The Daughters of Danaus Part 83

"And my robin? I hope he has not deserted us."

"Oh, no, he comes right into the room sometimes and hops about, just as he did that afternoon, the last time you was here! I think it's the same bird, for he likes to perch on that table and pick up the crumbs."

"Poor little soul! If you will give me a sc.r.a.p of bread, Mrs.

Williams----"

The caretaker left the room, and returned with a thick slice, which Hadria crumbled and scattered on the window-sill, as she stepped out to the terrace.

The calm old mansion with its delicate outlines, its dreamy exquisite stateliness, spoke of rest and sweet serenity. The place had the melancholy but also the repose of greatness. It was rich in all that lies nearest to the heart of that mysterious, dual-faced divinity that we call beauty, compounded of sorrow and delight.

Ah! if only its owner could come and take up his abode here. If only he would get well! Hadria's thoughts wandered backwards to that wonderful evening, when she had played to him and Algitha, and they had all watched the sunset afterwards, from the terrace. How long was it since she had touched the piano in this old drawing-room? Never since she returned from Paris. Even her own piano at home had been almost equally silent. She believed that she had not only quite abandoned hope with regard to music, but that she had prepared herself to face the inevitable decay of power, the inevitable proofs of her loss, as time went on. But so far, she had only had proofs that she could do astonis.h.i.+ngly much if she had the chance.

To-day, for the first time, the final ordeal had to be gone through. And her imagination had never conceived its horror. She was to be taken at her word. The neglected gift was beginning to show signs of decay and enfeeblement. It had given fair warning for many a year, by the persistent appeal that it made, the persistent pain that it caused; but the famine had told upon it at last. It was dying. As this fact insinuated itself into the consciousness, in the teeth of a wild effort to deny it, despair flamed up, fierce and violent. She regretted that she had not thrown up everything long ago, rather than endure this lingering death; she cursed her hesitation, she cursed her fate, her training, her circ.u.mstances, she cursed herself. Whatever there was to curse, she cursed. What hideous nonsense to imagine herself ready to face this last insult of fate! She was like a martyr, who invites the stake and the f.a.ggot, and knows what he has undertaken only when the flames begin to curl about his feet. She had offered up her power, her imperious creative instinct, to the Lares and Penates; those greedy little G.o.dlets whom there was no appeasing while an inch of one remained that they could tear to pieces. She clenched her hands, in agony. The whole being recoiled now, at the eleventh hour, as a fierce wild creature that one tries to bury alive. She looked back along the line of the past and saw, with too clear eyes, the whole insidious process, so stealthy that she had hardly detected it, at the time. She remembered those afternoons at the Priory, when the restless, ill-trained power would a.s.sert itself, free for the moment, from the fetters and the dismemberment that awaited it in ordinary life. But like a creature accustomed to the yoke, she had found it increasingly difficult to use the moments of opportunity when they came. The force of daily usage, the necessary bending of thoughts in certain habitual directions, had a.s.sisted the crippling process, and though the power still lay there, stiffer than of yore, yet the preliminary movements and readjustments used up time and strength, and then gradually, with the perpetual repet.i.tion of adverse habits, the whole process became slower, harder, crueler.

"Good heavens! are _all_ doors going to be shut against me?"

It was more than she could bear! And yet it must be borne--unless--no, there was no "unless." It was of no use to coquet with thoughts of suicide. She had thought all that out long ago, and had sought, at more than one crisis of desperate misery, for refuge from the horror and the insults of life. But there were always others to be considered. She could not strike them so terrible a blow. Retreat was ruthlessly cut off. Nothing remained but the endurance of a conscious slow decay; nothing but increasing loss and feebleness, as the surly years went by.

They were going, going, these years of life, slipping away with their spoils. Youth was departing, everything was vanis.h.i.+ng; her very self, bit by bit, slowly but surely, till the House of Life would grow narrow and shrunken to the sight, the roof descend. The gruesome old story of the imprisoned prince flashed into her mind; the wretched captive, young and life-loving, who used to wake up, each morning, to find that of the original seven windows of his dungeon, one had disappeared, while the walls had advanced a foot, and to-morrow yet another foot, till at length the last window had closed up, and the walls shrank together and crushed him to death.

"I can't, I _can't_ endure it!"

Hadria had leaned forward against the key-board, which gave forth a loud crash of discordant notes, strangely expressive of the fall and failure of her spirit.

She remained thus motionless, while the airs wandered in from the garden, and a broad ray of sunlight showed the strange incessant gyrations of the dust atoms, that happened to lie within the revealing brightness. The silence was perfect.

Hadria raised her head at last, and her eyes wandered out to the sweet old garden, decked in the miraculous hues of spring. The unutterable loveliness brought, for a second, a strange, inconsequent sense of peace; it seemed like a promise and a message from an unknown G.o.d.

But after that momentary and inexplicable experience, the babble of thought went on as before. The old dream mounted again heavenwards, like a cloud at sunset; wild fancies fas.h.i.+oned themselves in the brain. And then, in fantastic images, Hadria seemed to see a panorama of her own life and the general life pa.s.s before her, in all their incongruity and confusion. The great ma.s.s of that life showed itself as prose, because the significance of things had not been grasped or suspected; but here and there, the veil was pierced--by some suffering soul, by some poet's vision--and the darkness of our daily, pompous, careworn, ridiculous little existence made painfully visible.

"It is all absurd, all futile!" (so moved the procession of the thoughts); "and meanwhile the steady pulse of life beats on, not pausing while we battle out our days, not waiting while we decide how we shall live. We are possessed by a sentiment, an ideal, a religion; old Time makes no comment, but moves quietly on; we fling the thing aside as tawdry, insufficient; the ideal is tarnished, experience of the world converts us--and still unmoved, he paces on. We are off on another chase; another conception of things possesses us; and still the beat of his footstep sounds in our ears, above the tumult. We think and aspire and dream, and meanwhile the fires grow cold upon the hearth, the daily cares and common needs plead eloquently for our undivided service; the stupendous movement of Existence goes on unceasingly, at our doors; thousands struggling for gold and fame and mere bread, and resorting to infamous devices to obtain them; the great commercial currents flow and flow, according to their mystic laws; the price of stocks goes up, goes down, and with them, the life and fate of thousands; the inconsequent bells ring out from Craddock Church, and the people congregate; the grave of the schoolmistress sleeps in the suns.h.i.+ne, and the sound of the bells streams over it--meaning no irony--to lose itself in the quiet of the hills; rust and dust collect in one's house, in one's soul; and this and that, and that and this,--like the pendulum of the old time-piece, with its solemn tick--dock the moments of one's life, with each its dull little claim and its tough little tether, and lead one decorously to the gateway of Eternity."

There was a flutter of wings, in the room. A robin hopped in at the window and perched daintily on the table-ledge, its delicate claws outlined against the whiteness of the dust-sheet, its head inquisitively on one side, as if it were asking the reason of the musician's unusual silence. Suddenly, the little creature fluffed out its feathers, drew itself together, and warbled forth a rich ecstatic song, that seemed to be deliberately addressed to its human companion. Hadria raised her bowed head. Up welled the swift unaccustomed tears, while the robin, with increasing enthusiasm, continued his song. His theme, doubtless, was of the flicker of sunlit shrubberies, the warmth of summer, the glory of spring, the sweetness of the revolving seasons. For cure of heart-ache, he suggested the pleasantness of garden nooks, and the repose that lingers about a dew-sprinkled lawn. All these things were warmly commended to the human being whose song of life had ceased.

"But they break my heart, little singer, they break my heart!"

The robin lifted up its head and warbled more rapturously than ever.

The tears were falling fast now, and silently. The thoughts ran on and on. "I know it all, I know it all, and my heart is broken--and it is my own fault--and it does not matter--the world is full of broken hearts--and it does not matter, it does not matter. But, oh, if the pain might stop, if the pain might stop! The robin sings now, because the spring is here; but it is not always spring. And some day--perhaps not this winter, but some day--the dear little brown body will agonize--it will die alone, in the horrible great universe; one thinks little of a robin, but it agonizes all the same when its time comes; it agonizes all the same."

The thoughts were drowned, for a moment, in a flood of terrible, unbearable pity for all the sorrow of the world.

The robin seemed to think that he had a mission to cheer his companion, for he warbled merrily on. And beside him, the dust-motes danced the wildest of dances, in the shaft of suns.h.i.+ne.

"It is very lovely, it is very lovely--the world is a miracle, but it is all like a taunt, it is like an insult, this glory of the world. I am born a woman, and to be born a woman is to be exquisitely sensitive to insult and to live under it always, always. I wish that I were as marble to the magic of Life, I wish that I cared for nothing and felt nothing.

I pray only that the dream and the longing may be killed, and killed quickly!"

In the silence, the bird's note sounded clear and tender. The dance of the dust-motes, like the great dance of Life itself, went on without ceasing.

The robin seemed to insist on a brighter view of things. He urged his companion to take comfort. Had the spring not come?

"But you do not understand, you do not understand, little soul that sings--the spring is torturing me and taunting me. If only it would kill me!"

The robin fluffed out his feathers, and began again to impart his sweet philosophy. Hadria was shedding the first unchecked tears that she had shed since her earliest childhood. And then, for the second time to-day, that strange unexplained peace stole into her heart. Reason came quickly and drove it away with a sneer, and the horror and the darkness closed round again.

"If I might only die, if I might only die!"

But the little bird sang on.

CHAPTER LI.

"Quite hopeless!"

Joseph Fleming repeated the words incredulously.

"Yes," said Lady Engleton, "it is the terrible truth."

The Professor had been growing worse, and at length, his state became so alarming that he decided to return to England. Miss Du Prel and an old friend whom she had met abroad, accompanied him.

"I understand they are all at the Priory," said Joseph.

"Yes; Miss Du Prel telegraphed to Mrs. Temperley, and Mrs. Temperley and I put our heads together and arranged matters as well as we could in the emergency, so that the Professor's wish might be gratified. He desired to return to the Priory, where his boyhood was spent."

"And is there really no hope?"

"None at all, the doctor says."

"Dear me, dear me!" cried Joseph. "And is he not expected to live through the summer?"

"The summer! ah no, Mr. Fleming, he is not expected to live many days."

"Dear me, dear me!" was all that Joseph could say. Then after a pause, he added, "I fear Mrs. Temperley will feel it very much. They were such old friends."

"Oh! poor woman, she is heart-broken."

The Professor lingered longer than the doctor had expected. He was very weak, and could not bear the fatigue of seeing many people. But he was perfectly cheerful, and when feeling a little better at times, he would laugh and joke in his old kindly way, and seemed to enjoy the fragment of life that still remained to him.

"I am so glad I have seen the spring again," he said, "and that I am here, in the old home."

He liked to have the window thrown wide open, when the day was warm.

Then his bed would be wheeled closer to it, so that the suns.h.i.+ne often lay across it, and the scent of the flowering shrubs and the odour of growth, as he called it, floated in upon him. He looked out into a world of exquisite greenery and of serene sky. The room was above the drawing-room, and if the drawing-room windows were open, he could hear Hadria playing. He often used to ask for music.

The request would come generally after an exhausting turn of pain, when he could not bear the fatigue of seeing people.