The Book-Bills of Narcissus Part 7

He would be doing her no wrong; it was her own desire. Yet his kiss did mean more than he could have imagined it meaning a week before. She had grown to be genuinely desirable. If love tarried, pa.s.sion was awake--that dangerous pa.s.sion, too, to which the intellect has added its intoxication, and that is, so to say, legitimised by an 'idea.'

Her woman's intuition read the silence and answered to his thought.

'Have no fear,' she said, with the deep deliberation of pa.s.sion; 'I love you with my whole life, but I shall never burden you, Narcissus.

Love me as long as you can, I shall be content; and when the end comes, though another woman takes you, I shall not hinder.'

O great girl-soul! What a poltroon, indeed, was Narcissus beside you at that moment. You ready to stake your life on the throw, he temporising and bargaining as over the terms of a lease. Surely, if he could for one moment have seen himself in the light of your greatness, he had been crushed beneath the misery of his own meanness. But as yet he had no such vision; his one thought was, 'She will do it! will she draw back?'

and the feeble warnings he was obliged to utter to keep his own terms, by a.s.suring his conscience of 'her free-will,' were they not half-fearfully whispered, and with an inward haste, lest they should give her pause? 'But the world, my dear--think!' 'It will have cruel names for thee.' 'It will make thee outcast--think!'

'I know all,' she had answered; 'but I love you, and two years of your love would pay for all. There is no world for me but you. Till to-night I have never lived at all, and when you go I shall be as dead. The world cannot hurt such a one.'

Ah me, it was a wild, sweet dream for both of them, one the woman's, one the poet's, of a 'sweet impossible' taking flesh! For, do not let us blame Narcissus overmuch. He was utterly sincere; he meant no wrong. He but dreamed of following a creed to which his reason had long given a hopeless a.s.sent. In a more kindly-organised community he might have followed it, and all have been well; but the world has to be dealt with as one finds it, and we must get sad answers to many a fair calculation if we 'state' it wrongly in the equation. That there is one law for the male and another for the female had not as yet vitally entered into his considerations. He was too dizzy with the dream, or he must have seen what an unequal bargain he was about to drive.

At last he did awake, and saw it all; and in a burning shame went to Hesper, and told her that it must not be.

Her answer was unconsciously the most subtly dangerous she could have chosen: 'If I like to give myself to you, why should you not take me? It is of my own free-will. My eyes are open.' It was his very thought put into words, and by her. For a moment he wavered--who could blame him?

'Am I my brother's keeper?'

'Yes! a thousand times yes!' cried his soul; for he was awake now, and he had come to see the dream as it was, and to shudder at himself as he had well-nigh been, just as one shudders at the thought of a precipice barely escaped. In that moment, too, the idea of her love in all its divineness burst upon him. Here was a heart capable of a great tragic love like the loves of old he read of and whimpered for in sonnets, and what had he offered in exchange? A poor, philosophical compromise, compounded of pessimism and desire, in which a man should have all to gain and nothing to lose, for

'The light, light love he has wings to fly At suspicion of a bond.'

'I would I did love her,' his heart was crying as he went away. 'Could I love her?' was his next thought. 'Do I love her?'--but that is a question that always needs longer than one day to answer.

Already he was as much in love with her as most men when they take unto themselves wives. She was desirable--he had pleasure in her presence. He had that half of love which commonly pa.s.ses for all--the pa.s.sion; but he lacked the additional incentives which nerve the common man to face that fear which seems well-nigh as universal as the fear of death, I mean the fear of marriage--life's two fears: that is, he had no desire to increase his worldly possessions by annexing a dowry, or ambition of settling down and procuring a wife as part of his establishment. After all, how full of bachelors the world would be if it were not for these motives: for the one other motive to a true marriage, the other half of love, however one names it, is it not a four-leaved clover indeed?

Narcissus was happily poor enough to be above those motives, even had Hesper been anything but poor too; and if he was to marry her, it would be because he was capable of loving her with that perfect love which, of course, has alone right to the sacred name, that which cannot take all and give nought, but which rather holds as watchword that _to love is better than to be loved_.

Who shall hope to express the mystery? Yet, is not thus much true, that, if it must be allowed to the cynic that love rises in self, it yet has its zenith and setting in another--in woman as in man? Two meet, and pa.s.sion, the joy of the selfish part of each, is born; shall love follow depends on whether they have a particular grace of nature, love being the thanksgiving of the unselfish part for the boon granted to the other. The common nature s.n.a.t.c.hes the joy and forgets the giver, but the finer never forgets, and deems life but a poor service for a gift so rare; and, though pa.s.sion be long since pa.s.sed, love keeps holy an eternal memory.

'Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, pa.s.s'd in music out of sight.'

Since the time of fairy-tales Love has had a way of coming in the disguise of Duty. What is the story of Beauty and the Beast but an allegory of true love? We take this maid to be our wedded wife, for her sake it perhaps seems at the time. She is sweet and beautiful and to be desired; but, all the same, we had rather shake the loose leg of bachelordom, if it might be. However it be, so we take her, or maybe it is she takes us, with a feeling of martyrdom; but lo! when we are home together, what wonderful new lights are these beginning to ray about her, as though she had up till now kept a star hidden in her bosom. What is this new morning strength and peace in our life? Why, we thought it was but Thestylis, and lo! it is Diana after all. For the Thirteenth Maid or the Thirteenth Man, both alike, rarely come as we had expected.

There seems no fitness in their arrival. It seems so ridiculously accidental, as I suppose the hour of death, whenever it comes, will seem. One had expected some high calm prelude of preparation, ending in a festival of choice, like an Indian prince's, when the maids of the land pa.s.s before him and he makes deliberate selection of the fateful She. But, instead, we are hurrying among our day's business, maybe, our last thought of her; we turn a corner, and suddenly she is before us. Or perhaps, as it fell with Narcissus, we have tried many loves that proved but pa.s.sions; we have just buried the last, and are mournfully leaving its grave, determined to seek no further, to abjure bright eyes, at least for a long while, when lo! on a sudden a little maid is in our path holding out some sweet modest flowers. The maid has a sweet mouth, too, and, the old Adam being stronger than our infant resolution, we smell the flowers and kiss the mouth--to find arms that somehow, we know not why, are clinging as for life about us. Let us beware how we shake them off, for thus it is decreed shall a man meet her to have missed whom were to have missed all. Youth, like that faithless generation in the Scriptures, always craveth after a sign, but rarely shall one be given. It can only be known whether a man be worthy of Love by the way in which he looks upon Duty. Rachel often comes in the grey cloak of Leah. It rests with the man's heart whether he shall know her beneath the disguise; no other divining-rod shall aid him. If it be as Ba.s.sanio's, brave to 'give and hazard all he hath,' let him not fear to pa.s.s the seeming gold, the seeming silver, to choose the seeming lead.

'Why, _that's_ the lady,' thou poor magnificent Morocco. Nor shall the gold fail, for her heart is that, and for silver thou shalt have those 'silent silver lights undreamed of' of face and soul.

These are but scattered hints of the story of Narcissus' love as he told it me at last, in broken, struggling words, but with a light in his face one power alone could set there.

When he came to the end, and to all that little Hesper had proved to him, all the strength and illumination she had brought him, he fairly broke down and sobbed, as one may in a brother's arms. For, of course, he had come out of the ordeal a man; and Hesper had consented to be his wife. Often she had dreamed as he had pa.s.sed her by with such heedless air: 'If I love him so, can it be that my love shall have no power to make him mine, somehow, some day? Can I call to him so within my soul and he not hear? Can I wait and he not come?' And her love had been strong, strong as a destiny; her voice had reached him, for it was the voice of G.o.d.

When I next saw her, what a strange brightness shone in her face, what a new beauty was there! Ah, Love, the great transfigurer! And why, too, was it that his friends began to be dissatisfied with their old photographs of Narcissus, though they had been taken but six months before? There seemed something lacking in the photograph, they said.

Yes, there was; but the face had lacked it too. What was the new thing--'grip' was it, joy, peace? Yes, all three, but more besides, and Narcissus had but one name for all. It was Hesper.

Strange, too, that in spite of promises we never received a new one.

Narcissus, who used to be so punctual with such a request. Perhaps it was because he had broken his looking-gla.s.s.

CHAPTER X

'IN VISHNU-LAND WHAT AVATAR?'

'If I love you for a year I shall love you for ever,' Narcissus had said to his Thirteenth Maid. He did love her so long, and yet he has gone away. Do you remember your _Les Miserables_, that early chapter where Valjean robs the child of his florin so soon after that great illuminating change of heart and mind had come to him? Well, still more important, do you remember the clue Hugo gives us to aberration? There is comfort and strength for so many a heart-breaking failure there. It was the old impetus, we are told, that was as yet too strong for the new control; the old instinct, too dark for the new light in the brain. It takes every vessel some time to answer to its helm; with us, human vessels, years, maybe. Have you never suddenly become sensitive of a gracious touch in the air, and pondered it, to recognise that in some half-unconscious act you had that moment been answering for the first time the helm of an almost forgotten resolution? Ah me, blessed is it to see the prow strongly sweeping up against the sky at last!

'Send not a poet to London,' said Heine, and it was a true word. At least, send him not till his thews are laced and his bones set. He may miss somewhat, of course; there is no gain without a loss. He may be in ignorance of the last _nuance_, and if he deserves fame he must gain it unaided of the vulgar notoriety which, if he have a friend or two in the new journalism, they will be so eager to bestow; but he will have kept his soul intact, which, after all, is the main matter. It is sweet, doubtless, to be one of those same mushroom-men, sweet to be placarded as 'the new' this or that, to step for a day into the triumphal car of newspaper renown, drawn by teams of willing paragraph-men--who, does it never strike you? are but doing it all for hire, and earning their bread by their bent necks. Yet for those to whom it is denied there is solid comfort; for it is not fame, and, worse still, it is not life, 'tis but to be 'a Bourbon in a crown of straws.'

If one could only take poor foolish c.o.c.kneydom right away outside this poor vainglorious city, and show them how the stars are smiling to themselves above it, nudging each other, so to say, at the silly lights that ape their shining--for such a little while!

Yes, that is one danger of the poet in London, that he should come to think himself 'somebody'; though, doubtless, in proportion as he is a poet, the other danger will be the greater, that he should deem himself 'n.o.body.' Modest by nature, credulous of appearances, the noisy pretensions of the hundred and one small celebrities, and the din of their retainers this side and that, in comparison with his own unattended course, what wonder if his heart sinks and he gives up the game; how shall his little pipe, though it be of silver, hope to be heard in this land of ba.s.soons? To take London seriously is death both to man and artist. Narcissus had sufficient success there to make this a temptation, and he fell. He lost his hold of the great things of life, he forgot the stars, he forgot his love, and what wonder that his art sickened also. For a few months life was but a feverish clutch after varied sensation, especially the dear tickle of applause; he caught the facile atheistic flippancy of that poor creature, the 'modern young man,' all-knowing and all-foolish, and he came very near losing his soul in the nightmare. But he had too much ballast in him to go quite under, and at last strength came, and he shook the weakness from him. Yet the fall had been too far and too cruel for him to be happy again soon. He had gone forth so confident in his new strength of manly love; and to fall so, and almost without an effort! Who has not called upon the mountains to cover him in such an hour of awakening, and who will wonder that Narcissus dared not look upon the face of Hesper till solitude had washed him clean, and bathed him in its healing oil? I alone bade him good-bye. It was in this room wherein I am writing, the study we had taken together, where still his books look down at me from the shelves, and all the memorials of his young life remain. O _can_ it have been but 'a phantom of false morning'? A Milton s.n.a.t.c.hed up at the last moment was the one book he took with him.

From that night until this he has made but one sign--a little note which Hesper has shown me, a sob and a cry to which even a love that had been more deeply wronged could never have turned a deaf ear. Surely not Hesper, for she has long forgiven him, knowing his weakness for what it was. She and I sometimes sit here together in the evenings and talk of him; and every echo in the corridor sets us listening, for he may be at the other side of the world, or but the other side of the street--we know so little of his fate. Where he is we know not; but if he still lives, _what_ he is we have the a.s.surance of faith. This time he has not failed, we know. But why delay so long?

_November_ 1889--_May_ 1890. _November_ 1894.

THE END