Part 7

"There was a very kind Scotch lady who took me to the hotel. She was very kind. I don't know who she was. The divers came from Belfast during the night. Ottalie was in the saloon. She was wearing her wraps. She must have just put them on. There were five others in the saloon. The inquest was ghastly. One of the witnesses was drunk, and the jury were laughing. The waiter at the hotel knew me. He wired to Leslie, and Leslie hired a motor and came over. Colonel Fawcett is in bed with sciatica. Leslie is arranging everything."

"Is Leslie here?"

"No. Maggie has bronchitis. He had to go back. He'll be here late to-night."

"I might have been with you, Agatha. If I'd stayed in another minute on Tuesday morning, I should have seen her. I should have travelled with you. It wouldn't have happened. I should have gone for the wraps."

"We saw you at your play, on Monday."

"I didn't know you were in town. Oh, if I had only known!"

"It was my fault that you did not know. I kept back her letter to you. I was jealous. I was wicked. I think the devil was in me."

"Don't think of that now," said Roger gently. He had known it from the first. "Is there anything which I can do, Agatha? Letters to write?"

"There are stacks of letters. They all say the same thing. Oh, I am so wretched, so very wretched!" The shuddering took hold of her. She wept in a shaking tremble which seemed to tear her in pieces.

"Agatha," said Roger, "will you come to Belfast with me? I will hire the motor in the village. I must get some flowers. It would do you good to come."

"No. I must stay. I shall only have her two days more."

He would have asked to look upon Ottalie; but he refrained, in the presence of that passion. Agatha had enough to bear. He would not flick her jealousies. Ottalie was lying just overhead, within a dozen feet of him. Ten minutes ago he had been thinking of her as a lover thinks of his beloved. His heart had been leaping with the thought of her. There she was, in that quiet room, behind the blinds, lying on the bed, still and blank. And where was what had made her so wonderful? Where was the spirit who had used her as a lodging? She had been all that makes woman wonderful. Beautiful with beauty of mind; a perfect, perfect spirit. And she was dead. She was lying upstairs dead. And here were her two lovers, listening to the clock, listening to the spade-strokes in the garden, where old John was at work. The smell of the potpourri, which she had made the summer before, seemed as strong as incense. The portrait by Raeburn, of her great-grandfather, looked down dispassionately, with eyes that were very like her eyes. The clock had told the time to that old soldier when he went to be painted. It had gone on ticking ever since. It had been ticking when the old soldier died, when his son died, when his grandson died. Now she was dead, and it was ticking still, a solemn old clock, by Frodsham, of Sackville Street, Dublin, 1797, the year before the rising. It would be ticking still, perhaps, when all the hearts then alive would have ceased to tick. There was something pitiless in that steady beat. Three or four generations of Fawcetts had had their lives measured by it, all those beautiful women and noble soldiers. All the "issue" mentioned in Burke.

He went out into the light. All the world seemed melted into emotion, and poured upon him. He was beaten. It poured upon him. He drew it in with his breath. Everything within sight was an agony with memories of her. "I must be doing something," he said aloud. "I must get flowers. I shall wake up presently." He turned at the gate, his mind surging. "Could Agatha be sure that she is dead? Perhaps I am dead. Or it may be a dream." It was not a dream.

At the bottom of the loaning he met a red-haired man from whom in old time he had bought a boat.

"It's a fine day, sir," said the man.

"John," said Roger, "tell Pat Deloney I want the car, to go to Belfast at once. I shall want him to drive. Tell him to come for me here."

"Indeed, sir," said John, looking at him narrowly. "There's many feeling that way. There was a light on her you'd think it was a saint, and her coming east with brightness."

After John had gone down to the village, there limped up an old, old, half-witted drunken poet, who fiddled at regattas. He saluted Roger, who leaned on a gate, staring uphill towards the house.

"Indeed, Mr. Roger," said the old man; "there's a strong sorrow on the place this day. There was a light burning beyant. I seen the same for her da, and for her da's da. There was them beyant wanted her." He waited for Roger to speak, but getting no answer began to ramble in Irish, and then craved for maybe a sixpence, because "indeed, I knew your da, Mr. Roger. Ah, your da was a grand man, would turn the heads of all the women, and they great queens itself, having the pick of professors and prime ministers and any one they'd a mind to."

After a time, singing to himself in Irish, he limped on up the loaning to the house, to beg maybe a bit of bread, in exchange for the fact that he had seen a light burning for her, just as he had seen it for her da, her da's da, and (when the kitchen brandy had arisen in him) her da's da's da years ago.

The car came snorting up the hill, and turned in the broad expanse where the loaning joined the highway. John opened the door for Roger. "If I was a young gentleman and had the right to do it," he said, "I would go in a cyar the like of that cyar down all the craggy precipices of the world." The car shook, spat, and darted. "Will ye go by Torneymoney?" said Pat. "There's no rossers that way."

"By Torneymoney," said Roger. "Drive hard."

"Indeed," said Pat; "we will do great deeds this day. We will make a strong story by the blessing of God. Let you hold tight, your honour. There's holes in this road would give a queer twist to a sea-admiral."

The funeral was on Saturday. About a dozen men came. There were five or six Fawcetts and old Mr. Laramie, who had married Maisie Fawcett, Ottalie's aunt, one of the beauties of her time. The rest were friends from the countryside, Englishmen in faith, education, and feeling. They stood with bared heads in the little lonely Protestant graveyard, as Roman soldiers may have stood by the pyres of their mates in Britain. They were aliens there. They were part of the garrison. They were hiding under the ground something too good and beautiful to belong to that outcast country. Roger had the fancy that God would have to be very strong to hold that outpost. He had not slept for two nights. Sentiments and fancies were overwhelming him. It was one of those Irish days in which a quality or rarity in the air gives a magic, either alluring or terrible, to every bush and brook and hillock. He had often thought that Ireland was a haunted country. He thought so now, standing by Ottalie's grave. Just beyond the graveyard was the river, which was "bad," and beyond that again a hill. The hill was so "bad," that the beggarwomen, passing in the road, muttering at "the mouldy old Prots, playing at their religion, God save us," crossed themselves as they went by it. Roger prayed that that fair spirit might be at peace, among all this invisible evil. His hand went into his breast pocket from time to time to touch her letter to him. He watched Leslie Fawcett, whose face was so like hers, and old Mr. Laramie, who had won the beauty of her time, and an old uncle Fawcett, who had fought in Africa, sixty years before. The graves of other Fawcetts lay in that corner of the graveyard. He read their names, remembering them from Burke. He read the texts upon the stones. The texts had been put there in agonies of remorse and love and memory by the men and women who played croquet in an old daguerreotype in Ottalie's sitting-room. "He giveth His beloved sleep," and "It is well with the child," and one, a strange one, "Lord, have patience with me, and I will pay Thee all." They had been beautiful and noble, these Fawcetts. Not strong, not clever, but wonderful. They had had a spirit, a spiritual quality, as though for many, many centuries their women had kept themselves unspotted by anything not noble. An instinct for style running in the race of the Fawcetts for centuries had made them what they were.

A hope burned up in Roger like inspiration. All that instinct for fineness, that fastidious selection of the right and good which had worked to make Ottalie, from long before her birth, and had flowered in her, was surely eternal. She had used life to make her character beautiful and gentle, just as he had used life to discipline his mind to the expression of his imagination. "What's to come" was still unsure; but he felt sure, even as the trembling old incumbent reminded them that St. Paul had bidden them not to sorrow, that that devotion was stronger than death. Her spirit might be out in the night, he thought, as in time his would be; but what could assail that devotion? It was a strong thing, it was a holy thing. He was very sure that nothing would overcome it. Like many young men, ignorant of death, he had believed in metempsychosis. This blow of death had brought down that fancy with all the other card-houses of his mind. His nature was now, as it were, humbled to its knees, wondering, stricken, and appalled by possibilities of death undreamed of. He could not feel that Ottalie would live again, in a new body, starting afresh, in a new life-machine, with all the acquired character of the past life as a reserve of strength. He could only feel that somewhere in that great empty air, outside the precise definition of living forms, Ottalie, the little, conquered kingdom of beauty and goodness, existed still. It was something. Newman's hymn, with its lovely closing couplet, moved him and comforted him. One of the Fawcetts was crying, snuffling, with a firm mouth, as men usually cry. He himself was near to tears. He was being torn by the thought that Ottalie was lonely, very lonely and frightened, out there beyond life, beyond the order of defined live things.

He walked back with Leslie Fawcett. Agatha's mother was at the house; Leslie was stopping in the cottage with him.

"Poor little Ollie," said Leslie gently.

"She was very beautiful," said Roger. He thought, as he said it, that it was a strange thing for an Englishman to say to a dead woman's brother. "She was very beautiful. It must be terrible to you. You knew her in an intimate relation."

"Yes," said Leslie, looking hard at Roger, out of grave level eyes. "She was a very perfect character."

They were climbing the cliff road to the cottage. The sea was just below them. The water was ruffled to whiteness. Sullivan's jobble stretched in breakers across the bay from Cam Point. Gannets, plunging in the jobble, flung aloft white founts, as though shot were striking.

"You were very great friends," said Roger. "I mean, even for brother and sister."

"Johnny was her favourite brother, as a child," said Leslie. "You did not see much of Johnny. He was killed in the war. And then he was in India a long time. It was after Johnny's death that Ottalie and I began to be so much to each other. You see, Agatha was only with her about five months in the year. She was with us nearly that each year. She was wonderful with children."

"Yes," said Roger, holding open the gate of the little garden so that his guest might pass, "I know." He was not likely to forget how wonderful she had been with children. They went into the little sitting-room where Norah, in one of her black moods, gave them tea. After tea they sat in the garden, looking out over the low hedge at the bay. At sunset they walked along the coast to a place which they had called "the cove." They had used to bathe there. A little brook tumbled over a rock in a forty-foot fall. Below the fall was a pool, overgrown later in the year with meadow-sweet and honeysuckle, but clear now, save for the rushes and brambles. The brook slid out from the basin over a reddish rock worn smooth, even in its veins and knuckles, by many centuries of trickling. Storms had piled shingle below this side of water. The brook dribbled to the sea unseen, making a gurgling, tinkling noise. Up above, at the place where the fall first leapt, among some ash-trees, windy and grey, stood what was left of a nunnery, of reddish stone, fire-blackened, among a company of tumbled gravestones.

Of all the places sacred to Ottalie in Roger's mind, that was the most sacred. They had been happy there. They had talked intimately there, moved by the place's beauty. His most vivid memories of her had that beautiful place for their setting.

"Roger," said Leslie, "did you see her in town, before this happened?"

"No."

"You did not see her?"

"No. Not this time."

"She was going to see you."

"I believe she came just before she started. I had just gone out. We missed each other."

Leslie lifted his pince-nez. He was looking at Roger, with the grave, steady look by which people remembered him. Roger thought afterwards that his putting on of the pince-nez had been done tenderly, as though he had said, "I see that you are suffering. With these glasses I shall see how to help you."

"You were in love with her?" he asked, in a low voice.

"Yes. Who was not?"

"I have something to say to you about that. Have you ever thought of what marriage means? I am not talking of the passionate side. That is nothing. I am talking of the everyday aspect of married life. Have you thought of that at all?"

"All men have thought of it."

"Yes; I grant you. All men have thought of it. But do many of them think it home? Have you? I imagine that most men never follow the thought home; but leave it in day-dreams, and images of selfishness. I don't think that many men realise how infinitely much finer in quality the woman's mind is. Nor how much more delicately quick it is. Nor what the clash of that quickness and fineness, with something duller and grosser, may entail, in ordinary everyday life, to the woman."

"I think that I realise it."

"Yes, perhaps. Perhaps you do realise it, as an intellectual question. But would you, do most men, realise it as life realises it? It is one thing to imagine one's duty to one's wife, when, as a bachelor, used to all manner of self-indulgence, one sits smoking over the fire. But to carry out that duty in life taxes the character. Swiftness of responsion, tact, is rarer than genius. I imagine that with you, temporary sensation counts for more than an ordered, and possibly rigid, attitude, towards life as a whole."

"Both count for very much; or did. Nothing seems very much at this moment."

"Ottalie loved you," said Leslie simply. "But she felt that there was this want in you, of so thinking things home that they become character. She thought you too ready to surrender to immediate and, perhaps, wayward emotions. She was not sure that you could help her to be the finest thing possible to her, nor that she could so help you."

"How do you know this?"

"She discussed it with me. She wanted my help. I said that I ought not to interfere, but that, on the whole, I thought that she was right. That, in fact, your love was not in the depths of your nature. I said this; but I added that you were too sensitive to impressions not to grow, and that (rightly influenced) there is hardly anything which you might not become. The danger which threatens you seems to me to threaten all artists. Art is a great strain. It compels selfishness. I have wondered whether, if things had been different, if you had married Ottalie, you could have come from creating heroines to tend a wife's headache; or, with a headache yourself, have seen the heroine in her. We have life before us. You are all tenderness and nobleness now. It is sad that we have not this always in our minds."

"Yes," said Roger. "We have life; and all my old life is a house of cards. Before this it seemed a noble thing to strive with my whole strength to express certain principles, and to give reality and beauty to imagined character. I worked to please her. And often I did not understand her, and did not know her. I have walked in her mind, and the houses were all shut up. I could only knock at the doors and listen. And now I never shall know. I only know that she was a very beautiful thing, and that I loved her, and tried to make my work worthy of her."

"She loved you, too," said Leslie. "Whatever death may be, we ought to look upon it as a part of life. Try to be all that you might have been with her. Never mind about your work. You have been too fond of emotional self-indulgence. Set that aside, and go on. She would have married you. Try to realise that. Her nature would have been a part of yours. All your character would have been sifted and tested and refined by her. Now let us go in, Roger. Tell me what you are going to do."

"There is not much to do. I must try to rearrange my life. But I see one thing, I think, that art is very frightful when it has not the seriousness of life and death in it."

"Yes," said Leslie. "Maggie and I went into that together. We built up a theory that the art life is strangely like the life of the religious contemplative. Both attract men by the gratification of emotion as well as by the possibility of perfection. One of the great Spanish saints, I think it is St. John of Avila, says that many novices deliberately indulge themselves in religious emotion, for the sake of the emotion, instead of for the love of God; but that the knowledge of God is only revealed to those who get beyond that stage, and can endure stages of 'stypticities and drynesses,' with the same fervour. It seems to us (of course we are both Philistines) that modern art does not take enough out of those who produce it. The world flatters them too much. I suspect that flattery of the world is going on in return."

"Not from the best."

Leslie shook his head unconvinced. "You are not producing martyrs," he said. "You do not attack bad things. You laugh at them, or photograph them, and call it satire. You belong to the world, my friend Roger. You are a part of the vanity of the world, the flesh, and the devil. You have not even made the idea of woman glorious in men's minds. Otherwise they would have votes and power in the Houses. Not one of you has even been imprisoned for maiming a censor of plays. All the generations have a certain amount of truth revealed to them. It is very dangerous to discover truth. You can learn what kind of truth is being revealed to an age by noting what kind of people give their lives for ideas. It used at one time to be bishops. Think of it."

Leslie talked on, shaping the talk as he had planned it beforehand, but pointing it so gently that it was not till afterwards that Roger, realising his motives, gave him thanks for his unselfishness. They stopped on the rushy hill below Ottalie's home, just as the sun, now sinking, flamed out upon her window, till it burned like the sun itself. To Roger it seemed like a flaming door. She had looked out there, from that window. Her little writing-table, with its jar of sweet peas, and that other jar, of autumn berries and the silvery parchment of honesty, stood just below it, on each side of the blotter, bound in mottled chintz. Leslie's talk came home to him fiercely. The clawings of remorse came. He knew the room. He had never known the inmate. She was gone. He had wasted his chance. He might have known her; but he had preferred to indulge in those emotions and sentiments which keep the soul from knowledge. Now she was gone. All the agony of remorse cried out in him for one little moment in the room with her, to tell her that he loved her, for one little word of farewell, one sight of the beloved face, so that he might remember it forever. Memories rose up, choking him. She was gone. There was only the flaming door.

"Roger," said Leslie, in his even, gentle voice, which had such a quality of attraction in it, "Maggie asked me to bring you back with me to stay a couple of weeks."

In his confused sleep that night he dreamed that Ottalie was lying ill in her room, behind a bolted copper door which gleamed. The passage without the room was lighted. People came to the door to knock. A long procession of people came. He saw them listening intently there, with their ears bent to the keyhole. They were all the people who had been in love with her. Some were relatives, some were men who had seen her at dances, some were women, some were old friends like himself. Last of all came an elderly lady carrying a light. She was dressed in a robe of dim purple. She, too, knocked sharply on the door. She lingered there, long enough for him to study her fine, intellectual face. It was the face of Ottalie grown old. The woman was the completed Ottalie.

For a moment she stood there listening, as one listens at the door of a sick-room. Then she knocked a second time, sharply, calling "Ottalie!" He saw then that it was not a door but a flame. He heard from within a strangled answer, as though some one, half dead, had risen to open. Some one was coming to the door. Even in his dream his blood leaped with the expectation of his love.

But it was not his love. It was himself, strangling in the flames to get to her. She reached her hand to him. Though the flames were stifling, he touched her. It was as though the agony of many years had been changed suddenly to ecstasy. "Roger," she said. Her hand caught him, she drew him through the fire to her. He saw her raise the candle to look at his face. For a moment they were looking at each other, there in the passage. The agony was over. They were together, looking into each other's eyes. He felt her life coursing into him from her touch.

Voices spoke without. Norah, at the door, was haggling. "Is that all the milk ye've brought, Kitty O'Hara?"

The dream faded away as the life broke in upon him. There was some word, some song. Some one with a fine voice was singing outside, singing in the dream, singing about a fever. Ottalie was holding him, but her touch was fading from his sense, and joy was rushing from him. Outside, on the top spray of the blackthorn, a yellow-hammer trilled, "A little bit of bread and no--che-e-e-e-se," telling him that the world was going on.

The fortnight passed. Roger was going back to London. The day before he sailed he rode over with Leslie to take a last look at Ottalie's home. He left Leslie at the cottage, so that he might go there alone. He walked alone up the loaning. Within the garden he paused, looking down at the house. The smell of the sweet verbena was very strong, in that mild damp air, full of the promise of rain. A paper was blowing about along the walk. A white kitten, romping out from the stable, pounced on it, worried it with swift gougings of the hind claws, then, spitting, with ears laid back and tail bristling, raced away for a swift climb up a pear-tree. Roger picked up the paper. It would be a relic of the place. He felt inclined to treasure everything there, to take the house, never to go away from it, or, failing that, to carry away many of her favourite flowers. He straightened the paper so that he might read it.