"Tell his lordship, please, that Miss Boyce is here."
The t.i.tle jarred and hurt Marcella"s ear. But she had scarcely time to catch it before Aldous entered, a little bent, as it seemed to her, from his tall erectness, and speaking with an extreme quietness, even monotony of manner.
"He is waiting for you--will you come at once?"
He led her up the central staircase and along the familiar pa.s.sages, walking silently a little in front of her. They pa.s.sed the long line of Caroline and Jacobean portraits in the upper gallery, till just outside his own door Aldous paused.
"He ought not to talk long," he said, hesitating, "but you will know--of course--better than any of us."
"I will watch him," she said, almost inaudibly, and he gently opened the door and let her pa.s.s, shutting it behind her.
The nurse, who was sitting beside her patient, got up as Marcella entered, and pointed her to a low chair on his further side. Susie Hallin rose too, and kissed the new-comer hurriedly, absently, without a word, lest she should sob. Then she and the nurse disappeared through an inner door. The evening light was still freely admitted; and there were some candles. By the help of both she could only see him indistinctly. But in her own mind, as she sat down, she determined that he had not even days to live.
Yet as she bent over him she saw a playful gleam on the cavernous face.
"You won"t scold me?" said the changed voice--"you did warn me--you and Susie--but--I was obstinate. It was best so!"
She pressed her lips to his hand and was answered by a faint pressure from the cold fingers.
"If I could have been there!" she murmured.
"No--I am thankful you were not. And I must not think of it--or of any trouble. Aldous is very bitter--but he will take comfort by and by--he will see it--and them--more justly. They meant me no unkindness. They were full of an idea, as I was. When I came back to myself--first--all was despair. I was in a blank horror of myself and life. Now it has gone--I don"t know how. It is not of my own will--some hand has lifted a weight. I seem to float--without pain."
He closed his eyes, gathering strength again in the interval, by a strong effort of will--calling up in the dimming brain what he had to say. She meanwhile, spoke to him in a low voice, mainly to prevent his talking, telling him of her father, of her mother"s strain of nursing--of herself--she hardly knew what. Hew grotesque to be giving him these little bits of news about strangers--to him, this hovering, consecrated soul, on the brink of the great secret!
In the intervals, while he was still silent, she could not sometimes prevent the pulse of her own life from stirring. Her eye wandered round the room--Aldous"s familiar room. There, on the writing-table with its load of letters and books, stood the photograph of Hallin; another, her own, used to stand beside it; it was solitary now.
Otherwise, all was just as it had been--flowers, books, newspapers--the signs of familiar occupation, the hundred small details of character and personality which in estrangement take to themselves such a smarting significance for the sad and craving heart. The date--the anniversary--echoed in her mind.
Then, with a rush of remorseful pain, her thoughts came back to the present and to Hallin. At the same moment she saw that his eyes were open, and fixed upon her with a certain anxiety and expectancy. He made a movement as though to draw her towards him; and she stooped to him.
"I feel," he said, "as though my strength were leaving me fast. Let me ask you one question--because of my love for you--and _him_. I have fancied--of late--things were changed. Can you tell me--will you?--or is it unfair?"--the words had all their bright, natural intonation--"Is your heart--still where it was?--or, could you ever--undo the past--"
He held her fast, grasping the hand she had given him with unconscious force. She had looked up startled, her lip trembling like a child"s.
Then she dropped her head against the arm of her chair, as though she could not speak.
He moved restlessly, and sighed.
"I should not," he said to himself; "I should not--it was wrong. The dying are tyrannous."
He even began a word of sweet apology. But she shook her head.
"Don"t!" she said, struggling with herself; "don"t say that! It would do me good to speak--to you--"
An exquisite smile dawned on Hallin"s face.
"Then!"--he said--"confess!"
A few minutes later they were still sitting together. She strongly wished to go; but he would not yet allow it. His face was full of a mystical joy--a living faith, which must somehow communicate itself in one last sacramental effort.
"How strange that you--and I--and he--should have been so mixed together in this queer life. Now I seem to regret nothing--I _hope_ everything.
One more little testimony let me bear!--the last. We disappear one by one--into the dark--but each may throw his comrades--a token--before he goes. You have been in much trouble of mind and spirit--I have seen it.
Take my poor witness. There is one clue, one only--_goodness_--_the surrendered will_. Everything is there--all faith--all religion--all hope for rich or poor.--Whether we feel our way through consciously to the Will--that asks our will--matters little. Aldous and I have differed much on this--in words--never at heart! I could use words, symbols he cannot--and they have given me peace. But half my best life I owe to him."
At this he made a long pause--but, still, through that weak grasp, refusing to let her go--till all was said. Day was almost gone; the stars had come out over the purple dusk of the park.
"That Will--we reach--through duty and pain," he whispered at last, so faintly she could hardly hear him, "is the root, the source. It leads us in living--it--carries us in death. But our weakness and vagueness--want help--want the human life and voice--to lean on--to drink from. We Christians--are orphans--without Christ! There again--what does it matter what we think--_about_ him--if only we think--_of_ him. In _one_ such life are all mysteries, and all knowledge--and our fathers have chosen for us--"
The insistent voice sank lower and lower into final silence--though the lips still moved. The eyelids too fell. Miss Hallin and the nurse came in. Marcella rose and stood for one pa.s.sionate instant looking down upon him. Then, with a pressure of the hand to the sister beside her, she stole out. Her one prayer was that she might see and meet no one. So soft was her step that even the watching Aldous did not hear her. She lifted the heavy latch of the outer door without the smallest noise, and found herself alone in the starlight.
After Marcella left him, Hallin remained for some hours in what seemed to those about him a feverish trance. He did not sleep, but he showed no sign of responsive consciousness. In reality his mind all through was full of the most vivid though incoherent images and sensations. But he could no longer distinguish between them and the figures and movements of the real people in his room. Each pa.s.sed into and intermingled with the other. In some vague, eager way he seemed all the time to be waiting or seeking for Aldous. There was the haunting impression of some word to say--some final thing to do--which would not let him rest. But something seemed always to imprison him, to hold him back, and the veil between him and the real Aldous watching beside him grew ever denser.
At night they made no effort to move him from the couch and the half-sitting posture in which he had pa.s.sed the day. Death had come too near. His sister and Aldous and the young doctor who had brought him from London watched with him. The curtains were drawn back from both the windows, and in the clearness of the first autumnal frost a crescent moon hung above the woods, the silvery lawns, the plain.
Not long after midnight Hallin seemed to himself to wake, full of purpose and of strength. He spoke, as he thought, to Aldous, asking to be alone with him. But Aldous did not move; that sad watching gaze of his showed no change. Then Hallin suffered a sudden sharp spasm of anguish and of struggle. Three words to say--only three words; but those he _must_ say! He tried again, but Aldous"s dumb grief still sat motionless. Then the thought leapt in the ebbing sense, "Speech is gone; I shall speak no more!"
It brought with it a stab, a quick revolt. But something checked both, and in a final offering of the soul, Hallin gave up his last desire.
What Aldous saw was only that the dying man opened his hand as though it asked for that of his friend. He placed his own within those seeking fingers, and Hallin"s latest movement--which death stopped half-way--was to raise it to his lips.
So Marcella"s confession--made in the abandonment, the blind pa.s.sionate trust, of a supreme moment--bore no fruit. It went with Hallin to the grave.
CHAPTER III.
"I think I saw the letters arrive," said Mrs. Boyce to her daughter.
"And Donna Margherita seems to be signalling to us."
"Let me go for them, mamma."
"No, thank you, I must go in."
And Mrs. Boyce rose from her seat, and went slowly towards the hotel.
Marcella watched her widow"s cap and black dress as they pa.s.sed along the _pergola_ of the hotel garden, between bright ma.s.ses of geraniums and roses on either side.
They had been sitting in the famous garden of the Cappucini Hotel at Amalfi. To Marcella"s left, far below the high terrace of the hotel, the green and azure of the Salernian gulf shone and danced in the sun, to her right a wood of oak and arbutus stretched up into a purple cliff--a wood starred above with gold and scarlet berries, and below with cyclamen and narcissus. From the earth under the leafy oaks--for the oaks at Amalfi lose and regain their foliage in winter and spring by imperceptible gradations--came a moist English smell. The air was damp and warm. A convent bell tolled from invisible heights above the garden; while the olives and vines close at hand were full of the chattering voices of gardeners and children, and broken here and there by clouds of pink almond-blossom. March had just begun, and the afternoons were fast lengthening. It was little more than a fortnight since Mr. Boyce"s death. In the November of the preceding year Mrs. Boyce and Marcella had brought him to Naples by sea, and there, at a little villa on Posilippo, he had drawn sadly to his end. It had been a dreary time, from which Marcella could hardly hope that her mother would ever fully recover. She herself had found in the long months of nursing--nursing of which, with quiet tenacity, she had gradually claimed and obtained her full share--a deep moral consolation. They had paid certain debts to conscience, and they had for ever enshrined her father"s memory in the silence of an unmeasured and loving pity.
But the wife? Marcella sorely recognised that to her mother these last days had brought none of the soothing, reconciling influences they had involved for herself. Between the husband and wife there had been dumb friction and misery--surely also a pa.s.sionate affection!--to the end.
The invalid"s dependence on her had been abject, her devotion wonderful.
Yet, in her close contact with them, the daughter had never been able to ignore the existence between them of a wretched though tacit debate--reproach on his side, self-defence or spasmodic effort on hers--which seemed to have its origin deep in the past, yet to be stimulated afresh by a hundred pa.s.sing incidents of the present. Under the blight of it, as under the physical strain of nursing, Mrs. Boyce had worn and dwindled to a white-haired shadow; while he had both clung to life and feared death more than would normally have been the case.