CHAPTER XXI. THE LAST RIDE
In the morning, as Walter was dressing, he received a copy of his poems which he had taken in sheets to a book-binder to put in morocco for Lady Lufa. Pleased like a child, he handled it as if he might hurt it. Such a feeling he had never had before, would never have again. He was an author! One might think, after the way in which he had treated not a few books and not a few authors, he could scarcely consider it such a very fine thing to be an author; but there is always a difference between thine and mine, treated by the man of this world as essential. The book was Walter’s book and not another’s!—no common prose or poetry this, but the first-born of his deepest feeling! At length it had taken body and shape! From the unseen it had emerged in red morocco, the color of his heart, its edges golden with the light of his hopes!
As to the communication of the night, its pain had early vanished. Was not Sefton a disappointed lover? His honesty, however evident, could not alter that fact! Least of all could a man himself tell whether disguised jealousy and lingering hope might not be potently present, while he believed himself solely influenced by friendly anxiety!
“I will take his advice, however,” said Walter to himself, “and put an end to my anxiety this very day!”
“Do you feel inclined for a gallop, Mr. Colman?” asked Lufa as they sat at the breakfast-table. “It feels just like a spring morning. The wind changed in the night. You won’t mind a little mud—will you?”
In common phrase, but with a foolish look of adoring gratitude, Walter accepted the invitation. “How handsome he is!” thought Lufa; for Walter’s countenance was not only handsome but expressive. Most women, however, found him attractive chiefly from his frank address and open look; for, though yet far from a true man, he was of a true nature. Every man’s nature indeed is true, though the man be not true; but some have come into the world so much nearer the point where they may begin to be true, that, comparing them with the rest, we say their nature is true.
Lufa rose and went to get ready. Walter followed, and overtook her on the stair.
“I have something for you,” he said; “may I bring it you?”
He could not postpone the effect his book might have. Authors young and old think so much of their books that they seldom conceive how little others care about them.
She was hardly in her room, when he followed her with the volume.
She took it, and opened it.
“Yours!” she cried. “And poetry! Why, Walter!”
She had once or twice called him by his name before.
He took it from her hand, and turning the title-page, gave it her again to read the dedication. A slight rose-tinge suffused her face. She said nothing, but shut the book, and gave it a tender little hug.
“She never did that to anything Sefton gave her!” thought Walter.
“Make haste,” she said, and turning, went in, and closed her door.
He walked up and down the hall for half an hour before she appeared. When she came tripping down the wide, softly descending stair, in her tight-fitting habit and hat and feather, holding up her skirt, so that he saw her feet racing each other like a cataract across the steps, saying as she came near him, “I have kept you waiting, but I could not help it; my habit was torn!” he thought he had never seen her so lovely. Indeed she looked lovely, and had she loved, would have been lovely. As it was, her outer loveliness was but a promise whose fulfillment had been too long postponed. His heart swelled into his throat and eyes as he followed her and helped her to mount.
“Nobody puts me up so well as you!” she said.
He could hardly repress the triumph that filled him from head to foot. Anyhow, and whoever might object, she liked him! If she loved him and would confess it, he could live on the pride of it all the rest of his days!
They were unattended, but neither spoke until they were well beyond the lodge-gate. Winter though it was, a sweet air was all abroad, and the day was full of spring-prophecies: all winters have such days, even those of the heart! how could we get through without them? Their horses were in excellent spirits—it was their first gallop for more than a week; Walter’s roan was like a flame under him. They gave them so much to do, that no such talk as Walter longed for, was possible. It consoled him, however, to think that he had never had such a chance of letting Lufa see he could ride.
At length, after a great gallop, they were quieter, seeming to remember they were horses and not colts, and must not overpass the limits of equine propriety.
“Is it our last ride, Lufa?” said Walter.
“Why should it be?” she answered, opening her eyes wide on him.
“There is no reason I know,” he returned, “except—except you are tired of me.”
“Nobody is tired of you—except perhaps George, and you need not mind him; he is odd. I have known him from childhood, and don’t understand him yet.”
“He is clever!” said Walter.
“I dare say he is—if he would take the trouble to show it.”
“You hardly do him justice, I think!”
“How can I? he bores me! and when I am bored, I am horribly bored. I have been very patient with him.”
“Why do you ask him so often then?”
“I don’t ask him. Mamma is fond of him, and so—”
“You are the victim!”
“I can bear it; I have consolations!”
She laughed merrily.
“How do you like my binding?” he asked, when they had ridden awhile in silence.
She looked up with a question.
“The binding of my book, I mean,” he explained.
“It is a good color.”
He felt his hope rather damped.
“Will you let me read a little from it?”
“With pleasure. You shall have an audience in the drawing-room, after luncheon.”
“Oh, Lufa! how could you think I would read my own poems to a lot of people!”
“I beg your pardon! Will the summer-house do?”
“Yes, indeed; nowhere better.”
“Very well! The summer-house, after lunch!”
This was not encouraging! Did she suspect what was coming? and was she careful not to lead the way to it? She had never been like this before! Perhaps she did not like having the book dedicated to her! But there was no mention of her name, or anything to let “the heartless world” know to whom it was offered!
As they approached the house, Walter said,
“Would you mind coming at once to the summer-house?”
“Lunch will be ready.”
“Then sit down in your habit, and come immediately after. Let me have my way for once, Lufa.”
“Very well.”
CHAPTER XXII. THE SUMMER-HOUSE
The moment the meal was over, he left the room, and in five minutes they met at the place appointed—a building like a miniature Roman temple.
“Oh,” said Lufa, as she entered, “I forgot the book. How stupid of me!”
“Never mind,” returned Walter. “It was you, not the book I wanted.”
A broad bench went round the circular wall; Lufa seated herself on it, and Walter placed himself beside her, as near as he dared. For some moments he did not speak. She looked up at him inquiringly. He sunk at her feet, bowed his head toward her, and but for lack of courage would have laid it on her knees.
“Oh, Lufa!” he said, “you can not think how I love you!”
“Poor, dear boy!” she returned, in the tone of a careless mother to whom a son has unburdened his sorrows, and laid her hand lightly on his curls.
The words were not repellent, but neither was the tone encouraging.
“You do not mind my saying it?” he resumed, feeling his way timidly.
“What could you do but tell me?” she answered.
“What could I do for you if you did not let me know! I’m so sorry, Walter!”
“Why should you be sorry? You can do with me as you please!”
“I don’t know about such things. I don’t quite know what you mean, or what you want. I will be as kind to you as I can—while you stay with us.”
“But, Lufa—I may call you Lufa?”
“Yes, surely! if that is any comfort to you.”
“Nothing but your love, Lufa, can be a comfort to me. That would make me one of the blessed!”
“I like you very much. If you were a girl, I should say I loved you.”
“Why not say it as it is?”
“Would you be content with the love I should give a girl? Some of you want so much!”
“I will be glad of any love you can give me. But to say I should be content with any love you could give me, would be false. My love for you is such, I don’t know how to bear it! It aches so! My heart is full of you, and longs for you till I can hardly endure the pain. You are so beautiful that your beauty burns me. Night nor day can I forget you!”
“You try to forget me then?”
“Never. Your eyes have so dazzled my soul that I can see nothing but your eyes. Do look at me—just for one moment, Lufa.”
She turned her face and looked him straight in the eyes—looked into them as if they were windows through which she could peer into the convolutions of his brain. She held her eyes steady until his dropped, unable to sustain the nearness of her presence.
“You see,” she said, “I am ready to do anything I can to please you!”
He felt strangely defeated, rose, and sat down beside her again, with the sickness of a hot summer noon in his soul.
But he must leave no room for mistake! He had been dreaming long enough! What had not Sefton told him!
“Is it possible you do not understand, Lufa, what a man means when he says, ‘I love you’?”
“I think I do! I don’t mind it!”
“That means you will love me again?”
“Yes; I will be good to you.”
“You will love me as a woman loves a man?”
“I will let you love me as much as you please.”
“To love you as much as I please, would be to call you my own; to marry you; to say wife to you; to have you altogether, with nobody to come between, or try to stop my worshiping of you—not father, not mother—nobody!”
“Now you are foolish, Walter! You know I never meant that! You must have known that never could be! I never imagined you could make such a fantastic blunder! But then how should you know how we think about things! I must remember that, and not be hard upon you!”
“You mean that your father and mother would not like it?”
“There it is! You do not understand! I thought so! I do not mean my father and mother in particular; I mean our people—people of our position—I would say rank, but that might hurt you! We are brought up so differently from you, that you can not understand how we think of such things. It grieves me to appear unkind, but really, Walter! There is not a man I love more than you—but marriage! Lady Lufa would be in everybody’s mouth, the same as if I had run off with my groom! Our people are so blind that, believe me, they would hardly see the difference. The thing is simply impossible!”
“It would not be impossible if you loved me!”
“Then I don’t, never did, never could love you. Don’t imagine you can persuade me to anything unbecoming, anything treacherous to my people! You will find yourself awfully mistaken!”
“But I may make myself a name! If I were as famous as Lord Tennyson, would it be just as impossible?”
“To say it would not, would be to confess myself worldly, and that I never was! No, Walter; I admire you; if you could be trusted not to misunderstand, I might even say I loved you! I shall always be glad to see you, always enjoy hearing you read; but there is a line as impassable as the Persian river of death. Talk about something else, or I must go!”
Here Walter, who had been shivering with cold, began to grow warm again as he answered:
“How could you write that poem, Lady Lufa—full of such grand things about love, declaring love everything and rank nothing; and then, when it came to yourself, treat me like this! I could not have believed it possible! You can not know what love is, however much you write about it!”
“I hope I never shall, if it means any confusion between friendship and folly! It shall not make a fool of me! I will not be talked about! It is all very well and very right in poetry! The idea of letting all go for love is so splendid, it is the greatest pity it should be impossible. There may be some planet, whose social habits are different, where it might work well enough; but here it is not to be thought of—except in poetry, of course, or novels. Of all human relations, the idea of such love is certainly the fittest for verse, therefore we have no choice; we must use it. But because I think with pleasure of such lovers, why must I consent to be looked at with pleasure myself? What obligation does my heroine lay on me to do likewise? I don’t see the thing. I don’t want to pose as a lover. Why should I fall in love with you in real life, because I like you to read my poem about lovers? Can’t you see the absurdity of the argument? Life and books are two different spheres. The one is the sphere of thoughts, the other of things, and they don’t touch.”
But for pride, Walter could have wept with shame: why should he care that one with such principles should grant or refuse him anything! Yet he did care!
“There is no reason at all,” she resumed, “why we should not be friends. Mr. Colman, I am not a flirt. It is in my heart to be a sister to you! I would have you the first to congratulate me when the man appears whom I may choose to love as you mean! He need not be a poet to make you jealous! If he were, I should yet always regard you as my poet.”
“And you would let me kiss your shoe, or perhaps your glove, if I was very good!” said Walter.
She took no notice of the outburst: it was but a bit of childish temper!
“You must learn,” she went on, “to keep your life and your imaginations apart. You are always letting them mix, and that confuses everything. A poet of all men ought not to make the mistake. It is quite monstrous! as monstrous as if a painter joined the halves of two different animals! Poetry is so unlike life, that to carry the one into the other is to make the poet a ridiculous parody of a man! The moment that, instead of standing aloof and regarding, he plunges in, he becomes a traitor to his art, and is no longer able to represent things as they ought to be, but can not be. My mother and I will open to you the best doors in London because we like you; but pray do not dream of more. Do, please, Walter, leave it possible for me to say I like you—oh, so much!”
She had been staring out of the window as she spoke; now she turned her eyes upon him where he sat, crushed and broken, beside her. A breath of compassion seemed to ruffle the cold lake of her spirit, and she looked at him in silence for a moment. He did not raise his eyes, but her tone made her present to his whole being as she said,
“I don’t want to break your heart, my poet! It was a lovely thought—why did you spoil it?—that we two understood and loved each other in a way nobody could have a right to interfere with!”
Walter lifted his head. The word loved wrought on him like a spell: he was sadly a creature of words! He looked at her with flushed face and flashing eyes. Often had Lufa thought him handsome, but she had never felt it as she did now.
“Let it be so!” he said. “Be my sister-friend, Lufa. Leave it only to me to remember how foolish I once made myself in your beautiful eyes—how miserable always in my own blind heart.”
So little of a man was our poet, that out of pure disappointment and self-pity he burst into a passion of weeping. The world seemed lost to him, as it seemed at such a time to many a better man. But to the true the truth of things will sooner or later assert itself, and neither this world nor the next prove lost to him. A man’s well-being does not depend on any woman. The woman did not create, and could not have contented him. No woman can ruin a man by refusing him, or even by accepting him, though she may go far toward it. There is one who has upon him a perfect claim, at the entrancing recognition of which he will one day cry out, “This, then, is what it all meant!” The lamp of poetry may for a time go out in the heart of the poet, and nature seem a blank; but where the truth is, the poetry must be; and truth is, however the untrue may fail to see it. Surely that man is a fool who, on the ground that there can not be such a God as other fools assert, or such a God as alone he is able to imagine, says there is no God!
Lufa’s bosom heaved, and she gave a little sob; her sentiment, the skin of her heart, was touched, for the thing was pathetic! A mist came over her eyes, and might, had she ever wept, have turned to tears.
Walter sat with his head in his hands and wept. She had never before seen a man weep, yet never a tear left its heavenly spring to flow from her eyes! She rose, took his face between her hands, raised it, and kissed him on the forehead.
He rose also, suddenly calmed.
“Then it was our last ride, Lufa!” he said, and left the summer-house.
CHAPTER XXIII. THE PARK
Walter did not know where he was going when he turned from Lufa. It was solitude he sought, without being aware that he sought anything. Must it not be a deep spiritual instinct that drives trouble into solitude? There are times when only the highest can comfort even the lowest, and solitude is the ante-chamber to his presence. With him is the only possibility of essential comfort, the comfort that turns an evil into a good. But it was certainly not knowledge of this that drove Walter into the wide, lonely park. “Away from men!” moans the wounded life. Away from the herd flies the wounded deer; away from the flock staggers the sickly sheep—to the solitary covert to die. The man too thinks it is to die; but it is in truth so to return to life—if indeed he be a man, and not an abortion that can console himself with vile consolations. “You can not soothe me, my friends! leave me to my misery,” cries the man; and lo his misery is the wind of the waving garments of him that walks in the garden in the cool of the day! All misery is God unknown.
Hurt and bleeding Walter wandered away. His life was palled with a sudden hail-cloud which hung low, and blotted out color and light and loveliness. It was the afternoon; the sun was fast going down; the dreary north wind had begun again to blow, and the trees to moan in response; they seemed to say, “How sad thou art, wind of winter! see how sad thou makest us! we moan and shiver! each alone, we are sad!” The sorrow of nature was all about him; but the sighing of the wind-sifting trees around his head, and the hardening of the earth about the ancient roots under his feet, was better than the glow of the bright drawing-room, with its lamps and blazing fires, its warm colors and caressing softnesses. Who would take joy in paradise with hell in his heart! Let him stay out in the night with the suffering, groaning trees, with the clouds that have swallowed the moon and the stars, with the frost and the silent gathering of the companies, troops, and battalions of snow!
Every man understands something of what Walter felt. His soul was seared with cold. The ways of life were a dull sickness. There was no reason why things should be, why the world should ever have been made! The night was come: why should he keep awake! How cold the river looked in its low, wet channel! How listlessly the long grasses hung over its bank! And the boy on the other side was whistling!
It grew darker. He had made a long round, and unaware was approaching the house. He had not thought what he must do. Nothing so practical as going away had yet occurred to him. She had not been unkind! She had even pressed on him a sister’s love! The moth had not yet burned away enough of its wings to prevent it from burning its whole body! it kept fluttering about the flame. Nor was absent the childish weakness, the unmanly but common impulse, to make the woman feel how miserable she had made him. For this poor satisfaction, not a few men have blown their brains out; not a few women drowned themselves or taken poison—and generally without success! Walter would stand before her the ruin she had made him, then vanish from her sight. To-morrow he would leave the house, but she must see him yet once, alone, before he went! Once more he must hang his shriveled pinions in the presence of the seraph whose radiance had scorched him! And still the most hideous thought of all would keep lifting its vague ugly head out of chaos—the thought that, lovely as she was, she was not worshipful.
The windows were dimly shining through their thick curtains. The house looked a great jewel of bliss, in which the spirits of paradise might come and go, while such as he could not enter! What should he do? Where should he go? To his room, and dress for dinner? It was impossible! How could he sit feeling her eyes, and facing Sefton! How endure the company, the talk, the horrible eating! All so lately full of refinement, of enchantment—the music, the pictures, the easy intercourse—all was stupid, wearisome, meaningless! He would go to his room and say he had a headache! But first he would peep into the drawing-room: she might be there—and looking sad!