A Spirit in Prison

by Robert Hichens

That night, for the first time in her young life, Vere did not sleep. She heard the fisherman call, but the enchantment of sea doings did not stir her. She was aware for the first time of the teeming horrors of life. There, in the darkness beneath the cliff, Peppina had sobbed out her story, and Vere, while she listened, had stepped from girlhood into womanhood.

She had come into the house quietly, and found Artois waiting for her alone. Hermione had gone to bed, leaving word that she had a headache. And Vere was glad that night not to see her mother. She wished to see no one, and she bade Artois good-bye at once, telling him nothing, and not meeting his eyes when he touched her hand in adieu. And he had asked nothing. Why should he, when he read the truth in the grave, almost stern face of the child?

Vere knew.

The veils that hung before the happy eyes of childhood had been torn away, and those eyes had looked for the first time into the deeps of an unhappy human heart.

And he had thought it possible to preserve, perhaps for a long while, Vere’s beautiful ignorance untouched. He had thought of the island as a safe retreat in which her delicate, and as yet childish talent, might gradually mature under his influence and the influence of the sea. She had been like some charming and unusual plant of the sea, shot with sea colors, wet with sea winds, fresh with the freshness of the smooth-backed waves. And now in a moment she was dropped into the filthy dust of city horrors. What would be the result upon her and upon her dawning gift?

The double question was in his mind, and quite honestly. For his interest of the literary man in Vere was very vivid. Never yet had he had a pupil or dreamed of having one. There are writers who found a school, whose fame is carried forward like a banner by young and eager hands. Artois had always stood alone, ardently admired, ardently condemned, but not imitated. And he had been proud of his solitude. But—lately—had not underthoughts come into his mind, thoughts of leaving an impress on a vivid young intellect, a soul that was full of life, and the beginnings of energy? Had not he dreamed, however vaguely, of forming, like some sculptor of genius, an exquisite statuette—poetry, in the slim form of a girl-child singing to the world?

And now Peppina had rushed into Vere’s life, with sobs and a tumult of cries to the Madonna and the saints, and, no doubt, with imprecations upon the wickedness of men. And where were the dreams of the sea? And his dreams, where were they?

That night the irony that was in him woke up and smiled bitterly, and he asked himself how he, with his burden of years and of knowledge of life, could have been such a fool as to think it possible to guard any one against the assaults of the facts of life. Hermione, perhaps, had been wiser than he, and yet he could not help feeling something that was almost like anger against her for what he called her quixotism. The woman of passionate impulses—how dangerous she is, even when her impulses are generous, are noble! Action without thought, though the prompting heart behind it be a heart of gold—how fatal may it be!

And then he remembered a passionate impulse that had driven a happy woman across a sea to Africa, and he was ashamed.

Yet again the feeling that was almost like hostility returned. He said to himself that Hermione should have learned caution in the passing of so many years, that she ought to have grown older than she had. But there was something unconquerably young, unconquerably naïve, in her—something that, it seemed, would never die. Her cleverness went hand in hand with a short-sightedness that was like a rather beautiful, yet sometimes irritating stupidity. And this latter quality might innocently make victims, might even make a victim of her own child.