The Nest, The White Pagoda, The Suicide, A Forsaken Temple, Miss Jones and the Masterpiece Part 2

"You are lying, Kitty--you are lying!"

"That too! You can say that! To me! To me!"

"It's true. You know you lie. I haven't loved you as I did. But I've cared--good G.o.d! I see now how much.--It is you who have ceased to care."

At these words Kitty was transfigured. Joy, joy unmistakable, flamed up in her. It mounted to her eyes and lips, revivifying her ravaged face, beaming forth, inundating him, unfaltering, a.s.sured, absolute.

"Darling--darling--you love me? you do love me?--Oh, you shan't die--I won't let you die. My love will keep you with me. We will forget all these years when we haven't understood--when we've forgotten. We will forget everything--except that we love each other and that that is all there is to live for in the world."

"And--Sir Walter?--" he said, simply and helplessly.

Kitty's arms were about his neck, her transfigured face was upturned to him. Wors.h.i.+pped by those eyes, held in that embrace, his words, in his own ears, were absurd. Yet he hadn't been dreaming yesterday. Kitty might make the words seem absurd; but even Kitty's eyes and Kitty's arms could not conjure away the facts of the sunlit summer-house, the tears, the parting kiss. What of Sir Walter? What else was there left to say?

But after he had said them, and stood looking at her, it was as if his words released the last depths of her rapture. She did not flush or falter or show, even, any shock or surprise. Her arms about him, her eyes on his, it was a stiller, a more solemn joy that dwelt on him and enfolded him.

"You know?" she said.

"I heard you last evening," Holland answered. "I was sitting outside the summer-house. You said you loved him. You let him kiss you."

"You will forgive me," said Kitty. They were looking at each other like two children. "I thought I loved him, because I was so unhappy, and he is so dear and kind and loves me so much. I must love some one. I must be loved. I was so lonely. And you seemed not to care at all any more.

You were only my husband, you weren't my lover.--And you don't know all.

He doesn't know it. But I know it now. And I must tell you everything--all the dreadful weakness--you must understand it all.

Perhaps, if this hadn't come, perhaps, if you hadn't been given back to me like this, I might have gone away with him, Nicholas. It wasn't that I had ceased to love you; it was that I had to be loved and was weak before love. It is dreadful;--I believe all women are like that. And I did struggle, oh, I did. Nicholas, you will forgive me?"

"I knew it, dear, and I forgave you."

"You knew it? You loved me so much that you forgave?"

"That was why I told you, Kitty. I hadn't meant to tell you; I had meant to keep it from you, this sadness, and to make our last month together a happy one for you. I was coming back to you with such longing, dear. And then I heard; and then I was afraid that you might go away before you would be free."

"You loved me so much? You did it because you loved me so much?--Oh!

Nicholas--Nicholas!"

"That was why I said those horrible things. I wanted you to be happy. I didn't think you could be more than a little sad when you knew that you were going to be free. Foolish, darling Kitty--you are sure it's me you do love?"

Again she could not speak, but it was her joy that made her silent. She was no more to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers sprang beneath her footsteps; her smile was life. And the memory of his own cynical vision of her smote him with a self-reproach that deepened tenderness. She was only subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. She was womanly, meant for love only, and her folly made her the more lovable. Love was all that was left him. One month of love. His hands yielded to her hands; his eyes answered her eyes. The fragrance of the flowers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly garments. One month of life; but how flat, how mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer world of the last years; how deep the goblet of enchantment that the unambiguous angel held out to him.

CHAPTER III

There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to p.r.o.nounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give.

She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked.

They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compa.s.sed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower.

To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was there. Sir Walter pa.s.sed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him--"quite simply and gently" said Kitty--that she had been very foolish and had let her friends.h.i.+p for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband.

The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.

"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment.

Oh, I know that I did, too!--don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see--see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh--it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak--just because I did listen."

"Ah, do forgive him--just because you were so strong that you never let him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come.

She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and la.s.situde, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from him with encircling arms. When fear pa.s.sed, she seemed to lead him out into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid, as single-minded, as pa.s.sionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The serpent of weariness still slept.

"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day--how they talked and talked about themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, a.n.a.lysing long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy of being forgiven--"Tell me; you loved me so much that you were willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me;--but, if you hadn't been going to die--oh darling!--then you would have loved me too much to give me up, wouldn't you?"

His arm was about her, a book between them--unread, it usually was unread--and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house; Kitty had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her husband there and, despite his protest, had kissed his hands, with tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat.

He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious answer: "But then I couldn't have set you free, dear."

"No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But--would the fear of losing me have made you _re-fall_ in love with me? You know you only re-fell, darling, only knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, in saying that I loved you; but you would have loved me--not in that dreadful, big, inhuman way--but loved _me_, just _me_--loved me enough to fight for me, wouldn't you?"

He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel have a little dust on its s.h.i.+ning hair? It was a foolish angel, as he knew; and it lived for love, as he knew; and women who did that and who didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle--he remembered the swift train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one forgot the outer world and need not consider it again; it was done with him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would have loved you for yourself; I would have fought for you."

"And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if only it had been sooner, sooner."

Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; but he remembered it; remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought, where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths.

Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two friends who dropped in upon them for a night seemed like quaint marionettes crossing a stage that now and then they agreed to have set up before the bower.

These figures, their own relation to them, quickened the sense of secrecy and love. Their eyes sought each other past unconscious eyes; they had lovers' dexterities in meeting un.o.bserved by their guests, gay little escapades when they would run away for an hour drifting on the river or wandering in the woods. And the formalities and chatter of social life--all these queer people interested in queer things, people who used the present only for the future, who were always planning and looking forward,--made the hidden truths the sharper and sweeter.

Nothing, for the two lovers, was to go on. That was the truth that made the marionettes so insignificant and that made their love so deep. There was, for them, no looking forward, no adapting of means to ends. There were no ends, or, rather, they were always at the end. And there was nothing for them to do except to love each other.

"I feel sometimes as if we had become a Pierrot and a Pierrette,"

Holland said to her. "It's for that, I suppose, that a Pierrot is such an uncanny and charming creature;--the future doesn't exist for him at all."

Kitty, who had always been a literal person, and whose literalness had now become so beautifully appropriate,--for what is literalness but a seeing of the fact as standing still?--Kitty tried to smile but begged him not to jest about such things.

"I'm not jesting, darling. I'm only musing on our strange state. It's like a fairy-tale, the life we lead."

She turned her head, with the pathetic gesture grown habitual with her of late, and hid her eyes on his shoulder. "Oh, darling," she said, "do you hate to leave me!"

She had felt the moment of detached fancy as separative, and he had now to soothe her pa.s.sionate weeping.

He found that there was a certain pendulum-swing of mood in Paradise.

Emotion was the being of this mood, and to keep emotion one must swing.

Either he must soothe Kitty or Kitty must soothe him, or they must transcend the dark necessities of their case by finding in each other a joy including in its ecstasy the sorrow it obliterated. This pendulum swung spontaneously during those first weeks, it swung as their hearts beat, from need to response. And, at the beginning of the third week, it was not so much a faltering in the need or the response that Holland knew, as a mere lessening of the swing;--it didn't go quite so fast or carry him quite so far. He became conscious of an unequal rhythm; Kitty seemed to swing even faster and further.

She saw him as dead; that was the urgent vision that lay behind her demonstrations and ministrations; she saw him as more dead with every day that pa.s.sed, and every moment of every day was, to her, of pa.s.sionate significance. No one had ever been idealised as he was idealised, or clung to as he was clung to. The sense of desperate tendrils enlacing him was almost suffocating, and each tendril craved for recognition; a lapse, a look, an inattention was the cutting of something that bled, and clung the closer. Every moment was precious, and any not given to love was a robbery from her dwindling store. As the time grew less her need for significance grew greater. Her sense of her own tragedy grew with her sense of his, and he must share both.

Resignation to his fate was a resignation of her, and a crime against their love. Holland by degrees grew conscious of keeping himself up to a mark.

It was then that the blossoms began to look a little over-blown, the paths to become monotonous, the bowers to grow oppressive with their heavy sweetness as though a noonday sun beat down changelessly upon them. The dew was gone, and though Kitty remained a primitive Eve, he himself knew that in his conscious ardour there hovered the vague presence of something no longer pure, something unwholesome and enervating.