Greifenstein

by F. Marion Crawford

‘What is that?’

‘Many things. Ask Greif.’

His tone had changed, and he spoke so seriously that she was surprised, for she did not in the least comprehend his mood. It was strange to himself, and he afterwards wondered whether his own words had any sense in them, unwilling to allow that he had spoken out of the fulness of an admiration he had no right to express. He did not say, even to himself, that she was the most beautiful woman, the best, the kindest he had ever known, but at the thought of what he would have said in his own heart, had all restraint been removed, he felt a shock, such as a man feels who strikes his hand against some unexpected sharp object in the dark, and draws back, groping his way carefully lest he should hurt himself again.

Certain it was that his admiration of Hilda threatened to pass the bounds by which admiration of any sort is separated from the stronger feelings that lie beyond it. But as he perceived this in the course of time, he explained it away by telling himself that it was natural and harmless. Loving his brother as he did, it would have been strange if he had not felt something like devotion for the woman who had saved his brother’s life. It would have been astonishing if he had not felt a most sincere affection for her, if he had not been willing to sacrifice anything for her.

It was an odd sort of devotion at first, for it grew up like a tender plant surrounded on all sides by sharp pricks, straight in self-defence, and sensitive by avoiding all contact with things hurtful. Rex became conscious of its growth, and was surprised to find anything so delicate and beautiful in his own heart, where such beauties had never grown, or had budded only to wither prematurely, leaving the ground more dry and arid and unpromising than before. It was as though a soft light had dawned in his soul and was gradually brightening into day. From having distrusted himself a little at first, he put an unbounded faith in his own heart since he saw what it contained. He would even talk to Greif by the hour together of Hilda’s perfections, vying with her husband in discovering new things to praise, and utterly happy in the freedom of speaking about her which he thus enjoyed.

He fancied that he looked upon her almost as though she had been his daughter, and he imagined that he understood stories he had read, and cases he had known in his own experience, where such pure affections were concerned. He, who was far from imaginative by nature, made romances in the air, in which he fancied that he had once been married to a woman he had loved to distraction—a woman not unlike Hilda, perhaps—and that Hilda herself was the daughter of that union, all there was left to remind him of her who was dead. There was something oddly fantastic in the thought, which satisfied him for a time, and made his life seem full of a love, tender, regretful, expressing itself in a boundless devotion to the one object which recalled it.

And the dead woman grew in his fancy, until she became very lifelike. He could remember how he had closed her darkened eyes, and smoothed her yellow hair, how he had buried her on a dark winter’s day, among the fir trees, and how through long years he had mourned for her, while Hilda was a little child at his knee. It was all fancy, but it was very vivid. Then he could go back still farther, he could recall the sound of her voice, for Hilda’s own reminded him of it, and out of the misty echoes of past time he could reconstruct conversations, phrases of love, words full of meaning. He remembered their first meeting, in an ancient castle in a distant land—he had been a guest in her father’s house—so long ago. He remembered how they had ridden together so often through a dim forest, and how the echo of the horses’ hoofs amongst the ringing trees had broken upon the silvery music of her voice. It all came back to him, the scene, the colour of the shadows; the snort of the horses, the curves of her figure as she sat so straight in the saddle, the silences that said more than words. Then the scene changed, and they were upon a moonlit lawn in summer. He was standing still, and she was coming towards him through the misty light. His heart beat fast. Slender and tall as a fair spirit she advanced. Her two hands were held out before her, and found his. Face to face they stood in silence, their gaze meeting; was it to be, or not? Then, in that wonderful moment, he felt his own hard eyes soften and saw the warm light in hers. Not a word was spoken, as his arms went round her—then they turned and walked together upon the dark, dewless grass, beneath the summer moon.

And again, he was with her upon a balcony at night. In the warm dusk he could see the whiteness of her face, and the outline of her figure. She had said something, and he had felt the hot blood surging to his forehead, and falling again, as by its own weight, upon his heart. All at once he had answered her with such words as he had not guessed a man could speak, for they had broken forth in a passionate eloquence, unrestrained and fresh with young life, as words first spoken can be. He could not always remember them now; the heartfelt ring of them waked him from his sleep, sometimes; and again, in the midst of the occupations of the day, the stirring echo of their music filled the room in a moment and was gone before he could seize it, or was blown into his ear by the clear breeze that swept the valley.

The dead woman was alive—the woman who had never lived save in his brain—and Hilda was growing to be like her. Rex watched them both, her whom he saw with open eyes, and her who was present with him the instant his eyes were closed. No daughter was ever so exact an image of the mother who had borne her; line for line, the features grew to be the same, shade for shade the colour of the one became the colour of the other, coil for coil the yellow hair of both was wound alike upon the noble head. And the love of this dead woman, who had never breathed, but whom he had buried with such bitter tears and such heartbroken grief, filled his whole being and twined itself through all the mazes of his complex nature, till no action of his life was independent of it, and no thought free from its all-dominating influence.

In the first beginnings of this creation of his fancy he had found such peace and such sweet melancholy satisfaction that he had encouraged its growth and had tried to persuade himself of its reality. And the reality had come, so far as it can come to anything wholly built up in the imagination. It had also brought with it its consequences, unless it could be said to be a consequence in itself. Rex’s devotion to Hilda increased with every day, as she seemed to him to be more and more like the woman he had loved, the mother he had imagined for her in place of her own. For it was out of Hilda herself that his love for a shadow had grown to be what it was, and the shadow itself was but the reflection of Hilda’s present brightness upon the misty emptiness of his own past life.