The Daughters of Danaus Part 34

"It was in there, in the old drawing-room, where we had sat together evening after evening, that they found her dead, the very type of all that is brilliant and exquisite and living. To me she was everything.

All my personal happiness was centred in her. I cared for nothing so long as she was in the same world as myself, and I might love her. In the darkness that followed, I was brought face to face with the most terrible problems of human fate. I had troubled myself but little about the question of the survival of the personality after death; I had been pre-occupied with life. Now I realized out of what human longings and what human desperation our religions are built. For one gleam of hope that we should meet again--what would I not have given? But it never came. The trend of my thought made all such hopes impossible. I have grown charier of the word 'impossible' now. We know so infinitesimally little. I had to learn to live on comfortless. All that was strongly personal in me died. All care about myself went out suddenly, as in other cases I think it goes out slowly, beaten down by the continued buffetings of life. I gave myself to my work, and then a curious decentralizing process took place. I ceased to be the point round which the world revolved, in my own consciousness. We all start our career as pivots, if I am not mistaken. The world span, and I, in my capacity of atomic part, span with it. I mean that this was a continuous, not an occasional state of consciousness. After that came an unexpected peace."

"You have travelled a long and hard road to find it!" cried Hadria.

"Not a unique fate," he said with a smile.

"It must be a terrible process that quite kills the personal in one, it is so strong. With me the element is clamorous."

"It has its part to play."

"Surely the G.o.ds must be jealous of human beings. Why did they destroy the germ of such happiness as you might have had?"

"The stern old law holds for ever; wrong and error have to be expiated."

The Professor traced the history of his wife's family, shewing the gradual gathering of Fate to its culmination in the tragedy of her short life. Her father and grandfather had both been men of violent and tyrannical temper, and tradition gave the same character to their forefathers. Eleanor's mother was one of the meek and saintly women who almost invariably fall to the lot of overbearing men. She had made a virtue of submitting to tyranny, and even to downright cruelty, thus almost repeating the story of her equally meek predecessor, of whose ill-treatment stories were still current in the district.

"When death put an end to their wretchedness, one would suppose that the evil of their lives was worked out and over, but it was not so. The Erinnys were still unsatisfied. My poor wife became the victim of their fury. And every new light that science throws upon human life shews that this _must_ be so. The old Greeks saw that unconscious evil-doing is punished as well as that which is conscious. These poor unselfish women, piling up their own supposed merit, at the expense of the character of their tyrants, laid up a store of misery for their descendant, my unhappy wife. Imagine the sort of training and tradition that she had to contend with; her mother ignorant and supine, her father violent, bigoted, almost brutal. Eleanor's nature was obscured and distorted by it. Having inherited the finer and stronger qualities of her father's race, with much of its violence, she was going through a struggle at the time of our marriage: training, native vigour and n.o.bility all embroiled in a desperate civil war. It was too much. There is no doubt as to the ultimate issue, but the struggle killed her. It is a common story: a character militant which meets destruction in the struggle for life. The past evil pursues and throttles the present good."

"This takes away the last consolation from women who have been forced to submit to evil conditions," said Hadria.

"It is the truth," said the Professor. "The Erinnys are no mere fancy of the Greek mind. They are symbols of an awful fact of life that no one can afford to ignore."

"What insensate fools we all are!" Hadria exclaimed. "I mean women."

The Professor made no polite objection to the statement.

As they were wending their way towards the Red House, the Professor reminded his companion of the old friends.h.i.+p that had existed between them, ever since Hadria was a little girl. He had always cherished towards her that sentiment of affectionate good-fellows.h.i.+p. She must check him if he seemed to presume upon it, in seeking sympathy or offering it. He watched her career with the deepest interest and anxiety. He always believed that she would give some good gift to the world. And he still believed it. Like the rest of us, she needed sympathy at the right moment.

"We need to feel that there is someone who believes in us, in our good faith, in our good will, one who will not judge according to outward success or failure. Remember," he said, "that I have that unbounded faith in you. Nothing can move it. Whatever happens and wherever you may be led by the strange chances of life, don't forget the existence of one old friend, or imagine that anything can shake his friends.h.i.+p or his desire to be of service."

CHAPTER XXII.

"The worst thing about the life of you married people," said Valeria, "is its ridiculous rigidity. It takes more energy to get the dinner delayed for a quarter of an hour in most well-regulated houses, or some slight change in routine, than to alter a frontier, or pa.s.s an Act of Parliament."

Hadria laughed. "Until you discovered this by personal inconvenience, you always scolded me for my disposition to jeer at the domestic scheme."

"It _is_ a little geometrical," Valeria admitted.

"Geometrical! It is like a gigantic ordnance map palmed off on one instead of a real landscape."

"Come now, to be just, say an Italian garden."

"That flatters it, but the simile will do. The eye sees to the end of every path, and knows that it leads to nothing."

"Ah! dear Hadria, but all the pathways of the world have that very same goal."

"At least some of them have the good taste to wind a little, and thus disguise the fact. And think of the wild flowers one may gather by the wayside in some forest track, or among the mountain pa.s.ses; but in these prim alleys what natural thing can one know? Brain and heart grow tame and clipped to match the hedges, or take on grotesque shapes----"

"That one must guard against."

"Oh, I am sick of guarding against things. To be always warding off evil, is an evil in itself. Better let it come."

Valeria looked at her companion anxiously.

"One knows how twirling round in a circle makes one giddy, or following the same path stupefies. How does the polar bear feel, I wonder, after he has walked up and down in his cage for years and years?"

"Used to it, I imagine," said Valeria.

"But before he gets used to it, that is the bad time. And then it is all so confusing----"

Hadria sat on the low parapet of the terrace at the Priory. Valeria had a place on the topmost step, where the sun had been beating all the morning. Hadria had taken off her hat to enjoy the warmth. The long sprays of the roses were blown across her now and then. Once, a thorn had left a mark of blood upon her hand.

Valeria gathered a spray, and nodded slowly.

"I don't want to allow emotion to get the better of me, Valeria. I don't want to run rank like some overgrown weed, and so I dread the acc.u.mulation of emotion--emotion that has never had a good explosive utterance. One has to be so discreet in these Italian gardens; no one shouts or says 'd.a.m.n.'"

"Ah! you naturally feel out of your element."

Hadria laughed. "It's all very well to take that superior tone. _You_ don't reside on an ordnance map."

There was a pause. Miss Du Prel seemed lost in thought.

"It is this dead silence that oppresses one, this hushed endurance of the travail of life. How do these women stand it?"

Valeria presently woke up, and admitted that to live in an English village would drive her out of her mind in a week. "And yet, Valeria, you have often professed to envy me, because I had what you called a place in life--as if a place in Craddock Dene were the same thing!"

"It is well that you do not mean all you say."

"Or say all I mean."

Valeria laid her hand on Hadria's with wistful tenderness.

"I don't think anyone will ever quite understand you, Hadria."

"Including perhaps myself. I sometimes fancy that when it became necessary to provide me with a disposition, the material had run out, for the moment, nothing being left but a few remnants of other people's characters; so a living handful of these was taken up, roughly welded together, and then the mixture was sent whirling into s.p.a.ce, to boil and sputter itself out as best it might."

Miss Du Prel turned to her companion.

"I see that you are incongruously situated, but don't you think that you may be wrong yourself? Don't you think you may be making a mistake?"

Hadria was emphatic in a.s.sent.

"Not only do I think I may be wrong, but I don't see how--unless by pure chance--I can be anything else. For I can't discover what is right. I see women all round me actuated by this frenzied sense of duty; I see them toiling submissively at their eternal treadmill; occupying their best years in the business of filling their nurseries; losing their youth, narrowing their intelligence, ruining their husbands, and clouding their very moral sense at last. Well, I know that such conduct is supposed to be right and virtuous. But I can't see it. It impresses me simply as stupid and degrading. And from my narrow little point of observation, the more I see of life, the more hopelessly involved become all questions of right and wrong where our confounded s.e.x is concerned."

"Why? Because the standards are changing," a.s.serted Miss Du Prel.