It was very dark in the room. He seemed by slow degrees to awake from along and heavy torpor, from an utter forgetfulness, and as he raised hiseyes he could scarcely discern the pale whiteness of the paper on thedesk before him. He remembered something of a gloomy winter afternoon, ofdriving rain, of gusty wind: he had fallen asleep over his work, nodoubt, and the night had come down.
He lay back in his chair, wondering whether it were late; his eyes werehalf closed, and he did not make the effort and rouse himself. He couldhear the stormy noise of the wind, and the sound reminded him of thehalf-forgotten days. He thought of his boyhood, and the old rectory, andthe great elms that surrounded it. There was something pleasant in theconsciousness that he was still half dreaming; he knew he could wakeup whenever he pleased, but for the moment he amused himself by thepretence that he was a little boy again, tired with his rambles and thekeen air of the hills. He remembered how he would sometimes wakeup in the dark at midnight, and listen sleepily for a moment to the rushof the wind straining and crying amongst the trees, and hear it beat uponthe walls, and then he would fall to dreams again, happy in his warm,snug bed.
The wind grew louder, and the windows rattled. He half opened his eyesand shut them again, determined to cherish that sensation of long ago. Hefelt tired and heavy with sleep; he imagined that he was exhausted bysome effort; he had, perhaps, been writing furiously without rest. Hecould not recollect at the instant what the work had been; it would bedelightful to read the pages when he had made up his mind to bestirhimself.
Surely that was the noise of boughs, swaying and grinding in the wind. Heremembered one night at home when such a sound had roused him suddenlyfrom a deep sweet sleep. There was a rushing and beating as of wings uponthe air, and a heavy dreary noise, like thunder far away upon themountain. He had got out of bed and looked from behind the blind to seewhat was abroad. He remembered the strange sight he had seen, and hepretended it would be just the same if he cared to look out now. Therewere clouds flying awfully from before the moon, and a pale light thatmade the familiar land look strange and terrible. The blast of wind camewith a great shriek, and the trees tossed and bowed and quivered; thewood was scourged and horrible, and the night air was ghastly with aconfused tumult, and voices as of a host. A huge black cloud rolledacross the heaven from the west and covered up the moon, and there came atorrent of bitter hissing rain.
It was all a vivid picture to him as he sat in his chair, unwilling towake. Even as he let his mind stray back to that night of the past years,the rain beat sharply on the window-panes, and though there were no treesin the grey suburban street, he heard distinctly the crash of boughs. Hewandered vaguely from thought to thought, groping indistinctly amongstmemories, like a man trying to cross from door to door in a darkenedunfamiliar room. But, no doubt, if he were to look out, by some magic thewhole scene would be displayed before him. He would not see the curve ofmonotonous two-storied houses, with here and there a white blind, a patchof light, and shadows appearing and vanishing, not the rain plashing inthe muddy road, not the amber of the gas-lamp opposite, but the wildmoonlight poured on the dearly loved country; far away the dim circle ofthe hills and woods, and beneath him the tossing trees about the lawn,and the wood heaving under the fury of the wind.
He smiled to himself, amidst his lazy meditations, to think how real itseemed, and yet it was all far away, the scenery of an old play longended and forgotten. It was strange that after all these years of troubleand work and change he should be in any sense the same person as thatlittle boy peeping out, half frightened, from the rectory window. It wasas if looking in the glass one should see a stranger, and yet know thatthe image was a true reflection.
The memory of the old home recalled his father and mother to him, and hewondered whether his mother would come if he were to cry out suddenly.One night, on just such a night as this, when a great storm blew from themountain, a tree had fallen with a crash and a bough had struck the roof,and he awoke in a fright, calling for his mother. She had come and hadcomforted him, soothing him to sleep, and now he shut his eyes, seeingher face shining in the uncertain flickering candle light, as she bentover his bed. He could not think she had died; the memory was but a partof the evil dreams that had come afterwards.
He said to himself that he had fallen asleep and dreamed sorrow andagony, and he wished to forget all the things of trouble. He would returnto happy days, to the beloved land, to the dear and friendly paths acrossthe fields. There was the paper, white before him, and when he chose tostir, he would have the pleasure of reading his work. He could not quiterecollect what he had been about, but he was somehow conscious that thehad been successful and had brought some long labor to a worthy ending.Presently he would light the gas, and enjoy the satisfaction that onlythe work could give him, but for the time he preferred to linger in thedarkness, and to think of himself as straying from stile to stile throughthe scented meadows, and listening to the bright brook that sang to thealders.
It was winter now, for he heard the rain and the wind, and the swaying ofthe trees, but in those old days how sweet the summer had been. The greathawthorn bush in blossom, like a white cloud upon the earth, had appearedto him in twilight, he had lingered in the enclosed valley to hear thenightingale, a voice swelling out from the rich gloom, from the treesthat grew around the well. The scent of the meadowsweet was blown to himacross the bridge of years, and with it came the dream and the hope andthe longing, and the afterglow red in the sky, and the marvel of theearth. There was a quiet walk that he knew so well; one went up from alittle green byroad, following an unnamed brooklet scarce a foot wide,but yet wandering like a river, gurgling over its pebbles, with its dwarfbushes shading the pouring water. One went through the meadow grass, andcame to the larch wood that grew from hill to hill across the stream, andshone a brilliant tender green, and sent vague sweet spires to theflushing sky. Through the wood the path wound, turning and dipping, andbeneath, the brown fallen needles of last year were soft and thick, andthe resinous cones gave out their odor as the warm night advanced, andthe shadows darkened. It was quite still; but he stayed, and the faintsong of the brooklet sounded like the echo of a river beyond themountains. How strange it was to look into the wood, to see the tallstraight stems rising, pillar-like, and then the dusk, uncertain, andthen the blackness. So he came out from the larch wood, from the greencloud and the vague shadow, into the dearest of all hollows, shut in onone side by the larches and before him by high violent walls of turf,like the slopes of a fort, with a clear line dark against the twilightsky, and a weird thorn bush that grew large, mysterious, on the summit,beneath the gleam of the evening star.
And he retraced his wanderings in those deep old lanes that began fromthe common road and went away towards the unknown, climbing steep hills,and piercing the woods of shadows, and dipping down into valleys thatseemed virgin, unexplored, secret for the foot of man. He entered such alane not knowing where it might bring him, hoping he had found the way tofairyland, to the woods beyond the world, to that vague territory thathaunts all the dreams of a boy. He could not tell where he might be, forthe high banks rose steep, and the great hedges made a green vault above.Marvelous ferns grew rich and thick in the dark red earth, fasteningtheir roots about the roots of hazel and beech and maple, clustering likethe carven capitals of a cathedral pillar. Down, like a dark shaft, thelane dipped to the well of the hills, and came amongst the limestonerocks. He climbed the bank at last, and looked out into a country thatseemed for a moment the land he sought, a mysterious realm withunfamiliar hills and valleys and fair plains all golden, and white housesradiant in the sunset light.
And he thought of the steep hillsides where the bracken was like a wood,and of bare places where the west wind sang over the golden gorse, ofstill circles in mid-lake, of the poisonous yew-tree in the middle ofthe wood, shedding its crimson cups on the dank earth. How he lingered bycertain black waterpools hedged on every side by drooping wych-elms andblack-stemmed alders, watching the faint waves widening to the banks as aleaf or a twig dropped from the trees.
And the whole air and wonder of the ancient forest came back to him. Hehad found his way to the river valley, to the long lovely hollow betweenthe hills, and went up and up beneath the leaves in the warm hush ofmidsummer, glancing back now and again through the green alleys, to theriver winding in mystic esses beneath, passing hidden glens receiving thestreams that rushed down the hillside, ice-cold from the rock, passingthe immemorial tumulus, the graves where the legionaries waited for thetrumpet, the grey farmhouses sending the blue wreaths of wood smoke intothe still air. He went higher and higher, till at last he entered thelong passage of the Roman road, and from this, the ridge and summit ofthe wood, he saw the waves of green swell and dip and sink towards themarshy level and the gleaming yellow sea. He looked on the surgingforest, and thought of the strange deserted city moldering into a pettyvillage on its verge, of its encircling walls melting into the turf, ofvestiges of an older temple which the earth had buried utterly.
It was winter now, for he heard the wail of the wind, and a sudden gustdrove the rain against the panes, but he thought of the bee's song in theclover, of the foxgloves in full blossom, of the wild roses, delicate,enchanting, swaying on a long stem above the hedge. He had been instrange places, he had known sorrow and desolation, and had grown greyand weary in the work of letters, but he lived again in the sweetness, inthe clear bright air of early morning, when the sky was blue in June, andthe mist rolled like a white sea in the valley. He laughed when herecollected that he had sometimes fancied himself unhappy in those days;in those days when he could be glad because the sun shone, because thewind blew fresh on the mountain. On those bright days he had been glad,looking at the fleeting and passing of the clouds upon the hills, andhad gone up higher to the broad dome of the mountain, feeling that joywent up before him.
He remembered how, a boy, he had dreamed of love, of an adorable andineffable mystery which transcended all longing and desire. The time hadcome when all the wonder of the earth seemed to prefigure this alone,when he found the symbol of the Beloved in hill and wood and stream, andevery flower and every dark pool discoursed a pure ecstasy. It was thelonging for longing, the love of love, that had come to him when he awokeone morning just before the dawn, and for the first time felt the sharpthrill of passion.
He tried in vain to express to himself the exquisite joys of innocentdesire. Even now, after troubled years, in spite of some dark cloud thatovershadowed the background of his thought, the sweetness of the boy'simagined pleasure came like a perfume into his reverie. It was no love ofa woman but the desire of womanhood, the Eros of the unknown, that madethe heart tremble. He hardly dreamed that such a love could ever besatisfied, that the thirst of beauty could be slaked. He shrank from allcontact of actuality, not venturing so much as to imagine the inner placeand sanctuary of the mysteries. It was enough for him to adore in theouter court, to know that within, in the sweet gloom, were the vision andthe rapture, the altar and the sacrifice.
He remembered, dimly, the passage of many heavy years since that time ofhope and passion, but, perhaps, the vague shadow would pass away, and hecould renew the boy's thoughts, the unformed fancies that were part ofthe bright day, of the wild roses in the hedgerow. All other thingsshould be laid aside, he would let them trouble him no more after thiswinter night. He saw now that from the first he had allowed hisimagination to bewilder him, to create a fantastic world in which hesuffered, molding innocent forms into terror and dismay. Vividly, he sawagain the black circle of oaks, growing in a haggard ring upon thebastions of the Roman fort. The noise of the storm without grew louder,and he thought how the wind had come up the valley with the sound of ascream, how a great tree had ground its boughs together, shudderingbefore the violent blast. Clear and distinct, as if he were standing nowin the lane, he saw the steep slopes surging from the valley, and theblack crown of the oaks set against the flaming sky, against a blaze andglow of light as if great furnace doors were opened. He saw the fire, asit were, smitten about the bastions, about the heaped mounds that guardedthe fort, and the crooked evil boughs seemed to writhe in the blast offlame that beat from heaven. Strangely with the sight of the burningfort mingled the impression of a dim white shape floating up the dusk ofthe lane towards him, and he saw across the valley of years a girl'sface, a momentary apparition that shone and vanished away.
Then there was a memory of another day, of violent summer, of whitefarmhouse walls blazing in the sun, and a far call from the reapers inthe cornfields. He had climbed the steep slope and penetrated the mattedthicket and lay in the heat, alone on the soft short grass that grewwithin the fort. There was a cloud of madness, and confusion of brokendreams that had no meaning or clue but only an indefinable horror anddefilement. He had fallen asleep as he gazed at the knotted fantasticboughs of the stunted brake about him, and when he woke he was ashamed,and fled away fearing that "they" would pursue him. He did not know who"they" were, but it seemed as if a woman's face watched him from betweenthe matted boughs, and that she summoned to her side awful companions whohad never grown old through all the ages.
He looked up, it seemed, at a smiling face that bent over him, as he satin the cool dark kitchen of the old farmhouse, and wondered why thesweetness of those red lips and the kindness of the eyes mingled with thenightmare in the fort, with the horrible Sabbath he had imagined as helay sleeping on the hot soft turf. He had allowed these disturbedfancies, all this mad wreck of terror and shame that he had gathered inhis mind, to trouble him for too long a time; presently he would light upthe room, and leave all the old darkness of his life behind him, and fromhenceforth he would walk in the day.
He could still distinguish, though very vaguely, the pile of papersbeside him, and he remembered, now, that he had finished a long task thatafternoon, before he fell asleep. He could not trouble himself torecollect the exact nature of the work, but he was sure that he had donewell; in a few minutes, perhaps, he would strike a match, and read thetitle, and amuse himself with his own forgetfulness. But the sight of thepapers lying there in order made him think of his beginnings, of thosefirst unhappy efforts which were so impossible and so hopeless. He sawhimself bending over the table in the old familiar room, desperatelyscribbling, and then laying down his pen dismayed at the sad resultson the page. It was late at night, his father had been long in bed, andthe house was still. The fire was almost out, with only a dim glow hereand there amongst the cinders, and the room was growing chilly. He roseat last from his work and looked out on a dim earth and a dark and cloudysky.
Night after night he had labored on, persevering in his effort, eventhrough the cold sickness of despair, when every line was doomed as itwas made. Now, with the consciousness that he knew at least theconditions of literature, and that many years of thought and practice hadgiven him some sense of language, he found these early struggles bothpathetic and astonishing. He could not understand how he hadpersevered so stubbornly, how he had had the heart to begin a fresh pagewhen so many folios of blotted, painful effort lay torn, derided,impossible in their utter failure. It seemed to him that it must havebeen a miracle or an infernal possession, a species of madness, that haddriven him on, every day disappointed, and every day hopeful.
And yet there was a joyous side to the illusion. In these dry days thathe lived in, when he had bought, by a long experience and by countlesshours of misery, a knowledge of his limitations, of the vast gulf thatyawned between the conception and the work, it was pleasant to think of atime when all things were possible, when the most splendid design seemedan affair of a few weeks. Now he had come to a frank acknowledgment; sofar as he was concerned, he judged every book wholly impossible till thelast line of it was written, and he had learnt patience, the art ofsighing and putting the fine scheme away in the pigeon-hole of what couldnever be. But to think of those days! Then one could plot out a book thatshould be more curious than Rabelais, and jot down the outlines of aromance to surpass Cervantes, and design renaissance tragedies andvolumes of contes, and comedies of the Restoration; everything was tobe done, and the masterpiece was always the rainbow cup, a little waybefore him.
He touched the manuscript on the desk, and the feeling of the pagesseemed to restore all the papers that had been torn so long ago. It wasthe atmosphere of the silent room that returned, the light of the shadedcandle falling on the abandoned leaves. This had been painfullyexcogitated while the snowstorm whirled about the lawn and filled thelanes, this was of the summer night, this of the harvest moon risinglike a fire from the tithebarn on the hill. How well he remembered thosehalf-dozen pages of which he had once been so proud; he had thought outthe sentences one evening, while he leaned on the foot-bridge and watchedthe brook swim across the road. Every word smelt of the meadowsweet thatgrew thick upon the banks; now, as he recalled the cadence and the phrasethat had seemed so charming, he saw again the ferns beneath the vaultedroots of the beech, and the green light of the glowworm in the hedge.
And in the west the mountains swelled to a great dome, and on the domewas a mound, the memorial of some forgotten race, that grew dark andlarge against the red sky, when the sun set. He had lingered below it inthe solitude, amongst the winds, at evening, far away from home; and oh,the labor and the vain efforts to make the form of it and the awe of itin prose, to write the hush of the vast hill, and the sadness of theworld below sinking into the night, and the mystery, the suggestion ofthe rounded hillock, huge against the magic sky.
He had tried to sing in words the music that the brook sang, and thesound of the October wind rustling through the brown bracken on the hill.How many pages he had covered in the effort to show a white winter world,a sun without warmth in a grey-blue sky, all the fields, all the landwhite and shining, and one high summit where the dark pines towered,still in the still afternoon, in the pale violet air.
To win the secret of words, to make a phrase that would murmur of summerand the bee, to summon the wind into a sentence, to conjure the odor ofthe night into the surge and fall and harmony of a line; this was thetale of the long evenings, of the candle flame white upon the paper andthe eager pen.
He remembered that in some fantastic book he had seen a bar or two ofmusic, and, beneath, the inscription that here was the musical expressionof Westminster Abbey. His boyish effort seemed hardly less ambitious,and he no longer believed that language could present the melody and theawe and the loveliness of the earth. He had long known that he, at allevents, would have to be content with a far approach, with a few brokennotes that might suggest, perhaps, the magistral everlasting song of thehill and the streams.
But in those far days the impossible was but a part of wonderland thatlay before him, of the world beyond the wood and the mountain. All was tobe conquered, all was to be achieved; he had but to make the journey andhe would find the golden world and the golden word, and hear those songsthat the sirens sang. He touched the manuscript; whatever it was, it wasthe result of painful labor and disappointment, not of the old flush ofhope, but it came of weary days, of correction and re-correction. Itmight be good in its measure; but afterwards he would write no more for atime. He would go back again to the happy world of masterpieces, to thedreams of great and perfect books, written in an ecstasy.
Like a dark cloud from the sea came the memory of the attempt he hadmade, of the poor piteous history that had once embittered his life. Hesighed and said alas, thinking of his folly, of the hours when he wasshaken with futile, miserable rage. Some silly person in London had madehis manuscript more saleable and had sold it without rendering an accountof the profits, and for that he had been ready to curse humanity. Black,horrible, as the memory of a stormy day, the rage of his heart returnedto his mind, and he covered his eyes, endeavoring to darken the pictureof terror and hate that shone before him. He tried to drive it all out ofhis thought, it vexed him to remember these foolish trifles; the trick ofa publisher, the small pomposities and malignancies of the country folk,the cruelty of a village boy, had inflamed him almost to the pitch ofmadness. His heart had burnt with fury, and when he looked up the sky wasblotched, and scarlet as if it rained blood.
Indeed he had almost believed that blood had rained upon him, and coldblood from a sacrifice in heaven; his face was wet and chill anddripping, and he had passed his hand across his forehead and looked atit. A red cloud had seemed to swell over the hill, and grow great, andcome near to him; he was but an ace removed from raging madness.
It had almost come to that; the drift and the breath of the scarlet cloudhad well-nigh touched him. It was strange that he had been so deeplytroubled by such little things, and strange how after all the years hecould still recall the anguish and rage and hate that shook his soul aswith a spiritual tempest.
The memory of all that evening was wild and troubled; he resolved that itshould vex him no more, that now, for the last time, he would let himselfbe tormented by the past. In a few minutes he would rise to a new life,and forget all the storms that had gone over him.
Curiously, every detail was distinct and clear in his brain. The figureof the doctor driving home, and the sound of the few words he had spokencame to him in the darkness, through the noise of the storm and thepattering of the rain. Then he stood upon the ridge of the hill and sawthe smoke drifting up from the ragged roofs of Caermaen, in the eveningcalm; he listened to the voices mounting thin and clear, in a weird tone,as if some outland folk were speaking in an unknown tongue of awfulthings.
He saw the gathering darkness, the mystery of twilight changing thehuddled squalid village into an unearthly city, into some dreadfulAtlantis, inhabited by a ruined race. The mist falling fast, the gloomthat seemed to issue from the black depths of the forest, to advancepalpably towards the walls, were shaped before him; and beneath, theriver wound, snake-like, about the town, swimming to the flood andglowing in its still pools like molten brass. And as the water mirroredthe afterglow and sent ripples and gouts of blood against the shudderingreeds, there came suddenly the piercing trumpet-call, the loud reiteratedsummons that rose and fell, that called and recalled, echoing through allthe valley, crying to the dead as the last note rang. It summoned thelegion from the river and the graves and the battlefield, the hostfloated up from the sea, the centuries swarmed about the eagles, thearray was set for the last great battle, behind the leaguer of the mist.
He could imagine himself still wandering through the dim unknown,terrible country, gazing affrighted at the hills and woods that seemed tohave put on an unearthly shape, stumbling amongst the briars that caughthis feet. He lost his way in a wild country, and the red light thatblazed up from the furnace on the mountains only showed him a mysteriousland, in which he strayed aghast, with the sense of doom weighing uponhim. The dry mutter of the trees, the sound of an unseen brook, made himafraid as if the earth spoke of his sin, and presently he was fleeingthrough a desolate shadowy wood, where a pale light flowed from themoldering stumps, a dream of light that shed a ghostly radiance.
And then again the dark summit of the Roman fort, the black sheer heightrising above the valley, and the moonfire streaming around the ring ofoaks, glowing about the green bastions that guarded the thicket and theinner place.
The room in which he sat appeared the vision, the trouble of the wind andrain without was but illusion, the noise of the waves in the seashell.Passion and tears and adoration and the glories of the summer nightreturned, and the calm sweet face of the woman appeared, and he thrilledat the soft touch of her hand on his flesh.
She shone as if she had floated down into the lane from the moon thatswam between films of cloud above the black circle of the oaks. She ledhim away from all terror and despair and hate, and gave herself to himwith rapture, showing him love, kissing his tears away, pillowing hischeek upon her breast.
His lips dwelt on her lips, his mouth upon the breath of her mouth, herarms were strained about him, and oh! she charmed him with her voice,with sweet kind words, as she offered her sacrifice. How her scentedhair fell down, and floated over his eyes, and there was a marvelous firecalled the moon, and her lips were aflame, and her eyes shone like alight on the hills.
All beautiful womanhood had come to him in the lane. Love had touched himin the dusk and had flown away, but he had seen the splendor and theglory, and his eyes had seen the enchanted light.
AVE ATQUE VALEThe old words sounded in his ears like the ending of a chant, and heheard the music's close. Once only in his weary hapless life, once theworld had passed away, and he had known her, the dear, dear Annie, thesymbol of all mystic womanhood.
The heaviness of languor still oppressed him, holding him back amongstthese old memories, so that he could not stir from his place. Oddly,there seemed something unaccustomed about the darkness of the room, as ifthe shadows he had summoned had changed the aspect of the walls. He wasconscious that on this night he was not altogether himself; fatigue, andthe weariness of sleep, and the waking vision had perplexed him. Heremembered how once or twice when he was a little boy startled by anuneasy dream, and had stared with a frightened gaze into nothingness, notknowing where he was, all trembling, and breathing quick, till he touchedthe rail of his bed, and the familiar outlines of the looking-glass andthe chiffonier began to glimmer out of the gloom. So now he touched thepile of manuscript and the desk at which he had worked so many hours, andfelt reassured, though he smiled at himself, and he felt the old childishdread, the longing to cry out for some one to bring a candle, and showhim that he really was in his own room. He glanced up for an instant,expecting to see perhaps the glitter of the brass gas jet that was fixedon the wall, just beside his bureau, but it was too dark, and he couldnot rouse himself and make the effort that would drive the cloud and themuttering thoughts away.
He leant back again, picturing the wet street without, the rain drivinglike fountain spray about the gas lamp, the shrilling of the wind onthose waste places to the north. It was strange how in the brick andstucco desert where no trees were, he all the time imagined the noise oftossing boughs, the grinding of the boughs together. There was a greatstorm and tumult in this wilderness of London, and for the sound of therain and the wind he could not hear the hum and jangle of the trams,and the jar and shriek of the garden gates as they opened and shut. Buthe could imagine his street, the rain-swept desolate curve of it, as itturned northward, and beyond the empty suburban roads, the twinklingvilla windows, the ruined field, the broken lane, and then yet anothersuburb rising, a solitary gas-lamp glimmering at a corner, and the planetree lashing its boughs, and driving great showers against the glass.
It was wonderful to think of. For when these remote roads were ended onedipped down the hill into the open country, into the dim world beyond theglint of friendly fires. Tonight, how waste they were, these wet roads,edged with the red-brick houses, with shrubs whipped by the wind againstone another, against the paling and the wall. There the wind swayed thegreat elms scattered on the sidewalk, the remnants of the old statelyfields, and beneath each tree was a pool of wet, and a torment ofraindrops fell with every gust. And one passed through the red avenues,perhaps by a little settlement of flickering shops, and passed the lastsentinel wavering lamp, and the road became a ragged lane, and the stormscreamed from hedge to hedge across the open fields. And then, beyond,one touched again upon a still remoter avant-garde of London, an islandamidst the darkness, surrounded by its pale of twinkling, starry lights.
He remembered his wanderings amongst these outposts of the town, andthought how desolate all their ways must be tonight. They were solitaryin wet and wind, and only at long intervals some one pattered and hurriedalong them, bending his eyes down to escape the drift of rain. Within thevillas, behind the close-drawn curtains, they drew about the fire, andwondered at the violence of the storm, listening for each great gust asit gathered far away, and rocked the trees, and at last rushed with ahuge shock against their walls as if it were the coming of the sea. Hethought of himself walking, as he had often walked, from lamp to lampon such a night, treasuring his lonely thoughts, and weighing the hardtask awaiting him in his room. Often in the evening, after a long day'slabor, he had thrown down his pen in utter listlessness, feeling that hecould struggle no more with ideas and words, and he had gone out intodriving rain and darkness, seeking the word of the enigma as he trampedon and on beneath these outer battlements of London.
Or on some grey afternoon in March or November he had sickened of thedull monotony and the stagnant life that he saw from his window, and hadtaken his design with him to the lonely places, halting now and again bya gate, and pausing in the shelter of a hedge through which the austerewind shivered, while, perhaps, he dreamed of Sicily, or of sunlight onthe Provençal olives. Often as he strayed solitary from street to field,and passed the Syrian fig tree imprisoned in Britain, nailed to anungenial wall, the solution of the puzzle became evident, and he laughedand hurried home eager to make the page speak, to note the song he hadheard on his way.
Sometimes he had spent many hours treading this edge and brim ofLondon, now lost amidst the dun fields, watching the bushes shaken bythe wind, and now looking down from a height whence he could see thedim waves of the town, and a barbaric water tower rising from a hill,and the snuff-colored cloud of smoke that seemed blown up from thestreets into the sky.
There were certain ways and places that he had cherished; he loved agreat old common that stood on high ground, curtained about with ancientspacious houses of red brick, and their cedarn gardens. And there wason the road that led to this common a space of ragged uneven ground witha pool and a twisted oak, and here he had often stayed in autumn andlooked across the mist and the valley at the great theatre of the sunset,where a red cloud like a charging knight shone and conquered a purpledragon shape, and golden lances glittered in a field of faerie green.
Or sometimes, when the unending prospect of trim, monotonous, modernstreets had wearied him, he had found an immense refreshment in thediscovery of a forgotten hamlet, left in a hollow, while all new Londonpressed and surged on every side, threatening the rest of the red roofswith its vulgar growth. These little peaceful houses, huddled togetherbeneath the shelter of trees, with their bulging leaded windows anduneven roofs, somehow brought back to him the sense of the country, andsoothed him with the thought of the old farm-houses, white or grey, thehomes of quiet lives, harbors where, perhaps, no tormenting thoughts everbroke in.
For he had instinctively determined that there was neither rest norhealth in all the arid waste of streets about him. It seemed as if inthose dull rows of dwellings, in the prim new villas, red and white andstaring, there must be a leaven working which transformed all to basevulgarity. Beneath the dull sad slates, behind the blistered doors, loveturned to squalid intrigue, mirth to drunken clamor, and the mystery oflife became a common thing; religion was sought for in the greasy pietyand flatulent oratory of the Independent chapel, the stuccoed nightmareof the Doric columns. Nothing fine, nothing rare, nothing exquisite,it seemed, could exist in the weltering suburban sea, in the habitationswhich had risen from the stench and slime of the brickfields. It was asif the sickening fumes that steamed from the burning bricks had beensublimed into the shape of houses, and those who lived in these greyplaces could also claim kinship with the putrid mud.
Hence he had delighted in the few remains of the past that he could findstill surviving on the suburb's edge, in the grave old houses that stoodapart from the road, in the moldering taverns of the eighteenth century,in the huddled hamlets that had preserved only the glow and the sunlightof all the years that had passed over them. It appeared to him thatvulgarity and greasiness and squalor had come with a flood, that notonly the good but also the evil in man's heart had been made common andugly, that a sordid scum was mingled with all the springs, of death as oflife. It would be alike futile to search amongst these mean two-storiedhouses for a splendid sinner as for a splendid saint; the very vices ofthese people smelt of cabbage water and a pothouse vomit.
And so he had often fled away from the serried maze that encircled him,seeking for the old and worn and significant as an antiquary looks forthe fragments of the Roman temple amidst the modern shops. In some waythe gusts of wind and the beating rain of the night reminded him of anold house that had often attracted him with a strange indefinablecuriosity. He had found it on a grim grey day in March, when he had goneout under a leaden-molded sky, cowering from a dry freezing wind thatbrought with it the gloom and the doom of far unhappy Siberian plains.More than ever that day the suburb had oppressed him; insignificant,detestable, repulsive to body and mind, it was the only hell that avulgar age could conceive or make, an inferno created not by Dante but bythe jerry-builder. He had gone out to the north, and when he lifted uphis eyes again he found that he had chanced to turn up by one of thelittle lanes that still strayed across the broken fields. He had neverchosen this path before because the lane at its outlet was so whollydegraded and offensive, littered with rusty tins and broken crockery, andhedged in with a paling fashioned out of scraps of wire, rotting timber,and bending worn-out rails. But on this day, by happy chance, he had fledfrom the high road by the first opening that offered, and he no longergroped his way amongst obscene refuse, sickened by the bloated bodies ofdead dogs, and fetid odors from unclean decay, but the malpassage hadbecome a peaceful winding lane, with warm shelter beneath its banks fromthe dismal wind. For a mile he had walked quietly, and then a turn in theroad showed him a little glen or hollow, watered by such a tiny rushingbrooklet as his own woods knew, and beyond, alas, the glaring foreguardof a "new neighborhood"; raw red villas, semi-detached, and then a rowof lamentable shops.
But as he was about to turn back, in the hope of finding some otheroutlet, his attention was charmed by a small house that stood back alittle from the road on his right hand. There had been a white gate, butthe paint had long faded to grey and black, and the wood crumbled underthe touch, and only moss marked out the lines of the drive. The ironrailing round the lawn had fallen, and the poor flower-beds were chokedwith grass and a faded growth of weeds. But here and there a rosebushlingered amidst suckers that had sprung grossly from the root, and oneach side of the hall door were box trees, untrimmed, ragged, but stillgreen. The slate roof was all stained and livid, blotched with thedrippings of a great elm that stood at one corner of the neglected lawn,and marks of damp and decay were thick on the uneven walls, which hadbeen washed yellow many years before. There was a porch of trellis workbefore the door, and Lucian had seen it rock in the wind, swaying as ifevery gust must drive it down. There were two windows on the groundfloor, one on each side of the door, and two above, with a blind spacewhere a central window had been blocked up.
This poor and desolate house had fascinated him. Ancient and poor andfallen, disfigured by the slate roof and the yellow wash that hadreplaced the old mellow dipping tiles and the warm red walls, anddisfigured again by spots and patches of decay; it seemed as if its happydays were for ever ended. To Lucian it appealed with a sense of doom andhorror; the black streaks that crept upon the walls, and the green driftupon the roof, appeared not so much the work of foul weather and drippingboughs, as the outward signs of evil working and creeping in the livesof those within.
The stage seemed to him decked for doom, painted with the symbols oftragedy; and he wondered as he looked whether any one were so unhappy asto live there still. There were torn blinds in the windows, but he hadasked himself who could be so brave as to sit in that room, darkened bythe dreary box, and listen of winter nights to the rain upon the window,and the moaning of wind amongst the tossing boughs that beat against theroof.
He could not imagine that any chamber in such a house was habitable. Herethe dead had lain, through the white blind the thin light had filtered onthe rigid mouth, and still the floor must be wet with tears and stillthat great rocking elm echoed the groaning and the sobs of those whowatched. No doubt, the damp was rising, and the odor of the earth filledthe house, and made such as entered draw back, foreseeing the hour ofdeath.
Often the thought of this strange old house had haunted him; he hadimagined the empty rooms where a heavy paper peeled from the walls andhung in dark strips; and he could not believe that a light ever shonefrom those windows that stared black and glittering on the neglectedlawn. But tonight the wet and the storm seemed curiously to bring theimage of the place before him, and as the wind sounded he thought howunhappy those must be, if any there were, who sat in the musty chambersby a flickering light, and listened to the elm-tree moaning and beatingand weeping on the walls.
And tonight was Saturday night; and there was about that phrase somethingthat muttered of the condemned cell, of the agony of a doomed man.Ghastly to his eyes was the conception of any one sitting in that room tothe right of the door behind the larger box tree, where the wall wascracked above the window and smeared with a black stain in an ugly shape.
He knew how foolish it had been in the first place to trouble his mindwith such conceits of a dreary cottage on the outskirts of London. And itwas more foolish now to meditate these things, fantasies, feigned forms,the issue of a sad mood and a bleak day of spring. For soon, in a fewmoments, he was to rise to a new life. He was but reckoning up theaccount of his past, and when the light came he was to think no more ofsorrow and heaviness, of real or imagined terrors. He had stayed too longin London, and he would once more taste the breath of the hills, and seethe river winding in the long lovely valley; ah! he would go home.
Something like a thrill, the thrill of fear, passed over him as heremembered that there was no home. It was in the winter, a year and ahalf after his arrival in town, that he had suffered the loss of hisfather. He lay for many days prostrate, overwhelmed with sorrow and withthe thought that now indeed he was utterly alone in the world. MissDeacon was to live with another cousin in Yorkshire; the old home was atlast ended and done. He felt sorry that he had not written morefrequently to his father: there were things in his cousin's letters thathad made his heart sore. "Your poor father was always looking for yourletters," she wrote, "they used to cheer him so much. He nearly brokedown when you sent him that money last Christmas; he got it into his headthat you were starving yourself to send it him. He was hoping so muchthat you would have come down this Christmas, and kept asking me aboutthe plum-puddings months ago."
It was not only his father that had died, but with him the last stronglink was broken, and the past life, the days of his boyhood, grew faintas a dream. With his father his mother died again, and the long yearsdied, the time of his innocence, the memory of affection. He was sorrythat his letters had gone home so rarely; it hurt him to imagine hisfather looking out when the post came in the morning, and forced to besad because there was nothing. But he had never thought that his fathervalued the few lines that he wrote, and indeed it was often difficult toknow what to say. It would have been useless to write of those agonizingnights when the pen seemed an awkward and outlandish instrument, whenevery effort ended in shameful defeat, or of the happier hours when atlast wonder appeared and the line glowed, crowned and exalted. To poorMr. Taylor such tales would have seemed but trivial histories of someOriental game, like an odd story from a land where men have time for theinfinitely little, and can seriously make a science of arranging blossomsin a jar, and discuss perfumes instead of politics. It would have beenuseless to write to the rectory of his only interest, and so he wroteseldom.
And then he had been sorry because he could never write again and neversee his home. He had wondered whether he would have gone down to the oldplace at Christmas, if his father had lived. It was curious how commonthings evoked the bitterest griefs, but his father's anxiety that theplum-pudding should be good, and ready for him, had brought the tearsinto his eyes. He could hear him saying in a nervous voice that attemptedto be cheerful: "I suppose you will be thinking of the Christmas puddingssoon, Jane; you remember how fond Lucian used to be of plum-pudding. Ihope we shall see him this December." No doubt poor Miss Deacon paledwith rage at the suggestion that she should make Christmas pudding inJuly; and returned a sharp answer; but it was pathetic. The wind wailed,and the rain dashed and beat again and again upon the window. He imaginedthat all his thoughts of home, of the old rectory amongst the elms, hadconjured into his mind the sound of the storm upon the trees, for,tonight, very clearly he heard the creaking of the boughs, the noise ofboughs moaning and beating and weeping on the walls, and even a patteringof wet, on wet earth, as if there were a shrub near the window that shookoff the raindrops, before the gust.
That thrill, as it were a shudder of fear, passed over him again, and heknew not what had made him afraid. There were some dark shadow on hismind that saddened him; it seemed as if a vague memory of terrible dayshung like a cloud over his thought, but it was all indefinite, perhapsthe last grim and ragged edge of the melancholy wrack that had swelledover his life and the bygone years. He shivered and tried to rousehimself and drive away the sense of dread and shame that seemed so realand so awful, and yet he could not grasp it. But the torpor of sleep, theburden of the work that he had ended a few hours before, still weigheddown his limb and bound his thoughts. He could scarcely believe that hehad been busy at his desk a little while ago, and that just before thewinter day closed it and the rain began to fall he had laid down the penwith a sigh of relief, and had slept in his chair. It was rather as if hehad slumbered deeply through a long and weary night, as if an awfulvision of flame and darkness and the worm that dieth not had come to himsleeping. But he would dwell no more on the darkness; he wentback to the early days in London when he had said farewell to the hillsand to the waterpools, and had set to work in this little room in thedingy street.
How he had toiled and labored at the desk before him! He had put awaythe old wild hopes of the masterpiece conceived and executed in a furyof inspiration, wrought out in one white heat of creative joy; it wasenough if by dint of long perseverance and singleness of desire he couldat last, in pain and agony and despair, after failure and disappointmentand effort constantly renewed, fashion something of which he need not beashamed. He had put himself to school again, and had, with what patiencehe could command, ground his teeth into the rudiments, resolved that atlast he would test out the heart of the mystery. They were good nightsto remember, these; he was glad to think of the little ugly room, withits silly wall-paper and its "bird's-eye" furniture, lighted up, whilehe sat at the bureau and wrote on into the cold stillness of the Londonmorning, when the flickering lamplight and the daystar shone together.It was an interminable labor, and he had always known it to be ashopeless as alchemy. The gold, the great and glowing masterpiece, wouldnever shine amongst the dead ashes and smoking efforts of the crucible,but in the course of the life, in the interval between the failures, hemight possibly discover curious things.
These were the good nights that he could look back on without any fear orshame, when he had been happy and content on a diet of bread and tea andtobacco, and could hear of some imbecility passing into its hundredththousand, and laugh cheerfully—if only that last page had been imaginedaright, if the phrases noted in the still hours rang out their music whenhe read them in the morning. He remembered the drolleries and fantasiesthat the worthy Miss Deacon used to write to him, and how he had grinnedat her words of reproof, admonition, and advice. She had once instigatedDolly fils to pay him a visit, and that young prop of respectabilityhad talked about the extraordinary running of Bolter at the Scurraghmeeting in Ireland; and then, glancing at Lucian's books, had inquiredwhether any of them had "warm bits." He had been kind though patronizing,and seemed to have moved freely in the most brilliant society of StokeNewington. He had not been able to give any information as to the presentcondition of Edgar Allan Poe's old school. It appeared eventually thathis report at home had not been a very favorable one, for no invitationto high tea had followed, as Miss Deacon had hoped. The Dollys knew manynice people, who were well off, and Lucian's cousin, as she afterwardssaid, had done her best to introduce him to the beau monde of thosenorthern suburbs.
But after the visit of the young Dolly, with what joy he had returned tothe treasures which he had concealed from profane eyes. He had looked outand seen his visitor on board the tram at the street corner, and helaughed out loud, and locked his door. There had been moments when he waslonely, and wished to hear again the sound of friendly speech, but, aftersuch an irruption of suburban futility, it was a keen delight, to feelthat he was secure on his tower, that he could absorb himself in hiswonderful task as safe and silent as if he were in mid-desert.
But there was one period that he dared not revive; he could no bear tothink of those weeks of desolation and terror in the winter after hiscoming to London. His mind was sluggish, and he could not quite rememberhow many years had passed since that dismal experience; it sounded all anold story, but yet it was still vivid, a flaming scroll of terror fromwhich he turned his eyes away. One awful scene glowed into his memory,and he could not shut out the sight of an orgy, of dusky figures whirlingin a ring, of lurid naphtha flares blazing in the darkness, of greatglittering lamps, like infernal thuribles, very slowly swaying in aviolent blast of air. And there was something else, something which hecould not remember, but it filled him with terror, but it slunk in thedark places of his soul, as a wild beast crouches in the depths of acave.
Again, and without reason, he began to image to himself that oldmoldering house in the field. With what a loud incessant noise the windmust be clamoring about on this fearful night, how the great elm swayedand cried in the storm, and the rain dashed and pattered on the windows,and dripped on the sodden earth from the shaking shrubs beside the door.He moved uneasily on his chair, and struggled to put the picture out ofhis thoughts; but in spite of himself he saw the stained uneven walls,that ugly blot of mildew above the window, and perhaps a feeble gleam oflight filtered through the blind, and some one, unhappy above all and forever lost, sat within the dismal room. Or rather, every window was black,without a glimmer of hope, and he who was shut in thick darkness heardthe wind and the rain, and the noise of the elm-tree moaning and beatingand weeping on the walls.
For all his effort the impression would not leave him, and as he satbefore his desk looking into the vague darkness he could almost see thatchamber which he had so often imagined; the low whitewashed ceiling heldup by a heavy beam, the smears of smoke and long usage, the cracks andfissures of the plaster. Old furniture, shabby, deplorable, battered,stood about the room; there was a horsehair sofa worn and tottering, anda dismal paper, patterned in a livid red, blackened and moldered near thefloor, and peeled off and hung in strips from the dank walls. And therewas that odor of decay, of the rank soil steaming, of rotting wood, avapor that choked the breath and made the heart full of fear andheaviness.
Lucian again shivered with a thrill of dread; he was afraid that he hadoverworked himself and that he was suffering from the first symptoms ofgrave illness. His mind dwelt on confused and terrible recollections, andwith a mad ingenuity gave form and substance to phantoms; and even now hedrew a long breath, almost imagining that the air in his room was heavyand noisome, that it entered his nostrils with some taint of the crypt.And his body was still languid, and though he made a half motion to risehe could not find enough energy for the effort, and he sank again intothe chair. At all events, he would think no more of that sad house in thefield; he would return to those long struggles with letters, to the happynights when he had gained victories.
He remembered something of his escape from the desolation and the worsethan desolation that had obsessed him during that first winter in London.He had gone free one bleak morning in February, and after those drearyterrible weeks the desk and the heap and litter of papers had once moreengulfed and absorbed him. And in the succeeding summer, of a night whenhe lay awake and listened to the birds, shining images came wantonly tohim. For an hour, while the dawn brightened, he had felt the presence ofan age, the resurrection of the life that the green fields had hidden,and his heart stirred for joy when he knew that he held and possessedall the loveliness that had so long moldered. He could scarcely fallasleep for eager and leaping thoughts, and as soon as his breakfastwas over he went out and bought paper and pens of a certain celestialstationer in Notting Hill. The street was not changed as he passed to andfro on his errand. The rattling wagons jostled by at intervals, a rarehansom came spinning down from London, there sounded the same hum andjangle of the gliding trams. The languid life of the pavement wasunaltered; a few people, un-classed, without salience or possibledescription, lounged and walked from east to west, and from west to east,or slowly dropped into the byways to wander in the black waste to thenorth, or perhaps go astray in the systems that stretched towards theriver. He glanced down these by-roads as he passed, and was astonished,as always, at their mysterious and desert aspect. Some were utterlyempty; lines of neat, appalling residences, trim and garnished as if foroccupation, edging the white glaring road; and not a soul was abroad, andnot a sound broke their stillness. It was a picture of the desolation ofmidnight lighted up, but empty and waste as the most profound and solemnhours before the day. Other of these by-roads, of older settlement, werefurnished with more important houses, standing far back from thepavement, each in a little wood of greenery, and thus one might look downas through a forest vista, and see a way smooth and guarded with lowwalls and yet untrodden, and all a leafy silence. Here and there in someof these echoing roads a figure seemed lazily advancing in the distance,hesitating and delaying, as if lost in the labyrinth. It was difficult tosay which were the more dismal, these deserted streets that wandered awayto right and left, or the great main thoroughfare with its narcotic andshadowy life. For the latter appeared vast, interminable, grey, and thosewho traveled by it were scarcely real, the bodies of the living, butrather the uncertain and misty shapes that come and go across the desertin an Eastern tale, when men look up from the sand and see a caravan passthem, all in silence, without a cry or a greeting. So they passed andrepassed each other on those pavements, appearing and vanishing, eachintent on his own secret, and wrapped in obscurity. One might have swornthat not a man saw his neighbor who met him or jostled him, that hereevery one was a phantom for the other, though the lines of their pathscrossed and recrossed, and their eyes stared like the eyes of live men.When two went by together, they mumbled and cast distrustful glancesbehind them as though afraid all the world was an enemy, and thepattering of feet was like the noise of a shower of rain. Curiousappearances and simulations of life gathered at points in the road, forat intervals the villas ended and shops began in a dismal row, and lookedso hopeless that one wondered who could buy. There were women flutteringuneasily about the greengrocers, and shabby things in rusty black touchedand retouched the red lumps that an unshaven butcher offered, and alreadyin the corner public there was a confused noise, with a tossing of voicesthat rose and fell like a Jewish chant, with the senseless stir ofmarionettes jerked into an imitation of gaiety. Then, in crossing a sidestreet that seemed like grey mid-winter in stone, he trespassed from oneworld to another, for an old decayed house amidst its garden held theopposite corner. The laurels had grown into black skeletons, patched withgreen drift, the ilex gloomed over the porch, the deodar had blighted theflower-beds. Dark ivies swarmed over an elm-tree, and a brown clusteringfungus sprang in gross masses on the lawn, showing where the roots ofdead trees moldered. The blue verandah, the blue balcony over the door,had faded to grey, and the stucco was blotched with ugly marks ofweather, and a dank smell of decay, that vapor of black rotten earth inold town gardens, hung heavy about the gates. And then a row of mustyvillas had pushed out in shops to the pavement, and the things in fadedblack buzzed and stirred about the limp cabbages, and the red lumps ofmeat.
It was the same terrible street, whose pavements he had trodden so often,where sunshine seemed but a gaudy light, where the fume of burning bricksalways drifted. On black winter nights he had seen the sparse lightsglimmering through the rain and drawing close together, as the drearyroad vanished in long perspective. Perhaps this was its most appropriatemoment, when nothing of its smug villas and skeleton shops remained butthe bright patches of their windows, when the old house amongst itsmoldering shrubs was but a dark cloud, and the streets to the north andsouth seemed like starry wastes, beyond them the blackness of infinity.Always in the daylight it had been to him abhorred and abominable, andits grey houses and purlieus had been fungus-like sproutings, anefflorescence of horrible decay.
But on that bright morning neither the dreadful street nor those whomoved about it appalled him. He returned joyously to his den, andreverently laid out the paper on his desk. The world about him was but agrey shadow hovering on a shining wall; its noises were faint as therustling of trees in a distant wood. The lovely and exquisite forms ofthose who served the Amber Venus were his distinct, clear, and manifestvisions, and for one amongst them who came to him in a fire of bronzehair his heart stirred with the adoration of love. She it was who stoodforth from all the rest and fell down prostrate before the radiant formin amber, drawing out her pins in curious gold, her glowing brooches ofenamel, and pouring from a silver box all her treasures of jewels andprecious stones, chrysoberyl and sardonyx, opal and diamond, topaz andpearl. And then she stripped from her body her precious robes and stoodbefore the goddess in the glowing mist of her hair, praying that to herwho had given all and came naked to the shrine, love might be given, andthe grace of Venus. And when at last, after strange adventures, herprayer was granted, then when the sweet light came from the sea, and herlover turned at dawn to that bronze glory, he saw beside him a littlestatuette of amber. And in the shrine, far in Britain where the blackrains stained the marble, they found the splendid and sumptuous statue ofthe Golden Venus, the last fine robe of silk that the lady had dedicatedfalling from her fingers, and the jewels lying at her feet. And her facewas like the lady's face when the sun had brightened it on that day ofher devotion.
The bronze mist glimmered before Lucian's eyes; he felt as though thesoft floating hair touched his forehead and his lips and his hands. Thefume of burning bricks, the reek of cabbage water, never reached hisnostrils that were filled with the perfume of rare unguents, with thebreath of the violet sea in Italy. His pleasure was an inebriation, anecstasy of joy that destroyed all the vile Hottentot kraals and mudavenues as with one white lightning flash, and through the hours of thatday he sat enthralled, not contriving a story with patient art, but raptinto another time, and entranced by the urgent gleam in the lady's eyes.
The little tale of The Amber Statuette had at last issued from a humbleoffice in the spring after his father's death. The author was utterlyunknown; the author's Murray was a wholesale stationer and printer inprocess of development, so that Lucian was astonished when the bookbecame a moderate success. The reviewers had been sadly irritated, andeven now he recollected with cheerfulness an article in an influentialdaily paper, an article pleasantly headed: "Where are the disinfectants?"
And then—but all the months afterwards seemed doubtful, there were onlybroken revelations of the laborious hours renewed, and the white nightswhen he had seen the moonlight fade and the gaslight grow wan at theapproach of dawn.
He listened. Surely that was the sound of rain falling on sodden ground,the heavy sound of great swollen drops driven down from wet leaves by thegust of wind, and then again the strain of boughs sang above the tumultof the air; there was a doleful noise as if the storm shook the masts ofa ship. He had only to get up and look out of the window and he would seethe treeless empty street, and the rain starring the puddles under thegas-lamp, but he would wait a little while.
He tried to think why, in spite of all his resolutions, a dark horrorseemed to brood more and more over all his mind. How often he had sat andworked on just such nights as this, contented if the words were in accordthough the wind might wail, though the air were black with rain. Evenabout the little book that he had made there seemed some taint, someshuddering memory that came to him across the gulf of forgetfulness.Somehow the remembrance of the offering to Venus, of the phrases that hehad so lovingly invented, brought back again the dusky figures thatdanced in the orgy, beneath the brassy glittering lamps; and again thenaphtha flares showed the way to the sad house in the fields, and the redglare lit up the mildewed walls and the black hopeless windows. He gaspedfor breath, he seemed to inhale a heavy air that reeked of decay androttenness, and the odor of the clay was in his nostrils.
That unknown cloud that had darkened his thoughts grew blacker andengulfed him, despair was heavy upon him, his heart fainted with ahorrible dread. In a moment, it seemed, a veil would be drawn away andcertain awful things would appear.
He strove to rise from his chair, to cry out, but he could not. Deep,deep the darkness closed upon him, and the storm sounded far away. TheRoman fort surged up, terrific, and he saw the writhing boughs in a ring,and behind them a glow and heat of fire. There were hideous shapes thatswarmed in the thicket of the oaks; they called and beckoned to him, androse into the air, into the flame that was smitten from heaven about thewalls. And amongst them was the form of the beloved, but jets of flameissued from her breasts, and beside her was a horrible old woman, naked;and they, too, summoned him to mount the hill.
He heard Dr. Burrows whispering of the strange things that had been foundin old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage, obscene figures, and unknown contrivances.She was a witch, he said, and the mistress of witches.
He fought against the nightmare, against the illusion that bewilderedhim. All his life, he thought, had been an evil dream, and for the commonworld he had fashioned an unreal red garment, that burned in his eyes.Truth and the dream were so mingled that now he could not divide one fromthe other. He had let Annie drink his soul beneath the hill, on the nightwhen the moonfire shone, but he had not surely seen her exalted in theflame, the Queen of the Sabbath. Dimly he remembered Dr. Burrows comingto see him in London, but had he not imagined all the rest?
Again he found himself in the dusky lane, and Annie floated down to himfrom the moon above the hill. His head sank upon her breast again, but,alas, it was aflame. And he looked down, and he saw that his own fleshwas aflame, and he knew that the fire could never be quenched.
There was a heavy weight upon his head, his feet were nailed to the floor,and his arms bound tight beside him. He seemed to himself to rage andstruggle with the strength of a madman; but his hand only stirred andquivered a little as it lay upon the desk.
Again he was astray in the mist; wandering through the waste avenues of acity that had been ruined from ages. It had been splendid as Rome,terrible as Babylon, and for ever the darkness had covered it, and it laydesolate for ever in the accursed plain. And far and far the greypassages stretched into the night, into the icy fields, into the place ofeternal gloom.
Ring within ring the awful temple closed around him; unending circles ofvast stones, circle within circle, and every circle less throughout allages. In the center was the sanctuary of the infernal rite, and he wasborne thither as in the eddies of a whirlpool, to consummate his ruin, tocelebrate the wedding of the Sabbath. He flung up his arms and beat theair, resisting with all his strength, with muscles that could throw downmountains; and this time his little finger stirred for an instant, andhis foot twitched upon the floor.
Then suddenly a flaring street shone before him. There was darkness roundabout him, but it flamed with hissing jets of light and naphtha fires,and great glittering lamps swayed very slowly in a violent blast of air.A horrible music, and the exultation of discordant voices, swelled in hisears, and he saw an uncertain tossing crowd of dusky figures that circledand leapt before him. There was a noise like the chant of the lost, andthen there appeared in the midst of the orgy, beneath a red flame, thefigure of a woman. Her bronze hair and flushed cheeks were illuminate,and an argent light shone from her eyes, and with a smile that frozehis heart her lips opened to speak to him. The tossing crowd faded away,falling into a gulf of darkness, and then she drew out from her hair pinsof curious gold, and glowing brooches in enamel, and poured out jewelsbefore him from a silver box, and then she stripped from her body herprecious robes, and stood in the glowing mist of her hair, and held outher arms to him. But he raised his eyes and saw the mould and decaygaining on the walls of a dismal room, and a gloomy paper was dropping tothe rotting floor. A vapor of the grave entered his nostrils, and hecried out with a loud scream; but there was only an indistinct gutturalmurmur in his throat.
And presently the woman fled away from him, and he pursued her. She fledaway before him through midnight country, and he followed after her,chasing her from thicket to thicket, from valley to valley. And at lasthe captured her and won her with horrible caresses, and they went up tocelebrate and make the marriage of the Sabbath. They were within thematted thicket, and they writhed in the flames, insatiable, for ever.They were tortured, and tortured one another, in the sight of thousandswho gathered thick about them; and their desire rose up like a blacksmoke.
Without, the storm swelled to the roaring of an awful sea, the wind grewto a shrill long scream, the elm-tree was riven and split with the crashof a thunderclap. To Lucian the tumult and the shock came as a gentlemurmur, as if a brake stirred before a sudden breeze in summer. And thena vast silence overwhelmed him.
A few minutes later there was a shuffling of feet in the passage, and thedoor was softly opened. A woman came in, holding a light, and she peeredcuriously at the figure sitting quite still in the chair before the desk.The woman was half dressed, and she had let her splendid bronze hair flowdown, her cheeks were flushed, and as she advanced into the shabby room,the lamp she carried cast quaking shadows on the moldering paper, patchedwith marks of rising damp, and hanging in strips from the wet, drippingwall. The blind had not been drawn, but no light or glimmer of lightfiltered through the window, for a great straggling box tree that beatthe rain upon the panes shut out even the night. The woman came softly,and as she bent down over Lucian an argent gleam shone from her browneyes, and the little curls upon her neck were like golden work uponmarble. She put her hand to his heart, and looked up, and beckoned tosome one who was waiting by the door.
"Come in, Joe," she said. "It's just as I thought it would be: 'Death bymisadventure'"; and she held up a little empty bottle of dark blue glassthat was standing on the desk. "He would take it, and I always knew hewould take a drop too much one of these days."
"What's all those papers that he's got there?"
"Didn't I tell you? It was crool to see him. He got it into 'is 'ead hecould write a book; he's been at it for the last six months. Look 'ere."
She spread the neat pile of manuscript broadcast over the desk, and tooka sheet at haphazard. It was all covered with illegible hopelessscribblings; only here and there it was possible to recognize a word.
"Why, nobody could read it, if they wanted to."
"It's all like that. He thought it was beautiful. I used to 'ear himjabbering to himself about it, dreadful nonsense it was he used to talk.I did my best to tongue him out of it, but it wasn't any good."
"He must have been a bit dotty. He's left you everything."
"Yes."
"You'll have to see about the funeral."
"There'll be the inquest and all that first."
"You've got evidence to show he took the stuff."
"Yes, to be sure I have. The doctor told him he would be certain to dofor himself, and he was found two or three times quite silly in thestreets. They had to drag him away from a house in Halden Road. He wascarrying on dreadful, shaking at the gaite, and calling out it was 'is'ome and they wouldn't let him in. I heard Dr. Manning myself tell 'im inthis very room that he'd kill 'imself one of these days. Joe! Aren't youashamed of yourself. I declare you're quite rude, and it's almost Sundaytoo. Bring the light over here, can't you?"
The man took up the blazing paraffin lamp, and set it on the desk, besidethe scattered heap of that terrible manuscript. The flaring light shonethrough the dead eyes into the dying brain, and there was a glow within,as if great furnace doors were opened.
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