by E. Nesbit
‘The other gain?’ I asked.
‘The other gain,’ she said slowly, ‘I gave my soul for. It is this. If you also will give up your hopes of heaven I can remain a woman, I can move in your world – I can be your wife. Oh, my dear, after all these years, at last – at last.’
‘If I sacrifice my soul,’ I said slowly, with no thought of the imbecility of such talk in our ‘so-called nineteenth century’ – ‘if I sacrifice my soul, I win you? Why, love, it’s a contradiction in terms. You are my soul.’
Her eyes looked straight into mine. Whatever might happen, whatever did happen, whatever may happen, our two souls in that moment met, and became one.
‘Then you choose – you deliberately choose – to give up your hopes of heaven for me, as I gave up mine for you?’
‘I decline,’ I said, ‘to give up my hope of heaven on any terms. Tell me what I must do, that you and I may make our heaven here – as now, my dear love.’
‘I will tell you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Be alone here tomorrow night – twelve is ghost’s time, isn’t it? – and then I will come out of the picture and never go back to it. I shall live with you, and die, and be buried, and there will be an end of me. But we shall live first, my heart’s heart.’
I laid my head on her knee. A strange drowsiness overcame me. Holding her hand against my cheek, I lost consciousness. When I awoke the grey November dawn was glimmering, ghost-like, through the uncurtained window. My head was pillowed on my arm which rested – I raised my head quickly – ah! not on my lady’s knee, but on the needle-worked cushion of the straight-backed chair. I sprang to my feet. I was stiff with cold, and dazed with dreams, but I turned my eyes on the picture. There she sat, my lady, my dear love. I held out my arms, but the passionate cry I would have uttered died on my lips. She had said twelve o’clock. Her lightest word was my law. So I only stood in front of the picture and gazed into those grey-green eyes till tears of passionate happiness filled my own.
‘Oh, my dear, my dear, how shall I pass the hours till I hold you again?’
No thought, then, of my whole life’s completion and consummation being a dream.
I staggered up to my room, fell across my bed, and slept heavily and dreamlessly. When I awoke it was high noon. Mildred and her mother were coming to lunch.
I remembered, at one shock, Mildred’s coming and her existence.
Now, indeed, the dream began.
With a penetrating sense of the futility of any action apart from her, I gave the necessary orders for the reception of my guests. When Mildred and her mother came I received them with cordiality; but my genial phrases all seemed to be someone else’s. My voice sounded like an echo; my heart was other where.
Still, the situation was not intolerable until the hour when afternoon tea was served in the drawing-room. Mildred and her mother kept the conversational pot boiling with a profusion of genteel commonplaces, and I bore it, as one can bear mild purgatories when one is in sight of heaven. I looked up at my sweetheart in the ebony frame, and I felt that anything that might happen, any irresponsible imbecility, and bathos of boredom, was nothing, if, after it all, she came to me again.
And yet, when Mildred, too, looked at the portrait, and said, ‘What a fine lady! One of your flames, Mr Devigne?’ I had a sickening sense of impotent irration, which became absolute torture when Mildred – how could I ever have admired that chocolate-box barmaid style of prettiness? – threw herself into the high-backed chair, covering the needlework with her ridiculous flounces, and added, ‘Silence gives consent! Who is it, Mr Devigne? Tell us all about her: I am sure she has a story.’
Poor little Mildred, sitting there smiling, serene in her confidence that her every word charmed me – sitting there with her rather pinched waist, her rather tight boots, her rather vulgar voice – sitting in the chair where my dear lady had sat when she told me her story! I could not bear it.
‘Don’t sit there,’ I said; ‘it’s not comfortable!’
But the girl would not be warned. With a laugh that set every nerve in my body vibrating with annoyance, she said, ‘Oh, dear! Mustn’t I even sit in the same chair as your black-velvet woman?’
I looked at the chair in the picture. It was the same; and in her chair Mildred was sitting. Then a horrible sense of the reality of Mildred came upon me. Was all this a reality after all? But for fortunate chance might Mildred have occupied, not only her chair, but her place in my life? I rose.
‘I hope you won’t think me very rude,’ I said; ‘but I am obliged to go out.’
I forget what appointment I alleged. The lie came readily enough.
I faced Mildred’s pouts with the hope that she and her mother would not wait dinner for me. I fled. In another minute I was safe, alone, under the chill, cloudy autumn sky – free to think, think, think of my dear lady.
I walked for hours along streets and squares; I lived over again and again every look, word, and hand-touch – every kiss; I was completely, unspeakably happy.
Mildred was utterly forgotten: my lady of the ebony frame filled my heart and soul and spirit.
As I heard eleven boom through the fog, I turned, and went home.
When I got to my street, I found a crowd surging through it, a strong red light filling the air.
A house was on fire. Mine.
I elbowed my way through the crowd.
The picture of my lady – that, at least, I could save!
As I sprang up the steps, I saw, as in a dream – yes, all this was really dream-like – I saw Mildred leaning out of the first-floor window, wringing her hands.
‘Come back, sir,’ cried a fireman, ‘we’ll get the young lady out right enough.’
But my lady? I went on up the stairs, cracking, smoking, and as hot as hell, to the room where her picture was. Strange to say, I only felt that the picture was a thing we should like to look on through the long glad wedded life that was to be ours. I never thought of it as being one with her.
As I reached the first floor I felt arms around my neck. The smoke was too thick for me to distinguish features.
‘Save me!’ a voice whispered. I clasped a figure in my arms, and, with a strange unease, bore it down the shaking stairs and out into safety. It was Mildred. I knew that directly I clasped her.
‘Stand back,’ cried the crowd.
‘Everyone’s safe,’ cried a fireman.
The flames leaped from every window. The sky grew redder and redder. I sprang from the hands that would have held me. I leaped up the steps. I crawled up the stairs. Suddenly the whole horror of the situation came on me. ‘As long as my picture remains in the ebony frame.’ What if picture and frame perished together?
I fought with the fire, and with my own choking inability to fight with it. I pushed on. I must save my picture. I reached the drawing-room.
As I sprang in I saw my lady – I swear it – through the smoke and the flames, hold out her arms to me – to me – who came too late to save her, and to save my own life’s joy. I never saw her again.
Before I could reach her, or cry out to her, I felt the floor yield beneath my feet, and I fell into the fiery hell below.
How did they save me? What does that matter? They saved me somehow – curse them. Every stick of my aunt’s furniture was destroyed. My friends pointed out that, as the furniture was heavily insured, the carelessness of a nightly-studious housemaid had done me no harm.
No harm!
That was how I won and lost my only love.
I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty, but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness – ah, no – it is the rest of life that is the dream.
But if I think that, why have I married Mildred, and grown stout and dull and prosperous?
I tell you it is all this that is the dream; my dear lady only is the reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream?
HURST OF HURSTCOTE
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br /> We were at Eton together, and afterwards at Christ Church, and I always got on very well with him; but somehow he was a man about whom none of the other men cared very much. There was always something strange and secret about him; even at Eton he liked grubbing among books and trying chemical experiments better than cricket or the boats. That sort of thing would make any boy unpopular. At Oxford, it wasn’t merely his studious ways and his love of science that went against him; it was a certain habit he had of gazing at us through narrowing lids, as though he were looking at us more from the outside than any human being has a right to look at any other, and a bored air of belonging to another and a higher race, whenever we talked the ordinary chatter about athletics and the Schools.
A wild paper on ‘Black Magic’, which he read to the Essay Society, filled to overflowing the cup of his College’s contempt for him. I suppose no man was ever so much disliked for so little cause.
When we went down I noticed – for I knew his people at home – that the sentiment of dislike which he excited in most men was curiously in contrast to the emotions which he inspired in women. They all liked him, listened to him with rapt attention, talked of him with undisguised enthusiasm. I watched their strange infatuation with calmness for several years, but the day came when he met Kate Danvers, and then I was not calm anymore. She behaved like all the rest of the women, and to her, quite suddenly, Hurst threw the handkerchief. He was not Hurst of Hurstcote then, but his family was good, and his means not despicable, so he and she were conditionally engaged. People said it was a poor match for the beauty of the county; and her people, I know, hoped she would think better of it. As for me – well, this is not the story of my life, but of his. I need only say that I thought him a lucky man.
I went to town to complete the studies that were to make me MD; Hurst went abroad, to Paris or Leipzig or somewhere, to study hypnotism and prepare notes for his book on ‘Black Magic’. This came out in the autumn, and had a strange and brilliant success. Hurst became famous, famous as men do become nowadays. His writings were asked for by all the big periodicals. His future seemed assured. In the spring they were married; I was not present at the wedding. The practice my father had bought for me in London claimed all my time, I said.
It was more than a year after their marriage that I had a letter from Hurst.
Congratulate me, old man! Crowds of uncles and cousins have died, and I am Hurst of Hurstcote, which God wot I never thought to be. The place is all to pieces, but we can’t live anywhere else. If you can get away about September, come down and see us. We shall be installed. I have everything now that I ever longed for – Hurstcote – cradle of our race – and all that, the only woman in the world for my wife, and— But that’s enough for any man, surely.
JOHN HURST OF HURSTCOTE
Of course I knew Hurstcote. Who does not? Hurstcote, which seventy years ago was one of the most perfect, as well as the finest, brick Tudor mansions in England. The Hurst who lived there seventy years ago noticed one day that his chimneys smoked, and called in a Hastings architect. ‘Your chimneys,’ said the local man, ‘are beyond me, but with the timbers and lead of your castle I can build you a snug little house in the corner of your park, much more suitable for a residence than this old brick building.’ So they gutted Hurstcote, and built the new house, and faced it with stucco. All of which things you will find written in the Guide to Sussex. Hurstcote, when I had seen it, had been the merest shell. How would Hurst make it habitable? Even if he had inherited much money with the castle, and intended to restore the building, that would be a work of years, not months. What would he do?
In September I went to see.
Hurst met me at Pevensey Station.
‘Let’s walk up,’ he said; ‘there’s a cart to bring your traps. Eh, but it’s good to see you again, Bernard!’
It was good to see him again. And to see him so changed. And so changed for good, too. He was much stouter, and no longer wore the untidy ill-fitting clothes of the old days. He was rather smartly got up in grey stockings and knee-breeches, and wore a velvet shooting-jacket. But the most noteworthy change was in his face; it bore no more the eager, inquiring, half-scornful, half-tolerant look that had won him such ill-will at Oxford. His face now was the face of a man completely at peace with himself and with the world.
‘How well you look!’ I said, as we walked along the level winding road through the still marshes.
‘How much better, you mean?’ he laughed. ‘I know it. Bernard, you’ll hardly believe it, but I’m on the way to be a popular man!’
He had not lost his old knack of reading one’s thoughts.
‘Don’t trouble yourself to find the polite answer to that,’ he hastened to add. ‘No one knows as well as I how unpopular I was; and no one knows so well why,’ he added, in a very low voice. ‘However,’ he went on gaily, ‘unpopularity is a thing of the past. The folk hereabout call on us, and condole with us on our hutch. A thing of the past, as I said – but what a past it was, eh! You’re the only man who ever liked me. You don’t know what that’s been to me many a dark day and night. When the others were – you know – it was like a hand holding mine, to think of you. I’ve always thought I was sure of one soul in the world to stand by me.’
‘Yes,’ I said – ‘yes.’
He flung his arm over my shoulder with a frank, boyish gesture of affection, quite foreign to his nature as I had known it.
‘And I know why you didn’t come to our wedding,’ he went on; ‘but that’s all right now, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said again, for indeed it was. There are brown eyes in the world, after all, as well as blue, and one pair of brown that meant heaven to me as the blue had never done.
‘That’s well,’ Hurst answered, and we walked on in satisfied silence, till we passed across the furze-crowned ridge, and went down the hill to Hurstcote. It lies in the hollow, ringed round by its moat, its dark red walls showing the sky behind them. There was no welcoming sparkle of early litten candle, only the pale amber of the September evening shining through the gaunt unglazed windows.
Three planks and a rough handrail had replaced the old drawbridge. We passed across the moat, and Hurst pulled a knotted rope that hung beside the great iron-bound door. A bell clanged loudly inside. In the moment we spent there, waiting, Hurst pushed back a briar that was trailing across the arch, and let it fall outside the handrail.
‘Nature is too much with us here,’ he said, laughing. ‘The clematis spends its time tripping one up, or clawing at one’s hair, and we are always expecting the ivy to force itself through the window and make an uninvited third at our dinner-table.’
Then the great door of Hurstcote Castle swung back, and there stood Kate, a thousand times sweeter and more beautiful than ever. I looked at her with momentary terror and dazzlement. She was indeed much more beautiful than any woman with brown eyes could be. My heart almost stopped beating.
‘With life or death in the balance: Right!’
To be beautiful is not the same thing as to be dear, thank God. I went forward and took her hand with a free heart.
It was a pleasant fortnight I spent with them. They had had one tower completely repaired, and in its queer eight-sided rooms we lived, when we were not out among the marshes, or by the blue sea at Pevensey.
Mrs Hurst had made the rooms quaintly charming by a medley of Liberty stuffs and Wardour Street furniture. The grassy space within the castle walls, with its underground passes, its crumbling heaps of masonry, overgrown with lush creepers, was better than any garden. There we met the fresh morning; there we lounged through lazy noons; there the grey evening found us.
I have never seen any two married people so utterly, so undisguisedly in love as these were. I, the third, had no embarrassment in so being – for their love had in it a completeness, a childish abandonment, to which the presence of a third – a friend – was no burden. A happiness, reflected from theirs, shone on me. The days went by, dreamlike, and b
rought the eve of my return to London, and to the commonplaces of life.
We were sitting in the courtyard; Hurst had gone to the village to post some letters. A big moon was just showing over the battlements, when Mrs Hurst shivered.
‘It’s late,’ she said, ‘and cold; the summer is gone. Let us go in.’ So we went in to the little warm room, where a wood fire flickered on a brick hearth, and a shaded lamp was already glowing softly. Here we sat on the cushioned seat in the open window, and looked out through the lozenge panes at the gold moon, and ah! the light of her making ghosts in the white mist that rose thick and heavy from the moat.
‘I am so sorry you are going,’ she said presently; ‘but you will come and skate on the moat with us at Christmas, won’t you? We mean to have a medieval Christmas. You don’t know what that is? Neither do I; but John does. He is very, very wise.’
‘Yes,’ I answered, ‘he used to know many things that most men don’t even dream of as possible to know.’
She was silent a minute, and then shivered again. I picked up the shawl she had thrown down when we came in, and put it round her.
‘Thank you! I think – don’t you? – that there are some things one is not meant to know, and someone is meant not to know. You see the distinction?’
‘I suppose so – yes.’
‘Did it never frighten you in the old days,’ she went on, ‘to see that John would never – was always—’
‘But he has given all that up now?’
‘Oh yes, ever since our honeymoon. Do you know, he used to mesmerise me. It was horrible. And that book of his—’
‘I didn’t know you believed in Black Magic.’
‘Oh, I don’t – not the least bit. I never was at all superstitious, you know. But those things always frighten me just as much as if I believed in them. And besides – I think they are wicked; but John – Ah, there he is! Let’s go and meet him.’