‘Was it she who sought separation?’
‘I believe it was her people, sir. He was a bad lot, they say, wild after the women, and not over nice in his ways. She’s gentle now, but she was proud and passionate as a girl, and she felt the shame of the thing and ran. ’Tis a wonder the poor crathurs don’t oftener run, the provocation thim fine gentlemen gives them. Anyway, her people settled the matter, and she came to live here, ’tis now close on four years ago. The second child was born here, God bless it, and we all love it like our own.’
I went outside to smoke a cigarette in the solitude of starlit night. One never wants for proof of how much cruelty, shame, misery, and injustice may be gathered into an innocent girl’s existence by marriage. I had already seen much of it, and was familiar with the musings melancholy contemplation of it provoked. But here was matter not for musing but for fiery revolt. Every nerve thrilled with a sympathy so complete as to make her retrospective pain most personally mine, to thrust my individuality from its old bright environment out for ever into her desperate loneliness. Joy seemed to me a miserable mockery, the portion of trivial, contemptible humanity. The best proof of moral worth lay in the excess of suffering endured. Virtue was measured by the degree of pain, and laughter dwelt with the ignoble jesters and clowns. Sorrow was a diadem upon that golden head, I murmured, and looked for confirmation in the cold radiance of the stars above, darting their shuttles of lambent flame in and out the purple depths of sky.
I peered down through the darkness, searching for the grey manor among the massive shadows. But no lighted window revealed it to my yearning gaze, and somehow I felt glad that Brases had suffered. Tears were the mark of the elect, and had given her eyes that penetrating, unjoyous clearness of the stars, had given her beautiful lips their set line of austere silence, had placed on that frail white brow the conquering seal of valour and forbearance. A passion so remote from whimpering sentiment as that which she had inspired, was one to take pride in, and I cared not now whether grief or weal were my portion, for I, too, was crowned, and, like her, stood apart.
I was glad to face the wide, empty moors by sunrise. The valley lay below the brilliantly lit mountain shoulder, where scarcely a shadow offered rest for the eyes. The Reeks opening out, peak upon peak, glittering and wild, made a magnificent picture. Here a crescent of shattered points, there a sunny tarn through the hollow of the cliff, shot with amber rays; and downward, deep valley beyond deep valley, dusk with foliage, and broken by zigzag pathways. I sat on the shelf of a rock, whence I could perceive the glen and grey mass of the manor. An eagle sweeping over the brow of the bluff, the shrill cry of curlews in their undulary shoreward flight, presaging tempest, the thunder of the Atlantic in the steady roll of its surges, were the sole sounds in my majestic solitude.
I sat and dreamed, and filled in the unknown pages of that one volume now for me, the life of an innocent and high-spirited girl, urged in the passivity of an untroubled heart into an uncongenial marriage. The thought that she might have loved a worthless husband was an intolerable smart, and I rejected it for the more bearable belief that she had entered bondage in a neutral condition, without any apprehension of the warmer moments of life, unawakened to the imperious claims of the heart.
And in dwelling bitterly on the penalties of such experience, the illimitable price exacted for limitable error, I started to my feet in angry denial that part of the price was the harsh sentence against other choice. What did it matter if the world’s wisdom rebuked our folly? What did it matter if the callous eye saw stain where I felt glory? What did anything matter, so long as I had the will to leap all barriers that lay between Brases and me? To pass through flame and wave, so that she was on the other side of peril with outstretched arms?
The manor, with its air of rude decay, was curious rather than picturesque. It fronted a lawn that dropped into a thick plantation of fir, along which ran a silver trout-stream. The gravelled walks wandered away into the woodlands that waved in brilliant arches of beech and larch by an upward slope to the horizon, where the spires of pine scalloped the skyline. Trueberry was asleep, so I amused myself by inspecting the portraits of the hall. They were all members of my hostess’s family. That was obvious, even if the old butler had not informed me of the fact. A fair lady in velvet and long ruffles looked at me with her clear eyes, just so sweet, but bolder, and one tall girl was so vividly like her that I greeted her with a flame of enamoured recognition I would not dare bestow on the living woman. The same gold-leaf of hair, the same exquisite intangibility of look, the same wanness of cheek and ineffable upward line of chin and brow.
When at last I saw Trueberry, I found him coherent and eager for my visit. He lay in a faded, heavily-curtained room, so old and dim that the bright rays of morning penetrating through the crimson curtains sparkled incongruously, and turned squares of the silk into blood-red. Coming in from the sunlit air, its sombreness shot me blind, and I could see nothing until I had blinked the sun out of my eyes.
‘What a dark room!’ I cried.