The Last Miracle Part 13

However this was, it was soon beyond doubt that Dr Burton would not only be invited, but would accept the primacy. The rumour grew and grew. The Prime Minister, in fact, must have been under the strongest pressure to invite Burton, and after a struggle with fate, with his hair, and with the wire-pullers, had to give in. Mrs Edwards herself, who drove over one afternoon from Goodford, told us so much; and by the middle of March it began to be taken for granted that Dr Burton would be metropolitan of Canterbury. I remember the date very well, for just about that time Baron Kolar came down to Goodford for one afternoon to repose himself, to eat the Misses Chambers' toast, and sleep on their sofa, and have his hair brushed; and it was that same day--either the 14th or 15th of March--that the weak voice of our friend said to her brother: "you should go to Styria, since it is so." It was a rough evening, before the candles were lit, and we two were sitting beside her cane chair by her fire; and Langler, with his brow bowed over her hand, answered: "yes, I will go, since I should. We have written a letter to the authorities in those parts, and are waiting for their answer, but if it does not come within a week--or two--I shall do as you bid me."

CHAPTER XV

OUR START

Ten more days pa.s.sed without answer from Styria, and I was daily awaiting Miss Emily's word: "You should start now."

She had left her room on the 22nd, and I can see again in fancy our friend as she was that day, with her hair somewhat lax, and the little wren on her bosom; she was palish, but one would hardly have thought that she had come through a great illness, and more laughter than I could quite account for, than quite pleased me perhaps, was on her lips.

Those were warm days in which much more than the daffodil had blown in Swandale, and on the 25th of the month our friend went out of doors.

Towards evening she and I were in the pavilion--for I find that I must tell something as to her and me, and since I must, will tell it more or less verbatim, with reporter's blankness, as well as I can remember. We, then, being in the pavilion (a circular temple at the end of an oblong of water), she said to me: "those groups of lily-leaves on the lake looking like ears must remember the music which Aubrey and I made here most nights last summer. They will never hear us more. We used to sit in that recess there, and this is the cupboard where we put up the violin and harp." (A series of cupboards and old chairs went round the wall, and there were chambers within the thickness of the marble, each with its big window and seat; in one of the cupboards I saw still a harp in a bag.)

"But the water-lilies will hear you and him again, Emily," I answered.

"Will they? What name shall we give him, Kitty-wren?" she asked of the bird, "let's call him Mr Hopeful, Mr b.u.t.terlips; let's screech him down with nicknames, Jenny"--whereat the bird from picking at the scab in her palm broke, as if in answer, into chattering, so that we had to smile: indeed, this tiny brown being that had come to us so strangely with its message from Styria, and would never leave us, was seldom silent even in the winter, and now in the spring would sometimes scatter one's talk with its showers of music. Miss Emily touched its c.o.c.ky, short tail, saying: "Jenny knows! and the water-lilies know, too: they are never to hear us more. Birds and herbs and women: they are in the original obiah-dodge, and know what they do know."

"Women above all," I remember saying, though my heart was sore for her and for me.

"Look at her now!" she cried--"perched right atop of the harp, screaming something: the devil's in the bird, I think--pneuma akatharton echei!"

This she said with a laugh, but when the bird now suddenly hopped upon her she stepped back from it with grave looks, brus.h.i.+ng it off, murmuring, "get away, you, go"; and at this I found myself bowed over her drawn left palm, choked with her name; for she was no longer herself, and feelings surged within me which cannot be told; but as I held her hand, she first looked gravely at me, and then, to my wonder, began to hum the common song: "two in a bed," whereat, with playful reproach, I murmured "Gregorian," and let go her hand. Just then, the bird settling afresh upon her, she said to it: "well, come then, Kitty-wren: though you be the banshee, the very moth of death, I sha'n't shun you--not though your mood be all of shrouds, and of thundery lone nights in the ground, and good-bye all. Still, you were sick, you know, and I nursed you, I have fed you, and watered you, and cleaned you, and tamed you, and loved you, and you have a devil against me, Jenny."

"Oh, but, Emily," I said, "this little bird begins now to take up too much of your thoughts!"

She did not answer me, but remarked thoughtfully: "she has baseness in her nature; yes, she makes a show of affection, but how flightily she forsook me that evening! I was just by that whitethorn bush out there, looking down at the water-lilies, and she was on my left shoulder, when suddenly she flew away, and before you could say 'Jenny!' a wet cloth was over my face, my mouth was crammed, and the scream of my being made no sound in my ears. Yet I have a sort of memory of a man, a masked man, a lanky man with a stoop, so strong, so rude, dark as death, cruel as the grave----"

"But, Emily, you speak of that?" I cried.

"Aubrey isn't here to hear," she said in a confidential way, "so it is nothing. Let me talk. There's something in mere blackness without one ray, in ravines without bottom, in bitterness so bitter that it churns to cud in the chewing. You don't know how strong he was: I struggled with him, but I was like a straw in his grasp; and when I felt myself going, and no succour nor ruth in the world, and the large darkness glooming, why then I sighed and was reconciled, and I chewed the brash of the grave like black bread, and it was boon and good to me."

When I began now to reproach her for such melancholies she hummed a catch of Langler's--

"In its dash Showers down the rill,"

then at once ran to a window, crying: "look, you can see the whitethorn from here; I must have been dragged at least forty yards from it----"

but I would no longer hear her, but drawing her down to the window-seat, said, "hear me, dear Emily: you are not well, you are still far from well, and for some days I have determined to ask you whether you do not see that it would be well for you now to end my ordeal. If I have the right----"

"Which right, Jenny?" she cried: "here is a young man who wishes to sleep two in a bed with me--two in a bed, bed, bed, bed, bed! but he will never sleep two in a bed with _me_, I think."

At these words I was so alarmed for her and pierced with pain, that I could only bow my head over her knees, and I used the word "mercy."

"Mercy?" said she, "is it she who lives in Cuckoo-town? But you have not waited long."

"Five years."

"Is that long? madly, dyingly long?... But it is only four."

"The fifth has long since begun."

"Has it? Truly? You might have reminded me!"

"On the morning when it began I begged of you a rose as symbol, and you would not give it."

"Is that so? But perhaps I might have given some forget-me-nots, only there were none.... You see, there's failure in you somewhere, Arthur, there's a troubled light about your eyes, you were not born to make a mother of me: you should buy an urn, Arthur, to blubber in."

"Well, I must, since you p.r.o.nounce me so unfortunate," I said; "but after four years and nearly a half of hope and promise----"

"Not promise."

"But of hope so warm----"

"The conditions remain: I have a brother." "But, Emily, you care----"

"For him."

"Alone?"

"They say the flowers grow fresher on maids' graves, Arthur: have you ever heard say that?"

"Yes, but hear me: a day had to come when you must leave Aubrey--only for a time, only partially--and for over a week it has seemed sure to me that it is come now. You should be taken from Swandale, you should enter upon a new life--only for a time. Hear me, Emily: you have been fearfully ill, nigh to death; turn to me, say that you will come----"

"_To Styria?_"

"Styria! Of course, I did not mean Styria."

"Then, where does the man mean, Kitty-wren?" cried she: "he is talking in Nephelo-coccugia, he hears a toll and thinks it a marriage-bell, I am sure he is bewitched, he has blinkers on his eyes and morris bells on his fingers: let's scream at him, and stop his dancing; he will take worms to his bed, and be hugging them for his warm darling: Heaven guard us from such a carle!"

"But pray, pray," was all that I could say, for a hunger and pity of her possessed me.

"I am only telling you the truth," she answered, "your luck has leprosy, your G.o.dmother must have been cross-eyed; and have I ever vowed to be one Mrs Templeton, with your ring round my finger, whispering: '_this is my body_'? I don't remember! I knew you when you were a young boy, and I had a dream of you one night in which something said into my ear nothing but 'Arthur, Arthur, Arthur'--just 'Arthur, Arthur, Arthur' for years, and nothing else--a rum dream. But '_wife!_' '_wife!_' shrilled the thrush, and the cuckoo answered, 'all gone,' 'all gone.' 'Wife' is a bird-word, Jenny, it has no equivalent in my language. '_Wife!_' sing '_wife!_' My tongue is too thick to sweet it."

"Mine isn't," I said, "if you will hear me say it. Emily, look at me, I am praying you----"

"Idolatrously: I am wood and stone. Still, let me hear you say it."

"Say what?"

"'Wife': to hear how you p.r.o.nounce the fluty f-sound and the deep i and the wallowing w."

"Well, since that pleases you, I say--'wife.'"

"Oh, but so sheepishly? without unction? Hear _me_ say it--'_wife_.'"

"Well, so I too say it--'_wife_.'"