THE PORTRAIT OF THE BELOVED.

The tall, young, frock-coated librarian came into the ladies’ reading-room with a noiseless, gliding step and an air of apology. He moved a library ladder against the high shelves of calf-bound volumes, ran up the ladder with a gentle swiftness, selected a tall folio from the top shelf and came down again, leaving the room by the half-glass door as unobtrusively as he had entered it.

There were only two people in the reading-room. One was an elderly woman, who sat in front of a splendid fire, dozing, her head to one side. She rested her cheek in her hand. She was elderly and had a disordered, tousled look. Her hair, which had been a colourless fair, and was now an indeterminate grey, was falling loose about her ears. Yet there was a suggestion of lost beauty and grace, something evanescent, something of youth, of the wreck of loveliness, about the drooped head and the huddled figure.

Outside, the streets were miserable. The flagged courtyard beneath the windows showed a dull surface of glimmering wet reflection. No hope of its clearing. The skies were muddy, and beyond the courtyard in the narrow street there passed now and again an oilskinned figure under an umbrella, or a depressed cab-horse, behind an ancient driver and disgracefully rickety vehicle—himself, poor beast, only fit for the knacker’s yard. It was comfortable in the ladies’ reading-room, where very few people came except the two who now occupied it. There was something that appealed to Esther Denison, the younger of the two ladies, in the rooms which had been undisturbed since Lord Edward Fitzgerald had moved about them, his head full of rare dreams, more than a century ago.

That was the Beloved himself in the portrait above the magnificently carved mantelpiece, set amid the backs of the old volumes on their shelves, glimmering out of the soberly rich surroundings with a suggestion of eternal gaiety and tender charm.

Such colour and vivacity! The brown eyes of the portrait drew Esther Denison from her books and manuscripts, in spite of herself. She was working at ‘Middle Irish’ for a University studentship. Now and again she had to tinkle the little bell for a librarian to find something she wanted. There were several librarians, but it was always the same one who answered her bell. She was hardly conscious of him while she thanked him so sweetly for finding what she wanted. She was hardly aware how painstaking he was, how anxious to help. There never was more than a murmured word between them. They observed the rule of silence of the reading-room, although there was never anyone there but Esther Denison, and that queer old Miss Brooke, who in her waking hours read nothing but eighteenth-century memoirs, with now and again a volume of poetry or a romance.

The ladies’ reading-room was a very good place for such work as Esther Denison’s. The quiet was unbroken, because of the thick walls and the retired situation of the great house between the courtyard and the gardens at the back. All the corridors were lined with books,—such books as no one ever asks to read—old calf and leather-bound volumes, which were never taken from their shelves. Those Transactions of Parliament had been there when the Beloved was young and in love, when he went to and fro between this house and the House of Commons in College Green. The deep walls of books seemed to deaden all rumour of life in the ladies’ reading-room, while downstairs the men’s reading-room was crowded, and the swing-doors went from morn till even.

Esther Denison used to forget that there was any presence in the room but her own while she worked. The work absorbed her: she delighted in it, difficult as it was. Hour after hour she would sit there, her delicate Muse-like head bent over the abstruse page. Her face was as soft in colour, as delicately and firmly moulded, as a pink sweet-pea. She wore her fair hair plaited, and twisted like a laurel-wreath around her small head. She never looked round, nor glanced up, when the librarian came in noiselessly. He went away carrying with him an impression of the pure profile, the softly opening lips, the head filleted with pale gold, which drew him to return against his will.

Little by little something of intimacy sprang up between Esther Denison and Miss Brooke. At first the girl had sent the elder woman a pitying glance and thought. She was half crazed or whole crazed, poor thing. She talked in her sleep, and she was often asleep. When she woke up, she talked to herself or to the picture above the fireplace. Some girls might have been afraid of this strange companion. Not so Esther Denison. She had become accustomed to the odd figure sitting in the chair in front of the fire. She would have missed it if it had not been there.

One very grey, very dull afternoon, the fire sank low in the grate while Miss Brooke slept. Esther realised with a start that the room was cold. She had opened a window and the damp chill had entered. It was nearly time for the lights. She stood up and went to replenish the fire, putting on the coal gently, bit by bit, so as not to disturb the sleeper.

Kneeling between her and the fire, Miss Brooke’s face seemed to glimmer out of the dark. The rooms were always full of mysterious shadows. Glancing at her, as a little flame sprang up in the grate and died away, Esther Denison had a queer illusion. The withered face was for the moment the face of a girl, soft and round and purely tinted—not so unlike the face of which she had caught a careless glimpse in the glass as she arranged her hat before coming out that morning. Then the illusion vanished. Miss Brooke woke up with a weary sigh and shivered. She was elderly and cracked-looking again. Esther stirred up the fire and went to the window, which she closed before returning to her work.

Every afternoon, about five, a bright face would appear framed in the glass of the door, and there would come a sharp little tapping on the pane. Then Esther would nod, close her book, and lay it aside; gather her things together and go off home through the wet streets—they were nearly always wet that winter—with her brother, Bobby, who was a student at Trinity College. Bobby would wait, cooling his heels in the corridor, while his sister put on her outdoor things in an inner room of the ladies’ reading-room. That too had its roaring fire and deep, shabby, easy chairs. It also was walled with books. The ordinary reader, whenever she came—which was seldom—seemed unaware of the inner room which you entered by a door that simulated book-shelves, continuing the long line of books by dummy backs, painted on the door. People had occasionally been startled to see that door open.

Esther would go home with her brother to the house in the suburbs and the pretty faded mother, who lamented that she had a blue-stocking for a daughter.

‘You grow old-maidish already,’ she would say. ‘Your indifference has cooled off the men your pretty face attracted. You will be old before your time, working in that fusty room at something that will never be any good to you. Men hate a blue-stocking.’

Esther only laughed. She was very fond of the pretty complaining mother with whom she had so little in common. She merely remarked that the reading-room was the most comfortable place in Dublin during these winter days. By and by, when the spring came, she would go out into the fields. It did not matter to her about men. She was only interested in them when they were grey and scholarly—except, of course, Bobby, who was her darling and always stood up for her. She had not met the young man who mattered to her.

As she said it she remembered the face of the portrait in the reading-room, and her pulses quickened a little. Men like that did not live nowadays.

Her lips curled a little scornfully. There were none like the Beloved in these prosperous days of a peaceful dullness. She remembered his eyes, brown as salmon-pools in their amber depths, his quick sideways smile, the light on his brown head. Why, there were moments in the high dim room full of shadows when the portrait had looked alive! It was a brilliant bit of painting—the green of the cravat, the scarlet of the waistcoat, the brown face with the touch of carmine in the cheeks. Odd, how they lit the room!

Every morning now she returned to the reading-room with an ever growing sense of pleasant anticipation. No matter how early she arrived Miss Brooke was already there, in her accustomed place. If another reader came by any chance, Miss Brooke would go off into the inner room and remain there till the intruder had gone. Her meals were brought to her in that inner room from some place outside. They were very light meals—tea, a boiled egg, a little fruit, some hot cakes.

The time came when, with an air of friendliness, she brought a cup of tea and placed it by Esther’s elbow.

‘You forget to go out for your lunch,’ she said. ‘That is not good for the young. You spend too much time over those queer characters. You will lose the brightness of your eyes; your back will bend. I like to look up and see you there when I am awake. But⸺I was once as pretty as you. Do not come here too much. This place is full of dreams. I have found it worth while to give up all things, but⸺’

She would be quite sensible and coherent for a while; then she would wander off into something unintelligible.

While they were talking one day the librarian came in. He greeted Miss Brooke in a murmur as he passed on to find the thing he needed. He seemed to need many books from those otherwise undisturbed shelves.

‘That is a pleasant young man,’ Miss Brooke said as he went out, closing the door behind him. ‘He is in and out here a great deal since you began to read here, much more than formerly.’

She fixed her rather mad, bright eyes on Esther, who, to her annoyance, felt the colour come to her cheeks; she always coloured very easily.

‘Ah, that is right,’ Miss Brooke said. ‘Mr. Tyrrell is an excellent young man. You do not know him. I must make you known to each other. I was afraid that you were going to follow me. You are so exactly like a girl I once knew. I am disappointed in you, but it is best so. One should grasp at the happiness near at hand, even though grace and beauty—and more than that—are dead a hundred years.’

She stopped suddenly as though she listened, and went on again.

‘What was I talking about?’ she asked. ‘My poor head! It is full moon. I always talk nonsense when there is a full moon. Is that your brother come for you, my dear?’

It was not Bobby. It was the librarian. He brought a message from Bobby, who was unable to come for her. She was to take a cab home with her books and papers.

Having delivered his message the librarian waited while Esther put on her hat. She dressed very prettily, in the picturesque fashion of a day which had an artistic movement all to itself. Her cloak and flat cap of green velvet were like the sheathing of a flower. As she came from the inner room so attired, the librarian’s eyes fluttered as though he had seen a vision.

‘I will carry these for you,’ he said, lifting the parcel of books.

Miss Brooke did not appear to notice. She had a queer way of suddenly leaving realities behind. The librarian replenished the fire. She did not seem to notice the noise he made. Her eyes were fixed on the picture above the fireplace.

‘What time does she go home?’ Esther Denison asked, as they went out into the dim corridor where the lights were not yet on. ‘It seems so lonely, leaving her there.’

‘As a matter of fact’—the librarian had the slightest hesitation of speech, which gave him the air of a gentle deference—‘she does not go home. I do not believe she has any home to go to.’

‘Then she lives here?’

‘I believe she sleeps in front of the fire. It was a long time before we discovered that she remained here at night, after every one was gone. When we discovered—it is an irregularity of course—but—we wink at it. We could not discover that she had anywhere to go to or any friends. She does no harm. She is always about—as though she has just arrived—when the servants begin to arrange the rooms in the morning. She is not really mad, you know. She has only hallucinations. She has been coming here so long that she seems to belong to the house.’

‘It is a beautiful house to belong to,’ Esther said, as though she were talking to herself. ‘I am glad you let her stay.’

A little later a thought came to her. Supposing Miss Brooke were to be taken ill in the night? Some one, she supposed, slept on the premises. Only the front of the house—the main block, in which had been the reception-rooms—was used as library and reading-rooms. There was the underground story, in which no servant would sleep nowadays; but there was also abundant room at the back, or at the top of the house—not accessible from this part. She had already ascertained that there was no communication between these rooms and a great portion of the old house. The rooms suddenly ceased in a wall of books. The communication must have been blocked up.

She was working very hard at this time. The annoying thing was that, as the examination came near, she began to find it difficult to concentrate her thoughts. Perhaps she had been working too hard. It could not be that ‘Middle Irish’ was losing its fascination for her; but, little by little, she found that something was coming between her and the folios and manuscripts. The something was—it took the shape of—the portrait of the Beloved. Once or twice she fell asleep, just as Miss Brooke did, and slept, her face upon her folded arms, amid the scattered learning on the table.

‘The room was so hot,’ she said apologetically to the librarian, who had wakened her and seemed more perturbed about her drowsiness than need be.

‘You are overworking,’ he answered, with a sharpness in his voice. ‘You will have to give it up, or have a nervous breakdown.’

She forgot to wonder at the something like anger in his voice.

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that!’ she said, ‘so near the exam.! Afterwards, I shall take a good rest. I shall read nothing but novels for a month.’

‘Not here,’ he said. ‘There are cobwebs here that get into people’s brains. Look at Miss Brooke! You must go away into the country and not touch a book. The Spring will be here soon. Although it is wet to-night there is a west wind that brings the fields.’

‘I must get through my exam. first,’ she said. ‘Afterwards, I dare say it will be best for me.’

‘You will break down before,’ he replied gloomily, and she was frightened.

There came a few fine, beautiful days, when she went out and wandered in country lanes and by the sea. The librarian was taking a holiday at this time and sometimes she encountered him, and they walked together and returned to town together. The larks were singing by this time, and here and there in the fields there was a daisy. There were authentic tidings of spring blown down from the mountains and in from the fields and woods. She had listened at last to the librarian—their intimacy had grown in those country walks—and had consented to lay aside her work till the eve of the studentship exam., because she felt that she was going to fail if she stuck at it. But he could not know, she said to herself, the strain it was upon her to keep away from her work in the reading-room. She had been so happy there. There was something missing even in the fields and by the sea.

A week passed, and one evening she dined alone, her mother and Bobby having gone to a theatre. Her dinner was but a pretence. She remembered that the ladies’ reading-room was open till nine o’clock. It tempted her like a forbidden fruit. She could get in an hour’s work there while they were at the theatre. Her heart began to beat hard as the thought came to her of the walk through the wet streets, the lit windows of the great house beyond the courtyard, the hall through which she would pass so quickly, the stairs, the narrow corridor between the books. Then the ladies’ reading-room, so good after the cheerless street, its fire, the brown books with their flash of gilding, Miss Brooke sitting by the fire, the portrait—it would flash a look of welcome as she came in, wondering why she had stayed away so long.

She loved her work, and she had missed it. It was lucky Mr. Tyrrell was out of town or he might have called, as he had called once or twice lately, with a book or some other pretext for coming, and had hindered her. The rest had done her good. It was so good to be getting back to work, to be so keen.

Her pulses beat in her ears as she hurried on her way. She arrived at her destination. As she passed through the hall, she had an absurd feeling that Archie Tyrrell—she knew his name was Archie by this time—might meet her and turn her back. He had taken a masterful way with her lately. If by any unforeseen chance he should have come back!

She glanced fearfully at the swing-door of the general reading-room. Then she remembered. He was not on duty in the evenings, even if he had been in town. Few readers came in the evenings. It was a concession to poor students engaged in the daytime that kept the library and reading-room open at night till nine o’clock. She hurried along the corridor, joy in her blood and giving wings to her feet. Through the half-glass door she saw that the room was dim beyond. There was only firelight in it. She was glad. That meant she should find only Miss Brooke. The last day she had been there a couple of girls had come in: had asked for Swinburne’s poems and Rossetti’s, and had hovered over them like butterflies, dipping into a page here, a page there, till they remembered an appointment and went away. She had felt a sense of resentment against them as intruders into a place which had become so strangely dear to her.

Miss Brooke was not there, though her chair stood in front of the fire as usual. She must only just have left it, for the leather back was warm. Oddly enough, now that she was come, Esther had no inclination to work. She sat down in Miss Brooke’s chair. She leant back, looking up at the portrait. It seemed to lean towards her, smiling at her. It was as though the sun had come out.

Had she fallen asleep? She awoke with the strange sense of its being night and every one in the world asleep. The fire had gone low, was almost out. There was a little glimmer in the darkness, which she knew somehow came from the street-lamps beyond the courtyard. Somewhere there was a faint murmuring as of voices at a distance—in the rooms, not out-of-doors.

She was suddenly frightened—of the old house and all its ghosts. She remembered the Beloved. With him no woman need be afraid.

She turned to where the portrait hung for comfort; but she could see nothing. She stood up, groping in the darkness.

Somewhere a clock struck two great strokes in the silence of the sleeping town.

Where was Miss Brooke? She felt her way towards the wall of books, still but half awake. They still burnt oil-lamps in the library: electric light was not yet come into general use. She had no matches to strike a light. The darkness was very baffling. The furniture seemed to get in her way as though it were something animate that would keep her back.

At last she found the book-shelves. She groped along them for the door. It was slightly ajar. There were the whispering voices not far away.

She passed into the inner room. To her amazement, in the solid wall of books before her there was a door, which stood ajar. Beyond it was a light. The voices were in the room beyond the open door.

She went forward quickly, striking against a table as she went. Something fell with a loud noise. The whispering—it was not much more than that—went on undisturbed.

She was at the door. With her hand upon her frightened heart she stood, looking in amazement. The room into which she looked was a stately long room. It was lit by three hanging chandeliers in which were many candles. It had an air of old-fashioned elegance with its gilt couches and tabourets covered in a Pompadour silk. The walls and ceilings were painted with Watteau shepherds and shepherdesses and wreaths of flowers. The curtains of the long windows were of the same silk as the chair-covers. She noticed the colour of the silk—a faded delicate blue.

At the moment, she was not aware that she noticed any of these things. Her conscious self was only aware of two people clasped in each other’s arms by the fireplace at the far end of the room. The Beloved—just as he was in the picture—and a childishly young girl, her face lifted to his. There was something of wild sweetness about the girl, in her bunched-up white frock and scarlet ribbons. Her dark hair fell in a maze of curls—like—was it ‘The Parson’s Daughter’ of Romney? Something as familiar as that.

They were entirely absorbed in each other. The girl’s white arms were flung about the neck of the Beloved. Esther Denison forgot that she was spying. She stood against the darkness of the room, watching them with distended eyes. Was there some sickness of envy in her heart? The Beloved made so perfect a lover, and these days were so drab.

‘Edouard! mon Edouard!’

It was the girl who spoke in a passionate whisper.

‘Hist!’ he said, turning about in a startled way. ‘Did you hear a sound?’

The girl dropped her arms from about his neck. She seemed to listen. She grew pale, clasping her hands together and looking at him. She was very young, although she had the soft roundness of young maternity about her childish figure.

‘Mon ami!’ she began, panting.

‘It is nothing,’ he said with a little laugh. ‘A mouse in the wainscotting. The place is alive with them. We have an hour yet before dawn.’

The lights were broken up, wavering. Some queer unreality was coming over the scene. There were voices, the murmuring of many waters in Esther’s ears. She felt like some one coming back from a great distance to the light, travelling slowly, painfully.

Then she was aware of something familiar, comforting. It was the face of the librarian—a good, strong, reassuring face, something to hold on to in the medley of her thoughts that made the world insubstantial. The room was full of grey light, beyond the one lamp which some one had thought of lighting.

‘Are you better, darling?’

It was her mother’s voice. Gradually she came to the knowledge of where she was. She was in the ladies’ reading-room. Before her was the wall of books in which there had been the door she had seen open.

‘You must have fallen asleep, darling, and been locked in,’ her mother went on, in the voice of one who speaks to some one unutterably dear, who has very nearly slipped away from love and life. ‘We were terrified not to find you at home. No one knew where you had gone to. Fortunately, Bobby thought at last of Mr. Tyrrell. He had just come back from the country by the last train. There was a business to find the person who had the keys. But⸺You are all right, darling, and we are here—Bobby and Mr. Tyrrell and I. There is a carriage waiting.’

Some days later she told Archie Tyrrell her story. Oddly enough, she had felt unable to tell it to anyone else. ‘No one is ever to hear it but you,’ she had stipulated.

‘I promise.’

She was still on her sofa. She had been rather alarmingly ill from the shock of her experience. He listened. His face was grave and gentle. He expressed no disbelief. He did not try to persuade her that her vision was hallucination. Instead, he said something for which she loved him. She had been so afraid of disbelief—of hard, practical common sense.

‘The house is his monument,’ he said, ‘his shrine, his temple. You cannot get away from him. You must not read there again: it is too lonely. They are going to close those rooms. Soon we shall have the fine new building growing up.’

‘Ah,’ she said pitifully. ‘I am sorry. It is like turning them out. And poor Miss Brooke—what will she do?’

She had a sudden thought.

‘I believe she used to see him,’ she said. ‘She talked so oddly that I did not heed her—but now things come back to me.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘She thought she saw him. It began when she was quite a young girl, a student like you, and very pretty. She was always sitting there facing the portrait. It became real to her. He put her out of conceit with common men. She might have married: there was a lover—but then’⸺

‘He was not the Beloved,’ said Esther Denison, and slipped her hand into his. Then she began to weep.

He did not tell her then, not till some weeks had passed, that Miss Brooke was dead. The threat of eviction from her old quarters had killed her. She had been found in some kind of a fit in her familiar place in the ladies’ reading-room, on the very afternoon of the day that was to end with Esther’s falling asleep under the eyes of the Beloved.

She was quite herself again, and within a week of her wedding-day, when he thought it safe to take her to see the alterations which were being made in the ladies’ reading-room. The portrait was gone—to the gallery across the garden. A great number of the books had been removed. The place looked disordered and unhappy—not as she had known it. This would have laid no spell on her.

It was in the workmen’s dinner-hour. They had the place to themselves. He took her hand and held it in a firm, warm clasp. ‘There was a door,’ he said; ‘you were quite right. It was just where we found you in a huddled-up heap on the floor. But it was locked, and the bookcases covered it. You can walk through now.’

They went into the inner room. There was the open door as she had seen it. But what desolation beyond! The long room was bare of furniture; it had evidently been shut up for a long time, for it smelt mouldily. The light came in coldly through the long windows, curtained only with cobwebs. There was dust everywhere, in drifts on the floor, deadening the sounds of their feet. It had dimmed the shepherds and shepherdesses of the painted walls and the flower-wreaths and Cupids of the ceiling.

‘They used to meet here,’ he said in a low voice. ‘When he was “on his keeping.” He had some secret way of entry known only to them and one or two faithful servants. When the scent was hot she hid him here, and not even the Duke or Duchess knew. He used to read in these rooms when the house was asleep. There was a man here before me who swore he saw him at night searching the shelves for some book he wanted. It is the influence, of course. Such as he leaves the influence behind him long after he is dead.’

She was very pale. As they turned and went out of the room quietly, she said, nodding her head towards the fine new building which was going up in the courtyard:

‘After all, I do not think I shall ever read there. I doubt that I am cut out for scholarship. I do not feel that I could go back to “Middle Irish.” The studentship will have to go.’

‘No?’ he said, with a lifting of his handsome eyebrows. ‘After all, a married woman will not have much time for scholarship—of so difficult a kind.’

‘I suppose not,’ she said, as they stepped out into the open air. ‘Perhaps—after all—I worked too hard. Women have that way—have they not? I am not surprised I ... broke down.’

Then she added something quite irrelevant:

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘if poor Miss Brooke ever saw them together. When she spoke—it was only of him. Could she have seen them—as I did?’

Katharine Tynan.