After a minute’s waiting, Soulsby moved to the door; and Claverhouse suddenly spoke, in a voice that was almost a cry.
“No, do not leave me — do not leave me. Do not leave me alone in my outer life, as I am in the other.”
Soulsby returned to the hearth, and stood for some moments silent. When at last he spoke, he shrank at the sound of his own voice.
“Are you not — I think — are you not dwelling too much on the trouble? It — it is, I think, your nature to do so. It — it is — is it not a time for the exercise of will?”
Claverhouse made a sound and movement of the intense irritation, which comes from the breaking of thought that leads to a climax at once intensely shrunk from and sought; but Soulsby, at cost to himself, held to his purpose.
“What of the play — the play you have just finished? I have not heard it read as — as a whole. If — if you could lose yourself for a time in some other interest, you — you would be able to look more fairly at the trouble itself.”
The playwright started to his feet, as if a thought had given him strength. He burst from the room, with something of the old suddenness of action which was leaving him as the failing of his sight demanded caution in movement; and Soulsby heard that his steps on the stairs had their old uneven violence. In a minute he returned, with a pile of manuscript; and Soulsby fought with a feeling that approached to anger, for the helpless young creature, whose life was lost with trivial things as one of them. The words he heard brought a startled feeling, that grew to a sense almost of guilt.
“Soulsby, this play is the master-work of my life. It is to be put to the deepest use in my life. You will never read it, or hear it read. It will be buried with her. I can make one sign of what I shall never put in words. I shall not live, feeling that I have given nothing in return for what I have taken.”
He set the papers on the table, and fingered them as though composing them to lie as he said; and Soulsby looked on with eyes troubled and incredulous, living the experience as a dream.
The blind man felt the unbelief, whose signs were hidden from him. He suddenly swept up the papers, sprang to the grate, and thrust them on the dying fire. The embers leapt into life; and as a flaring, crackling sound told its hopeless tale, Soulsby darted forward with some agitated words. But he held his ground with unyielding strength; and by the time his friend had forced a passage, the moments had done their work. The flames were flickering to their death, and the sparks vanishing from their grey, trembling bed.
He watched them vanish with the strange gaze, at once straining and half — exultant, of growing blindness following something of a nature to be still discernible. When the last was gone, he knelt and gathered the ashes in his hands; his eyes held closely to the grate, his fumbling fingers touching them as things of price. A softening came like a spasm over his face, as he rose with his hands helpless with their crumbling burden, and his dim eyes caught the white expanse of a cloth which Soulsby had snatched from the table, and held to receive them. He yielded them at once; and glanced from his friend to the grate, with a groping wistfulness eloquent in its mute appeal. In a moment Soulsby was on his knees, gathering with his shapely hands the remaining cinders to their last vestige. He put them with the others; and stood with a set face of sorrow, as the dramatist folded the cloth, and spoke his parting words.
“They will be buried with her, Soulsby. It is well that you drove me to burn it. How could I have known with my blindness that my words were obeyed? And with it and her, will be buried the happiness that might have remained to me. So it is as it should and must be. I will leave you for to-day. Through the hours of tonight I must sit at her side.”
He left the room, carrying the folded cloth in both his blackened hands; and Soulsby took a step backwards, and looked after him with his fingers pressed to his forehead. As he moved back, his eye was caught by the note-book on the table. His hand mechanically sought it, and his eyes went down its open page. He started, and flung it from him as if it had stung him.
It was Perdita’s diary — the record of her hand of the hidden history of her wifehood.
Chapter XIV
“No,” said Dolores; “I cannot think as you do. I cannot think that the way to honour the memory of one who was loved, is to make one’s own life emptier. I am sure she would not feel it so. Surely the effort of rising above a life of passive remorse, and filling the days with striving, would be a better tribute.”
“Passive remorse!” said Claverhouse, pressing his elbows on the desk.
“I mean that it achieves nothing,” said Dolores. “Or, rather, as you were thinking, it has achieved harm. Why should you not set some object before you — some purpose to fulfil — as your token of your sorrow?”
“I will do it,” said Claverhouse, rising and clenching his hands. “I will fling myself into the writing — the re-writing of the old play. In both of its forms — and in both of its fates, it will have been, as you say, my token of my sorrow for her — for her sufferings — of which I was the cause.”
“I am glad,” said Dolores, with her unconscious impressiveness; “more glad than I can say in words.”
“But I must tell you the truth,” he broke out. “I feel I must tell you all things. It is my wish to write the play — my — my longing, the one thing I desire. I feel that my remorse, the remorse that made the year after her death a hell to me, is lost in the old purpose. It has fallen back into a part of my past life — a part of the experience that has added to my knowledge of men. It has happened with it, as with everything I have ever felt.”
“Time must blunt the edge of feeling,” said Dolores. “Surely it is not right to clutch at a grief. The grief that came in spite of yourself, is as it is. You will not add to its meaning by seeking it. Love and grief are different things. It is only a tribute to the one, that it outlives the other.”
“But I do not know if it does outlive it,” he said, his tone almost querulous. “I do not know if I ever felt love for her. What I felt was something different.”
“It must have been something very near it,” said Dolores, gently. “What you have suffered must have had its root in love.”
“Ah! what I suffered! That year! I weary you with my dwelling on it; but I must tell you fully once. The memory of it, unless it is shared, burdens me; gives me a feeling almost of guilt; and there is no one but you — and Soulsby, my good friend — to whom I can speak.”
“It is my greatest joy — if I have helped you,” said Dolores.
“It was a dark time,” said the dramatist, in quick, low tones of shrinking, as though the subject still held unfaceable pain. “Day after day, and every hour of each day, I went through her feelings — the feelings I knew — I had learned — were hers, in the nine months she was with me, from our marriage till her death. I clutched at the knowledge of them. I felt myself straining after it; that I might as it were endure them myself, and show myself their endurance was bearable. The moment of her seeing her home — of first knowing her lot — and all the others — I have spent days in grasping after each. And the deadness which came, when it seemed that my soul was exhausted — and the awaking from it! He shuddered, and put his hand before his eyes.
Dolores was silent, waiting; and he continued in an easier manner, as though narrating what was past the helping of emotions.
“But the times of exhaustion began to come oftener — more easily, as I now understand; and the awaking had the numbness of having been lived many times. At first I barely felt the change; but now I look back and see it. I have reached the feeling, I have had at the end of all my sorrows — though I thought this was not as the others, and would have no end — the feeling of almost rejoicing in my understanding of it, and of longing to — to create some creature with the same experience.”