Sister Teresa Part 50

"All the happiness I ever had I owe to you. How can I thank you for those ten years?"

"But you paid for them with a great deal of sorrow."

"Had it not been for you, Evelyn, I shouldn't have lived at all. How often have I told you that? I have seen all the world, and yet I have only seen one thing in the world--you."

"Owen, you mustn't speak to me like that."

"While that bird is singing you are afraid to listen to me! How pa.s.sionately it sings, but how little it feels compared with what I am feeling. Why did you say that the Evelyn of old is dead?"

"Well, Owen, don't you know that we are always dying, always changing. You are in love, not with me, but with your memory of me."

"A great deal of my love is memory, of course, still--"

Words again seemed vain, foolish, even sacrilegious, so little could he convey to her of what he believed to be the truth, and they walked in silence through the fragrance of the soft night, thinking of the colour of the sky, in which the sunset was not yet quite dead. His memory of his love of this woman long ago in Dulwich, in Paris, and in all the cities and scenes they had visited together, raised him above himself; and he felt that her soul mingled with his in an ecstatic sadness beyond words, but which the nightingale sang clearly; the stars, too, sang it clearly; and they stood mute in the midst of the immortal symphony about them. "Evelyn, I love you. How wonderful our lives have been!" But what use to break the music, audible and inaudible, with such weak words? The villagers under the hill could speak as well; the bird in the bush and the stars above it were speaking for him; and he was content to listen.

The silence of the night grew more intense, there were millions of stars, small and great, and the moon now shone amidst them alone, "of different birth," divided from them for ever as he was divided from this woman, whose arm touched his as they walked through the darkness, divided for ever, unable to communicate his soul to hers.

Did she understand what he was feeling--the mystery of their lives written in the stars, sung by the nightingale and breathed by the flowers? Did she understand? Had the convent rule left her sufficient sensibility to understand such simple human truths?

"How sweetly the tobacco plant smells!" she said.

"Yes, doesn't it? But what is the meaning of our story? My finding you at Dulwich--Evelyn, have you ever thought enough about it? How extraordinary that event was, extraordinary as the stars above us; my going down that evening and hearing you sing? Do you remember the look with which you greeted me--do you remember that cup of tea?"

"It was coffee."

"And then all our meetings in the garden under the cedar-tree?"

"You used to say we looked like a picture by Marcus Stone when we sat under it."

"Never mind what we looked like. Think of it! Of our journey to Paris, and my visit to Brussels to hear you sing."

"And Madame Savelli, who wouldn't let me speak to you; she said I might tire my voice."

"Yes, how I hated her and Olive that day! You sang 'Elizabeth,' and when you walked up, to the sound of flutes and clarionettes,'

seemingly to the stars, there was something in the way you did it that put a fear into my heart. It was all predestined from the beginning."

"So you believe, Owen, that the end is fated, and that I was created to come back after many wanderings to help these poor little crippled boys?"

"Is that the meaning of it all, Evelyn?"

"Maybe--who knows?--that meaning as well as another." And through the dusk he could see her eyes shining with something of their old light.

"Was it fated from the beginning that I should only, meet you here to part with you again? Is that the meaning you read in the song of the nightingale, in the stare of the moon and the perfume of the garden?

There is a meaning, Evelyn, in our lives for certain, but are you reading it aright?"

For a moment the meaning of their lives seemed clear to them. Life had a meaning! for a moment, they were both sure of it; they had met for something, there was a design in life, and though they were separated on earth they seemed to move in celestial circles, just as the stars moved in that great design above them, each sphere rolling on, filled with love for its sister sphere, guided and controlled each by the other, yet always apart. Owen walked thinking how, billions of years hence, all those lights might wax into one light, all souls to one soul, all ends to one end. For one moment he Height possess Evelyn's soul as he had never been able to possess it on earth... perhaps.

"I love you now just as much as I loved you before, perhaps more, for there is memory to aid me."

"You are in love with memory, not with me."

Her words went to his heart, as the thorn of the rose is said to go to the nightingale's heart, and, unable to answer her, he listened.

"How wonderfully the bird sings, the interpreter of the primal melancholy from which we never escape... since the beginning of time, its interpreter."

"Is he telling his own story, or is he telling ours?"

"Both, for all love songs are as ours, made of the same intense pa.s.sionate melancholy. Why is love the most melancholy of all joys?

With what pa.s.sionate melancholy he enchants her who is sitting in the nest close by! The origin of art is s.e.x; woman is a reed, and our desire--"

"Hush! Listen to the nightingale! His discourse is better than yours."

"How absorbed he is in his song, stave after stave; he seems to say, 'You want more tunes? If that is all, you shall have more.' Hush!" And they listened to the rich warble, sounding so strange in the midst of the lonely country. "A love-call of three notes, which he repeats before pa.s.sing into cadenzas. Hush!" The bird started again, and this time as if encouraged by the success of his last efforts.

"What flutings! What trills! What runs! Pearls and jewels scattered.

Little tunes of three or four notes, casting a spell about the hillside, followed by pa.s.sionate cadenzas."

Another bird answered far away out of the stillness, the same sweet strain it was; and listening, they seemed to hear the same strain within their hearts--a silent, mysterious song. All the world seemed singing the same sweet strain of melancholy, now when the moon pa.s.sed out of the dusk--shining high up in the heavens, with stars above and beneath--Owen thought of some mysterious music-maker. Flocks of various coloured stars, flaming Jupiter high up in the sky, red Mars low down in the horizon, the Great Bear beautifully distinct, the polar star at an angle--the star whereby Owen used to steer. All the world seemed to be going to the same sweet strain, the soul, seemingly freed, rose to the lips, and, in her pride, sought words wherewith to tell the pa.s.sionate melancholy of the night and of life.

But the soul could not tell it; only the nightingale, who, without knowing it, was singing what the soul may only feel.

"The bird is telling me what your voice used to tell me long ago."

The lovers wandered through the garden, suffused with delicate scents, and Owen told her of the legend of the nightingale and the swallow, a legend coming down from some barbaric age, from a king called Pandion, who, despite his wife's beauty, fell in love with her sister, and ravished her in some town in Thessaly, the name of which Owen could not remember. Fearing, however, that his l.u.s.t would reach his wife's ears, Pandion cut out the girl's tongue. This barbarous act, committed before Greece was, had been redeemed by the Grecian spirit, which had added that the girl; though without tongue to tell the cruel deed, had, nevertheless, hands wherewith to weave it. The weft of her misfortune only inspired another barbarous deed: Pandion killed both sisters and his son Italus. Again the Grecian spirit touched the legend, changing the tongueless girl into a swallow, a bird with a little cry, and fleet wings to carry its cry all over the world, and the unhappy wife into the bird "which sleeps all day and sings all night." "Sophocles," Owen said, "speaks of the nightingale as moaning all the night in ivy cl.u.s.ters, moaning or humming. A strange expression his seems to us, our musical sense being different from that of the antique world, if the antique world really possessed any musical sense." The lovers wandered round the house, listening to the bird's sweet singing, stopping at the hill's steep side so that they might listen better.

"Now the bird is telling of sorrows other than ours--isn't that so, Evelyn? I don't seem to recognise anything of ourselves in its song; it is singing a new song."

"Perhaps," Evelyn answered, "now it is singing the sadness of the mother under the hill for her son."

"I went to see her, she is not unhappy; she is happy that her son is With you."

"But another child died last year; and for her, if she is listening, the bird is certainly singing the death of that child."

When they had completed once more the round of the garden, the bird seemed to have again changed his intervals; a gaiety seemed to have come into his singing, and Owen said:

"Now his music is lighter; he is singing an inveigling little story, the story of first love. Look, Evelyn, do you see that boy and girl walking under the hedge with their arms entwined? They, too, have stopped to listen to the nightingale, but the song they really hear comes out of their own hearts."

Then the song changed, suddenly acquiring a strange, voluptuous accent, which carried Owen's thoughts back to a night when he had been awakened out of his sleep by a woman's voice singing, and, starting up in bed, he had listened, rousing himself sufficiently from sleep to distinguish that the voice he was listening to was Evelyn's. The song was a love-call, and, believing it to be such, he had thrown aside the curtain, and had found her leaning out of her window, singing the Star Song, not to the evening star, as in the opera, but to the morning star shining white like a diamond out of the dawning of the sky. The valley under the castle walls was submerged in mist, and the distant hillside was indistinguishable.

The castle seemed to stand by the side of some frozen sea, so intense was the silence. He had always looked back upon this morning as one of the great moments of his life, and going to her room like going to some great religious rite. Each man must worship where he finds the G.o.dhead.

"Who knows," he said to Evelyn, "that the bird in the nest close by does not listen with the same rapture--"

"As you, in the box, used to listen to me on the stage? For the comparison to hold good, I should have sung Italian music, roulades.

Listen to those cadenzas!"

"How melancholy are their gaieties!"

"Yes, aren't they?" she answered. "How poignant the two notes!--with which _il commence son grand air_."

"But our love-call ended years ago," she said, with an accent of regret in her voice. And they walked towards the house, Owen dreading that some sudden impulse might throw her into his arms and her mind might be unhinged again, and he would lose her utterly. So he spoke to her of the first; thing that came into her mind, and what came first was a memory of Moschus's lament for Bion and the brevity of human life as contrasted with the long life of the world.