Part 45 (1/2)
”The Mother.... How can she approve your joining the ranks of the Shrieking Sisterhood?”
”She knows,” Lynette explained, with adorable gravity, ”that I should never shriek.”
”How will you bear parting from her? And how will she endure parting from you?”
The girl's mobile lips began to tremble. The luminous amber eyes were dimmed with moisture as she said:
”It will not be losing me. Nor could I ever bear to leave her if I did not know that I should come back. But I shall come back. And she will ask me what I have done. And I shall tell her: 'This, and this, and all the rest, my Mother, for the love of you, and for the sake of those others who once sat in darkness and the Shadow of Death, and now have found the Way of Peace.'”
”And those others, Beatrice?”
Saxham knew now the secret of the haunting familiarity of the beautiful girlish face. The delicate oval outline, the pale wild-rose colouring, the reddish-brown of the fine, glistening tresses, the amber-hazel of the wistful, brilliant eyes, reproduced to a wonderful degree the modelling and tinting of the wonderful Guido portrait, the white-draped head in the Barberini Gallery, which, in defiance of Bertolotti and the _Edinburgh Review_, will always be a.s.sociated with the name of the sorrowful-sweet heroine of the most sombre of s.e.x-tragedies.
”Why do you call me Beatrice?” she asked, with that sudden darkening of those luminous eyes. He told her:
”Because you are like the Daughter of the Cenci. Sh.e.l.ley used to be my favourite among the English poets, and when I first went to Rome, years ago, the first thing I did was to hunt up the portrait in the Barberini Palace Gallery; and it is marvellous. No reproduction has ever done justice to it. One could not forget it if one tried.”
”I am glad I am like Beatrice,” she said slowly. ”I have always loved and pitied her. I pray to her as my friend among the Blessed Souls in Paradise, and she always hears. And by-and-by she will help me when I go out into the world----”
”To look for those others,” Saxham interpolated. ”Tell me who they are?”
She looked at him, and for an instant the virginal veil fell from her, and there was strange and terrible knowledge in her eyes.
”They are women, and girls, and children,” she answered him. ”They are the most unhappy of all the souls that suffer on earth. For they are the slaves and the victims and the martyrs of the unrelenting, merciless, dreadful pleasures of Man. And I want to go among them and lift them up, and say to them, 'You are free!' And one day I will do it.”
There was a dull burning under Saxham's opaque skin, and a drumming in his ears. His authority and knowledge fell from him as that virginal veil had fallen from her; he stood before her humbled and ashamed, shunning her eyes, that penetrated and scathed his soul as the eyes of an avenging Angel might, with their clear, simple, direct estimate of himself and his fellow-men. And the distance between them, that had seemed to be lessening as they talked, spread illimitably vast; a dark, sunless plain, bounded by a livid horizon, reflected in the slimy pools of foul swamps and pestilential marshes, where poisonous reptiles bred in slimy, writhing knots, and the Eaters of Human Flesh lurked under the tangled shade of the jungles. Less vile of life, even in his degradation, than many men, he felt himself beside this girl a moral leper.
”Unclean, unclean!”
While that voice yet echoed in the desert places of his soul, he heard her saying:
”I don't know why I should talk to you of these plans and projects of mine. I never have spoken of them yet to anyone except the Mother.
But--you spoke of sympathy with those who suffer. I think you have it, Dr.
Saxham, and that you have suffered yourself. It is in your face. And--you are not to suppose that I believe all men to be----”
He ended for her: ”To be devouring beasts. No; but we are bad enough, the best of us, if the truth must be told. And--I _have_ suffered, Miss Mildare, at the hands of men and women, and through the unwritten laws, as through the accepted inst.i.tutions of what is called Society, most brutally. I would not soil and scorch your ears with the recital of my experiences, for all that a miracle could give me back. I swear to you that I would not!”
She touched the little ears with a smile that had pathos in it.
”They have heard much that is evil, these ears of mine.”
”And the evil has left them undefiled,” said Saxham.
”Thank you!”
She begged him again not to forget the sick child at Mrs. Greening's shelter, and hurried away, keeping her face from Saxham. He knew that there was no hope for him, that there never would be any. And he loved her--hungrily, hopelessly loved her. Dear innocent, wise enthusiast, with her impossible scheme for cleansing the Augean stable of this world!
Chivalrous child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, whose sails are whirled by burning blasts from h.e.l.l, and whose millstones grind the souls of Eve's lost daughters into the dust that makes the devil's daily bread--how should the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp dare to love her? But he did not cease to, for all the height of his self-knowledge and all the depth of his self-scorn.
He seemed to Lynette a strange, harsh man, but there was something in him that won her liking. He had a stern mouth, she thought, and sorrowful, angry eyes, with that thunder-cloud of black, lowering eyebrow above them.