Madame Milónoff awoke two mornings later to find her maid already in the room, drawing the blinds. It was chilly. Rain was beating against the windows. A fire, started an hour before, was cracking gaily in the tiled chimney-piece, on the mantel of which an old-fashioned glass-enclosed clock, with a swinging shepherd boy for pendulum, told her that it was past her usual breakfast hour.
The accustomed “tick … tick … tick,” faint and familiar, beat its delicate rhythm into her awakening ears—the pulse of a new day.
“It is a grey morning, little mother,” said the maid, in Russian, coming from the window to arrange the breakfast tray.
“Not in here, Polinka.” She leaned back against the pillows and deliberately sent her gaze roving about the room to alight and flutter away from the beloved companions of her invalid condition—her dressing table, from which came a gleam of ivory and silver; the azalea blooming in a jardinière of beaten copper near the window; the little carved walnut table by the fireplace strewn with books; the two statuettes on the chest-of-drawers—one drooped in a deep curtsey, the other inclined in a courtly bow; the wicker work-table, from which peeped a loop of cherry-coloured ribbon; the carnations—two vases of them, one at the foot of her bed and another near the closed and curtained door; the pictures, mostly tiny things in frames which closely hugged their precious contents; except for a large pastel of a woman with a saintly face, whose benign and sorrowful gaze rested with an air of blessing upon the reclining occupant of the room.
After bestowing her usual glance of greeting on these intimate objects Madame Milónoff turned her attention to the tray. First she picked up the letters lying in a little heap beside her plate. Among them was a bulky envelope addressed in a hand which caused her shoulders to rise with a quick inhalation of her breath. She tucked it under the coverlet and began her breakfast, while Polinka, sitting on a low stool beside the bed, read out the items of interest in that morning’s ‘Times.’
They were unusually brief, for Polinka had noticed the envelope. She knew whose writing it was, and her timid heart fluttered for her mistress. At first she had wished that Densham might have been handsomer; but as the weeks passed she began to think of him with a sort of idolatry, because she could see that he had taken captive the kind heart in whose service she delighted.
“The news is very little this morning, madam,” she said, and went quietly out with the tray.
Madam Milónoff tore open the envelope and began to read:
Dearest —
You are here—so near to me that I can feel your arms about me, as they were last night—and yet something impels me to sit down and write. It is only that I want to talk to you—no, after all, it is not even that—but just that I want to be with you, now, ever, always!
When I left you I walked slowly home, murmuring—over and over again—your name—over and over again—‘Natálya Feódorovna!’— as though it were a charm to keep you near me, the very fragrance of you and the deep look in your eyes, the memory of your caressing fingers, the light touch of your lips on my hair. So long as I kept repeating it, over and over again ‘Natálya Feódorovna!!’—so long, I felt, you would never leave me.
And the stars leaned out of heaven to listen. Their little white glances were never before so pale. How dimmed they seemed— those immense luminaries—by the radiance of our love! Even the world seemed to shrink under my feet into a tiny ball. But it didn’t matter. I needed no earth to tread!
How you will laugh at me! … leaving you so dejected and returning to you in such a transport of joy.
Laugh then, dearest one; but let me hear you. I am jealous enough that I could wish you never to laugh nor speak again, nor stir from where I left you, until I return to your side.
‘We have found each other too late,’ I said last night. I didn’t mean it. But I was obsessed by the thought that we have been cheated of half our lives.
But, today, you seem so near, and the future seems boundless. The years stretch out before me like a bright landscape, sunned by the sweet light of your eyes. O Natálya Feódorovna—say that you will be kind, that you will let me stay beside you, even in this queer wrong old world.
It doesn’t seem half so wrong today. Right and wrong; what has seemed bright and what has seemed dark, no longer possess either gleam or shadow. All I know is that I love you. There is room in my heart for nothing else—no other thought—and yet it is not a thought. Nothing could be less finite—less bound.
If only I could make you see what it means to me. When I met you I had left behind my youth. Foolish as it may sound to you. I was resigning myself to the thought of age. The bleakness of the second half of life chilled me. It was not that I had lost hope of loving or being loved again. I did not think of love, did not wish for it or expect it. At best it seemed to me an exasperating and a transient thing … torture … an hour of ecstasy … dregs! No, it was not that I expected ever again to love. It was that I felt my dreams falling shattered all about me. Never to soar, never to create, never to accomplish—conquer— achieve! Nothing but a life eked out in common ways; a pittance of comfort, perhaps; a little ease; and then … the guttering of the brief candle. Cannot you imagine the barrenness, the bitterness …?
But how all is changed, dearest alchemist!
Out of the mire of my irresolution you have rescued my birthright—the right to strive, to climb,—the right, above all, to make the ideal real!
O dearest when I started I meant to say so much; but “words are such feeble things.” Do you know that little song:
“I have no words to tell you how I love you;
Words are such feeble things!
But I have thoughts, sweet tender thought about you—
And thoughts have wings.”
Imagine! It must be eleven or twelve years since I sang that; but you have brought the words back to me. That is one of the thousand wonderful things about you—that you call up all the beautiful things I have ever heard, or experienced.
All that is beautiful in life, all my faith, my love, the craving of my heart, is centred in and about you. You have renewed my youth, my enthusiasm, my pride in myself, my desire to do! O, keep your wings under me, dear angel.
I am all—all—wholly yours. Do with me as you will.
It is dark. I yearn for your soft voice above me, whispering that “it is true”. I lean into the night and kiss you—deep into your soul.
Griffith.
Madame Milónoff pressed the letter to her bosom, and sank back against the pillows. Her wildly beating heart—too weak to sustain the emotion his words evoked—seemed to be stifling her. For a long time she lay very white and still.
That night Densham left London by an early train after dinner. It had not been dark when he reached the house. Few lights were burning. His heart rose.
Polinka came to the door.
“Madame is out,” she said. “Anton has taken her for a walk.”
“Has she been well today?”
His many visits had accustomed Polinka to Densham’s place in her mistress’s heart. It was she who had softened Anton’s stern regard for the frequent caller. The old footman, always possessing the air of being about to break out in lamentation, had often lifted his prophet-like arms, below stairs, and predicted calamity for Madame if she allowed herself to love “the gloomy Englishman”
“But if it is comfort to her,” Polinka had protested.
Anton shook his beard in her face.
“Eckh! such a goose you are. What a little pigeon! Know you not that her heart cannot stand it—goose!—the grande passion? Comfort! Psssh! Who but a little pigeon gets comfort out of love?”
She was reminded of what Anton had said by Densham’s question. She came a step forward and pressed her little red hands together as though she were going to pray.
“No, your honour, not as usual. The letter, your letter. Ah!” Her blue eyes rolled upward as she prolonged the low exclamation.
“What? Tell me, Polinka!”
“I went in—after. The letter—it was there—in her hand. I think she— what do you say?—faint?”
Densham grasped the girl’s arm. “But she is better—allright now?”
“Yes, your honour,” Polinka replied, soberly, with a tiny curtsey.
“I’ll look for her. Probably they are not far.”
“No, your honour. They are not long gone.”
He found them in the little recreation ground by the church, where he had seen her that first time. There was no moon; but the stars were brilliant, and he could see the oval of her face against the dark background of the chair, coming towards him.
The night was so still that he could hear her recognize him with a whispered cry,— “Griffith!”—when he was still some paces away.
Anton halted the chair.
“You startled me,” she murmured, faintly; both her hands pressed to her heart.
“Ah madame,” he answered, in a low voice. “How thoughtless of me.”
“You may go, Anton. Mr. Densham will bring me home.”
Without a sound the old footman glided away into the darkness.
Griffith went round to the back of the chair and pushed it toward a bench under a laburnum tree which hung over an old wall. They did not speak until he had faced her about and had seated himself so that he could take her hands.
“You must not write to me like that,” she said, after a while. “I wish you could. It seems so hard that when you do come—after all these years—to fulfill my dreams, I must shut my heart to you…”
“O no, no.”
“I must, dear, if I am to live … and I can’t die, now that I’ve found you. But I swooned, after reading your letter today. O Griffith! It is you who must be kind to me. Learn to love me … quietly.”
She drew his hands toward her and laid them against her throat.
“I knew of no sweeter death,” she went on, and stopped suddenly with a gesture of her hand to her temple, as startling and alarming as a trumpet call.
“No, no! what am I saying? I have never wanted so much to live.”
He freed his hands and thrust them wildly into his hair. “O, Natálya! Live! live! Dearest. I didn’t know. I am so selfish!”
“No, no.”
“I didn’t think. I didn’t know. O, black heaven! O Natálya!”
He began to sob.
“Griffith,” she breathed above him, for he had fallen on his knees in the grass, and his face was buried in the folds of her dress.
He looked up through his tears and was shocked into quietness by the dry-eyed anguish of her face.
“Have pity,” she said. “Take me home.”
He sprang to his feet. “Home!”
He was about to say, “There is no home for us, neither for you nor me, no happiness, nothing but bitterest rue on this side of the grave.” The words framed themselves in his distracted mind; but he did not utter them.
He went to the back of the chair and leaned over her. Their faces were so close that even in the deep shadow they could see the slightest play of expression in each other’s eyes. His were dull with the effort of repression. Hers were questing, seeking some sign of calm.
“Will you be good to me, Griffith?”
He flung one open hand above his head as though to hold back the wrath that seemed to be pouring upon them out of the black night.
“Through a thousand lives and deaths!”