Sir Harry: A Love Story

by Archibald Marshall

How beautiful he looked as he lay there, his head slightly turned on the pillow and one arm and hand along his side on the counterpane—and how innocent! How she loved him for that beauty and innocence! She felt it as uplifting her from the lower plane of unrest and petulance upon which she was apt to move. She blessed him for the calming, purifying thoughts which he brought to her, and took comfort to herself in the thoughts that there must be something good in herself since it was partly owing to her influence that he was so free from evil. Yes, he was hers; her own dear child whom she loved, and who loved her. She had set herself aside and allowed another to direct his life and hers. Soon he would be free from that tutelage, but not from the bonds that her love had woven around him. She would reap her reward. Oh, it was a blessed thing to bear children, and after long years to have them as a prop and stay, as well as a solace. Not for many years would he leave her, in spirit, though in body they would sometimes be parted. She must be more to him now than she had ever been, and when the time came to give him up to another she would not complain, since she would have had him so perfectly for a time.

It was nearly two o'clock when Harry awoke, suddenly, and in complete possession of himself. He might have thought that he had not slept at all, but that the moon shining in at his window told him the hour as plainly as if it had been called in his ear.

He sprang out of bed and began to put on his clothes, but paused for a moment, asking himself why he was in such a hurry to do so.

As happens so often in sleep, the perplexities with which he had lain down seemed to have resolved themselves without conscious process. He had wanted to ask himself what had happened to him, but it seemed now as if some romantic mist had cleared away from his brain and nothing in particular had happened to him—nothing, at least, that needed any careful process of self-examination. He had met a very charming and friendly girl, and he was going to meet her again in the day that was already moving towards dawn. That would be very agreeable, but what was there in it to have put him into the state in which he had lived through the evening?

But, as the thought of meeting her again with half the hours of darkness already gone—presented itself to him, he felt again the glow of pleasure and anticipation. Yes, he wanted to think about her, and he could think best about her out in the open.

He dressed quickly and dropped from his window onto the grass, which was not more than ten feet or so below him. And now he seemed to be more master of himself, as he passed across a strip of moonlit green and into the dimness of the wood. He was reminded of the night in which the vision of the fairies dancing had come to him. Now it was full summer and then spring had only been on its way; his long-trained sense marked the difference in a thousand little signs. But that had been a night of silver moonshine, as this was. The contact with nature was clear on such quiet, illumined nights as this.

Viola!

She grew slowly upon him as he trod the soft grass or the dry crackling beech-mast. Her face, somewhat to his surprise, he could not call up before him, though he tried to see it with his inward eye. But he dwelt upon the slight supple figure that had moved beside him so freely and so gracefully. It gave him pleasure to recall her slender hand, which had lain in his, and he remembered her feet and ankles in their neat brown shoes and stockings, and the fall of her skirt over them, and the little hat of soft white straw with its twisted ribbon.

Again he was a little puzzled at the effect these memories had upon him. He had an eye for beauty of animate form. He loved the grace of certain animals; he and Wilbraham together had taken delight in pictures of Greek statuary and vase painting, with special reference to that beauty; he had admired the quick, clean limbs of the two children with whom he had been so much, and of other children of the village, older or younger. But it had been purely an æsthetic pleasure, and had brought with it none of the emotion with which the thought of Viola moved him.

He was a little frightened of this emotion and inclined to resist it; but something out of the soft night whispered to him that its current was one with all the emotions upon which he had fed, and grown in feeding. It was part of the secret which he had only half divined at the end of that vigil which seemed to have marked a stage in his life.