Man and Maid

The disappointment was bitter.

“But I’ll send a letter for you,” he tried to soften it with.

Sybil’s self-control almost gave way. A tear glistened on her veil.

“I do want to see him most awfully,” she said, “and I know he wants to see me. It was I who rode the goat in the book, you know – ”

She did not realise how much she was admitting, but the literary agent did.

“Look here,” he said smartly, “I’ll wire to him at once; and if he says I may, I’ll give you the address. Can you call in an hour?”

Sybil wandered on the Embankment for a conscientious hour, and then went back.

The literary agent smiled victory.

“The answer is ‘Yes,’” he said, and handed her a slip of paper —

“Three Chimneys,

Near Paddock Wood,

Kent.”

“Have you a time-table?” asked she.

The dusty, hired fly lumbered and jolted along the white roads, and in it, as in the train, Sybil read the novel, the book every one was talking about – the great book – and her heart was full to overflowing of joy and pride and other things.

The carriage shook itself fiercely and stopped, and she looked up from the last page of the book with eyes that swam a little, to find herself at the broken wooden gate of a low, white house, shabbily blindless, and a long way off its last painting and whitewashing.

She paid for the carriage and dismissed it. She would walk back to the station with him. She passed in at the rickety gate and up the flagged path, and a bell in answer to her touch jangled loudly, as bells do in empty houses.

Her dress was greeny, with lace about it of the same colour as very nice biscuits, and her hat seemed to be made entirely of yellow roses. She was not unconscious of these facts.

Steps sounded within, and they, like the bell, seemed to sound in an empty house. The door opened, and there was Rupert. Sybil’s lips were half-parted in a smile that should match the glow of gladness that must shine on his face when he saw her – Her – the unattainable, the unapproachable, at his very door. But her smile died away, for his face was grave. Only in his eyes something that was bright and fierce and like a flame leapt up and shone a moment.

“You!” he said.

And Sybil answered as most people do to such questions: “Yes, me.” There was a pause: her eyes wandered from his to the blank face of the house, the tangle of the untidy garden. “Mayn’t I come in?” she asked.

“Yes; oh yes, come in!”

She crossed the threshold – the doorstep was dank with green mould – and followed him into a room. It was a large room, and perfectly bare: no carpet, no curtains, no pictures. Loose bricks were arranged as a fender, and dead embers strewed the hearth. There was a table; there was a chair; there were scattered papers, pens, and ink. From the window one saw the neglected garden, and beyond it the round shoulders of the hills.

He drew forward the one chair, and she sat down. He stood with his back to the fireless grate.

“You are very, very pretty,” he said suddenly. And the explanation of his disappearance suddenly struck her like a blow between the eyes. But she was not afraid. When all a woman’s thoughts, day and night for a year, have been given to one man, she is not afraid of him; no, not even if he be what Sybil for one moment feared that this man was. He read the fear in her eyes.

“No, I’m not mad,” he said. “Sybil, I’m very glad you came. Come to think of it, I’m very glad to see you. It is better than writing. I was just going to write out everything, as well as I could. I expect I should have sent it to you. You know I used to care for you more than I did for any one.”

Sybil’s hands gripped the arms of the windsor chair. Was he really – was it through her that he was —

“Come out,” she said. “I hate this place; it stifles me. And you’ve lived here – worked here!”

“I’ve lived here for eleven months and three days,” he said. “Yes, come out.”

So they went out through the burning July sun, and Sybil found a sheltered spot between a larch and a laburnum.

“Now,” she said, throwing off her hat and curling her green, soft draperies among the long grass. “Come and sit down and tell me – ”

He threw himself on the grass.

“Sure it won’t bore you?” he asked.

She took his hand and held it. He let her take it; but his hand did not hold hers.

“I seem to remember,” he said, “the last time I saw you – you were going away, or something. You told me I ought to do something great; and I told you – or, anyway, I thought to myself – that there was plenty of time for that. I’d always had a sort of feeling that I could do something great whenever I chose to try. Well – yes, you did go away, of course; I remember perfectly – and I missed you extremely. And some one told me I looked ill; and I went to my doctor, and he sent me to a big swell, and he said I’d only got about a year to live. So then I began to think.”

Her fingers tightened on the unresponsive hand.

“And I thought: Here I’ve been thirty years in this world. I’ve the experience of twenty-eight and a half – I suppose the first little bit doesn’t count. If I’d had time, I meant to write another book, just to show exactly what a man feels when he knows he’s only got a year to live, and nothing done – nothing done.”

“I won’t believe it,” she said. “You don’t look ill; you’re as lean as a greyhound, but – ”

“It may come any day now,” he went on quietly; “but I’ve done something. The book – it is great. They all say so; and I know it, too. But at first! Just think of gasping out your breath, and feeling that all the things you had seen and known and felt were wasted – lost – going out with you, and that you were going out like the flame of a candle, taking everything you might have done with you.”

“The book is great,” she said; “you have done something.”

“Yes. But for those two days I stayed in my rooms in St James’s Street, and I thought, and thought, and thought, and there was no one to care where I went or what I did, except a girl who was fond of me when she was little, and she had gone away and wasn’t fond of me any more. Oh, Sybil – I feel like a lunatic – I mean you, of course; but you never cared. And I went to a house agent’s and got the house unfurnished, and I bought the furniture – there’s nothing much except what you’ve seen, and a bed and a bath, and some pots and kettles; and I’ve lived alone in that house, and I’ve written that book, with Death sitting beside me, jogging my elbow every time I stopped writing, and saying, ‘Hurry up; I’m waiting here for you, and I shall have to take you away, and you’ll have done nothing, nothing, nothing.’”

“But you’ve done the book,” said Sybil again. The larch and the garden beyond were misty to her eyes. She set her teeth. He must be comforted. Her own agony – that could be dealt with later.

“I’ve ridden myself with the curb,” he said. “I thought it all out – proper food, proper sleep, proper exercise. I wouldn’t play the fool with the last chance; and I pulled it off. I wrote the book in four months; and every night, when I went to sleep, I wondered whether I should ever wake to go on with the book. But I did wake, and then I used to leap up and thank God, and set to work; and I’ve done it. The book will live – every one says it will. I shan’t have lived for nothing.”

“Rupert,” she said, “dear Rupert!”

“Thank you,” he said forlornly; “you’re very kind.” And he drew his limp hand from hers, and leaned his elbows on the grass and his chin on his hands.

“Oh, Rupert, why didn’t you write and tell me?”

“What was the use of making you sad? You were always sorry for maimed things – even the worms the gardener cut in two with his spade.”

She was struggling with a growing desire to scream and shriek, and to burst out crying and tear the grass with her hands. He no longer loved her – that was the lesser evil. She could have borne that – have borne anything. But he was going to die! The intensity of her belief that he was going to die caught her by the throat. She defended herself instinctively.

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Don’t believe what?”

“That you’re going to die.”