by E. F. Benson
“At last, Edward!” she said. “And we shall meet again soon. Aunt Julia has asked mamma and me down for next Sunday.”
He looked at her a moment without speaking. She saw that his breath came quickly as if he had been running.
“I know. She told me she was going to write,” he said.
“She met mamma this afternoon, and said it instead.”
“Must I go away?” he asked. “Of course I will if you wish it. But — but mayn’t I see you again?”
At his voice, at the entreaty in his eyes, all but her love for him, unstained and bright-burning, vanished utterly.
“Yes, why not, if you want to?” she said. “But I shall understand so well if you do not.”
“I have wanted nothing else every day,” he said.
All her heart went out to him.
“Aren’t you happy, dear?” she said.
“How can you ask that?”
“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “And Edith?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about her. I try to be kind and nice to her. In fact I am.”
A wretched, quivering smile broke out on the girl’s face.
“Conceit!” she said. “I’m glad we have met, Edward, for we had to get this over, you know. Well, it’s over.”
They stood in silence a moment. Then suddenly he broke out —
“Why wouldn’t you trust your own heart, Elizabeth, and let me trust mine? What good has come of it all? What has come of it but wretchedness? I don’t ask if you are happy. I know you aren’t.”
“No. But you kept faith. That good has come of it. Don’t say those things. It isn’t the best of you that says them. And what are you doing here?”
“I often walk this way,” he said. “Then I go up Oakley Street. The evenings are getting light now. Do you mind my doing that?”
Then something swelled in her throat forbidding speech.
“I — I must go on,” she said at length.
“May I walk with you a little?”
“To the corner. I shall take a ‘bus there.”
There was but a little way to go, and they stood together, waiting for the ‘bus, looking at the darkling river, down which poured the wild west wind.
“Sea-gulls,” she said to him, pointing. “Sea-gulls and spring, Edward.”
And she mounted quickly up the winding iron stairs, not looking back. But as the ‘bus swung round a corner a little distance up the road she could not resist turning round. He was still there at the corner where she had left him, a minute speck on the pavement that glowed in the rose-coloured sunset, so minute, so significant. It seemed to her that all of her essential self, her heart, her power of love, was standing there with him; that he gazed but at an empty wraith of herself who sat on the pounding, swaying ‘bus, while she stood by his side as the spring evening darkened and the sea-gulls hovered and wheeled.
CHAPTER XIII
THE GRISLY KITTENS
Elizabeth, as requested by her stepmother, did not leave her concert that night until the very last note of all had died away. But it is doubtful whether that request had very much to do with it: the probability is that she was really incapable of doing so. Just as the hypnotized subject has his will taken possession of by his controller, so that all his wishes, his intentions, his desires are for the time in abeyance and the independence of his own powers completely paralysed, so that night Elizabeth was taken captive by the power of sound. Many times before she had felt that she was penetrating into a new kingdom, a fresh province of thought and feeling, but to-night a more surprising adventure held her bound. She penetrated into no fresh kingdoms, she saw no new peaks upraise themselves or valleys carve themselves at her feet. She was completely in familiar places; only a fresh light, one that for her had never lit sea or land, shone on them, which transfigured them not by fantastic effects and the sensationalism of musical limelights, but with the dawning as of the everlasting day.
She was unconsciously prepared for this, as she had never been before. She, or a hundred others whose souls were steeped with the love of melody, might have heard just what she heard that night, and have had their tastes gratified, their emotions roused, without being gripped in this manner so supreme, so enlightening. New sensations might have flitted through her, new beauties been perceived, new glories been manifested, without this ethical perception being awakened. But with her to-night, all the quiet patience of these past months, of the succession of dark and difficult days, to solve the meaning of which she had applied herself with efforts and strivings after the light, so unremitting, so unnoticed, had rendered her capable of receiving the true illumination. Cell by cell, she had stored honey in the dark; now with the coming of spring, the workers of her soul swarmed out with rush of joyous wings into the light. She was charged to the brim with supersaturated waters; it wanted but the one atom the more to be added that should solidify all that had been put into her, all that by the grace of God she had gathered. Probably the meeting with Edward gave her the last crystal of the salt, took out from her love the grain of bitterness that still lurked there. That made her ready to receive the ultimate gift that music has to bring, namely, the identification of it with all other noble effort, the perception of its truth, which is one with the truth of everything that is beautiful, and is lit by the light that illuminates the whole world, and turns it into the garden of God. Never again in those on whom one gleam of the light has shone can it be wholly quenched. For the future they know from their own selves, from the recollection of the one thing in the world which it is impossible to forget, that whatever storms of adversity, thunder-clouds of trouble lower, there is no such thing any more for them as a darkness quite untransfused, no place so slippery that they can doubt whether their feet are set on a rock and their goings ordered.
The hall was but half-filled, and Elizabeth, seated at the back of the amphitheatre, saw she would be uncumbered with the distraction of near neighbours. The concert opened with the Third Symphony of Brahms, and immediately she was carried into it. Even as one who looks at some superb statue has his mind modelled, as it were, into the image of what he sees, so that his body can, faintly following, unconsciously drop into a pose somewhat like it, so, listening to this, she was made one with it, fused into it, so that, while it sang its message to her, she knew of no existence separate from it. Her mind, her nature became part of it; she, like a sheet of calm waters, burned with the glories of the melodious sky. She became godlike, as she inhaled that ampler ether of glorified intellect through music, which perhaps alone of the arts can make wholly visible to the spiritual eye the wonder and the beauty of pure and abstract thought. No longer did its melodies suggest images to her; her brain strove not after similes to express, as it were, in mere black and white the effect of the rainbow song; it revealed itself, mind.
Then the hall swam into sight again; there was applause. It sounded quite meaningless; you did not clap your hands when daylight came.
There were but three items in the programme, and for the second, the grand piano in front of the stage was opened. The player was familiar enough to her, he with his magical fingers and exuberant youth, but just now he seemed a detached and impersonal figure, as nameless as the viol-holding cherubim in a canvas of Bellini, who make music for the reverie of the saints and angels who stand on either side of the Mother of God. But it was no song of heavenly soul and sexless quires that he was to sing; he was the interpreter of the joy of life and of love and of the myriad emotions that spring like flowers from the fruitful earth. Brahms had revealed what is possible to the wise mind of man, here in the great concerto Tschaikowsky poured out the inspired tale of its emotions; the splendour of their shining, the tenderness of their reveries. Instantly in the presence of this more concrete, more frail and human music the images leaped and danced again in Elizabeth’s mind. The noonday shone on the innumerable smile of a blue sea; high above the sultry plain were fixed the spear-heads of Chitral; the dusk fell on the
Indian garden with its tangle of Peshawar roses. More personal yet grew the appeal. She walked with her father there; she showed him, as never yet had it been given her to show him, how love had touched her, even as he had said, with its enchantment, how the loyalty of her renunciation of its material fulfilment had not withered its stem, but caused it to blossom with a rarer and more fragrant flowering. She told him how the bitter waters had been sweetened, how the sting had been sheathed, how through darkness love had felt its way up to the day. With tender glance at the pain of it that was passed they dwelt on it; with smiles for her miscomprehension of its growth, for her ignorance of where it led they traced its springing tendrils, on which there were the traces of healed scars where it had bled. But its bleeding was over, and strong grew its shoots over unsightly places. The whole world danced together, not men and women only, not only boys and girls, but sun and sea and sky, and the lions in the desert and the tigers burning bright in the jungle. The peaks and ledges of untrodden snow danced in a whirling magical maze of rhythmic movement. The angels of God joined in it; the devils of hell would have done so had there been such things as devils, or such a place as hell. Again the music grew more personal. All she had ever known of joy, and that was much, was marshalled round her, and through the dancers, this crowd of earthly elements, came he whom every nerve and agent of perception in her body loved. Her human power of emotion leaped to the supremest arc of that rainbow curve, and with him stood there poised. By some divine right he was hers, by a right no less divine he was separated from her. Yet that separation was somehow one with the union.
Then followed a pause of some ten minutes. But no reaction came to her, for it was no mimic show that was now over, no feigned dramatic presentment that she had watched or listened to (she hardly knew which), but something quite real, more real than the rows of dark red stalls, than the shaded scarlet lights, like huge inverted anemones, which hung above the orchestra, more real even than the actual music itself, which was but the husk or at most the temporary embodiment of the truth that underlay and illumined it. She had been shown the vision of mind at its highest, of emotion in its supremest degree. There was something still lacking, which should bind them together, exhibit them, as they truly were, parts of an infinite whole. She knew what was coming, and with the tenseness of an expectation that must be fulfilled, with a suspense that was not the less for the certainty of its coming resolution, she waited.
Half an hour later she came out into the mellow spring night, that teemed with the promise of the south-west wind. Just as the Brahms symphony had summed up for her the glory of mind, and the Tschaikowsky concerto had sung of the depth and sunlit splendours of human emotion, so the Good Friday music had bridged and connected the two, and shown her whence came the light that shone on them. But whereas the concerto had led her through generalities to its culmination of the appeal to her own individual personality, and its needs and longings, in this she was led across the dim threshold of herself, so to speak, into the halls that were full of light, into the house of many mansions. Vivid and ecstatic at first had been the sense of her own intense experience; she was bathed in sun and sea, and then was opened to her a communion of soul with those she loved that transcended all she had ever felt before. And yet, very soon, that faded into nothingness, it passed off the shield of her perception, as a breath is dispersed in frosty air; soon she was no longer the centre of her consciousness, but only an atom of infinite insignificance in it. It was no revelation of herself that was thus manifested, yet inasmuch as she was part of the vital essence of the love that crowned the human understanding, the human passions, inasmuch as she could give thanks for its great glory, that glory was part of her, her love part of it. One and indivisible it stirred in her, even as it moved the sun and all the stars....
It was with no sense of interruptions or of a broken mood that she came out into the jostling of the populous streets, for truth is not a mood, and they with their crowded pavements and whirring roadways were part of it also, and knew her solemn and joyful secret. Without doubt she would not always be able to feel with the same vividness of perception that the eternal peace encompassed her, but, having once realized it, she knew that it would be there always, a sure refuge, that it was the answer to all the riddles and difficulties that life assuredly would continue to ply her with. Again and again, she knew, they would puzzle and perplex her, again and again she would be mist-blinded by them. But she had seen an authentic glimpse, as from Pisgah, of the kingdom to which led the royal roads. They might wind over stony hill-sides, be packed with sand, or clogged with resistant mire, but they led to the promised land, to the kingdom that was within, the gates of which stood open night and day, for all who willed to enter.
It was late, already after eleven, when she dismounted from the ‘bus at the corner of Oakley Street, and she half expected to find that her stepmother had gone to bed. It must be allowed that Elizabeth would not have been very sorry if this proved to be the case, for she felt that she could give but a vague attention to the voluble trivialities that would otherwise await her. But not till she had softly closed the street door behind her, did she bring into focus the fact that Mrs. Fanshawe had been dining alone with Sir Henry, or that the voluble trivialities might be supplanted by news not trivial at all.
The idea when first it had occurred to her had repelled her, with the repulsion that a deep love must naturally feel for any self-conscious and shallow affection. There was a sort of heart-breaking jar in the thought that Mrs. Fanshawe, with her pen still dipping for ink to write the Memoir, should be thinking about re-marriage. But now the repulsion had left her; she found herself less jealous for her father’s memory, more ready to let the immortality of love look after itself, more capable of sinking her personal feeling. It was not that the idea had lost its sharp edges from her greater familiarity with it; she saw it as distinctly as ever; only the sharp edges now failed to fret her. Besides, how could the shallowness of her stepmother’s affections, the insincerity that in itself was of so unreal a nature, affect anything that was real?
Mrs. Fanshawe had not gone to bed, but was sitting in a very pretty pensive attitude (hastily assumed when she heard Elizabeth’s step on the stairs) over a brisk little fire, in front of which was standing in the fender a small covered dish. She had put on a white bedroom wrapper with little black bows of ribbon; her long, abundant hair streamed over her shoulders; there was never so bewitching a little widow. She held out her arm with a welcoming gesture as Elizabeth entered.
“Darling, how late you are!” she said. “But if you have been enjoying yourself that is all I ask of you. I could not bear to think that my little Elizabeth should come in and find a silent house, with no one to welcome her home.”
She got up and gave Elizabeth a little butterfly kiss.
“See, dear, I lit the fire for you with my own hands, so that your supper might keep warm. There is a napkin which I spread for a tablecloth, and a little rack of toast, and some lemonade with plenty of sugar in it, and just the wing of a chicken, which I saved for you, and ate a leg myself instead. And a little bunch of grapes to follow and some gingerbread cake. And while you eat, dear, you shall tell me all about your concert. Fancy if some day you played at a concert at the Queen’s Hall. How proud I should be! And should I not burst my gloves in applauding?”
To “tell all about the concert” was a somewhat extensive suggestion, but there was no need for Elizabeth to reply, as Mrs. Fanshawe went on without pause.
“I could not attend to anything, dear,” she said, “until I had quite settled in my mind what would be the nicest little supper I could think of for you. I had quite a little squabble with Sir Henry about eating a leg myself, though I assured him that all epicures prefer the leg. And he helped me to light the fire; I assure you, he was as zealous on your behalf as I was. And he told me to be sure and give you his love, if I did not think you would consider that a liberty.”
“Thank you, mamma,” said the g
irl. “And it was good of you to take so much thought for me. I almost expected to find you had gone to bed; I am so late. I suppose Sir Henry has been gone some time?”
“A quarter of an hour ago perhaps. I had not more than time to take off my dress and brush my hair. But I could not go without a peep at you when you returned. And I promised myself a little cosy talk over the fire when you had finished your supper.”
Elizabeth left the table and sat down in a big arm-chair near Mrs. Fanshawe. The latter took Elizabeth’s hand as it lay on the arm, and held it in both of hers.
“I have been thinking of you so much, dear,” she said, “all the time dear Sir Henry was here. You have been in my mind every minute. Such a wise, kind man he is, and so full of sympathy and tenderness for me. And he shows it with such wonderful tact, not by dwelling on my great loss, but by encouraging me and cheering me up. I declare I laughed outright as I have not done for months at some of his delicious, droll stories. He is the sort of man to whom one can open one’s heart completely. All kinds of things we talked about — about old, dear, happy days, and about India, and oh, Elizabeth, how I long to see dear India again! He quoted something which I thought so true, about hearing the East a-calling, and said it ought to be ‘when you hear the East a-bawling.’ Was not that quaint of him? The East a-bawling! Yes. That is just what it does. Dear, happy days in India, with all its pleasant parties and society and balls! I miss the gaiety of it all in our sad, secluded life here in this little tiny house. Why, the drawing-room is not much bigger than my bathroom was at Peshawar. I think that I am naturally of a gay and joyous nature, dear. I was not made for sadness.”