Chapter 29

Ian guided the boat to the water steps. Above, over the wall, streamed roses, a great, soundless fall of them, reflected, mass and color, in the lake. Above the roses sprang deep trees, shade behind shade, and here sang nightingales. Facing him sat the Milanese song-bird, the singer Antonia Castinelli. She had the throat of the nightingale and the beauty of the velvety open rose.

"Why land?" she said. "Why climb the steps to the chatter in the villa?"

"Why indeed?"

"They are not singing! They are talking. There is deep, sweet shadow around that point."

The boat turned glidingly. Now it was under tall rock, parapeted with trees.

"Let Giovanni have the boat. Come and sit beside me! You are too far away for singing together."

Old Giovanni at the helm, boatman upon this lake since youth, used long since to murmuring words, to touching hands, stayed brown and wrinkled and silent and unspeculative as a walnut. Perhaps his mind was sunk in his own stone hut behind vine leaves. The two under the rose-and-white-fringed canopy leaned toward each other.

"Tell me of your strange, foreign land! Have you roses there--roses--roses? And nightingales that sing out your heart under the moon?"

"I will tell you of the heather, the lark, and the mavis."

She listened. "Oh, it does not taste as tastes this lake! Give me pain! Tell me of women you have loved.... Oh, hear! The nightingales stop singing."

"Do you ever listen to the silence?"

"Of course ... when a friend dies--or I go to Mass--and sometimes when I am singing very passionately. But this lake--"

She began to sing. The contralto throbbed, painted, told, brought delight and melancholy. He sat with his hand loosened from hers, his eyes upon the lake's blue-green depths. At last she stopped.

"Oh--h!... Let us go back to the talking shore and the chattering villa! Somebody else is singing--somebody or something! I hear silence--I hear it in the silence.... Some things I can sing against, and some things I can't."

They went underneath the wall of roses. Her arm, sleeved as with mist, touched his; her low, wide brow and great liquid eyes were at his shoulder, at his breast. "O foreigner--and yet not at all foreign! Tell me your English words for roses--walls of roses--and music that never ceases in the night--and pleasing, pleasing, pleasing love!"

The boat came to the water steps. The two left it, climbing between flowers. Down to them came a wave of laughter and hand-clapping.

"Celestina recites--but I do not think she does it so well!... That is my window--see, where the roses mount!"

The company, flowing forth, caught them upon the terrace. "Lo, the truants!"

But that night, instead of climbing where the roses climbed, he took a boat from the number moored by the steps and rowed himself across the lake to a piece of shore, bare of houses, lifting by steep slope and crag into the mountain masses. He fastened the boat and climbed here. The moon was round, the night merely a paler day. He went up among low trees and bushes until he came to naked rock. He climbed here as far as he might, found some manner of platform, and threw himself down, below him the lake, around him the mountains.

He lay still until the expended energy was replaced. At last the mind moved and, apprentice-bound to feeling, began again a hot and heavy and bitter work, laid aside at times and then renewed. It was upon the vindication to himself of Ian Rullock.

It was made to work hard.... Its old task used to be to keep asleep upon the subject. But now for a considerable time this had been its task. Old feeling, old egoism, awakened up and down, drove it hard! It had to make bricks without straw. It had to fetch and carry from the ends of the earth.

Emotion, when it must rest, provided for it a dull place of listlessness and discontent. But the taskmaster now would have it up at all hours, fashioning reasons and justifications. The soonest found straw in the fields lay in the faults of others--of the world in general and Alexander Jardine in particular. Feeling got its anodyne in gloating over these. It had the pounce of a panther for such a bitter berry, such a weed, such a shameful form. It did not always gloat, but it always held up and said, _Who could be weaker here--more open to question?_ It made constant, sore comparison.

The lake gleamed below him, the herded mountains slept in a gray silver light. How many were the faults of the laird of Glenfernie! Faults! He looked at the dark old plains of the moon. That was a light word! He saw Alexander pitted and scarred.

Pride! That had always been in the core of Glenfernie. That has been his old fortress, walled and moated against trespass. Pride so high that it was careless--that its possessor could seem peaceable and humble.... But find the quick and touch it--and you saw! What was his was his. What he deemed to be his, whether it was so or not! Touch him there and out jumped jealousy, hate, and implacableness--and all the time one had been thinking of him as a kind of seer!

Ian turned upon the rock above Como. And Glenfernie was ignorant! The seer had seen very little, after all. His touch had not been precisely permeative when it came to the world, Ian Rullock. If liking meant understanding, there had not been much understanding--which left liking but a word. If liking was a degree of love, where then had been love, where the friend at all? After all, and all the time, Glenfernie's notion of friendship was a sieve. The notion that he had held up as though it were the North Star!

The world, Ian Rullock, could not be so contemned....

He felt with heat and pain the truth of that. It was a wrong that Glenfernie should not understand! The world, Ian Rullock, might be incomplete, imperfect--might have taken, more than once, wrong turns, left its path, so to speak, in the heavens. But what of the world, Alexander Jardine? Had it no memories? He brooded over what these memories might be--must be; he tried to taste and handle that other's faults in time and space. But he could not plunge into Alexander's depths of wrath. As he could not, he made himself contemptuous of all that--of Old Steadfast's power of reaction!

A star shot across the moon-filled night, so large a meteor that it made light even against that silver. A mass within Ian made a slow turn, with effort, with thrilling, changed its inclination. He saw that disdain, that it was shallow and streaked with ebony. He moved with a kind of groan. "Was there--is there--wickedness?... What, O God, is wickedness?"

He pressed the rock with his hand--sat up. The old taskmaster, alarmed, gathered his forces. "I say that it is just that--pride, vengefulness, hard misunderstanding!"

A voice within him answered. "Even so, is it not still yourself?"

He stared after the meteor track. There was a conception here that he had not dreamed of.

It seemed best to keep still upon the rock. He sat in inner wonder. There was a sense of purity, of a fresh coolness not physical, of awe. He was in presence of something comprehensive, immortal.

"Is it myself? Then let it pour out and make of naught the old poison of myself!"

The perception could not hold. It flagged and sank, echoing down into the caves. He sat still and felt the old taskmaster stir. But this time he found strength to resist. There resulted, not the divine novelty and largeness of that one moment, but a kind of dim and bare desert waste of wide extent. And as it ate up all width, so it seemed timeless. Across this, like a person, unheralded, came and went two lines from "Richard III"

Clarence is come--false, fleeting, perjured Clarence, That stabbed me in the field by Tewksbury.

It went and left awareness of the desert. "False--fleeting--perjured...."

He saw himself as in mirrors.

The desert ached and became a place of thorns and briers and bewilderment. Then rose, like Antæus, the taskmaster. "_And what of all that--if I like life so?_"

Sense of the villa and the roses and the nightingales in the coverts--sense of wide, mobile sweeps and flowing currents inwashing, indrawing, pleasure-crafts great and small--desire and desire for desire--lust for sweetness, lust for salt--the rose to be plucked, the grapes to be eaten--and all for self, all for Ian....

He started up from the rock above Como, and turned to descend to the boat. That within him that set itself to make thin cloud of the taskmaster pulled him back as by the hair of the head and cast him down upon the rocky floor.

He lay still, half upon his face buried in the bend of his arm. He felt misery.

"My soul is sick--a beggar--like to become an outcast!"

How long he lay here now he did not know. The nadir of night was passed, but there was cold and voidness, an abyss. He felt as one fallen from a great height long ago. "There is no help here! Let me only go to an eternal sleep--"

A wind began. In the east the sky grew whiter than elsewhere. There came a sword-blow from an unseen hand, ripping and tearing veils. _Elspeth--Elspeth Barrow!_

In a bitterness as of myrrh he came into touch with cleanness, purity, wholeness. Henceforth there was invisible light. Its first action was not to show him scorchingly the night of Egypt, but with the quietness of the whitening east to bring a larger understanding of Elspeth.