II
That afternoon, passing through the hall on my way to Trueberry’s room, I was arrested upon no direct effort of will by the face of the pale blonde girl, looking at me so vividly out of canvas through the dear glance my own ached with longing to behold. Standing thus, my ear detected with a thrill of recognition the light footfall behind me. I turned, and the sight was water to a man fevered with thirst. All morning I had wondered if a transient state of nerves might not be accountable for an effect perhaps over-excited imagination had exaggerated. But this second meeting was full confirmation of the agonising power of Brases over me. I rejoiced in this added proof of my servitude. Because of her presence, life revealed deeper meaning, earth fresher hues. My heart fluttered on the topmost crest of emotion, and tossed on a violent wave of joy. The awful quietude of our full long gaze held me tranced in silence.
‘You found your friend better,’ she said, and her voice in that tense moment was like the bursting of the surges upon their swell. My eyes must have told it with fatal illumination, had hers not absently fallen on a portrait. ‘I should gladly press you to stay here with him, but I fear you would find it dull. The house, I know, is gloomy, and I see no one. But if you can face the dulness for your friend’s sake, if it would lessen your anxiety——’
‘You are too kind,’ I burst out eagerly, for some inexplicable reason repelled by the suggestion of Trueberry and myself together under her roof. ‘My friend is in the best of hands, and I should not dream of trespassing so far. Besides, I enjoy my walks to and from the cottage.’
What an idiot I was, to be sure, and what a miserably inadequate refusal! Yet could I give my real reason? That a sharp-witted man of the world, an intelligent French writer of some fame, should be driven to inane stuttering at the greatest moment of his existence, was surely a grotesque fatality. I saw with a shock the contraction of the delicate brows, and the surprised interrogation of the proud glance she levelled at me. Then pride and surprise ebbed back to their still depths, and the brows smoothed by sheer effort of will, I divined, and she smiled coldly, a little austere smile, remote and frosted like a ray on ice. A woman of my own land would have read below the commonplace words the deeper melody of the heart’s unuttered eloquence. But Brases, so untutored, so wrapped in her musing and undiscerning solitude, had not this tact of sympathy, this subtle divination, this keen scent of sex. Her simplicity was mournful and gentle, but not penetrative nor scrutinising. Mute fervour I saw would leave her untroubled, and with Trueberry near, I feared to hope her regard would ever gleam and drop in glad surrender at my coming, or her pulses quicken to the bidding of my touch. I felt crushed, out of reach of comfort, and resolved no more to tread that haunting pathway from the little rocky plateau to this sombre valley, but to go out with my immeasurable pain into the soothing limitlessness of earth and sea and air upon the moors. Yet there was the misery of it—I could not command my will. I felt the folly of it; I apprehended the misery of a rivalry between Trueberry and me,—self at odds with the finest friendship that ever knitted men together. But I as well knew that my hunger to-morrow for Brases would be greater even than to-day, and a starving man will gnaw at straw when you refuse him bread.
I found Trueberry half raised upon his pillow, a pink flush like the reflection of a flame upon his pallid cheek, and the blue of his eyes burning darkly.
‘Have you seen her?’ he asked, meeting my hand affectionately.
‘Yes.’
The dull, brief tone must have struck him as implied negation of his visible enthusiasm, for he scanned my face quickly, and asked in a surprised voice—
‘Don’t you find her beautiful, Gontran?’
‘Most beautiful,’ I replied, with grim emphasis.
I sat down, and took up a volume of The Ring and the Book, which lay on a little table close to an arm-chair at the foot of the bed.
‘No, no, Gontran. Not that, pray. She has been reading it to me,’ he shouted, as if a wound were pressed.
I looked at him queerly, I felt; how far he had travelled already, when it was ‘she’ with him, and he could voice so candidly the trouble of blood and being. Or else my passion was the deeper, and ran in a mysterious channel, where speech is desecration, thought hardly delicate enough to follow its intangible flow.
‘You remember those lovely lines, beginning—
“First infancy pellucid as a pearl”?
‘They might have been written of her,’ he continued, in his dear, fresh, expansive way. ‘Pompilia, infant, child, maid, woman, wife, the ideal of our earth. Why, it was surely of her that Browning was dreaming.’
I continued in silence to finger the book her hand had touched, and my eye fell on that chivalrous passage, clear even to my foreign eye in spite of antipathy to Browning’s roughness:
‘And if they recognised in a critical flash
From the Zenith, each the other, her need of him,
His need of—say a woman to perish for,
The regular way of the world, yet break no vow,
Do no harm, save to himself—?’
Sully Prudhomme, I thought, would have expressed the idea more exquisitely. I preferred the soft musical murmur of that unapproachable little poem, the breathing soul of a tenderer chivalry:
‘Si je pouvais aller lui dire,
Elle est à vous et ne m’inspire,
Plus rien, même plus d’amitié
Je n’en ai plus pour cette ingrate.
Mais elle est pâle, délicate,
Ayez soin d’elle par pitié.
Écoutez-moi sans jalousie,
Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer.
Je sais comment sa main repousse,
Mais pour ceux qu’elle aime elle est douce,
Ne la faites jamais pleurer.
Je pourrais vivre avec l’idée
Qu’elle est chérie et possédée
Non par moi mais selon mon cœur.
Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes,
Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.’
But the virile sweep of the sentiment Browning revealed had something of ocean’s strength and immensity that aroused the sea-born Breton under the extraneous veneer of culture. A Parisian cannot escape the charm of classic polish, but now and then with us the Celt runs riot, and sentiment rebels against the leash of form.
Under the cynicism of the analytical novelist’s sacrifice, renunciation, the conquering strife of passion over duty, noble failure, the greatly borne martyrdom of humanity, are the things that have ever appealed to me. I have always desired to love and be loved in the cleansing fire of pain rather than in the facile yielding to the senses. So that there really was no logical reason why I should whimper and mope because Brases had not dropped into my arms by some magnetic influence. And even if she chose elsewhere! So long as her choice was justified by happiness, what need had I to complain? I murmured Sully Prudhomme’s lines, of a more subtle beauty of feeling than Browning’s, and Trueberry cocked a wistful brow.
‘Repeat them louder, they sound so beautiful,’ he urged, and I repeated them.
‘“Car l’aile de sa fantaisie,
N’a fait, hélas, que m’effleurer,”’
he cried, with water in his eyes. ‘Could you picture yourself, Gontran, saying that of the woman you loved to the man who had gained her!’
‘I hope so,’ I replied, smiling. ‘The bitter would be so sweet. And then the magnificent retort upon broken hopes:
“Méchante enfant qui m’abandonnes,
Vois le chagrin que tu me donnes?
Je ne puis rien pour ton bonheur.”’
I spoke lightly, like the cynical boulevardier, while inwardly I was bleeding. But Trueberry, bereft, by weakness and love, of all power of scrutiny or penetration, saw nothing of my suffering. He was in the absorbing paradise of a new-born claim, in the unconscious premonition of response, and smiled vaguely at me, dear fellow, as if a strong but agreeable opiate had drugged him.
Trueberry was so improved next morning that I found the children playing in his room. They were a little lad and girl in the toddling age, prettily named Brendan and Mave. I have never seen children so well-bred, so charming to look at and to talk to. The boy had thick brown curls, with a reddish gleam in them, and his mother’s eyes, while the girl had her gold hair, with big eyes, like the leaf of a purple pansy. They lisped, as only angels ought to lisp, and fetched your heart between your eyelashes from very delight and sympathy.
While we played and chattered, and those pretty creatures rolled over Trueberry, the waves of their embroidered skirts entangled in his beard and neck, they like white balls, taking their falls so good-humouredly, and then on the ground, standing like birds to shake out their snowy plumage, the door opened, and Brases smiled upon the threshold.
Trueberry’s pinched expressive face waved pink, and gazing blue went instantly to black. I stood grasping the back of my chair, and saw Brases for the first time not icily aloof, not throned on dead dreams. There was a human flame under her pallor, and her smile had an approachable womanly sweetness. It deepened the grey of her eyes, and lent an ineffable softness to her sad mouth. The curves of the lips pleaded like a child’s for tenderness and unexacting devotion. I could have bent a knee to her in a rush of feeling less lofty than homage, and said: ‘Bid me suffer, dear one, so that you are happy.’ To my surprise, she shook hands with me, in cordial frankness, hoped I was pleased with the condition of my friend, and then bent and took Trueberry’s hand with a very different air. Of course, he was her invalid, and no woman worth the name is ever the same to the sick and the strong. For Brases to look at me like that, and hold my hand with that gentle imperiousness, I, too, should have to be wounded and stretched under her roof on my back.
She had no Irish fluency, and her speech was curiously strained and elaborated, without, however, any obvious affectation. The words came deliberately, and yet with a fearless reticence. It was repression, not secrecy. Life with her was a tale of baffled personal hopes, of unmeasured pain, of nature overcome, of lower impulses proudly unrecognised, of cold allegiance to duty, and the unfathomable tenderness of maternity. Her children, as she told us, with their little arms about her neck, were her one joy.
‘I fear I spoil them,’ she added; ‘but I strive to make them think of others, while they, alas! so well know that I only think of them.’
Mave, I was glad to see, was the mother’s favourite. At all times I like a woman to love her girls best; the preference breathes in my esteem, so essentially of distinction and lovableness. But æsthetic gratification here was sharpened by the fact that Mave’s father had never seen her. To me Mave was all her mother’s child, for which reason, during my visits, I never failed to coax her on my knee, where she would sit at first in a stiffened attitude of good behaviour, until she got used to my dark, foreign face, and gleefully ran to greet me. While she nestled and gurgled in my arms, lisping her excited speech, Trueberry and Brendan chanted nursery rhymes, taught each other surprising verses, and told one another fairy tales.
It was the day Trueberry first got up that conjecture stabbed me with the jealous knife of certainty. Despair closed round me like a physical grasp, and I toppled rudely over my airy ideal of renunciation and self-effacement. I had dwelt with such soothing vanity of spirit on my gracious bending to the happiness of my sovereign lady and my friend, and when I saw them then exchange a long, grave, shining gaze of full confession, and noted the enchanting air of command with which she waved him back to his chair, when he stood to greet her, the deeps of nature burst their barriers.
Unstrung and irritable from the strain of my false position, I walked rapidly up to the cottage, asking myself whether I should go or stay, and unable to decide which would cost me more. My host was smoking a pipe outside, in placid contemplation of a patch of potatoes. He directed secretive eyeshot sideways on me in sharp inquiry, then bent his glance again upon the green leaves, and meditatively kicked away a stone.
‘’Tisn’t good for a young man of your years, sir, to lead this sort of life,’ he said. ‘Foreign cities are gay places, I’ve heard tell. ’Tis among them you ought to be. The moors, and the rocks, and the sea, the praties I plant and eat, and the salmon I catch, satisfy the likes of me, but I’m thinking, sir, ’tis poor work for you, counting the stars be night, and crying for the moon be day.’
‘A man might be worse employed than watching the stars,’ I replied, ignoring his rebuke.
‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a useless sort of thing.’
‘So it seems, viewed in any light—rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to stay?’
‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away. You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you. But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’
His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.
‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself has no business to go hankering after one as has known deception and wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know. Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and ’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on us.’
‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’
I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight, pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart, or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude of unacknowledged, unexacting devotion. I was a poor exasperated human wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of it. I had craved so little,—the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish, of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.
Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity and our intelligence.