Marcella Part 97

"You will keep this sitting-room, Aldous?"

"Always."

"I am glad. I have known you in it so long. What good talks we have had here in the old hot days! I was hot, at least, and you bore with me.

Land Reform--Church Reform--Wages Reform--we have threshed them all out in this room. Do you remember that night I kept you up till it was too late to go to bed, talking over my Church plans? How full I was of it!--the Church that was to be the people--reflecting their life, their differences--governed by them--growing with them. You wouldn't join it, Aldous--our poor little a.s.sociation!"

Aldous's strong lip quivered.

"Let me think of something I _did_ join in," he said.

Hallin's look shone on him with a wonderful affection.

"Was there anything else you didn't help in? I don't remember it. I've dragged you into most things. You never minded failure. And I have not had so much of it--not till this last. This has been failure--absolute and complete."

But there was no darkening of expression. He sat quietly smiling.

"Do you suppose anybody who could look beyond the moment would dream of calling it failure?" said Aldous, with difficulty.

Hallin shook his head gently, and was silent for a little time, gathering strength and breath again.

"I ought to suffer"--he said, presently. "Last week I dreaded my own feeling if I should fail or break down--more than the failure itself.

But since yesterday--last night--I have no more regrets. I see that my power is gone--that if I were to live I could no longer carry on the battle--or my old life. I am out of touch. Those whom I love and would serve, put me aside. Those who invite me, I do not care to join. So I drop--into the gulf--and the pageant rushes on. But the curious thing is now--I have no suffering. And as to the future--do you remember Jowett in the Introduction to the Phaedo--"

He feebly pointed to a book beside him, which Aldous took up. Hallin guided him and he read--

"_Most persons when the last hour comes are resigned to the order of nature and the will of G.o.d. They are not thinking of Dante's 'Inferno'

or 'Paradiso,' or of the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' Heaven and h.e.l.l are not realities to them, but words or ideas_--_the outward symbols of some great mystery, they hardly know what_."

"It is so with me," said Hallin, smiling, as, at his gesture, Aldous laid the book aside; "yet not quite. To my _mind_, that mystery indeed is all unknown and dark--but to the heart it seems unveiled--with the heart, I see."

A little later Aldous was startled to hear him say, very clearly and quickly:

"Do you remember that this is the fifth of October?"

Aldous drew his chair closer, that he might not raise his voice.

"Yes, Ned."

"Two years, wasn't it, to-day? Will you forgive me if I speak of her?"

"You shall say anything you will."

"Did you notice that piece of news I sent you, in my last letter to Geneva? But of course you did. Did it please you?"

"Yes, I was glad of it," said Aldous, after a pause, "extremely glad. I thought she had escaped a great danger."

Hallin studied his face closely.

"She is free, Aldous--and she is a n.o.ble creature--she has learnt from life--and from death--this last two years. And--you still love her. Is it right to make no more effort?"

Aldous saw the perspiration standing on the wasted brow--would have given the world to be able to content or cheer him--yet would not, for the world, at such a moment be false to his own feeling or deceive his questioner.

"I think it is right," he said deliberately, "--for a good many reasons, Edward. In the first place I have not the smallest cause--not the fraction of a cause--to suppose that I could occupy with her now any other ground than that I occupied two years ago. She has been kind and friendly to me--on the whole--since we met in London. She has even expressed regret for last year--meaning, of course, as I understood, for the pain and trouble that may be said to have come from her not knowing her own mind. She wished that we should be friends. And"--he turned his head away--"no doubt I could be, in time.... But, you see--in all that, there is nothing whatever to bring me forward again. My fatal mistake last year, I think now, lay in my accepting what she gave me--accepting it so readily, so graspingly even. That was my fault, my blindness, and--it was as unjust to her--as it was hopeless for myself. For hers is a nature"--his eyes came back to his friend; his voice took a new force and energy--"which, in love at any rate, will give all or nothing--and will never be happy itself, or bring happiness, till it gives all. That is what last year taught me. So that even if she--out of kindness or remorse for giving pain--were willing to renew the old tie--I should be her worst enemy and my own if I took a single step towards it. Marriage on such terms as I was thankful for last year, would be humiliation to me, and bring no gain to her. It will never serve a man with her"--his voice broke into emotion--"that he should make no claims! Let him claim the uttermost far-thing--her whole self. If she gives it, _then_ he may know what love means!"

Hallin had listened intently. At Aldous's last words his expression showed pain and perplexity. His mind was full of vague impressions, memories, which seemed to argue with and dispute one of the chief things Aldous had been saying. But they were not definite enough to be put forward. His sensitive chivalrous sense, even in this extreme weakness, remembered the tragic weight that attaches inevitably to dying words.

Let him not do more harm than good.

He rested a little. They brought him food; and Aldous sat beside him making pretence to read, so that he might be encouraged to rest. His sister came and went; so did the doctor. But when they were once more alone, Hallin put out his hand and touched his companion.

"What is it, dear Ned?"

"Only one thing more, before we leave it. Is that _all_ that stands between you now--the whole? You spoke to me once in the summer of feeling _angry_, more angry than you could have believed. Of course, I felt the same. But just now you spoke of its all being your fault. Is there anything changed in your mind?"

Aldous hesitated. It was extraordinarily painful to him to speak of the past, and it troubled him that at such a moment it should trouble Hallin.

"There is nothing changed, Ned, except that perhaps time makes _some_ difference always. I don't want now"--he tried to smile--"as I did then, to make anybody else suffer for my suffering. But perhaps I marvel even more than I did at first, that--that--she could have allowed some things to happen as she did!"

The tone was firm and vibrating; and, in speaking, the whole face had developed a strong animation most pa.s.sionate and human.

Hallin sighed.

"I often think," he said, "that she was extraordinarily immature--much more immature than most girls of that age--as to feeling. It was really the brain that was alive."

Aldous silently a.s.sented; so much so that Hallin repented himself.

"But not now," he said, in his eager dying whisper; "not now. The plant is growing full and tall, into the richest life."

Aldous took the wasted hand tenderly in his own. There was something inexpressibly touching in this last wrestle of Hallin's affection with another's grief. But it filled Aldous with a kind of remorse, and with the longing to free him from that, as from every other burden, in these last precious hours of life. And at last he succeeded, as he thought, in drawing his mind away from it. They pa.s.sed to other things. Hallin, indeed, talked very little more during the day. He was very restless and weak, but not in much positive suffering. Aldous read to him at intervals, from Isaiah or Plato, the bright sleepless eyes following every word.

At last the light began to sink. The sunset flooded in from the Berks.h.i.+re uplands and the far Oxford plain, and lay in gold and purple on the falling woods and the green stretches of the park. The distant edges of hill were extraordinarily luminous and clear, and Aldous, looking into the west with the eye of one to whom every spot and line were familiar landmarks, could almost fancy he saw beyond the invisible river, the hill, the "lovely tree against the western sky," which keep for ever the memory of one with whose destiny it had often seemed to him that Hallin's had something in common. To him, as to Thyrsis, the same early joy, the same "happy quest," the same "fugitive and gracious light" for guide and beacon, that--

does not come with houses or with gold, With place, with honour and a flattering crew;

and to him, too, the same tasked pipe and tired throat, the same struggle with the "life of men unblest," the same impatient tryst with death.

The lovely lines ran dirge-like in his head, as he sat, sunk in grief, beside his friend. Hallin did not speak; but his eye took note of every change of light, of every darkening tone, as the quiet English scene with its villages, churches, and woods, withdrew itself plane by plane into the evening haze. His soul followed the quiet deer, the homing birds, loosening itself gently the while from pain and from desire, saying farewell to country, to the poor, to the work left undone, and the hopes unrealised--to everything except to love.

It had just struck six when he bent forward to the window beneath which ran the wide front terrace.

"That was her step!" he said, while his face lit up, "will you bring her here?"

Marcella rang the bell at the Court with a fast beating heart. The old butler who came gave what her shrinking sense thought a forbidding answer to her shy greeting of him, and led her first into the drawing-room. A small figure in deep black rose from a distant chair and came forward stiffly. Marcella found herself shaking hands with Miss Raeburn.

"Will you sit and rest a little before you go upstairs?" said that lady with careful politeness, "or shall I send word at once? He is hardly worse--but as ill as he can be."

"I am not the least tired," said Marcella, and Miss Raeburn rang.