Chapter 18

The day grew into afternoon. She awoke from a dreamless sleep of about an hour, and, still under its soothing influence, she pinned up her hair, settled the ribbons of her dressing-gown, and went downstairs. She found her father and John in the drawing-room.

'Oh, here is Kitty!' they exclaimed.

'But what is the matter, dear? Why are you not dressed?' said Mr. Hare.

'But what is the matter? ... Are you ill?' said John, and he extended his hand.

'No, no, 'tis nothing,' she replied, and avoiding the outstretched hand with a shudder, she took the seat furthest away from her father and lover. They looked at her in amazement, and she at them in fear and trembling. She was conscious of two very distinct sensations--one the result of reason, the other of madness. She was not ignorant of the causes of each, although she was powerless to repress one in favour of the other. She knew she was looking at and talking to her dear, kind father, and that the young man sitting next him was John Norton, the son of her dear friend, Mrs. Norton; she knew he was the young man who loved her, and whom she was going to marry. At the same time she seemed to see that her father's kind, benign countenance was not a real face, but a mask which he wore over another face, and which, should the mask slip--and she prayed that it might not--would prove as horrible and revolting as---

But the mask that John wore was as nothing--it was the veriest make- believe. And she could not but doubt now but that the face she had known him so long by was a fictitious face, and as the hallucination strengthened, she saw his large mild eyes grow small, and that vague, dreamy look turn to the dull, liquorish look, the chin came forward, the brows contracted... the large sinewy hands were, oh, so like! Then reason asserted itself; the vision vanished, and she saw John Norton as she had always seen him.

But was she sure that she did? Yes, yes--but her head seemed to be growing lighter, and she did not appear to be able to judge things exactly as she should; a sort of new world seemed to be slipping like a painted veil between her and the old.

John and Mr. Hare looked at her.

John at length rose, and he said, 'My dear Kitty, I am afraid you are not well....'

She strove to allow him to take her hand, but she could not overcome the instinctive feeling which caused her to shrink from him.

'Don't come near me--I cannot bear it!' she cried; 'don't come near me, I beg of you.'

More than this she could not do, and giving way utterly, she shrieked and rushed from the room. She rushed upstairs. She stood in the middle of the floor listening to the silence, her thoughts falling about her like shaken leaves. It was as if a thunderbolt had destroyed the world, and left her alone in a desert. The furniture of the room, the bed, the chairs, the books she loved, seemed to have become as grains of sand, and she forgot all connection between them and herself. She pressed her hands to her forehead, and strove to separate the horror that crowded upon her. But all was now one horror--the lonely hills were in the room, the grey sky, the green furze, the tramp; she was again fighting furiously with him; and her lover and her father and all sense of the world's life grew dark in the storm of madness.

A step was heard on the stairs; her quick ears caught the sound, and she rushed to the door to lock it. But she was too late. John held it fast.

'Kitty, Kitty,' he cried, 'for God's sake, tell me what is the matter?'

'Save me! save me!' she cried, and she forced the door against him with her whole strength. He was, however, determined on questioning her, on seeing her, and he passed his head and shoulders into the room.

'Save me, save me! help, help!' she cried, retreating from him.

'Kitty, Kitty, what do you mean? Say, say--'

'Save me; oh mercy, mercy! Let me go, and I will never say I saw you, I will not tell anything. Let me go!' she cried, retreating towards the window.

'For heaven's sake, Kitty, take care--the window, the window!'

But Kitty heard nothing, knew nothing, was conscious of nothing but a mad desire to escape. The window was lifted high--high above her head, and her face distorted with fear, she stood amid the soft greenery of the Virginia creeper.

'Save me!' she cried.

The white dress passed through the green leaves, and John heard a dull thud.

XIV.

Mr. Hare stood looking at his dead daughter; John Norton sat by the window. His brain was empty, everything was far away. He saw things moving, moving, but they were all far away. He could not re-knit himself with the weft of life; the thread that had made him part of it had been snapped. He knew that Kitty had thrown herself out of the window and was dead. The word shocked him, but there was no sense of realisation to meet it. She had walked with him on the hills, she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had waved her hand to him before they walked quite out of each other's sight. Now she was dead.

Had he loved her? Why was there neither burning grief nor tears? He envied the hard-sobbing father's grief, the father who held his dead daughter's hand, and showed a face on which was printed so deeply the terror of the soul's emotion, that John felt a supernatural awe creep upon him; felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege. He crept downstairs. He went into the drawing-room, and looked about for the place he had last seen her in.

She usually sat on that sofa; how often had he seen her sitting there! And now he should not see her any more. Only three days ago she had been sitting in that basket-chair. How well he remembered her words, her laughter! Shadow-like is human life! one moment it is here, the next it is gone. Her work-basket; the very ball of wool which he had held for her to wind; the novel which she had lent to him, and which he had forgotten to take away. He would never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in memory of her, of her whom yesterday he had parted with on the hills--her little Puritan look, her external girlishness, her golden brown hair, and the sudden laugh so characteristic of her.... She had lent him this book--she who was now but clay.

He took up his hat and set forth to walk home across the downs, all the while thinking, thinking over what had happened. He had asked her to be his wife. She had consented, and, alarmed at the prospect of the new duties he had contracted, he had returned home. These newly- contracted duties had stirred his being to its very depth; the chance appearance of a gipsy girl (without the aid of that circumstance he felt he would never have spoken) had set his life about with endless eventuality; he could not see to the end; the future he had indefinitely plighted, and his own intimate and personal life had been abandoned for ever. He had exchanged it for the life of the hearth, of the family; that private life--private, and yet so entirely impersonal-which he had hitherto loathed. He had often said he had no pity for those who accepted burdens and then complained that they had not sufficient strength to carry them. Such had been his theory; he must now make his theory and practice coincide.

He had walked up and down his study, his mind aflame; he had sat in his arm-chair, facing the moonlight, considering a question, to him so important, so far-reaching, that his mind at moments seemed as if like to snap, to break, but which was accepted by nine-tenths of humanity without a second thought, as lightly as the most superficial detail of daily life. But how others acted was not his concern; he must consider his own competence to bear the burden--the perilous burden he had asked, and which had been promised to him.

He must not adventure into a life he was not fitted for; he must not wreck another's life; in considering himself he was considering her; their interests were mutual, they were identical; there was no question of egotism. But this marriage question had been debated a thousand times in the last six months; it had haunted his thought, it had become his daily companion, his familiar spirit. Under what new aspect could he consider this question? It faced him always with the same unmovable, mysterious eyes in which he read nothing, which told him nothing of what he longed to know. He only knew that he had desired this girl as a wife. A desire had come he knew not whence; and he asked himself if it were a passing weakness of the flesh, or if this passion abided in him, if it had come at last to claim satisfaction? On this point he was uncertain, this was nature's secret.

In the midst of his stress of mind his eyes had wandered over his books; they had been caught by the colour of a small thin volume, and, obeying an instinct, he had taken the volume down. He knew it well; a few hundred small pages containing the wisdom of a great Greek philosopher, Epictetus, and John had often before turned to this sage discourse for relief in his mental depressions and despair of life.

'The subject for the good and wise man is his master faculty, as the body is for the physician and the trainer, and the soil is the subject for the husbandman. And the work of the good and wise man is to use appearances according to Nature. For it is the nature of every soul to consent to what is good and reject what is evil, and to hold back about what is uncertain; and thus to be moved to pursue the good and avoid the evil, and neither way for what is neither good nor evil.'

In the light of these words John's mind grew serene as a landscape on which the moon is shining; and he asked himself why he had hesitated if marriage were the state which he was destined to fulfil?

'If a habit affects us, against that must we endeavour to find some remedy? And what remedy is to be found against a habit? The contrary habit.'

A temptation of the flesh had come upon him; he had yielded to it instead of opposing it with the contrary habit of chastity. For chastity had never afflicted him; it had ever been to him a source of strength and courage. Chastity had brought him peace of mind, but the passion to which he had in a measure yielded had robbed him of his peace of mind, and had given him instead weakness, and agitation of spirit and flesh. The last six months had been the unhappiest of his life. Nothing in this world, he thought, is worth our peace of mind, and love robs us of that, therefore it must be maleficent. 'And this passion which has caused me so much trouble, what is it? A passing emotion of which I am ashamed, of which I would speak to no one. An emotion which man shares with the lowest animals, but which his higher nature teaches him to check and subject.' Then he remembered that this emotion might come upon him again. But each time he thought, 'I shall be able to control it better than the last, and it will grow weaker and weaker until at last it will pass and to return no more.'

But he had proposed to Kitty and had been accepted, and for some solution of this material difficulty he had to fall back upon the argument that he had no right to wreck another's life, that in considering his interests he was considering hers. And he had stood in the dawn light pondering a means of escape from a position into which a chance circumstance had led him.

He had gone to bed hoping to find counsel in the night, and in the morning he had waked firm in his resolve, and had gone to Shoreham in the intention of breaking his engagement. But instead he had witnessed a cruel and terrible suicide, the reason of which was hidden from him. Possibly none would ever know the reason. Perhaps it were better so; the reasons that prompted suicide were better unrevealed....

And now, as he returned home after the tragedy, about midway in his walk across the downs, the thought came upon him that the breaking off of his engagement might have been sufficient reason in an affected mind for suicide. But this was not so. He knew it was not so. He had been spared that!

'She was here with me yesterday,' he said. And he looked down the landscape now wrapped in a white mist. The hills were like giants sleeping, the long distance vanished in mysterious moonlight. He could see Brighton, nearer was Southwick; and further away, past the shadowy shore, was Worthing.

He sat down by the blown hawthorn bush that stands by the burgh. A ship sailed across the rays of the moon, and he said--

'Illusion, illusion! so is it always with him who places his trust in life. Ah, life, life, what hast thou for giving save deceptions? Why did I leave my life of contemplation and prayer to enter into that of desire? Did I not know that there was no happiness save in calm and contemplation, and foolish is he who places his happiness in the things of this world?'

But what had befallen her? She was mad when she threw herself out of the window to escape from him. But how had she become mad? Yesterday he had looked back and had seen her walking away and waving her parasol, a slight happy figure on the gold-tinted sky. What had happened? By what strange alienation of the brain, by what sudden snapping of the sense had madness come? Something must have happened. Did madness fall like that? like a bolt from the blue. If so she must have always been mad, and walking home the slight thread of sense half worn through had suddenly snapped. He knew that she liked him. Had she guessed that when it came to the point that he would not, that he might not have been able to marry her? If so, he was in a measure responsible. Ah, why had he ventured upon a path which he must have known he was not fitted to walk in?

XV.

Next morning John and Mrs. Norton drove to the Rectory, and without asking for Mr. Hare, they went to _her_ room. The windows were open; Annie and Mary Austin sat by the bedside watching. The blood had been washed out of the beautiful hair, and she lay very white and fair amid the roses her friends had brought her. She lay as she had lain in one of her terrible dreams--quite still, the slender body covered by a sheet. From the feet the linen curved and marked the inflections of the knees; there were long flowing folds, low-lying like the wash of retiring water. And beautiful indeed were the rounded shoulders, the neck, the calm and bloodless face, the little nose, and the drawing of the nostrils, the extraordinary waxen pallor, the eyelids laid like rose-leaves upon the eyes that death has closed for ever. An Ascension lily lay within the arm, in the pale hand.

Candles were burning, and the soft smell of wax mixed with the perfume of the roses. For there were roses everywhere--great snowy bouquets and long lines of scattered blossoms, and single roses there and here, and the petals falling were as tears shed for the beautiful dead, and the white flowerage vied with the pallor and the immaculate stillness of the dead.

When they next saw her she was in her coffin. It was almost full of white blossoms--jasmine, Eucharis lilies, white roses, and in the midst of the flowers the hands lay folded, and the face was veiled with some delicate, filmy handkerchief.

For the funeral there were crosses and wreaths of white flowers, roses, and stephanotis. And the Austin girls and their cousins, who had come from Brighton and Worthing, carried loose flowers. Down the short drive, through the iron gate, through the farm gate, the bearers staggering a little under the weight of lead, the little _cortege_ passed two by two. A broken-hearted lover, a grief-stricken father, and a dozen sweet girls, their eyes and cheeks streaming with tears. Kitty, their girl friend, was dead. The word 'dead' rang in their hearts in answer to the mournful tolling of the bell. The little by- way along which they went, the little green path leading over the hill, was strewn with blossoms fallen from the bier and the fingers of the weeping girls.

The old church was all in white; great lilies in vases, wreaths of stephanotis; and, above all, roses--great garlands of white roses had been woven, and they hung along and across. A blossom fell, a sob sounded in the stillness. An hour of roses, an hour of sorrow, and the coffin sank out of sight, a snow-drift of delicate bloom descended into the earth.

XVI.

John wandered through the green woods and fields into the town. He stood by the railway gates. He saw the people coming and going in and out of the public-houses; and he watched the trains that whizzed past.

A train stopped. He took a ticket and went to Brighton.

He walked through the southern sunlight of the town. The brown sails of the fishing-boats waved in translucid green; and the white field of the sheer cliff, and all the roofs, gables, spires, balconies, and the green of the verandahs were exquisitely indicated and elusive in the bright air; and the beach was loud with acrobats and comic minstrels, and nurse-maids lay on the pebbles reading novels, children with their clothes tied tightly about them were busy building sand castles.

But he saw not these things; on his mind was engraved a little country cemetery--graves, yews, a square, impressive spire. He heard not the laughter and the chatter of the beach, but the terrible words: _Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,_ and the dread, responsive rattle given back by the coffin lid. 'And these,' his soul cried, 'are the true realities, death, and after death Heaven or Hell!'

Then he wondered at the fate that had led him from his calm student life.... He had come to Thornby Place with the intention of founding a monastery; instead, he had fallen in love (the word shocked him), and he asked himself if he had ever thought of her more as a wife than as a sister; if he could have been her husband? He feared that he had adventured perilously near to a life of which he could nowise sustain or fulfil, to a life for which he knew he was nowise suited, and which might have lost him his soul.

He never could have married her--no, not when it came to the point. He thought of the wedding-breakfast, the cake, the speeches, the congratulations, and of the woman with whom he would have gone away, of the honeymoon, of the bridal chamber! He knew now that he could not have fulfilled the life of marriage. If those things had happened he would have had to tell her--ah! when it was too late--that he was mistaken, that he could not, in any real sense of the word, be her husband. They could not have lived together. They would have had to part. His life and hers would have been irretrievably ruined, and then? John remembered the story of Abelard and Heloise. A new Abelard --a new Heloise!

The romance of the idea interested him. Then returning suddenly to reality, he asked himself what had happened to Kitty--what was the cause of her madness? Something had occurred. Once again, as he remembered the blithe innocence of her smiling eyes when they parted on the hill, and he recalled with terror the trembling, forlorn, half- crazy girl that had sat opposite him in the drawing-room next day. He remembered the twitch of her lips, the averted eyes, and the look of mad fear that had crept over her face, her flight from him, her cries for help, and her desperate escape through the window. His thoughts paused, and then, like a bolt from the blue, a thought fell into his mind. 'No,' he cried, 'not that.' He tried to shake himself free from the thought; it was not to be shaken off. That was the explanation. It could only be that--ah! it was that, that, and nothing but that.

And as he viewed the delicate, elusive externality of the southern town, he remembered that he had kissed her--he had kissed her by force! 'My God! then the difference between us is only one of degree, and the vilest humanity claims kinship of instinct with me!' He clasped his hands across his eyes, and feeling himself on the brink of madness, he cried out to God to save him; and he longed to speak the words that would take him from the world. Life was not for him. He had learnt his lesson. Thornby Place should soon be Thornby Abbey, and in the divine consolation of religion John Norton hoped to find escape from the ignominy of life.

AGNES LAHENS.

I.

A grey, winter morning filtered through lace curtains into drawing- rooms typical of a fashionable London neighbourhood and a moderate income. There was neither excess of porcelain, nor of small tables, nor of screens. Two large vases hinted at some vulgarity of taste; a grand piano in the back room suggested a love of music, and Mrs. Lahens had but to sing a few notes to leave no doubt that she had bestowed much care on the cultivation of her voice. But method only disguised its cracks and thinness as powder and rouge did the fading and withering of her skin. She was like her voice.

Lord Chadwick stood behind her, following the music bar by bar, and with an interest and a pleasure that did not concord with his appearance. For there was nothing in his appearance to indicate that his intelligence was on a higher plane than that of the mess-room. His appearance seemed to fluctuate between the mess-room and the company promoter's office. He was a good-looking solicitor, he was a good- looking officer; the eyes were attractive; the nose was too large, but it was well-shaped; a heavy military moustache curled over his cheeks, and, as he stood nodding his head, delighted with the music, the seeming commonness of his appearance wore away.

Her song finished, Mrs. Lahens got up from the piano. She was tall and well-made; perhaps too full in the bosom, perhaps too wide in the hips, and perhaps the smallness of the waist was owing to her stays. Her figure suggested these questions. She wore a fashionable lilac blue silk, pleated over the bosom; and round her waist a chatelaine to which was attached a number of trinkets, a purse of gold net, a pencil case, some rings, a looking-glass, and small gold boxes jewelled-- probably containing powder. Her hair was elaborately arranged, as if by the hairdresser, and she exhaled a faint odour of heliotrope as she crossed the room. She was still a handsome woman; she once had been beautiful, but too obviously beautiful to be really beautiful; there was nothing personal or distinguished in her face; it was made of too well-known shapes--the long, ordinary, clear-cut nose, and the eyes, forehead, cheeks, and chin proportioned according to the formula of the casts in vestibules. That she was slightly _declassee_ was clear in the first glance. And she represented all that the word could be made to mean--_liaisons,_ familiarity with fashionable restaurants, and the latest French literature.

Lord Chadwick saw that she was out of temper, and wondered what was the cause. He had not yet spoken to her; she was singing when he came into the room. So laying his hand on her shoulder, he said:

'What is the matter, Olive?'

But it was some time before he could get an answer. At last she said:

'I had an unpleasant scene with the Major this morning.'

'I am glad it is no more than that,' and Lord Chadwick threw himself into an arm-chair. 'What further eccentricity has he been guilty of? Does he want to sweep the crossing, or to wait at table in the crossing-sweeper's clothes?' 'He has bought an old overcoat from the butler.'

'And wants to wear it at lunch?'

'No; he's got a new suit. I insisted on that. It came home last night. He had to give way, for I told him that if he would come down to lunch he must come decently dressed, otherwise he would do Agnes a great deal of harm.'

'But you couldn't persuade him to stick to his type-writing, and keep out of the way?'

'No, and I thought it better not to try. Agnes' return home has excited him dreadfully, and he fancies that it is his duty to watch over her--to protect her from my friends.'

'Then I suppose we shall never get rid of him. He'll be here all day, night and day. Good Heavens!'