The Sundered Streams: The History of a Memory That Had No Full Stops

by Reginald Farrer

The soul passes in a moment from youth to manhood, through the iron door of a great sorrow. Between past and present stands the bolted portal, and the event of half an hour has set an eternal barrier between the thing one is and the thing one was. Kingston Darnley, as soon as his dazed brain began to understand what had happened, found that he looked back at his past across the haze of fire as on a drama played by strangers. Everything had changed; on that drama a curtain of anguish had descended, and now, when it lifted, the scene had altered, and the old actors had disappeared for ever. Kingston, no less than Isabel, had passed through the furnace. Seared and burned and blackened he emerged from it, changed beyond his own recognition, with passions killed and passions kindled. Somehow, by some mysterious help, he had struggled through the agony, and come out alive; but his consciousness was dazed and bruised, his vitality crushed, his fiery interest in life turned suddenly to the grey ashes of mere endurance.

The days went by in a dreary dream. Kingston went mechanically about his duties, and saw the figure of Gundred moving at his side like something unreal and strange. There were inevitable activities for him to carry through, and he discharged them steadfastly, with his numbed mind fixed on other matters. As for Gundred, not having so suffered, she found herself more alive to the matters in hand. There were condolences, inquiries to answer, arrangements to be made, restorations to be seen about. Gundred’s interest in the details of life could never lie long dormant, and when the first shock had passed with two or three days of intermittent tears, Gundred dried her eyes carefully, with a due regard to their appearance, and began to pluck up her sense of importance once more, thanking Heaven for her powers of self-control.

The fire had confined itself to the old wooden wing and the chapel, and had made no attempt to devour the stark stone walls of the Castle itself. Gundred was deeply grateful for the forbearance thus manifested by Heaven, and was soon immersed in plans for the rebuilding of the ruins. Her husband, stupefied and calm, was not yet able to give her any effectual help, and so on her unaided shoulders she triumphantly supported all the responsibilities of the case. As time passed, and her first outbreak of genuine sorrow was quelled by the flood of her new activities, Gundred even began to enjoy the importance which events had so abruptly conferred upon her. Suddenly she became more conspicuous in the public eye than ever in her life before. The tragedy of Brakelond challenged attention and pity up and down the length and breadth of England. In horror, in picturesqueness, in romance, it possessed all the titillating qualities best fitted to make it the talk of the country. And Gundred became the central figure of the picture; sympathy and admiration were concentrated on her; her courage, her coolness, her grief, her rapid resumption of self-control, were made the daily subject of laudation. Of her husband nobody knew much, or cared. Her own name, her own position, made her the pivot of the drama, to say nothing of all the other causes that had tended to obscure Kingston since the catastrophe—his dazed acquiescence in events, his reluctance to enter the world of new plans in which Gundred was moving so happily. He sank into the background, and was alone with his sorrow.

Gundred was busy with designs for the new stone wing that should arise in place of the treacherous old wooden fire-trap, as soon as the ruins should have been cleared away. Kingston could be moved by nothing except the hope of finding Isabel’s relics. It was not till the third day that his wish was fulfilled. Then, buried in the densest chaos of débris, they found what remained of the dead. Gundred cried bitterly over the tragic discovery, and then, dabbing her eyes, began to meditate an epitaph that should compensate everyone for all that had been suffered. Kingston faced the piteous remains in a stupor. He could not have told what it was that he had expected the excavations to reveal, but surely nothing so crude as this mere wreckage of mortality that came to light. The fire had been merciless: a few fragments of flaky bone, the blackened crust of a skull, from which the white teeth gleamed horribly—this was all that it had left of Isabel. Kingston could never have anticipated the raw ugliness of the revelation. It stunned him anew. This black, bare globe was dreadful, filled with dreadful thoughts and associations, a monstrous burlesque of love and things lovely; its eyeless glare, its obtrusive grin, were ghastly in their mockery of life’s beauties; the glitter of two gold-crowned teeth in the lower jaw set the last fine edge on the horror, in their ironical reminder of the daily life now destroyed for ever. And yet this was Isabel—the real Isabel—or, rather, it was the earthly emblem of her. That rounded shape had actually contained her, had contained the hopes, the fears, the love that had gone to make up Isabel. And now, where and what was Isabel? Only the outward form had suffered; how could the mysterious secret passions that had been the framework of her personality, how could they have any share in the ruin that had fallen on the outward manifestation of Isabel? And yet, without that outward manifestation, how could she still be Isabel? Dimly, fantastically, he tried to figure her in another shape—as another woman, as a man. The task was impossible. To his bounded human outlook, the outward form was an integral part of the real Isabel. Yet, now he was brought face to face with the obvious fact that, while the outward form had been reduced to a thing of loathing and horror, the real Isabel must still be in existence somewhere, incorrupt and incorruptible. It was unthinkable that she should have suffered the fate of her body. So he must perforce bring himself to realize that the thing he loved had had no true connection with the hair, the skin, the features that it had worn for a while. Hair and skin and features were gone; but the beloved remained—out of sight, unrecognisable, remote; yet, for all that, perfect and unalienated. Fire could not touch the heart that was Isabel, the courage, the loyalty, the devotion that were Isabel. They were still alive as ever. But where, in what far world, how to be found again, and how to be known again when found?

Kingston passed insensibly beyond the cheap materialism of orthodoxy. He could not postulate an infinite gilded space where Isabel might be eternally walking in her habit as she had lived on earth. This invincible anthropomorphism, this obstinate survival of the savage in us, by which we are all prone to imagine the dead as we saw them in life, and familiar for ever by their earthly features, had now no hold on Kingston. He knew that, whenever we may meet our dead again, and wherever that may be, heart will call to heart, and soul be known again to soul; but the features that we have known and loved, the bones, the flesh, the softness, will all have passed long since into other forms of life, merged in the huge kaleidoscope of the universe. Perhaps, in circumstances less cogent, he might have conceived himself as meeting the physical Isabel years hence in some glorified state, yet recognisable to eyes that had known her on earth. The sight of her relics, however, jarred him once and for all out of the puny, materialistic dream. The blackened hideousness of them forced on his attention the irrelevance of all physical forms. For a time they may be everything, these forms and features; ultimately they go for nothing, pass utterly, are dropped, discarded, alike by the love that wore them and by the love that worshipped the spirit they clothed. No, he had done for ever with the corporeal Isabel. Weaknesses and beauties of shape were all destroyed, reduced to their native insignificance. Yet Isabel remained. But he had lost her; she had passed beyond his knowledge into dim places where, if ever she heard the cry of his soul far off, she could not make him any answer. Now and then, perhaps, she might call to him in return; in the whisper of the evening wind, in the song of a bird; but never again in the accents he had known, from the lips that he had watched; and, even so, she might call unceasingly to the hungering ears of his soul, yet never be able to make them understand whose voice it was that they heard. His deep certainty that she still lived made the separation more paradoxical, more horrible than ever to Kingston. To know that she was there, yet to call in vain; never to see her, never to meet her, to be unable, through all his days, to open up any means of communication with the thing he knew to be still existing,—this was the ghastliest instance of Fate’s irony, giving so much, yet making the gift so nugatory.

Kingston began to feel that, after all, the bill sent in by the gods had fallen more heavily on him than even on Isabel. Isabel had passed through agony to glory. But he, he had another agony, longer and more incurable than hers, though less poignant; and no glory to compensate, at the end, for the gnawing persistence of his pain. The grey, sad merit of doing his drudging duty by the world for two or three more score of years—that, perhaps, lay before him; but a chilling, colourless glory was this, at once harder and less rewarding than the sudden flare of martyrdom through which Isabel had passed upwards on her way. For upwards she had gone, leaving him henceforth alone on the lower levels where they had first met. Isabel—selfish, passionate, barbarous Isabel—in one whirling moment had leapt above all the trammels of false desire and fear—had soared into the great heights of selflessness, and left far beneath her the outworn husk of her old struggling egoism. In that other state where she now went radiant, it must be another Isabel that lived and moved—a purified Isabel, stripped of many mean and selfish thoughts; an Isabel far nearer than before to the ultimate radiance towards which the whole world is inevitably tending through ages of slow purification. How should he even be able to catch up lost ground and come level with this glorified Isabel once more? And yet, again, without features—without the well-remembered features of body (without so many of the mind’s well-remembered features too)—how, even if chance should be given, was he to recognise the soul that had once been one with his own?

She had utterly outstripped him in the race. No test of his endurance could equal that test of hers—no, not if he lived decently and honestly all his days, doing the best he could with his duty through the lagging years that probably lay ahead; why, that would be nothing to compare with her ordeal, no such swift burning furnace as that through which Isabel had passed, and from which she had emerged all gold in the sunlight of her future.

Because duty and honour had seemed to call, he had sacrificed the thing he loved for the thing he had promised to love. Even in cold blood he would still have done the thing—must have done it; any other course would have been impossible, a treason, a horror. But the sacrifice had been a rending of the heart; his whole soul was strained and bleeding from the wrench—bleeding to death, he thought. And, while Isabel had won freedom for herself, he had gained nothing but a lifetime’s loneliness. Without any peddling notions of striking a bargain with the gods, he could not but feel the sarcasm of their smile. He had sold his life’s happiness—to buy a lifetime’s unhappiness and desolation. He had done what was an agony to do, in order to obtain that which would be a long agony to endure. So he looked angrily, contemptuously, on the chilly duty and self-respect which was all that his martyrdom had gained him. He hated them for what they had cost, and hated them the more for his inmost knowledge that the purchase had been inevitable. Life without Isabel! It seemed that his soul had never in all the ages imagined the possibility of such a thing, yet now he was to envisage it through every remaining day and hour of his existence. She was gone, rising on strong wings towards heaven; he remained on earth, alone for ever, he who had so helped her take her flight.

So time dragged by, and insensibly the first agony of his loneliness wore down into a calmer sorrow. Isabel’s bones were duly buried, and honoured with a neat inscription devised by Gundred, and matters gradually began to fall into a settled course once more. Kingston began to return to ordinary life, and his private grief no longer claimed his whole attention. Between himself and Gundred a barrier still rose, but he grew able to give her his help, and, bit by bit, to share once more in the superficial interest of her days. She, for her part, went bravely on her way; with more courage and on a more difficult way than she or anyone else suspected. The new wing was built; the new wing lost its raw look of novelty; gradually Isabel and her end became to Gundred little more than a vague if awful memory. She was not the kind of woman whose nerves can be thrown permanently out of gear. Self-restraint had been drilled into her blood through many generations, and she made imperturbability the test-virtue of good breeding. Only once in all her life had perfect coolness failed her, and that one momentary lapse had been the immediate cause of Isabel’s death. For a long time the knowledge of this was her secret cross. In her heart of hearts, that last awful instant had showed her that Kingston loved Isabel, that his care for his wife was mere loyalty. The sudden perception, the combination of new terrors and responsibilities had been suddenly too much for her endurance, already sapped and damaged by hidden anxieties and by the shock of the accident. Not meaning to be selfish, transported rather with the longing to be unselfish and give up her own life that her husband might save Isabel’s, she had yet, in the crisis, helplessly committed the final selfishness. She had killed Isabel. Nothing at first could quite excuse her to herself. And she knew that her husband must inevitably feel as she did. This was the barrier between them—Gundred’s innocent guilt, and Kingston’s answering knowledge that she, and she alone, had been the real cause of Isabel’s death. Her weakness had cost him the happiness of his life. How could he bring himself all at once to look on the poor woman with a cordial eye? He could not but bear her a grudge—all the more bitter that he realized how unintentional had been the cowardice that had had such terrible results. He guessed, in his inmost consciousness, that Gundred—cool, practical Gundred—would have wished to be no less heroic than Isabel, would have wished to sacrifice her own life to his happiness; and this instinct only aggravated his grudge, only intensified in its first vigour his aching, bitter grief that the sacrifice had not been achieved or made unnecessary by a brief exercise of Gundred’s usual calm. Yes, the death of Isabel stood between them for a while like a sword of fire.

But Gundred was not a woman to suffer exaggerated scruples. Soon she surmounted the shock, and Bellowes’ Hypophosphates enabled her to triumph over morbid qualms. She reflected on the goodness and honesty of her intentions, set remorse in the background, and ere long was facing Kingston without any more such distressing reserves. He, meanwhile, was also growing quieter and more sane in his views. After all, no one was guilty. Everyone had acted for the best. Nature was not to be blamed. He was too fond of his wife to go on condemning her for an instant’s lapse. He saw the hysterical injustice of his grudge against her, and in time succeeded in overcoming it.