AUTUMN
When on that November night Lennan stole to the open door of his dressing-room, and stood watching his wife asleep, Fate still waited for an answer.
A low fire was burning--one of those fires that throw faint shadows everywhere, and once and again glow so that some object shines for a moment, some shape is clearly seen.The curtains were not quite drawn, and a plane-tree branch with leaves still hanging, which had kept them company all the fifteen years they had lived there, was moving darkly in the wind, now touching the glass with a frail tap, as though asking of him, who had been roaming in that wind so many hours, to let it in.Unfailing comrades--London plane-trees!
He had not dared hope that Sylvia would be asleep.It was merciful that she was, whichever way the issue went--that issue so cruel.
Her face was turned towards the fire, and one hand rested beneath her cheek.So she often slept.Even when life seemed all at sea, its landmarks lost, one still did what was customary.Poor tender-hearted thing--she had not slept since he told her, forty-eight hours, that seemed such years, ago! With her flaxen hair, and her touching candour, even in sleep, she looked like a girl lying there, not so greatly changed from what she had been that summer of Cicely's marriage down at Hayle.Her face had not grown old in all those twenty-eight years.There had been till now no special reason why it should.Thought, strong feeling, suffering, those were what changed faces; Sylvia had never thought very deeply, never suffered much, till now.And was it for him, who had been careful of her--very careful on the whole, despite man's selfishness, despite her never having understood the depths of him--was it for him of all people to hurt her so, to stamp her face with sorrow, perhaps destroy her utterly?
He crept a little farther in and sat down in the arm-chair beyond the fire.What memories a fire gathered into it, with its flaky ashes, its little leaf-like flames, and that quiet glow and flicker! What tale of passions! How like to a fire was a man's heart! The first young fitful leapings, the sudden, fierce, mastering heat, the long, steady sober burning, and then--that last flaming-up, that clutch back at its own vanished youth, the final eager flight of flame, before the ashes wintered it to nothing!
Visions and memories he saw down in the fire, as only can be seen when a man's heart, by the agony of long struggle, has been stripped of skin, and quivers at every touch.Love! A strange haphazard thing was love--so spun between ecstacy and torture! Athing insidious, irresponsible, desperate.A flying sweetness, more poignant than anything on earth, more dark in origin and destiny.A thing without reason or coherence.A man's love-life--what say had he in the ebb and flow of it? No more than in the flights of autumn birds, swooping down, alighting here and there, passing on.The loves one left behind--even in a life by no means vagabond in love, as men's lives went! The love that thought the Tyrol skies would fall if he were not first with a certain lady.
The love whose star had caught in the hair of Sylvia, now lying there asleep.A so-called love--that half-glamorous, yet sordid little meal of pleasure, which youth, however sensitive, must eat, it seems, some time or other with some young light of love--a glimpse of life that beforehand had seemed much and had meant little, save to leave him disillusioned with himself and sorry for his partner.And then the love that he could not, even after twenty years, bear to remember; that all-devouring summer passion, which in one night had gained all and lost all terribly, leaving on his soul a scar that could never be quite healed, leaving his spirit always a little lonely, haunted by the sense of what might have been.Of his share in that night of tragedy--that 'terrible accident on the river'--no one had ever dreamed.And then the long despair which had seemed the last death of love had slowly passed, and yet another love had been born--or rather born again, pale, sober, but quite real; the fresh springing-up of a feeling long forgotten, of that protective devotion of his boyhood.He still remembered the expression on Sylvia's face when he passed her by chance in Oxford Street, soon after he came back from his four years of exile in the East and Rome--that look, eager, yet reproachful, then stoically ironic, as if saying: 'Oh, no! after forgetting me four years and more--you can't remember me now!' And when he spoke, the still more touching pleasure in her face.Then uncertain months, with a feeling of what the end would be; and then their marriage.Happy enough--gentle, not very vivid, nor spiritually very intimate--his work always secretly as remote from her as when she had thought to please him by putting jessamine stars on the heads of his beasts.A quiet successful union, not meaning, he had thought, so very much to him nor so very much to her--until forty-eight hours ago he told her; and she had shrunk, and wilted, and gone all to pieces.And what was it he had told her?
A long story--that!
Sitting there by the fire, with nothing yet decided, he could see it all from the start, with its devilish, delicate intricacy, its subtle slow enchantment spinning itself out of him, out of his own state of mind and body, rather than out of the spell cast over him, as though a sort of fatal force, long dormant, were working up again to burst into dark flower....
