Puslapio vaizdai
PDF
„ePub“

acting on an impulse that he would regret to-morrow, or on reason of which he was only doubtful for to-day. Impulse had urged him to hasten Helen's escape from Gideon; reason could only, so far, tell him that he had acted like a madman. On the other hand, it was an opposite impulse, very like a selfish one, that now warned him with the voice of Dr. Dale against folly; reason said loudly that had he acted otherwise he would have been thinking of prudence first and of Helen afterwards. "Look before you leap," and "Second thoughts are best," were not maxims that could commend themselves to one who felt that, with the heir of Copleston, Helen should come first, and all other things nowhere. Only, was it Helen whom he had been putting first, or a mere impulse of pity, chivalry, and indignation? Gideon Skull was Helen's husband, after all; and it is ill to come between the bark and the tree.

He had gathered a great deal of her story by now. He had scarcely gone beyond literal truth when he told her that she was not known to herself so well as she was to him. The very bitterness of her self-accusations, and her apparent eagerness to act in accordance with what she thought of herself, told him more of her than facts could tell him. Hers was not the honest cynicism of Gideon Skull, but a state of rebellion against all the conditions and circumstances of life, and the protest of a strong spirit against them. "That girl could love ten thousand times better than she thinks she can hate!" thought he, a hundred times. "And it is through me that Gideon

Skull has become part of her life. What can I do for her? Only look on with a stare of pity, and put my hands behind my back when she is holding out hers."

And how was she to live? It was he who had advised her to trust herself to the open sea of the world, without oars or sails; and how could he, being rich, let her struggle and starve? And yet, how could he help her with money without her knowledge? while, how, with her knowledge, could he contrive to help her at all? Could she only have painted, however badly, he could have spent Copleston in buying her daubs through other hands. But since she could do nothing, what was there for him to do?

If she were only free! She had become his one thought; and he would have found none of the coldness of duty in taking her whole life into his own. It seemed to him now that, when he had first seen her touching the silent keys of the organ in Hillswick Church, she had played herself into some deeper life of his than he had dreamed of owning until now. He remembered how, when she declared war upon him in the churchyard, he had thought

Her full power

how dear a friend such an enemy might be. of living was displayed to him in every word she spoke, in every breath she drew, in every look of her eyes. She could not lose a battle without making a point of losing as thoroughly as she would have won; she could not find fault with herself without rushing into a reckless extreme of self-scorn. That such a life should be spent in beating against the bars of a cage seemed to him to be nothing less. than horrible.

He thought of himself as little as any man can. But he also had his needs and his desires. For he was no longer satisfied with himself; he was drifting, and he could not drift with an easy mind. He was longing to grasp the rudder and to tug at the oars. If Helen were only free, he knew well enough what he would do. He would not rest until he could claim her as Victor Waldron who had won her as Walter Gray. Chivalry would serve him for the selfexcuse that interest and Copleston had been to Gideon Skull.

And was she not free? His whole heart drifted out into the sea of the Casuistries of our time. What sort of a marriage was that which had been on both sides, admittedly and without concealment, a gross bargain of purchase and sale? Is not love the essence of marriage? so that, without love, what marriage can there be? How can laws and forms affect souls? If he needed her as much as she surely needed him, were they to be slaves to the existence of a Gideon Skull? And so on and so on he travelled, through all the jargon of logic with which simple passion tries to justify its birth and its growth in its own eyes, until at least one thing, and one thing only, was clear to him-that he did not care for Helen, because "care" was all too weak a word. Against his will she had come into his life; but, being there, no will could thrust her out again. Nor,

in such cases, are men particularly apt to will.

Love-well, however it comes, it is all the same thing when it has come. Since the word has been written, let it be written, once for all. The idyllic road to it may be the best, but it is not the only road. Could Victor have dreamed out his first dream, and have made friends at Copleston with his far-off cousin Helen, and after a short and no more than pleasantly roughened love-course have married her in Hillswick Church-and all this might have been—it would all have been a pleasanter story: but the end would have been the same as this, when, her disguised enemy, he knew that he loved her whom it was not lawful for him to win. Love would have been born in pleasant fancies then, but it would have become passion: and neither more nor less than the same passion was it now that it

had been born, not in fancy, but in pity for a most unhappy woman, and in revolt against her wrongs. It is desperately hard to tell from the look of a blossom whether the flower was planted by good or evil hands. Some, indeed, hold that, whatever hands may have planted it, the flower is the same.

Helen had not been so deaf as she had seemed to the words "I care for you." She had never heard them before: and not even she, with all her desperate determination to disbelieve henceforth in all things and in all men, could fail to feel how much they meant-to her. That they were meant was as plain as that they were spoken. Do what she would, she could not feel alone. She knew nothing of this Walter Gray but that he had said "I care for you," and had meant his words. But that meant that she knew him enough-for in these words he had given her more than any human being had ever given her before. After all, he had been Alan's friend.

As a matter of course, he came to see after her next day, and to consult with her as to what she should do when her means were gone. He had called at the house on his way, and nothing had been heard of Gideon, who had now been absent many days.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Is there grave too low and lone
For the clouds to rain upon,
So that he who passeth by
Finds not e'en a Daisy's eye?

Him who lies there lovedst thou?
He will give thee flowers enow;
If no more than Daisies be,
They are white to comfort thee.
Who shall call a life that's sped
Vain, which speaketh being dead ?
Who shall say the grave's in vain
Where grow Daisies after rain?

MANY more days passed by, and still Gideon Skull did not return. Habits soon grow, and no day passed without Helen's seeing Victor. He was beginning to understand his heart at last, and she had nothing. to do but to look for his coming. She would not put his care for her into a conscious thought, but she knew it in her heart, and her refusal to look the fact in the face did not weaken its influence over

her. She felt by instinct that she must make herself deaf and blind to any hint of sweetness in her life, lest she should recover her waking senses and find it gone or turned to bitterness like all the rest of the things that life had given her. She feared nothing more for herself than this, because this alone was quite enough for her to fear. Nay, if she thought-so she felt-her half-known friend might turn out to be merely as selfish and as self-seeking as his fellows: and she clung to her last illusion, telling herself that it might be no more, but refusing to part with it while a thread of it might hold together.

At first Gideon's prolonged absence seemed natural enough, considering his character. His grand coups, as Victor knew even better than Helen, had often been preceded by a long course of swimming under water. Before coming to the surface he had always dived. After a while, however, it began to wear something of the character of a mystery. Could it be that he had meant to desert his wife, as well as to slip away from his strangely indifferent creditors? He must be conscious of her want of love for him; he could notso Victor fancied-have loved in any sense a woman whom he had won by deliberate treachery: she could only be a burden upon him in any new adventure. If he had deserted her, the last link that bound her to him had surely gone. What was left but a shadowso Victor argued-between her and any true marriage that might come to her? Surely life, peace, comfort, not impossible happiness, were never meant to be baulked because there was a Gideon Skull alive in some unknown part of the world! Reason itself had turned traitor, and had gone over to the other side.

Victor knew now that he neither merely pitied nor only sympathised with her any more, but that he simply loved her with all his heart, as surely as that he breathed. He desired her good above all things; but it was now in the way that makes us desire the good of another because hers, or his, is our own; and which, moreover, makes us but too often mistake what we fancy to be our own good for theirs. He still knew he was drifting; but the shoals ahead looked green and fair, and he no longer felt his own need to shape his own course with sail and oar. How could he leave her now, he asked, when she needed him, without being the most selfish of cowards? But he knew all the time that he would have found some equally good reason for not leaving her, even had she not needed him. Only, to this last piece of knowledge he blinded his eyes as much as she, to another piece, was blinding hers.

Love was surely not the less because it had come into his heart like the consciousness of thunder before the storm. One day he

came to her as usual, without any sort of word to say to her after he had taken her hand. Everything seemed to have been said that could be said, except the first and last word of all. Nor did she break the silence. She never had the heart to speak of small things, and even she was wearying of her own eternal "I" and "Me." Nothing was to be said of every-day matters that had not been already said a hundred times. And he felt as if, were he henceforth to call upon Helen every day for fifty years, his power of speech would grow less and less, unless some sudden moment were to strike from him the one word which alone he had to say to her. It was strange to him that all the self-consciousness should seem to be on his own side, and that silence did not seem any burden to her. He had come to her, as usual, without any plan of speech, and he could form none But something he must say. Silence itself began to feel too much like the speech which he had not planned.

now.

"I was thinking "-he said at last-meaning both much and nothing.

"Of what I ought to do?" asked she.

soon."

[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

"I must do something

"Yes and no I was thinking of that and of other things besides. One thinks of what can be; but one can't help thinking of what might have been, too."

"Of what might have been? No. There is no use in thinking of anything but what can be."

"We can make the two agree, though, sometimes . . . . if we are not afraid. It seems to me that nothing can ever be, unless we take our own lives into our own hands, and do not let ourselves be blown about by other people's lives, like straws by the wind. I was wondering, and I was thinking too."

"I have given up wondering long ago."

"I was wondering-for example-if Victor Waldron is not quite so black as he is painted: if you and he had met as other cousins meet, both free and both heart-whole-"

"I am wondering what would happen if the skies were to fall. I dare say, if he had wanted to marry me, I should have married him for the sake of Copleston, just as I married Gideon Skull"

"For the sake of self-sacrifice for others. Helen, never let me hear you speak of yourself like that again. And as for this Waldron-how do you know that you judge him rightly when you judge yourself so wrongly? How do you know that he may not be feeling Copleston a curse, since it came to him by another's wrong? I know how I should feel

"

« AnkstesnisTęsti »