My words seemed merely to be like drops of water dripping upon a sponge. “Wake!” I tugged at his hand. “Look!” Kneeling down sidelong, I stooped my cheek up at him from a cool, green mat of grass, amid which a glowworm burned: “Is this a—a Stranger’s face?”
He came no nearer; surveyed me with a long, quiet smile of infinitely sorrowful indulgence. “A Stranger’s? How else could it be, if I love you?”
Intoxicated in that earthy fragrance, washed about with the colours of the motionless flowers, it seemed I was merely talking to someone who could assure me that I was still in life, still myself. A strand of my hair had fallen loose, and smiling, its gold pin between my lips, I looped it back. “Oh, but you see—haven’t I told you?—I can’t love you. Perhaps; I don’t know. … What shall I do? What shall I say? Now suppose,” I went on, “I like myself that much,” and I held my thumb and finger just ajar, “then I like you, think of you, hope for you, why, that!”—and I swept my hand clean across the empty zenith. “Now do you understand?”
“Oh, my dear, my dear,” he said, and smiled into my eyes.
I laughed out in triumph at the success of my device. And he laughed too, as if in a conspiracy with me—and with Misery, I could see, sitting like an old hag at the door from which the sound came. And out of the distance the nightjar set again to its churring.
“Then I have made you a little—a little less unhappy?” I asked him, and hid my face in my hands in a desolate peace and solitude.
He knelt beside me, held out his hand as if to touch me, withdrew it again. All presence of him distanced and vanished away in that small darkness. I prayed not to think any more, not to be exiled again into—how can I explain my meaning except by saying—Myself? Would some further world have withdrawn its veils and have let me in then and forever if that lightless quiet could have continued a little longer? Is it the experience of every human being seemingly to trespass at times so close upon the confines of existence as that?
It was his own harsh voice that broke the spell.
“Wake, wake!” it called in my ear. “The woman is looking for you. We must go.”
My hands slipped from my face. A slow, sobbing breath drew itself into my body. And there beneath evening’s vacancy of twilight showed the transfigured scene of the garden, and, near me, the anxious, suffering face of this stranger, faintly greened by the light of the worm.
“Wake!” he bade me, rapping softly with his bony finger on my hand. I stared at him out of a dream.
XXXVII
Time and circumstance have strangely divided me from the Miss M. of those days. I look back on her, not with shame, but with a shrug of my shoulders, a sort of incredulous tolerance—almost as if she too were a stranger. Perhaps a few years hence I shall be looking back with an equal detachment on the Miss M. seated here at this moment with her books and her pen in the solitude of her thoughts, vainly endeavouring to fret out and spin together mere memories that nobody will ever have the patience to read. Shall I then be able to tell myself what I want now, give words to the vague desires that still haunt me? Shall I still be waiting on for some unconceived eventuality?
There is, too, another small riddle of a different kind, which I cannot answer. In memory and imagination, as I steadily gaze out of this familiar room recalling the past, I am that very self in that distant garden of Wanderslore. But even as I look, I am not only within myself there, but also outside of myself. I seem, I mean, actually to be contemplating, as if with my own eyes, those two queer, silent figures returning through the drowsying, moth-haunted flowers and grasses to the black, vigilant woman awaiting them beside the garden house. “Alas, you poor, blind thing,” I seem, like a ghost, to warn the one small creature, “have a care; seize your happiness; it is vanishing!”
All that I write, then, is an attempt only to tell, not to explain. I realize that sometimes I was pretending things, yet did not know that I was pretending; that often I acted with no more conscience or consciousness, maybe, than has a carrion crow that picks out the eyes of a lamb, or a flower that draws in its petals at noon. Yet I know—know absolutely, that I was, and am, responsible not only for myself, but for everything. For my whole world. And I cannot explain this either. At times, as if to free myself, I had to stare at what appalled me. I am sure, for instance, that Mrs. Monnerie never dreamed that her mention of Mr. Crimble sent me off in fancy at the first opportunity to that woeful outhouse in his mother’s garden to look in on him there—again. But I did so look at him, and was a little more at peace with him after that. Why, then, cannot I be at peace with one who loved me?
Maybe if I could have foreseen how I was to come to Wanderslore again, I should have been a less selfish, showy, and capricious companion to him that June evening. But I
