PART II

I

E had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed.

It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him northward on a dark October night.

A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck in from the half-opened window.

Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more emphatic, only, than they had been.

At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious. The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed, enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility. No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening to fixity.

To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands, after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the mere sense of comparison was arresting.

The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the many hours of his lonely journey,—time and place were like empty goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory.

Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back, drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once it had him, it carried him far.

It was, at the beginning, as far back as Eppie and childhood that it carried him, to the sunny summer days and to the speechless parting of the rainy autumn morning. And, with all that sense of change, he was surprised to find how very much one thing had held firm. He had never forgotten. He had kept the mute promise of that misty morning. How well he had kept it he hadn’t known until he found the chain of memory hold so firm as he pulled upon it. The promise had been made to himself as well as to her, given in solemn hostage to his own childish fears. Even then what an intuitive dread had been upon him of the impermanence of things. But it wasn’t impermanent after all, that vision.

Dear little Eppie. It was astonishing now to find how well he remembered, how clearly he could see, in looking back,—more clearly than even his acute child’s perception had made evident to him,—what a dear little Eppie she had been. She lived in his memory, and probably nowhere else: in the present Eppie he didn’t fancy that he should find much trace of the child Eppie, and it was sad, in its funny way, to think that he, who had, with all his forebodings, so felt the need of a promise, should so well remember her who, undoubtedly, had long ago forgotten him. He took little interest in the present Eppie. But the child wore perfectly with time.

Dear child Eppie and strange, distant boy, groping toward the present Gavan; unhappy little boy, of deep, inarticulate, passionate affections and of deep hopes and dreads. There they walked, knee-deep in heather; he smelled it, the sun warm upon it, Eppie in her white, Alice-in-Wonderland frock and her “striped” hair. And there went Robbie, plunging through the heather before them.

Robbie. Eppie had been right, then. He had not forgotten him at all. He and Eppie stood at the window looking out at the dawn; the scent of the wet pine-tree was in the air, and their eyes were heavy with weeping. How near they had been. Had any one, in all his life, ever been nearer him than Eppie?

Curious, when he had so well kept the promise never to forget, that the other promise, the promise to return, he had not been able to keep. In making it, he had not imagined, even with his foreboding, what manacles of routine and theory were to be locked upon him for the rest of his boyhood. He had soon learned that protest, pleading, rebellion, were equally vain, and that outward conformity was the preservative of inner freedom. He could not jeopardize the purpose of his life—his mother’s rescue—by a persistence that, in his uncle’s not unkind and not unhumorous eyes, was merely foolish. He was forced to swallow his own longings and to endure, as best he could, his pangs of fear lest Eppie should think him slack, or even faithless. He submitted to the treadmill of a highly organized education, that could spare no time for insignificant summers in Scotland. Every moment in Gavan’s youth was to be made significant by tangible achievement. The distilled knowledge of the past, the intellectual trophies of civilization, were to be his; if he didn’t want them, they, in the finished and effective figure of his uncle, wanted him, and, in the sense of the fulfilment of his uncle’s hopes, they got him.

During those years Gavan wrote to Eppie, tried to make her share with him in all the lonely and rather abstract interests of his life. But he found that the four years of difference, counting for nothing in the actual intercourse of word and look, counted for everything against any reality of intercourse in writing. Translated into that formality, the childish affection became as unlike itself as a pressed flower is unlike a fresh one. Eppie’s letters, punctual and very fond, were far more immature than she herself. These letters gave accounts of animals, walks, lessons, very bald and concise, and of the Grainger cousins and their doings, and then of her new relation, cousin Alicia, whose daughters, children of Eppie’s own age, soon seemed to poor Gavan, in his distant prison, to fill his place. Eppie went away with these cousins to Germany, where they all heard wonderful music, and after that they came to Kirklands for the summer. Altogether, when Gavan’s opportunity came and, with the dignity of seventeen to back his request, he had his uncle’s consent to his spending of a month in Scotland, he felt himself, even as he made it, rather silly in his determination to cling at all costs to something precious but vanishing. Then it was that Eppie had been swept away by the engulfing relative. At the very moment of his own release, she was taken to the Continent for three years of travel and study. The final effort of childhood to hold to its own meaning was frustrated. The letters, after that, soon ceased. Silence ended the first chapter.

Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene—that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at.

In that first chapter, whose page he had just turned, he had seen himself as a very unhappy boy—unhappy from causes as apparent as a cage about a pining bird. His youth had been weighted with an over-mature understanding of wrong and sorrow. His childish faith in supreme good had shaped itself to a conception of life as a place of probation where oneself and, far worse, those one loved were burned continually in the fiery furnace of inexplicable affliction. One couldn’t say what God might not demand of one in the way of endurance. He had, helpless, seen his fragile, shrinking mother hatefully bullied and abused or more hatefully caressed. He had been parted from her to brood and tremble over her distant fate. Loved things had died; loved things had all, it seemed, been taken from him; the soulless machinery of his uncle’s system had ground and polished at his stiffening heart. No wonder that the boy of that first chapter had been very unhappy. But in the later chapters, to which he had now come, the causes for unhappiness were not so obvious, yet the gloom that overhung them deepened. He saw himself at Eton in the hedged-round world of buoyant youth, standing apart, preoccupied, indifferent. He had been oddly popular there. His selflessness, his gentle candor, his capacity for a highly keyed joy,—strung, though it was, over an incapacity for peace,—endeared him; but even to his friends he remained a veiled and ambiguous personality. He seemed to himself to stand on the confines of that artificially happy domain, listening always for the sound of sorrow in the greater world outside. History, growing before his growing mind, loomed blood-stained, cruel, disastrous. The defeat of goodness, its degradation by the triumphant forces of evil, haunted him. The dependence of mind, of soul, on body opened new and ominous vistas. For months he was pursued by morbid fears of what a jostled brain-cell or a diseased body might do to one. One might become a fiend, it seemed, or an imbecile, if one’s atoms were disarranged too much. Life was a tragic duty,—he held to that blindly, fiercely at times; but what if life’s chances made even goodness impossible? what if it were to rob one of one’s very selfhood? It became to him a thing dangerous, uncertain, like an insecurely chained wild beast that one must lie down with and rise with and that might spring at one’s throat at any moment.

Under the pressure of this new knowledge, crude enough in its materialistic forms, and keen, new thought, already subtle, already passing from youthful crudity, the skeptical crash of his religious faith came at last upon him. Religion had meant too much to him for its loss to be the merely disturbing epoch of readjustment that it is in much young development. He found himself in a reeling horror of darkness where the only lights were the dim beacons of science and the fantastic will-o’-the-wisps of estheticism. In the midst of the chaos he saw his mother again. He dreaded the longed-for meeting. How could he see her and hide from her the inner desolation? And when she came, at last, after all these years, a desperate pity nerved him to act a part. She was changed; the years had told on her more than even his imagination had feared. She drooped like a tired, fading flower. She was fading, that he saw at the first glance. Mentally as well as physically, there was an air of withering about her, and the look of sorrow was stamped ineffaceably upon her aging features. To know that he had lost his faith, his hold on life, his trust in good, would have been, he thought, to kill her. He kept from her a whisper of his desolation; and to a fundamental skepticism like his, acting was facile. But when she was gone, back to her parched life, he knew that to her, as well as to him, something essential had lacked. Her love, again and again, must have fluttered, however blindly, against that barrier between them. The years of separation had been sad, but, in looking back at it, the summer of meeting was saddest of all.

The experience put an edge to his hardening strength. He must fail her in essentials; they could never meet in the blessed nearness of shared hopes; but he wouldn’t fail her in all the lesser things of life. The time of her deliverance was near. Love and beauty would soon be about her. He worked at Oxford with the inner passion of a larger purpose than mere scholarship that is the soul of true scholarship. He felt the sharp, cold joy of high achievement, the Alpine, precipitous scaling of the mind. And here he embarked upon the conscious quest for truth, his skepticism grown to a doubt of its own premises.

Gavan looked quietly back upon the turmoil of that quest.

He watched himself in those young years pressing restlessly, eagerly, pursued by the phantoms of death and nothingness, through spiral after spiral of human thought: through Spinoza’s horror of the meaninglessness of life and through Spinoza’s barren peace; through Kant’s skepticism that would not let him rest in Kant’s super-rational assurance; precipitated from Hegel’s dialectics—building their pyramid of paradox to the apex of an impersonal Absolute—into Schopenhauer’s petulant despair. And more and more clearly he saw, through all the forms of thought, that the finite self dissolved like mist in the one all-embracing, all-transcending Subject. Science, philosophy, religion, seemed, in their final development, to merge in a Monism that conceived reality as spirit, but as impersonal spirit, a conception that, if in western thought it did not reduce to illusion every phase of experience, yet reduced the finite self to a contradiction and its sense of moral freedom, upon which were built all the valuations of life and all its sanctions, to a self-deception. His own dual life deepened his abiding intuition of unreality. There was the Gavan of the river, the debate, the dinner, popular among his fellows, gentle, debonair; already the man of the world through the fineness of his perception, his instinct for the fitting, his perfection of mannerless manner that was the flower of selflessness. And there was the Gavan of the inner thought, fixed, always, in its knot of torturing perplexity. To the inner Gavan, the Gavan of human relations was a wraith-like figure. Now began for him the strange experience at which childish terrors had hinted. It was in the exhaustions that followed a long wrench of thought, or after an illness, a shock of sorrow that left one pulseless and inert, that these pauses of an awful peace would come to him. One faced, then, the dread vision, and it seized one, as when, in the deep stillness of the night, the world drops from one and only a consciousness, dispassionate and contemplative, seeing all life as dream, remains. It was when life was thus stilled, its desires quenched by weakness or great sorrow, that this peace stole into the empty chambers, and whispered that all pain, all evil, all life were dreams and that the dreams were made by the strife and restlessness of the fragmentary self in its endless discord. See oneself as discord, as part of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it, and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire, striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. To turn, with an almost physical sickness of horror, from the hypnotic spell, to forcibly forget thought, to clasp life about him like a loved Nessus-robe, was a frequent solution during these years of struggle; to reënter the place of joy and sorrow, taking it, so to speak, at its own terms. But the specter was never far from the inner Gavan, who more and more suspected that the longing for reality, for significance, that flamed up in him with each renewal of personal force and energy, was the mere result of life, not its sanction. And more and more, when, in such renewals, his nature turned with a desperate trust to action, as a possible test of worth, he saw that it was not action, not faith, that created life and the trust in life, but life, the force and will incarnated in one, that created faith and action. The very will to act was the will to live, and the will to live was the will of the Whole that the particular discord of one’s personal self should continue to strive and suffer.

Life, indeed, clutched him, and that quite without any artificial effort of his own, when his mother came home to England to die.

Gavan had just left Oxford. He was exquisitely equipped for the best things of life, and, with the achievement, his long dependence on his uncle suddenly ceased. An eccentric old cousin, a scholarly recluse, who had taken a fancy to him, died, leaving him a small estate in Surrey and fifteen hundred pounds a year.

With the good fortune came the bitter irony that turned it to dust and ashes. All his life he had longed to help his mother, to smooth her rough path and put power over fate into her hand. Now he could only help her to die in peace.

He took her to the quiet old house, among its lawns, its hedges, its high-walled gardens and deep woods. He gave her all that it was now too late to give—beauty, ease, and love.

She was changed by disease, more changed than by life and sorrow; gentle, very patient, but only by an effort showing her appreciation of the loveliness, only by an effort answering his love.

Of all his fears the worst had been the fear that, with the conviction of the worthlessness of life, the capacity for love had left him. Now, as with intolerable anguish, her life ebbed from her, there was almost relief in his own despair; in feeling it to the full; in seeing the heartlessness of thought wither in the fierce flame of his agony.

It seemed to him that he had never before known what it was to love. It was as if he were more her than himself. He relived her life and its sorrows. He relived her miserable married years, the long loneliness, parted from her child, her terror of the final parting, coming so cruelly upon them; and he lived the pains of her dissolution. He understood as he had never understood, all that she was and felt; he yearned as he had never yearned, to hold and keep her with him in joy and security; he suffered as he had never suffered.

Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind rage of mere feeling—feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life. And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to lose her, he might not even have her to the end.

For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself, her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life. She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word or look that brought them near.

Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor.

On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the spring woods.

The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift, aimless wandering, Gavan paused.

The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,—a little bird just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,—he repeated, “Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.

A dimness overtook him: as if the note, no longer keenly singing, sank to an insect-like buzz, a chaos of minute, whirring vibrations that made a queer, dizzy rhythm; and, in a daze of sudden indifference, both to beauty and anguish, he seemed to see himself standing there, collapsed against the tree, his frail figure outworn with misery,—to see himself, and the trees, the pools of water, the drinking bird, and the snowy flowers,—like a picture held before calm, dying eyes.

“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,—me, herself, life; that is why she didn’t care any longer.”

He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew clear—clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably, so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he thought on; “they are all of them right.”

With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life: joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be must always mean.

He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead as she is,” he thought.

In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of attitude,—not pitying it,—while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above it all.”

The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.

He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.

All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was stilled forever.

II

AVAN did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker and a tolerably interested observer of existence.

As he had ceased to have value for himself, so others had no value in his eyes. Social effort and self-realization were, as ideals, equally meaningless to him; and though pity was always with him, it was a pity gentle and meditative, hopeless of alleviation: for suffering was life, and to cure one, one must abolish the other. Material remedies seemed to him worse than useless; they merely renewed the craving forces. The Imitation of Christ was a fitter panacea than organized charities and progressive legislation.

Physical pain in the helpless, the dumbly conscious, in children or animals, hurt him and made him know that he, too, lived; and he would spend himself to give relief to any suffering thing. He sought no further in metaphysical systems; he desired no further insight. Now and then, finding their pensive pastures pleasant, he would read some Hindoo or medieval mystic; but ecstasies were as alien to him as materialism: both were curious forms of self-deception—one the inflation of the illusory self into the loss of any sense of relation, and the other the self’s painful concentration into imbecilely selfish aims. The people most pleasing to him were the people who, without self-doubt and without self-consciousness, performed some inherited function in the state; the simply great in life; or those who, by natural gift, the fortunately finished, the inevitably distinguished, followed some beautifully complex calling. The mediocre and the pretentious were unpleasing phenomena, and the ideals of democracy mere barbarous nonsense.

His own pursuits were those of a fashionable and ambitious man, and, to the casual observer, the utter absence of any of the pose of disillusionized youth made all the more apparent what seemed to be a man of the world cynicism. Those who knew him better found him charming and perplexing. He seemed to have no barriers, yet one could not come near him. His center receded before pursuit. And he was much pursued. He aroused conjecture, interest, attachment. His exquisite head, the chill sweetness of his manner, the strange, piercing charm of his smile, drew eyes and hearts to him. Idly amused, he saw himself, all inert, boosted from step to step, saw friends swarm about him and hardly an enemy’s face.

It was rare for him to meet dislike. One young man, vaguely known at Oxford, noticed with interest as a relative of Eppie’s, he had, indeed, by merely being, it seemed, antagonized. Gavan had really felt something of a shy, derivative affection for this Jim Grainger, a dogged, sullen, strenuous youth; because of the dear old memory, he had made one or two delicate, diffident approaches—approaches repulsed with bull-dog defiance. Gavan, who understood most things, quite understood that to the serious, the plain, the obviously laborious son of an impecunious barrister, he might have given the impression, so funnily erroneous, of a sauntering dilettantism, an aristocratic flânerie. At all events, Grainger was intrenched in a resolute disapproval, colored, perhaps, with some tinge of reminiscent childish jealousy. When their paths again crossed in London and Gavan found his suavity encountered by an even more scowling sarcasm, jealousy, of another type, was an obvious cause. Grainger, scornful of social dexterities and weapons, had worked himself to skin and bone in preparation for a career, and a career that he intended to be of serious significance. And at its outset he found himself in apparent competition with Gavan for a post that, significant indeed to him, as the first rung on the political ladder, could only be decorative to his rival—the post of secretary to a prominent cabinet-minister. Grainger had his justified hopes, and he was, except for outward graces, absolutely fitted for the place.

In his path he found the listless figure of the well-remembered and heartily disliked Gavan—a gilded youth, pure and simple, and as such being lifted, by all accounts, onto the coveted rung of the coveted ladder. Gavan’s scholarly fitness for the post Grainger only half credited. Of the sturdy professional class, with a streak of the easily suspicious bourgeois about him, he was glad to believe tales of drawing-room influence. He expressed himself with disgusted openness as to the fatal effect of a type like Palairet’s on public life. Gavan heard a little and guessed more. He found himself sympathizing with Grainger; he had always liked him. With an effort that he had never used on his own behalf, he managed to get him fitted into the pair of shoes that were standing waiting for his own feet. It had been, indeed, though in superficial ways, an affair of drawing-room influence. The wife of the great statesman, as well as that high personage himself, was one of Gavan’s devoted and baffled friends. She said that he made her think of a half-frozen bird that one longed to take in one’s hands and warm, and she hopefully communed with her husband as to the invigorating effect of a career upon him. She suspected Gavan—his influence over her husband—when she found that an alien candidate was being foisted upon her.

“Grainger!” she exclaimed, vexed and incredulous. “Why Grainger? Why not anybody as well as Grainger? Yes, I’ve seen the young man. He looks like a pugilistic Broad-Church parson. All he wants is to climb and to reform everything.”

“Exactly the type for British politics,” Gavan rejoined. “He is in earnest about politics, and I’m not; you know I’m not.” His friend helplessly owned that he was exasperating. Grainger, had he known to whom he was indebted for his lift, would have felt, perhaps, a heightened wrath against “drawing-room influence.”

Happily and justifiably unconscious, he proceeded to climb.

Meanwhile another pair of shoes was swiftly found for Gavan. He went out to India as secretary to the viceroy.

Here, in the surroundings of his early youth, the second great moral upheaval of his life came to him. Three years had passed since his mother’s death. He was twenty-six years old.

During a long summer among the mountains of Simla, he met Alice Grafton. She was married, a year older than himself, but a girl still in mind and appearance—fragile, hesitant, exquisite. Gavan at his very first seeing of her felt something knocking in his heart. It seemed like pity, instinctive pity, the bond between him and life, and for some time he deluded himself with this comparatively safe interpretation. He did not quite know why he should pity Mrs. Grafton. That she should look like a girl was hardly a reason, nor that her husband, large, masterful, embossed with decorations, was uninteresting. She had been married to him—by all accounts the phrase applied—at nineteen and could not find him sympathetic; but, after all, many cheerful women were in that situation. He was a kindly, an admiring husband, and her life was set in luxurious beauty. Yet piteousness was there. She was all promise and unfulfilment; and dimly, mutely, she seemed to feel that the promise would never be fulfilled, as though a too-early primrose smiled wistfully through a veil of ice. Should she never become consciously unhappy that would be but another symptom of permanent immaturity.

Gavan rode with her and talked with her, and read with her in her fresh, flower-filled drawing-room. Their tastes were not at all alike; but he did not in the least mind that when she lifted her lovely eyes to him over poor poetry; and when she played and sang to him her very ineffectuality added a pathos, full of charm, to the obvious ballads that she liked. It was sweet, too, and endearing, to watch her, by degrees, molding her taste to his until it became a delightful and intuitive echo.

He almost wondered if it was also in echo that she began to feel for herself his own appreciation of her. Certainly she matured to consciousness of lack. She began to confide; not with an open frankness, but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of the world. At first it appealed, and then it possessed him. He had thought that what he felt for her was only pity. He had thought himself too dead to all earthly pangs for the rudimentary one of love to reach him. But when, one day, he found her weeping, alone, among her flowers, he took her into his arms and the great illusion seized him once more.

It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self, as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.

“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.

He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and terror in the joy.

They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever. That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.

Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through the broken barriers of thought—jealousies and desires that showed him his partaking of the common life of humanity.

Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet, and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong, instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.

It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as dishonorable.

He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him. They would go back to Europe; live in Italy—the land of happy outcasts from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.

“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about anything but you; I never will—ambition, country, family. Nothing outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”

But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong. Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things, the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.

She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last, since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”

He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he understood.

Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave me! You will not abandon me!”

“I cannot—stay with you.”

“You win my heart—humiliate me,—see that I’m yours—only yours,—and then cast me off!”

“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to let me take you with me?”

“A target for the world!”

“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all—all; but what else is there—unless I leave you?”

She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue—I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”

“You despise me; you think me wicked—because I can’t have such horrible courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like that—cut off from everything—and not be degraded in the end.”

It was a new species of torture that now tore at Gavan’s heart and mind. He saw too clearly the force of the arguments that underlay her specious appeal—more clearly, far, than she could see. It was horribly true that the life of happy outlawry he proposed might wither and debase more than a conscious sin. The organized, crafty wisdom of life was on her side. And on his was a mere matter of taste. He could find no sanction for his resistance to her and to himself except in that instinctive recoil from what he felt as dishonor. He was sacrificing them both to a silly, subjective figment. The lurid realization, that burned and froze, went through him, and with it the unanswerable necessity. He must, he must, sacrifice them. And he must talk the language of right and wrong as though he believed in it. He acted as if he did, yet nothing was further from him than such belief; that was the strange agony that wrenched his brain as he said: “You are blind, not wicked. Some day you will thank me if I make it possible for you to let me go.” And, he too incredulous, he cried, “Alice, Alice, will you really let me go without you?”

She would not consent to the final alternative, and the struggle lasted for a week, through their daily meetings—the dream-like, deft meetings under the eyes of others,—and while they rode alone over the hills—long, sad rides, when both, often in a moody silence, showed at once their hope and their resistance.

Her fear won at last. “And I can’t even pretend that it’s goodness,” she said, her voice trembling with self-scorn. “You’ve abased me to the dust, Gavan. Yes, it’s true, if you like—my fear is greater than my love.” Irony, a half-felt anger, helped her to bear the blow, for, to the end, she could not believe that he would find strength to leave her.

The parting came suddenly. Wringing her hands, looking hard into her face, where he saw still a fawning hope and a half-stupefied despair, he left her, and felt that he had torn his heart up by the very roots.

And he had sacrificed her and himself, to what? Gavan could ask himself the question at leisure during the following year.

Yet, from the irrational sacrifice was born a timid, trembling trust, a dim hope that the unbannered combat had not been in vain, that even the blind holding to the ambiguous right might blossom in a better life for her than if he had taken the joy held out to him. The trust was as irrational as the sacrifice, but it was dear to him. He cherished it, and it fluttered in him, sweet, intangible, during all the desolate year. Then, at the year’s end, he met Alice, suddenly, unexpectedly, and found her ominously changed. Her girlhood was gone. A hard, glittering surface, competent, resourceful, hid something.

The strength of his renouncement was so rooted that he felt no personal fear, and for her, too, he no longer felt fear in his nearness. What he felt was a new pity—a pity suffocating and horrible. Whispers of discreet scandal enlightened him. Alice was in no danger of what she most shrank from—a public pillory; but she was among those of whom the world whispers, with a half-condoning smile and shrug.

Gavan saw her riding one morning with a famous soldier, a Nietzschian type of strength, splendor, and high indifference. And now he understood all. He knew the man. He was one who would have stared light irony at Gavan’s chivalrous willingness to sacrifice his life to a woman; to such a charming triviality as an intrigue he would sacrifice just enough and no more. He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.

A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.

She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair.

She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the use of shields.

“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,—far worst,—I don’t love him; I never loved him. It was simply—simply”—she could hardly speak—“that he frightened and flattered me. It was vanity—recklessness—I don’t know what it was.”

After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that something quiet enveloped her.

She looked up to see his eyes far from her.

“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.

Once more he was looking at it all—all the cruel, the meaningless drama in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained. He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire, only an immense, an indifferent pity.

“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me; but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated mechanically, gently stroking her hair—hair whose profuse, wonderful gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.

“You forgive me—you do forgive me, Gavan?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear Alice.”

“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I haven’t lost that.”

He did not reply, looking away and lifting his hand from her hair.

The woman, leaning on his knees, felt a stealing sense of awe, worse than any fear of his anger. And worse than a vehement disavowal of love, worse than a spurning of her from him, were his words: “I want you not to suffer, dear Alice; I want you to find peace.”

“Peace! What peace can I find?”

He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and letting it all go.”

“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what do you mean? If you would forgive me—really forgive me—and take me now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you, nothing else matters.”

He looked steadily at her, no longer touching her. “You have said what I mean. You have found it out. The only thing to be afraid of is ourselves. You will not see this man again? You will keep that promise to me?”

“Any promise! Anything you ask! And, indeed, indeed, I could not see him now,” she shuddered. “Gavan, you will take me away with you?”

He wondered at her that she did not see how far he was from her—how far, and yet how one with her, how merged in her through his comprehension of the essential unity that bound all life together, that made her suffering part of him, even while he looked down upon it from an almost musing height.

He felt unutterable gentleness and unutterable ruthlessness. “I don’t mean that, Alice. You won’t lose yourself by clinging to me, by clinging to what you want.”

“You don’t love me! Oh, you don’t love me! I have killed your love!” she wailed out, rising to her feet, pierced by her full realization. She stepped back from him to gaze at him with a sort of horror. “You talk as if you had become a priest.”

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her—priestly indeed, almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way—to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true—the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to—is to”—he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth—“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand—“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly—or foolish—again.”

Her lover lost,—the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,—a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven—we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;—that lasted for a year;—and then, alas! alas!—but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,—that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard—perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now—the other; not as she had loved Gavan,—that would always be first,—but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,—there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past—his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.

People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat. Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of queer little sects,—failures in the struggle for survival,—their brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.

His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble, flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to work, as to all else.

GAVAN’S mind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they might be together in heaven.

He had rarely known a greater lucidity than in those swift, lonely hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past accomplished and a future not yet begun—as though one should sunder time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage, and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal moment.

This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled.

One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison.

He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.

Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy.

This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son, an officer in the Guards—a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsman had not even prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her broken heart—and she didn’t deny that it was broken—for a year or so of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely as possible,—it wasn’t a deep break after all,—and on the thrilling occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect. She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now—Eppie’s was the publicity of popularity—of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger, who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes. All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by misfortune and cured forever of folly.

So the talk went, and Gavan took such gabble with a large pinch of ironic incredulity; but at the same time the gossip left its trail. The impetuous and devastating young lady, with her assurance and her aim at large successes, was to him a distasteful figure. There was pain in linking it with little Eppie. It stood waiting in the wings and was altogether novel and a little menacing to one’s peace of mind. He really did not want to see Miss Gilford; she belonged to a modern type intensely wearisome to him. But she was staying with her uncle and aunt—only Miss Barbara was left—at Kirklands, and the general, after a meeting in London, had written begging him to pay them all a visit, and, since there had seemed no reason for not going, here he was.

Here he was, and round the corner of the wing the new Eppie stood waiting. Poor little Eppie of childhood—she was lost forever.

But all the clearness of the night concentrated, at dawn, into that vivid memory of the past where they had wandered together, sharing joy and sorrow.

That was long, long over. To-morrow was already here, and to-morrow belonged to the new Eppie.

III

AVAN spent the morning in Edinburgh, seeing an old relative, and reached Kirklands at six.

It was a cold October evening, the moors like a dark, sullenly heaving ocean and a heavy bar of sunset lying along the horizon.

The windows of the old white house mirrored the dying color, and here and there the inner light of fire and candle seemed like laughter on a grave face. With all its loneliness it was a happy-looking house; he remembered that; and in the stillness of the vast moors and the coming night it made him think of a warmly throbbing heart filling with courage and significance a desolate life.

The general came from the long oak library, book in hand, to welcome him. Gavan was almost automatically observant of physical processes and noted now the pronounced limp, the touch of garrulity—symptoms of the fine old organism’s placid disintegration. Life was leaving it unreluctantly, and the mild indifference of age made his cordiality at once warmer and more impersonal than of old.

As he led Gavan to his room, the room of boyhood, near Eppie’s, overlooking the garden and the wooded hills, he told him that Eppie and Miss Barbara were dressing and that he would have time for a talk with them before dinner at eight.

“It’s changed since you were here, Gavan. Ah! time goes—it goes. Poor Rachel! we lost her five years ago. If Eppie didn’t look after us so well we should be lonely, Barbara and I. We seldom get away now. Too old to care for change. But Eppie always gives us three or four months, and a letter once a week while she’s away. She puts us first. This is home, she says. She sees clever people at Alicia Waring’s, has the world at her feet,—you’ve heard, no doubt,—but she loves Kirklands best. She gardens with me—a great gardener Eppie, but she is good at anything she sets herself to; she drives her aunt about, she reads to us and sings to us,—you have heard of her singing, too,—keeps us in touch with life. Eppie is a wonderful person for sharing happiness,” the general monologued, looking about the fire-lit room; and Gavan felt that, from this point of view, some of the little Eppie might still have survived.

“So you have given up the idea of the House?” the general went on.

“I’m no good at it,” said Gavan; “I’ve proved it.”

“Proved it? Nonsense. Wait till you are fifty before saying that. Why, you’ve everything in your favor. You weren’t enough in earnest; that was the trouble. You didn’t care enough; you played into your opponents’ hands. The British public doesn’t understand idealism or irony. Eppie told us all about it.”

“Eppie? How did Eppie know?” He found himself using her little name as a matter of course.

“She knows everything,” the general rejoined, with his air of happy, derived complacency; “even when she’s not in England, she never loses touch. Eppie is very much behind the scenes.”

The simile recalled to Gavan his own vision of the stage and the waiting figure. “Even behind my scenes!” he ejaculated, smiling at so much omniscience.

“From the moment you came into public life, yes.”

“And she knows why I failed at it? Idealism and irony?”

“That’s what she says; and I usually find Eppie right.” The general, after the half-humorous declaration, had a pause, and before leaving his guest, he added, “Right, except about her own affairs. She is a child there yet.”

Eppie’s disaster must have been keenly felt and keenly resented at Kirklands. The general made no further reference to it and Gavan asked no question.

There was a fire, a lamp, and several clusters of candles in the long, dark library when Gavan entered it an hour later, so that the darkness was full of light; yet he had wandered slowly down its length, looking about him at the faded tan, russet, and gilt of well-remembered books, at the massive chairs and tables, all in their old places, all so intimately familiar, before seeing that he was not alone in the room.

Some one in white was sitting, half submerged in a deep chair, behind the table with its lamp—some one who had been watching him as he wandered, and who now rose to meet him, taking him so unawares that she startled him, all the light in the dim room seeming suddenly to center upon her and she herself to throw everything, even his former thoughts of her, into the background.

It was Eppie, of course, and all that he had heard of her, all that he had conjectured, fell back before the impression that held him in a moment, long, really dazzled, yet very acute.

Her face was narrow, pale, faintly freckled; the jaw long, the nose high-bridged, the lips a little prominent; and, as he now saw, a clear flush sprang easily to her cheeks. Eyes, lips, and hair were vivid with color: the hair, with its remembered rivulets of russet and gold, piled high on her head, framing the narrow face and the long throat; the eyes gray or green or gold, like the depths of a mountain stream.

He had heard many analogies for the haunting and fugitive charm of Miss Gifford’s face—a charm that could only, apparently, be caught with the subtleties of antithesis. One appreciator had said that she was like an angelic jockey; another, that with a statesman’s gaze she had a baby’s smile; another, that she was a Flying Victory done by Velasquez. And with his own dominant impression of strength, sweetness, and daring, there crowded other similes. Her eyes had the steeplechaser’s hard, smiling scrutiny of the next jump; the halloo of the hunt under a morning sky was in them, the joyous shouts of Spartan boys at play; yet, though eyes of heroism and laughter, they were eyes sad and almost tragically benignant.

She was tall, with the spare lightness of a runner poised for a race, and the firm, ample breast of a hardy nymph. She suggested these pagan, outdoor similes while, at the same time, luxuriously feminine in her more than fashionable aspect, the last touches of modernity were upon her: her dress, the eighteenth-century, interpreted by Paris, her decorations all discretion and distinction—a knot of silver-green at her breast, an emerald ring on her finger, and emerald earrings, two drops of smooth, green light, trembling in the shadows of her hair.

Altogether Gavan was able to grasp the impression even further, to simplify it, to express at once its dazzled quality and its acuteness, as various and almost violent, as if, suddenly, every instrument in an orchestra were to strike one long, clear, vibrating note.

His gaze had been prolonged, and hers had answered it with as open an intentness. And it was at last she who took both his hands, shook them a little, holding them while, not shyly, but with that vivid flush on her cheek, “You,” she said.

For she was startled, too. It was he. She remembered, as if she had seen them yesterday, his air of quick response, surface-shrinking, deep composure, the old delicious smile, and the glance swiftly looking and swiftly averted.

“And you,” Gavan repeated. “I haven’t changed so much, though,” he said.

“And I have? Really much? Long skirts and turned up hair are a transformation. It’s wonderful to see you, Gavan. It makes one get hold of the past and of oneself in it.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it?” She let go his hands, and moving to the fire and standing before it while she surveyed him, she went on, not waiting for an answer:

“But I don’t suppose that you have my keenness of memory. It all rushes back—our walks, our games, our lessons, the smell of the heather, the very taste of the heather-honey we ate at tea, and all the things you did and said and looked; your building the Petit Trianon, and your playing dolls with me that day; your Agnes, in her pink dress, and my Elspeth, whom I used to whip so.”

“I remember it all,” said Gavan, “and I remember how I broke poor Elspeth.”

“Do you?”

“All of it: the attic windows and the pine-tree under them, and the great white bird, and the dreadful, soft little thud on the garden path.”

“Yes, I can see your face looking down. You were quite silent and frozen. I screamed and screamed. Aunt Barbara thought that you had fallen at first from the way I screamed.”

“Poor little Eppie. Yes, I remember; it was horrid.”

Their eyes, smiling, quizzical, yet sad, watched, measured each other, while they exchanged these trophies from the past. He had joined her beside the fire, and, turning, she leaned her hands on the mantel and looked into the flames. So looking, her face had its aspect of almost tragic brooding. It was as if, Gavan thought, under the light memories, all those visions of his night were there before her, as if, astonishingly, and in almost uncanny measure, she shared them.

“And do you remember Robbie?” she asked presently.

“I was just thinking of Robbie,” Gavan answered. It was her face that had brought back the old sorrow, and that memory, more than any, linked them over all that was new and strange. They glanced at each other.

“I am so glad,” said Eppie.

“Because I remember?”

“Yes, that you haven’t forgotten. You said you would.”

“Did I?” he asked, though he quite remembered that, too.

“Yes; and I should have felt Robbie more dead if you had forgotten him.”

This was wonderfully not the Miss Gifford, and wonderfully the old Eppie. She saw that thought, too, answering it with, “Things haven’t really changed so much, have they? It’s all so very near—all of that.”

So near, that its sudden sharing was making Gavan a little uncomfortable, with the discomfort of the night before justified, intensified.

He hadn’t imagined such familiar closeness with a woman really unknown, nor that, sweeping away all the formalities that might have grown up between them, she should call him Gavan and make it natural for him to call her Eppie. He didn’t really mind. It was amusing, charming perhaps, perhaps even touching—yes, of course it was that; but she was rather out of place: much nearer than where he had imagined she would be, on the stage before him.

Passing to another memory, she now said, “I clung for years, you know, to your promise to come back.”

“I couldn’t come—really and simply could not.”

“I never for a moment thought you could, any more than I thought you could forget Robbie.”

“And when I could come, you were gone.”

“How miserable that made me! I was in Rome when I had the news from Uncle Nigel.”

He felt bound fully to exonerate the past. “I had the life, during my boyhood, of a sumptuous galley-slave. I had everything except liberty and leisure. I was put into a system and left there until it had had its will of me. And when I was free I imagined that you had forgotten all about me. To a shy, warped boy, a grown-up Eppie was an alarming idea.”

“I never thought you had forgotten me!” said Eppie, smiling.

Again she actually disturbed him; but, lightly, he replied with the truth, feeling a certain satisfaction in its lightness: “Never, never; though, of course, you fell into a background. You can’t deny that I did.”

“Oh, no, I don’t deny it.” Her smile met his, seemed placidly to perceive its meaning. She did not for a moment imply, by her admissions, any more than he did; the only question was, What did his admissions imply?

She left them there, going on in an apparent sequence, “Have you heard much about me, Gavan?”

“A good deal,” he owned.

“I ask because I want to pick up threads; I want to know how many stitches are dropped, so to speak. Since you have heard, I want to know just what; I often seem to leave reverberations behind me. Some rather ugly ones, I fear. You heard, perhaps, that I was that rather ambiguous being, the young woman of fashion, materialistic, ambitious, hard.” Her gaze, with its cool scrutiny, was now upon him.

“Those are really too ugly names for what I heard. I gathered, on the whole, that you were merely very vigorous and that you had more opportunities than most people for vigor.”

“I’m glad that you saw it so; but all the same, the truth, at times, hasn’t been beautiful. I have, often, been too indifferent toward people who didn’t count for me, and too diplomatic toward those who did. You see, Gavan,” she put it placidly before him, not at all as if drawing near in confidence,—she was much further in her confidences than in her memories,—but merely as if she unrolled a map before him so that he might clearly see where, at present, they found themselves, “you see, I am a nearly penniless girl—just enough to dress and go about. Of course if I didn’t dress and didn’t go about I could keep body and soul together; but to the shrewd eyes of the world, a girl living on her friends, making capital of her personality, while she seeks a husband who will give her the sort of place she wants—oh, yes, the world isn’t so unfair, either, when one takes off the veils. And this girl, with the personality that pays, was put early in a place from where she could see all sorts of paths at once, see the world, in its ladder aspect, before her—all the horridness of low rungs and all the satisfaction of high ones. I have been tempted through complexity of understanding; perhaps I still am. One wants the best; and when one doesn’t see clearly what the best is, one is in danger of becoming ugly. But echoes are often distorting.”

Miss Gifford was now very fully before him, as she had evidently intended to be. It was as if she herself had drawn between them the barrier of the footlights and as if, on her chosen stage, she swept a really splendid curtsey. And this frank and panoplied young woman of the world was far easier to deal with than the reminiscent Eppie. He could comfortably smile and applaud from his stall, once more the mere spectator—easiest of attitudes.

“The echoes, on the whole, were rather magnificent, as if an Amazon had galloped across mountains and left them calling her prowess from peak to peak.”

Her eyes, quickly on his, seemed to measure the conscious artificiality, to compare it with what he had already, more helplessly, shown her. He felt his rather silly deftness penetrated and that she guessed that the mountain calls had not at all enchanted him. She owned to her own acuteness in her next words:

“And you don’t like young ladies to gallop across mountains. Well, I love galloping, though I’m sorry that I leave over-loud echoes. You, at all events, are noiseless. You seem to have sailed over my head in an air-boat. It was hard for me to keep any trace of you.”

“But I don’t at all mean that I dislike Amazons to have their rides.”

“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I first came to London. I only heard of lofty things—scholarly distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”

“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his appropriate bouquet.

She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her—and more for him than for herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of herself at all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she, more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made him feel himself a blunderer.

But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars, but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant, elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of really you. It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad, because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”

He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over his own blunder.

“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was defeated,” he said.

“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”

“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”

“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by merely stretching out your hand—they were under it, not over your head. You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts, suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she leaned back in her chair, fixing him with that look of cheerful hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type, that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t you?”

“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I said—you didn’t care enough.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you, a lot?”

“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged him—gaily, not defiantly—to misunderstand her again.

“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.

“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I believe that its grapes are worth while,—and by grapes I mean the things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”

Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.

“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”

“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”

He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality; looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-natured gipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it would have been neither.”

“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”

“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”

Once more he was conscious of the discomfort, slight and stealing, as though the gipsy knew too much already. But he protested, and with sincerity: “If there is anything to find you will certainly find it. I hope that you will find it worth your while. I hope that we shall be great friends.”

She smiled up at him, clearly and quietly: “I have always been your great friend.”

“Always? All this while?”

“All this while. Never mind if you haven’t felt it; I have. I will do for both.”

Her smile, her look, made him finally and completely understand the application of the well-worn word to her. She was charming. She could be lavish, pour out unasked bounty upon one, and yet, in no way undervaluing it, be full of delicacy, of humor, in her generosity.

“I thought I hadn’t any right to feel it,” said Gavan. “I thought you would not have remembered.”

“Well, you will find out—I always remember, it’s my strong point,” said Eppie.

IV

EXT morning at breakfast he had quite a new impression of her.

Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.

Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation, or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated; over-expression had become automatic with her.

Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had had a walk, stooping to kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat, dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks, morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested sadness.

Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it were.

There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine, took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols. Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.

While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the light, the movement of their monotonous days. Not only did she bring them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race. Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so significant symptom, the power of playfulness—the intellectual detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread to a strong hand.

Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black—with a blackness beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her doing it herself.

From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that, meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under a pot, all this, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”

“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a topic.

“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said Eppie.

“Gavan’s not of that weak-kneed persuasion.”

“Oh, he isn’t weak-kneed!” laughed Eppie.

She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room, her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea. She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so wonderfully comprehended his fears.

She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her pockets, her head unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches upon the notes of the past rare things with her.

In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy.

“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation.

“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.

Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.”

“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor.

“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”

“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity.

“I don’t know. I did. There,”—she paused to point,—“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?—with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass. When I was a child—did I ever confide it to you?—my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.”

“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”

“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.”

“You are fond of thrills and perils.”

“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing—something fundamental in us, I suppose.”

She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed, being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed, penetrated,—for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering. Still, she should run, if possible, no such risk. They were to be friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.

Meanwhile, unconscious, no doubt, of these barriers, Eppie walked beside him and made him talk about himself. She knew, of course, of his mother’s death; she did not speak of that: many barriers were her own—she was capable of most delicate avoidances. But she asked after his father. “He is still alive, I hear.”

“Yes, indeed, and gives me a good deal of his company.”

“Oh.” She was a little at a loss. He could guess at what she had heard of his father. He went on, though choosing his words in a way that showed a slight wincing behind his wish to be very frank and friendly with her, for even yet his father made him wince, standing, as he did, for the tragedy of his mother’s life: “He is very much alive for a person so gone to pieces. But I can put up with him far more comfortably than when he was less pitiable.”

“How much do you have to put up with him?” she asked, trying to image, as he saw, his ménage in Surrey, in the house he had just been describing to her, its old bricks all vague pinks and mauves, its high-walled gardens clustering near it, its wonderful hedges, that, he said, it ruined him to keep up to their reputation of exquisite formality; and, within, its vast library—all the house a brain, practically, the other rooms like mere places for life’s renewal before centering in the intellectual workshop. She evidently found it difficult to place, among the hedges, the lawns, the long walls of the library, a father, gone to pieces perhaps, but displaying all the more helplessly his general unworthiness. Even in lenient circles, Captain Palairet was thought to have an undignified record.

“Oh, he is there for most of the time. He is there now,” said Gavan, without pathos. “He has no money left, and now that I’ve a little I’m the obvious thing to retire to.”

“I hope that it’s not very horrid for you.”

“I can’t say that it’s horrid at all. I don’t see much of him, and, in many respects, he has remained, for the onlooker, rather a charming creature. He gives me very little trouble—smokes, eats, plays billiards. When we meet, we are very affable.”

Eppie did not say, “You tolerate him because he is piteous,” but he imagined that she guessed it.

V

E was awakened early next morning by the sound of singing in the garden below.

His windows were widely opened and a cold, pure air filled the room. He lay dreamily listening for some moments before recognizing Eppie’s voice—recognizing it, though he had never heard her sing.

Fresh and strong, it put a new vitality into the simple sadness of an old Scotch ballad, as though in the very sorrow it found joy. It was not an emotional voice. Clearly and firmly it sounded, and seemed a part of the frosty, sunny morning, part of the sky that was like a great chalice filled with light, of the whitened hills, the aromatic pine-woods, and the distant, rushing burn. He had sprung up after the first dreamy listening and looked out at it all, and at her walking through the garden, her dog at her heels. She went out by the little gate sunken deep in the wall, and disappeared in the woods; and still the voice reached him, singing on, and at each repetition of the monotonous, departing melody, a sadder, sweeter sense of pain strove in his heart.

He listened, looking down at the pine-tree beneath the window, at the garden, the summer-house, the withered tangle of the rose upon the wall, and up at the hilltop, at the crystalline sky; and such a sudden pang of recollection pierced him that tears came to his eyes.

What was it that he remembered? or, rather, what did he not? Things deep and things trivial, idle smiles, wrenching despairs, youth, sorrow, laughter,—all the past was in the pang, all the future, too, it seemed, and he could not have said whether his mother, Alice, Eppie with her dolls, and little Robbie, or the clairvoyant intuition of a future waiting for him here—whether presage or remembrance—were its greater part.

Not until the voice had died, in faintest filaments of sound, far away among the woods, did the pain fade, leaving him shaken. Such moods were like dead things starting to life, and reminded him too vividly of the fact that as long as one was alive, one was, indeed, in danger from life; and though his thought was soon able to disentangle itself from the knot of awakened emotions that had entwined it for a moment, a vague sense of fear remained with him. Something had been demanded of him—something that he had, involuntarily, found himself giving. This it was to have still a young nature, sensitive to impressions. He understood. Yet it was with a slight, a foolishly boyish reluctance, as he told himself, that he went down some hours later to meet Eppie at breakfast.