The Unknown Sea Part 32

Then neither pa.s.sion had been entirely feigned; now she knew that love swayed her alone, turning her to a worship of the man. No bitterer penance could she conceive than with confession to him to strip heart and soul naked as her body; this only could extend it: should his large generosity keep under his loathing and contempt, and order him to deal gently for her help according to pity. No way could he remit her dues.

As she went to meet his face, she lifted her gaze up the slant moonbeams, looking piteous, despairing appeal for darkness to come back and cover her. Wisps of cloud made only a poor pretence. She met the tide unhindered, and stood; she looked, no man was there; she wailed 'Christian, Christian,' and no voice answered. With relief for the lengthened shadows below the rocks, she made for the very spot where he had knelt; it was far overpa.s.sed by the tide. Ankle deep she trod: knee deep. She sets her foot upon a man's hand, leaps, stumbles on his body to a fall: Christian dead lies under her embrace.

Supreme justice had measured her due.

The placid clay had returned to an old allegiance, and weltered with the tide according to the joint ordering of earth and moon. The living creature would not acknowledge that right dominion, most desperately would withstand it. She stooped her shoulder beneath the low head, and heaved it up above the tide: the air did but insist that it lay dead-still. With all her slender feminine strength put out for speed, she girthed, she held, she upbore the inert weight afloat for moonlighted shallows. There her knee up-staying, her frantic hands prevailing over the p.r.o.ne figure, the dead face fell revealed. No hope could appeal against that witness.

A strange grey had replaced the ruddy tan of life, darker than the usual pallor of the dead. That, and the slack jaw, and the fixed, half-shut eyes, a new and terrible aspect gave to the head, dear and sacred above all on earth to the stricken creature beholding.

For a long moment appalled she gazed, knowing yet but one fathom of her misery: just her loss, her mere great loss past repair. Then moaning feebly, her arms went round again to draw it close. Her smooth palms gliding over the body told of flawed surfaces, bidding her eyes leave the face to read new scores: on the breast a deep rent, on the shoulder another, and further more and more wherever a hand went. Along one arm she stretched hers, and lifted it up to the light of the moon. Beside the tense, slender limb, gleaming white, that other showed ma.s.sive, inert, grey-hued, with darker breaks. The hand hanging heavy was a dark horror to see.

Shadows invaded, for the moon was foundering on the rocks.

Across her shoulders she drew the heavy burden, strove to rise upright to bear it, tottered, fell, and then dragged on with elbows and knees as the waves resigned to her the full load. Heavy knees furrowed the sand beside hers, heavy arms trailed; the awful, cold face drooped and swayed from her shoulder as she moved; now and again it touched her cheek.

Withdrawn from the fatal sea, what gain had she? The last spark of life was long extinct, and she knew it; yet a folly very human set her seeking Christian's self in the sh.e.l.l that was left, scanning it, handling it, calling upon deaf ears, drawing the wet head against her breast. Cold, cold was her breast; the sea-magic had bred out all heat from her heart.

She pressed the dripping hair; she stooped and kissed her dead lover on the lips. It was then her iniquity struck home with merciless rigour complete. 'I will lay my face down against yours, and out of very pure hate will kiss you once. Even in the death-agony I mean you to know my fingers in your hair.'

The wretched soul writhed as the hideous words rose up against her to d.a.m.n. They were alive with every tone and laugh; they would live stinging and eating out her heart until she died.

And after death?

'Christian! Christian!'

The agonised cry now was no effort to waken deaf ears; it called after Christian himself, gone past reach of her remorse into unknown night.

Gone deliberately, to be finally quit of so abhorred a creature? In mute witness the quiet body lay to vindicate Christian: too broken it was, too darkly grey for any death self-willed.

Then she could look upon the blank face no more, for the moon pa.s.sed quite away. Then the stretching tide came lapping and fawning, soon to sway the dead weight she held. She was not worthy to look upon clay so sacred, she was not worthy to touch it, she who in wanton moods had inclined to a splendid male, nor recognised in him a n.o.bler version of love. No spark of profane pa.s.sion could remain after she had kissed the cold, dead face.

The dreadful cry of a soul's despair broke the vacant air with the name of Christian. Many times his name, and no other word. The desolation of great agony was hers: no creature of the sea could bring her any comfort now; no creature under heaven; for the one on earth to whom her child's heart yearned was the one on earth she least dared face with her awful load of guilt.

Nothing could atone for what she had done: life could never give scope, nor death. Were this that she held Christian himself, able to see and hear, her pa.s.sionate remorse could conceive no dearer impossibility than at his feet to fall, with supplication, with absolute confession delivering the love and worship of her heart before him: to be spurned by his inevitable hate. The inexorable indifference of the dead was a juster, a more terrible, recompense.

Yet a more terrible conception woke from a growing discernment of Christian's utter abstraction from the mortal shape, that so long had represented him to her, and so well. This his body had ceased from suffering and endurance, yet the very self of Christian might bear with him una.s.suaged the wounds and aches her malice had compa.s.sed. Hate would heal, would sear, at least; but oh! if he had not quit him of a tyrannous love, then bruised and bleeding he carried with him still a living pain of her infliction. She dared not confidently reckon her vileness against the capacity of his extravagant love. She dared not. Her full punishment reached home to her at last.

Her ignorant mortal senses strained to pierce the impenetrable mystery that had wrapt Christian to an infinite remoteness. For his relief, not for her own, would she present to him her agonies of love and remorse: him stanched, averse: him bleeding, tender; to gratify, to satisfy, to plenish any want.

Tempests of despair raged through that undisciplined soul. Every hope was cut off, every joy was extinct. The sweet attraction of loving service, the pride and glory of despotic rule, were not for her, an exile from the one, and from the other abdicating. In all the world there was no place for her but this, between sea and land, with a hold on a dead illusion of Christian, with vain, frantic crying after his reality.

She did not know, whelmed in gulfs of sin and grief and despair, she did not know how divine a dawn brooded over the waste. From the long-lost past clear echoes swept of childish prayers, to blend as an undercurrent with that message her lover had so tried to deliver, that she had repelled as hideous and grotesque. She used no conscious memory, nor followed any coherent thought, but, consonant with the first instinct of her fresh awakened soul, that longing for her mother's sake to make renunciation, consonant with Christian's finished achievement--his striving, suffering, enduring even death for her unworthy sake--was this incoherent impression of a divinity vastly, vaguely suffering in exemplary extreme out of great compa.s.sion and love to mankind, thence accrediting suffering as the divinest force that can move the world. Her also it had vanquished.

The tide had turned; it pressed her gently to resume her old way to the deeps. The drift of another tide took her.

Out of her futile striving for direct communion with Christian grew a sense that the sole possibility left to her was to yield body and soul to his will in strict possession, and to follow that guidance. In her great misery and helpless desolation a how and a whither with quailing beset her going. Lo! the first step was sure, because it entailed a heartrending renunciation.

Ah! desperately dear was this, Christian's body, to her mortal apprehension of him. She held it very closely with an access of love and worship such as appertains to vacant shrines. O woe to part from it, to lay it aside and leave it to final obliteration!

Suddenly she wept. This near, definite distress, so humanly common, broke up the fountain of her tears so many a year sealed. To a creature long of the cold sea breeding tears were scalding to the heart.

Moaning, weeping, yet a little while she failed to forgo that embrace of pure worship and untainted love. Worthy of reverence that piece of clay was, for its loyal alliance with a high soul; wonderful as a n.o.ble and true representative; very sacred from the record of devotion scored deep, so fatally deep.

She wept, she wept as though weeping could cease from her never. Could the deep draught of sea-magic in tears be distilled, void of it should she be long before daybreak come.

The shallowing run of the tide drove her to resign the dead weight that exceeded her strength to uphold. Weeping, heartwrung, she bent her to replace her own will by Christian's! So first she gave away the dead body to final peace, and laid it down for ever in its destined sepulchre, and thereafter went alone into unfamiliar darkness to grope blind among strange worlds for the ways of Christian's countenance.

We beseech, we beseech, we beseech: Lord G.o.d for my unbaptized! Dear Christ for Christian's Diadyomene! Blessed Trinity and all Saints for a nameless soul in sore need!

CHAPTER XVII

Some four days after Rhoda heard what more befell before that night was out. The chief monitress told her.

'We were watching all,' she said, 'and praying according to that promise I had made for a nameless soul in sore need, whose name, Diadyomene, you have restored to us. The dull roar of the sea came in swells of sound, filled as often with an illusion of voices; angry voices they sounded then. This I say that you may understand how a cry like a human creature in distress could pa.s.s unregarded at first. Again and again it came more distinctly, till we were startled into suspicion that a feeble knocking was close by at the lych door of our chapel. One went at my bidding to look out. Back she fled, with terror white as death: "G.o.d and His saints guard," she said, "that without is not of flesh and blood!"

'I and another took her light and went to the door, and before unclosing I asked in the name of G.o.d who was there. No answer came but a sound of bitter sobbing. Then I looked out, and verily doubted also if what I looked on were indeed flesh and blood. Upon the threshold crouched a slender woman-shape, naked. I flung wide the door and touched her: she was cold as marble, colder, I dreaded, than any creature of life could be. Then did she raise her head to show the fairest and saddest face I have ever beheld. Her eyes were full of tears fast falling, and oh! the wild, hunted, despairing look they had. "Christian, Christian!" she wailed. None knew of any such name.

'We lifted her up and led her in and covered her hastily. Her dark hair was all drenched; recent wet had not dried from her skin. A few flakes of snow had been drifting down; I noticed some that lay on her shoulders: they did not melt there. Cold as a marble statue she was, and as white, and of as beautiful a form as any that man has fashioned, and but for her sobbing and that one cry of "Christian," one could think as dumb.

'I would have led her to comfort and warmth and food, but she would not: from touch and question she shrank bewildered and scared; as though the cloak we had wrapped about her were irksome, she slipped it off once and again, unashamed of nakedness. Still her tears fell like rain, and heavy sobs shook her. But as the great bells struck overhead, she caught in sudden breath and held it while the air throbbed, and thereafter broke out with her cry: "Christian, Christian!"

'I bade all kneel and pray, that if this were indeed one of G.o.d's creatures, wisdom might be given us to deal with her for her welfare. In great perplexity I prayed, and some fear. I think it was that utter coldness of a living body that appalled me most.

'One spoke from her knees. "The name of Christ is in her utterance; no creature outcast from salvation could frame any such word." Then I said: "I will take upon me to offer her instant baptism. That may be her need that she cannot perfectly utter." She did not seem to hear one word when I spoke to her; I could see her mind was all too unknit for comprehension; she only cried out as before. But when I turned towards the altar and took her by the hand, she followed me unresisting.

'So, right before the altar we brought her, and made her kneel among us all. All our font was a stoup of holy water held at hand. Then I prayed aloud as G.o.d gave me the grace. She ceased to weep; she caught my hand in hers; I know she heard. In the name of the blessed Trinity I baptized her, but signed no cross; too suddenly she rose upright; she flung up her arms with one deep sigh. I caught a dead body from falling.

'G.o.d knows what she was.'

The speaker fell to prayer. Presently Rhoda said: 'How did you name her?'

'I named her Margaret.'

Rhoda whispered: 'She was Diadyomene.'

Then she covered her face with her hands, lest the grave eyes should read over deep.

'What else?' she said, 'tell all.'

'When the grace of G.o.d had prevailed over our doubt and dismay, we did not dread to consider the dead countenance. It was fairer even than in life; serene as any sleeping child; death looked then like a singular favour.

'We closed her eyes and folded her hands, and laid her out before the altar, and resumed prayer for the one nameless and another Margaret.

'And no more we knew of whence she came than this: that by daybreak a powder of drying brine frosted her dark hair, and the hollows of her ears were white with salt.'

'So,' said Rhoda, 'might come one cast ash.o.r.e from a wreck.'