Gertrude Page

“ Not that Eileen ever wanted to express them. She had not as yet met a kindred soul whom she felt could in any wise understand, and meanwhile, having the mountains, and the lake, and the sea, for companions, it did not seem that she needed a listener. She could talk to these in a rapturous silence as she could talk to no other, and feel that her spirit was one with their spirit, and that what men call “solitude” is in reality a wealth of deep companionship for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. ”

“ Indeed, it was so, if possible, for in her longing for her father, her heart would turn and turn piteously to Lawrence, and only feel the greater desolation. Yet no word or sign escaped her. Only that frail, wasted expression grew on her face, and the unchanging sadness deepened in her eyes.
“It seems impossible that only a few weeks ago we were all so happy,” he said at last. “It’s very hard when Life lets you go on being careless and light-hearted for years and years; and then, without any warning, suddenly grips you by the throat and makes you feel half strangled by the weight of it all.” ”

“ That’s how it will be with you, Lawrie. When Mary Jane Right turns up you’ll tear your hair—what there is of it—and stamp, and rave, and storm, just like any other love-sick male. Till then, if it pleases you to be cynical and blasé, and all that nonsense, why, be cynical and blasé; it doesn’t hurt any one else—in fact, it’s rather amusing,” and she rested her hand on his arm and looked into his face with roguish, laughing eyes. “I’d have just loved to have a brother,” she said, “but, like that nice old General Adair who wanted a son, I guess I’ve got the next best thing.” ”

“ He was thinking she looked as well in her tam-o’-shanter, short skirt, and blouse, with linen collar and cuffs, as anything he had ever seen her in. Compared with some of the resplendent beauties he had admired, she was as the cosy fireside is to the marble palace, or the fragrant violet is to the dazzling poppies. And then for a moment on the mountain side, with the fresh blowing winds, and the fragrance, and the loveliness of the lake and mountains, an unusually soft mood seemed to take possession of him, and something apart from her beauty to stir his pulses and rest his senses. ”

“ Eileen breathed. “It helps me only to hear you talk.”
“I want very much to help you,” the little lady said sadly. “You are going away to a hard change, my child, and carrying more than one heavy cross with you. I wish I could bear something for you. But you must try not to brood, lest it injure your health and add to your mother’s sorrow; and you must try to be bright to help poor Paddy. London will be terrible to her, poor child I fancy I see her now straining her eyes to the horizon, dreaming of her dear mountains and loch.” ”

“ I refuse your kindly pat on the shoulder, and your offer to be a good girl because you think you owe me thanks. You can keep your feud and your hatred—anything is better than a soppy middle course. It is my turn now, and I refuse your offer of sisterly affection, which is what it amounts to. I will have your love some day, but until then, your hate, please. As long as you go on hating I shall know at least that you are not indifferent, and that the sound of my name does not pass unheeded by your ears. ”

“ If Lawrence dimly perceived this, he blinded himself to it. To him love-making was a very different process to this calm interchange of ideas, and he certainly refrained from much that he would not have thought twice about with any other pretty girl who interested and pleased him. Could any more be expected? No one could ever say he made love to Eileen. He did not make love to her, but he sought her companionship beyond all other, and looked his admiration of her quiet loveliness, regardless that to such as she these delicate attentions were almost a declaration. ”

“ It seemed to Paddy that if she yielded to the wave that seemed like to sweep her off her feet, she not only let go her watchword of Loyalty, but she compromised with her half-formed, dimly seen ideal of Love. Always before her mind, if she thought of love in the future, had been the image of such men as the grand old General—the gentle, kindly doctor—the simple, manly, open-hearted Jack. Among such as these, how could she give such as Lawrence the place of honour? ”

“ For twenty-five years—that is since Jack was born—we have been intensely happy in this dear, quiet spot. It is hard to lose him now, and you and Paddy also, and most of our happiness will go with you, but we shall still have each other, and it is not right to repine when one is drawing near old age and the portals of the great New Day. I only pray I may live to see you all happy, for yours is not the only aching heart, Eileen—My poor boy! ”

“ Lawrence looked out into the awful gloom, felt the creeping cold through all his bones and the sharp, shooting pains in his limbs, and was content. Of a truth he was not a man to do his loving by halves when it was real.
But human nature is not infallible, and it is doubtful if he could have endured much longer by the time a vague sound over the mountain fell on his ear. ”

“ She could not vent her feelings in anger like Paddy—least of all anger with Lawrence—so in her misery she became a prey to those questionings and reasonings which torment each soul confronted suddenly by some strange enigma of existence. Questions of faith, questions of doubt, all the boundless “why and wherefore” of daily being thronged round and hammered unceasingly at her brain, stealing the delicate colour from her cheeks, the light from her eyes, and the elasticity from her steps. ”

“ But it was so hard at the time; oh! my dear, I know so well, when the future looks all black and hopeless. But it is never really so. What God takes away from us with one hand, He repays with the other. I was quite certain no joy was left in all the world for me—nothing but a long, lonely single life. And instead, it has all been so blessed and so sweet. What I have lost in husband and child, I seem to have found again a thousand times in you and Paddy and Jack, and all the young folks and children around that I love so well. It has been the same with Jane, I think. ”

“ Now you know why sister and I have never married, yet are rich because we have known the deep wonder of Love. It is worth some sorrow to have that knowledge, and there is no life so barren, whatever else it holds, as the life that has not known a deep and true Love.”
She got up, and in the firelight it seemed to Eileen that some inner radiance lit up her sweet, lined face, reflecting a faint aureole round her silver hair. ”

“ At moments she longed passionately to be with Jack galloping over the grass plains of the Argentine; and her heart was sore at the fate which had condemned her of all people to mixing medicines in a dingy suburb. She even ruminated a little wistfully, if only Lawrence had not been Lawrence. If some other man had lived at Mourne Lodge, and wanted her to make her home there, what a heaven on earth she might have had! ”

“ In all their lives he had never known Paddy adopt that tone to him, and he regarded her as if she had suddenly developed into a new species of wild animal.
“Oh, you needn’t look like that,” ran on poor Paddy, getting more and more beside herself with exasperation; “you know perfectly well you are little better than a mere boy. If you had gone out into the world like other men, and made a way for yourself, you might have come back and won Eileen, and saved her from all that’s coming. ”

“ And Miss Jane did—having her own cry out later by herself—while the steamer started into the black, wintry night, and Jack stood watching it from Greenore pier, with a mist before his eyes and a queer huskiness in his throat. Just when life was opening for him with all its sweetest and best, it seemed hard, indeed, that Paddy—his old chum and playmate—should be assailed with this trouble of which she would not speak, and in which apparently none of them could help her. ”

“ On the afternoon of the third day Paddy wandered alone to a little creek by the loch, and, sitting down on a fallen tree, sank her chin in her hands and gazed across the water with a whole world of yearning longing in her eyes at the thought of leaving it all and returning to the streets, and chimney-pots, and smuts. So rapt was she that she did not hear some one approach over the moss and stand silently beside her—some one who saw the yearning, and read it aright with mingled feelings of regret and gladness. ”

“ Oh, auntie! how could I—a great strong fellow such as I—with my health and strength, take away the income of two frail women?”
“Jack dear,” she urged tearfully, “don’t look at it in that way. It is only that we long to repay you for all the happiness you have brought into our lives.”
“It is impossible, auntie,” he said, and his eyes glistened.
“Jack,”—there was a new note of tenderness in Miss Mary’s voice—“is there anything between you and Eileen?”
For answer he dropped his face in his hands with a low groan. For some moments Miss Mary was silent. She could not trust herself to speak. ”

“ Still, whenever he remembered Eileen he felt the same twinge. He recognised that she was not quite like other girls. She had not in any way laid herself open to the blow he had dealt her, and she had certainly not led him on. All through she had been just her own natural self, and he could not but know this only placed his conduct in a still less pleasant light. It would have been nothing to be proud of with any girl, but it does sometimes happen that a man is not wholly to blame when he has gone further than he meant.
At the same time Lawrence was a little surprised. ”

“ Paddy watched him covertly, feeling interested. She realised that he had the look of a man who could not be thwarted with impunity. A man strong enough to be patient up to a certain point, and then capable of being unscrupulous rather than give in. She wished vaguely that he had been different, and at that moment, before she had time to lower her gaze, Lawrence looked up suddenly from his paper straight into her eyes.
There was no time for subterfuge, and a sudden flood of colour in her cheeks told its own tale. ”

“ Miss Mary having the greater intuition, was the first to offer a solution. “Can it be Eileen?” she asked with dread—“Eileen and Lawrence Blake?”
They looked into each other’s eyes with a sudden sense of awakening.
“Surely not—” murmured Miss Jane, but her face belied her words.
“Oh, sister,” breathed little tender-hearted Miss Mary, “if it is true he will suffer so. I can’t bear to think of our boy suffering,” and two big tears gathered in her eyes. ”

“ There was a pause.
“She’s like my mother,” he said slowly; “only mother was never as good-looking.”
“Yes, that’s all very well,” quoth Gwen; “but men never want to marry their mothers, even when they worship them. I can just see the whole thing now, and you’ve behaved like an idiot, for all your brains and cleverness. If I had been there to look after you it wouldn’t have happened. A man of your type does not love a girl of her type; he only admires and respects from a distance. If you had married her you wouldn’t have made her happy, so it’s a very good thing for her you’ve come away. ”

“ In the deep, silent depths of her Celtic imagination, in which dwelt ever paramount, before all, that divine love of beauty which imbues a too often prosaic world with a vague wonder of loveliness, and fair promise, she saw only the heights to which men might rise, and the power of goodness, and held to her ideals in the face of all destroying.
She was aroused at last by a step approaching over the shingle that was so like the step of the afternoon that she started and held her breath in wondering expectation. ”

“ Nevertheless, often across her studies would steal the memory of the mountains and loch. In fancy she would smell the heather or the peat, hear the curlews calling or the cry of the plover, the lapping of the little waves against the keel of the boat, or their light murmuring on the shingle; she would wonder what the aunties were doing, and how the hockey club was getting on with its new captain, and whether they all thought of her sometimes and missed her! ”

“ For sorrow does not come so hard upon the old as upon the young, since when half the journey is over and can be looked back upon, for those who have eyes to see there is ever the God-light visible shining through the darkest hours.
That day Jack told Paddy, and the news began to spread swiftly, until it was known in all the neighbourhood that not only was The Ghan House to be let to strangers, but Jack O’Hara, everybody’s favourite, was going away across the sea to seek his fortune in foreign lands. ”

“ However, they were mellow, dreaming days, and an atmosphere of peaceful dreaminess seemed to pervade them all—like the calm before a storm.
To do Lawrence justice, he did not go out of his way to win Eileen’s love. On the contrary, he did go a little out of his way to shock her, but since she possessed divination enough to realise something of this, it had the opposite effect. She was so simple and natural herself that she was incapable of understanding deception. ”

“ This, then, surely had something to do with the wistful expression in the little sad-eyed Eileen’s face, and in later years so deeply entwined her round her mother’s heart. Only Mrs Adair rarely showed it, for she was eminently a just woman, and in the peaceful waters of her after-life she put her sad past resolutely aside, and tried to live only for the husband who was so good to her, and for her harum-scarum tom-boy daughter, as much as for the child who would always possess the largest share of her heart. ”

“ Gwen stood a moment watching her cross the hall with a fascinated gaze, and then suddenly darted across to the drawing-room, and burying her face in a sofa-cushion burst into tears, to the unutterable consternation of her faithful giant, who followed immediately, and had much ado to soothe her. They were startled presently by the sound of a door being violently slammed, as only a man could slam it, and then halting footsteps approached the hall. Gwen went to the door, but drew back horror-struck. Mrs Blake was going toward the stairs, and her face was the colour of a corpse. ”