"Welcome home!" said Siegmund.
He flung himself down on the high, breezy slope of the dip, looking out to sea. Helena sat beside him. It was absolutely still, and the wind was slackening more and more. Though they listened attentively, they could hear only an indistinct breathing sound, quite small, from the water below: no clapping nor hoa.r.s.e conversation of waves. Siegmund lay with his hands beneath his head, looking over the sparkling sea. To put her page in the shadow, Helena propped her book against him and began to read.
Presently the breeze, and Siegmund, dropped asleep. The sun was pouring with dreadful persistence. It beat and beat on Helena, gradually drawing her from her book in a confusion of thought. She closed her eyes wearily, longing for shade. Vaguely she felt a sympathy with Adam in "Adam Cast Forth". Her mind traced again the tumultuous, obscure strugglings of the two, forth from Eden through the primitive wildernesses, and she felt sorrowful. Thinking of Adam blackened with struggle, she looked down at Siegmund. The sun was beating him upon the face and upon his glistening brow. His two hands, which lay out on the gra.s.s, were full of blood, the veins of his wrists purple and swollen with heat. Yet he slept on, breathing with a slight, panting motion.
Helena felt deeply moved. She wanted to kiss him as he lay helpless, abandoned to the charge of the earth and the sky. She wanted to kiss him, and shed a few tears. She did neither, but instead, moved her position so that she shaded his head. Cautiously putting her hand on his hair, she found it warm, quite hot, as when you put your hand under a sitting hen, and feel the hot-feathered bosom.
"It will make him ill," she whispered to herself, and she bent over to smell the hot hair. She noticed where the sun was scalding his forehead.
She felt very pitiful and helpless when she saw his brow becoming inflamed with the sun-scalding.
Turning weariedly away, she sought relief in the landscape. But the sea was glittering unbearably, like a scaled dragon wreathing. The houses of Freshwater slept, as cattle sleep motionless in the hollow valley. Green Farringford on the slope, was drawn over with a shadow of heat and sleep. In the bay below the hill the sea was hot and restless. Helena was sick with sunshine and the restless glitter of water.
""And there shall be no more sea,"" she quoted to herself, she knew not wherefrom.
"No more sea, no more anything," she thought dazedly, as she sat in the midst of this fierce welter of sunshine. It seemed to her as if all the lightness of her fancy and her hope were being burned away in this tremendous furnace, leaving her, Helena, like a heavy piece of slag seamed with metal. She tried to imagine herself resuming the old activities, the old manner of living.
"It is impossible," she said; "it is impossible! What shall I be when I come out of this? I shall not come out, except as metal to be cast in another shape. No more the same Siegmund, no more the same life. What will become of us--what will happen?"
She was roused from these semi-delirious speculations in the sun furnace by Siegmund"s waking. He opened his eyes, took a deep breath, and looked smiling at Helena.
"It is worth while to sleep," said he, "for the sake of waking like this. I was dreaming of huge ice-crystals."
She smiled at him. He seemed unconscious of fate, happy and strong. She smiled upon him almost in condescension.
"I should like to realize your dream," she said. "This is terrible!"
They went to the cliff"s edge, to receive the cool up-flow of air from the water. She drank the travelling freshness eagerly with her face, and put forward her sunburnt arms to be refreshed.
"It is really a very fine sun," said Siegmund lightly. "I feel as if I were almost satisfied with heat."
Helena felt the chagrin of one whose wretchedness must go unperceived, while she affects a light interest in another"s pleasure. This time, when Siegmund "failed to follow her", as she put it, she felt she must follow him.
"You are having your satisfaction complete this journey," she said, smiling; "even a sufficiency of me."
"Ay!" said Siegmund drowsily. "I think I am. I think this is about perfect, don"t you?"
She laughed.
"I want nothing more and nothing different," he continued; "and that"s the extreme of a decent time, I should think."
"The extreme of a decent time!" she repeated.
But he drawled on lazily:
"I"ve only rubbed my bread on the cheese-board until now. Now I"ve got all the cheese--which is you, my dear."
"I certainly feel eaten up," she laughed, rather bitterly. She saw him lying in a royal ease, his eyes nave as a boy"s, his whole being careless. Although very glad to see him thus happy, for herself she felt very lonely. Being listless with sun-weariness, and heavy with a sense of impending fate, she felt a great yearning for his sympathy, his fellow-suffering. Instead of receiving this, she had to play to his buoyant happiness, so as not to shrivel one petal of his flower, or spoil one minute of his consummate hour.
From the high point of the cliff where they stood, they could see the path winding down to the beach, and broadening upwards towards them.
Slowly approaching up the slight incline came a black invalid"s chair, wheeling silently over the short dry gra.s.s. The invalid, a young man, was so much deformed that already his soul seemed to be wilting in his pale sharp face, as if there were not enough life-flow in the distorted body to develop the fair bud of the spirit. He turned his pain-sunken eyes towards the sea, whose meaning, like that of all things, was half obscure to him. Siegmund glanced, and glanced quickly away, before he should see. Helena looked intently for two seconds. She thought of the torn, shrivelled seaweed flung above the reach of the tide--"the life tide," she said to herself. The pain of the invalid overshadowed her own distress. She was fretted to her soul.
"Come!" she said quietly to Siegmund, no longer resenting the completeness of his happiness, which left her unnecessary to him.
"We will leave the poor invalid in possession of our green hollow--so quiet," she said to herself.
They sauntered downwards towards the bay. Helena was brooding on her own state, after her own fashion.
"The Mist Spirit," she said to herself. "The Mist Spirit draws a curtain round us--it is very kind. A heavy gold curtain sometimes; a thin, torn curtain sometimes. I want the Mist Spirit to close the curtain again, I do not want to think of the outside. I am afraid of the outside, and I am afraid when the curtain tears open in rags. I want to be in our own fine world inside the heavy gold mist-curtain."
As if in answer or in protest to her thoughts, Siegmund said:
"Do you want anything better than this, dear? Shall we come here next year, and stay for a whole month?"
"If there be any next year," said she.
Siegmund did not reply.
She wondered if he had really spoken in sincerity, or if he, too, were mocking fate. They walked slowly through the broiling sun towards their lodging.
"There will be an end to this," said Helena, communing with herself.
"And when we come out of the mist-curtain, what will it be? No matter--let come what will. All along Fate has been resolving, from the very beginning, resolving obvious discords, gradually, by unfamiliar progression; and out of original combinations weaving wondrous harmonies with our lives. Really, the working out has been wondrous, is wondrous now. The Master-Fate is too great an artist to suffer an anti-climax. I am sure the Master-Musician is too great an artist to allow a bathetic anti-climax."
_Chapter 15_
The afternoon of the blazing day pa.s.sed drowsily. Lying close together on the beach, Siegmund and Helena let the day exhale its hours like perfume, unperceived. Siegmund slept, a light evanescent sleep irised with dreams and with suffering: nothing definite, the colour of dreams without shape. Helena, as usual, retained her consciousness much more clearly. She watched the far-off floating of ships, and the near wading of children through the surf. Endless trains of thoughts, like little waves, rippled forward and broke on the sh.o.r.e of her drowsiness. But each thought-ripple, though it ran lightly, was tinged with copper-coloured gleams as from a lurid sunset. Helena felt that the sun was setting on her and Siegmund. The hour was too composed, spell-bound, for grief or anxiety or even for close perception. She was merely aware that the sun was wheeling down, tangling Siegmund and her in the traces, like overthrown charioteers. So the hours pa.s.sed.
After tea they went eastwards on the downs. Siegmund was animated, so that Helena caught his mood. It was very rare that they spoke of the time preceding their acquaintance, Helena knew little or nothing of Siegmund"s life up to the age of thirty, whilst he had never learned anything concerning her childhood. Somehow she did not encourage him to self-discovery. Today, however, the painful need of lovers for self-revelation took hold on him.
"It is awfully funny," he said. "I was _so_ gone on Beatrice when I married her. She had only just come back from Egypt. Her father was an army officer, a very handsome man, and, I believe, a bit of a rake.
Beatrice is really well connected, you know. But old FitzHerbert ran through all his money, and through everything else. He was too hot for the rest of the family, so they dropped him altogether.
"He came to live at Peckham when I was sixteen. I had just left school, and was to go into father"s business. Mrs FitzHerbert left cards, and very soon we were acquainted. Beatrice had been a good time in a French convent school. She had only knocked about with the army a little while, but it had brought her out. I remember I thought she was miles above me--which she was. She wasn"t bad-looking, either, and you know men all like her. I bet she"d marry again, in spite of the children.
"At first I fluttered round her. I remember I"d got a little, silky moustache. They all said I looked older than sixteen. At that time I was mad on the violin, and she played rather well. Then FitzHerbert went off abroad somewhere, so Beatrice and her mother half lived at our house.
The mother was an invalid.
"I remember I nearly stood on my head one day. The conservatory opened off the smoking-room, so when I came in the room, I heard my two sisters and Beatrice talking about good-looking men.
""I consider Bertram will make a handsome man," said my younger sister.
""He"s got beautiful eyes," said my other sister.
""And a real darling nose and chin!" cried Beatrice. "If only he was more _solide_! He is like a windmill, all limbs."
""He will fill out. Remember, he"s not quite seventeen," said my elder sister.