A Life's Morning

by George Gissing

  She was sitting in the chair she always occupied, and was dressed with the accustomed perfection. But her face was an index to the sufferings she had endured this past week. As soon as the door had closed, she stood to receive him, but not with extended hand. Her eyes were fixed upon him steadily, and Wilfrid, with difficulty meeting them, experienced a shook of new fear, a kind of fear he could not account for. Outwardly she was quite calm; it was something in her look, an indefinable suggestion of secret anguish, that impressed him so. He did not try to take her hand, but, having laid down his hat, came near to her and spoke as quietly as he could.

  ‘May I speak to you of what passed between us last Monday?’

  ‘How can we avoid speaking of it?’ she replied, in a low voice, her eyes still searching him.

  ‘I ought to have come to see you before this,’ Wilfrid continued, taking the seat to which she pointed, whilst she also sat down. ‘I could not.’

  ‘I have been expecting you,’ Beatrice said, in an emotionless way.

  The nervous tension with which he had come into her presence had yielded to a fit of trembling. Coldness ran along his veins; his tongue refused its office; his eyes sank before her gaze.

  ‘I felt sure you would come to-day,’ Beatrice continued, with the same absence of pronounced feeling. ‘If not, I must have gone to your house. What do you wish to say to me?’

  ‘That which I find it very difficult to say. I feel that after what happened on Monday we cannot be quite the same to each other. I fear I said some things that were not wholly true.’

  Beatrice seemed to be holding her breath. Her face was marble. She sat unmoving.

  ‘You mean,’ she said at length, ‘that those letters represented more than you were willing to confess?’

  It was calmly asked. Evidently Wilfrid had no outbreak of resentment to fear. He would have preferred it to this dreadful self-command.

  ‘More,’ he answered, ‘than I felt at the time. I spoke no word of conscious falsehood.’

  ‘Has anything happened to prove to you what you then denied?’

  He looked at her in doubt. Could she in any way have learnt what had come to pass? Whilst talking, he had made up his mind to disclose nothing definitely; he would explain his behaviour merely as arising from doubt of himself. It would make the rest easier for her to bear hereafter.

  ‘I have read those letters again,’ he answered.

  ‘And you have learnt that you never loved me?’

  He held his eyes down, unable to utter words. Beatrice also was silent for a long time. At length she said—

  ‘I think you are keeping something from me?’

  He raised his face.

  ‘Has nothing else happened?’ she asked, with measured tone, a little sad, nothing more.

  The truth was forced from him, and its utterance gave him a relief which was in itself a source of new agitation.

  ‘Yes, something else has happened.’

  ‘I knew it.’

  ‘How did you—?’

  ‘I felt it. You have met her again.’

  Again he was speechless. Beatrice asked—

  ‘Does she live in London?’

  ‘She does.’

  ‘You have met her, and have—have wished that you were free?’

  ‘Beatrice, I have done worse. I have acted as though I were free.’

  She shook, as if a blow had fallen upon her. Then a smile came to her lips.

  ‘You have asked her again to be your wife?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘And she has consented?’

  ‘Because I deceived her at the same time that I behaved dishonourably to you.’

  She fixed upon him eyes which had a strange inward look, eyes veiled with reverie, vaguely troubled, unimpassioned. It was as though she calmly readjusted in her own mind the relations between him and herself. The misery of Wilfrid’s situation was mitigated in a degree by mere wonder at her mode of receiving his admissions. This interview was no logical sequence upon the scene of a week ago; and the issue then had been, one would have thought, less provocative of demonstration than to-day’s.

  Directness once more armed her gaze, and again he was powerless to meet it. Still no resentment, no condemnation. She asked—

  ‘It is your intention to marry soon?’

  He could not reply.

  ‘Will you let me see you once more before your marriage?’ she continued. ‘That is, if I find I wish it. I am not sure. I may or may not.’

  It was rather a debate with herself than an address to him.

  ‘May I leave you now, Beatrice?’ he said, suddenly. ‘Every drop of blood in me is shame-heated. In telling you this, I have done something which I thought would be beyond my force.’

  ‘Yes,’ she murmured, ‘it will be better if we part now.’

  She rose and watched him as he stepped to the table and took his hat. There was a moment’s hesitation on either side, but Beatrice did not offer her hand. She stood superbly, as a queen might dismiss one from whom her thoughts were already wandering. He bowed, with inward self-mockery, and left her.

  Some hours later, when already the summer evening had cloaked itself, Wilfrid found himself wandering by the river, not far from Hammersmith. The influence of a great water flowing from darkness into darkness was strong upon him; he was seeking for a hope in the transitoriness of all things earthly. Would not the hour come when this present anguish, this blood-poisoning shame, would have passed far away and have left no mark? Was it not thinking too grandiosely to attribute to the actions of such a one as himself a tragic gravity? Was there not supernal laughter at the sight of him, Wilfrid Athel, an English gentleman, a member of the Lower House of the British Parliament, posing as the arbiter of destinies? What did it all come to? An imbroglio on the threshold of matrimony; a temporary doubt which of two women was to enjoy the honour of styling herself Mrs. Athel. The day’s long shame led to this completeness of self-contempt. As if Beatrice would greatly care! Why, in his very behaviour he had offered the cure for her heartburn; and her calmness showed how effective the remedy would be. The very wife whom he held securely had only been won by keeping silence; tell her the story of the last few days, and behold him altogether wifeless. He laughed scornfully. To this had he come from those dreams which guided him when he was a youth. A commonplace man, why should he not have commonplace experiences?

  He had walked in this direction with the thought of passing beneath Emily’s window before he returned home, yet, now that he was not more than half an hour’s walk from her, he felt weary and looked aside for a street which should lead him to the region of vehicles. As he did so, he noticed a woman’s form leaning over the riverside parapet at a short distance. A thought drew him nearer to her. Yes, it was Emily herself.

  ‘You were coming to see me?’ she asked.

  Love in a woman’s voice—what cynicism so perdurable that it will bear against that assailant? In the dusk, he put her gloved hand against his lips, and the touch made him once more noble.

  ‘I had meant to, beautiful, but it seemed too late, and I was just on the point of turning back. You always appear to me when I most need you.’

  ‘You wanted to speak to me, Wilfrid?’

  ‘When do I not? My life seems so thin and poor; only your breath gives it colour. Emily, I shall ask so much of you. I have lost all faith in myself; you must restore it.’

  They stood close to each other, hand in hand, looking down at the dark flow.

  ‘If I had not met you, Wilfrid,’ she said, or whispered, ‘I think my end must have been there—there, below us. I have often come here at night. It is always a lonely place, and at high tide the water is deep.’

  His hand closed upon hers with rescuing force.

  ‘I am carrying a letter,’ Emily continued, ‘that I was going to post before I went in. I will give it you now, and I am glad of the opportunity; it seems safer. I have written what I feel I could never say to you. Read it and de
stroy it, and never speak of what it contains.’

  She gave him the letter, and then he walked with her homewards.

  On the morrow, shortly after breakfast, he was sitting in his study, when a knock came at the door. He bade enter, and it was Beatrice. She came towards him, gave her hand mechanically, and said—

  ‘Can you spare me a few minutes?’

  He placed a chair for her. Her eyes had not closed since they last looked at him; he saw it, though the expression of her features was not weariness.

  ‘There is one thing, Wilfrid, that I think I have a right to ask you. Will you tell me why she left you, years ago?’

  Her tone was that of one continuing a conversation. There might have been no break between yesterday and to-day. We cannot always gather from the voice what struggle has preceded utterance.

  Wilfrid turned away. On the table lay that letter of Emily’s; he had read it many times, and was reading it when the knock disturbed him. With a sudden movement, he took up the sheet of paper and held it to Beatrice.

  ‘It is there—the reason. I myself have only known it a few hours. Read that. I have no right to show it you—and no right to refuse.’

  Beatrice held the letter for a brief space without turning her eyes upon it. Wilfrid walked to a distance, and at length she read. Emily had recounted every circumstance of her father’s death, and told the history of her own feelings, all with complete simplicity, almost coldly. Only an uncertainty in the hand-writing here and there showed the suffering it had cost her to look once more into the very eyes of the past. Yet it was of another than herself that she wrote; she felt that even in her memory of woe.

  They faced each other again. Beatrice’s eyes were distended; their depths lightened.

  ‘I am glad! I am glad you met her before it was too late!’

  Her voice quivered upon a low, rich note. Such an utterance was the outcome of a nature strong to the last limit of self-conquest. Wilfrid heard and regarded her with a kind of fear; her intensity passed to him; he trembled.

  ‘I have nothing to pardon,’ she continued. ‘You were hers long before my love had touched your heart. You have tried to love me; but this has come soon enough to save us both.’

  And again—

  ‘If I did not love you, I should act selfishly; but self is all gone from me. In this moment I could do greater things to help you to happiness. Tell me; have you yet spoken to—to the others?’

  ‘To no one.’

  ‘Then do not. It shall all come from me. No one shall cast upon you a shadow of blame. You have done me no wrong; you were hers, and you wronged her when you tried to love me. I will help you—at least I can be your friend. Listen; I shall see her. It shall be I who have brought you together again—that is how the shall all think of it. I shall see her, and as your friend, as the only one to whom you have yet spoken. Do you understand me, Wilfrid? Do you see that I make the future smooth for her and you? She must never know what we know, And the others—they shall do as I will; they shall not dare to speak one word against you. What right have they, if I am—am glad?’

  He stood in amaze. It was impossible to doubt her sincerity; her face, the music of her voice, the gestures by which her eagerness expressed herself, all were too truthful. What divine nature had lain hidden in this woman! He gazed at her as on a being more than mortal.

  ‘How can I accept this from you?’ he asked hoarsely.

  ‘Accept? How can you refuse? It is my right, it is my will! Would you refuse me this one poor chance of proving that my love was unselfish? I would have killed myself to win a tender look from you at the last moment, and you shall not go away thinking less of me than I deserve. You know already that I am not the idle powerless woman you once thought me; you shall know that I can do yet more. If she is noble in your eyes, can I consent to be less so?’

  Passion the most exalted possessed her. It infected Wilfrid. He felt that the common laws of intercourse between man and woman had here no application; the higher ground to which she summoned him knew no authority of the conventional. To hang his head was to proclaim his own littleness.

  ‘You are not less noble, Beatrice,’ his voice murmured.

  ‘You have said it. So there is no longer a constraint between us. How simple it is to do for love’s sake what those who do not know love think impossible. I will see her, then the last difficulty is removed. That letter has told me where she lives. If I go there to-day, I shall find her?’

  ‘Not till the evening,’ Wilfrid replied under his breath.

  ‘When is your marriage?’

  He looked at her without speaking.

  ‘Very soon? Before the end of the session?’

  ‘The day after tomorrow.’

  She was white to the lips, but kept her eyes on him steadily.

  ‘And you go away at once?’

  ‘I had thought’—he began; then added, ‘Yes, at once; it is better.’

  ‘Yes, better. Your friend stays and makes all ready for your return. Perhaps I shall not see you after to-day, for that time. Then we are to each ether what we used to be. You will bring her to hear me sing? I shall not give it up now.’

  She smiled, moved a little away from him, then turned again and gave her hand for leave-taking.

  ‘Wilfrid!’

  ‘Beatrice?’

  ‘She would not grudge it me. Kiss me—the last time—on my lips!’

  He kissed her. When the light came again to his eyes, Beatrice had gone.

  In the evening Emily sat expectant. Either Wilfrid would come or there would be a letter from him; yes, he would come; for, after reading what she had written, the desire to speak with her must be strong in him. She sat at her window and looked along the dull street.

  She had spent the day as usual—that is to say, in the familiar school routine; but the heart she had brought to her work was far other than that which for long years had laboriously pulsed the flagging moments of her life. Her pupils were no longer featureless beings, the sole end of whose existence was to give trouble; girl-children and budding womanhood had circled about her; the lips which recited lessons made unconscious music; the eyes, dark or sunny, laughed with secret foresight of love to come. Kindly affection to one and all grew warm within her; what had been only languid preferences developed in an hour to little less than attachments, and dislikes softened to pity. The girls who gave promise of beauty and tenderness she looked upon with the eyes of a sister; their lot it would be to know the ecstasy of whispered vows, to give and to receive that happiness which is not to be named lest the gods become envious. Voices singing together in the class practice which had ever been a weariness, stirred her to a passion of delight; it was the choral symphony of love’s handmaidens. Did they see a change in her? Emily fancied that the elder girls looked at each other and smiled and exchanged words in an undertone—about her.

  It was well to have told Wilfrid all her secrets, yet in the impatience of waiting she had tremors of misgiving; would he, perchance, think as she so long had thought, that to speak to anyone, however near, of that bygone woe and shame was a sin against the pieties of nature, least of all excusable when committed at the bidding of her own desires? He would never breathe to her a word which could reveal such a thought, but Wilfrid, with his susceptibility to the beautiful in character, his nature so intensely in sympathy with her own, might more or less consciously judge her to have fallen from fidelity to the high ideal. Could he have learnt the story of her life, she still persevering on her widowed way, would he not have deemed her nobler? Aid against this subtlety of conscience rose in the form of self-reproof administered by that joyous voice of nature which no longer timidly begged a hearing, but came as a mandate from an unveiled sovereign. With what right, pray, did she desire to show in Wilfrid’s eyes as other than she was? That part in life alone becomes us which is the very expression of ourselves. What merit can there be in playing the votary of an ascetic conviction when the heart is bursting with its stifle
d cry for light and warmth, for human joy, for the golden fruit of the tree of life? She had been sincere in her renunciation; the way of worthiness was to cherish a sincerity as complete now that her soul flamed to the bliss which fate once more offered her.

  The hours passed slowly; how long the night would be if Wilfrid neither wrote to her nor came. But he had written; at eight o’clock the glad signal of the postman drew her to the door of her room where she stood trembling whilst someone went to the letter-box, and—oh, joy! ascended the stairs. It was her letter; because her hands were too unsteady to hold it for reading, she knelt by a chair, like a child with a new picture-book, and spread the sheet open. And, having read it twice, she let her face fall upon her palms, to repeat to herself the words which danced fire-like b re her darkened eyes. He wrote rather sadly, but she would not have had it otherwise, for the sadness was of love’s innermost heart, which is the shrine of mortality.

  As Emily knelt thus by the chair there came another knock at the house-door, the knock of a visitor. She did not hear it, nor yet the tap at her own door which followed. She was startled to consciousness by her landlady’s voice.

  ‘There’s a lady wishes to see you, Miss Hood.’

  ‘A lady?’ Emily repeated in surprise. Then it occurred to her that it must be Mrs. Baxendale, who knew her address and was likely to be in London at this time of the year. ‘Does she give any name?’

  No name. Emily requested that the visitor should be introduced.

  Not Mrs. Baxendale, but a face at first barely remembered, then growing with suggestiveness upon Emily’s gaze until all was known save the name attached to it. A face which at present seemed to bear the pale signs of suffering, though it smiled; a beautiful visage of high meanings, impressive beneath its crown of dark hair. It smiled and still smiled; the eyes looked searchingly.

  ‘You do not remember me, Miss Hood?’

  ‘Indeed, I remember you—your face, your voice. But your name—? You are Mrs. Baxendale’s niece.’

  ‘Yes; Miss Redwing.’

  ‘O, how could I forget!’

  Emily became silent. The eyes that searched her so were surely kind, but it was the time of fears. Impossible that so strange a visit should be unconnected with her fate. And the voice thrilled upon her strung nerves ominously; the lips she watched were so eloquent of repressed feeling. Why should this lady come to her? Their acquaintance had been so very slight.