Bram Stoker

“ As Athlyne stood face to face with him, watching for every sign of intention as a fencer watches his opponent, he realised that there would be for him no pity, no mercy, not even understanding. He would have to fight an uphill contest—if Joy was to be saved even a single pang. What he could do he would: sacrifice himself in any way that a man can accomplish it. Life and happiness had for him passed by! One of his greatest difficulties would be, he felt, that of so controlling himself that he would not of necessity shut behind him, by anything which he might say or do, the door of conciliation. ”

“ To the strongest and most resolute warrior must be a moment when he can no more; when the last blow has been struck and the calling of another world is ringing in his ears; to the resolute amongst men this moment is the moment of death. To women it is surrender of self; surrender to the embrace of Death—or to the embrace of Love. It is the true end of the battle. The rest is but the carrying out of the Treaty of Peace, the Triumph of the Victory in which she is now proud to have a part—if it be only that of captive!
There was no sleep for Joy that night. ”

“ Do you think Sally that I have arrived at old maidhood without knowing what a young maid thinks and feels; without having any share of the torture that women must bear in some form or another. I know it all as well as though it was all fresh before me instead of a lurid memory. Ah, my dear she has all our nature—and her father’s too. And he never learned the restraint that we had to learn—and practice. When she is face to face with passion she may find herself constrained to take it as he has always done: for life or death! ”

“ Shame was not for them, or to them, who loved with all their hearts—whose souls already felt as one. For shame, which is a conventional ordering of the blood, has no place—not even a servitor’s—in the House of Love: that palace where reigns the love of husbandhood and wifehood, of fatherhood and motherhood—that true, realized Cosmos—the aim, the objective, the heaven of human life.
Their circumstances but intensified the pleasure of the embrace. Athlyne and Joy had both felt the same communion of spirits when they embraced at their first meeting out of Ambleside when their souls had met. ”

“ As she heard it Joy’s heart beat so that she feared he would notice it, and all the self-protective instincts of womanhood rose at the thought. For an instant her face glowed; then it grew pale again. She did not hesitate, however. She raised her eyes and looked him full in the face. Her cheeks were flaming now, but she did not heed it. In the face of nature what, after all, is convention. As Athlyne lost himself in those wonderful eyes he had a wild almost over-mastering desire to take her in his arms and kiss her straight on the beautiful mouth. ”

“ The girl laughed outright:
“Why on earth Aunt Judy, if you’re well, do you go to bed at ten o’clock in the morning?” Miss Hayes was not angry; there was a momentary gleam in her eye as she said with a manifestedly exaggerated dignity:
“You forget my dear, that I am an old maid!”
“What has old-maidenhood to do with it? But anyhow you are not an old maid. You are only forty!”
“Not forty, Joy! Only forty, indeed! My dear child when that unhappy period comes a single lady is put on the shelf—out of reach of all masculine humanity. ”

“ His ardour redoubled, and her heart beat harder with new love as well as triumph as he drew her closer to him in a pythonic embrace. Then she, too, clung to him even closer than before. That embrace was all lover-like—an agony of rapture.
In its midst they were startled somewhat by the rumbling of a motor driven fast which seemed to stop close to them. Instinctively Joy tried to draw away from her lover; such is woman’s impulse. But Athlyne held her all the tighter—his embrace was not all love now, but the protection which comes from love. ”

“ It is perhaps in such moments that we realise that passion, however earthly may be its exciting cause, is in itself an attribute or emanation of the Soul. Over and over again did Joy live through the mad moments of that ride towards death. Over and over again did that heroic figure sweep up beside her out of the great unknown. She began to understand now whence came her calmness and quickness of apprehension as she realised his presence—the presence of a man who dominated her—even whose horse in the easiness of its calm intention outstripped the wildness of her own maddened steed. ”

“ Judy had a wild impulse to tell Joy to go to the door with the departing guest, but in the presence of her mother she did not dare to suggest it. Had she been alone she would probably have done so.
Athlyne walked away with his mind in a whirl. In his heart was ever surging up through all other thoughts that one sublime recognition which comes to every man at least once in his life: that which Sir Geraint voiced:
“Here, by God’s rood is the one maid for me!” To this all other thoughts gave way. It obsessed him. ”

“ THE CAR OF DESTINY Athlyne did not feel safe till the French vessel was dipping her nose into the open Atlantic seas, and the Long Island Hills were a faint blue line on the western horizon. The last dozen hours of his stay in New York had been as though spent in prison. He knew well now that he really loved Joy; that this was no passing fancy, no mere desire of possession of a pretty woman. All phases of the passion of love, from the solely physical to the purely spiritual, have their own forces commanding different sets of nerves. ”

“ But this man, heart-hungry and naturally susceptible after some years of campaigning, fell madly in love. His very soul had gone down into the depths of those unfathomable eyes, and come back purified and sweetened—like the smoke drawn through the rosewater of a hookah. Every instant that he sat beside her the spell grew upon him. Joy was a woman in whom the sex-instinct was very strong. She was woman all over; type of woman who seems to draw man to her as the magnet draws the steel. Athlyne was a very masculine person and therefore peculiarly sensitive to the influence. ”

“ Each day he marked out a space that he thought it ought to have covered, crediting it for every hour of daylight with top speed. After all, no matter what our ages may be, we are but children and the new toy but renews the old want and the old impatience; bringing in turn the old disillusionment and the old empty-hearted discontent. And the new toy may be of any shape: even that of a motor-car—or a beating human heart.
Partly out of affection for her father and so from sympathy with him, and partly as a relief to herself, Joy looked eagerly for the coming of the car. ”

“ For it is our life to be silent in men’s quarrels. We are not given a part—any part. We are not supposed to even look on. It is another world from ours, and we have to accept it so. Please God may you never know what it is to be in or on the fringe of a Feud. Well I know its dread, its horror! My own life that years ago was as bright and promising as any young life can be; when the Love that had dawned on my girlhood rose and beat with noonday heat on my young-womanhood made it seem as if heaven had come down to earth. ”

“ But a false name—even in jest, my dear—is an offence against society generally, and hurts and offends every one. And in addition it is every one of the sins you have named; and all the others in the calendar as well.”
“How on earth do you make out that, Daddy?”
“Take them in order as you mentioned them. Murder, burglary, theft, wife-beating, cheating at cards! What is murder? Killing without justification! Does not one who approaches another in false guise kill something? The murderer takes the life; the other kills what is often more than life: self respect, belief in human nature, faith. ”

“ Athlyne had his full share of it. Being young and strong and of a class in life which seldom lacks amusement he had not been given to self-analysis. But all the same, though he did not think of it, the force was there. In his present emotional crisis it brought the lover in him up to the Celtic ideal. An ideal so strangely saturated with love that his whole being, his aims and ambitions, his hopes and fears, his pleasures and pains yielded place to it and for the time became merged in it. To him the whole world seemed to revolve round Joy as a pivotal point. ”

“ I know that things do not look well. I realise that you must have been shocked when you came into the room. But, Daddy dear, there are few things in the world that cannot be explained—at any rate in part. Don’t forget that I am a woman now. I am no longer a child whose ignorance is her innocence. Speak to me! Ask me what you will, and I will answer you truly! Hear me, even as you would listen to one dying! For indeed it is so. If you carry out your intention, as I have heard it expressed, I shall no longer live; there will be nothing for me to live for. ”

“ Judy herself knew the power of those gray, deep eyes. Even when her niece had been a baby there seemed something hypnotic about them. They could disarm anger, or change the iron of theory into the water of fact. Often and often after some such episode when she had thought the matter over she had said to herself:
“Lord! if she’s like that as a baby with me, what will she be with a man when she’s a woman!” Judy who was a self-observer knew instinctively that in Joy was an inherent influence over men. ”

“ It is strange how the perspective of lines of lamps gets changed when one is riding or driving or cycling in mist or fog. If one kept the centre of the road it would be all right; but as one keeps of necessity to the left the lines between the lamps which guide the eye change with each instant. The effect is that straight lines appear to be curved; and if the driver loses nerve and trusts to appearances he will soon come to grief. This was Joy’s first experience of driving in mist, and she naturally fell into the error. ”

“ Then she went with some hesitation:
“Lucius you are so determined when you take up an idea, and I know you are not pleased with this little joke. You are mixing it up with honour—the honour that you fight about; and if you go on, it may cause pain to us all. We are only a pack of women, after all, and you mustn’t be hard on us.”
“Judy, my dear, I am never hard on a woman, am I?”
“No! Indeed you’re not,” she avowed heartily. “You’re the very incarnation of sweetness, and gentleness, and tenderness, and chivalry with them ... But then you take it out of the men that cross you!” ”