CHAPTER XXVII.
I never could tell just why, but Sunday afternoon during my old life
had been a time when I was peculiarly subject to melancholy, when the
color unaccountably faded out of all the aspects of life, and
everything appeared pathetically uninteresting. The hours, which in
general were wont to bear me easily on their wings, lost the power of
flight, and toward the close of the day, drooping quite to earth, had
fairly to be dragged along by main strength. Perhaps it was partly
owing to the established association of ideas that, despite the utter
change in my circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression
on the afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.
It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression without
specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken of, but a
sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my position. The
sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication of the vast moral
gap between the century to which I belonged and that in which I found
myself, had had an effect strongly to accentuate my sense of
loneliness in it. Considerately and philosophically as he had spoken,
his words could scarcely have failed to leave upon my mind a strong
impression of the mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a
representative of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.
The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by Dr. Leete
and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith, had hitherto
prevented my fully realizing that their real sentiment toward me must
necessarily be that of the whole generation to which they belonged.
The recognition of this, as regarded Dr. Leete and his amiable wife,
however painful, I might have endured, but the conviction that Edith
must share their feeling was more than I could bear.
The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a fact so
obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something which perhaps the
reader has already suspected,—I loved Edith.
Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which our
intimacy had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of the whirlpool
of madness; the fact that her sympathy was the vital breath which had
set me up in this new life and enabled me to support it; my habit of
looking to her as the mediator between me and the world around in a
sense that even her father was not,—these were circumstances that had
predetermined a result which her remarkable loveliness of person and
disposition would alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable
that she should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite different
from the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world. Now
that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the hopes I had
begun to cherish, I suffered not merely what another lover might, but
in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter forlornness, such as no
other lover, however unhappy, could have felt.
My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits, and did their
best to divert me. Edith especially, I could see, was distressed for
me, but according to the usual perversity of lovers, having once been
so mad as to dream of receiving something more from her, there was no
longer any virtue for me in a kindness that I knew was only sympathy.
Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of the
afternoon, I went into the garden to walk about. The day was overcast,
with an autumnal flavor in the warm, still air. Finding myself near
the excavation, I entered the subterranean chamber and sat down there.
"This," I muttered to myself, "is the only home I have. Let me stay
here, and not go forth any more." Seeking aid from the familiar
surroundings, I endeavored to find a sad sort of consolation in
reviving the past and summoning up the forms and faces that were about
me in my former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in
them. For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down on
Edith Bartlett's grave, and the graves of all my generation.
The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight, and from the
present I was shut out. There was no place for me anywhere. I was
neither dead nor properly alive.
"Forgive me for following you."
I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the subterranean room,
regarding me smilingly, but with eyes full of sympathetic distress.
"Send me away if I am intruding on you," she said; "but we saw that
you were out of spirits, and you know you promised to let me know if
that were so. You have not kept your word."
I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but making, I fancy,
rather sorry work of it, for the sight of her loveliness brought home
to me the more poignantly the cause of my wretchedness.
"I was feeling a little lonely, that is all," I said. "Has it never
occurred to you that my position is so much more utterly alone than
any human being's ever was before that a new word is really needed to
describe it?"
"Oh, you must not talk that way,—you must not let yourself feel that
way,—you must not!" she exclaimed, with moistened eyes. "Are we not
your friends? It is your own fault if you will not let us be. You need
not be lonely."
"You are good to me beyond my power of understanding," I said, "but
don't you suppose that I know it is pity merely, sweet pity, but pity
only. I should be a fool not to know that I cannot seem to you as
other men of your own generation do, but as some strange uncanny
being, a stranded creature of an unknown sea, whose forlornness
touches your compassion despite its grotesqueness. I have been so
foolish, you were so kind, as to almost forget that this must needs be
so, and to fancy I might in time become naturalized, as we used to
say, in this age, so as to feel like one of you and to seem to you
like the other men about you. But Mr. Barton's sermon taught me how
vain such a fancy is, how great the gulf between us must seem to you."
"Oh that miserable sermon!" she exclaimed, fairly crying now in her
sympathy, "I wanted you not to hear it. What does he know of you? He
has read in old musty books about your times, that is all. What do you
care about him, to let yourself be vexed by anything he said? Isn't it
anything to you, that we who know you feel differently? Don't you care
more about what we think of you than what he does who never saw you?
Oh, Mr. West! you don't know, you can't think, how it makes me feel to
see you so forlorn. I can't have it so. What can I say to you? How can
I convince you how different our feeling for you is from what you
think?"
As before, in that other crisis of my fate when she had come to me,
she extended her hands towards me in a gesture of helpfulness, and, as
then, I caught and held them in my own; her bosom heaved with strong
emotion, and little tremors in the fingers which I clasped emphasized
the depth of her feeling. In her face, pity contended in a sort of
divine spite against the obstacles which reduced it to impotence.
Womanly compassion surely never wore a guise more lovely.
Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it seemed that the
only fitting response I could make was to tell her just the truth. Of
course I had not a spark of hope, but on the other hand I had no fear
that she would be angry. She was too pitiful for that. So I said
presently, "It is very ungrateful in me not to be satisfied with such
kindness as you have shown me, and are showing me now. But are you so
blind as not to see why they are not enough to make me happy? Don't
you see that it is because I have been mad enough to love you?"
At my last words she blushed deeply and her eyes fell before mine, but
she made no effort to withdraw her hands from my clasp. For some
moments she stood so, panting a little. Then blushing deeper than
ever, but with a dazzling smile, she looked up.
"Are you sure it is not you who are blind?" she said.
That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable,
incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden age had
bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love. Still, I half
believed I must be under some blissful hallucination even as I clasped
her in my arms. "If I am beside myself," I cried, "let me remain so."
"It is I whom you must think beside myself," she panted, escaping from
my arms when I had barely tasted the sweetness of her lips. "Oh! oh!
what must you think of me almost to throw myself in the arms of one I
have known but a week? I did not mean that you should find it out so
soon, but I was so sorry for you I forgot what I was saying. No, no;
you must not touch me again till you know who I am. After that, sir,
you shall apologize to me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do,
that I have been over quick to fall in love with you. After you know
who I am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than
my duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of
proper feeling in my place could do otherwise."
As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to waive
explanations, but Edith was resolute that there should be no more
kisses until she had been vindicated from all suspicion of
precipitancy in the bestowal of her affections, and I was fain to
follow the lovely enigma into the house. Having come where her mother
was, she blushingly whispered something in her ear and ran away,
leaving us together. It then appeared that, strange as my experience
had been, I was now first to know what was perhaps its strangest
feature. From Mrs. Leete I learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter
of no other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning me for
fourteen years, she had made a marriage of esteem, and left a son who
had been Mrs. Leete's father. Mrs. Leete had never seen her
grandmother, but had heard much of her, and, when her daughter was
born, gave her the name of Edith. This fact might have tended to
increase the interest which the girl took, as she grew up, in all that
concerned her ancestress, and especially the tragic story of the
supposed death of the lover, whose wife she expected to be, in the
conflagration of his house. It was a tale well calculated to touch the
sympathy of a romantic girl, and the fact that the blood of the
unfortunate heroine was in her own veins naturally heightened Edith's
interest in it. A portrait of Edith Bartlett and some of her papers,
including a packet of my own letters, were among the family heirlooms.
The picture represented a very beautiful young woman about whom it was
easy to imagine all manner of tender and romantic things. My letters
gave Edith some material for forming a distinct idea of my
personality, and both together sufficed to make the sad old story very
real to her. She used to tell her parents, half jestingly, that she
would never marry till she found a lover like Julian West, and there
were none such nowadays.
Now all this, of course, was merely the daydreaming of a girl whose
mind had never been taken up by a love affair of her own, and would
have had no serious consequence but for the discovery that morning of
the buried vault in her father's garden and the revelation of the
identity of its inmate. For when the apparently lifeless form had been
borne into the house, the face in the locket found upon the breast was
instantly recognized as that of Edith Bartlett, and by that fact,
taken in connection with the other circumstances, they knew that I was
no other than Julian West. Even had there been no thought, as at first
there was not, of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete said she believed that
this event would have affected her daughter in a critical and
life-long manner. The presumption of some subtle ordering of destiny,
involving her fate with mine, would under all circumstances have
possessed an irresistible fascination for almost any woman.
Whether when I came back to life a few hours afterward, and from the
first seemed to turn to her with a peculiar dependence and to find a
special solace in her company, she had been too quick in giving her
love at the first sign of mine, I could now, her mother said, judge
for myself. If I thought so, I must remember that this, after all, was
the twentieth and not the nineteenth century, and love was, no doubt,
now quicker in growth, as well as franker in utterance than then.
From Mrs. Leete I went to Edith. When I found her, it was first of all
to take her by both hands and stand a long time in rapt contemplation
of her face. As I gazed, the memory of that other Edith, which had
been affected as with a benumbing shock by the tremendous experience
that had parted us, revived, and my heart was dissolved with tender
and pitiful emotions, but also very blissful ones. For she who brought
to me so poignantly the sense of my loss was to make that loss good.
It was as if from her eyes Edith Bartlett looked into mine, and smiled
consolation to me. My fate was not alone the strangest, but the most
fortunate that ever befell a man. A double miracle had been wrought
for me. I had not been stranded upon the shore of this strange world
to find myself alone and companionless. My love, whom I had dreamed
lost, had been re=EBmbodied for my consolation. When at last, in an
ecstasy of gratitude and tenderness, I folded the lovely girl in my
arms, the two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever
since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that on
Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities. Never,
surely, was there between freshly united lovers a stranger talk than
ours that afternoon. She seemed more anxious to have me speak of Edith
Bartlett than of herself, of how I had loved her than how I loved
herself, rewarding my fond words concerning another woman with tears
and tender smiles and pressures of the hand.
"You must not love me too much for myself," she said. "I shall be very
jealous for her. I shall not let you forget her. I am going to tell
you something which you may think strange. Do you not believe that
spirits sometimes come back to the world to fulfill some work that lay
near their hearts? What if I were to tell you that I have sometimes
thought that her spirit lives in me,—that Edith Bartlett, not Edith
Leete, is my real name. I cannot know it; of course none of us can
know who we really are; but I can feel it. Can you wonder that I have
such a feeling, seeing how my life was affected by her and by you,
even before you came. So you see you need not trouble to love me at
all, if only you are true to her. I shall not be likely to be
jealous."
Dr. Leete had gone out that afternoon, and I did not have an interview
with him till later. He was not, apparently, wholly unprepared for the
intelligence I conveyed, and shook my hand heartily.
"Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say that this
step had been taken on rather short acquaintance; but these are
decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In fairness, perhaps I ought to
tell you," he added, smilingly, "that while I cheerfully consent to
the proposed arrangement, you must not feel too much indebted to me,
as I judge my consent is a mere formality. From the moment the secret
of the locket was out, it had to be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith
had not been there to redeem her great-grandmother's pledge, I really
apprehend that Mrs. Leete's loyalty to me would have suffered a severe
strain."
That evening the garden was bathed in moonlight, and till midnight
Edith and I wandered to and fro there, trying to grow accustomed to
our happiness.
"What should I have done if you had not cared for me?" she exclaimed.
"I was afraid you were not going to. What should I have done then,
when I felt I was consecrated to you! As soon as you came back to
life, I was as sure as if she had told me that I was to be to you what
she could not be, but that could only be if you would let me. Oh, how
I wanted to tell you that morning, when you felt so terribly strange
among us, who I was, but dared not open my lips about that, or let
father or mother"—
"That must have been what you would not let your father tell me!" I
exclaimed, referring to the conversation I had overheard as I came out
of my trance.
"Of course it was," Edith laughed. "Did you only just guess that?
Father being only a man, thought that it would make you feel among
friends to tell you who we were. He did not think of me at all. But
mother knew what I meant, and so I had my way. I could never have
looked you in the face if you had known who I was. It would have been
forcing myself on you quite too boldly. I am afraid you think I did
that to-day, as it was. I am sure I did not mean to, for I know girls
were expected to hide their feelings in your day, and I was dreadfully
afraid of shocking you. Ah me, how hard it must have been for them to
have always had to conceal their love like a fault. Why did they think
it such a shame to love any one till they had been given permission?
It is so odd to think of waiting for permission to fall in love. Was
it because men in those days were angry when girls loved them? That is
not the way women would feel, I am sure, or men either, I think, now.
I don't understand it at all. That will be one of the curious things
about the women of those days that you will have to explain to me. I
don't believe Edith Bartlett was so foolish as the others."
After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she finally insisted
that we must say good night. I was about to imprint upon her lips the
positively last kiss, when she said, with an indescribable archness:—
"One thing troubles me. Are you sure that you quite forgive Edith
Bartlett for marrying any one else? The books that have come down to
us make out lovers of your time more jealous than fond, and that is
what makes me ask. It would be a great relief to me if I could feel
sure that you were not in the least jealous of my great-grandfather
for marrying your sweetheart. May I tell my great-grandmother's
picture when I go to my room that you quite forgive her for proving
false to you?"
Will the reader believe it, this coquettish quip, whether the speaker
herself had any idea of it or not, actually touched and with the
touching cured a preposterous ache of something like jealousy which I
had been vaguely conscious of ever since Mrs. Leete had told me of
Edith Bartlett's marriage. Even while I had been holding Edith
Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I had not, till this
moment, so illogical are some of our feelings, distinctly realized
that but for that marriage I could not have done so. The absurdity of
this frame of mind could only be equalled by the abruptness with which
it dissolved as Edith's roguish query cleared the fog from my
perceptions. I laughed as I kissed her.
"You may assure her of my entire forgiveness," I said, "although if it
had been any man but your great-grandfather whom she married, it would
have been a very different matter."
On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the musical telephone
that I might be lulled to sleep with soothing tunes, as had become my
habit. For once my thoughts made better music than even twentieth
century orchestras discourse, and it held me enchanted till well
toward morning, when I fell asleep.
