Part 50 (1/2)
”All the happiness I ever had I owe to you. How can I thank you for those ten years?”
”But you paid for them with a great deal of sorrow.”
”Had it not been for you, Evelyn, I shouldn't have lived at all. How often have I told you that? I have seen all the world, and yet I have only seen one thing in the world--you.”
”Owen, you mustn't speak to me like that.”
”While that bird is singing you are afraid to listen to me! How pa.s.sionately it sings, but how little it feels compared with what I am feeling. Why did you say that the Evelyn of old is dead?”
”Well, Owen, don't you know that we are always dying, always changing. You are in love, not with me, but with your memory of me.”
”A great deal of my love is memory, of course, still--”
Words again seemed vain, foolish, even sacrilegious, so little could he convey to her of what he believed to be the truth, and they walked in silence through the fragrance of the soft night, thinking of the colour of the sky, in which the sunset was not yet quite dead. His memory of his love of this woman long ago in Dulwich, in Paris, and in all the cities and scenes they had visited together, raised him above himself; and he felt that her soul mingled with his in an ecstatic sadness beyond words, but which the nightingale sang clearly; the stars, too, sang it clearly; and they stood mute in the midst of the immortal symphony about them. ”Evelyn, I love you. How wonderful our lives have been!” But what use to break the music, audible and inaudible, with such weak words? The villagers under the hill could speak as well; the bird in the bush and the stars above it were speaking for him; and he was content to listen.
The silence of the night grew more intense, there were millions of stars, small and great, and the moon now shone amidst them alone, ”of different birth,” divided from them for ever as he was divided from this woman, whose arm touched his as they walked through the darkness, divided for ever, unable to communicate his soul to hers.
Did she understand what he was feeling--the mystery of their lives written in the stars, sung by the nightingale and breathed by the flowers? Did she understand? Had the convent rule left her sufficient sensibility to understand such simple human truths?
”How sweetly the tobacco plant smells!” she said.
”Yes, doesn't it? But what is the meaning of our story? My finding you at Dulwich--Evelyn, have you ever thought enough about it? How extraordinary that event was, extraordinary as the stars above us; my going down that evening and hearing you sing? Do you remember the look with which you greeted me--do you remember that cup of tea?”
”It was coffee.”
”And then all our meetings in the garden under the cedar-tree?”
”You used to say we looked like a picture by Marcus Stone when we sat under it.”
”Never mind what we looked like. Think of it! Of our journey to Paris, and my visit to Brussels to hear you sing.”
”And Madame Savelli, who wouldn't let me speak to you; she said I might tire my voice.”
”Yes, how I hated her and Olive that day! You sang 'Elizabeth,' and when you walked up, to the sound of flutes and clarionettes,'
seemingly to the stars, there was something in the way you did it that put a fear into my heart. It was all predestined from the beginning.”
”So you believe, Owen, that the end is fated, and that I was created to come back after many wanderings to help these poor little crippled boys?”
”Is that the meaning of it all, Evelyn?”
”Maybe--who knows?--that meaning as well as another.” And through the dusk he could see her eyes s.h.i.+ning with something of their old light.
”Was it fated from the beginning that I should only, meet you here to part with you again? Is that the meaning you read in the song of the nightingale, in the stare of the moon and the perfume of the garden?
There is a meaning, Evelyn, in our lives for certain, but are you reading it aright?”
For a moment the meaning of their lives seemed clear to them. Life had a meaning! for a moment, they were both sure of it; they had met for something, there was a design in life, and though they were separated on earth they seemed to move in celestial circles, just as the stars moved in that great design above them, each sphere rolling on, filled with love for its sister sphere, guided and controlled each by the other, yet always apart. Owen walked thinking how, billions of years hence, all those lights might wax into one light, all souls to one soul, all ends to one end. For one moment he Height possess Evelyn's soul as he had never been able to possess it on earth... perhaps.
”I love you now just as much as I loved you before, perhaps more, for there is memory to aid me.”
”You are in love with memory, not with me.”
Her words went to his heart, as the thorn of the rose is said to go to the nightingale's heart, and, unable to answer her, he listened.