A COMEDY
She took the bottle from its wrappings and looked at it—at its apparent insignificance and the huge significance of the glaring word "Poison" printed across it. She looked resolutely, and as resolutely went with it to the other side of the room, and locked it away in the drawer of her dressing-table. She paused here, and her eyes met her mirrored eyes. The expression of her face arrested her attention. Did people who were going to die usually look so calm, so placid? Really, it was a sort of placidity that gazed back at her, so unlike the disfigured, tear-blinded reflection that had been there that morning—when she had read the paper. After the tempest of despair, the frozen decision, the nightmare securing of the means of death (if any one should guess! stop her!) it was indeed a sort of apathy that drenched her being, as if already the drug had gone through it. The face in the mirror was very young and very helpless and very charming. It was like the face of a little wind-blown ghost, with its tossed-back hair and wide, empty, gazing eyes. The sweetness of the wasted cheeks and soft, parted lips suddenly smote on the apathy, and tears came. She pressed her hands over her eyes, struggled, and mastered herself again. Her own pathos must not unnerve, and her unbearable sorrow must nerve, her.
She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. Just three. She could give herself ample time for writing the letter; then she must go and post it. Before five she would be back here—locked in her room. Before six—
She went to the writing-table, unlocked a drawer,—the key hung on a ribbon around her neck, under her bodice,—and took out a thick packet of closely written papers. Sitting there, hesitating a moment, she wondered if she would look back at those records of hope and suffering—more than a whole year of beautiful suffering, beautiful hope. The rising of tears again warned her that such a retrospect would make her more unfit for writing the last letter as it must be written—with full possession of her best and deepest meaning. She must be her most courageous self to write now. The writer of those past records seemed a little sister half playing with her grief, beside the self that sat here now, stricken and determined.
Drawing pen and paper to her, she wrote:
My Dearest—My best Beloved: This is the last of the letters. I am going to send them all to you now, so that you may know all. I read this morning in the paper that you were to be married. And now there is nothing left for me but to die. When you read this I shall be dead.
You must not blame me, or think me too cowardly. I am a fragile person, I know, and my life hung on you. Without hope it can't go on; it's too feeble to find anything else to live for. And you could never, never blame yourself. How could you have helped it? How could you have dreamed that I loved you? If you had you could have done nothing but be sorry—and irked. But it comforts me in dying to let you know how I have loved you; it is like a dying gift I make you,—do you see?—all the love that I have hidden. If I had lived I could never have made the gift. Had you guessed, or had I told you, it would have been a burden, a ludicrous burden. But as you read this, knowing that I am dead, my love must come to you as a blessing; you must feel it as something, in its little way beautiful, and care for it; for any love that only gives and makes no claim is beautiful, is it not? I think I find dying so much easier than living because in dying I can give you the gift.
All these letters, written from the first day I met you, almost a year and a half ago, will tell you step by step what I have felt. Don't let the hopes that flickered up sometimes hurt you; the strength of my feeling made the flame, nothing that you ever said or did.
How I remember that first day, in the country, at the Ashwells', when mamma and I came on to the lawn where you were all sitting, and mamma laughed at me for stumbling over a chair—and you smiled at me. From the moment I saw you then, I loved you. You were like some dream come true. You never knew what joy it gave me (only joy; the pain was in not being with you) when we walked together and talked; the letters will tell you that. But to-day it all comes back, even the little things that I hardly knew I was seeing or hearing—the late white roses in the garden; and the robin sitting on the garden wall (we stopped to look at it, and it sat still, looking at us: I wonder if you remember the robin); and the distant song some labourers were singing in the fields far away.
And here in London, the dinners we met at, the teas you came to, the one or two books you gave me and that we wrote about—what I felt about it all, these meteors through my gray life, I have written it all down. Did I not act well? You could never have guessed, under my composure and cheerfulness, could you? I am a little proud of myself when I think of it.
And that this is no sudden rocking of my reason you will see, too, from the growing hopelessness, of emptiness in the last months, when I have not seen you. In the bottom of my heart I had always the little hope that some day I might give you these myself, that we might read them together, you and I, smiling over my past sorrow. And if I had died, and you had not loved me, you were to have had them, as I told you, for I wanted to give you my love; I could not bear that it should go out and that you should never know.
I wish that I could have died, and need not have killed myself; I am so afraid that that may give you pain, though it ought not to, if you think justly of it all.
Of course you will be sorry for me—I am afraid that I want you to be sorry; but don't be too sad. I am so much happier in dying than I could have been in living; and in loving you I have felt so much, I have lived so much—more perhaps than many people in a whole lifetime.
See the gift you have given me, dearest one. Good-bye. Good-bye.
Allida.
It was over,—the last link with life, her last word spoken or written,—and the echo of it seemed to come to her already as across a great abyss that separated her from the world of the living.
With the signing of her name she had drawn the shroud over her face.
Only the mechanical things now remained to be done: dying was really over; she really was dead.
She wrapped this last letter around all the others, kissed it, and sealed it in a large envelope; then, putting on her hat and coat and holding the letter in her ulster pocket, she left her room and went down the stairs.
The house was a typically smart, flimsy London house, of the cheaper Mayfair sort—a narrow box set on end and fitted with chintz and gilt and white mouldings; a trap to Allida's imagination—an imagination that no longer shrank from the contemplation of the facts of her life; for they, too, were seen from across that abyss.
In the drawing-room, among shaded lamps, cushions, and swarming bric-à-brac, her mother had flirted and allured—unsuccessfully—for how many years? She had felt, since the time when, as a very little girl, she had gone by the room every day coming in from her walk at tea-time with her governess, and heard inside the high, smiling, artificial voice, with its odd appealing quality, its vague, waiting pauses, the shrinking from her mother and her mother's aims. Later on the aims had been for her, too, and their determination had been partly, Allida felt, hardened by the fact of a grown-up daughter being such a deterrent—so in the way of a desperate, fading beauty who had never made the brilliant match she hoped for. That she had never, either, made even a moderate match for her, Allida, the girl felt, with a firmer closing of her hand on the letter, she perhaps owed to him. What might her weakness and her hatred of her home not have urged her into had not that ideal—that seen and recognized ideal—armed her? The vision of old Captain Defflin, his bruised-plum face and tight, pale eyes, rose before her, and the vacuous, unwholesome countenance of young Sir Alfred Cutts. How often had she been dexterously left alone with them in the drawing-room! Thank God! all that was far, far behind her. Death was dignified, sweet-smelling in its peace, when she thought of all that the gilt-and-chintz drawing-room stood for in her memories. Death was sweet when life was so ugly.
Now she was in the street, the door closed behind her, and no servant had seen her.
It was a foggy afternoon, and the soiled white houses opposite were dim. A thin, stray cat rubbed against the area railings and mewed as Allida stood, pausing for a moment, on the steps.
Which was the nearest pillar-box? At the end of the street, just round the corner. The plaintive, nasal cry of the cat caught her attention. Poor creature! She ought to spare some poison for it. The irony of the idea almost made her smile as she stooped and patted the dingy head. The cat, leaning like a ship in a stiff wind, walked to and fro across her dress, looking up at her as it still plaintively, interrogatively mewed. Its appeal put aside for a moment the decision as to which pillar-box. She picked up the cat and returned to the door. The maid answered her ring.
Allida was a little sorry that she must speak once more, after all, on this mundane plane. The finish of her tragedy seemed slightly marred by this episode. But she heard her calm voice telling the maid to feed the cat—"And keep it until you can find a home for it. Cook won't mind, will she?"
"Oh, no, miss; cook is fond of cats. Poor thing, then," said the maid, who was tender of heart.
Again the door was shut, and again the pillar-box was the last act but one of her drama.
She walked swiftly down the street, thinking, oddly, more about the cat than about her destination or the letter she held clutched in her pocket. The stripes on the cat's head, its rough, sooty fur, the sharp projection of its backbone and the grotesque grimace of its mew—her mind dwelt on these trivial details; and under all was a funny added contentment at this further proof of the mercilessness and ugliness of the world she was leaving.
The corner of the street was reached and turned. There, in the fog, stood the red shaft of the pillar-box. Beyond it a street lamp, already lighted, made a blur of light in the thick air and cast upward a long cone of shadow.
Allida's heart suddenly shrank and shuddered.
The lamp and the pillar-box looked horrible. Death was horrible. To see him no more was horrible. She felt only horror as mechanically she took out the letter and dropped it into the box.
The heavy sound of its fall turned her shuddering heart to ice.
She had felt horror, she had been prepared for horror, but not for such horror as this. It would all be like this now, she knew, until the end. Let her hurry through it, then; let her escape quickly; and, at all events, her own room, her familiar little room, with its fire, its books, its quiet white bed, would be a refuge after this terrible, empty street. She thought only of her room,—the thought blotting out what would happen in it,—knowing only that she longed to be there, with a longing like a wounded child's for its mother's arms. And yet she still stood staring at the slit in the pillar-box.
"Miss Fraser," a voice said beside her.
It was a voice of carefully quiet greeting, guarded interrogation, guarded expostulation.
She looked up, feeling something shatter in her, fearing that she was going to faint. It was almost like the crash of death and like a swooning into a new consciousness. She only dimly, through the swooning sense of change, recognized the face that looked at her, smiling, but so puzzled, so pained—so pained that she guessed that her own face must show some strange terror.
She had seen the face, in the chintz-and-gilt drawing-room,—it had seemed out of place there,—she had seen it often; but memory was blurred. Had he not taken her down to dinner somewhere only the other day? Yes; she knew him well; only she was dead, a ghost, and reality, familiar reality, looked different.
"Mr. Haldicott," she said, putting out her hand. Her voice was normal—she heard that; she felt that she could almost have smiled. Yet something was fearfully shattered, some power in herself that had directed her so resolutely till now. The cat had been disconcerting, but the appearance of this man, whom she knew quite well, who might talk, might question her, might walk back beside her, seemed fatally disconcerting. For could she act? Could she still speak on normally? And further delay, now that every link was broken, now that to all real intents and purposes she was dead, was a torture too fearful to be contemplated. Yet how evade it? She felt that her hand, which he still held, held very tightly, was trembling.
"You are ill," he said.
She shook her head.
"No; not at all. I only came out for a little walk. And I must go back to tea."
"Your mother is at home?"
"No; she is out of town. She doesn't get back till to-morrow."
"You are going to have tea all alone?"
Allida gazed at him. How should she evade him if he offered to come back?
"I haven't had my walk yet. I came out for a little walk," she repeated.
By the blurred light of the street lamp he still looked at her, still held her trembling hand. His face showed his perplexed indecision. Suddenly he drew the hand within his arm.
"Let us have the little walk, then," he said, "only you must let me come with you. You are in some great trouble. Don't bother to deny it. Don't say anything. Your face showed me that something dreadful was happening to you. Don't speak—I saw it as I was passing on the other side of the street. The lamp was just lighted, else I shouldn't have recognised you. Now walk quietly on like this. Don't even think. I'm not a meddling idiot; I know I'm not. You are desperate about something, and anything, any one, even a complete stranger, and I'm not that, who steps in between desperation and an act is justified—perhaps a Godsend."
He was walking beside her, half leading her, talking quickly, as if to give her time to recover, and glancing at her stricken, helpless face.
As they walked they heard behind them the rattling fall of letters into a postman's bag; the pillar-box had been emptied.
The youth of the face, its essential childishness, the web of soft hair that hung disarranged over her cheek, made her look like a very little girl, and was in strange contrast with the look of terror.
They walked on and on, down streets, across wide, phantasmal squares.
Haldicott held the hand on his arm,—he did not speak,—and Allida felt herself moving with him through the fog like an Eurydice led by Orpheus, a shade among the shades. And all the while there hovered before her thoughts the vision of that quiet room, that white bed, still waiting for her. Suddenly she broke into sobs. She stopped. She leaned helplessly against his arm.
"Good heavens! you will tell me now," Haldicott exclaimed. "Cross the road here. Lean on me. We will go into the park. No one can see you."
She stumbled on blindly beside him, both hands clutching his arm.
All she knew was that she had left life behind her, and yet that she must go back to that room, and that the room now was more horrible than the pillar-box had been. She had left life behind her, and yet she still clung to it—here beside her. Life! life! warm, kind life!
In the park he led her into a deserted path. A bench stood beneath a tall, leafless tree, its branches stencilled flatly on the yellow-gray fog. Haldicott and Allida sat down side by side.
"Now tell me. You can trust me utterly. Tell me everything," said Haldicott.
His fine face, all competence and mastery, studied hers, its shattered loveliness. She leaned her head back against the bench. Life was there, and a great peace seemed to flow through her as the mere consciousness of its presence filled her. As long as he held her hand she could not be frightened; and since she was only a ghost, since all her past seemed to have dropped from her, she could look at it with him, she could tell him what he asked. As if exhausted, borne along by his will, she said, "I am going to commit suicide."
Haldicott made no ejaculation and no movement. Her eyes were closed, and he studied her face. Its innocent charm almost made him smile at her words; and yet the expression he had seen from across the street, as she dropped that letter into the box and stood frozen, had gone too well with such words. He reflected silently. He had long known Allida Fraser, never more than slightly; and yet from the frequency of slight knowledge he found that he had accumulated, quite unconsciously, an impression of her, distinct, sweet, appealing. He saw her, silent and gentle, in her tawdry mother's tawdry house; he heard her grave quiet voice. He had thought her, not knowing that he thought at all, charming. He had always been glad to talk to her, to make her gravity, the little air of chill composure that he had so understood, and liked, in the daughter of a desperate, faded flirt, warm into confident interest and smiles. Thinking of that quiet voice, that gentle smile, the poise and dignity of all the little personality, he could not connect them with hysterical shallowness. But he had, he now recognized, thought of her as older, more tempered to reality. There was a revelation of desperate youth, and youth's sense of the finality of desperation, on her face; and, with all the rigid resolve he had seen, he could guess in it youth's essential fluidity. She was resolved, and yet all resolves in a soul so young were only moods, unless circumstances let them stand still, stagnate, and finally freeze. She was not frozen yet. It was only a mood standing still; shake it, and it would fluctuate into surprising changes. Allida opened her eyes while he reflected, and many moments had gone by since her words.
"How amazing that I should tell you, calmly tell you, isn't it?" she said. "And yet I can't feel it as amazing. Nothing could amaze me. I seem to have passed beyond any feeling of that sort. But since I am so really dead already, that I can tell you, you must respect my confidence in you. You must not try to prevent me. I trust you."
"I shan't prevent you," said Haldicott.
Again she closed her eyes. "Thanks. It is almost a comfort to be able to tell some one. I know now how fearfully lonely I have been. And yet—I wish I hadn't met you—or I will wish it. Now I can wish nothing, and feel nothing—except that you are there, alive, and that I am going to die. But it will be harder to do now. Everything seems so vague, everything seems left behind. The very sorrow that makes me do it seems so far away—like a dream. I can't go through all the realization again, and when I do it now, it will seem to be for something unreal." Her voice trailed off.
"Are you sure you are going to do it?" Haldicott asked presently.
They spoke very slowly, with long pauses, as though a monotony of leisure were about them; as though, in some quiet, dim place of departed spirits, time had ceased.
"Yes; quite sure. I have bought it—the poison—I had a doctor's prescription—I have thought it all out carefully. It's in the top drawer of my dressing-table."
She would, he saw, tell him everything.
Again he paused.
"Is it an irremediable sorrow that makes life impossible, or is it life itself, in general, that you can't go on with?"
"Both—both," said Allida.
Again a long, long silence grew; every moment, Haldicott felt, a drop in the deep cup of oblivion that, unconsciously, she was drinking, that would make the past more and more unreal, until from oblivion she woke into the sane world of struggle and life.
"Yet you are so young," he said at last, "with everything before you—real joys as well as—forgive me!—realer sorrows; they would balance better if you would live a little longer. You know, if you waited for just one year, let us say, you would look back with wonder at this, with thankfulness that you hadn't."
"Perhaps," she said. "Only I don't want to live that year."
"And when were—when are you going to do it?"
"This evening. I had meant to do it long before this. Mamma is away. There could be no better time. Besides, it must be this evening. I've written."
"To her? To tell her?"
"No," Allida answered; "not to her." And she added, "I don't love her."
"Your mother?"
"This is my dying confession, so I will say the truth. No, I don't love her. She has made me so unhappy—made life so ugly."
"Then you wrote to some one whom you do love?"
"Yes," said Allida, after another pause. Her hat had loosened as she leaned her head back, and her disordered hair was about her face; she still kept her eyes closed with her expression of weary abandonment to the peace of confession.
He looked at her keenly, with most intent interest, most intent pity, and yet with a flicker of amusement in the look. She could do it. He believed her. Yet it would be as absurd as it would be tragic if she did. It wasn't a face made for tragedy; it had strayed into it by mistake.
"This some one you love," he said gently, "will it not hurt them terribly? Have you thought of that?"
He saw the tears come. They rolled slowly down her cheeks. She faintly whispered:
"He doesn't love me."
Haldicott could feel no amusement now, the pity was too great. He put his other hand on the hand he held.
"Used he to love you?" he asked.
"No," said Allida; "he never loved me."
For a moment Haldicott struggled with a half-nervous wish to laugh; relief was in the wish.
"And he knows that you love him?" he controlled his voice to ask.
"He will—when he gets my letter."
"Poor devil!" ejaculated Haldicott.
"Oh, you don't understand!" cried Allida. She opened her eyes and sat upright, drawing her hand from his. "How could you understand? You think it's a sort of vengeance I'm taking—for his not loving me. I can't drag myself through explanations, indeed I can't. Of course I see that my tragedy to you must be almost farce. I must go. Why should I have told you anything? I am desecrating it all, making it all grotesque, by being still alive."
"No, no; you mustn't go yet," said Haldicott, seizing her hand firmly, yet with not too obvious a restraint. "You mustn't go, not at peace with me. You have all the evening still before you,—it's not six yet,—and it doesn't take long to kill one's self with poison. Trust me. You must trust me. Don't think about its being grotesque; most things are in certain aspects. I think that we are both behaving very naturally, considering the circumstances. The circumstances, I grant you, are a little grotesque—not the circumstance of your being still alive, but of your wishing to die. But, indeed, I shall understand, you poor child, poor sweet child, if you will explain."
Again the mirage sense of compulsion, of peace in yielding to it, of letting this ghost-like consciousness shut out the long past and the short future, crept over her. She sank back again beside him.
"But how can I explain? Where shall I begin?"
"Listen to me now, dear Allida—we can use Christian names, I think, in a case of last dying confession like this. I am not going to prevent you, or put any constraint upon you; but I want you to explain as clearly and fully as you can, so that, in trying to make me see, you may see yourself, clearly and fully, what you are doing, where you are. Probably you are in a condition of absolutely irrational despair. Let us look at it together. I may be able to show you something else. Begin with him. Who is he?"
Allida had leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She dropped her face into her hands as she answered:
"Oliver Ainslie."
"Yes; I know him."
"Yes; you know him."
"He is—a charming fellow," said Haldicott.
"I met him over a year ago," said Allida. "I am very miserable at home. I have grown up alone. My mother and I have never been at all sympathetic. I hardly saw her when I was growing up. She only wanted to marry me off as soon as possible, and—she hasn't found it easy to marry me off. I haven't money—or looks in particular—oh, but I can't go into all that! You know mamma. I have hated my life with her."
"Yes, yes. I understand."
"Not that there is any harm in mamma," Allida amended, with a weary exactitude; "everybody understands that, too. Only she is so utterly silly, so utterly selfish. This all sounds horrible."
"I understand."
"I met him. I had never seen any one so dear, so sympathetic. I seemed to breathe with happiness when he was there. It was like morning sunlight after a hot, glaring ballroom, being with him. He never cared one bit for me; but—the first time I saw him he smiled at me, and he was kind and dear to me,—as he would be to any one,—and from that first moment I loved him—oh, loved him!"
She paused, a sacred sweetness in the pause.
Haldicott, sitting beside her in the fog, felt the presence of something radiant and snowy.
"And I sometimes thought and hoped—that he would care for me. I wrote to him all the time, letters I never sent; but I wrote as if he were to see them—some day. It's almost strange to me to think that such love didn't bring him to me by its very force and yearning. One hears, you know, of thoughts making themselves felt—becoming realities. I wonder where all those thoughts of mine went!"
He saw them all—those white, innocent thoughts—flying out like birds, like a flock of white birds, and disappearing in the darkness. How could a soul not have felt them fluttering about it, crying vainly for admittance? He almost shared Allida's wonder.
"And to-day, I sent all the letters with the last one telling of my death. For—I saw it this morning—he is engaged. So I couldn't go on. I could never love any one else; I shouldn't want to. My heart broke when I read the paper; really it broke. And I explained it all to him, so that it could not hurt him, that I was dying because life had become worthless to me—and yet that there was joy in dying because I could, in dying, tell him. There had been beauty and joy in loving him; he must not be too sorry; and he must care for my love. It was a gift—a gift that I could give him only in going away for ever myself."
She was silent. The evening was late by now, and the fog about them shut them into a little space, a little island just large enough for their bench, a bit of path, a dim border of railing opposite, and a branch of tree overhead. The muffled sound of cautious traffic was far away. They were wonderfully alone.
Haldicott took one of the hands on which she leaned, and raised it to his lips.
"Sweet, foolish child!" he said.
She turned her head and looked at him; it was almost as if she saw him for the first time—the man, not only Life's personification. They could still see quite clearly each other's faces, and for a long time, gravely, they looked into each other's eyes.
"Don't you see that it's all a dream?" said Haldicott.
"A dream?" Allida repeated. "The reality of a whole year?"
And yet it was a dream to her; even while she had told him of that year it was as if she told of something far behind her, lived through long, long ages ago, in another, a different life.
But she struggled to hold the vanishing pain and beauty of it all—the reality that, unreal, would make her whole being seem like a little handful of thin cloud dying away into emptiness.
"This is a dream," she said, still looking at him, "this, this. What am I doing here?" She rose to her feet, gasping now. "Oh! he will get the letter—and I shall not be dead! I must go at once—at once!"
"To save yourself from being ridiculous? You are going to kill yourself so as to keep a tragic attitude that you've taken before this man who doesn't care for you—an attitude that's really disarranged? Dear—pitiful—enchanting little idiot!" said Haldicott.
He had risen too, and, holding her hands, he still, but not too obviously, kept her near him.
His words were almost cruel in their lightness; his voice had a feeling that, more than any words, any supplication or remonstrance, made her past life seem illusory, and she herself, with it, disappearing into pure nothingness. The world rocked with her. Only the feeling in that voice seemed real.
"Are you sure, are you sure," he said, "that you can never love anybody else? Won't you wait a year to find out? Won't you wait a month? Allida, won't you wait a day?"
"Why do you try to humiliate me?" she gasped, and the tears fell down her face. He almost feared that he had been brutal, that she was going to faint.
"I am not trying to humiliate you. I am trying to wake you. Perhaps the truth will wake you. Will you wait a day, an hour, Allida, and see?"
"See what?"
"That this is a dream; that you wove it out of nothing to fill the emptiness of your sad life; that it would have gathered round the first 'dear sympathetic' person who smiled at you. And after you see that, will you wait and see——" he paused.
"What?" she repeated.
"How much I can make you love me," said Haldicott.
"Why do you mock me?" Allida said. "Why, unless you think me mad?"
"Well, of course you are mad, in a sense; any coroner's inquest would say so. But mock you! I love you, Allida."
Her face had now as wild, as frozen a look on it as the one he had seen, not three hours before, after she had slipped the letter into the pillar-box; but it was with another wildness—of wonder rather than of despair.
"But how can you?" she faltered.
"I can tell you how, but you must wait an hour—more than an hour—to hear. You will wait—Allida?"
"It is pity, to save me."
"To save you? Why, I'd hand you over to the nearest policeman if I only wanted to save you. I do want to save you—for myself."
There drifted through her mind a vision of her little room, where, by this time, she might have been lying on the bed, the empty bottle of poison near her. And that vision of death was now far away, across an abyss, and she was in life, and life held her, claimed her.
"But I can't understand. How is it possible?" She closed her eyes. "My letter," she whispered.
Haldicott put his arm around her and led her down the path.
"Ainslie is a dear fellow," he said. "We will write him another letter as soon as we get in."
She was hardly aware of the walk back to the little house in Mayfair, back to the doorstep where, such aeons ago, she had paused to look at the crying cat. If she had not paused, if she had gone a little earlier to the pillar-box, before the lamp was lighted——Her mind was blurred again. All—all was dream, except that life, near her, was claiming her.
Now they were in the drawing-room, among the shaded lamps, the gilt, the chintz and bric-à-brac.
Haldicott sent for wine and made her drink. He said to the maid that Miss Fraser had felt faint during her walk. For a long time Allida leaned back in the chair where he had put her, shading her eyes with her hand.
"Can you write to Ainslie now?" Haldicott asked at last. "We will send your letter by special messenger."
"Yes, yes; let me write." She drew off her gloves, and Haldicott put paper and pen before her.
She looked up at him.
"What shall I say?" she asked.
This time, uncontrollably, he wanted to laugh; if he did not laugh he must burst out crying; he leaned his elbows on the table as he sat beside her, burying his face on his arms, his shoulders shaking.
Allida sat with the pen in her hand, gazing at him. The nightmare, after all, was too near for her to share his dubious amusement; but that she saw its point as well as he did was evinced in her next question, asked in still the faltering voice:
"Shall I say that I've decided to wait a day?"
Haldicott looked up.
"Thank Heaven, you have a sense of humour. It was my one anxiety about you—all through. Say, dearest Allida, that you are awake."
She looked at him, and now, though she did not smile, her wan face was touched by a pale, responsive radiance.
"It is so strange—to be awake," she murmured, bending to her paper.
But hardly had the first slow line been written when running steps were heard outside, the door was flung open before the amazed maid could reach it, and Oliver Ainslie, white and distraught, darted into the room.
He did not glance at Haldicott. The distraction of his look had only time to break into stupefied thanksgiving before the same rush that had brought him in carried him to Allida. He fell on his knees before her. Clasping her round the waist, he hid his face, crying, "Thank God!"
Allida sat, still holding her pen. She did not look at Ainslie, but across the room at Haldicott, and again, before her look, as of one confronted with her own utter inadequacy to deal with the situation, Haldicott could almost have laughed. But the moment for light interpretations had gone. Anything amusing in the present situation was only grimly so for him. The fairy prince had turned up—a real fairy prince, for a wonder, and three hours of everyday reality had no chance of counting against a year of fairy-tale with such a lasting chapter. After all, it was very beautiful; he was able to see that, thank goodness! Yet Allida's perfectly blank look held him. She was evidently unable to deal single-handed with her dilemma—to explain to her fairy prince why he found her alive rather than dead. Haldicott turned to the mantelpiece and moved, unseeingly, the idiotic silver ornaments upon it, waiting for an opportunity to strike a blow for her deliverance.
Ainslie had lifted his face to hers.
"It was a mistake, that announcement: it's my cousin who is to be married; we have the same name. Oh, Allida! darling Allida! if I had not come in time! That I should have found you—you! And only just in time!"
He became now, perhaps from the blankness of her face, aware more fully of Haldicott's unobtrusive presence.
To the silent query of his eyes she answered:
"He knows—everything."
"He prevented you! He met you and prevented you! I see it all. Haldicott, it is you, isn't it——"
Haldicott reluctantly turned to him.
"My dear fellow, can I ever thank you enough? My dear Haldicott, it's all too astonishing. You know? And why she was going to? The poor, darling child!" He had risen, and, with his arm around Allida's shoulders, was gazing at her.
"I saw Miss Fraser posting her letter to you, and guessed from her expression that something very bad was up," said Haldicott. "I forced her to walk a little with me, and I made her tell me the story; and then I made her see that the truer love for you would be shown in living. She had just recognised that,"—Haldicott smiled at her,—"and she was going to write, and see if she couldn't waylay that letter—spare you the pain of it and, at all events, tell you that she wasn't going to burden you with unfair remorse for the rest of your days. That's about the truth of it all, isn't it?" And he so believed it to be, now, the only essential truth, or, at least, the half-truth that she had better believe in, that his smile had not a touch of bitterness.
Allida still held her pen and still gazed at him.
"Ah! thank God for it all—for the fact that the letter wasn't waylaid, and for the fact that you were, Allida! When I think of it—that gift coming to me—your gift, Allida—and not too late—not too late!"
The young man, in his rapturous thankfulness, indifferent to the guardian presence, raised her hand to his lips, kissing it with a fervour where tears struggled with smiles.
"I'll go now," Haldicott said gently. "I'm so—immensely glad for you both."
But Allida, at this, started from her helpless apathy.
"No, no! Don't—don't go!" she cried. "I can't think. It's all so impossible. Do you mean," and her eyes now went to Ainslie while she drew her hand from his—"do you mean that you love me?"
"Love you, darling Allida? Don't you see it?"
"Because you got the letter," Allida said, as if linking in her mind a chain of evidence. "If you hadn't got it—you would not love me now."
"Forgive me, dearest, for my blindness! I should not have known you if I had not got it."
Allida still looked at him.
"You are just as dear—even dearer than I thought you; you are even more worthy of any love than I dreamed," she said. Her face had lost all apathy, all helplessness. It was with the stricken resolution that it could so strangely show that she pushed back her chair and rose, moving away from the young man, who, enchantingly a fairy prince, gazed at her with adoring eyes.
"It was written in a dream," said Allida, clasping her hands and returning his gaze. "It was written in a dream," she repeated. "It was all—all the whole year—a dream—only a dream."
The trust of his gaze was too deep for understanding to sink through it.
"I am awake now," said Allida; "you are dearer than I ever dreamed, but I am awake."
"When reality comes, the past always seems rather dream-like," Ainslie said. He felt and understood as well, as truly as the other had done. "Darling Allida, I can never be worthy of such a love as yours, but I will try. And now that you are awake, you will find how much better waking is than any dream."
She gasped at this, and retreated before him.
"But I am horrid; I am unbelievable. There isn't any reality. There isn't any love to be worthy of," she cried, and covered her face with her hands.
Ainslie, from her attitude of avowal and abasement, looked his stupefaction at Haldicott, and, for all answer, got a stupefaction as complete.
"What does she mean?" the younger man at length inquired.
"I don't think she knows what she means," Haldicott answered. "I think she is, naturally, overwrought. All feeling, all meaning, is paralyzed. She probably won't mean anything worth listening to for a good while."
They were speaking quite as if Allida, standing there with her hidden face, were a lunatic, the diagnosis of whose harmless case was as yet impossible in the absence of fresh symptoms. But a symptom was forthcoming.
"I mean that," she said. "I don't understand. I can't explain. It's as if something were broken in me. There isn't any love; there never will be. If you can ever forgive me, please tell me so—when you do. It mustn't be more than a dream for you, too—a dream only an hour long."
The two men again exchanged glances, but now with more hesitation.
"But, Allida,"—Ainslie spoke with gentle pain—"I love you. I am not dreaming. Do you mean to say that you can't love me? Do you mean to say that if I had loved you, with no letter to awaken me, you would have thought your love a dream, merely because it was answered?"
"It isn't that. I can't explain. Something broke. You came too late. It's as if I had died—and become almost another person. I know it's unbelievable; I don't understand it myself; but it is true. It is all over, really."
"All over?" dazedly Ainslie repeated. "But why? After those letters? After what you were going to do? Allida!"
She dropped her hands, and once more her eyes went to Haldicott in that look—the appeal of incompetence. But there was more in it: suffering and shame, and a strength that strove to hide them from him.
"Perhaps, my dear Ainslie, you had better go," said Haldicott, "for the present at least." But, in its wonder, his answering look now appealed and was helpless in its incomprehension.
Ainslie stared at her.
"Good-bye," he said at last.
"Oh, good-bye," said Allida, with a fervor of relief that all her humility and pity could not dissemble.
"Good-bye," he repeated, holding her hand, "sweet, strange, cruel Allida."
She put her hand over his and looked clearly at him.
"Remember," she said—"remember how absurd I am."
He was gone. Allida did not turn to Haldicott. She remained looking at the door that had closed on the exit of her "best beloved."
"But why?" said Haldicott. He repeated Ainslie's broken words almost faintly. "When the dream came true—why didn't you take it?"
She made no reply.
"I never meant that because it had been a dream it couldn't become a reality," he went on.
She looked vaguely round the room. Indeed, things swam to her; the nearest support was the mantelpiece. She leaned against it, looking down.
"It's not anything I said—in my efforts to shake you awake? You were in love with him, you know. Weren't you in love with him, Allida?"
"Yes; I suppose so. How can I tell you anything? All I know is that I was dreaming."
"But—why did the dream go?"
"You killed it, perhaps," she said in a colourless voice, leaning her forehead upon her hand, and still looking fixedly down.
"I—I killed it? You mean—that any one who had come then—would have stopped you—made you see your own folly—waked you?"
"They might have stopped me—they might have saved me," she said, and she paused.
"But only I could wake you? Only I could prevent the coming true of your dream?" Again in his wondering, groping voice was the feeling that, like a torch, had led her up from Tartarus—up through blackness to the sweet air again.
She still hid her eyes, not daring to look or trust.
"Allida!" he supplicated.
"Oh," she said in a voice so low that it did not shake—it was as if she just dared to let it sound at all—"was your dream true, or was it only the rope you threw out to me to drag me on shore with?"
Haldicott stretched out his hand to her.
"Do you mean that my three hours of reality count for more than his—than his, backed by your whole year of dreaming? Allida, are you really absurd enough to say that I count for more than Oliver Ainslie?"
She put her weary, ashamed head down on the arm that leaned upon the mantelpiece. She did not take his hand.
"What can I say? Everything I say seems unbelievable. Can anything I say be more absurd than anything else? Yes, you do count for more. You count for everything. Did I love him—or did I only love love? I don't know. I only know that what you said—and are—made it all a dream. And now you will think that I am going to kill myself because you don't love me! But my absurdity is over, I promise you. Really, I am awake."
"Allida, darling," said Haldicott—he went to her and took both her hands, so that she must raise her head and look at him—"if I've made fun of you when I was feeling horribly frightened, and called you ridiculous when I found you as tragic and adorable as you were grotesque, that was the rope. Now I will take an hour, or a day, or a whole week, if necessary, to make you believe it; but I could have committed suicide—I assure you I could—when I saw Oliver Ainslie come into the room."