Victorian Short Stories: Stories of Courtship
letter.) 'Let us possess our souls in patience a little longer. I need
not tell you how vexatious it will be to find myself nursing him in
Homburg--out of the season even--instead of the prospect to which I had
looked forward with my whole heart and soul. But what can one do? How
true is the French proverb, 'Nothing happens but the unexpected'! Write
to me immediately _Poste Restante_, that I may at least console myself
with your dear words.'
The unexpected did indeed happen. Despite draughts of Elizabeth-brunnen
and promenades on the Kurhaus terrace, the stalwart woman beater
succumbed to his malady. The curt telegram from Winifred gave no
indication of her emotions. He sent a reply-telegram of sympathy with
her trouble. Although he could not pretend to grieve at this sudden
providential solution of their life-problem, still he did sincerely
sympathize with the distress inevitable in connection with a death,
especially on foreign soil.
He was not able to see her till her husband's body had been brought
across the North Sea and committed to the green repose of the old
Hampstead churchyard. He found her pathetically altered--her face wan
and spiritualized, and all in subtle harmony with the exquisite black
gown. In the first interview, he did not dare speak of their love at
all. They discussed the immortality of the soul, and she quoted George
Herbert. But with the weeks the question of their future began to force
its way back to his lips.
'We could not decently marry before six months,' she said, when
definitely confronted with the problem.
'Six months!' he gasped.
'Well, surely you don't want to outrage everybody,' she said, pouting.
At first he was outraged himself. What! She who had been ready to
flutter the world with a fantastic dance was now measuring her
footsteps. But on reflection he saw that Mrs. Glamorys was right once
more. Since Providence had been good enough to rescue them, why should
they fly in its face? A little patience, and a blameless happiness lay
before them. Let him not blind himself to the immense relief he really
felt at being spared social obloquy. After all, a poet could be
unconventional in his _work_--he had no need of the practical outlet
demanded for the less gifted.
VI
They scarcely met at all during the next six months--it had, naturally,
in this grateful reaction against their recklessness, become a sacred
period, even more charged with tremulous emotion than the engagement
periods of those who have not so nearly scorched themselves. Even in her
presence he found a certain pleasure in combining distant adoration with
the confident expectation of proximity, and thus she was restored to
the sanctity which she had risked by her former easiness. And so all was
for the best in the best of all possible worlds.
When the six months had gone by, he came to claim her hand. She was
quite astonished. 'You promised to marry me at the end of six months,'
he reminded her.
'Surely it isn't six months already,' she said.
He referred her to the calendar, recalled the date of her husband's
death.
'You are strangely literal for a poet,' she said. 'Of course I _said_
six months, but six months doesn't mean twenty-six weeks by the clock.
All I meant was that a decent period must intervene. But even to myself
it seems only yesterday that poor Harold was walking beside me in the
Kurhaus Park.' She burst into tears, and in the face of them he could
not pursue the argument.
Gradually, after several interviews and letters, it was agreed that they
should wait another six months.
'She _is_ right,' he reflected again. 'We have waited so long, we may as
well wait a little longer and leave malice no handle.'
The second six months seemed to him much longer than the first. The
charm of respectful adoration had lost its novelty, and once again his
breast was racked by fitful fevers which could scarcely calm themselves
even by conversion into sonnets. The one point of repose was that
shining fixed star of marriage. Still smarting under Winifred's reproach
of his unpoetic literality, he did not intend to force her to marry him
exactly at the end of the twelve-month. But he was determined that she
should have no later than this exact date for at least 'naming the day'.
Not the most punctilious stickler for convention, he felt, could deny
that Mrs. Grundy's claim had been paid to the last minute.
The publication of his new volume--containing the Winifred lyrics--had
served to colour these months of intolerable delay. Even the reaction of
the critics against his poetry, that conventional revolt against every
second volume, that parrot cry of over-praise from the very throats that
had praised him, though it pained and perplexed him, was perhaps really
helpful. At any rate, the long waiting was over at last. He felt like
Jacob after his years of service for Rachel.
The fateful morning dawned bright and blue, and, as the towers of
Oxford were left behind him he recalled that distant Saturday when he
had first gone down to meet the literary lights of London in his
publisher's salon. How much older he was now than then--and yet how much
younger! The nebulous melancholy of youth, the clouds of philosophy, had
vanished before this beautiful creature of sunshine whose radiance cut
out a clear line for his future through the confusion of life.
At a florist's in the High Street of Hampstead he bought a costly
bouquet of white flowers, and walked airily to the house and rang the
bell jubilantly. He could scarcely believe his ears when the maid told
him her mistress was not at home. How dared the girl stare at him so
impassively? Did she not know by what appointment--on what errand--he
had come? Had he not written to her mistress a week ago that he would
present himself that afternoon?
'Not at home!' he gasped. 'But when will she be home?'
'I fancy she won't be long. She went out an hour ago, and she has an
appointment with her dressmaker at five.'
'Do you know in what direction she'd have gone?'
'Oh, she generally walks on the Heath before tea.'
The world suddenly grew rosy again. 'I will come back again,' he said.
Yes, a walk in this glorious air--heathward--would do him good.
As the door shut he remembered he might have left the flowers, but he
would not ring again, and besides, it was, perhaps, better he should
present them with his own hand, than let her find them on the hall
table. Still, it seemed rather awkward to walk about the streets with a
bouquet, and he was glad, accidentally to strike the old Hampstead
Church, and to seek a momentary seclusion in passing through its avenue
of quiet gravestones on his heathward way.
Mounting the few steps, he paused idly a moment on the verge of this
green 'God's-acre' to read a perpendicular slab on a wall, and his face
broadened into a smile as he followed the absurdly elaborate biography
of a rich, self-made merchant who had taught himself to read, 'Reader,
go thou and do likewise,' was the delicious bull at the end. As he
turned away, the smile still lingering about his lips, he saw a dainty
figure tripping down the stony graveyard path, and though he was somehow
startled to find her still in black, there was no mistaking Mrs.
Glamorys. She ran to meet him with a glad cry, which filled his eyes
with happy tears.
'How good of you to remember!' she said, as she took the bouquet from
his unresisting hand, and turned again on her footsteps. He followed her
wonderingly across the uneven road towards a narrow aisle of graves on
the left. In another instant she has stooped before a shining white
stone, and laid his bouquet reverently upon it. As he reached her side,
he saw that his flowers were almost lost in the vast mass of floral
offerings with which the grave of the woman beater was bestrewn.
'How good of you to remember the anniversary,' she murmured again.
'How could I forget it?' he stammered, astonished. 'Is not this the end
of the terrible twelve-month?'
The soft gratitude died out of her face. 'Oh, is _that_ what you were
thinking of?'
'What else?' he murmured, pale with conflicting emotions.
'What else! I think decency demanded that this day, at least, should be
sacred to his memory. Oh, what brutes men are!' And she burst into
tears.
His patient breast revolted at last. 'You said _he_ was the brute!' he
retorted, outraged.
'Is that your chivalry to the dead? Oh, my poor Harold, my poor Harold!'
For once her tears could not extinguish the flame of his anger. 'But you
told me he beat you,' he cried.
'And if he did, I dare say I deserved it. Oh, my darling, my darling!'
She laid her face on the stone and sobbed.
John Lefolle stood by in silent torture. As he helplessly watched her
white throat swell and fall with the sobs, he was suddenly struck by the
absence of the black velvet band--the truer mourning she had worn in the
lifetime of the so lamented. A faint scar, only perceptible to his
conscious eye, added to his painful bewilderment.
At last she rose and walked unsteadily forward. He followed her in mute
misery. In a moment or two they found themselves on the outskirts of the
deserted heath. How beautiful stretched the gorsy rolling country! The
sun was setting in great burning furrows of gold and green--a panorama
to take one's breath away. The beauty and peace of Nature passed into
the poet's soul.
'Forgive me, dearest,' he begged, taking her hand.
She drew it away sharply. 'I cannot forgive you. You have shown yourself
in your true colours.'
Her unreasonableness angered him again. 'What do you mean? I only came
in accordance with our long-standing arrangement. You have put me off
long enough.'
'It is fortunate I did put you off long enough to discover what you
are.'
He gasped. He thought of all the weary months of waiting, all the long
comedy of telegrams and express letters, the far-off flirtations of the
cosy corner, the baffled elopement to Paris. 'Then you won't marry me?'
'I cannot marry a man I neither love nor respect.'
'You don't love me!' Her spontaneous kiss in his sober Oxford study
seemed to burn on his angry lips.
'No, I never loved you.'
He took her by the arms and turned her round roughly. 'Look me in the
face and dare to say you have never loved me.'
His memory was buzzing with passionate phrases from her endless letters.
They stung like a swarm of bees. The sunset was like blood-red mist
before his eyes.
'I have never loved you,' she said obstinately.
'You--!' His grasp on her arms tightened. He shook her.
'You are bruising me,' she cried.
His grasp fell from her arms as though they were red-hot. He had become
a woman beater.