in quiet, her head in her hands, her face still hidden, he said, “You must set about mending now, Eppie.”

“I can’t mend. I’ll live; but I can’t mend.”

“Don’t say it, Eppie. This may pass as--well--other things in your life have passed.”

“Do you, too, talk Spinoza to me, Jim?”

“Damn Spinoza! I’m talking life to you--the life we both believe in. I’m not telling you to turn your back on it because it has crippled you. You won’t, I know it. I know that you are brave. Eppie, Eppie,”--before her, now, he bent to her, then knelt beside her chair,--“let me be the crutch. Let me have the fragments. Let’s try, together, to mend them. I ask nothing of you but that trying, with my help, to mend. He isn’t for you. He’s never for you. I’ll say no more brutalities of him. I’ll use your own words and say that he can’t,--that his saintship can’t. So won’t you, simply, let me take you? Even if you’re broken for life, let me have the broken Eppie.”

She had never, except in the moment of the kiss, seen this deepest thing in him, this gentleness, this reverent tenderness that, under the bullying, threatening, angry aspects of his love, now supplicated with a beauty that revealed all the angel in humanity. Strange--she could think it in all her sorrow--that the thing that held him to her was the thing that held her to Gavan, the deep, the mysterious, the unchangeable affinity. For him, as for her, there could be but one, and for that one alone could these depths and heights of the heart open themselves.

“Jim, dear, dear Jim, never, never,” she said. “I am his, only his, fragments, all of me, for as long as I am I.”

Grainger hid his face on the arm of her chair.

“And he is mine,” said Eppie. “He knows it, and that is why he fears me. He is mine forever.”

“I am glad for your sake that you can believe that,” Grainger muttered, “and glad, for my own, that I don’t.”

“Why, Jim?”

“I could hardly live if I thought that you were going to love him in eternity and that I was, forever, to be shut away. Thank goodness that it’s only for a lifetime that my tragedy lasts.”

She closed her eyes to these perplexities, laying her hand on his.

“I don’t know. We can only think and act for this life. It’s this we have to shape. Perhaps in eternity, really in eternity, whatever that may mean, I won’t need to shut you out. Dear, dear Jim, it’s hard that it must seem that to you now. You know what I feel about you. And who could feel it as I do? We are in the same boat.”

“No, for he, at least, loves no one else. You haven’t that to bear. As far as he goes,--and it isn’t far,--he is yours. We are not at all in the same boat. But that’s enough of me. I suppose I am done for, as you say, forever.”

He had got upon his feet, and, as if at their mutual wreckage, looked down with a face that had found again its old shield of grimness.

“As for you,” he went on, “I sha’n’t, at all events, see you suffocating. You must mend alone, then, as best you can. Really, you’re not as tragic as you might have been.”

Then, after this salutary harshness, and before he turned from her to go, he added, as once before, “Poor darling.”

IX

Grainger hardly knew why he had come and, as he walked up the deep Surrey lane from the drowsy village station, his common-sense warred with the instinct, almost the obsession, that was taking him to Cheylesford Lodge. Eppie had been persistently in his thoughts since their meeting of the week before, and from his own hopelessness had sprung the haunting of a hope for her. Turn from it as he would, accuse himself angrily of madness, morbidity, or a mere tendency to outrageous meddling,--symptomatic of shattered nerves,--he couldn’t escape it. By day and night it was with him, until he saw himself, in a lurid vision, as responsible for Eppie’s very life if he didn’t test its validity. For where she had failed might not a man armed with the strength of his selfless love succeed?

He had said, in his old anger, that as Gavan’s wife Gavan would kill her; but he hadn’t really meant that literally; now, literally, the new fear had come that she might die of Gavan’s loss. Her will hadn’t snapped, but her vitality was like the flare of the candle in its socket. To love, the eremite of Cheylesford Lodge wouldn’t yield--perhaps for very pity’s sake; but if he were made to see the other side of it?--Grainger found a grim amusement in the paradox--the lover, in spite of love, might yield to pity. Couldn’t his own manliness strike some spark of manliness from Gavan? Couldn’t he and Eppie between them, with their so different appeals,--she to what was soft, he to what was tough,--hoist his tragically absurd head above water, as it were, into the air of real life, that might, who knew? fill and sustain his aquatic lungs? It gave him a vindictive pleasure to see the drowning simile in the most ludicrous aspects--Gavan, draped in the dramatic robes of his twopenny-halfpenny philosophies, holding his head in a basin of water, there resolved to die. Grainger felt that as far as his own inclinations were concerned it would have given him some pleasure to help to hold him under, to see that, while he was about it, he did it thoroughly; but the question wasn’t one of his own inclinations: it was for Eppie’s sake that he must try to drag out the enraptured suicide. It was Eppie, bereft and dying,--so it seemed to him in moments of deep fear,--whose very life depended on the submerged life. And to see if he could fish it up for her he had come on this undignified, this ridiculous errand.

Very undignified and very ridiculous he felt the errand to be, as he strode on through the lane, its high hedge-rows all dusty with the autumn drought; but he was indifferent enough to that side of it. He felt no confusion. He was completely prepared to speak his mind.

Coming to a turning of the lane, where he stood for a moment, uncertain, at branching paths, he was joined by an alert little parson who asked him courteously if he could direct him on his way. They were both, it then appeared, going to Cheylesford Lodge; and the Reverend John Best, after introducing himself as the rector of Dittleworth parish, and receiving Grainger’s name, which had its reverberations, with affable interest, surmised that it was to another friend of Mr. Palairet’s that he spoke.

“Yes. No. That is to say, I’ve known him after a fashion for years, but seen little of him. Has he been here all summer?” Grainger asked, as they walked on.

It seemed that Gavan had only returned from the Continent the week before, but Mr. Best went on to say, with an evidently temperamental loquacity, that he was there for most of the time as a rule and was found a very charming neighbor and a very excellent parishioner.

This last was a rôle in which Gavan seemed extremely incongruous, and Grainger looked his perplexity, murmuring, “Parishioner?”

“Not, I fear, that we can claim him as an altogether orthodox one,” Mr. Best said, smiling tolerantly upon his companion’s probable narrowness. “We ask for the spirit, rather than the letter, nowadays, Mr. Grainger; and Mr. Palairet is, at heart, as good a Christian as any of us, of that I am assured: better than many of us, as far as living the Christian life goes. Christianity, in its essence, is a life. Ah, if only you statesmen, you active men of the world, would realize that; would look past the symbols to the reality. We, who see life as a spiritual organization, are able to break down the limitations of the dry, self-centered individualism that, for so many years, has obscured the glorious features of our faith. And it is the spirit of the Church that Mr. Palairet has grasped. Time only is needed, I am convinced, to make him a partaker of her gifts.”

Grainger walked on in a sardonic silence, and Mr. Best, all unsuspecting, continued to embroider his congenial theme with illustrations: the village poor, to whom Mr. Palairet was so devoted; the village hospital, of which he was to talk over the plans to-day; the neighborly thoughtfulness and unfailing kindness and charity he showed toward high and low.

“Palairet always seemed to me very ineffectual,” said Grainger when, in a genial pause, he felt that something in the way of response was expected of him.

“Ah, I fear you judge by the worldly standard of outward attainment, Mr. Grainger.”

“What other is there for us human beings to judge by?”

“The standard of our unhappy modern plutocratic society is not that by which to measure the contemplative type of character.”

Grainger felt a slight stress of severity in the good little parson’s affability.

“Oh, I think its standards aren’t at all unwholesome,” he made reply. He could have justified anything, any standard, against Gavan and his standards.

“Unwholesome, my dear Mr. Grainger? That is just what they are. See the beauty of a life like our friend’s here. It judges your barbarous Christless civilization. He lives laborious, simple days. He does his work, he has his friends. His influence upon them counts for more than an outside observer could compute. Great men are among them. I met Lord Taunton at his house last Sunday. A most impressive personality. Even though Mr. Palairet has abandoned the political career, one can’t call him ineffectual when such a man is among his intimates.”

“The monkish type doesn’t appeal to me, I own.”

“Ah, there you touch the point that has troubled me. It is not good for a man to live alone. My chief wish for him is that he may marry. I often urge it on him.”

“Well done.”

“One did hear,” Mr. Best went on, his small, ruddy face taking on a look of retrospective reprobation, “that there was an attachment to a certain young woman--the tale was public property--only as such do I allude to it--a very fashionable, very worldly young woman. I was relieved indeed when the rumor came to nothing. He escaped finally, I can’t help fancying it, this summer. I was much relieved.”

“Why so, pray?”

“I am rural, old-fashioned, my dear young man, and that type of young woman is one toward which, I own it, I find it difficult to feel charitably. She represents the pagan, the Christless element that I spoke of in our modern world. Her charm could not have been a noble one. Had our friend here succumbed to it, she could only have meant disaster in his life. She would have urged him into ambition, pleasure-seeking, dissipation. Of course I only cite what I have heard in my quiet corner, though I have had glimpses of her, passing with a friend, a very frivolous person, in a motor-car. She looked completely what I had imagined.”

“If you mean Miss Gifford,” said Grainger, trying for temperateness, “I happen to know her. She is anything but a pleasure-seeker, anything but frivolous, anything, above all, but a pagan. If Palairet had been lucky enough to marry her it would have been the best thing that ever happened to him in his life, and a very dubious thing for her. She is a thousand times too good for him.”

“My dear Mr. Grainger, pardon me; I had no idea that you knew the lady. But,” Mr. Best had flushed a little under this onslaught, “I cannot but think you a partisan.”

“Do you call a woman frivolous who spends half of her time working in the slums?”

“That is a phase, I hear, of the ultra-smart young woman. But no doubt rumor has been unjust. I must beg you to pardon me.”

“Oh, don’t mind that. You heard, no doubt, the surface things. But no one who knows Miss Gifford can think of them, that’s all.”

“And if I have been betrayed into injustice, I hope that you will reconsider a little more charitably your impression of Mr. Palairet,” said Mr. Best, in whom, evidently, Grainger’s roughness rankled.

Grainger laughed grimly. “I can’t consider him anything but a thousand times too bad for Miss Gifford.”

They had reached the entrance to Cheylesford Lodge on this final and discordant phrase. Mr. Best kept a grieved silence and Grainger’s thoughts passed from him.

He had had in his life no training in appreciation and was indifferent to things of the eye, but even to his insensible nature the whole aspect of the house that they approached between high yew hedges, its dreaming quiet, the tones of its dim old bricks, the shadowed white of paneled walls within, spoke of pensive beauty, of a secure content in things of the mind. He felt it suddenly as oppressive and ominous in its assured quietness. It had some secret against the probes of feeling. Its magic softly shut away suffering and encircled safely a treasure of tranquillity.

That was the secret, that the magic; it flashed vaguely for Grainger--though by its light he saw more vividly his own errand as ridiculous--that a life of thought, pure thought, if one could only achieve it, was the only _safe_ life. Where, in this adjusted system of beauty and contemplation, would his appeals find foothold?

He dashed back the crowding doubts, summoning his own crude forces.

The man who admitted them said that Mr. Palairet was in the garden, and stepping from opened windows at the back of the house, they found themselves on the sunny spaces of the lawn with its encompassing trees and its wandering border of flowers.

Gavan was sitting with a book in the shade of the great yew-tree. In summer flannels, a panama hat tilted over his eyes, he was very white, very tenuous, very exquisite. And he was the center of it all, the secret securely his, the magic all at his disposal.

Seeing them he rose, dropping his book into his chair, strolling over the miraculous green to meet them, showing no haste, no hesitation, no surprise.

“I’ve come on particular business,” Grainger said, “and I’ll stroll about until you and Mr. Best are done with the hospital.”

Mr. Best, still with sadness in his manner, promised not to keep Mr. Palairet long and they went inside.

Grainger was left standing under the yew-tree. He took up Gavan’s book, while the sense of frustration, and of rebellion against it, rose in him. The book was French and dealt with an obscure phase of Byzantine history. Gavan’s neat notes marked passages concerning some contemporary religious phenomena.

Grainger flung down the book, careless of crumpled leaves, and wandered off abruptly, among the hedges and into the garden. It was a very different garden from the old Scotch one where a sweet pensiveness seemed always to hover and where romance whispered and beckoned. This garden, steeped in sunlight, and where plums and pears on the hot rosy walls shone like jewels among their crisp green leaves, was unshadowed, unhaunted, smiling and decorous--the garden of placid wisdom and Epicurean calm. Grainger, as he walked, felt at his heart a tug of strange homesickness and yearning for that Northern garden, its dim gray walls and its disheveled nooks and corners. Were they all done with it forever?

By the time he had returned to the lawn Gavan was just emerging from the house. They met in the shadow of the yew.

“I’m glad to see you, Grainger,” Gavan said, with a smile that struck Grainger as faded in quality. “This place is a sort of harbor for tired workers, you know. You should have looked me up before, or are you never tired enough for that?”

“I don’t feel the need of harbors, yet. One never sees you in London.”

“No, the lounging life down here suits me.”

“Your little parson doesn’t see it in that light. He has been telling me how you live up to your duties as neighbor and parishioner.”

“It doesn’t require much effort. Nice little fellow, isn’t he, Best? He tells me that you walked up together.”

“We did,” said Grainger, with his own inner sense of grim humor at the memory. “I should think you would find him rather limited.”

“But I’m limited, too,” said Gavan, mildly. “I like being with people so neatly adapted to their functions. There are no loose ends about Best; nothing unfulfilled or uncomfortable. He’s all there--all that there is of him to be there.”

“Not a very lively companion.”

“I’m not a lively companion, either,” Gavan once more, with his mild gaiety, retorted.

Grainger at this gave a harsh laugh. “No, you certainly aren’t,” he agreed.

They had twice paced the length of the yew-tree shadow and Gavan had asked no question; and Grainger felt, as the pause grew, that Gavan never would ask questions. Any onus for a disturbance of the atmosphere must rest entirely on himself, and to disturb it he would have to be brutal.

He jerked aside the veils of the placid dialogue with sudden violence. “I’ve seen Eppie,” he said.

He had intended to use her formal name only, but the nearer word rushed out and seemed to shatter the magic that held him off.

Gavan’s face grew a shade paler. “Have you?” he said.

“You knew that she had been ill?”

“I heard of it, recently, from General Carmichael. It was nothing serious, I think.”

“It will be serious.” Grainger stood still and gazed into his eyes. “Do you want to kill her?”

It struck him, when he had said it, and while Gavan received the words and seemed to reflect on them, that however artificial his atmosphere might be he would never evade any reality brought forcibly into it. He contemplated this one and did not pretend not to understand.

“I want Eppie to be happy,” he said presently.

“Happy, yes. So do I,” broke from Grainger with a groan.

They stood now near the great trunk of the yew-tree, and turning away, striking the steel-gray bark monotonously with his fist, he went on: “I love her, as you know. And she loves you. She told me--I made her tell me. But any one with eyes could see it; even your gossiping little fool of a parson here had heard of it--was relieved for your escape. But who cares for the cackling? And you have crippled her, broken her. You have tossed aside that woman whose little finger is worth more to the world than your whole being. I wish to God she’d never seen you.”

“So do I,” Gavan said.

“I’d kill you with the greatest pleasure--if it could do her any good.”

There was relief for Grainger in getting out these fundamental things.

“Yes,--I quite understand that. So would I,” Gavan acquiesced,--“kill myself, I mean,--if it would do her any good.”

“Don’t try that. It wouldn’t. She’s beyond all help but one. So I am here to put it to you.”

The still, hot day encompassed their shadow and with its quiet made more intense Grainger’s sense of his own passion--passion and its negation, the stress between the two. Their words, though they spoke so quietly, seemed to fill the world.

“I am sorry,” Gavan said; “I can do nothing.”

Grainger beat at the tree.

“You love her.”

“Not as she must be loved. I only want her, when I am selfish. When I think for her I have no want at all.”

“Give her your selfishness.”

“Ah, even that fades. That’s what I found out. I can’t count on my selfishness. I’ve tried to do it. It didn’t work.”

Grainger turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; these moments under the yew-tree, that white figure with its pale smile, its comprehending gravity confronting him, would count in his life, he knew, among its most racking memories.

“I consider you a madman,” he now said.

“Perhaps I am one. You don’t think it for Eppie’s happiness to marry a madman?”

“My God, I don’t know what to think! I want to save her.”

“But so do I,” Gavan’s voice had its first note of eagerness. “_I_ want to save her. And I want her to marry you. That’s her chance, and yours--and mine, though mine really doesn’t count. That’s what I hope for.”

“There’s no hope there.”

“Have patience. Wait. She will, perhaps, get over me.”

Grainger’s eyes, with their hot, jaded look of baffled purpose, so selfless that it transcended jealousy and hatred, were still on him, and he thought now that he detected on the other’s face the strain of some inner tension. He wasn’t so dead, then. He was suffering. No, more yet, and the final insight came in another vague flash that darkly showed the trouble at the heart of all the magic, the beauty, he, too, more really than Eppie, perhaps, was dying for love. Madman, devoted madman that he was, he was dying for love of the woman from whom he must always flee. It was strange to feel one’s sane, straightforward mind forced along this labyrinth of dazed comprehension, turning in the cruelly knotted paradox of this impossible love-story. Yet, against his very will, he was so forced to follow and almost to understand.

There wasn’t much more to say. And he had his own paradoxical satisfaction in the sight of the canker at the core of thought. So, at all events, one wasn’t safe even so.

“She won’t get over you,” he said. “It isn’t a mere love-affair. It’s her life. She may not die of it; that’s a figure of speech that I had no right, I suppose, to use. At all events, she’ll try her best not to die. But she won’t get over you.”

“Not even if I get out of the way forever?”

Gavan put the final proposition before him, but Grainger, staring at the sunlight, shook his head.

“The very fact that you’re alive makes her hold the tighter. No, you can’t save her in that way. I wish you could.”

X

Grainger had had his insight, but, outwardly, in the year that followed, Gavan’s life was one of peace, of achieved escape.

The world soon ceased to pull at him, to plead or protest. With a kindly shrug of the shoulders the larger life passed him by as one more proved ineffectual. The little circle that clung about him, as the flotsam and jetsam of a river drift from the hurrying current around the stability and stillness of a green islet, was, in the main, composed of the defeated or the indifferent. One or two cynical fighters moored their boats, for a week-end, at his tranquil shores, and the powerful old statesman who believed nothing, hoped nothing, felt very little, and who, behind his show-life of patriotic and hard-working nobleman, smiled patiently at the whole foolish comedy, was his most intimate companion. To the world at large, Lord Taunton was the witty Tory, the devoted churchman, the wise upholder of all the hard-won props of civilization; to Gavan, he was the skeptical and pessimistic metaphysician; together they watched the wheels go round.

Mayburn came down once or twice to see his poor, queer, dear old Palairet, and in London boasted much of the experience. “He’s too, too wonderful,” he said. “He has achieved a most delicate, recondite harmony. One never heard anything just like it before, and can’t, for the life of one, tell just what the notes are. Effort, constant effort, amidst constant quiet and austerity. Work is his passion, and yet never was any creature so passionless. He’s like a rower, rowing easily, indefatigably, down a long river, among lilies, while he looks up at the sky.”

But Mayburn felt the quiet and austerity a little disturbing. He didn’t, after all, come to look at quiet and austerity unless some one were there to hear him talk about them; and his host, all affability, never seemed quite there.

So a year, more than a year, went by.

It was on an early spring morning that Gavan found on his breakfast-table a letter written in a faltering hand,--a hand that faltered with the weeping that shook it,--Miss Barbara’s old, faint hand.

He read, at first, hardly comprehending.

It was of Eppie she wrote: of her overwork--they thought it must be that--in the winter, of the resultant fragility that had made her succumb suddenly to an illness contracted in some hotbed of epidemic in the slums. They had all thought that she would come through it. People had been very kind. Eppie had so many, many friends. Every one loved her. She had been moved to Lady Alicia’s house in Grosvenor Street. She, Aunt Barbara, had come up to town at once, and the general was with her.

It was with a fierce impatience that he went on through the phrases that were like the slow trickling of tear after tear, as if he knew, yet refused to know, the tragedy that the trivial tears flowed for, knew what was coming, resented its insufferable delay, yet spurned its bare possibility. At the end, and only then, it came. Her strength had suddenly failed. There was no hope. Eppie was dying and had asked to see him--at once.

A bird, above the window open to the dew and sunlight, sang and whistled while he read, a phrase, not joyous, not happy, yet strangely full of triumph, of the innocent praise of life. Gavan, standing still, with the letter in his hand, listened, while again and again, monotonously, freshly, the bird repeated its song.

He seemed at first to listen quietly, with pleasure, appreciative of this heraldry of spring; then memory, blind, numbed from some dark shock, stirred, stole out to meet it--the memory of Eppie’s morning voice on the hillside, the voice monotonous yet triumphant with its sense of life; and at each reiteration, the phrase seemed a dagger plunged into his heart.

Oh, memory! Oh, cruel thought! Cruel life!

After he had ordered the trap, and while waiting for it, he walked out into the freshness and back and forth, over and over across the lawn, with the patient, steady swiftness of an animal caged and knowing that the bars are about it. So this was to be the end. But, though already he acquiesced, it seemed in some way a strange, inapt ending. He couldn’t think of Eppie and death. He couldn’t see her dead. He could only see her looking at death.

* * * * *

The early train he caught got him to London by eleven, and in twenty minutes he was in Grosvenor Street. He had wired from the country, and Miss Barbara met him in the drawing-room of the house, hushed in its springtime gaiety. She was the frail ghost of her shadowy old self, her voice tremulous, her face blurred with tears and sleepless nights. Yet he saw, under the woe, the essential listlessness of age, the placidity beneath the half-mechanical tears. “Oh, Gavan,” she said, taking his hand and holding it in both her own--“Oh, Gavan, we couldn’t have thought of this, could we, that she would go first.” And that his own face showed some sharp fixity of woe he felt from its reflection on hers--like a sword-flash reflected in a shallow pool.

She told him that it was now an affair of hours only. “I would have sent for you long ago, Gavan; I knew--I knew that you would want it. But she wouldn’t--not while there was hope. I think she was afraid of hurting you. You know she had never been the same since--since--“

“Since what?” he asked, knowing.

“Since you went away. She was so ill then. Poor child! She never found herself, you see, Gavan. She did not know what she wanted. She has worn herself out in looking for it.”

Miss Barbara was very ignorant. He himself could not know, probably Eppie herself didn’t know, what had killed her, though she had so well known what she wanted; but he suspected that Grainger had been right, and that it was on him that Eppie’s life had shattered itself.

Her will, evidently, still ruled those about her, for when Miss Barbara had led him up-stairs she said, pausing in the passage, that Eppie would see him alone; the nurse would leave them. She had insisted on that, and there was now no reason why she should not have her way. The nurse came out to them, telling him that Miss Gifford waited; and, just before she let him go, Miss Barbara drew his head down to hers and kissed him, murmuring to him to be brave. He really didn’t know whether he were more the felon, or more the victim that she thought him. Then the door closed behind him and he was alone with Eppie.

Eppie was propped high on pillows, her hair twisted up from her brows and neck and folded in heavy masses on her head.

In the wide, white room, among her pillows, so white herself, and strange with a curious thinness, he had never received a more prodigious impression of life than in meeting her eyes, where all the forces of her soul looked out. So motionless, she was like music, like all that moves, that strives and is restless; so white, she was like skies at dawn, like deep seas under sunlight. In the stillness, the whiteness, the emptiness of the room she was illusion itself, life and beauty, a wonderful rainbow thing staining “the white radiance of eternity.” And as if, before its final shattering, every color flamed, her whole being was concentrated in the mere fact of its existence--its existence that defied death. A deep, quiet excitement, almost a gaiety, breathed from her. In the tangled rivers of her hair, the intertwined currents of dark and gold winding in a lovely disorder,--in the white folds of lawn that lay so delicately about her; in the emerald slipping far down her finger, the emeralds in her ears, shaking faintly with her ebbing heart-beats, there was even a sort of wilful and heroic coquetry. She was, in her dying, triumphantly beautiful, yet, as always, through her beauty went the strength of her reliance on deeper significances.

She lay motionless as Gavan approached her, and he guessed that she saved all her strength. Only as he took the chair beside her, horror at his heart, the old familiar horror, she put out her hand to him.

He took it silently, looking up, after a little while, from its marvelous lightness and whiteness to her eyes, her smile. Then, at last, she spoke to him.

“So you think that you have got the better of me at last, don’t you, Gavan dear?” she said. Her voice was strange, as though familiar notes were played on some far-away flute, sweet and melancholy among the hills. The voice was strange and sad, but the words were not. In them was a caress, as though she pitied his pity for her; but the old antagonism, too, was there--a defiance, a willingness to be cruel to him. “I did play fair, you see,” she went on. “I wouldn’t have you come till there was no danger, for you, any more. And now this is the end of it all, you think. You will soon be able to say of me, Gavan,

“her words to Scorn
Are scattered, and her mouth is stopt with Dust!”

His hand shut involuntarily, painfully, on hers, and as though his breath cut him, he said, “Don’t--don’t, Eppie.”

But with her gaiety she insisted: “Oh, but let us have the truth. You must think it. What else could you think?” and, again with the note of pity that would atone for the cruel lightness, “Poor Gavan! My poor, darling Gavan! And I must leave you with your thoughts--your empty thoughts, alone.”

He had taken a long breath over the physical pang her words had inflicted, and now he looked down at her hand, gently, one after the other, as though unseeingly, smoothing her fingers.

“While I go on,” she said.

“Yes, dear,” he assented.

“You humor me with that. You are so glad, for me, that I go with all my illusions about me. Aren’t you afraid that, because of them, I’ll be caught in the mill again and ground round and round in incarnations until, only after such a long time, I come out all clean and white and selfless, not a scrap of dangerous life about me--Alone with the Alone.”

He felt now the fever in her clearness, the hovering on the border of hallucination. The colors flamed indeed, and her thoughts seemed to shoot up in strange flickerings, a medley of inconsequent memories and fancies strung on their chain of unnatural lucidity.

He answered with patient gentleness, “I’m not afraid for you, Eppie. I don’t think all that.”

“Nor I for myself,” she retorted. “I love the mill and its grindings. But what you think,--I know perfectly what you think. You can’t keep it from me, Gavan. You can’t keep anything from me. And I found something that said it all. I can remember it. Shall I say it to you?”

He bowed his head, smoothing her hand, not looking up at her while, in that voice of defiance, of fever, yet of such melancholy and echoing sweetness, she repeated:

“Ne suis-je pas un faux accord
Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord?

“Elle est dans ma voix, la criarde!
C’est tout mon sang, ce poison noir!
Je suis le sinistre miroir
Où la mégère se regarde!

“Je suis la plaie et le couteau!
Je suis le soufflet et la joue!
Je suis les membres et la roue,
Et le victime et le bourreau!”

She paused after it, smiling intently upon him, and he met the smile to say:

“That’s only one side of it, dear.”

“Ah, it’s a side I know about, too! Didn’t I see it, feel it? Haven’t I been all through it--with you, for you, because of you? Ah, when you left me--when you left me, Gavan--“

Still she smiled, with brilliant eyes, repeating,

“Qui me secoue et qui me mord.”

He was silent, sitting with his pallid, drooping head; and suddenly she put her other hand on his, on the hand that gently, mechanically, smoothed her fingers.

“You caress me, you try to comfort me,--while I am tormenting you. It’s strange that I should want to torment you. Is it that I’m so afraid you sha’n’t feel? I want you to feel. I want you to suffer. It is so horrible to leave you. It is so horrible to be afraid--sometimes afraid--that I shall never, never see you again. When you feel, when you suffer, I am not so lonely. But you feel nothing, do you?”

He did not answer her.

“Will you ever miss me, Gavan?”

He did not answer.

“Won’t you even remember me?” she asked.

And still he did not answer, sitting with downcast eyes. And she saw that he could not, and in his silence, of a dumb torture, was his reply. He looked the stricken saint, pierced through with arrows. And which of them was the victim, which the executioner?

With her question a clearness, quieter, deeper, came to her, as though in the recoil of its engulfing anguish she pushed her way from among vibrating discords to a sudden harmony that, in holy peace, resolved them all in unison. Her eyelids fluttered down while, for an instant, she listened. Yes, under it all, above it all, holding them all about, there it was. She seemed to see the pain mounting, circling, flowing from its knotted root into strength and splendor. But though he was with her in it he was also far away,--he was blind, and deaf,--held fast by cruel bonds.

“Look at me,” she commanded him gently.

And now, reluctantly, he looked up into her eyes.

They held him, they drew him, they flooded him. With the keenness of life they cut into his heart, and like the surging up of blood his love answered hers. As helpless as he had ever been before her, he laid his head on her breast, his arms encircling her, while, with closed eyes, he said: “Don’t think that I don’t feel. Don’t think that I don’t suffer. It’s only that;--I have only to see you;--something grasps me, and tortures me--“

“Something,” she said, her voice like the far flute echo of the voice that had spoken on that night in the old Scotch garden, “that brings you to life--to God.”

“Oh, Eppie, what can I say to you?” he murmured.

“You can say nothing. But you will have to wake. It will have to come,--the sorrow, the joy of reality,--God--and me.”

It was his face, with closed eyes, with its stricken, ashen agony, that seemed the dying face. Hers, turned gently toward him, had all the beneficence, the radiance of life. But when she spoke again there was in her voice a tranced stillness as though already it spoke from another world.

“You love me, Gavan.”

“I love you. You have that. That is yours, forever. I long for you, always, always,--even when I think that I am at peace. You are in everything: I hear a bird, and I think of your voice; I see a flower, or the sky, and it’s of your face I think. I am yours, Eppie--yours forever.”

“You make me happy,” she said.

“Eppie, my darling Eppie, die now, die in my arms, dearest--in your happiness.”

“No, not yet; I can’t go yet--though I wish it, too,” she said. “There are still horrid bits--dreadful dark places--like the dreadful poem--the poem of you, Gavan--where I lose myself; burning places, edges of pain, where I fight to find myself again; long, dim places where I dream--dream--. I won’t have you see me like that; you might think that you watched the scattering of the real me. I won’t have you remember me all dim and broken.”

Her voice was sinking from her into an abyss of languor, and she felt the swirl of phantom thoughts blurring her mind even while she spoke.

As on that far-away night when he held her hand and they stood together under the stars, she said, speaking now her prayer, “O God! God!”; and seeming in the effort of her will to lift a weight that softly, inexorably, like the lid of a tomb, pressed down upon her, “I am here,” she said. “You are mine. I will not be afraid. Remember me. So good-by, Gavan.”

“I will remember,” he said.

His arms still held her. And through his mind an army seemed to rush, galloping, with banners, with cries of lamentations, agony, regret, passionate rebellion. It crashed in conflict, blood beneath it, and above it tempests and torn banners. And the banners were desperate hopes riddled with bullets; and the blood was love poured out and the tempest was his heart. It was, he thought, even while he saw, listened, felt, the last onslaught upon his soul. She was going--the shadow of life was sliding from her--and from him, for she was life and its terror and beauty. Above the turmoil was the fated peace. He had won it, unwillingly. He could not be kept from it even by the memory that would stay.

But though he knew, and, in knowing, saw his contemplative soul far from this scene of suffocating misery, Eppie, his dear, his beautiful, was in his arms, her eyes, her lips, her heart. He would never see her again.

He raised his head to look his last, and, like a faint yet piercing perfume, her soul’s smile still dwelt on him as she lay there speechless. For the moment--and was not the moment eternity?--the triumph was all hers. The moment, when long, long past, would still be part of him and her triumph in it eternal. To spare her the sight of his anguish would be to rob her. Anguish had been and was the only offering he could make her. He felt--felt unendurably, she would see that; he suffered, he loved her, unspeakably; she had that, too, while, in their last long silence, he held her hands against his heart. And her eyes, still smiling on him with their transcendent faith, showed that her triumph was shadowless.

* * * * *

He heard next day that she had died during the night.

Peace did not come to him for long; the wounds of the warring interlude of life had been too deep. He forgot himself at last in the treadmill quiet of days all serene laboriousness, knowing that it could not be for many years that he should watch the drama. She had shattered herself on him; but he, too, had felt that in himself something had broken. And he forgot the wounds, except when some sight or sound, the song of a bird in Spring, a spray of heather, a sky of stars, startled them to deep throbbing. And then a hand, stretched out from the past, would seize him, a shudder, a pang, would shake him, and he would know that he was alone and that he remembered.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Shadow of Life, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick