[CHAPTER XXVI.]
Nearly a month had gone by since Marjory Carmichael had whispered to the darkness, "Come back to me, Paul, and we will forget our love." The sudden awakening to the realities, not only of life but of her own nature, caused by his reckless avowal of love, had passed, as all awakenings must, into calm acquiescence in the commonplace facts of consciousness. There was no denying of the truth possible to her clear sight, and as she sate on the last day of October, on the last day of holiday before she and little Paul set off together to make acquaintance with a new world, she laid down her pen in the middle of a sentence in the letter she was writing to Tom Kennedy, and looked out over the stormy whitecrested waves of the loch set in its rampart of grey, snow-powdered, mist-shrouded hills, and wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. Blind to half the great problems of life! And then, with a smile, infinitely sweeter than it used to be because infinitely stronger, she took up a letter which lay beside her, and leaning back in her chair began to read it over again, just as she had re-read a letter down by the river side three months before, on the day when her holiday began--on the day when she had first seen Paul Macleod.
But it was a very different letter from the one Dr. Kennedy had sent her then; for all unconsciously the girl, in the first bewilderment of her awakening, had stretched out her hands to him, as it were, for help, and he had given her what he could, smiling a trifle bitterly as he wrote to think how little that was. "You ask me to tell you the truth," she read, "but how can I when I do not know it myself? If I had, the world might have been different--for us both. Only this seems clear, that friendship is a bigger thing than love, unless they both grow from the same root, and then--I fancy, Mademoiselle Grands-serieux, that the botanists ought to characterise the product as a sport! It is rare enough--God knows! I have sate for hours over the puzzle, trying to get at the bottom of myself, only to come back to the old paradox that Love is not worth calling Love unless it is something which is not Love. And that is no solution. Pure and simple, unveiled of mist and sentiment, it is all too easy of explanation. It is ever-present, and must be so--it seems--till the end of all things. Then there is--shall we call it the transcendental form conceivable only to those who recognise some innate, or almost innate, sense of order or beauty in mankind. That too, given this premise, is easy. I believe I understand it. I am sure you do. It is the hybrid of these two held up to our admiration, and believed in by the majority of cultivated people, which beats me altogether. Look round you, dear, and think for yourself. A man and a woman have mental sympathy with each other. What has that to do with marriage? A man and a woman are married. What has that to do with mental sympathy? The two things are not incompatibles. Heaven forbid! But have friendship and what the world calls love any real connection, and what part have they to play in marriage? That sounds like a conundrum, and perhaps it is as well, since we were getting too serious, and that is a fatal mistake when there is no answer to the riddle. But there is a sacrilegious little story, my dear, regarding the reasons for not enforcing celibacy on the clergy, which is not altogether irrelevant to our subject. Luther, I believe, is responsible for declaring that marriage is a 'discipline' not to be surpassed in spiritual efficacy; a discipline before which hair shirts and flagellations are sensual indulgence. N.B.--Was Luther any relation of the Cornish man who said, 'Women was like pilchards; when 'ums bad 'ms bad, and when 'ms good they is but middlin'?' I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle G.S., but one must laugh--if one is not to cry. What if love were the mutual attraction of certain elements, which combined and neutralised in the children, would go to form a more useful compound of humanity? Would not this go further towards raising our instincts out of the mire than all the romance in the world? And then it would account, of course--since chemicals are apt to evolve heat in combining--for a good deal of friction in the married state, which in its turn must polish the sufferers! But as this theory canonises Mrs. Caudle, and makes wife-beating a virtue, perhaps we had better change the subject by saying, as we said at the beginning--friendship is a bigger thing than love, and so pass on to the lives we have to lead, love or no love."
So with kindly thought, and a plentiful humour irradiating every page, he went on to tell her of his work, of stirring scenes in that hand-to-hand fight with Death, the great enemy of Love, in which he lived. A tender, charming letter, such as his were always. Letters which none know how to write save those who, despising the control of time and space, have learnt to lean over the edge of the world, and claim a part in some far-off life. Letters which, without one word of sentiment from beginning to end, leave both the writer's and reader's hearts full of a great kindliness and peace.
They set Marjory a thinking, as they were meant to do, and the result was good, since her clear common sense never failed her. Yet side by side with that common sense existed a certain fanciful idealism, which took the place of the former in matters beyond the limits of plain reason. And this, as she read, made her pause to wonder if Tom could be right, and the calm content which came to her from him, so different from the unrest which the mere thought of Paul produced, meant that they were too nearly akin to need neutralisation. Then she laid down the letter and took up the pen again, striving unconsciously to imitate his playful touch.
"No, Tom!" she wrote; "I am not growing morbid. I am not, as you call it, trying to measure my world with home-made imitations of the imperial quart; still, I do wish I knew what the cubit was! Then I would add it to my stature and rise superior--perhaps. If I had known what I know now when my holiday began would it have made any difference? If I had had a mother, if I had been brought up with other girls, should I have gone on as I did, using a wrong terminology? I will tell you something, Tom. What I thought was love in those old days is just what I feel for you, dear. Perhaps I might have thought so all my life if I had not met him. And now, if I meet him again, Tom, what will happen? I sit down before the proposition; but it is not to be solved like a problem in Euclid, because I have discovered that my heart and my brain are quite separate, and I used to think they were both a part of me. Don't tell me, please, that I am wrong. Perhaps I am physiologically. I know all about that horrid little V-shaped spot in the medulla oblongata, isn't it, where a pin-point will stop Tears and Laughter, Love and Friendship for ever. What then? Does it make it easier to understand why the heart beats, to know that we can stop its beating? I wish I knew! I wish I knew! I don't want it to beat, but it will. Oh! what a mercy it is that we two do not love each other!"
She laid down the pen as a knock came to the door.
"A strange shentlemen to see Miss Carmichael," said the new servant who had replaced the peccant Kirsty discovered--direful offence--in putting a dirty skimmer into the milk.
Now, in the country a "strange gentleman" generally resolves itself into the piano-tuner, so Marjory bade him be shown up with a certain calm impatience at the necessity for explaining that his services would not be wanted; then, the thread of her thoughts broken rudely, she sate waiting, her eyes fixed absently on the words, "that we two do not love each other!"
She looked up from them to see Paul Macleod standing at the door. He had come back to her!