Wilfrid Cumbermede

Her face flushed, and grew pale again instantly.

‘You must not talk so,’ she said. ‘Remember.’

‘I can never forget. I do not know why you say remember.’

‘On second thoughts, I must not have the verses. I beg your pardon.’

‘Mary, you bewilder me. I have no right to ask you to explain, except that you speak as if I must understand. What have they been telling you about me?’

‘Nothing—at least nothing that—’

She paused.

‘I try to live innocently, and were it only for your sake, shall never stop searching for the thread of life in its ravelled skein.’

‘Do not say for my sake, Mr Cumbermede. That means nothing. Say for your own sake, if not for God’s.’

‘If you are going to turn away from me, I don’t mind how soon I follow Charley.’

All this was said in a half-whisper, I bending towards her where she sat, a little sheltered by one of a pair of folding doors. My heart was like to break—or rather it seemed to have vanished out of me altogether, lost in a gulf of emptiness. Was this all? Was this the end of my dreaming? To be thus pushed aside by the angel of my resurrection?

‘Hush! hush!’ she said kindly. ‘You must have many friends. But—’

‘But you will be my friend no more? Is that it, Mary? Oh, if you knew all! And you are never, never to know it!’

Her still face was once more streaming with tears. I choked mine back, terrified at the thought of being observed; and without even offering my hand, left her and made my way through the crowd to the stair. On the landing I met Geoffrey Brotherton. We stared each other in the face and passed.

I did not sleep much that night, and when I did sleep, woke from one wretched dream after another, now crying aloud, and now weeping. What could I have done? or rather, what could any one have told her I had done to make her behave thus to me? She did not look angry—or even displeased—only sorrowful, very sorrowful; and she seemed to take it for granted I knew what it meant. When at length I finally woke after an hour of less troubled sleep, I found some difficulty in convincing myself that the real occurrences of the night before had not been one of the many troubled dreams that had scared my repose. Even after the dreams had all vanished, and the facts remained, they still appeared more like a dim dream of the dead—the vision of Mary was so wan and hopeless, memory alone looking out from her worn countenance. There had been no warmth in her greeting, no resentment in her aspect; we met as if we had parted but an hour before, only that an open grave was between us, across which we talked in the voice of dreamers. She had sought to raise no barrier between us, just because we could not meet, save as one of the dead and one of the living. What could it mean? But with the growing day awoke a little courage. I would at least try to find out what it meant. Surely all my dreams were not to vanish like the mist of the morning! To lose my dreams would be far worse than to lose the so-called realities of life. What were these to me? What value lay in such reality? Even God was as yet so dim and far off as to seem rather in the region of dreams—of those true dreams, I hoped, that shadowed forth the real—than in the actual visible present. ‘Still,’ I said to myself, ‘she had not cast me off; she did not refuse to know me; she did ask for my song, and I will send it.’

I wrote it out, adding a stanza to the verses:—

I bowed my head before her,
And stood trembling in the light;
She dropped the heavy curtain,
And the house was full of night.

I then sought my friend’s chambers.

‘I was not aware you knew the Osbornes,’ I said. ‘I wonder you never told me, seeing Charley and you were such friends.’

‘I never saw one of them till last night. My sister and she knew each other some time ago, and have met again of late. What a lovely creature she is! But what became of you last night? You must have left before any one else.’

‘I didn’t feel well.’

‘You don’t look the thing.’

‘I confess meeting Miss Osborne rather upset me.’

‘It had the same effect on her. She was quite ill, my sister said, this morning. No wonder! Poor Charley! I always had a painful feeling that he would come to grief somehow.’

‘Let’s hope he’s come to something else by this time, Marston,’ I said.

‘Amen,’ he returned.

‘Is her father or mother with her?’

‘No. They are to fetch her away—next week, I think it is.’ I had now no fear of my communication falling into other hands, and therefore sent the song by post, with a note, in which I begged her to let me know if I had done anything to offend her. Next morning I received the following reply:

‘No, Wilfrid—for Charley’s sake, I must call you by your name—you have done nothing to offend me. Thank you for the song. I did not want you to send it, but I will keep it. You must not write to me again. Do not forget what we used to write about. God’s ways are not ours. Your friend, Mary Osborne.’

I rose and went out, not knowing whither. Half-stunned, I roamed the streets. I ate nothing that day, and when towards night I found myself near my chambers, I walked in as I had come out, having no intent, no future. I felt very sick, and threw myself on my bed. There I passed the night, half in sleep, half in helpless prostration. When I look back, it seems as if some spiritual narcotic must have been given me, else how should the terrible time have passed and left me alive? When I came to myself, I found I was ill, and I longed to hide my head in the nest of my childhood. I had always looked on the Moat as my refuge at the last; now it seemed the only desirable thing—a lonely nook, in which to lie down and end the dream there begun—either, as it now seemed, in an eternal sleep, or the inburst of a dreary light. After the last refuge it could afford me it must pass from my hold; but I was yet able to determine whither. I rose and went to Marston.

‘Marston,’ I said, ‘I want to make my will.’

‘All right!’ he returned; ‘but you look as if you meant to register it as well. You’ve got a feverish cold; I see it in your eyes. Come along. I’ll go home with you, and fetch a friend of mine, who will give you something to do you good.’

‘I can’t rest till I have made my will,’ I persisted.

‘Well, there’s no harm in that,’ he rejoined. ‘It won’t take long, I dare say.’

‘It needn’t anyhow. I only want to leave the small real property I have to Miss Osborne, and the still smaller-personal property to yourself.’

He laughed.

‘All right, old boy! I haven’t the slightest objection to your willing your traps to me, but every objection in the world to your leaving them. To be sure, every man, with anything to leave, ought to make his will betimes;—so fire away.’

In a little while the draught was finished.

‘I shall have it ready for your signature by to-morrow,’ he said.

I insisted it should be done at once. I was going home, I said. He yielded. The will was engrossed, signed, and witnessed that same morning; and in the afternoon I set out, the first part of the journey by rail, for the Moat.

CHAPTER LVII. ANOTHER DREAM

The excitement of having something to do had helped me over the morning, and the pleasure of thinking of what I had done helped me through half the journey; but before I reached home I was utterly exhausted. Then I had to drive round by the farm, and knock up Mrs Herbert and Styles.

I could not bear the thought of my own room, and ordered a fire in my grandmother’s, where they soon got me into bed. All I remember of that night is the following dream.

I found myself at the entrance of the ice-cave. A burning sun beat on my head, and at my feet flowed the brook which gathered its life from the decay of the ice. I stooped to drink; but, cool to the eye and hand and lips, it yet burned me within like fire. I would seek shelter from the sun inside the cave. I entered, and knew that the cold was all around me; I even felt it; but somehow it did not enter into me. My brain, my very bones, burned with fire. I went in and in. The blue atmosphere closed around me, and the colour entered into my soul till it seemed dyed with the potent blue. My very being swam and floated in a blue atmosphere of its own. My intention—I can recall it perfectly—was but to walk to the end, a few yards, then turn and again brave the sun; for I had a dim feeling of forsaking my work, of playing truant, or of being cowardly in thus avoiding the heat. Something else too was wrong, but I could not clearly tell what. As I went on, I began to wonder that I had not come to the end. The gray walls yet rose about me, and ever the film of dissolution flowed along their glassy faces to the runnel below; still before me opened the depth of blue atmosphere, deepening as I went. After many windings, the path began to branch, and soon I was lost in a labyrinth of passages, of which I knew not why I should choose one rather than another. It was useless now to think of returning. Arbitrarily I chose the narrowest way, and still went on.

A discoloration of the ice attracted my attention, and as I looked it seemed to retreat into the solid mass. There was something not ice within it, which grew more and more distinct as I gazed, until at last I plainly distinguished the form of my grandmother lying as then when my aunt made me touch her face. A few yards further on lay the body of my uncle, as I saw him in his coffin. His face was dead white in the midst of the cold clear ice, his eyes closed, and his arms straight by his side. He lay like an alabaster king upon his tomb. It was he, I thought, but he would never speak to me more—never look at me–never more awake. There lay all that was left of him—the cold frozen memory of what he had been, and would never be again. I did not weep. I only knew somehow in my dream that life was all a wandering in a frozen cave, where the faces of the living were dark with the coming corruption, and the memories of the dead, cold and clear and hopeless evermore, alone were lovely.

I walked further; for the ice might possess yet more of the past—all that was left me of life. And again I stood and gazed, for, deep within, I saw the form of Charley—at rest now, his face bloodless, but not so death-like as my uncle’s. His hands were laid palm to palm over his bosom, and pointed upwards, as if praying for comfort where comfort was none: here at least were no flickerings of the rainbow fancies of faith and hope and charity! I gazed in comfortless content for a time on the repose of my weary friend, and then went on, inly moved to see what further the ice of the godless region might hold. Nor had I wandered far when I saw the form of Mary, lying like the rest, only that her hands were crossed on her bosom. I stood, wondering to find myself so little moved. But when the ice drew nigh me, and would have closed around me, my heart leaped for joy; and when the heat of my lingering life repelled it, my heart sunk within me, and I said to myself: ‘Death will not have me. I may not join her even in the land of cold forgetfulness: I may not even be nothing with her.’ The tears began to flow down my face, like the thin veil of water that kept ever flowing down the face of the ice; and as I wept, the water before me flowed faster and faster, till it rippled in a sheet down the icy wall. Faster and yet faster it flowed, falling, with the sound as of many showers, into the runnel below, which rushed splashing and gurgling away from the foot of the vanishing wall. Faster and faster it flowed, until the solid mass fell in a foaming cataract, and swept in a torrent across the cave. I followed the retreating wall through the seething water at its foot. Thinner and thinner grew the dividing mass; nearer and nearer came the form of my Mary. ‘I shall yet clasp her,’ I cried; ‘her dead form will kill me, and I too shall be inclosed in the friendly ice. I shall not be with her, alas! but neither shall I be without her, for I shall depart into the lovely nothingness.’ Thinner and thinner grew the dividing wall. The skirt of her shroud hung like a wet weed in the falling torrent. I kneeled in the river, and crept nearer with outstretched arms: when the vanishing ice set the dead form free, it should rest in those arms—the last gift of the life-dream—for then, surely, I must die. ‘Let me pass in the agony of a lonely embrace!’ I cried. As I spoke she moved. I started to my feet, stung into life by the agony of a new hope. Slowly the ice released her, and gently she rose to her feet. The torrents of water ceased—they had flowed but to set her free. Her eyes were still closed, but she made one blind step towards me, and laid her left hand on my head, her right hand on my heart. Instantly, body and soul, I was cool as a Summer eve after a thunder-shower. For a moment, precious as an aeon, she held her hands upon me—then slowly opened her eyes. Out of them flashed the living soul of my Athanasia. She closed the lids again slowly over the lovely splendour; the water in which we stood rose around us; and on its last billow she floated away through the winding passage of the cave. I sought to follow her, but could not. I cried aloud and awoke.

But the burning heat had left me; I felt that I had passed a crisis, and had begun to recover—a conviction which would have been altogether unwelcome, but for the poor shadow of a reviving hope which accompanied it. Such a dream, come whence it might, could not but bring comfort with it. The hope grew, and was my sole medicine.

Before the evening I felt better, and, though still very feeble, managed to write to Marston, letting him know I was safe, and requesting him to forward any letters that might arrive.