Light, Descending

by Octavia Randolph

  “With or without your parent’s consent?”

  Rose wished he had not said this, and she found herself shaking her head. “With all my heart I hope it is with.”

  “And, may I speak to them now about us? Have I leave?”

  Now the warm hand was withdrawn.

  “My dear St. Crumpet, they won’t I fear be pleased. Mama I think is angry now and will only be angrier. She felt––I don’t know––surprised to find you liked me so well...She thought from all your letters and visits, and all the nice talks you two had had, that you were, well, her friend...And Papa––Papa I think will be very cross with you; after my birthday dinner he had a talk with me, naming no names, but telling me he should never like to see a daughter of his wed to an––old man like him. I tried to make him laugh by telling him he wasn’t old––but I knew what he meant to warn me about.”

  The path was clear before him, as clear as if she held a lantern in her hand and she his only goal.

  “Then I shall go to them and tell them exactly what I tell you now: you have my utter obedience to your slightest wish, forever; that I will never in these three years of waiting stand between you and any other suitor you might entertain; and that my love for you is absolute, final, and has been tested by years. And that I shall die loving you.”

  When she left he went silently to his room. He opened his diary and wrote 1097–counting down the number of days to her 21st birthday when he might know her answer. Then he realised he did not have the star-flower she had offered him. He returned to the garden and searched until dark in vain to recover it.

  Mrs. LaTouche was so very much occupied that it was some days before she could see him. He wished to speak to her first, and privately, banking on the past sympathy between them. He was surprised then when he arrived in Mayfair for their interview not to be ushered up to her small fern-and-orchid-filled conservatory where they had enjoyed prior tête-á-têtes. Instead he was shown to Mr. LaTouche’s library on the ground floor.

  She was not there to greet him. The room was empty, and the smallest imaginable fire burned in the grate; it looked like a single coal. He stood in the centre of the room, casting his eyes from the oxblood leather-topped desk with its impossible ink stand to the bronze ceiling lamp suspended by swags of dark coppery chain. Matched sets of leather bound, gilt-stamped octavo and quarto volumes surrounded him, books he knew had been purchased for this house when it was built, and suspected had never been touched since save by the maid’s ostrich feather-duster.

  Maria LaTouche entered, in a steel-grey dress and jet jewellery. Her familiar scent of Parma violets was missing, and Ruskin recognized––as if his anxiety had heightened his olfactory nerve––that it was the first time he had been in her presence without that gentle fragrance surrounding her.

  “Mr. Ruskin, forgive my delay. Emily’s wedding, Rose’s presentation plans––” She offered her hand readily enough, but the smile faded at once. “Please sit down,” she said, although she did not. He remained standing as she began.

  “I know why you have come to see me––and no, I am not pleased about your startling proposal.”

  He began to protest having made any mystery of his devotion, but she went on.

  “I don’t think you have any idea of Rose’s real condition. Despite her apparent high spirits here in London she is neither physically nor mentally fit to entertain the idea of marriage to anyone.”

  She folded her hands and sat down, and he took a chair opposite her.

  “Mrs. LaTouche, Rose to me is the most precious member of Creation, but I respectfully––most respectfully––contest your idea that she is in any way unfit––”

  “I don’t think you understand me, Mr. Ruskin, and so I forgive you for supposing a mother’s judgement inferior to your own. Rose is young for her age and still recovering from her illness––which might re-occur at any time should she be over-excited.”

  She let this last term hang in the air, almost as an impropriety.

  “You are, moreover a man of shipwrecked faith, and have already made Rose suffer particularly, and acutely, for you.”

  “If she has suffered it was from her own––”

  But Mrs. LaTouche was on her feet.

  “And there is the age discrepancy. Of course some girls marry much older men, but Mr. LaTouche and I do not favour such unions.”

  She hesitated. “And in this case––in this case, are you not in effect forfeiting the role of a beloved uncle in an attempt to become a suitor?”

  The indecency of those words, of the thought behind them, queered him from any attempt of declaring his true and pure love.

  “I have told Rose she is utterly free to accept other suitors,” he said, “but I will be guided by her actions alone.”

  “Rose is still a fragile child who must be guarded and guided by her parents’ love,” returned Mrs. LaTouche.

  The interview was at its close. Her shoulders seemed to soften at last.

  “We have been friends,” she ended, “and allies too; but I cannot be allied against Mr. LaTouche.”

  Before the family left for Harristown in April he had had a scant handful of occasions for seeing Rose, but never for one moment alone. There were few points of intersection between their respective social circles. He could not introduce her or any of the LaTouches to the coterie of his artist friends, despite the charm, intelligence, and conviviality often found there. Almost as an act of benediction he brought Rose to meet the irascible Carlyle, but could not countenance inflicting a pious and wealthy banker like John LaTouche upon the fiercely anti-materialist sage. He bought tickets for Mendelssohn’s Elijah, knowing that Rose would enjoy it, but as the lights dimmed and the chorus started he and his cousin Joan sat in their box with three empty chairs. In the interval a boy brought a message saying Rose was sick with head-ache and begged their pardon for herself and sister and mother. He recalled nothing of the triumphal second act.

  I want leave to love, he thought, sitting in the darkened theatre; and the sense that the fair creature whom I do love is made happy by being loved. I do not even care that Rosie should love me, just that she be happy in being loved... He was struck by the imbalance of condition this implied, and by his own helplessness in awaiting her twenty-first birthday. Ahead of him lay nearly 1100 days of uncertainty before he might learn if Rose was to be his. He found himself remembering golden-haired St. Ursula, martyred with her attendant 1100 virgins. Ursula began appearing in his dreams, not once but repeatedly, from which he awakened with eyes wet with tears. As the dreams deepened and developed he heard the angel who visited her insist that the pagan prince who sought her hand not only convert, but wait three years for her. It seemed a sentence for them all. Ursula would not live to wed her pagan prince, but die a virgin.

  The day before the LaTouches departed for Ireland, Maria LaTouche sent him a note with express instructions forbidding––forbidding him––to write to Rose. The child had been rash enough to make a three year compact until she gave her answer, and he must be content with that. Lacerta had found her venom after all.

  How much more puzzling then to find a letter coming for Joan, inviting her to Harristown for a visit of several weeks’ duration. By September she was engaged to Percy LaTouche.

  Rose had promised to find a way to send him a letter for Christmas. She was allowed to write to Joan, and Joan in turn would convey such a missive to him. When the day passed without a note he cursed her cruelty. Why deny him even a sprig of holly, or a few rose leaves, for her message? He spent much of the day wandering heedlessly through the neighbourhood, and when no letter arrived on Boxing Day felt he could understand the worst acts that men could do.

  Percy LaTouche made several trips to visit Joan at Denmark Hill, never carrying a letter from his sister. Through friends he heard occasional word of Rose. One red-letter day she wrote him herself, enclosing some verse from her own hand, and the news of Emily’s bab
y. Responding was torturously difficult. He, so free in words, agonised over his letter, attempting to strike the correct note of nostalgic playfulness and lover’s ardency. Nothing came in return.

  On her birthday in January he marked off as complete a year’s waiting for her answer. Then came the news that Rose was in a nursing home in Ireland, and had even once to be restrained in her bed. He hung between hope and despair on every word that reached him about her condition. Mrs. LaTouche sometimes wrote Joan, and it was through her letters he learnt of Rose’s gradual recovery.

  In late Spring Joan was again at Harristown, happy to be so near Percy. It was only Ruskin’s inviting her to join a hastily arranged trip to Switzerland with his confidante Lady Pauline Trevelyan and her naturalist husband Sir Walter that brought her back. Lady Pauline was unwell with a stomach ailment which had been growing steadily worse, and the high air might be found salutary. And he hoped he might lose himself in undertaking a study of alpine mosses.

  “How did she speak of me?” he asked Joan when she arrived back at Denmark Hill. She had been home for several hours, and Ruskin could contain himself no longer.

  Joan had been uneasily expecting this question. Her anxious cousin seemed to be staring holes right through her, and she didn’t like the look of his colour. “She said nothing of you, Coz,” she finally told him. “When I arrived she let me know her parents had forbidden the mention of your name. She even wrote it in a note to me, so as not to disobey them.”

  Her unaffected Scot’s accent, never neutralized through social aspiration, fell the blunter on Ruskin’s eager ear. He was unable to answer, and unable even to turn from her to conceal his pain. Joan put her hand on his arm in silent consolation.

  Before they set out for Switzerland he sent a bouquet of flowers to Cheyne Row to cheer ailing Jane Carlyle. Instead of a thank you acknowledging receipt the boy carried back a terse note from a physician saying she had died that afternoon after running after a carriage which had slightly injured her pet dog. An added cruelty was that the dog had been a gift to Jane from Lady Pauline. Carlyle was away in Edinburgh receiving honours and beyond the reach of any comfort he might give.

  He could not bring himself to dampen the spirits of his little party. Despite their inquiries he did not reveal the additional grief he was harbouring until they reached Paris and read about the death themselves.

  In Paris Lady Pauline became too ill to leave her bed. After some days they moved her with difficulty to Neuchâtel, where she died with Sir Walter and him at her side. Loss after loss.

  In the alpine heights Ruskin dreamt of a small green snake he found lacing through tall grass. Rose was at his side, and in his dream he had no fear of the creature, and allowed it to entwine about his fingers. He made her feel its scales, and she did so, laughing; then she placed it back in his hands so he would feel them. It was then the snake transformed into a fearful, fat thing, a monstrous thick serpent which sucked onto his hand like a leech, and which he could not shake off. He awoke trembling, trembling with dread and excitement.

  In August Joan returned to Harristown for Percy’s 21st birthday celebration. The careless manner which had charmed her on first acquaintance had taken a more decided course. She was frightened to see him riotous with drink at his birthday dinner, and by mutual consent the engagement was quietly terminated.

  Joan was heart-sick at her forfeit, and Ruskin felt unable to comfort one so tender who had, like him, been harmed by the LaTouches. And he had lost an important conduit for news of Rose. He wrote again to the senior LaTouches, begging that he might he allowed to correspond freely.

  It was not in the best interest of their daughter’s health, came the reply. He re-doubled his pleas to any mutual friend he could conjure to intercede for him. The year passed, and in his diary each dawn he wrote the number of days remaining until he should learn his fate.

  An entire hemisphere of his life was in suspension, and with it his efforts at work, drawing, and sustained thought blasted. How galling for a man whose personal motto was ‘To-day’––who awakened each day before dawn to labour against that coming dark when no man could work. It was his work that had driven him, given him meaning and pleasure, and a girl with a heart of flint had robbed his hours of his essential desideratum.

  Then a letter came.

  Dear St. C––I want you to know I am Yours, and nothing can come between Us.

  It was the complete contents, one line. She had gotten it to a friend who had sent it on to Denmark Hill. To mark the day in his diary he placed beside the number 245, Peace.

  He travelled to Dublin to deliver a lecture, his heart racing as he drew so close to Harristown. His subject––The Mystery of Life and its Arts––would hold appeal for the LaTouches. Might they themselves be amongst the sold-out house? There was much in it meant for their ears: an appreciation of those who fed and clothed the needy; the necessity for the artist to hold before him an ideal ever exceeding his grasp; and in stunning contrast to his earliest writings in Modern Painters, a rejection of certainty. He would speak of the impossibility of plumbing the depths of the ‘mysteries’ of life and art. One of the greatest mysteries, he would tell them, was the corruption of religion, particularly when it wasted the vital powers of earnest young women in fruitless agony over the Bible.

  On the morning of the lecture a letter was brought to him: Dear St. C, I am forbidden by my father and mother to write you. She enclosed two petals from a rose.

  Rose, it turned out, was there in Dublin. She was in a nursing home. Through the simple bribery of a staff member he arranged to meet her on its wooded grounds. A female attendant led her to him as he waited near a leafless copse of trees. The woman nodded at him and left to take her position a few yards off.

  Rose was gaunt. The warm and liquid eyes looked dry and glittery, and the pallor of her cheeks was such that even the East wind did not colour them. She seemed both enfeebled and agitated, and would not permit him to so much as take her hand.

  “I have been shown a letter,” she began. “It was from your wife.”

  His wife. He was too staggered to respond.

  “She that was your wife, I ought to say. Mama wrote her, and she wrote back the awfullest things about your––marriage. She said you are incapable of truly loving a woman, and ought not to spoil another one’s best years as you did hers. And Mama wrote to our lawyer, and he said he guessed Mrs. Millais was right, that if you should wed again and have a child, her marriage now would be invalid, and their children not in law.” Tears were rolling from her eyes, and her lower lip was quivering.

  “We can’t ever, ever, ever wed. And she said you were––unnatural––and most impure in your actions to her...” Her tears stopped her speech, but when Ruskin again attempted to touch her she stepped back like a frightened doe.

  His mind was racing, and he felt out of breath. He could not answer.

  She wiped her face with her handkerchief and drew breath. “I wish you to be Lover and Friend to me always––and no more. That is what you must have wanted with your wife, and that much I can grant, with all my heart.”

  Now he had an answer. “It was not what I wanted, at least not at first, and it is not what I wish from you now. I come to you in utter purity of heart, as one who has loved you faithfully for ten years, as one who awaits upon your word as a sacred vow.”

  “You have no need to wait.”

  He could not bear this injustice. “I don’t accept that. You promised me to wait three years to make your answer, and those years have not yet passed. And even after that day when you can refuse me, you cannot refuse my love and my sorrow; it will always be yours.”

  “Then we will trust in God.”

  What would it mean, he asked himself in watching her tear-stained face, if he could go down upon his knees on this cold Irish earth and tell her in complete truth that in the long months of separation he had once again found Faith? That all the prim little homilies a
nd exhortations to belief she had peppered her old letters with had acted upon him, and he was now redeemed through grace of her love and concern for him? If he could claim this as truth, would it expunge the foulness of the machinations of her mother, or the evil served him now by a vengeful but utterly forgotten wife?

  How Rose had made him suffer in the past––how her mother now crucified him with her actions. He had been silent in pain, he had laboured and wept, he had borne every insult. How cruelly he had been injured, and yet she remained the innocent! It was she who had been perverted, through the wrongness of her religion, to see evil in him. Could he in one gesture, one proclamation, cut through her fear and win her wholly?

  He wished to smite his head with his own furious hand, and force himself upon the ground at her feet. But he could not lie, and claim a return to his former narrow and naive faith.

  His torment must have shown on his face, for she said, “There is nothing but this frail ‘cannot’ to separate our life and love.”

  He was not aware of his own tears until she lifted her hand and brushed one away. “What do you mean?” he cried in an agony of hope.

  “Fare-well, dear friend,” she answered, and turned away.

  He went to Chamonix and tried to take comfort in his Alps. Even they were not immutable, the Glace du Mer was shrinking, and new and ugly towns springing up. He stared at barren mountain peaks and envied their insensibility. If he believed in a personal way in a heavenly Father––which he no longer could––he would have demanded: Why have you teazed me in this way? If there were no toys in the cupboard, I would have been satisfied––but the one I can’t have?

  Awaking from fitful sleep, he could not understand why his dreams were not nobler. He dreamt of floating under the bronze horses of St Mark’s. He dreamt of his father; of dark waters rushing by him; of standing in empty and crumbling cathedrals. He dreamt of snakes in all their many guises, not knowing if they were the death-dealing serpent in the Garden, the wisdom-bringing python of the Pythia, or the twined pair upholding the caduceus of the healer. Most hideous were dreams of the Gorgon, every hair a springing snake, sneering at him as he stood transfixed and powerless.