Chapter VIII: Part III: I (1)

The moor was like an amethyst under a radiant August sky, and the air, with its harmony of wind and sunlight, was like music.

Eppie walked beside him and Peter trotted before. The forms were changed, but it might almost have been little Eppie, the boy Gavan, and Robbie himself who went together through the heather. The form was changed, but the sense of saneness so strong that it would have seemed perfectly natural to pass an arm about a child Eppie’s neck and to talk of the morning’s reading in the Odyssey.

Never had the feeling of reality been so vague or the dream sense been so beautiful. His instinctive choice of this peace, instead of the other, had been altogether justified. It was all like a delightful game they had agreed to play, and the only rule of the game was to take each other’s illusions for granted and, in so doing, to put them altogether aside.

It was as if they went in a dream that tallied while, outside their dream, the sad life of waking slept. It was all limpid, all effortless, all clear sunlight and clear wind: limpid, like a happy dream, yet deliciously muddled too, as a happy dream is often muddled, with its mazed consciousness that, since it is a dream, ordinary impossibilities may become quite possible, that one only has to direct a little the turnings of the fairy-tale to have them lead one where one will, and yet that to all strange happenings there hovers a background of contradiction that makes them the more of an enchanted perplexity.

In the old white house the general and Miss Barbara would soon be expecting them back to tea, both older, both vaguer, both, to Gavan’s appreciation, more and more the tapestried figures, the background to the young life that still moved, felt, thought in the foreground until it, too, should sink and fade into a tapestry for other dramas, other fairy-tales.

The general retold his favorite anecdotes with shorter intervals between the tellings; cared more openly, with an innocent greediness, about the exactitudes of his diet; was content to sit idly with an unremembering, indifferent benignancy of gaze. All the sturdier significances of life were fast slipping from him, all the old martial activities; it was like seeing the undressing of a child, the laying aside of the toy trumpet and the soldier’s kilt preparatory to bed. Miss Barbara was sweeter than ever--a sweetness even less touched with variations than last year. And she was sillier, poor old darling; her laugh had in it at moments the tinkling, feeble foolishness of age.

Gavan saw it all imperturbably--how, in boyhood, the apprehension of it would have cut into him!--and it all seemed really very good--as the furniture to a fairy-tale; the sweet, dim, silly tapestry was part of the peace. How Eppie saw it he didn’t know; he didn’t care; and she seemed willing not to care, either, about what he saw or thought. Eppie had for him in their fairy-tale all the unexacting loveliness of summer nature, healing, sunny, smiling. He had been really ill, he knew that now, and that the peace was in part the languor of convalescence, and, for the sake of his recovery, she seemed to have become a part of nature, to ask no questions and demand no dues.

To have her so near, so tender, so untroubling, was like holding in his hands a soft, contented wild bird. He could, he thought, have held it against his heart, and the heart would not have throbbed the faster.

There was nothing in her now of the young Valkyrie of mists and frosts, shaking spears and facing tragedy with stern eyes. She threatened nothing. She saw no tragedy. It was all again as if, in a bigger, more beautiful way, she gave him milk to drink from a silver cup. Together they drank, no potion, no enchanted, perilous potion, but, from the cup of innocent summer days, the long, sweet dream of an Eternal Now.

To-day, for the first time, the hint of a cloud had crept into the sky.

“And to-morrow, Eppie, ends our tête-à-tête,” he said. “Or will Grainger make as little of a third as the general and Miss Barbara?”

“He sha’n’t spoil things, if that’s what you mean,” said Eppie.

She wore a white dress and a white hat wreathed with green; the emerald drops trembled in the shadow of her hair. She made him think of some wandering princess in an Irish legend, with the white and green and the tranquil shining of her eyes.

“Not our things, perhaps; but can’t he interfere with them? He will want to talk with you about all the things we go on so happily without talking of.”

“I’ll talk to him and go on happily with you.”

It was almost on his lips to ask her if she could marry Grainger and still go on happily, like this, with him, Gavan. That it should have seemed possible to ask it showed how far into fairy-land they had wandered; but it was one of the turnings that one didn’t choose to take; one was warned in one’s sleep of lurking dangers on that road. It might lead one straight out of fairy-land, straight into uncomfortable waking.

“How happily we do go on, Eppie,” was what he did choose to say. “More happily than ever before. What a contrast this--to East London.”

She glanced at him. “And to Surrey.”

“And to Surrey,” he accepted.

“Surrey was worse than East London,” she said.

“I didn’t know how much of a strain it had been until I got away from it.”

“One saw it all in your face.”

“‘One’ meaning a clever Eppie, I suppose. But, yes, I had a bad moment there.”

The memory of that heave of sod had no place in fairy-land, even less place than the forecast of an Eppie married to Jim Grainger, and he didn’t let his thought dwell on it even when he owned to the bad moment, and he was thinking, really with amusement over her unconsciousness, of the two means of escape from it that he had found to his hand,--the pistol and her letter,--when she took up his words with a quiet, “Yes, I knew you had.”

“Knew that I had had a strain, you mean?”

“No, had a bad moment,” she answered.

“You saw it in my face?”

“No. I knew. Before I saw you.”

He smiled at her. “You have a clairvoyant streak in your Scotch blood?”

She smiled back. “Probably. I knew, you see.”

Her assurance, with its calm over what it knew, really puzzled him.

“Well, what did you know?”

She had kept on quietly smiling while she looked at him, and, though she now became grave, it was not as if for pain but for thankfulness. “It was in the evening, the day after I wrote to you, the day your father was buried. I went to my room to dress for dinner, my room next yours, you know. And I was looking out,--at the pine-tree, the summer-house where we played, and, in especial, I remember, at the white roses that I could smell in the evening so distinctly,--when I knew, or saw, I don’t know which, that you were in great suffering. It was most of all as if I were in you, feeling it myself, rather than seeing or knowing. Then,” her voice went on in its unshaken quiet, “I did seem to see--a grave; not your father’s grave. You were seeing it, too,--a green grave. And then I came back into myself and knew. You were in some way,--going. I stood there and looked at the roses and seemed only to wait intensely, to watch intensely. And after that came a great calm, and I knew that you were not going.”

She quietly looked at him again,--her eyes had not been on him while she spoke,--and, though he had paled a little, he looked as quietly back.

He found himself accepting, almost as a matter of course, this deep, subconscious bond between them.

But in another moment, another realization came. He took her hand and raised it to his lips.

“I always make you suffer.”

“No,” she answered, though she, now, was a little pale, “I didn’t suffer. I was beyond, above all that. Whatever happened, we were really safe. That was another thing I knew.”

He relinquished the kissed hand. “Dear Eppie, dear, dear Eppie, I am glad that this happened.”

It had been, perhaps, to keep the dream safely around them that she had shown him only the calm; for now she asked, and he felt the echo of that suffering--that shared suffering--in it, “You had, then, chosen to go?”

Somehow he knew that they were safe in the littler sense, that she would keep the dream unawakened, even if they spoke of the outside life. “Yes,” he said, “you saw what was happening to me, Eppie. I had chosen to go. But your letter came, and, instead, I chose to come to you.”

She asked no further question, walking beside him with all her tranquillity.

But, to her, it was not in a second childhood, not in a fairy-tale, that they went. She was tranquil, for him; a child, for him; healing, unexacting nature, for him. But she knew she had not needed his admission to know it, that it was life and death that went together.

Sometimes, as they walked, the whole glory of the day melted into a phantasmagoria, unreal, specious, beside the intense reality of their unspoken thoughts, his thoughts and hers; those thoughts that left them only this little strip of fairy-land where they could meet in peace. Thoughts only, not dislikes, not indifferences, sundered them. Their natures, through all nature’s gamut, chimed; they looked upon each other--when in fairy-land--with eyes of love. But above this accord was a region where her human breath froze in an icy airlessness, where her human flesh shattered itself against ghastly precipices. To see those thoughts of Gavan’s was like having the lunar landscape suddenly glare at one through a telescope. His thoughts and hers were as real as life and death; they alone were real; only--and this was why, under its burden, Eppie’s heart throbbed more deeply, more strongly,--only, life conquered death. No, more still,--for so the strange evening vision had borne its speechless, sightless witness,--life had already conquered death. She had not needed him to tell her that, either.

And these days were life; not the dream he thought them, not the fairy-tale, but balmy dawn stealing in, fresh, revivifying, upon his long, arctic night; the flush of spring over the lunar landscape. So she saw it with her eyes of faith.

The mother was strong in her. She could bide her time. She could see death near him and, so that he should not see her fear, smile at him. She could play games with him, and wait.

II

Jim Grainger arrived that evening, and Gavan was able to observe, at the closest sort of quarters, his quondam rival.

His condition was so obvious that its very indifference to observation took everybody into its confidence. Nobody counted with Mr. Grainger except his cousin, and since he held open before her eyes--with angry constancy, gloomy patience--the page of his devotion, the rest of the company were almost forced to read with her. One couldn’t see Mr. Grainger without seeing that page.

He held it open, but the period of construing had evidently passed. All that there was to understand she understood long since, so that he was, for the most part, silent.

In Eppie’s presence he would wander aimlessly about, look with an oddly irate, unseeing eye at books or pictures, and fling himself into deep chairs, where he sat, his arms folded in a sort of clutch, his head bent forward, gazing at her with an air of dogged, somber resolve.

He was not by nature so taciturn. It was amusing to see the vehemence of reaction that would overtake him in the smoking-room, where his volubility became almost as overbearing and oppressive as his silences.

He was a man at once impatient and self-controlled. His face was all made up of short, resolute lines. His nose, chopped off at the tip; his lips, curled yet compressed; the energetic modeling of his brows with their muscular protuberances; the clefted chin; the crest of chestnut hair,--all expressed a wilful abruptness, an arrested force, the more vehement for its repression.

And at present his appearance accurately expressed him as a determined but exasperated lover.

“Of course,” Miss Barbara said, in whispered confidence to Gavan, mingled pity and reprobation in her voice, “as her cousin he comes when he wishes to do so. But she has refused him twice already--he told me so himself; and, simply, he will not accept it. He only spoke of it once, and it was quite distressing. It really grieved me to hear him. He said that he would hang on till one or the other of them was dead.” Grainger’s words in Miss Barbara’s voice were the more pathetic for their incongruity.

“And you don’t think she will have him,--if he does hang on?” Gavan asked.

Miss Barbara glanced at him with a soft, scared look, as though his easy, colloquial question had turned a tawdry light on some tender, twilight dreaming of her own.

He had wondered, anew of late, what Miss Barbara did think about him and Eppie, and what she had thought he now saw in her eyes, that showed their little shock, as at some rather graceless piece of pretence. He was quite willing that she should think him pretending, and quite willing that she should place him in Grainger’s hopeless category, if future events would be most easily so interpreted for her; so that he remained silent, as if over his relief, when she assured him, “Oh, I am sure not. Eppie does not change her mind.”

Grainger’s presence, for all its ineffectuality, thus witnessed to by Miss Barbara, was as menacing to peace and sunshine as a huge thunder-cloud that suddenly heaves itself up from the horizon and hangs over a darkened landscape. But Eppie ignored the thunder-cloud; and, hanging over fairy-land, it became as merely decorative as an enchanted giant tethered at a safe distance and almost amusing in his huge helplessness.

Eppie continued to give most of her time to Gavan, coloring her manner with something of a hospital nurse’s air of devotion to an obvious duty, and leaving Grainger largely to the general’s care while she and Gavan sat reading for hours in the shade of the birch-woods.

Grainger often came upon them so; Eppie in her white dress, her hat cast aside, a book open upon her knees, and Gavan, in his white flannels, lying beside her, frail and emaciated, not looking at her,--Grainger seldom saw him look at her,--but down at the heather that he softly pulled and wrenched at. They were as beautiful, seen thus together, as any fairy-tale couple; flakes of gold wavering over their whiteness, the golden day all about their illumined shade, and rivulets from the sea of purple that surrounded them running in among the birches, making purple pools and eddies.

Very beautiful, very strange, very pathetic, with all their serenity; even the unimaginative Grainger so felt them when, emerging from the gold and purple, he would pause before them, swinging his stick and eying them oddly, like people in a fairy-tale upon whom some strange enchantment rested. One might imagine--but Grainger’s imagination never took him so far--that they would always sit there among the birches, spellbound in their peace, their smiling, magic peace.

“Come and listen to Faust, Jim. We are polishing up our German,” Eppie would cheerfully suggest; but Grainger, remarking that he had none to polish, would pass on, carrying the memory of Gavan’s impassive, upward glance at him and the meaning in Eppie’s eyes--eyes in which, yes, he was sure of it, and it was there he felt the pathos, some consciousness seemed at once to hide from and to challenge him.

“Is he ill, your young Palairet?” he asked her one day, when they were alone together in the library. His rare references to his own emotions made the old, cousinly intimacy a frequent meeting-ground.

He noticed that a faint color drifted into Eppie’s cheek when he named Gavan.

“He is as old as you are, Jim,” she remarked.

“He looks like a person to be taken care of, all the same.”

“He has been ill. He took care of some one else, as it happens. He nursed his father for months.”

“Um,” Grainger gave an inarticulate grunt, “just about what he’s fit for, isn’t it? to help dying people out of the world.”

Eppie received this in silence, and he went on: “He looks rather like a priest, or a poet--something decorative and useless.”

“Would you call Buddha decorative and useless?”

“After all, Palairet isn’t a Hindoo. One expects something more normal from a white man.”

His odd penetration was hurting her, but she laughed at his complacent Anglo-Saxondom. “If you want a white man, what do you make of the one who wrote the Imitation?”

“Make of him? Nothing. Nor any one else, I fancy. What does your young Palairet do?” Grainger brought the subject firmly back from her digression.

Eppie was sitting in the window-seat, and, leaning her head back, framed in an arabesque of creepers, she now owned, after a little pause, and as if with a weariness of evasion she was willing to let him see as she did: “Nothing, really.”

“Does he care about anything?” Grainger placed himself opposite her, folding his arms with an air of determined inquiry.

And again Eppie owned, “He believes in nothing, so how can he care?”

“Believes in nothing? What do you mean by that?”

“Well,” with a real sense of amusement over the inner icy weight, she was ready to put it in its crudest, most inclusive terms, “he doesn’t believe in immortality.”

Grainger stared, taken aback by the ingenuous avowal.

“Immortality? No more do I,” he retorted.

“Oh, yes, you do,” said Eppie, looking not at him but out at the summer sky. “You believe in life and so you do believe in immortality, even though you don’t know that you do. You are, like most energetic people, too much preoccupied with living to know what your life means, that’s all.”

“My dear child,”--Grainger was fond of this form of appellation, an outlet for the pent-up forces of his baffled tenderness,--“any one who is alive finds life worth while without a Paradise to complete it, and any one who isn’t a coward doesn’t turn from it because it’s also unhappy.”

“If you think that Gavan does that you mistake the very essence of his skepticism, or, if you like to call it so, of his faith. It’s not because he finds it unhappy that he turns from it, but because he finds it meaningless.”

“Meaningless?--a place where one can work, achieve, love, suffer?”

Grainger jerked out the words from an underlying growl of protest.

Eppie now looked from the sky to him, her unconscious ally. “Dear old Jim, I like to hear you. You’ve got it, all. Every word you say implies immortality. It’s all a question of being conscious of one’s real needs and then of trusting them.”

“Life, here, now, could satisfy my needs,” he said.

She kept her eyes on his, at this, for a grave moment, letting it have its full stress as she took it up with, “Could it? With death at the end of it?” and without waiting for his answer she passed from the personal moment. “You said that life was worth while, and you meant, I suppose, that it was worth while because we were capable of making it good rather than evil.”

“Well, of course,” said Grainger.

“And a real choice between good and evil is only possible to a real identity, you’ll own?”

“If you are going to talk metaphysics I’ll cut and run, I warn you. Socratic methods of tripping one up always infuriate me.”

“I’m only trying to talk common-sense.”

“Well, go on. I agree to what you say of a real identity. We’ve that, of course.”

“Well, then, can an identity destroyed at death by the destruction of the body be called real? It can’t, Jim. It’s either only a result of the body, a merely materialistic phenomenon, or else it is a transient, unreal aspect of some supremely real World-Self and its good and its evil just as fated by that Self’s way of thinking it as the color of its hair and eyes is fated by nature. And if that were so the sense of freedom, of identity, that gives us our only sanction for goodness, truth, and worth, would be a mere illusion.”

Her earnestness, as she worked it out for him, held his eyes more than her words his thoughts. He was observing her with such a softening of expression as rarely showed itself on his virile countenance.

“You’ve thought it all out, haven’t you?” he said.

“I’ve tried to. Knowing Gavan has made me. It has converted me,” she smiled.

“So that’s your conversion.”

“Oh, more than that. I know that I’m _in_ life; _for_ it, and that’s more than all such reasoning.”

“And you believe that you’ll go on forever as you are now,” he said. His eyes dwelt on her: “Young and beautiful.”

“_Forever_; what queer words we must use to try to express it. We are in Forever now. It’s just that one casts in one’s lot, open-eyed, with life.”

“And has Palairet cast in his with death?”

Again the change of color was in her cheek, but it was to pallor now.

“He thinks so.”

“And he doesn’t frighten you?”

She armed herself to smile over Gavan’s old question. “Why should he?”

Grainger left her for some moments of aimless, silent wandering. He came back and paused again before her. He did not answer her.

“I throw in my lot with life, too, Eppie,” he said, “and I ask no more of it than the here and the now of our human affair. But that I do ask with all my might, and if might can give it to me, I’ll get it.”

She looked up at him gravely, without challenge, with a sympathy too deep for pity.

“At all events,” he added slowly, “at all events, in so far, our lots are cast together.”

“Yes,” she assented.

His eyes studied hers; his keen mind questioned itself: Could a woman look so steadily, with such a clear, untroubled sympathy, upon such a love as his, were there no great emotion within her, controlling her, absorbing her, making her indifferent to all lesser appeals? Had this negative, this aimless, this ambiguous man, captured, without any fight for it, her strong, her reckless heart? So he questioned, while Eppie still answered his gaze with eyes that showed him nothing but their grave, deep friendship.

“So it’s a contest between life and death?” he said at last.

“Between me and Gavan you mean?”

The shield of their personal question had dropped from her again, and the quick flush was in her cheek.

“Oh, I come into it, too,” he ventured.

“You don’t, in any way, depend on it, Jim.”

“So you say.” His eyes still mercilessly perused her. “That remains to be seen. If you lose, perhaps I shall come into it.”

Eppie found no answer.

III

It was night, and Eppie, Gavan, and Jim Grainger were on the lawn before the house waiting for a display of fireworks.

Grainger was feeling sore for his own shutting-out from the happy child-world of games and confidences that the other two inhabited, for it had been to Gavan that she had spoken of her love for fireworks and he who had at once sent for them.

Grainger was sore and his heart heavy, and not only it seemed to him, on his own account. Since the encounter in the library there had been a veil between him and Eppie, and through it he seemed to see her face as waiting the oncoming of some unknown fate. Grainger could not feel that fate, whatever the form it took, as a happy one.

She stood between them now, in her white dress, wrapped around with a long, white Chinese shawl, and the light from the open window behind them fell upon her hair, her neck, her shoulders, and the shawl’s soft, thick embroideries that were like frozen milk.

Gavan and Grainger leaned against the deep creepers of the old walls, Gavan’s cigarette a steady little point of light, the glow of Grainger’s pipe, as he puffed, coming and going in sharp pulses of color.

Aunt Barbara sat within at the open window, and beyond the gates, at the edge of the moor, the general and the gardener, dark figures fitfully revealed by the light of lanterns, superintended the preparations.

The moment was like that in which one watches a poised orchestra, in which one waits, tense and expectant, for the fall of the conductor’s bâton and for the first, sweeping note.

It seemed to break upon the stillness, sound made visible, when the herald rocket soared up from the dark earth, up to the sky of stars.

Bizarre, exquisite, glorious, it caught one’s breath with the swiftness, the strength, the shining, of its long, exultant flight; its languor of attainment; its curve and droop; the soft shock of its blossoming into an unearthly metamorphosis of splendor far and high on the zenith.

The note was struck and after it the symphony followed.

Like a ravished Ganymede, the sense of sight soared amazed among dazzling ecstasies of light and movement.

Thin ribbons of fire streaked the sky; radiant sheaves showered drops of multitudinous gold; fierce constellations of color whirled themselves to stillness on the night’s solemn permanence; a rain of stars drifted wonderfully, with the softness of falling snow, down gulfs of space. And then again the rockets, strong, suave, swift, and their blossoming lassitude.

Eppie gazed, silent and motionless, her uplifted profile like a child’s in its astonished joy. Once or twice she looked round at Gavan and at Grainger,--always first at Gavan,--smiling, and speechless with delight. Her folded arms had dropped to her sides and the shawl fell straightly from her shoulders. She made one think of some young knight, transfixed before a heavenly vision, a benediction of revealed beauty. The trivial occasion lent itself to splendid analogies. The strange light from above bathed her from head to foot in soft, intermittent, heavenly color.

Suddenly, in darkness, Grainger seized her hand. She had hardly felt the pressure, short, sharp with all the exasperation of his worship, before it was gone.

She did not turn to look at him. More than the unjustifiableness of the action, its unexpectedness, she felt a pain, a perplexity, as for something mocking, incongruous. And as if in instinctive seeking she turned her eyes on Gavan and found that he was looking at her.

Was it, then, her eyes, seeking and perplexed, that compelled him; was it his own enfranchised impulse; was it only a continuation of fairy-land fitness, the child instinct of sharing in a unison of touch a mutual wonder? In the fringes of her shawl his hand sought and found her hand. Another rose of joy had expanded on the sky; and they stood so, hand in hand, looking up.

Eppie looked up steadily; but now the outer vision was but a dim symbol, a reflection, vaguely seen, of the inner vision that, in a miracle of accomplished growth, broke upon her. She did not think or know. Her heart seemed to dilate, to breathe itself away in long throbs, that worshiped, that trembled, that prayed. Her strength was turned to weakness and her weakness rose to strength, and, as she looked up at the sky, the stars, the dream-like constellations that bloomed and drifted away, universes made and unmade on the void, her mind, her heart, her spirit were all one prayer and its strength and its humility were one.

She had known that she loved him, but not till now that she loved him with a depth that passed beyond knowledge; she had known that he loved her, but not till now had she felt that all that lived in him was hers forever. His voice, his eyes, might hide, might deny, but the seeking, instinctive hand confessed, dumbly, to all.

She had drawn him to her by her will; she had held him back from death by her love. His beloved hand clasped hers; she would never let him go.

Looking up at the night, the stars, holding his hand, she gave herself to the new life, to all that it might mean of woe and tragedy. Let it lead her where it would, she was beside him forever.

Yet, though her spirit held the sky, the stars, her heart, suffocated and appalled with love, seemed to lie at his feet, and the inarticulate prayer, running through all, said only, over and over, “O God, God.”

Meanwhile Grainger leaned against the wall, puffing doggedly at his pipe, unrepentant and unsatisfied.

“There, that is the end,” Miss Barbara sighed. “How very, very pretty. But they have made me quite sleepy.”

A few fumes still smoldered at the edge of the moor, and the night, like an obscure ocean, was engulfing the lights, the movements; after the radiance the darkness was thick, oppressive.

Eppie knew, as Gavan released her hand, that his eyes again sought hers, but she would not look at him. What could they say, here and now?

He went on into the house, and Grainger, lingering outside, detained her on the steps. “You forgive me?” he said.

She had almost forgotten for what, but fixing her eyes and thoughts upon him, she said, “Yes, Jim, of course.”

“I couldn’t stand it,--you were so lovely,” said Grainger; “I didn’t know that I was such a sentimental brute. But I had no business not to stand it. It’s my business in life to stand it.”

“I am so sorry, Jim,” Eppie murmured. “You know, I can do nothing--except forgive you.”

“I am not ungrateful. I know how good it is of you to put up with me. Do I bother you too much, Eppie?”

“No, Jim dear; you don’t.”

He stood aside for her to enter the house. He saw that, with all her effort to be kind, her thought passed from him. Pausing to knock the ashes of his pipe against the wall, he softly murmured, “Damn,” before following her into the house.

Eppie, in her own room, put out her candle and went to the window.

Leaning out, she could see the soft maze of tree-tops emerge from the dim abyss beneath. The boughs of the pine-tree made the starlit sky pale with their blackness.

This was the window where she and Gavan had stood on the morning of Robbie’s death. Here Gavan had shuddered, sobbing, in her arms. He had suffered, he had been able to love and suffer then.

The long past went before her, this purpose in it all, her purpose; in all the young, unconscious beginnings, in the reunion, in her growing consciousness of something to oppose, to conquer, to save. And to-night had consecrated her to that sacred trust. What lived in him was hers. But could she keep him in life? The memory, a dark shadow, of the deep indifference that she had seen in his contemplative eyes went with a chill over her.

Leaning out, she conquered her own deep fear, looking up at the stars and still praying, “O God, God.”

IV

She could not read his face next day. It showed a change, but the significance of the change was hidden from her. He knew that she knew; was that it? or did he think that they could still pretend at the unchanged fairy-tale where one clasped hands simply, like children? Or did he trust her to spare them both, now that she knew?

When they were alone, this, more than all, the pale, jaded face seemed to tell her, it would be able to hide nothing; but its strength was in evasion; he would not be alone with her.

All the morning he spent with the general and in the afternoon he went away, a book under his arm, down to the burn.

From the library window Eppie watched him go. She could see for a long time the flicker of his white figure among the distant birches.

She sat in a low chair in the deep embrasure of the window-seat, silent and motionless. She felt, after the night’s revelation, an apathy, mental and physical; a willing pause; a lull of the spirit, that rested in its accepted fate, should it be joyful or tragic. The very fact of such acceptance partook of both tragedy and joy.

Grainger was with her, walking, as usual, up and down the room, glancing at her as he passed and repassed.

He felt, all about him, within and without, the pressure of some crisis; and his ignorance, his intuitions, struggling within him, made a consciousness, oddly mingled, of sharp pain, deep dread, and, superficially, a suffocating irritation, continually rising and continually repressed.

Eppie’s aspect intensified the mingled consciousness. Her figure, in its thin dress of black and white, showed lassitude. With her head thrown back against the chair, her hands, long, white, inert, lying along the chair-arms, she looked out from the cool shadow of the room at the day, fierce in its blue and gold, its sunlight and its wind.

He had seen Gavan pass, so strangely alone; he had watched her watching of him. She was languid; but she was patient, she was strong. That was part of the suffocation, that such strength, such patience, should be devoted to ends so undeserving. More than by mere jealousy, though that seethed in him, he was oppressed by the bitter sense of waste, of the futile spending of noble capacity; for, more than all, she was piteous; there came the part of pain and dread, the presage of doom that weighed on his heart.

In her still figure, her steady look out at the empty, splendid vault of blue, the monotonous purple stretches of the moor, his unesthetic, accurate mind felt, with the sharp intuition that carried him so much further than any conscious appreciation, a symbol of the human soul contemplating the ominous enigma of its destiny. She made him dimly think of some old picture he had seen, a saint, courageous, calm, enraptured, in the luminous pause before a dark, accepted martyrdom. He did violence to the simile, shaking it off vehemently, with a clutch at the sane impatience of silly fancies.

Stopping abruptly before her, though hardly knowing for what end, he found himself saying, and the decisive words, as he heard, rather than thought them, had indeed the effect of shattering foolish visions, “I shall go to-day, Eppie.”

In seeing her startled, pained, expostulatory, he saw her again, very sanely, as an unfortunate woman bent on doing for herself and unable to hide her situation from his keen-sightedness. For really he didn’t know whether a hopeless love-affair or a hopeless marriage would the more completely “do” for her.

“My dear Jim, why to-day?” Eppie asked in a tone of kindest protest.

He was glad to have drawn her down to the solid ground of his own grievances. She hurt him less there.

“Why not to-day?” he retorted.

She replied that, if for no better reason, the weather was too lovely not to be enjoyed by them all together.

“Thanks, but I don’t care about the weather. Nor do I care,” Grainger went on, taking the sorry comfort that his own mere ill-temper afforded him, “to watch other people’s enjoyment--of more than weather. I’m not made of such selfless stuff as that.”

She understood, of course; perhaps she had all along understood what he was feeling more clearly than clumsy he had, and she met all that was beneath the mannerless words with her air of sad kindliness.

“You can share it, Jim.”

“No, I can’t share it. I share nothing--except the weather.”

She murmured, as she had the night before, that she was sorry, adding that she must have failed; but he interrupted her with: “It’s not that. You are all right. You give me all you can. It’s merely that you can’t give me anything I want. I came to see if there was any chance for me, and all I do see is that I may as well be off. I do myself no good by staying on,--harm, rather; you may begin to resent my sulkiness and my boorish relapses from even rudimentary good manners.”

“I have resented nothing, Jim. I can’t imagine ever resenting anything--from you.”

“Ah, that’s just the worst of it,” Grainger muttered.

“For your own sake,” Eppie went on, “you are perhaps wise to go. I own that I can’t see what happiness you can find in being with me, while you feel as you do.”

“While I feel as I do,” he repeated, not ironically, but as if weighing the words in a sort of wonder. “That ‘while’ is funny, Eppie. You are right. I don’t find happiness, and I came to seek it.” The “while” had cut deep. He paused, then added, eying her, “So I’ll go, and leave Palairet to find the happiness.”

Eppie was silent. Paler than before, her eyes dropped, she seemed to accept with a helpless magnanimity whatever he might choose to say. “You find me impertinent,”--Grainger, standing before her, clutched his arms across his chest and put his own thought of himself into the words,--“brutal.”

Without looking up at him she answered: “I am so fond of you, so near you, that I suppose I give you the right.”

The patient words, so unlike Eppie in their patience, the downcast eyes, were a torch to his exasperation.

“I can take it, then--the right?” he said. “I am near enough to say the truth and to ask it, Eppie?”

She rose and walked away from him.

With the sense of hot pursuit that sprang up in him he felt himself as ruthless as a boy, pushing through the thickets of reticence, through the very supplications of generosity, to the nest of her secret. It was not joy he sought, but his own pain, and to see it clearly, finally. He must see it. And when Eppie, her back to him, leaning her arm on the mantel and looking down into the empty cavern of the great chimney-place, answered, accepting all his implications, “Gavan hasn’t found any happiness,” he said, “He finds all that he asks for.”

It was as if he had wrenched away the last bough from the nest, and the words gave him, with their breathless determination, an ugly feeling of cruel, breaking malignity.

Eppie’s face was still turned from him so that he could not see how she bore the rifling, but in the same dulled and gentle voice she answered, “He doesn’t ask what you do.”

At that Grainger’s deepest resentment broke out.

“Doesn’t ask your love? No, I suppose not. The man’s a mollusk,--a wretched, diseased creature.”

He had struck at last a flash from her persistent gentleness. She faced him, and he saw that she tried to smile over deep anger.

“You say that because Gavan is not in love with me? It is a sick fancy that sees every man not in love with me as sick too.”

She had taken up a weapon at last, she really challenged him; and he felt, full on that quivering nerve of dread, that she defended at once herself and the man she loved from her own and from his unveiling.

It made a sort of rage rise in him.

“A man who cares for you,--a man who depends on you,--as he does,--a man whom you care for,--so much,--is a bloodless vampire if he doesn’t--respond.”

When he had driven the knife in like that, straight up to the hilt, he hardly knew whether his anger or his adoration were the greater; for, as if over a disabling wound, she bent her head in utter surrender, quite still for a moment, and then saying only, while she looked at him as if more sorry for him than for herself, “You hurt me, Jim.”

Tears of fury stood in his eyes. “You hurt, too. My love for you--a disease. _My_ love, Eppie!”

“Forgive me.”

“Forgive you! I worship everything you say or do!”

“It was that it hurt too much to see--what you did, with your eyes.”

“Then--then--you don’t deny it,--if I have eyes to see, he too must see--how much you care?”

“I don’t deny it.”

“And if I have courage enough to ask it, you have courage enough to answer me? You love him, Eppie?”

He had come to her, his eyes threatening her, beseeching her, adoring her, all at once. She saw it all--all that he felt, and the furious pity that was deeper than his own deep pain. She could resent nothing, deny nothing. As she had said, he was so near.

She put her hand on his shoulder, keeping him from her, yet accepting him as near, and then all that she found to say--but it was in a voice that brought a rapt pallor to his face--was, “Dear Jim.”

He understood her--all that she accepted, all that she avowed. Her hand was that of a comrade in misfortune. She forgave brutality from a heart as stricken as his. She forgave even his cruelly clear seeing of her own desperate case--a seeing that had revealed to her that it was indeed very desperate. But if she too was stricken, she too was resolute, and she could do no more for him than look with him at the truth. Their eyes recognized so many likenesses in each other.

He took the hand at last in both his own, looking down at it, pressing it hard.

“Poor darling,” he said.

“No, Jim.”

“Yes; even if he loves you.”

“Even if he doesn’t love me--and he does love me in a strange, unwilling way; but even if he doesn’t love me,--as you and I mean love,--I am not piteous.”

“Even if he loves you, you are piteous.” All his savagery had fallen from him. His quiet was like the slow dropping of tears.

“No, Jim. There is the joy of loving. You know that.”

“You are more piteous than I, Eppie. You, _you_, to sue to such a man. He is the negation of everything you mean. To live with him would be like fighting for breath. If you marry him,--if you bring him to it,--he’ll suffocate you.”

“No, Jim,” she repeated,--and now, looking up, he saw in those beloved eyes the deep wells of solemn joy,--“I am the stronger.”

“In fighting, yes, perhaps. Not in every-day, passive life. He’ll kill you.”

“Even if he kills me he’ll not conquer me.”

He shook away the transcendentalism with a gentle impatience, “Much good that would do to me, who would only know that you were gone. Oh, Eppie!--“

He pressed and let fall her hand.

The words of the crisis were over. Anything else would be only, as it were, the filling in of the grave.

He had walked away from her to the window, and said presently, while he looked out: “And I thought that you were ambitious. I loved you for it, too. I didn’t want a wife who would acquiesce in the common lot or make a virtue of incapacity. I wanted a woman who would rather fail, open-eyed, in a big venture than rest in security. You would have buckled the sword on a man and told him that he must conquer high places for you. You would have told him that he must crown you and make you shine in the world’s eyes, as well as in his own. And I could do it. You are so worthy of all the biggest opportunities and so unfit for little places. It’s so stupid, you know,” he finished, “that you aren’t in love with me.”

“It is stupid, I own it,” Eppie acquiesced.

He found a certain relief in following these bitterly comic aspects of their case and presently took it up again with: “I am so utterly the man for you and he is so utterly not the man. I don’t mean that I’m big enough or enough worth your while, but at least I could give you something, and I could fight for you. He won’t fight, for you, or for anything.”

“I shall have to do all the fighting if I get him.”

“You want him so that you don’t mind anything else. I see that.”

“Exactly. For a long time I didn’t know how I loved him just because I had always taken all that you are saying for granted, in the funniest, most naïvely conceited way; I took it for granted that I was a very big person and that the man I married must stand for big opportunities. Now, you see,” she finished, “he is my big opportunity.”

He was accepting it all now with no protest. “Next to no money, I suppose?” he questioned simply.

“Next to none, Jim.”

“It means obscurity, unless a man has ambition.”

“It means all the things I’ve always hated.” She smiled a little over these strange old hatreds.

Again a silence fell, and it was again Grainger who broke it.

“You may as well let me have the last drop of gall,” he said. “Own that if it hadn’t been for him you might have come to care for me.”

Still he did not look at her, and it was easier, so, to let him have the last gulp.

“I probably should.”

He meditated the mixed flavor for some moments; pure gall would have been easier to swallow. And he took refuge at last in school-boy phraseology. “I should like to break all the furniture in the room.”

“I should like to break some, too,” she rejoined, but she laughed out suddenly at this anticlimax, and, even before the unbroken heaviness of the gaze now turned on her, that comic aspect of their talk, the dearly, sanely comic, carried her laugh into a peal as boyish as his words.

Grainger still gazed at her. “I love that in you,” he said--“your laugh. You could laugh at death.”

“Ah, Jim,” she said, smiling on, though with the laughter tears had come to her eyes, “it’s a good deal more difficult to laugh at life, sometimes. And we both have to do a lot of living before we can laugh at death.”

“A lot of living,” he repeated. His stern, firm face had a queer grimace of pain at the prospect of it, and again she put out her hand to him.

“Let me count for as much as I can, always,” she said. “You will always count for so much with me.”

He had taken the hand, and he looked at her in a long silence that promised, accepted, everything.

But an appeal, a demand, wistful yet insistent, came into his silence as he looked--looked at the odd, pale, dear face, the tawny, russet hair, the dear, deep eyes.

“I’m going now,” he said, holding to his breast the hand she had given him. “And I will ask one thing of you--a thing I’ve never had and never shall, I suppose, again.”

“What is it, Jim?” But before his look she almost guessed and the guessing made her blanch.

“Let me take you in my arms and kiss you,” said Grainger.

“Ah, Jim!” Seeing herself as cruel, ungenerous, she yet, in a recoil of her whole nature, seemed to snatch from him a treasure, unclaimed, but no longer hers to give.

Grainger eyed her. “You could. You would--if it weren’t for him.”

“You understand that, too, Jim. I could and would.”

“He robs me of even that, then--your gift of courageous pity.”

His comprehension had arrested the recoil. And now the magnanimity she felt in him, the tragic force of the love he had seen barred from her forever, set free in her something greater than compassion and deeper than little loyalties, deeper than the lesser aspects of her own deep love. It was that love itself that seemed, with an expansion of power, to encircle all life, all need, all sorrow, and to find joy in sacrificing what was less to what was greater.

He saw the change that, in its illumined tenderness, shut away his craving heart yet drew him near for the benison that it could grant, and as she said to him, “No, Jim, he shall not rob you,” his arms went round her.

She shut her eyes to the pain there must be in enduring his passion of gratitude; but, though he held her close, kissing her cheeks, her brow, her hair, it was with a surprising, an exquisite tenderness.

The pain that came for her was when,--pausing to gaze long into her face, printing forever upon his mind the wonderful memory of what she could look like, for him--he kissed her lips; it came in a pang of personal longing; in a yearning, that rose and stifled her, for other arms, other kisses; and, opening her eyes, she saw, an ironic answer to the inner cry, Gavan’s face outside, turned upon her in an instant of swift passing.

Grainger had not seen. He did not speak another word to her. The kiss upon her lips had been in farewell. He had had his supreme moment. He let her go and left her.

V

Gavan came up from the burn, restless and dissatisfied.

He had wanted solitude, escape; but when he was alone, and walking beside the sun-dappled water, the loneliness weighed on him and he had seemed to himself walking with his own ghost, looking into eyes familiar yet alien, with curiosity and with fear. Was it he or that phantom of the solitude who smiled the long, still smile of mockery?

How he wanted something and how he wanted not to want; to be freed from the intolerable stirring and striving within him, as of a maimed thing, with half-atrophied wings, that could never rise and fly to its goal. It was last night that had wakened this turmoil, and as he walked his thought turned and turned about those moments under the dazzling sky when he had found her hand in the fringes of her shawl.

He knew that there had been a difference in the yielding of her hand, as he had known, in his own helpless stretching out for it in the darkness, another impulse than that of childlike tenderness. It had been as if some deep, primeval will beneath his own had stretched his hand out, searching in the dark; and with the strange blissfulness of so standing with her beneath the stars, there came a strange, new fear, as though he no longer knew himself and were become an automaton held by some incalculable force.

Wandering through the woods in the hope of reëntering nature’s beneficent impersonality, he felt no anodynes--only that striving and stirring within him of maimed limbs and helpless wings.

There was no refuge in nature, and there was none in himself. The thought of Eppie as refuge did not form itself, but it was again in seeking, as if through darkness for he knew not what, that he turned to the house. And then, on all his tangled mood, fell the vibrating shock of that vision at the window.

With his quick looking away he did not know whether Eppie had seen him see. He went on, knowing nothing definite, until, suddenly, as if some fierce beast had seized him, he found himself struggling, choking, torn by a hideous, elemental jealousy.

He stood still in the afternoon sunlight as he became aware of this phenomenon in himself, his hands involuntarily clenched, staring as if at a palpable enemy.

The savage, rudimentary man had sprung up in him. He hated Grainger. He longed to beat him into the earth, to crush the breath out of him; and for a moment, most horrible of all,--a moment that seemed to set fangs in his throat,--he could not tell whether he more hated Eppie or more desired to tear her from the rival, to seize her and bear her away, with a passion untouched by any glamour.

And Gavan was conscious, through it all, that only inhuman heights made possible such crumbling, crashing falls into savagedom; conscious that Grainger could not have known such thoughts. They were as ugly as those of a Saint Anthony. Wholesome manhood would recoil from their debasement. He, too, recoiled, but the debasement was within him, he could not flee from it. The moment of realization, helpless realization, was long. Ultra-civilization stood and watched barbarian hordes swarm over its devastated ruins. Then, with a feeling of horrible shame, a shame that was almost a nausea, he went on into the house.