“Lord, how dull it’s all been,” he murmured, and thrust the poker into the fire to raise it.
No, there had been nothing in his life to interest him as much as a certain odd fancy he had had for years, of a girl that he had never actually seen—except for that one instant, outside the library window, the night he had killed Saint Aumerle. And she had not looked pretty then, he reflected, her face distorted in terror and her mouth open as though she were shrieking to them, though not a sound could be heard. When he had rushed after her into the moonlit garden, there had been neither sound nor sight of her. His dreams of her had often ended so.
His account to Juliana of those dreams in boyhood had been true enough. They were less frequent as he grew older, but quite as vivid. As he grew older, his visitor did too, though her dress remained as odd and formless and her expression as smilingly frank and open as when she had been a child. He began to welcome and even seek for her, who had formerly been a teasing intrusion into a world of monstrous or splendid shadows. Now she appeared the only living figure in that world, which he still sought as relief and escape from a life that had grown less harsh but scarcely less tedious to him.
She was like no woman he had met in life, she had not their mannerisms, their way of speech, not even, it seemed, their way of thought. She was fearless but not bold, of a direct simplicity in speech that he found odd and charming, and very far removed from the simplicity of a fool. But in general they spoke little, though he delighted to pay her compliments, which she received with a child-like pleasure, as if, instead of the stale currency of talk between a man and woman, they were something rare and strange to her.
He called her Incognita, after the heroine of the late Mr. Congreve’s novel; she called him the Gentleman Unknown.
She did not enter his world now, whether of fancy or reality; he went with her through a world he did not know. They wandered through streets and jostling, alien crowds, through gardens equally crowded, that he had never seen.
Once or twice they loitered beside a miniature lake and lawn, shut in by railings, where rabbits fed undisturbed by the passing stream of people. One foggy autumn evening they came down a dark street to high iron gates that enclosed a tiny courtyard garden where a statue stood above an empty fountain; and stayed there long, not speaking, until suddenly she moved, her face upturned, her eyes glowing; and he bent to catch her in his arms, and woke.
So it had always ended, she eluding him, but with no coquetry nor intentional inflaming of his desire. Rather, she seemed to call to him, to try persistently to come to him. Sometimes he had stood aside and watched those monotonous crowds in his dream troop by, all alike, with white, inattentive faces and unfamiliar dark clothes; and had seen her pass among them, looking quickly now and then to right and left—looking, he knew, for him. Sometimes he could join her, but he could never catch her, never possess her, not even in a dream.
The desire of it had entered into him, giving the only vivid and consistent purpose to his cold existence. It had prompted him to the society of the strange company of magicians, alchemists and hypnotists, such as Saint Germain, Cagliostro, Mesmer, whom Paris welcomed with the fantastic delight of a city that had been wearied by its long period of crisp and elegant death of the emotions. He found that it was impossible for him to be sent into a trance, or “mesmerised” as it was beginning to be called, just as it was impossible for him to be affected by wine. On the other hand, he discovered considerable hypnotic powers in himself, and that he could send messengers where he could not follow. He had tried several, among them Monsieur le Due de Saint Aumerle, last of all, Juliana, the only one that had met with any success for his purpose.
Yet he could hardly have told what he wished for in success. If his dream could be embodied and possessed, would it be anything more than the repetition of an experience he had had so often that he was wearied to death of it? To reverse Æsop’s fable, he was dropping the shadow to snatch at the substance, but, unlike the dog in the fable, he could not be sure that the shadow had not after all the greater quality.
It was certainly an egregious piece of tomfoolery, a preposterous notion to try and match Doctor Donne’s fantastic commands—
“Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all times past are—”
The last words arrested his attention. He leaned forward and took the poker from the fire, repeating them, this time aloud.
“Tell me where all times past are.” The poker was hot to his hand and the end of it white hot. He had lately been reading that song in John Bell’s new pocket edition of the Poets from Chaucer to Churchill—
“If thou be’st born to strange sights,
Things invisible go see.”
An alluring invitation!
What was it that, very rarely, but from time to time, in the excellently judicious family of the Clares, prompted them to such insane pursuits as these mentioned by Doctor Donne? There had been the religious and poetic frenzies of the hermit who had cut such an incongruous figure in the time of Charles II; the beauty at King James I’s Court who had been tried for sorcery; and in the far distant past, a figure that he did not know if he had heard of as a child or actually dreamed of, so vividly had he appeared to see it—the figure of an old woman with terrible gleaming eyes and mouth twisted with curses, being hurried to a pond by a crowd of jeering, shouting villagers.
He had been idly contemplating the white-hot end of the poker in his hand, and how quickly it turned to red, and now, as he thought of that savage witch-ducking, he began to pass it along the pattern at the side of the carved wood chimney-piece. Since he was not again to enjoy that pattern, he would deface it, and the upturned corners of his lips curled into a definite smile as the hot iron seared and blackened the leaves and grapes and exquisite tendrils. The solid rams’ heads supporting the chimney-piece on either side with an air of such peaceful, almost divine responsibility, continued to stare solemnly down at the growing destruction.
Would they not show their opinion of this wanton sacrilege? The poker followed the twisting curls of a pair of horns, then suddenly stabbed and blasted the placid eyes between them.
“Tell me where all times past are,” he repeated softly in a whisper, again and again, as though he spoke to the hissing wood.
Times past, times present, or times to come, were they not all one, if he had the power to make them so?
A sudden breeze stirred the branches of the trees outside into a hurried, whispering sound, and was as suddenly hushed. Within the house, out in the street, there was now a silence as deep as on the Chidleigh lawns at night.
Lucian stayed motionless with his hand suspended. His mouth was drawn up in a sharp curve, like the mouth of the stone satyr on the terrace; his head was bent slightly to one side, which gave him the appearance of one who was listening intently. Yet the silence was as dead, as breathless as before.
Then again there came that light, whispering breeze, and a rush of rain drove suddenly against the windows with a noise like the beating of kettledrums. Lucian laid down the poker, rose to his feet with a quick, deliberate movement, and walked to the window. His breath came sharply between his shut teeth, his head was erect, his eyes shone with extraordinary brilliance. The indolent, quiescent figure seemed suddenly to have been quickened into an unnatural life and activity, a radiant expectancy.
He flung open the window. The room was on the first floor, about a man’s height above the street. The evening was not yet quite dark, a long stripe of stormy red sunset still hung over the houses of Soho. It had been fine and clear all day, but now the rain came down with the torrential violence of a thunderstorm, rushing down the gutters and quickly flooding them, the great drops splashing and leaping up into the air again like a myriad tiny fountains. As they fell past Lucian’s eyes, against the stormy light of the sunset they appeared red, for one instant, like drops of blood.
Further down the street, to t
he right, my Lady Gage was holding a reception. He could see a coach go rumbling and splashing through the mud, the dim forms of the footmen huddled forward on their box, crouching from the rain. There was a blaze of light on the steps as the hall door was thrown open and the brightly lit figures of a lady in a towering head-dress and spreading hoops, and a dapper little gentleman went up into the house. The lady was hurrying from the rain, but the gentleman, in spite of his pale coloured satin coat, walked behind her with elaborate nonchalance, lightly brushing the rain-drops from his sleeve.
A sedan chair came sharply round the corner and down the street towards my Lady Gage’s. The men were running and breathed in heavy, stertorian gasps, while a lady’s thin, screaming voice issued from within the chair in some command, inaudible to Lucian.
Suddenly the rain diminished and seemed about to cease, though the darkened sky had not yet grown clearer.
“Bartelmy is an unconscionable time,” he said softly, but the words were uttered without thought or intention, and he did not move from the window. His still form seemed to be charged with some exterior force that gave it life and power beyond the human. Conscious of it, exulting in it, he stood there, waiting.
A slight, dark figure, not unlike that of a link-boy, but carrying no lantern, came round the corner on the left and down the street, went past his house for a few steps then turned sharply, came back and stopped just beneath his window, looking up at him. He saw the dusky white oval of a girl’s face in the dim light, and knew it for the face he had seen so often in his dreams. The eyes were dark and wide with an expression he could not fathom, her lips parted a little in an eager wonder—was it also delight? She stood there in the lightly falling rain, in a straight coat with up-turned collar buttoned to the chin, a close-fitting cap on her head, which reached to a little below the window. Neither moved nor spoke—he did not know for how long.
It was the supreme moment for his impossible desires. He was awake and conscious, and he saw her there before him, a few feet away from him, no longer in a dream, but living, breathing a little quickly, her cheeks warm and fresh in the rain. Through Juliana, he had at last succeeded in bringing her to him.
He should not have thought of Juliana. It vaguely troubled him, intruding something that he did not wish to admit at this moment—a disturbance, a fear.
He shook it off and leaned towards the window. The girl below raised herself on tip-toe as if to approach him more nearly, she seemed about to speak. Her lips parted, moved quickly, he heard a clear voice speaking low, with eager pleasure. But he could not hear what she said, for he could not attend. Some other sound was clamouring for his attention, the sound of his own name, called urgently, beseechingly, in Juliana’s voice. He tried not to listen, but the whole air seemed full of that terror-stricken cry.
She was in extreme danger and she knew it, or she could not have called like that. Furiously, he tried to deafen himself to it, to hear only the voice of the girl in the street below, to remember only that the moment he had wished and worked for so long was his at last. But the small, pale face upturned below him, the clear eyes shining through the dusk, were growing blurred by an image that would rise before it, the image of Juliana’s face upturned to his, and wet, beseeching eyes that shone suddenly into smiles as he promised her that he would not let her be too much afraid.
He was losing his moment. Some power that lay in him and beyond him was slackening its force through his divided attention. Though awake and conscious, he had to struggle with himself, as one struggles not to awake when in a dream of ecstatic pleasure. For that actual and living being before him was not now as actual nor as living as the memory of his sister’s face.
Through Juliana, he had brought her to him. Was he now to lose her for Juliana’s sake? He flung from the window, and in a leap was down the stairs and at the door.
There was no one outside the door, nor any figure moving in the street. He stood there for a little time, waiting, watching in the falling rain. The coach in front of my Lady Gage’s house had driven off, and he could still hear the clatter and rattle of harness growing fainter in the distance; the street remained empty.
He went back into the house and called the servants. An hour later, he was riding out of London with Bartelmy beside him.
At the cross-roads he turned his horse’s head towards the road into Berkshire. Bartelmy spurred after him.
“My lord, my lord, the road to Dover lies straight ahead. At this pace we shall make it by the morning.”
“I ride to Chidleigh,” said my lord.
Chapter XXII
Juliana opened her eyes. She was lying in bed and Lucian was kneeling beside it, holding her hands, his face very near hers. The curtains had been pulled back, the windows opened wide, and the morning sunlight was full on his face, showing it more grey and drawn than she had ever seen it. It looked as though something had been drawn out of it, some life, some power, that would not return.
“You called me,” said Juliana faintly.
“I have been ’ calling ’ you for more than three hours,” he answered.
He let go her hands, rose slowly and fetched her something in a glass which he made her drink. His movements were like those of a tired old man. She saw that there was no one else in the room.
She found it easier to speak after the drink. “I tried to come before,” she said. “I was looking for you. I knew that without you I could never come back.”
“No,” said Lucian. “You could not have come back without me.”
He drank a glass of wine, then came back to the bed and knelt beside it again. But it seemed that he was more tired than Juliana, for he did not speak but remained looking at her with his head resting on his hand.
She remembered now that when she first knew that he was calling her, she had thought that she was drowning. She had tried to struggle upwards through deep waters to him; it was difficult, it was agonizing, she could not rise.
At last she had seen his eyes looking down on her through huge gulfs of water that were now clear as glass and then swept over her as black as ink. She had used to look into water, glass or ink until other faces looked back at her; now it seemed that she had slipped in where those faces swam, and sunk far down, so far she could never come back. Yet slowly, painfully, she had to rise toward him, until she was floating upon the water, and always it was his eyes that drew her up to him, two steely points, motionless, devoid of light and colour.
She knew that before that time of drowning, she had been wandering in an alien world, trying to find him. She did not want to remember that. She wanted to stay there quiet with Lucian looking at her, but she wished he did not look so tired. They stayed so for some time.
There was, however, something that would persist in disturbing her, that she must remember and tell him. And when the full memory came over her, it was so terrible that she clutched at his hand.
“Lucian, the rooms, the gardens—nothing is the same.”
“What is not the same?”
“Nothing is precisely the same.” She hesitated and could only whisper it. “Nurse’s cottage is not in the drive. And the drive—they are cutting down all the trees in the drive.”
Lucian roused himself as with an effort and took both her hands in his again.
“That was a dream, when your senses were wandering. I rode down the drive this very morning when the dawn was breaking and the dew lay thick and white on the ground. The trees were all there, each one, they looked huge and grey in that cold light, they were like the rugged columns of some ancient temple.
“Very soon, when you are stronger, you will walk down the drive and see that all the trees are there, and call at Nurse’s cottage for a gossip. Her garden was looking very neat and pretty as I passed, all the flowers glistening in the dew as though their faces had just been washed.” He took her face between his hands and looked intently into it. “The gardens, the park, the house are all the same—all precisely the same. You have been dreaming
, my pretty one, but very soon you will forget your dreams, even those that were the most strange and enthralling—yes, you will forget them altogether.”
His voice was coming with a little more strength and life in it. Suddenly he caught her to him and covered her face and hair with kisses. “My sweet, you have come back, you have come back. I thought I had sent you away for ever, but you have come back and you shall never wander again. No, never, for it was I who sent you, and I shall never send you again. Do you understand, Juliana? You are safe of me.”
She clung weakly to him, scarcely comprehending, but glad to know that she was safe, though his words troubled her.
“Safe of you, brother?”
“Yes, safe of me. Try to listen, for there may not be much time. You have asked me often enough what use or amusement you were to me, what it is that we share. It is this—that you were the most exquisite instrument to play on that I have ever known. You were sensible to the slightest impression, responded to the lightest touch. I could do what I wished with your spirit; I did it, and all but broke it. I did not think at first that it would trouble me to break it, but when I found that it was breaking, then I knew. Ah, do not try to understand, I only want you to know.”
“To know—to know?”
“That I love you,” he cried, and kissed her again.
“But—dear Lucian—indeed, I have always known that.”
“And had reason to, you hussy, for who would not love this fair face? Oh, you can well afford to triumph! You—who were to be my instrument—my delicate plaything—have tricked me at the last into loving you more than my own purpose. It is you, my sweet fool, who have the laugh of me. Why do you not laugh?”
“Brother, you talk so wildly. Why should I laugh? Why are you laughing?”
“To remember that there are others who love you and not to hurt, and that you will love them the better when I am gone.”
Still She Wished for Company Page 19
