Chapter I
Only some few dark minutes into which Imagination, once lit up within, And unconditional of time and space, Can pour infinities. Prospero had divined aright — the change he had long predicted was accomplished, the transformation was consummated. Heretofore Simona had served man for the sake of God, henceforth, little as she knew it, long as it might yet be before she realised the transition, she would serve God for the sake of man, and the man for whose sake she would perform that service was Prospero. Through that autumn, through the ensuing months of winter's grey rule, within the unaltered framework of the old life, a new ideal sprang into being, and so gradual, so stealthy was its growth that the one vision had supplanted the other before she was aware that the earlier image was effaced.
Hitherto she had sought goodness, purity, truth, as they found their highest expression in the immaculate humanity of a VOL. II. A divine Christ. Now she sought the divine features elsewhere. She strove to discover them under the dis tortions of guilt, beneath the shroud of evil ; further more, the sins of the world had become to her the excuse for the sins of the sinner. She had ceased to look upon guilt in its relation to God — it had taken a new aspect, viewed in its relation to Prospero. And, frail as was the foundation of her new creed, she accepted it with tenacious fervour, and clung to it as if it appealed to her devotion in inverse measure to the weakness of its appeal to her reason. Prospero was evil. Not so, but meshed in sin's net, tangled in its snares, she told herself. How could she divine the contagion of those crimes amid which he dwelt, she whose prayer had ever been in the foulness of street and tavern and prison cell, in every leprous scene of misliving which she was called to witness, when from the mire of the highway she strove to rescue or comfort some straying wanderer, that the hand of her God might be laid upon her eyes, that His will might shut the doors of her understand ing, so that seeing she might not see, and hearing she might preserve the sanctity of her ignorance ?
Womanhood should be the consecration of the earth, so Tristram had taught her, and well had she guarded its approaches. No knowledge, no pulsation of earth's desires had penetrated the strong citadel of her innocence, or violated the sacred temple of her gentle life. So the days went by, flowing in the old channels, and seeing all outward semblances the same, how should she guess they flowed towards a new sea ? Prospero was gone. The River Manor was once again deserted and untenanted ; she read her books, she studied and toiled and prayed, patient yet ex pectant. When would that day come, the hour of which Prospero had spoken with uncaring levity? She waited. Dies ires, in the day of need, of shame or grief, in the hour of the soul's distress or of the body's anguish, in death, or in that which is bitterer and darker and sharper than death, he would sum mon her to his side, his playmate, his companion, his friend, and she would obey his call. ' One sinner more, dear Lord, one more sin crying for one more redemption,' so she pleaded, and each petition was an offered sacrifice.
Truly for him, nay more, there was not one among all the men and women of the sea town, where daily and nightly her feet tracked the path where misery had trodden before, for whom she would not lightly have laid down the life she valued at so mean a price. One sinner more, one more soul added to the great multitude whom none may presume to number — but this time she prayed for the soul of the sinner who held her heart in hostage. February yielded its place to March, and the last snows had melted from the bent heads of the last snowdrops, the flowers whose eyes are never taken from their brown cradle. April was at hand, and still she lived trustful and undismayed, while around the curses of the Puritans grew deeper, and wild stories of Cavalier riot and wickedness spread through out the land. ' And the lord of the River Manor is master in the king's court at Whitehall, and in the king's council he is chief.' So she heard a man in the dress of a travelling merchant saying, as she passed a group of artisans and mechanics assembled on the doorstep of Martin's house.
The men were talking with sullen excitement, but as they became aware that an auditor was within earshot they lowered their voices. She went by hurriedly, until she reached the outskirts of the town, then she loitered longer than was her wont in the green marsh lands outside the walls. She stayed her steps again, and yet again, to turn and watch the western sunlight as it slanted over the level meadows, then she took a devious track, and leaving the highroad on her right, she went northward until she reached a spot from which, looking backwards, she fronted the grey manor. A broad tract of grass lay between her and the winding river, and beyond the river the vast edifice rose above a little slope of turf. The sun, setting behind it, streamed through the great central windows which faced east and west ; it seemed as if the dark towers on either side were transpierced by the rays, and that their walls shrouded a glow ing fire which blazed within.
A flight of rooks from a neighbouring field took noisy wing as she watched the ruddy illumination ; their polished breast feathers, catching the glint of the sunset, seemed no longer black, but shone with a white lustre, as they flew over her head, against the transparent, evanescent azure of the sky. Simona noted every flower and leaf — the little orange marsh flowers in a hedgerow near, with their pointed, half-closed petals and heart shaped leaves ; the blue veronica, in a sheltered nook ; the tall blackthorn upon a bank — it was in full blossom, the blossom of death ; the spotted wild arum the languid grasses by a weed-grown cattle pond The face of earth was to her the face of a friend. She drew a long sigh. Then once more her eye followed a narrow, foot-worn track, which, branching away from the path she had so far trodden, led to the river edge ; it ended opposite the landing-place where the grey curve of the stream encircled the home of the King's Favourite.
Where was he now ? how fared it with him? His image rose before her, his grave beauty, his Galahad face. 'Hope can wait,' she murmured. 'Only — how long?' It was as if in response to her thoughts that, with swiftly moving feet, a figure crossed her vision. It came along the very path upon which her eyes had rested, then, as she turned away to pursue her homeward course, it broke into a run, and, with shadowed features and beckoning hand, approached the spot where she stood, arrested by the sudden suggestion of a thought. ' He comes like a messenger,' was the idea which had flashed into her mind as in the runner she recognised Mad Peter, Prospero's living shadow. ' I have come to seek you,' he said, as with panting breath he reached the place where she awaited him. ' I have come to find you.' 'Wherefore?' she asked, with eager expectancy.
What could have brought him here? Was Pro spero returned? Was this mad worshipper of his the bearer of tidings, good or ill ? He fixed his wistful, variable eyes on her, lit with the misty radiance of the sunset's first vivid afterglow. ' I am dreaming a dream,' he said in his hurried, timid speech, a speech in which sound seemed to be flying from the silence which would follow, 'and I am come to tell you.' VOL. II. u Her hope died. This was no messenger. He was the bringer of no errand save the errands of his own wild fancy. 'What is your meaning?' she asked soothingly, touching his hand with hers. The gentle, steadfast hands of healing, which had lain between his bruised wrists and the lacerating fetters of the prison cell, had balm in their touch. ' We sleep,' she continued, in the same tones in which she would have solaced a frightened child, 'and in our sleep we dream, but when we waken our dreams fly from us.' The pitying touch, the soft patience of her voice had ever had power to allay the agitations of that weak, erring mind.
But now, as at times it had often chanced, the spirit of the unquiet vagrant rose in a gleam of strong intelligence, and regained its ascend ency over the straying faculties of his imagination. ' Not so,' he replied, and he spoke so rapidly that she could with difficulty follow the sentences. ' It is not so. That is men's blindness and error. Dreams are like the stars at midday — hidden, but always with us. It is not our dreams which leave us, it is we who leave our dreams. If we look and listen, with closed eyes and stopped ears, we shall see them and hear them all day — here — within.' He pressed his brows with interlaced fingers, as a man might clasp the casket of a hidden treasure. ' Only by day, Simona,' he went on, ' our spirit, the part of it which feels and knows and sees, wanders from them into the outward world of men and deeds; it strays among sounds the inner ear hears not, and among sights the inner vision sees not.
So, wandering afar, it loses its dream, forgets it until sleep and night, the cords of the spirit's true harbourage, draw it back. Then it quits those outward phantasms and re-enters the true world, the true life which men call dreams. Yet often it has lost the thread ; the dream has not tarried the wanderer's return, and the spirit, recalled, looks around, and the scene is changed, and he says in his ignorance, " it is a new dream," for the links which bind it to that which went before are lost to him; he knows not the faces, and the voices are strange, and he, in his own home country, is an alien and a foreigner. The earth-worlds wait, but the inner life goes as the lightning ; in it the seed and the fruit are sundered but by a hair's-breadth of time, and burial succeeds birth in but a moment of our reckonings.' Simona rendered but a divided attention to the discourse of her companion as she walked on slowly homeward through the meadows.
His imaginings were familiar to her ; in past days her peaceful and peace-giving presence had possessed a mag netism for his troubled spirit. He had haunted her steps, witnessing many a scene of her gentle ministry in the hamlets round, and in the by-streets of the town. Sometimes he would disappear for months, driven by restless moods, fierce or dejected, into long rovings, impelled to adventure himself on some fancied quest, whose object and whose goal were hidden even from himself. Yet prolonged as might be his absences he would ever revisit the sea town, lodging in the deserted wing of the River Manor, keeping forlorn vigils in the priest's cell, which adjoined what once had been the Manor chapel, or issuing forth to stray by night among the fields along the river margin. People called him mad, and yet to Simona it would sometimes seem that his reason was not so much a distorted reason as a reason, perfect indeed in each several part, but broken into fragments, its continuity severed, with the links which should rivet together its separate fractions disjoined. ' Strange, is it not ? ' he now demanded. ' In our dreams there is nor time nor space ; the conditions, which are ephemeral, of the temporal, the substantial, give way to the conditions, which are real and per manent, of eternity.
Distance no longer divides, the hour has no limit ; yet,' he sighed, ' we who dream in eternity must waken in time.' She smiled, according, as was her wont, her sym pathies to his mood. 'Yet, Peter,' she answered, 'it is not our life, it is our dreams, which we forget.' 'And why?' he asked, with a keen look. 'It is because resistance and pressure are needed to print memory's page with records. Day, with its manifold distractions of outward things, arouses the mind to this resistance ; awake, it rejects this sensation, it grasps that ; and thus it must perforce reject a thousand images to register one of the forms which pass before its eyes. By night, in sleep, when the avenues of the senses are shut, there is no distraction, and therefore no resistance, and night's images are printed but as if in water upon our memory.
Therefore we forget. I, too, as other men, forget, but not all — not all,' he repeated more vaguely. Simona would have spoken, but he checked her beseechingly. ' Ah, wait, nay, wait,' he cried, ' I remember now — as I came to seek you I was dreaming a dream, and you were with me in the dream ; it was your dream I dreamt. But then, alas, you called me out of it, and it has gone on without me and without you. How shall we re-enter it ? C me with me, we will recover it, will overtake it, press within until we reach it.' His words grew incoherent, then he lapsed into silence, with a flitting smile upon his lips, while his blue eyes lit with a child's glee. Again his trouble regained sway over him, and he spoke in fragmentary sentences. Through their confusion she could trace in part the substance of that imagined dream into whose scene he had in fancy returned. ' She was in it with him,' he said, speaking as a spectator of the events he described. ' She, and Prospero, and Peter were within the walls of the River Manor, and Prospero, the thief of souls, would rob her, as he had robbed Peter before, of her best treasure. ' Has Prospero not said it,' Peter cried, ' to know a man's treasure is to know his weakness, and doth he not know Simona's heart?
She loves him, and I know of her love, and he knows of it — she only knows it not. But I will tell her her secret, that she too — ' ' Hush ! ' Simona laid her hand upon his arms with an imperative command. A tremor of a passion as yet unknown stirred her calm repose, as a light flung by Peter's words irradiated the twilight of her heart's recesses. Peter started like a wakened sleep walker. ' It is late, Peter,' she said in her low voice. ' Hush — farewell ! We are at the gate of the House of Waters. See, the moon rises over the roof. I must go in. God keep thee.' With a slow movement of deep regret Peter looked around. ' Alas ! you have summoned me away from my dreams,' he exclaimed reproachfully. ' I can remain with them no longer.' ' Farewell ! ' Simona repeated. She saw his eyes cloud with angered tears. ' God keep thee.' ' Name Him not,' Peter cried, roused into a flash of violence at the holy name.
Then the violence was gone. He stooped penitently and lifted her hand to his lips ; he turned from the gateway of black shadows and fled from her with the same fugitive steps with which of old, in days of persecu tion, he had trodden the streets where armed riot held sway. She watched the slight, bent figure until it passed out of sight along the dusty, moonlit highroad, then she entered the lonely chambers of her desolate home. And she carried with her her secret — the secret that Peter had told her.
Chapter II
A sun Whose shadow I adore. She loved Prospero. She knew now with what keen suffering force she loved that life-wasted soul, and with the knowledge came a fresh confidence. Could she love thus without awakening some response, with out kindling some saving spark of pure fire from among the dead ashes of his squandered passions ? Sure her love would be her strength. In earlier days, when in his heart love was not, he had never told her that he loved her. That he told to other women, women who would not believe it. To her he had never lied; had he lied, she must have believed him. To her he had never spoken one light word ; in flattery was dispraise, and in her presence no word of empty compliment had fallen from his lips. Spring had passed. With the summer the sick ness, which in the preceding year had filled so many a grave in the burying-place of the sea town, had broken out in fiercer and more envenomed poison in the great inland cities of the country.
Fugitives from their contaminated streets fled by hundreds to seek safety from the infection in places where the pestilence was as yet unknown or already forgotten. And among the fugitives was the king, who now at the River Manor held his court, exiled by panic from Whitehall. Many a rumour of unholy revelry and riotous carousal reached Simona's ears. Godfearing men spoke of the house which had become the royal residence with hatred and abhorrence ; the fisher girls laughed and whispered together in knots at the street corners when gaily decked boats sailed down the river from the Manor landing-place and deposited their freight of gallant passengers upon the city quays. Martin's long lost daughter, wild Barbara, had been seen passing through the town in a silken gown, with a cavalier at her side, as fine as any lady in the king's retinue.
In the bare chapel where Martin, aged with sorrow and fierce shame, preached his stern gospel, he had proclaimed her disgrace, and numbered her among the lost. No good woman might set her foot within the threshold of that river-circled dwelling, so the elder women told Simona when she would have pleaded Barbara's cause, and it was there Barbara now dwelt. Since the light of the tapers in those long-deserted chambers had relit the high windows ; since the flags which declared it the royal abode had floated in purple and scarlet and gold above the square towers which flanked the central hall of the building ; since the skiffs laden with gay companies had plied up and down the stream, a pestilence, so they said, more grievous than that which their children had survived, had broken out among them, and Martin had found many a fellow in his shame and in his grief.
Listening to their talk, Simona grieved in silence, yet her hope remained unshaken. Prospero was not as these men of whom they spoke ; they spoke in ignorance. She had not looked on his face since they had parted by the water pool, she had never in street or by-way, on the highroad or in the market-place, crossed his path. She no longer sought the level meadows, nor turned her steps by the rushy river track. She was in no haste to anticipate the day when she would hear again his voice greeting her with gentle salutation, the day when her heart would receive the assurance for which it craved, the assurance that with him, in that he loved her, all was well. Yet, despite her patience, it seemed to her that in those days Peter's madness had infected her brain. She could not toil, nor read, nor pray.
Night by night, as the June moonlight fell upon her whitc coverleted couch, she lay awake, wearied, restless, expectant through the long hours, and, thus waking, fragments of Peter's warning words would ring in her memory, and the image of the King's Favourite would rise before the inward vision of her shut eyes. And when from short snatches of troubled slumber she started, with fevered hands and throbbing pulses, it was ever as though she came from his presence, as though in that inner world of which Peter had told her, they two had met and touched and spoken. So vivid was the impression that the outer world of day grew unreal and dreamlike to her imagination, while the inner realm, of which sleep was the portal, seemed the source whence sprang her thoughts her feelings ; it was the very atmosphere in which she lived and breathed.
Yet she could never recall the substance of those dreams. Day swept them from her, and no effort availed whereby she could retrace the prints which the first flicker of awakened consciousness erased from memory's page. Yet she could not evade, escape, or combat their subtle influence. ' If I could but remember,' she would sometimes cry, ' if I could but remember, I could perhaps forget' There came a morning when that spell of oblivion was broken, a morning when waking she did re member. The first long liquid notes of a thrush had sounded through the chill grey dusk of the dawn, before sleep, which that night seemed wholly to have forsaken, had visited her. In that morning slumber, the laggard slumber of an outwearied brain, she seemed again to be standing, as she had stood by Peter's side, listening to his wandering words, watching the light fading slowly behind the Manor walls in the sunset meadows.
But Peter was no longer with her — in his place was the King's Favourite. The flags, which, when the sun fronted them at noon, waved in all their brilliant hues above the battlements, drooped dusky and sombre against the luminous sky. ' Come, Madonna,' he said. Never before had he proffered any request, now he bade her ' Come.' Where? Whither? To that abode of evil, to his home, to lay her white fame in his hands, at his feet, to hazard all, to venture that which he ever withheld — a heart — in that perilous quest, the gain of a soul ! ' Come ! ' he said, and she obeyed. She stepped from the meadow grass to the little boat moored among the reeds, and the current bore them away from the bank, alone, together. The barred orange grating across the western heavens withered into brown, the boat broke its way through tangled stalks of floating weed.
It gained the open midstream, swept clear by the swifter currents. He did not touch her hand, he never looked upon her face, but, as he sat facing her, he gazed past, beyond the level pastures, into the tintless eastern clouds. She never looked back. She rose from her seat as the boat touched the steps beneath the shadow cast by the great stone walls of the Manor which blocked out the west. She climbed the slope of unmown grass which slanted up a steep acclivity towards the vast edifice. There were lights in the many windows — moving, flickering, shifting lights, steadfast, stationary, pulseless lights — but in the near wing of the fortress-like building the windows were dark. The King's Favourite led her into the shadow of a mossgrown gate remote from the main entrance. There he paused. ' Why have you come ? ' he asked slowly.
She answered him no word ; her silence was the reitera tion of her trust. In that trust, absolute and irre vocable, he would become worthy of her confidence. He knew its greatness, he needed not that she should utter it. ' You should not have come,' he said. ' I bade you come, but you should not have come.' ' It was not you who bade me come,' she answered. It was another voice, absolute and positive, which had bidden her thus to stake the harvest of years, if it might be that by so doing she should gather in one other wheat ear to the garner of the Great Husbandman. It was the voice which drove her forth day by day, an evangelist of pardon to the guilty and the fallen. She knew the imperious demand of sin upon innocence, she fathomed the magnitude of the faith which incredulity extorts before it can believe. ' Who, then, bade you?' the Favourite questioned, smiling as at some melancholy jest.
He waited for no reply, he crossed the threshold, and she followed him. ' Welcome,' he said, ' but you should not have entered.' She knew that he read on her face the heart-hunger of her love. The secret which Peter had divined was not hidden from Prospero. He read therein the measure of her peril, and warned her of its snares. He guided her up a winding turret stair ; they traversed corridor after corridor, and room after room. Each chamber was empty and deserted, like palace chambers in a dream. Tapestries hung upon the walls, curtains screened the embrasures of alcove and recess. Pastoral scenes, shepherds piping amid their flocks to rose crowned nymphs, women with swarthy, olive faces, with bare arms and gold brocaded robes, huntsmen and dogs and horses, negro kings and fair-haired slaves were figured in fantastic medley upon the painted panels or worked upon the silken hangings.
The twilight deepened, the silence grew more intense. Prospero spoke at intervals, with broken, mournful cadence of half-uttered sentences ; allusions whose meaning she did not understand, thoughts expressed in part and left unexplained, imagery of which the significance was veiled, stirred without disquieting her. She was wrapped in the repose his presence afforded ; he understood her love, it was enough. He had tested her trust, he was assured of its completeness, what more would he have of her ? They had reached the last of those vacant corridors. From a square gallery a broad staircase conducted downwards to the central hall of the Manor ; above, a few steps to the left, a door stood ajar. Prospero pointed to the dark entrance. ' It is the sanctuary of my home, its inner temple,' he said.
He let her pass in before him. What was the legend that wavered with blurred outlines in her memory ? A story, indistinct, evasive, of the triumph of an unseen evil, of the lord of sin who had here found his victim, of a woman who loved and lost. A subtle terror shot through Simona's brain, a spiritual dread seized her. The hinge of the door grated as it swung behind her ; she looked round for a fear, and found emptiness, and the vacancy was her fear. The room was small, un furnished, uncurtained, and bare of ornament, a cell of grey twilight and black shadow. 'You are afraid,' said her companion. 'You need not fear. The tempter is dead, and the spirit of that pale woman sleeps.' He indicated with a gesture a portrait set altarwise between two narrow windows, p rusty lamp, a relic of a past, before it.
She looked, and the portrait was herself. The mist drifted — a thin white veil below the window by which she stood — it floated between her and the meadows. She wondered to see how far below they were. The wind blew the mist, and the meadows seemed to sway backwards and forwards. She looked from them to Prospero. His eyes, dark and visionary and exhausted, rested with a half mocking challenge upon hers. His lips were slightly parted, his hand clasped a chain, the chain of Tristram's crucifix ; he remained motionless and mute in the blank dusk of the little room. Her dread was gone, in its stead a wave of pity, of keen compassion, swept over her. She flushed faintly, drawn to him by some spiritual com pulsion — she drew nearer, and yet nearer — she was close beside him. He lifted his hand, he folded back the veil she wore, and laid his fingers lightly on her loosened hair ; his touch was the signet of an unknown sweetness, the warrant of an unaccustomed protection.
She had nothing to fear. Noiselessly the door opened, a shaft of light streaked the dusty floor, then it was gone. ' We must go,' the King's Favourite said 'Yes, we must go — we must go back,' she mur mured, yielding to his guidance. ' Back ! ' he echoed in his low, tranquil accents. ' Yes ; back and home,' she repeated. ' Not back, but on.' His voice was gentle and sub dued. ' No man can go back — back is to what is not. It is to return to that which has ceased to be. The past exists no more save in the mirror we name memory. We must go on ; it is life's law.' She thought it was of his past, of his blemished youth that he spoke, of the irrecoverable innocence of a spoilt soul printed with the dark characters of misdeeds. ' It is all one,' she cried. The glad triumph of an ticipated victory which had at her coming trans figured many a sinner's dying should transfigure this sinner's living. ' Back or on, both roads lead to eternity.
Our spirits come unstained from the " before," and they go unstained to the " after," for the flesh cannot pass its portal. Before life, when we were not, and after life, when we are dead, on either side is God. Death is our morning and our evening star.' ' The star of my birth was Saint Lucifer,' interposed the King's Favourite, ' and its rays have pierced my heart' ' Ah, no,' she pleaded. ' Evil possesses, encloses, but it cannot penetrate. The pure spirit still dwells within, and even here, on earth, may shatter its prison grave and stand forth in resurrection glory keeping its Easter day. ' And if not ? ' he asked softly. ' If not, its Easter will await it — it may be far down the ages — yet it will wait. You know it,' she asserted, ' for you too have seen, you also understand.' ' My Easter will be a patient Easter.' The enig matical response, the divided attention of his negligent reply struck a new chord.
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