Gilbert Parker

“ Since then he had seen neither Philip nor Guida.
To Carterette he seemed not the man she had known. With her woman’s instinct she knew that he loved Guida, but she also knew that nothing which might have happened between them could have brought this look of shame and shrinking into his face. As these thoughts flashed through her mind her heart grew warmer. Suppose Ranulph was in some trouble—well, now might be her great chance. She might show him that he could not live without her friendship, and then perhaps, by-and-bye, that he could not live without her love. ”

“ It dulls the brain, and life winds in upon itself wearily at the last. But out there is light and fire and action and the quick-beating pulse, and the joy of power wisely used, even to the end. You come of a great people, you were born to great things; your child has rights accorded now by every Court of Europe. You must act for him. For your child’s sake, for my sake come out into the great field of life with me—as my wife, Guida.”
She turned to him frankly, she looked at him steadfastly, the colour in her face came and went, but her eyes glowed with feeling. ”

“ He must sit opposite his father day by day at table, talk with him, care for him, shrinking inwardly at every knock at the door lest it should be an officer come to carry the pitiful traitor off to prison.
And, more than all, he must give up for ever the thought of Guida. Here was the acid that ate home, the black hopelessness, the machine of fate clamping his heart. Never again could he rise in the morning with a song on his lips; never again his happy meditations go lilting with the clanging blows of the adze and the singing of the saws. ”

“ Suddenly Guida realised how different was her love from Philip’s, how different her place in his life from his place in her life. She reasoned with herself, because she knew that a man’s life was work in the world, and that work and ambition were in his bones and in his blood, had been carried down to him through centuries of industrious, ambitious generations of men: that men were one race and women were another. ”

“ With a hungry instinct for the morbid they stole to the doorway and looked down the Rue d’Driere after her. The Master was sympathetic, for had he not in his fingers at that moment a bill for a hundred and twenty livres odd? The way the apprentice craned his neck, and tightened the forehead over his large, protuberant eyes, showed his intense curiosity, but the face was implacable. It was like that of some strong fate, superior to all influences of sorrow, shame, or death. Presently he laughed—a crackling cackle like new-lighted kindling wood; nothing could have been more inhuman in sound. ”

“ Must they begin in blind faith, then be plunged into the darkness of disillusion, shaken by the storm of emotion, taste the sting in the fruit of the tree of knowledge—and go on again the same, yet not the same?
More or less incoherently these thoughts flitted through Guida’s mind. As yet her experiences were too new for her to fasten securely upon their meaning. In a day or two she would write to Philip freely and warmly of her love and of her hopes; for, maybe, by that time nothing but happiness would be left in the caldron of feeling. ”

“ You and I are apart from the world, a black loneliness no one understands. Let us be lonely no longer. Let us live our lives together. What shall we care for the rest of the world if we know we mean to do good and no wrong? So I’ve come to ask you to let me care for you and the child, to ask you to make my home your home. My father hasn’t long to live, and when he is gone we could leave this island for ever. Will you come, Guida?”
She had never taken her eyes from his face, and as his story grew her face lighted with emotion, the glow of a moment’s content, of a fleeting joy. ”

“ Recovering herself, however, and with an air of bright friendliness, she laid a hand upon the great arm-chair, above which hung the ancient sword of her ancestor, the Comte Guilbert Mauprat de Chambery, and said: “Sit here, Ranulph.”
Seating himself he gave a heavy sigh—one of those passing breaths of content which come to the hardest lives now and then: as though the Spirit of Life itself, in ironical apology for human existence, gives moments of respite from which hope is born again. Not for over four long years had Ranulph sat thus quietly in the presence of Guida. ”

“ How bad a man are you! In spite of all your promises; in spite of the surrender of honest heart and life to you; in spite of truth and every call of honour, you denied me—dared to deny me, at the very time you wrote this letter. For the hopes and honours of this world, you set aside, first by secrecy, and then by falsehood, the helpless girl to whom you once swore undying love. You, who knew the open book of her heart, you threw it in the dust. “Of course there is no wife?” the Duc de Bercy said to you before the States of Bercy. ”

“ He had a right to his adoption, he had no right to his duchy—no real right in the equity of nations. But all the time I never forgot that the wife of Philip d’Avranche and her child had rights infinitely beyond his own. All that he achieved was theirs by every principle of justice. My plain duty was to win for your child that succession belonging to him by all moral right. When Philip d’Avranche was killed, I set to work to do for your child what had been done by another for Philip d’Avranche. I have made him my heir. When he is of age I shall abdicate from the duchy in his favour. ”

“ Come what might, there was one thing that he could yet do, and even as the thought possessed him he spoke.
“Guida,” he said with rushing emotion, “it is not too late. Forgive the past-the wrong of it, the shame of it. You are my wife; nothing can undo that. The other woman—she is nothing to me. If we part and never meet again she will suffer no more than she suffers to go on with me. She has never loved me, nor I her. Ambition did it all, and of ambition God knows I have had enough! Let me proclaim our marriage, let me come back to you. ”

“ He knew well that she had been his champion in dark days, that he had received far more from her than he had ever given—even of friendship. In his own absorbing love for Guida Landresse, during long years he had been unconsciously blind to a devotion which had lived on without hope, without repining, with untiring cheerfulness.
In those three days spent on the top of the Perch Rock how blithe garcon Carterette had been! Danger had seemed nothing to her. She had the temper of a man in her real enjoyment of the desperate chances of life. ”

“ Some morning perhaps you forget, and you go out into the sun, and it all seems good; and you take your tools and go to work, and the sea comes washing up the shingle, and you think that the shir-r-r-r of the water on the pebbles and the singing of the saw and the clang of the hammer are the best music in the world. But all at once you remember—and then you work harder, not because you love work now for its own sake, but because it uses up your misery and makes you tired; and being tired you can sleep, and in sleep you can forget. ”

“ Many a Jersey boatman, many a fisherman who has lived his whole life in sight of the Paternosters on the north, the Ecrehos on the east, the Dog’s Nest on the south, or the Corbiere on the west, has in some helpless moment been caught by the unsleeping currents which harry his peaceful borders, or the rocks that have eluded the hunters of the sea, and has yielded up his life within sight of his own doorway, an involuntary sacrifice to the navigator’s knowledge and to the calm perfection of an admiralty chart. ”

“ She was no longer sole captain of herself. Philip would signal, and she must come until either he or she should die. He had taken her hand, and she must never let it go; the breath of his being must henceforth give her new and healthy life, or inbreed a fever which should corrode the heart and burn away the spirit. Young though she was, she realised it—but without defining it. The new-found knowledge was diffused in her character, expressed in her face.
Seldom had a day of Guida’s life been so busy. It seemed to her that people came and went far more than usual. ”

“ Now he should know the truth, now he should be sure that they had lied about his little Guida, those slanderers of the Vier Marchi. Yet, too, he had a strange, depressing fear, at variance with his loving faith and belief that in Guida there was no wrong: such belief as has the strong swimmer that he can reach the shore through wave and tide; yet also with strange foreboding, prelude to the cramp that makes powerless, defying youth, strength, and skill. ”

“ Then Philip would be able to talk with her of all he did at sea, and she would understand.
When, a few days ago, she had said to him that she did not know how she was going to be all that his wife ought to be, he had answered her: “All I ask is that you be your own sweet self, for it is just you that I want, you with your own thoughts and imaginings, and not a Guida who has dropped her own way of looking at things to take on some one else’s—even mine. It’s the people who try to be clever who never are; the people who are clever never think of trying to be.” ”

“ It was as if the outward action of life was suspended in them for a moment, and then came the battle of two strong spirits: the struggle of fretful and indulged egotism, the impulse of a vigorous temperament, against a deep moral force, a high purity of mind and conscience, and the invincible love of the mother for the child. Time, bitterness, and power had hardened Philip’s mind, and his long-restrained emotions, breaking loose now, made him a passionate and wilful figure. His force lay in the very unruliness of his spirit, hers in the perfect command of her moods and emotions. ”

“ If at times it would seem that Nature’s disposition of the events of a life or a series of lives is illogical, at others she would seem to play them with an irresistible logic—loosing them, as it were, in a trackless forest of experience, and in some dramatic hour, by an inevitable attraction, drawing them back again to a destiny fulfilled. In this latter way did she seem to lay her hand upon the lives of Philip d’Avranche and Guida Landresse. ”

“ She felt a sudden impulse to tell him all her thoughts. To know things, to understand, was a passion with her. It seemed to obliterate in her all that was conventional, it removed her far from sensitive egotism. Already she had begun “to take notice” in the world, and that is like being born again. As it grows, life ceases to be cliche; and when the taking notice is supreme we call it genius; and genius is simple and believing: it has no pride, it is naive, it is childlike.
Philip seemed to wear no mark of convention, and Guida spoke her thoughts freely to him. ”

“ The untoward happenings of her life had killed her grandfather, had bowed and aged the old Chevalier, had forced her to reject the friendship of Carterette Mattingley, for the girl’s own sake; had made the heart of one fat old woman heavy within her; and, it would seem, had taken hope and ambition from the life of this man before her. Love in itself is but a bitter pleasure; when it is given to the unworthy it becomes a torture—and so far as Ranulph and the world knew she was wholly unworthy. ”

“ In that moment Ranulph learned more than he had ever guessed of life’s subtle distinctions and the workings of a woman’s mind; and he knew that she was right. Her father, her grandfather, might have killed Philip d’Avranche—any one but himself, he the man who had but now declared his love for her. Clearly his selfishness had blinded him. Right was on his side, but not the formal codes by which men live. He could not avenge Guida’s wrongs upon her husband, for all men knew that he himself had loved her for years. ”

“ Will you run and ask Maitresse Aimable to come here to me soon?” Her voice had the steadiness of despair—that steadiness coming to those upon whose nerves has fallen a great numbness, upon whose sensibilities has settled a cloud that stills them as the thick mist stills the ripples on the waters of a fen.
All the glamour of Guida’s youth had dropped away. She had deemed life good, and behold, it was not good; she had thought her dayspring was on high, and happiness had burnt into darkness like quick-consuming flax. ”

“ Yet nearly all the time you’re awake it fairly kills you, for you feel some one always at your elbow whispering, ‘you’ll never be happy again, you’ll never be happy again!’ And when you tell the truth about anything, that some one at your elbow laughs and says: ‘Nobody believes—your whole life’s a lie!’ And if the worst man you know passes you by, that some one at your elbow says: ‘You can wear a mask, but you’re no better than he, no better, no—“’
While Ranulph spoke Guida’s face showed a pity and a kindness as deep as the sorrow which had deepened her nature. ”

“ To a cave at this point Dormy Jamais had brought the trembling Olivier Delagarde, unrepenting and peevish, but with a craven fear of the Royal Court and a furious populace quickening his footsteps. This hiding-place was entered at low tide by a passage from a larger cave. It was like a little vaulted chapel floored with sand and shingle. A crevice through rock and earth to the world above let in the light and out the smoke. ”

“ Guida [he began] , on the Ecrehos I said to you: “If I deceive you may I die a black, dishonourable death, abandoned and alone!” It has all come true. You were right, always right, and I was always wrong. I never started fair with myself or with the world. I was always in too great a hurry; I was too ambitious, Guida. Ambition has killed me, and it has killed her—the Comtesse. She is gone. What was it he said—if I could but remember what Grandjon-Larisse said—ah yes, yes!—after he had given me my death-wound, he said: “It is not the broken heart that kills, but broken pride.” ”

“ She walked up and down the garden, Biribi the dog by her side. Sitting down on the bench beneath the appletree, she recalled every word that Philip had said to her two days before. Every tone of his voice, every look he had given her, she went over in her thoughts. There is no reporting in the world so exact, so perfect, as that in a woman’s mind, of the words, looks, and acts of her lover in the first days of mutual confession and understanding. ”

“ Not a stray cat wandering into the Place du Vier Prison but found an asylum in the garden behind the cottage. Not a dog hungry for a bone, stopping at Guida’s door, but was sure of one from a hiding-place in the hawthorn hedge of the garden. Every morning you might have seen the birds in fluttering, chirping groups upon the may-tree or the lilac-bushes, waiting for the tiny snow-storm of bread to fall from her hand. ”

“ Why had Philip failed to keep his promise not to see her again after the marriage, till he should return from Portsmouth? It was selfish, painfully, terribly selfish of him. Why, even though she had been foolish in her request—why had he not done as she wished? Was that love—was it love to break the first promise he had ever made to his wife?
Yet she excused him to herself. Men were different from women, and men did not understand what troubled a woman’s heart and spirit; they were not shaken by the same gusts of emotion ”