Gilbert Parker

“ And so Lali, just here on the edge of Marion’s future, looking into that mirror, was catching the reflection of her own life. When two women come so near that, like the lovers in the Tempest, they have changed eyes, in so far as to read each other’s hearts, even indifferently, which is much where two women are concerned, there is only one resource, and that is to fall into each other’s arms, and to weep if it be convenient, or to hold their tears for a more fitting occasion; and most people will admit that tears need not add to a bride’s beauty. ”

“ Not possessed of a vivid imagination, he could scarcely conjure up this Indian bride at Greyhope.
But face to face with Marion Armour he saw what troubled his mind, and he determined he would not meet her irony with irony, her assumed indifference with indifference. He had learned one of the most important lessons of life—never to quarrel with a woman. Whoever has so far erred has been foolish indeed. It is the worst of policy, to say nothing of its being the worst of art; and life should never be without art. ”

“ Armour had come to some wisdom by reason of her love for Frank’s wife and child.
“My son,” she had said, “through the child is the surest way, believe me; for only a mother can understand what that means, how much and how far it goes. You are a father, but until last night you never had the flush of that love in your veins. You stand yet only at the door of that life which has done more to guide, save, instruct, and deepen your wife’s life than anything else, though your brother Richard—to whom you owe a debt that you can never repay—has done much in deed. ”

“ With a low cry, like that of a fawn struck in the throat, she slid forward on her knees beside him, and buried her face on his arm. She understood. Her father was dead. Mrs. Armour came forward, and, kneeling also, drew the dark head to her bosom. Then that flood came which sweeps away the rust that gathers in the eyes and breaks through the closed dikes of the heart.
Hours after, when she had fallen into a deep sleep, General Armour and his wife met outside her bedroom door.
“I shall not leave her,” Mrs. Armour said. “Send for Frank. His time has almost come.” ”

“ She had learned much since she came to Greyhope, and yet she could not at that moment have told exactly why she asked Richard the question that had confused him, nor did she know quite what lay behind the question. But every problem which has life works itself out to its appointed end, if fumbling human fingers do not meddle with it. Half the miseries of this world are caused by forcing issues, in every problem of the affections, the emotions, and the soul. There is a law working with which there should be no tampering, lest in foolish interruption come only confusion and disaster. ”

“ By this time all were at the window, Richard arriving last, and the Indian girl turned on them, her body all quivering with excitement, laughed a low, bird-like laugh, and then, clapping her hands above her head, she swung round and ran like a deer towards the lake, shaking her head back as an animal does when fleeing from his pursuers. She would scarcely have been recognised as the same placid, speechless woman in a blanket who sat with folded hands day after day on the Aphrodite. ”

“ She looked harder yet at Marion; then, with a flash of pride and her hands clasping before her, she drew herself up, and added: “Am I not worthy to be his wife now? Am I not beautiful—for a savage?”
There was no common vanity in the action. It had a noble kind of wistfulness, and a serenity that entirely redeemed it. Marion dated her own happiness from the time when Lali met her accident, for in the evening of that disastrous day she issued to Captain Hume Vidall a commission which he could never—wished never—to resign. ”

“ It was the letter of a man who knew how to appreciate at their proper value the misfortunes, as the fortunes, of life. While Frank Armour read he came to feel for the first time that his brother Richard had suffered, maybe, from some such misery as had come to him through Julia Sherwood. It was a dispassionate, manly letter, relieved by gentle wit, and hinting with careful kindness that a sudden blow was better for a man than a lifelong thorn in his side. ”

“ The trail is open to the White Valley, and the Scarlet Hunter hath saved me, when my feet strayed in the plains and my eyes were blinded. Thou art here. I have friends on the Far Off River who show me the yards where the musk-ox gather; I have found the gardens of the young sable, and my tents are full of store. Thou art here. In the morning my spirit is light, and I have harvest where I would gather, and the stubble is for my foes. In the evening my limbs are heavy, and I am at rest in my blanket. The hunt is mine and sleep is mine, and my soul is cheerful when I remember thee. ”

“ Too much had been taken out of his life all at once; for, in the first place, the family had been drawn together more during the trouble which Lali’s advent had brought; then the child and its mother, his pupil, were gone also. He wandered about in a kind of vague unrest. The hardest thing in this world to get used to is the absence of a familiar footstep and the cheerful greeting of a familiar eye. And the man with no chick or child feels even the absence of his dog from the hearth-rug when he returns from a journey or his day’s work. It gives him a sense of strangeness and loss. ”

“ The more a man’s sympathies and emotions are active, the less is he the philosopher. It is only when one has withdrawn from the more personal influence of the emotions that one’s philosophy may be trusted. One may be interested in mankind and still be philosophical—may be, as it were, the priest and confessor to all comers. But let one be touched in some vital corner in one’s nature, and the high, faultless impartiality is gone. In proportion as Richard’s interest in Lali had grown, the universal quality of his sympathy had declined. Man is only man. ”

“ Besides, why should any woman sell her affections even to her husband, bargain away her love, the one thing that sanctifies “what God hath joined let no man put asunder”? Lali was primitive, she was unlike so many in a trivial world, but she was right. She might suffer, she might die, but, after all, there are many things worse than that. Man is born in a day, and he dies in a day, and the thing is easily over; but to have a sick heart for three-fourths of one’s lifetime is simply to have death renewed every morning; and life at that price is not worth living. ”

“ Come along, my daughter,” he said to Lali; “come up here and take the last whiff of Greyhope that you will have for six months. Dear, dear, what lunatics we all are, to be sure! Why, we’re as happy as little birds in their nests out in the decent country, and yet we scamper off to a smoky old city by the Thames to rush along with the world, instead of sitting high and far away from it and watching it go by. ”

“ He had married her; and she was only an Indian girl from Fort Charles of the Hudson’s Bay Company, with a little honest white blood in her veins. Nobody, not even her own people, felt that she had anything at stake, or was in danger of unhappiness, or was other than a person who had ludicrously come to bear the name of Mrs. Francis Armour. If any one had said in justification that she loved the man, the answer would have been that plenty of Indian women had loved white men, but had not married them, and yet the population of half-breeds went on increasing. ”

“ Lali looked out to where little Richard disported himself; her eyes shone, and she turned with a responsive but still sad smile to Marion. “Marion,” she said gently, “the other should have come before he came.” “Frank loves you, Lali.”
“Who knows? And then, oh, I cannot tell! How can one force one’s heart? No, no! One has to wait, and wait, even if the heart grows harder, and one gets hopeless.”
Marion kissed her on the cheek and smiled. “Some day soon the heart will open up, and then such a flood will pour out! See, Lali. ”

“ Looking back now, it seemed so poor and paltry a thing that he, a man, should stoop to revenge himself upon those who had given him birth, as a kind of insult to the woman who had lightly set him aside, and should use for that purpose a helpless, confiding girl. To revenge one’s self for wrong to one’s self is but a common passion, which has little dignity; to avenge some one whom one has loved, man or woman,—and, before all, woman,—has some touch of nobility, is redeemed by loyalty. ”

“ The social convention had been engrafted. As yet she was used to thinking and speaking with all candour. She was to have her training in the charms of superficiality, but that was to come; and when it came she would not be an unskilful apprentice. Perhaps the latent subtlety of her race came to help her natural candour at the moment. For she said at once, in a slow, quiet tone:
“I never heard my husband speak of you. Will you sit down?”
“And Mrs. Armour and Marion are not in? No, I suppose your husband did not speak much of his old friends.” ”

“ That newer and deeper influence had come, and the result thereof was a woman standing upon the verge of the real tragedy to her life, which was not in having married the man, but in facing that marriage with her new intelligence and a transformed soul. Men can face that sort of thing with a kind of philosophy, not because men are better or wiser, but because it really means less to them. They have resources of life, they can bury themselves in their ambitions good or bad, but a woman can only bury herself in her affections, unless her heart has been closed ”

“ Truth to say, Richard Armour was not so young as he seemed a few months before. His shoulders were a little stooped, he was greyer about the temples. The little bit of cynicism which had appeared in that remark about the care of the child showed also in the lines of his mouth; yet his eyes had the same old true, honest look. But a man cannot be hit in mortal places once or twice in his life without its being etched on his face or dropped like a pinch of aloe from his tongue.
Still they sat and talked much longer, Frank showing better than when his brother came, Richard gone grey and tired. ”

“ At last the day of the wedding came, a beautiful September day, which may be more beautiful in uncertain England than anywhere else. Lali had been strangely quiet all the day before, and she had also seemed strangely delicate. Perhaps, or perhaps not, she felt the crisis was approaching. It is probable that when the mind has been strained for a long time, and the heart and body suffered much, one sees a calamity vaguely, and cannot define it; appreciates it, and does not know it. She came to Marion’s room about a half-hour before they were to start for the church. ”

“ You can stand just so much fighting, just so much work, just so much emotion—and you can stand less emotion than anything else. I’m sure more men and women break up from a hydrostatic pressure of emotion than from anything else. Upon my soul, that’s so.”
“You are right, General,” said Lambert. “The steady way is the best way. The world is a passable place, if a fellow has a decent income by inheritance, or can earn a big one, but to be really contented to earn money it must be a big one, otherwise he is far better pleased to take the small inherited income. ”

“ Marion was, however, not in good humour; she was nervous and a little petulant. She had a high-strung temperament, a sensitive perception of the fitness of things, and a horror of what was gauche; and she would, in brief, make a rather austere person if the lines of life did not run in her favour. She had something of Frank’s impulsiveness and temper; it would have been a great blessing to her if she had had a portion of Richard’s philosophical humour also. She was at a point of tension—her mother and Richard could see that. ”

“ Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and put on a fine red belt, and that was all. She was not envious now, not at all. But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself and her marriage. Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she loved, or loves. Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and her name before the world. ”

“ As a little child hanging in the trees, or sprawled beside a tepee, she had made friends with them all, even as she learned and loved all the signs of the earth beneath—the twist of a blade of grass, the portent in the cry of a river-hen, the colour of a star, the smell of a wind. She had known Nature then, now she knew men. ”

“ He dwelt upon what she did; the walks she took in the park, those hours in the afternoon when, with Mackenzie or Colvin, she vanished into the beeches, making friends with the birds and deer and swans. But most of all she loved to go to the stables. She was, however, asked not to go unless Richard or General Armour was with her. She loved horses, and these were a wonder to her. She had never known any but the wild, ungroomed Indian pony, on which she had ridden in every fashion and over every kind of country. Mrs. Armour sent for a riding-master, and had riding-costumes made for her. ”

“ He paused, was silent for a moment, then leaned over, caught his brother’s arm, and said, in a low, strenuous voice: “Frank Armour, you laid a hateful little plot for us. It wasn’t manly, but we forgave it and did the best we could. But see here, Frank, take my word for it, you have had a lot of luck. There isn’t one woman out of ten thousand that would have stood the test as your wife has stood it; injured at the start, constant neglect, temptation—” he paused. “My boy, did you ever think of that, of the temptation to a woman neglected by her husband? The temptation to men? ”