IV
John stepped forth from behind the rhododendrons, with a kind of devil-may-care, loose, aimless gait, the brim of his Panama pulled brigandishly down over one ear, his hands in the pockets of his coat, his head bent, his brow creased, his eyes sombre, every line and fibre of his person advertising him the prey of morose disgust. But when he saw Maria Dolores, he hastily straightened up, unpocketed his hands, took off his hat (giving it a flap that set the brim at a less truculent angle), and smiled. And when, the instant after, he caught sight of the flying form of Annunziata, his smile turned into a glance of wonder.
"What is the matter with Annunziata? Why is she running with all her legs like that?" he asked.
Maria Dolores had the tiniest catch of laughter. "She is running away from you," she answered.
"From me?" marvelled John. "Je suis donc un foudre de guerre? What on earth is she running away from me for?"
Maria Dolores smiled mysteriously.
"Ah," she said, "she asked me not to tell you. I am in the delicate position of confidante."
"And therefore I hope you'll tell me with the less reluctance," said John, urbanely unprincipled. "A confidante always betrays her confidence to some one,—that's the part of the game that makes it worth while."
Maria Dolores' smile deepened.
"In that pale green frock, on that bank of dark-green moss, with her complexion and her hair,—by Jove, how stunning she is!" thought John, in a commotion.
"Well," she said, "Annunziata ran away because she didn't want you to see that she'd been crying."
John raised his eyebrows, the blue eyes under them becoming expressive of dismay.
"Crying?" he echoed. "The poor little kiddie! What had she been crying about!"
"That is a long story, and involves some of her peculiar theological tenets," said Maria Dolores. "But, in a single word, about your friend."
John's eyebrows descended to their normal level, and drew together.
"Crying about my friend? What friend?" he puzzled.
"Your friend the priest—the man who has been passing the day here with you," explained Maria Dolores.
John gave a start, threw back his head, and eyed her with astonishment.
"That is extraordinary," he exclaimed.
"What?" asked she, lightly glancing up.
"That you should call him my friend the priest," said John, wagging a bewildered head.
"Why? Isn't he a priest? He has all the air of one," said Maria Dolores.
"No; he's an American millionaire," said John, succinctly.
Maria Dolores moved in her place, and laughed.
"Dear me!" she said, "I did strike wide of the mark. An American millionaire should cultivate a less deceptive appearance. With that thin, shaven face of his, and that look of an early Christian martyr in his eyes, and the dark clothes he wears, wherever he goes he's sure to be mistaken for a priest."
"Yes," said John, with a kind of grimness; "that's what's extraordinary. He comes of a long line of bigoted Protestants, he's a reincarnation of some of his stern old Puritan forebears, and you find that he looks like their pet abomination, a Romish priest. Well, you have a prophetic eye."
Maria Dolores gazed up inquiringly. "A prophetic eye?" she questioned.
"I merely mean," said John, with thaumaturgic airiness, "that the man is on his way to Rome to study for the priesthood." And he gave a thaumaturgic toss to his bearded chin.
"Oh!" cried Maria Dolores, and leaned back against her eucalyptus tree, and laughed again.
John, however, dejectedly shook his head, and gloomed.
"Laugh if you will," he said, "though it seems to me as far as possible from a laughing matter, and I think Annunziata chose the better part when she cried."
"I beg your pardon," said Maria Dolores, perhaps a trifle stiffly. "I was only laughing at the coincidence of my having supposed him to be a priest, and then learning that, though he isn't, he is going to become one. I was not laughing at the fact itself. Nor was it," she added, her stiffness leaving her, and a little glimmer of amusement taking its place, "that fact which made Annunziata cry."
"I dare say not," responded John, "seeing that she couldn't possibly have known it. But it might well have done so. It's enough to bring tears to the eyes of a brazen image." He angrily jerked his shoulders.
"What?" cried Maria Dolores, surprised, rebukeful. "That a man is to become a holy priest?"
"Oh, no," said John. "That fact alone, detached from special circumstances, might be a subject for rejoicing. But the fact that this particular man, in his special circumstances, is to become a priest—well, I simply have no words to express my feeling." He threw out his arms, in a gesture of despair. "I'm simply sick with rage and pity. I could gnash my teeth and rend my garments."
"Mercy!" cried Maria Dolores, stirring. "What are the special circumstances?"
"Oh, it's a grisly history," said John. "It's a tale of the wanton, ruthless, needless, purposeless sacrifice of two lives. It's his old black icy Puritan blood. Winthorpe—that's his name—had for years been a freethinker, far too intellectual and enlightened, and that sort of thing, you know, to believe any such old wives' tale as the Christian Religion. He and I used to have arguments, tremendous ones, in which, of course, neither in the least shook the other. Darwin and Spencer, with a dash of his native Emerson, were religion enough for him. Then this morning he arrived here, and said, 'Congratulate me. A month ago I was received into the Church.'"
Maria Dolores looked up, animated, her dark eyes sparkling.
"How splendid!" she said.
"Yes," agreed John, "so I thought. 'Congratulate me,' he said. I should think I did congratulate him,—with all my heart and soul. But then, naturally, I asked him how it had happened, what had brought it to pass."
"Yes—?" prompted Maria Dolores, as he paused.
"Well," said John, his face hardening, "he thereupon proceeded to tell me in his quiet way, with his cool voice (it's like smooth-flowing cold water), absolutely the most inhuman story I have ever had to keep my patience and listen to."
"What was the story?" asked Maria Dolores.
"If you can credit such inhumanity, it was this," answered John. "It seems that he fell in love—with a girl in Boston, where he lives. And what's more, and worse, the girl fell in love with him. So there they were, engaged. But she was a Catholic, and his state of unbelief was a cause of great grief to her. So she pleaded with him, and persuaded, till, merely to comfort her, and without the faintest suspicion that his scepticism could be weakened, he promised to give the Catholic position a thorough reconsideration, to read certain books, and to put himself under instruction with a priest: which he did. Which he did, if you please, with the result, to his own unutterable surprise, that one fine day he woke up and discovered that he'd been convinced, that he believed."
"Yes?" said Maria Dolores, eagerly. "Yes—? And then? And the girl?"
"Ah," said John, with a groan, "the girl That's the pity of it. That's where his black old Puritan blood comes in. Blood? It isn't blood—it's some fluid form of stone—it's flint dissolved in vinegar. The girl! Mind you, she loved him, they were engaged to be married. Well, he went to her, and said, 'I have been converted. I believe in the Christian religion—your religion. But I can't believe a thing like that, and go on living as I lived when I didn't believe it,—go on living as if it weren't true, or didn't matter. It does matter—it matters supremely—it's the only thing in the world that matters. I can't believe it, and marry—marry, and live in tranquil indifference to it. No, I must put aside the thought of marriage, the thought of personal happiness. I must sell all I have and give it to the poor, take up my cross and follow Him. I am going to Rome to study for the priesthood.' Imagine," groaned John, stretching out his hands, "imagine talking like that to a woman you are supposed to love, to a woman who loves you." And he wrathfully ground his heel into the earth.
Maria Dolores looked serious.
"After all, he had to obey his conscience," she said. "After all, he was logical, he was consistent."
"Oh, his conscience! Oh, consistency!" cried John, with an intolerant fling of the body. "At bottom it's nothing better than common self-indulgence, as I took the liberty of telling him to his face. It's the ardour of the convert, acting upon that acid solution of flint which takes the place of blood in his veins, and causing sour puritanical impulses, which (like any other voluptuary) he immediately gives way to. It's nothing better than unbridled passion. Conscience, indeed! Where was his conscience when it came to her? Think of that poor girl—that poor pale girl—who loved him. Oh, Mother of Mercy!"
He moved impatiently three steps to the left, three steps to the right, beating the palm of one hand with the back of the other.
"What did she do? How did she take it?" asked Maria Dolores.
"What she ought to have done," said John, between his teeth, "was to scratch his eyes out. What she did do, as he informed me with a seraphic countenance, was not merely to approve of everything he said, but to determine to do likewise. So, while he's on his way to Rome, to get himself tonsured and becassocked, she's scrubbing the floors of an Ursuline convent, as a novice. And there are two lives spoiled." He shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, no, no," contended Maria Dolores, earnestly, shaking her head, "not spoiled. On the contrary. It is sad, in a way, if you like, but it is very beautiful, it is heroic. Their love must have been a very beautiful love, that could lead them to such self-sacrifice. Two lives given to God."
"Can't people give their lives to God without ceasing to live?" cried John. "If marriage is a sacrament, how can they better give their lives to God than by living sanely and sweetly in Christian marriage? But these people withdraw from life, renounce life, shirk and evade the life that God had prepared for them and was demanding of them. It's as bad as suicide. Besides, it implies such a totally perverted view of religion. Religion surely is given to us to help us to live, to show us how to live, to enable us to meet the difficulties, emergencies, responsibilities of life. But these people look upon their religion as a mandate to turn their backs on the responsibilities of life, and scuttle away. And as for love! Well, she no doubt did love, poor lady. But Winthorpe! No. When a man loves he doesn't send his love into a convent, and go to Rome to get himself becassocked." He gave his head a nod of finality.
"That, I fancy, is a question of temperament," said Maria Dolores. "Your friend has the ascetic temperament. And it does not by any means follow that he loves less because he resigns his love. What you call an inhuman story seems to me a wonderfully noble one. I saw your friend this morning, when he and you were walking together, and I said to myself, 'That man looks as if he had listened to the Counsels of Perfection. His vocation shines through him.' I think you should reconcile yourself to his accepting it."
"Well," said John, on the tone of a man ready to change the subject, "I owe him at least one good mark. His account of his 'heart-state' led me to examine my own, and I discovered that I am in love myself,—which is a useful thing to know."
"Oh?" said Maria Dolores, with a little effect of reserve.
"Yes," said John, nothing daunted, "though unlike his, mine is an unreciprocated flame, and unavowed."
"Ah?" said Maria Dolores, reserved indeed, but not without an undertone of sympathy.
"Yes," said John, playing with fire, and finding therein a heady mixture of fearfulness and joy. "The woman I love doesn't dream I love her, and dreams still less of loving me,—for which blessed circumstance may Heaven make me truly thankful."
The sentiment sounding unlikely, Maria Dolores raised doubtful eyes. They shone into John's; his drank their light; and something violent happened in his bosom.
"Oh—?" she said.
"Yes," said he, thinking what adorable little hands she had, as they lay loosely clasped in her lap, thinking how warm they would be, and fragrant; thinking too what fun it was, this playing with fire, how perilous and exciting, and how egotistical he must seem to her, and how nothing on earth should prevent him from continuing the play. "Yes," he said, "it's a circumstance to be thankful for, because, like Winthorpe himself, though for different reasons, I'm unable to contemplate marriage." His voice sank sorrowfully, and he made a sorrowful movement.
"Oh—?" said Maria Dolores, her sympathy becoming more explicit.
"Winthorpe's too beastly puritanical—and I'm too beastly poor," said he.
"Oh," she murmured. Her eyes softened; her sympathy deepened to compassion.
"She must certainly put me down as the most complacent egotist in two hemispheres, so to regale her with unsolicited information about myself," thought John; "but surely it would need six hemispheres to produce another pair of eyes as beautiful as hers."—"Yes," he said, "I should be 'looking up' if I asked even a beggar-maid to marry me."
Maria Dolores' beautiful eyes became thoughtful as well as compassionate.
"But men who are poor work and earn money," she said, on the tone that young women adopt when the spirit moves them to preach to young men. And when the spirit does move them to that, things may be looked upon as having advanced an appreciable distance, the ball may be looked upon as rolling.
"So I've heard," said John, his head in the clouds. "It must be dull business."
Maria Dolores dimly smiled. "Do you do no work?" she asked.
"I've never had time," said John. "I've been too busy enjoying life."
"Oh," said Maria Dolores, with the intonation of reproach.
"Yes," said he, "enjoying the Humour, the Romance, the Beauty of it,—and combine the three together, make a chord of 'em, you get the Divinity. Or, to take a lower plane, the world's a stage, and life's the drama. I could never leave off watching and listening long enough to do any work."
"But do you not wish to play a part in the drama, to be one of the actors?" asked his gentle homilist. "Have you no ambition?"
"Not an atom," he easily confessed. "The part of spectator seems to me by far the pleasantest. To sit in the stalls and watch the incredible jumble-show, the reason-defying topsy-turvydom of it, the gorgeous, squalid, tearful, and mirthful pageantry, the reckless inconsequences, the flagrant impossibilities; to watch the Devil ramping up and down like a hungry lion, and to hear the young-eyed cherubim choiring from the skies: what better entertainment could the heart of man desire?"
"But are we here merely to be entertained?" she sweetly preached, while John's blue eyes somewhat mischievously laughed, and he felt it hard that he couldn't stop her rose-red mouth with kisses. "Aren't we here to be, as the old-fashioned phrase goes, of use in the world? Besides, now that you are in love, surely you will never sit down weakly, and say, 'I am too poor to marry,' and so give up your love,—like your friend Winthorpe indeed, but for ignoble instead of noble motives. Surely you will set to work with determination, and earn money, and make it possible to marry. Or else your love must be a very poor affair." And her adorable little hands, as they lay ("like white lilies," thought John) upon the pale-green fabric of her gown, unclasped themselves, opened wide for an instant, showing the faint pink of their palms, then lightly again interlaced their fingers.
He laughed. "You are delicious," he said to her fervently, in silence. "My love is all right," he said aloud. "I love her as much as it is humanly possible to love. I love her with passion, with tenderness; with worship, with longing; I love her with wonder; I love her with sighs, with laughter. I love her with all I have and with all I am. And I owe one to Winthorpe for having unwittingly opened my eyes to my condition. But earning money? I've a notion it's difficult. What could I do?"
"Have you no profession?" she asked.
"Not the ghost of one," said he, with nonchalance.
"But is there no profession that appeals to you—for which you feel that you might have a taste?" Her dark eyes were very earnest.
"Not the ghost of one," said he, dissembling his amusement. "Professions—don't they all more or less involve sitting shut up in stuffy offices, among pigeon-holes full of dusty and futile papers, doing tiresome tasks for the greater glory of other people, like a slave in the hold of a galley? No, if I'm to work, I must work at something that will keep me above decks—something that will keep me out of doors, in touch with the air and the earth. I might become an agricultural labourer,—but that's not very munificently paid; or a farmer,—but that would require perhaps more capital than I could command, and anyhow the profits are uncertain. I've an uncle who's a bit of a farmer, and year in, year out, I believe he makes a loss. 'Well, what's left? ... Ah, a gardener. I don't think I should half mind being a gardener."
Maria Dolores looked as if she weren't sure whether or not to take him seriously.
"A gardener? That's not very munificently paid either, is it?" she suggested, trying her ground.
"Alas, I fear not," sighed John. Then he made a grave face. "But would you have me entirely mercenary? Money isn't everything here below."
Maria Dolores smiled. She saw that for the moment at least he was not to be taken seriously.
"True," she agreed, "though it ran in my mind that to earn money, so that you might marry, was your only motive for going to work at all."
"I had forgotten that," said the light-minded fellow. "I was thinking of occupations that would keep one in touch with the earth. A gardener's occupation keeps him constantly in the charmingest possible sort of touch with her, and the most intimate."
"Do they call the earth her in English?" asked Maria Dolores. "I thought they said it."
"I'm afraid, for the greater part, they do," answered John. "But it's barbarous of them, it's unfilial. Our brown old mother,—fancy begrudging her the credit of her sex! Our brown and green old mother; our kindly, bounteous mother; our radiant, our queenly mother, old, and yet perennially, radiantly young. Look at her now," he cried, circling the garden with his arm, and pointing to the farther landscape, "look at her, shining in her robes of pearl and gold, shining and smiling,—one would say a bride arrayed for the altar. Such is her infinite variety. Her infinite variety, her infinite abundance, the fragrance and the sweetness of her,—oh, I could fall upon my face and worship her, like a Pagan of Eld. The earth and all that grows and lives upon her, the blossoming tree, the singing bird,—I could build temples to her."
"And the crawling snake?" put in Maria Dolores, a gleam at the bottom of her eyes.
"The crawling snake," quickly retorted John, "serves a most useful purpose. He establishes the raison d'être of man. Man and his heel are here to crush the serpent's head."
Maria Dolores leaned back, softly laughing.
"Your infatuation for the earth is so great," she said, "mightn't your lady-love, if she suspected it, be jealous?"
"No," said John, "it is the earth that might be jealous, for, until I saw my lady-love, she was the undivided mistress of my heart. For the rest, my lady-love enjoys, upon this point, my entire confidence. I have kept nothing from her."
"That is well," approved Maria Dolores. "And the sky and the sea," still softly laughing, she asked, "have they no place in your affections?
"The sky is her tiring-maiden, and I love the sky for that," said John. "'Tis the sky that clothes her in her many-coloured raiment, and holds the light whereby her beauty is made manifest. And the sea is a jewel that she bears upon her bosom,—a magical jewel, whence, with the sky's aid, she draws the soft rain that is her scent and her cosmetic. 'Fragrant the fertile earth after soft showers.' Do you know, I could almost forgive the dour and detestable Milton everything for the sake of those seven words. They show that in the sense of smell he had at least one attribute of humanity."
Maria Dolores' dark eyes were quizzical.
"The dour and detestable Milton?" she exclaimed. "Poor Milton! What has he done to merit such anathema?
"It isn't what he has done, but what he was," said John. "That he was dour nobody will deny, dour and sour and inhuman. Ask those unfortunate, long-suffering daughters of his, if you doubt it. They could tell you stories. But he was worse. He was a scribe and a Pharisee, a pragmatical, self-righteous, canting old scribe and Pharisee. And he was worse still, and still worse yet. He was—what seems to me to-day the worstest thing unhung—he was a Puritan. Like Winthorpe's, his blood was black and icy and vinegarish. Like Winthorpe—But there. I mustn't abuse Winthorpe any more, and I must try to forgive Milton. Milton wrote seven good words, and Winthorpe unwittingly opened a lover's eyes to his condition."
He paused, and smiled down upon her, and his newly opened (and very blue) blue eyes said much. Her eyes were dreaming on the landscape, where it shone in pearl and gold. However, as she gave no sign of finding his conversation wearisome, he took heart, and continued.
"For when he told me how he had put his love away, never again to see her, and how at that moment she would be scrubbing floors (or taking the discipline, perhaps?) in a convent of Ursulines, suddenly, and without any action of the will on my part, there rose before me the vision of a certain woman;—a woman I knew a little, admired immensely, very much liked, but didn't for an instant suppose I was seriously in love with. And involuntarily, with the vision of her before me, I asked myself whether, mutatis mutandis, I could have done as he had, and in a flash I saw that I could not,—that not for the wealth of Ormus and of Ind could I or would I give her up, if once I had her. So, by that token, and by the uncommon wrath with which his tale inflamed me," John, with a rhetorical flourish, perorated, "I discovered that I loved." And again his eyes said much.
Hers were still on the prospect.
"Yet if you only know her a little, how can you love her?" she asked, in a musing voice.
"Did I say I only know her a little?" asked John. "I know her a great deal. I know her through and through. I know that she is pure gold, pure crystal; that she is made of all music, all light, all sweetness, and of all shadow and silence and mystery too, as women should be. I know that earth holds naught above her. I do not care to employ superlatives, so, to put it in the form of an understatement, I know that she is simply and absolutely perfect. If you could see her! If you could see her eyes, her deep-glowing, witty, humorous, mischievous, innocent eyes, with the soul that burns in them, the passion that sleeps. If you could see the black soft masses of her hair, and her white brow, and the pale-rose of her cheeks, and the red-rose of her lovely smiling mouth. If you could see her figure, slender and strong, and the grace and pride of her carriage,—the carriage of an imperial princess. If you could see her hands,—they lie in her lap like languid lilies. And her voice,—'tis the colour of her mouth and the glow of her eyes made audible. And if you could whisper to yourself her melodious and thrice adorable name. I know her a great deal. When I said that I only knew her a little, I meant it in the sense that she only knows me a little,—which after all, alas, for practical purposes comes to the same thing."
He had spoken with emphasis, with fervour, his pink face animated and full of intention. Maria Dolores kept her soft-glowing eyes resolutely away from him, but I think the soul that burned in them (if not the passion that slept) was vaguely troubled. Qui pane d'amour—how does the French proverb run? Did she vaguely feel perhaps that the seas they were sailing were perilous? Anyhow, as John saw with sinking heart, she was at the point of putting an end to their present conjunction,—she was preparing to rise. He would have given worlds to offer a helping hand, but (however rich in worlds) he was, for the occasion, poor in courage. When love comes in at the door, assurance as like as not will fly out of the window. So she rose unaided.
"Let us hope," she said, giving him a glance in which he perceived an under-gleam as of not unfriendly mockery, "that she will soon come to know you better."
"Heaven forbid!" cried he, with a fine simulation of alarm. "It is upon her ignorance of my true character that I base such faint hopes as I possess of some day winning her esteem."
Maria Dolores laughed, nodded, and lightly moved away.
"My son," said John to himself, "you steered precious close to the wind. You had best be careful."
And then he was conscious of a sudden change in things. The garden smiled about him, the valley below laughed in the breeze, the blackcaps sang, the many windows of the Castle glistened in the sun; but their beauty and their pleasantness had departed, had retired with her into the long, low, white-walled, red-roofed pavilion. He was conscious of a sudden change in things, and of a sudden acute and bitter depression within himself.
"These are great larks," he said; "great larks while they last,—but what's the good of them in the end? What do they lead to? What's the good of coquetting with blisses that can't be yours?" And he breathed a prodigious sigh. "When shall I see her again?" he asked, and thereupon was seized by his old terror—his terror of yesterday, though it seemed to him a terror he had known all his life—lest he should never see her again. "She's only a visitor. What's to prevent her leaving this very night?"
The imagination was intolerable. He entered the Castle court, and climbed the staircase of honour, and rambled through the long suites of great empty rooms, empty of everything save the memory of the past and the portraits of the dead, there, if he might, for a time at least, to lose himself and to forget her.