CHAPTER XXXIV
THE DISSOLUBLE BONDAGE
If only it were that these things could continue--but alas! they cannot! We make our bubbles with all the colours of heaven in them, but cannot abide to see them only floating in the air. The greens and purples, the golds and scarlets, they seem so real upon the face of that diaphanous, crystal disc, that to touch them, to find their glorious stain upon the fingers, becomes the desire of every one of us. Out stretches the hand, the fingers tighten! The bubble is gone!
That was much the way with John's beautiful bubble of Nonsense. So long as Jill knew nothing of it; so long as he played with the fairy thing by himself, it was enough; but the every-day business of life, in which death is one of the unavoidable duties, intervened. One cannot play at these wonderful games for long. You cannot be married on paper--more perhaps is the pity. There would be fewer separations, fewer misunderstandings if you could. Life unfortunately does not permit of it. The law of Gravity is universal. You come down to earth.
When John had been living a married life of unbroken happiness for two months, there came two letters on the same day to Fetter Lane. He looked at one with no greater bewilderment than he did at the other. The first was from Venice in a strange handwriting; the second, from Jill. He opened it apprehensively. It could not be an invitation to her wedding? She could not have done that? Then what?
"Is there any reason why we should not see each other again? I shall be in Kensington Gardens to-morrow at 11.30."
He laid it down upon the table. For the moment, he forgot the existence of the other letter. In the midst of all his make-believe, this message from Jill was hard to realise; no easy matter to reconcile with all the phantoms in whose company he had been living.
What strange and unexpected things were women! Did ever they know what they wanted? or, knowing, and having found it, did any of them believe it to be what they had thought it at first?
Was she married? Since he had come back from Venice, the world might have been dead of her. He had heard nothing--seen nothing--and now this letter. Like the falling of some bolt of destruction from a heaven of blue, it had dropped into his garden, crushing the tenderest flowers he had planted there, in its swift rush of reality.
She wanted to see him again. The mere wish was a command; the mere statement that she would be in Kensington Gardens, a summons. All his sacrifice, his putting her away from him that day of her departure in Venice, was in one moment gone for nought. All this dream in which he had been living, became the bubble broken in the hand of such circumstance as this. While it had lasted, while he had continued to hear nothing of her, it had been real enough. Up till that moment, he had been happily married, quietly living down at Harefield in the county of Middlesex, in his cottage with its William Allan Richardson roses and its insurmountable wooden railing, two foot and a brick high. Every day, he had been coming up to London to work in Fetter Lane and to get his letters. Some very good reason, he had given to the old people why they should write to him there. And now, because he must obey this summons to go to Kensington Gardens and talk of things, perhaps, that little mattered, for fear they might embark upon the sea of those things that did, all his dream had vanished. The only reality left him, was that he was alone.