Part 7 (1/2)

He would be doing her no wrong; it was her own desire. Yet his kiss did mean more than he could have imagined it meaning a week before. She had grown to be genuinely desirable. If love tarried, pa.s.sion was awake--that dangerous pa.s.sion, too, to which the intellect has added its intoxication, and that is, so to say, legitimised by an 'idea.'

Her woman's intuition read the silence and answered to his thought.

'Have no fear,' she said, with the deep deliberation of pa.s.sion; 'I love you with my whole life, but I shall never burden you, Narcissus.

Love me as long as you can, I shall be content; and when the end comes, though another woman takes you, I shall not hinder.'

O great girl-soul! What a poltroon, indeed, was Narcissus beside you at that moment. You ready to stake your life on the throw, he temporising and bargaining as over the terms of a lease. Surely, if he could for one moment have seen himself in the light of your greatness, he had been crushed beneath the misery of his own meanness. But as yet he had no such vision; his one thought was, 'She will do it! will she draw back?'

and the feeble warnings he was obliged to utter to keep his own terms, by a.s.suring his conscience of 'her free-will,' were they not half-fearfully whispered, and with an inward haste, lest they should give her pause? 'But the world, my dear--think!' 'It will have cruel names for thee.' 'It will make thee outcast--think!'

'I know all,' she had answered; 'but I love you, and two years of your love would pay for all. There is no world for me but you. Till to-night I have never lived at all, and when you go I shall be as dead. The world cannot hurt such a one.'

Ah me, it was a wild, sweet dream for both of them, one the woman's, one the poet's, of a 'sweet impossible' taking fles.h.!.+ For, do not let us blame Narcissus overmuch. He was utterly sincere; he meant no wrong. He but dreamed of following a creed to which his reason had long given a hopeless a.s.sent. In a more kindly-organised community he might have followed it, and all have been well; but the world has to be dealt with as one finds it, and we must get sad answers to many a fair calculation if we 'state' it wrongly in the equation. That there is one law for the male and another for the female had not as yet vitally entered into his considerations. He was too dizzy with the dream, or he must have seen what an unequal bargain he was about to drive.

At last he did awake, and saw it all; and in a burning shame went to Hesper, and told her that it must not be.

Her answer was unconsciously the most subtly dangerous she could have chosen: 'If I like to give myself to you, why should you not take me? It is of my own free-will. My eyes are open.' It was his very thought put into words, and by her. For a moment he wavered--who could blame him?

'Am I my brother's keeper?'

'Yes! a thousand times yes!' cried his soul; for he was awake now, and he had come to see the dream as it was, and to shudder at himself as he had well-nigh been, just as one shudders at the thought of a precipice barely escaped. In that moment, too, the idea of her love in all its divineness burst upon him. Here was a heart capable of a great tragic love like the loves of old he read of and whimpered for in sonnets, and what had he offered in exchange? A poor, philosophical compromise, compounded of pessimism and desire, in which a man should have all to gain and nothing to lose, for

'The light, light love he has wings to fly At suspicion of a bond.'

'I would I did love her,' his heart was crying as he went away. 'Could I love her?' was his next thought. 'Do I love her?'--but that is a question that always needs longer than one day to answer.

Already he was as much in love with her as most men when they take unto themselves wives. She was desirable--he had pleasure in her presence. He had that half of love which commonly pa.s.ses for all--the pa.s.sion; but he lacked the additional incentives which nerve the common man to face that fear which seems well-nigh as universal as the fear of death, I mean the fear of marriage--life's two fears: that is, he had no desire to increase his worldly possessions by annexing a dowry, or ambition of settling down and procuring a wife as part of his establishment. After all, how full of bachelors the world would be if it were not for these motives: for the one other motive to a true marriage, the other half of love, however one names it, is it not a four-leaved clover indeed?

Narcissus was happily poor enough to be above those motives, even had Hesper been anything but poor too; and if he was to marry her, it would be because he was capable of loving her with that perfect love which, of course, has alone right to the sacred name, that which cannot take all and give nought, but which rather holds as watchword that _to love is better than to be loved_.

Who shall hope to express the mystery? Yet, is not thus much true, that, if it must be allowed to the cynic that love rises in self, it yet has its zenith and setting in another--in woman as in man? Two meet, and pa.s.sion, the joy of the selfish part of each, is born; shall love follow depends on whether they have a particular grace of nature, love being the thanksgiving of the unselfish part for the boon granted to the other. The common nature s.n.a.t.c.hes the joy and forgets the giver, but the finer never forgets, and deems life but a poor service for a gift so rare; and, though pa.s.sion be long since pa.s.sed, love keeps holy an eternal memory.

'Love took up the harp of life and smote on all the chords with might; Smote the chord of self, that, trembling, pa.s.s'd in music out of sight.'

Since the time of fairy-tales Love has had a way of coming in the disguise of Duty. What is the story of Beauty and the Beast but an allegory of true love? We take this maid to be our wedded wife, for her sake it perhaps seems at the time. She is sweet and beautiful and to be desired; but, all the same, we had rather shake the loose leg of bachelordom, if it might be. However it be, so we take her, or maybe it is she takes us, with a feeling of martyrdom; but lo! when we are home together, what wonderful new lights are these beginning to ray about her, as though she had up till now kept a star hidden in her bosom. What is this new morning strength and peace in our life? Why, we thought it was but Thestylis, and lo! it is Diana after all. For the Thirteenth Maid or the Thirteenth Man, both alike, rarely come as we had expected.