Part 11

“Yes,” I said quietly, “for the second time and always, because of what you have done. But I fear for myself now, and shall go on fearing. Let me go--O, Gogo, let me escape into the woods, and break my heart on frost and hunger rather than wrong.”

Still clutching at me, with a look of horror, as if he felt the shadow of his last hope eluding him, he scrambled erect again.

“Hunger!” he said. “Think of the snipe and teal! Listen to me, Diana. Before God, I will not offend again. Base, black coward that I am! Before God, Diana!”

I gazed at him intently.

“Why have you brought me here, Gogo?”

“Because,” he answered, “there was no nearer and surer refuge.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Ah, child! But you have not heard the story.”

“Well,” I murmured, reassured, though still shy of him, “if you will keep your promise and be good, you shall tell it me by and by.”

He gave a great sigh, and, gently disengaging myself, I stole to the door, while he followed me with his agitated eyes, and peered out. It was Shole, indeed, and the familiar village green that I saw beneath me, looking down the long wintry slope. Quiet and deserted in the chill mists of dawn, no view apparently less tragic, less harmful, could have greeted me. I returned to my companion, who received me with a pathetic relief. He was quite pale and trembling.

“If my arms had the reach of my heart!” he said. “Well, you have come back; and so--for breakfast.”

“Patty’s pot,” said I merrily. “The dear shall put new heart into me, as her wont was.”

He had bread, and some bottles of wine, a little of which I drank mixed with water. It was the loveliest, most intoxicating meal; and, when it was over, full of a new grace I bid Gogo to my side.

“Now,” said I, “tell me your story.”

“Well, first,” he said with a grunt, “for your safety here. It was the astrologer’s, and now is ours. He was carried away in a thunderstorm, on a red cloud.”

“What do you mean, Gogo, please?”

“I repeat the common superstition. Anyhow, he is gone, and the place is haunted and avoided since. Not a clown but myself will come within a mile of it; and as for me, I have lived here for a month undisturbed already.”

“You? But I know where the poor wretch was taken, and where he died.”

“In the asylum, eh? It is what I supposed; and the red earl comes to his own. Tell me about it.”

“By and by. I want to know first what brought you here.”

“The wish to lose myself and be lost, where I could devise a plan for your rescue.”

“You knew where I had been taken, then?”

“No perspicacity of mine. It was the common report. You had lost your head over love unrequited, and it had become necessary to confine you for a while.”

“O, indeed! Go on.”

“I hear your little white teeth clicking. Rest content. You are avenged: he has married her.”

I jumped to my feet.

“He! de Crespigny?”

“Yes.”

I burst into a shriek of laughter.

“They were reconciled, then? O, the dear particular lady! Does he wipe his boots on her? Did he take his love-potion very strong on the wedding night?”

“Very strong, no doubt,” said Gogo. And then suddenly he clasped my skirt, and buried his face in it.

“He would; it was his way,” he muttered. “O, girl, spare me and my unhappiness--my broken dreams! Did you not know? I had always a struggle to keep him from it. And now he will go down, down.”

“Yes,” I said, “while she clings to his legs, as fools drown together.”

“Would you not have had her try to save him?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“Ah! You are vindictive.”

“Don’t you hear me laughing?”

“Yes; like the devil.”

“Is it? I should be mad indeed if I could applaud her. Do you bear in mind what she has done to me? She is of the sort who make cruelty their pander--a frowsy, garterless Jezebel. O, how I hate prudery! For five years I longed to open the windows on it, and let the air in, and whatever wholesome little devils beside. I declare I loathe myself to be of her sex. Touch me, Gogo. Am I the same, or different? O, to be sure! I wish her joy of her bargain--and him.”

“She will pay. But for Noel, weak child of genius--leave me the sorrow of my broken hopes, Diana.”

“And nothing else? Why did he not meet me?”

“He had not the courage at the last moment.”

“And so, having cut the ground from under me, he stepped back, and instigated madam to her little _coup de theâtre_, I suppose, and helped her to push me over the precipice. And you--you sympathised with and abetted him?”

“Ay,” he said sorrowfully: “witness my long exile here, gnawing my fingers in the hungry moonlight.”

I sank upon the ground in a passion of tears, and he mingled his grief with mine.

“Child, I had loved him; and I had but to learn how he had abandoned you, to leave him. I cursed him--cursed de Crespigny. Will Jove forgive me? What matter, if I have saved you?”

I lifted my drowned eyes and agonised arms.

“Take me to Patty,” I cried, “and let me weep my soul out on her kind little heart.”

He shook his head.

“What!” I said; “you will not?”

“She must not even know,” he said. “I could not trust her anxious love. She must rest as she is, aware of my endless scheming, but not of its fruits. Some day, perhaps. And in the meanwhile my lady is gone honeymooning; there is no hope of appeal to her. A breath would redeliver you to your fate, and perhaps a worse. Come, and tell me all you have suffered, poor mistress.”

I crept to his feet, and in broken tones gave him the history of my misery, to the day, to the hour when he had appeared before me.

“And you have not told me,” I said, “how that was.”

“Once,” he answered, “after I had hidden and settled here, I was spying through the telescope above--(Ay,” he interrupted himself, to my exclamation, “they could be bold to capture the dying sorcerer, but to meddle with his tools was beyond their courage)--when I was witness of a characteristic little _affaire_ on the green below. There were a stilt-walker and his wench--a couple of the wandering tribe--a long-legged bird of passage and his little _cocotte_ of bright plumage. I could see her glitter where I stood--could see her spangles, and the ribbons float from her tambour as she danced. And then suddenly my lord viscount was on the scene. He had been sporting, and carried his gun. He had keepers with him (they were his own; not, as might have seemed apter to his wits, Dr. Peel’s); and his dogs ‘pointed’ at the gipsy, I suppose. Anyhow, there was an altercation; and the next I saw was the clown tipped up by his wooden heels, and lying prone. They carried off the girl--willing or unwilling, it would have needed a stronger telescope than the astrologer’s to discern--and presently the poor stunned fool came to his senses and sat up. I could see him try to gather his wits with his hand, plucking at his brow. He was alone, who had been in company. Where were the rest--his ravished mate, and the mob for whom she had tripped and sung? By and by I saw him, with many starts and delays, unbuckle his stilts, and, having shouldered them, hobble with slow, painful steps towards the village. He disappeared, and till night I sat thinking of him, and of the ‘Contrat Social,’ which M. Rousseau wrote for the angels, and which, therefore, you would not understand, Diana, though, for all my better sense, I adore you. About dark I descended into the woods at the back yonder; and there I came upon my stilt-walker seated dying against a tree. Yes, he was dying. His fall had shattered some ribs, and driven one into his lung, and death was already thawing the white snow on his face into patches of blue. I carried him up to the tower, and eased what I could of his agony, and received his last message to the world. It is a callous world, this world of ’87; a world of serf and Satan and Christianity crushed between. But I tell you I would rather give that message than receive it: would rather be Gogo, the clown and pariah, than the Viscount Salted with all his prospective acres. Well, he died, and I took a spade, and buried him at the foot of the tree where he had rested. Pray God it bears wholesome acorns, for why should he wish to poison the swine his brothers? Then I inherited his property; and a thought, an inspiration, occurred to me how I might use it. Was I not wont to stump the country, like a halting orator? I could stump it to higher purpose now--the purpose of your redemption. Sure the spirit of the dead clown would uphold me, for was it not privilege I fought? So, with no great practice necessary, I became a stilt-walker; and presently ventured afield, starting by night, reaping my little harvest of pence in the far villages by day, and under cover of dark returning. Gradually I contracted my circuit, hovering about your prison; and so, once upon a time, peering over the wall in a wintry evening, spied your figure come and go in the light of a high room. It might be yours! I must dare all, and cast the die. Well, Fortune favours--the fortunate.”

He ended, to a little silence.

“Poor Gogo,” I said softly. “It is true, I do believe, that I am her spoilt doll.”

“And I,” he said, “her Dutch tumbler.”

XVI. I PUT AN END TO ONE FOLLY

Hanging and wiving go by Destiny, which must be my excuse for accepting the silken cord which was weaving for my neck all this time. I knew no more than patient Griselda about my impending fate; yet Destiny was not to be gainsaid because I seemed content to resolve upon Gogo for my present welfare and protection.

He, good monster, never alluded again, during all the days I was with him, to his unhappy passion. He was slavish in his loyalty to his word, and in his attentions to the poor creature so utterly in his power. And if I could not but understand the significance of his sighs and oglings and contortions, my feigned ignorance of those hieroglyphics was undoubtedly the most merciful of all the tortures I might have inflicted on him. Thinking of this, I find salve for certain bruises on my conscience, which, nevertheless, were, I am sure, quite unnecessarily self-inflicted. I acted for the best, and with great pain to myself. He has admitted this since, though confessing he was long in forgiving me.

I was in the tower, in all, but four days, which, nevertheless, might have been as many weeks for their tediousness. Gogo was an incomparable slave and henchman, only his devotion necessarily lacked the relish of publicity. If I could have had but one other to whom to boast it, I could have endured it longer. But to be Single-heart’s exclusive fetish, immured in his wigwam and appropriated to his sole company, was what never appealed to me. Nor do I believe that it does truthfully to any other. We are omnivorous; we can’t live on spoon-meat alone; and there is an end of it.

“Gogo,” I said once, “why are you so attached to me?”

“Why?” said he, throwing up his hands, after his fashion, with a sort of protesting groan to the powers that be. “Because I am a creature of surfaces and impressions; because, drawing my life from the great external of all, it is my doom to worship externals. We talk of our inheriting the world. Pooh! we are just an itch on the skin of this monster, whose dark internals are as remote from us as our own hated organs. Have we ever a thought of possessing our kingdom? Think with what terror we contemplate a living burial. We are the dust of contact between earth and sky; are bandied between space and matter, the dross of one or the scum of the other. Love itself is but the measure of our penetration. It is the propagation of superficies: it probes no farther: and all the time is breathing in the air like a swimmer. Are my eyes in my feet? Ask me why I hate the dark, and am attached to the light--to the brightest gnat of an hour flying within it.”

“Thank you, sir,” said I. “And that is me, I suppose?”

“That is you,” he said--“dancing on a window-pane, and wondering what fate keeps you from the garden beyond.”

“And you,” I said, “are the spider lurking in the window-corner, _n’est ce pas_, and wondering what fate keeps you from devouring me. Well, you are very complimentary; but, for my part, I would rather have an hour’s dancing on the surface than possess all the world that’s under.”

“Ay,” he answered, “and that’s why I covet you.”

Now, was he not an inexplicable creature, and, it must be said, a depressing? Moreover, for all his advocacy of my cause, I could never quite reconcile him to my view of madam.

“Remember the day of the picture,” he would say; “and how she rebuked us all by her attitude. If I testify to your martyrdom, Diana, I must testify to hers that preceded it.”

“She is welcome to the palm,” I cried. “And may she live long to flaunt her conquest.”

He did not answer; and so letting his dissent pass by default, put a bar between us that was never quite surmounted.

In the meanwhile, day followed day, and the frost held, and I was cold and _ennuyée_; and still he delayed our flight on the score of peril. I had come but poorly clad for the test, and I cried and shivered much in our dismal refuge, where what fire we could afford must be kept low from dread of the smoke betraying us. Present food we had, and some wine that helped a little to comfort our dejection; and on the Friday he was due, tramping fourteen miles thither and back over the hills, to claim his fresh dole of the tree above Wellcot, where faithful Patty--who was in his confidence as to his retreat, and the means towards my salvation he hoped to make of it--was wont to conceal it. Dear darling! How I longed to convey her a message; but he would not hear of it.

“Of all ephemera,” he said, “she is the very transparent-bodied fly, the secrets of whose own heart she cannot help but reveal.”

So I had to submit, and hold her sweet image in my arms o’ nights, when the wind came in at the door and the stars crackled with cold. But Gogo was right, I had to confess, when once from the deep woods beyond Shole we heard the clanging of bloodhounds, and knew that my enemies were vainly seeking the trail which had no existence. Then I cowered low, and felt a new gush of affection for the resourceful giant who was so wise in the singleness of his passion.

Often by day I would climb up the ladder to the loft where the astrologer’s telescope yet remained, commanding, like a disused cannon, the house and village he had fancied under its dominion, and there spend hours spying hungrily for what tokens of life the bitter season afforded. They were not many or inspiriting; but they served at least to keep me in touch with that world of my fellows that seemed eternally lost to me.

On the Friday I fell at Gogo’s feet.

“Safe or unsafe,” I cried, “take me away! I can stand this loneliness no longer.”

His face was full of a sorrowful ecstasy.

“And it was a garden to me,” he murmured; “blind that I am!”

“I shall die,” I cried terribly, “and you will lay me with the dead clown under the tree.”

“So would you be for ever mine,” he continued, in a sort of dream.

I shrunk from him, and seeing my look, he cast himself down on his face before me.

“Command me as you will,” he cried; “only never, never bid me from serving you.”

“You will go?” I sat back, eagerly canvassing him. “Why should I dream of parting with you? Are not our fortunes pledged together, even if I did not owe you the best of all gratitude? You are so wise and brave; you will find a plan and a direction. Only I can stop here no longer.--O, I can’t!--Gogo, take me away--to London--anywhere.”

He raised himself.

“Spare me this evening to forage,” he said, “so that to-morrow we can at least start provided.”

In deep night he left me, to go to the tree. It was the first time I had been abandoned to my sole self. So long as I could discern his figure, striding over the fields, like some unearthly goblin, on its high stilts, I stood by the door gazing into the starlight. Then, when I could see him no more, I sat down just within, my back to the vast emptiness, and hugged and cried to myself against the long panic of waiting.

Not many minutes had I sat thus, when something--a footstep, a shadow--seemed to fall upon my heart with a shock that stopped its beating. Too terrified for look or utterance, I crouched low, hoping the thing would pass, and leave me unobserved.

“I have come, madam, to invite you to a safer asylum,” said a low and musical voice.

I gave an irresistible cry, suppressing it instinctively, even in its emission, lest it should call back my faithful squire, from his long toil across the fields, to a need which these gentle tones were far from justifying. I struggled to my feet, and made myself as small as possible against the wall.

“Who are you?” I whispered.

“An outcast like yourself,” answered the shadow; “a fellow-sufferer at the hands of the very family to which you owe your misfortunes.”

“Who are you?” I could only whisper again.

“I am George Rowe,” it said. “Do you remember me? We have met once--an ineffaceable impression to me. I have followed your career since; unknown to you, have traced you by the flowers in your footsteps--yes, even to that wicked place, and your flight from it. I have watched you since from the woods below; have stood at this door at night and listened to your breathing till I maddened; have sorely bided my time, seeking to speak to you. I have tracked the honest tracker, your good servant and saviour; and, while I applaud his devotion, must warn you against the equivocal position in which your further acceptance of that devotion may place you.”

I could not see his face, but only the dusk of a comely form, as it stood now before me. Well could I recall, indeed, “the good-humoured gentleman in the grey coat,” who had once so espoused my childish cause, and earned thereby the hatred of his kinsmen. My confidence was returning to me with my wits.

“You are very considerate for us,” I said deridingly. “Do you come as madam your sister’s emissary, since you are so particular for my character?”

“Alas!” he said, “you do well to doubt me, being so related. But I am an outlaw from all that house’s influence and consideration.”

“An outlaw--you!” I murmured.

“Ay,” he answered; “ruined, menaced, and driven forth to nurse my wrongs in hiding.”

“Why, where?” I asked.

“To the woods,” he answered, “like Robin Hood.”

“O, an attractive asylum, sir, for distressed ladies,” I said.

He replied, “Maid Marian thought so.”

“Perhaps she had an attachment there,” said I. “I miss the application to myself.”

He laughed softly.

“Whether we fly from fear, or fly to love, we fly,” he said. “You may hold your enemies too cheap, not knowing that my lord makes interest with his sister, and for his own purposes, to subsidise your Dr. Peel. For the sake of the secrets of the prison-house, he will not leave her solus to the hue and cry. You have planted two dragon-heads in place of the one you severed.”

I shrunk before him.

“What do you mean? How do you know?”

“By the token,” he said, “that he destined me to your fate, and I answered with the better part of valour, which you will be wise to imitate.”

“To-morrow,” I muttered; “we had already decided.”

“That is not all, nor enough,” he urged. “You may be Una, _with_ a rhinoceros, and that is not enough. My lord rides a thunder-bolt. It is not enough to flee him; you must vanish--be no more.”

Now all of a sudden--I know not how--his words seemed to wake me to the fond illusion of my state. How, indeed, was I situated, with a legless Caliban to show me how to run? I had been blinded, by Gogo’s devotion, to the real nature of the presumption it had thought to justify. What honest right had he to have undertaken so responsible a deed, save he had provided for it to the last details? I felt suddenly very naked and forlorn--shiftless and crying, like some poor exposed child in the night. I clasped my fingers to the shadow, entreating it in a broken voice--

“What am I to do? Advise me, help me!”

It moved upon me, soft, and swift, and irresistible. I felt my hands imprisoned--seized as out of the grave into an assurance of human warmth and sympathy.

“For what else am I here?” demanded the fervent voice. “Have I not the prior claim? Have you never thought of me in all these years--of what you might be now, save for my interference?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Indeed, indeed I am not one to forget.”

“Well,” he said, “I am just a vagabond at last, and desperate in romance; and you--your reason is forfeit, if not your life. Be under no delusion about it; nor about the real impotence of this good fellow to save you. Come with me, then, while there is time, and be my little sister. I am lonely in the deep woods.”

I did not move or speak, but I gazed up intently into the white bloom of his face. The strangest thought was struggling for expression in me--of some conscious gravitation, through all these years, towards an affinity which had been shadowed out to me at that first and only meeting. I felt no shyness, but only a restful confidence in his company. Was not that strange? To be brother and sister, one and indivisible in the candid sympathies of Nature. I recognised in a moment that it was that ideal relationship which had always appealed to me for the best and purest--that I could never be happy again divorced from it.

Suddenly the tears were in my eyes.

“If I could truly be your little sister,” I said, “and keep house for you, as Gretel did for the gentle shepherd who had plucked her when a flower.”

He heaved a long sigh, full of rapture.

“Quick, then! let me pluck my flower,” says he, “and run.”

But now, at that, for some reason, a revulsion of feeling took me. I sank down upon the ground away from him, and hid my face in my hands.

“No, no,” I cried--“not yet, not now. O, leave me, _please_!”

Perhaps he was wise to understand and temporise. Anyhow, he went, though no farther than the door.

For a moment I hated myself; for a moment I felt the basest thing on earth. What use to reflect that reason and kindness were on my side: that, since I could not cure a poor fond fool, it were no mercy, but the contrary, to submit him to the continued infection of my presence? I said so to myself, and saying it, saw his face returning--full of light and eagerness--to learn the damning truth! To be held accursed in that great heart! I could not, I could not! Poor Gogo! Had he not given up everything for me? I would not desert him. Why should he not come too? But no: I saw in the same instant that that was impossible, since he himself had no thought, no wish, to be my brother. And perhaps, if I went, I should never see him again. Well, would not that be the best for him? Let me nurse my grief eternal, so long as he found _his_ cure in separation. It were better I should go. Freed of this incubus, he would have no longer need to crouch and starve. The world had no reason, so far as I knew, to identify him with my flight. And now every hour he remained with me was an added peril to his safety, his very existence!

Quite wild, I rose to my feet and went panting to the shadow.

“Take me away,” I said, “before he breaks my heart, returning.”

He took my hand tight in his, drew me under the starlight, and together we fled down the hill and into the woods.

XVII. I AM CONSIGNED TO A GREEN GRAVE

To you, my dear Alcide, conscience is, I know, a disease, and virtue its relapse. I do not, then, ask your sympathy, but only your commiseration in that long struggle with my better self in which I was now to engage--a struggle which found me child, and left me woman--a struggle through whose intermittent deliriums moved ever the sorrowful figure of my poor lost Gogo.