We smoked in silence until our incommunicative companionship was abruptly disturbed by the arrival of a couple of officers from a neighbouring garrison town. Pleasant fellows both, carrying a rollicking breath of Lever into the surcharged atmosphere. They spoke at the top of their voices, hailed us with obvious delight, joked, quizzed, and gallantly misconducted themselves from the point of view of lucky and unlucky lover. I was reminded that I was French, and made an effort to do honour to my land. While they stayed, I shook off melancholy, and matched their breezy recklessness with the intoxication of despair. Heaven knows what we laughed at, but everybody except Trueberry shouted hearty guffaws, and seemed to regard life as the most entertaining of jokes. They chaffed Trueberry on his captivity to isolated beauty, and hinted in their broad barrack way at the perils of bewitchment. Trueberry went white with repressed anger, and I dusky as a savage. I wanted to fell the harmless fool for a pleasantry common enough in affairs of gallantry between men, but Trueberry passed it off with his superlative breeding, and the officer adroitly changed the conversation.
When Brases joined us before lunch, the younger of the two again provoked me by approaching her with a slight military swagger, his air, as he took her beautiful hand, so clearly saying: ‘Madame, allow me to observe that you are a remarkably handsome woman, and I shouldn’t mind being your captive myself.’ Not that he was impertinent or fatuous, but his admiration was of a crude and youthful and self-assured flavour. Trueberry lifted a dolorous lid upon me, as if seeking sympathy in me for the exquisite torment of this outer desecrating breath upon the divine and hidden.
They left us as cheerily as they had come, bidding me persuade Lady Fitzowen to come to their garrison ball next week. The major begged to know what sins the county had committed, to be so punished by its fairest woman. I saw Trueberry’s fingers clench ominously, and my own lips shut upon a grim twist for all response. Brases stared at them softly, as if they were a long way off, and then a little puzzled smile stirred her eyes as she sought Trueberry’s glance.
‘I wish you could persuade Monsieur d’Harcourt to go,’ was her acknowledgment of their invitation. ‘He does not look nearly so well as when he first came.’
I grasped this notice as a famished dog pounces on a stale crust. I flung her an enchanted beam of gratitude, and red ran momently through the grey universe. She came out, and stood beside me on the broad gravel, when the officers had driven away, and I found courage to urge her to come with me to the ball at Kilstern. It was no baseness to my friend, surely, that I should hunger and thirst and pray for one little moment of her life unshared with him!
‘Had I any such foolish desire, Monsieur, my obligations as hostess would still prevent me. It is so little I can do for your friend, so much I would gladly do. But it is no privation for me to dispense with society. I never liked it, and have only bitter recollections of it. I ask nothing now from life but peace,—and strength to live my days for my children’s sake, striving not to wish them shortened, and remembering that there is much else besides personal hope and happiness. One despairs so quickly in youth, and then the children come, with their sweet faces made up of morning light, soft as flowers, with the smile of paradise in their clear eyes. And youth for me lies so far away,’ she added, with a scarce perceptible change of voice, and a ray lighting up her delicate face, showed a smile so wan and faint as rather to resemble the memory of a smile, reminiscent as the spectre of that youth she greeted as an alien, and I listening, wished I had died before hearing words so sad from her lips.
Her gesture in one less superlatively sincere might have been taxed with coquetry, so exquisite was its expression; her white hands fell in a gentle depression with the finger-tips curved inward.
‘Even music no longer pleases me,’ she continued, sweeping the circumscribed scene with a flame of revolt under the drawn arch of the lovely brows. ‘It is not sad enough. That is why I am so fond of the ravening melancholy of ocean’s song down upon the desolate beach. I listen for it at night as I lie awake, and it is the eternal funeral march of my dead youth.’
It was hardly by an effort of will that she ceased speaking: speech dropped from her as sound drops from the receding wave, and I could have cried aloud in passionate protest as I saw the veil drawn over this transient revelation of herself. Never had she spoken to me so before. Never had she referred to her past. And the hint that all joy for her lay in her children fired my brain with hope’s delirium. Surely I had been mistaken in my haunting dread, and stupidly interpreted the looks between her and Trueberry. He might love her, as I loved her, but her feeling was only the soft interest of compassion. And yet—and yet——!
Leaving her, I walked slowly down the path. At the gate I looked back. She was still standing there, staring across the hills, with the sunset hues upon the amber of her head, and revealing the matchless purity of line and tint of face and throat. Not surrender, not love, did that dejection of air denote. The thought went with me, rooted in my heart, and kept me awake, tossing on a fever-troubled pillow. I started up, and stood at the window to watch the stars till dawn sent a grey glimmer down the dusk, and a white cloud sped like a wing over the sky. I had a foreboding of rashness, of perilous explosion on the morrow, unless I had the wisdom to steal out alone into the empty world. If they loved one another, it was plainly my duty. But, oh! to be able to look into her eyes, and cry: ‘I love you, yet I leave you. For me death were easier, but my death would stain your bliss with regret’s shadow.’