Where the Path Breaks

by C. N. Williamson; A. M. Williamson

The difference in time between Santa Barbara and Gorston Old Hall was about twelve hours; and fifteen days ago, he had posted his letter. It was just possible, even in war-time delays, that it had reached her, he calculated, as the eyes of the portrait held him spellbound.

When the picture was finished, he took its measurements and ordered a glass to protect the fragile colors, delicate as the microscopic plumes of a moth’s wing. But he could not content himself with any design for a frame. He went to shop after shop, and even traveled as far as Los Angeles, in the hope of finding the right thing. But nothing was right as a frame for Barbara. The handsomer a frame was, the more conventional and banal it looked in Denin’s eyes, when he tried to associate it with her. At last he decided to carve out the frame with his own hands, from the beautiful fluted redwood of the great sequoias of California: wonderful, ruddy wood with an auburn sheen and a wave running through it like that of Barbara’s hair.

The idea seized him and brought extraordinary delight. He took three lessons from an astonished cabinet-maker of whom he was able to buy the redwood, and then with confidence and joy began his work. In two days it was finished, and the picture in place. It was almost as if he had built a house for Barbara, and she had come to live in it, and look out of the door at him.

The portrait was half life-size; and rimmed in its rich fluted setting of redwood a thousand years old, it was of exactly the right length and shape to hang on the door of child-Barbara’s bedroom—his bedroom now. It was for that place he had planned it, because in these days he had lost the unbroken privacy of his first weeks at the Mirador. John Sanbourne had been “discovered,” and without churlishness was unable to remain any longer a hermit. He went nowhere, except for the long, solitary walks he loved, and refused all invitations, but he could not lock his gate against the three or four kindly persons who ventured with the best intentions, to “dig him up” and “keep him from being lonely.” His memory-portrait of Barbara was too strikingly like her, in its strange impressionist way, not to be in danger of recognition by some old acquaintance of her childhood. Besides, a picture of his love, even if unrecognized, was far too sacred to be seen by stranger eyes. In Denin’s bedroom the smiling visitant was safe. No one but himself ever went there. And with the heavy frame firmly clamped to the door panels, the effect of the girl gazing out into the room was thrillingly intensified for Denin. Thus hung, the portrait was opposite his camp bed; and when he waked at sunrise, Barbara and he looked at each other.

The picture had been in its place for a day when her letter came, a very thick letter; and with the envelope uncut he went up to sit before her likeness and read what she had to say to John Sanbourne.

“You are a lifeline thrown to me!” he read. “I grasp it thankfully. I wonder if you will think me a silly, sentimental creature, if I tell you that even before I opened your letter a strong golden current seemed to come out through the envelope into my fingers, and up my arm? If you were just an ordinary friend, a man, living near me, I shouldn’t be able to say this to you, or tell you that I put your letter like a talisman inside my dress, so as to keep it near me, and not lose the sense of its influence after I had read it three times over. But to you at your distance I can tell many things that are sacred, because I’m only a shadow to you, not a flesh-and-blood woman, with all my faults and foolishnesses under your eyes to be judged. I’m a shadow to you, and I don’t mind being a shadow, because it gives me freedom and liberty. Yet I mustn’t abuse that liberty, and deceive you, my friend so far off—and so near. I’m afraid that I have deceived you already, and asked for your sympathy, your help, under false pretenses. Perhaps if you’d known the real truth about me and my life, you would have written me a terribly different letter. Whenever I am feeling the comfort of it most, suddenly that thought pierces through me, very cold and deadly, like a spear of ice. I want the comfort—oh, how I want it!—and so, to make sure whether I have the right to take it or not, I am going to tell you everything. You will not be bored, or think me egotistic. I know you well enough, through your book and your letters, to be sure of that. When you have read this, you will be able to judge whether I can dare to claim the consolation you offer me, and whether I have a right to comfort myself with those thoughts, about the only man I have loved or shall ever love. Because, I have given another man a place in my outer life.

“What thought comes into your mind when you read those words—cold-hearted, horrible, disloyal words? Do you slam the door of your sympathy in my face, and turn me away? No, please, please don’t do that—anyhow don’t do it quite yet. Wait till I’ve explained as well as I can—if any explanation is possible.

“I want you to know all the truth and understand entirely, so I must even tell you a thing that seems absurd to tell. It would be absurd, if it were not for the thing’s consequences. When I was fourteen my mother and I came away from America, where we’d lived ever since I was born, came to live in Paris, though she is English by birth. A cousin of hers, an officer in the British army, was on leave from his regiment just then. He ran over to Paris, to amuse himself, not to see us; but as he knew we were there, he called. He was twenty-seven—thirteen years older than I—and I thought he was like all the heroes of all the novels I’d ever read, in the form of one perfectly handsome, perfectly fascinating man. He treated me like a child, and teased me a little about being a ‘flapper,’ but that only made me look up to him more, because he seemed so high above me, and wonderful and unattainable, like a prince.

“Perhaps he saw how I felt, and gloried in it as great fun. He gave me his picture in uniform, and I worshiped it humbly, as a little Eastern girl might worship an idol. Soon he went to India, but I saw him once again, nearly two years afterwards, when I was almost sixteen. I had never forgotten my ‘prince,’ and after he came back he flirted with me—rather cruelly, I think. When I realized—just as he was saying good-by, that he’d only been playing a little, it all but broke my heart—what I thought was my heart. I used actually to enjoy being miserable, and telling myself I should never love again—just as if I’d been a grown-up woman. I was even angry with my frivolous self when I found that I was getting over it. For I did get over it very soon, and before I was seventeen I could look back and laugh at my childish silliness. That was over five years ago, for I am twenty-two now; and all my real life has come since then.

“My mother and I were poor, until a little while ago. She is very good really and very charming, and absolutely unselfish, so I’m not picking flaws in her if I have to explain to you that she was selfish for me. Being English herself, she has always thought—in spite of marrying an American and going to live in America—that there’s nothing quite so good in the world as the best kind of English life. By the ‘best kind,’ she means life among the aristocracy, in country houses, and in London in the season. She made up her mind before I was eighteen that she wanted me some day to marry a man who could give me just that life. I used to laugh then, when she mapped out my future. It seemed only funny, not vulgar and horrid to talk about marrying some vague, imaginary man for his title and money; but when Mother took a house in London—a better house than we could afford—and went into debt to buy me heaps of lovely clothes, and fussed and schemed to get me presented and dragged into the ‘right set,’ I began to be ashamed.