CHAPTER XI.

_HAUNTING MEMORIES._

I am digging my warm heart Till I find its coldest part; I am digging wide and low, Further than a spade can go, Till that, when the pit is deep And large enough, I there may heap All my present pain and past.

It was late on the following morning when L'Estrange awoke. He felt strangely refreshed, and wondered for the first few moments what was this change which had come upon him. Then the remembrance of that night's conflict and conquest returned. The calm was still in his heart, drowning in its depths all earthly yearnings.

But more urgently than before he felt the necessity for action. He rang the bell, and his special attendant answered it. From him he learnt that the child, fearful of disturbing him, had taken her morning run with Gretchen while he slept, and that the two Englishmen had started from the hotel with alpenstocks and knapsacks, stating that they would probably not return that evening. From scraps of their conversation the man had gathered that the elder of the two was desirous of showing the younger his home among the mountains. It was therefore more than probable that the chalet usually inhabited by Mr. Grey was their destination.

Mr. Grey's servant, somewhat to his own displeasure, had been left behind at the hotel.

To all this intelligence L'Estrange listened silently. He was surprised, for he had not imagined Maurice Grey would have taken so kindly to the young man who was interesting himself in his affairs; he was disappointed, for on this very day he had determined to meet Maurice, and now another necessary delay must intervene. But he did not express any of his feelings to his attendant. He was accustomed to make use of men, but to all whom he made thus useful himself, his motives and his emotions were a sealed book.

He rose, dressed with the help of the complaisant waiter, and went into the hotel-garden to wait for the return of his darling, and to try, by diligent exercise and exposure to the keen bracing air, to regain some of his old strength.

In the mean time, Maurice Grey and Arthur Forrest were finding their way over the mountains to the chalet, which Arthur was curious to see.

They were drawn together by a kind of mutual attraction that neither of them could explain to himself. Arthur was occasionally very indignant with Maurice's cynicism; he was almost afraid of his superior knowledge of the world; he shrank painfully from his ready sneer, and while he was with him lived in a constant state of agitation in his fear of letting out anything before the time, and thus widening the breach between husband and wife; yet he liked Maurice Grey, he admired his fine proportions, endowed him with all kinds of knowledge and wisdom, and was impatient of the hours that divided them. Maurice, on the other hand, was inclined to despise this boy's rawness and simplicity, and to despise himself for in any sense making a confidant of him, and yet he liked him; he enjoyed his society; the bright expressive eyes of the young man had the power of drawing him out, of making him talk about himself and the troubles of his life.

Perhaps the secret of this strange attraction on his side might have been found in the young Arthur's sympathy and frank admiration, for few men are above the pardonable weakness of liking to be admired and sought out.

The paths that led to Maurice's dwelling-place were tolerably steep, and in some places the snow was soft, in others the frost made the paths slippery; therefore during their walk Maurice and Arthur were too much engrossed with the one necessity of keeping their footing to find much breath for conversation. But they were both good walkers and strong, stalwart men; therefore, although they had started comparatively late in the morning, the sun had not dropped behind the mountains that shut in the valley before they were seated in Maurice's little room, a jug of whisky punch between them, and on the table the white bread and the meat with which Maurice had taken care to provide himself before leaving the hotel that morning.

They found everything in first-rate order. On the previous day Marie and her little grandchild had arrived. The stove had been kept alight all night, according to Karl's strict orders, lest the books and manuscripts should suffer from the damp, and the old woman had just finished a general cleaning up when her master and his visitor arrived.

The dinner was certainly plain, but the two Englishmen did justice to it--Arthur perhaps appreciating it all the more for the absence of any suspicious-looking _entrees_.

"What do you think?" said Maurice when they both paused at last from sheer exhaustion. "This is a very rough place; can you manage to put up with it for a night or two? If so, I will undertake to show you some of the finest points of view in the Alps, seeing which at this season, you know, will render you for all the future a respectable traveller."

Arthur laughed: "Put up with it! I should just think so. I never saw anything so delightfully primitive. I quite envy you your little snuggery."

A sad smile played round Maurice's lips, it softened his face marvellously: "I am scarcely a person to envy, and yet this had been my dream for many a long day. I thought it would make me happy."

There was a bitter ring, a kind of irony of self, in the last words. He looked out meditatively over the snow. "Men are strangely constituted," he continued sadly; "the dream and hope of to-day are the weariness and disgust of to-morrow." He turned to his young companion: "People will always insist upon buying their own experience at any cost, or else I should prove to you, as a lesson that I have painfully gained, how foolish it is to set one's heart too much on anything under the sun. 'Light come, light go;' if we hold to our possessions lightly, the loss of them grieves us little. I see in your eyes that my philosophy is repugnant."

For Arthur read all Maurice's cynicism in the light of his history. His face flushed. "Depth of feeling is never wasted," he said earnestly; "I ought to know that."

Maurice had cleared away the remnants of their simple meal. They were sitting, one on each side of the small stove, discussing some famous cigars, a stock of which Arthur always had on hand.

His remark made Maurice turn round to him suddenly: "That's rather a deep doctrine for one of your age; but it reminds me you were to tell me something to prove that Solomon, who professed, by the bye, to understand human nature, was altogether wrong in that impolite statement of his about women. Stop, let me see! I drank rather too much last night; still, I don't think I am wrong."

But Arthur turned away. His heart and courage had fallen suddenly. It had been easy enough to think and plan, to imagine how with heart-eloquence he would describe the woman he loved--how he could tell of her quiet, self-denying life, of her constancy, of her undying memory of the past--how, when his story had been triumphantly told, he would give her name, and so dispel for ever the mist of falsehood which had risen in dark clouds about her husband's idea of her. The moment for all this had come, and he found that the heart-thrilling words would not answer to his summons, that his feelings were too intense, that the fear of failure paralyzed him.

"Not now, not here," he said to himself, and then he rose and looked out of the window.

The sun was setting over the mountains, and on their summits a dark cloud was resting, but above it and beyond in a vast circle of rays the golden glory shone. It irradiated the pure snows till they blushed into beauty, it lit up the heavens, it glistened from the torrents. The whole landscape was transfigured--changed from the still fixity of the snow-bound North into the voluptuous warmth of an Oriental dream; the dark fir trees showed crimson stems; the reaches of billowy snow looked warm and inviting under the golden radiance; the distant peaks glowed and shone till to the excited fancy of the gazer they might have seemed hewn out of fire. Arthur looked, and the narrow roof seemed to press him down, the four walls of his friend's chalet were a prison.

"I cannot tell it here," he said to himself; "out there under the witness of the sky, in the presence of the pure snow-peaks, it may perhaps be easier."

Maurice was looking at him curiously. "I fear I have been showing impertinent curiosity," he said lightly, "but you drew it on yourself. Why did you interest me so strangely?"

"I spoke impulsively," replied Arthur in the same light manner, "and, I think, rather underrated the difficulties of what I was attempting. For this once you must excuse me. I have a certain disinclination, for which I really am at a loss to account, to telling my story (a very simple one, after all) in this place. If you can preserve your interest till to-morrow, I will promise not to disappoint you. Take me to the point you mentioned just now, and there I will tell you as well as I can."

As he spoke the last words the young man's voice deepened, and there was a certain solemnity in his manner which aroused Maurice's curiosity; but he said nothing more on the subject, and the two men smoked on in silence till the golden glory had passed from the earth, and the snow lay pale once more under the gray mystery of a northern night. Then Maurice looked at his young companion across the interval of shadow, and saw, by the light which gleamed fitfully from the open stove, that there was a deep thoughtfulness on his brow.

Perhaps it was this that drew him on to speak as he did. "You have only begun life," he said, "I have lived out mine, at least all the good that is in it, and yet, I scarcely know how it is, I have been drawn on to speak to you as I seldom speak to either men or women. I don't say I have no friends. I have made many, and good ones too, in the course of my wanderings, and I have appreciated their friendship, but to the best of them all my life has been a sealed-up book." He paused a little, puffing away silently, and Arthur did not speak, only the earnestness on his face deepened as he literally trembled with hope.

For Arthur's heart was as true as steel. He had thrown himself with a self-denying ardor that nothing could curb into Margaret's cause. She was still the queen of his heart, but since those first days, when her regal beauty and apparent friendlessness had driven him nearly mad with longing and desire, his queen had risen to a far loftier place in his thoughts and dreams. There was something very beautiful and rare in this unselfish devotion. Margaret _for himself_, even if he had found that her husband was dead, Arthur never imagined for a moment; in so far he had gained full victory over his own heart. Margaret happy, Margaret raised to her true position, restored to her undoubted rights, and by _his_ instrumentality,--this was the proud desire of his soul. Therefore it was that he hung upon Maurice's words that evening, rejoicing with trembling that so far he had been successful.

Young and inexperienced as he was, he saw the world-weary man trusted him. This was something gained, a step in the right direction.

Arthur scanned his companion's face curiously during the silence that followed his last words. It was a mobile face, though for years it had been trained to express nothing but cynic indifference to life and its concerns. On this special evening Maurice had given way, and emotions for which few of his friends would have given him credit were writing their impress on his brow.

He got up suddenly, and crossing to the window shut out the pale snow. "It is desolate," he said in a low tone; "it makes one shiver." Then he lighted a small reading-lamp, that cast a warm yellow light over the room, and sat down again. "I saw a picture once," he continued in the same low voice, "and the snow out there makes me think of it. It was an English scene, a bit out of a village, the church lit up from inside, a house near it, the pleasant firelight shining from within crimson curtains; outside, snow and desolation. There was a solitary figure amongst it all--a woman with thin tattered clothes and haggard face in which could be seen the remnants of beauty. She was shivering alone in the cold and darkness, looking piteously in at the light. Some moral was tacked on to it, for, if I remember rightly, I came across this long ago in a book or magazine. The whole runs strangely in my mind to-night."

"And what was the moral?" asked Arthur.

"An unloved life or some such sentimental rubbish."

He tried to laugh off the impression, but Arthur, who was deeply interested, said nothing to change the subject, and almost in spite of himself, as it were, Maurice returned to it.

"Strange how this haunts me!" he muttered. "'An unloved life!'--poets' trash. Women can always console themselves, and the misery of the fair is given rather to reclining on velvet and down than shivering out in the snow."

He laughed aloud, and raising his glass drained it at a draught; but there came a sudden change over his face, his brows knit, his hands worked convulsively. "If I had been mistaken--" he murmured, and his head sank upon his breast. Then, as the futility of his vague thoughts flashed over him, he raised it again. "There is no peace but in forgetfulness," he cried, and pouring out a glass of raw spirit he tossed it down his throat.

There followed a few moments of silence which Arthur feared to break, then Maurice looked across at him with a sad smile. "Young man," he said, "it is a good thing to be happy. Misery and remorse change a man woefully. Ah, it is wonderful," he continued, and there was a plaintive ring in his voice--"wonderful to think how entirely they can change us--how we become morose, dark, fretful--how we look for the old landmarks and find them gone, vanished like a dream--how we become absolutely others than ourselves!"

Arthur's voice was husky as he questioned: "Remorse! what have you to do with that?"

"I once thought nothing. Great God!"--he lifted his gleaming eyes; in the agony of the moment he seemed to have forgotten his companion--"we cannot all have patience like to Thine; and I _thought_ I acted for the best. I took away my obnoxious presence, I left her to her chosen pleasures, I fled from my own disgrace."

His head sank. Emotion, fatigue, strong drink had combined to unnerve him utterly. "The face in the picture is hers," he continued in a low, broken voice; "last night I saw her so--pale, wasted by misery, an outcast--and I opened my arms to take her to a shelter, but she fled from me with horror."

Arthur was listening with an interest so deep and earnest that for a moment he forgot his self-imposed caution. He started forward impulsively, and gazing into the bloodshot eyes of the man who faced him, "It was a lying dream," he cried. "She--"

But he broke off suddenly, for Maurice looked at him in a strange, questioning manner. He could have bitten off his tongue for its betrayal. "I mean--I mean--" he explained falteringly, "it was a strange dream."

His explanation could not mend matters; the mischief was done. Maurice was sufficiently himself to be able to detect a certain reality in those first hasty words. He looked at Arthur with suspicion. Could it be possible that the young man knew something of his history? The bare idea made him hastily resume his cloak of proud reserve.

He drew himself up, composed his face, and threw out his hands with a yawn: "I really should crave your indulgence. Something has come over me to-night. I feel as if I had been talking a considerable amount of nonsense." He shook his fist at the whisky-bottle. "There's the traitor. Then," bending his head courteously, "it is long since I have enjoyed anything so pleasant as an evening gossip with a friend. Really, the worst of this kind of life is the difficulty of passing one's evening. Come! a recipe for killing the time: what do you advise?"

"I know no means but endurance," replied Arthur, trying to speak lightly, though his heart was full, for the earnestness had left Maurice's face, the smile of the cynic was playing round his lips.

Indignant and disappointed, Arthur turned away, in case his less manageable features should betray him. The sphere of his experience was narrow, and therefore it was that in this relapse to his indifferent mood he failed to sympathize with Maurice.

It is only when the world has given thrust upon thrust to the heart, it is only when the dreary cry, "Vanity of vanities!" has written itself in all its desolation on the spirit, that these rapid changes from grave to gay, from deep earnestness to bitter cynicism, can be understood; for they are the product of the world's harsh lessons, the carrying out into practice of a creed taught by repeated disappointments. They speak of the soul's fear of revealing itself. Its best and its highest it would cover over with the frost-work of frivolity and cynicism, lest the pearls of its spiritual being should be trampled under the feet of swine.

Too often, unhappily, the result is that the pearls are buried irrecoverably and for ever, that the soul gains the indifference it assumes--an undying heritage of bitterness.

Ah! it is sad, infinitely sad, to think of a soul torn, ruined, in its struggles with wayward fate--too sad, if there were no beyond. But if man be weak, God is merciful. It may be that for the disappointed there is a haven, after all, in the great Hereafter to which all humanity is hastening.