The Sword of Damocles. Анна Грин
warm noontide at the side of her whose half gracious, half scornful, wholly indolent acceptance of his homage, he called love, and enervated by an atmosphere he was as yet too inexperienced to recognize as of the world, worldly, had strolled forth to cool his fevered brow in the fresh autumn breeze that blew up from the river. He was a gay-hearted youth in those days, heedless of everything but the passing moment; nature meant little to him; and when in the course of his ramble he came upon the form of a child sitting on the edge of the river, he remembers wondering what she saw in a sweep of empty water to interest her so deeply. Indeed he was about to inquire when she turned and he caught a glimpse of her eyes and knew at once without asking. Yet in those days he was anything but quick to recognize the presence of feeling. A face was beautiful or plain to him, not eloquent or expressive. But this child's countenance was exceptional. It made you forget the cotton frock she wore, it made you forget yourself. As he gazed on it, he felt the stir of something in his breast he had never known before, and half dreaded to hear her speak lest the charm should fail or the influence be lost. Yet how could he pass on and not speak. Laying his hand on her head, he asked her what she was thinking of as she sat there all alone looking off on the river; and the wee thing drew in her breath and surveyed him with all her soul in her great black eyes before she replied, "I do not know, I never know." Then looking back she dreamily added, "It makes me want to go away, miles away,"—and she held out her tiny arms towards the river with a longing gesture; "and it makes me want to cry."
And he understood or thought he did and for the first time in his life looked upon the river that had met his gaze from childhood, with eyes that saw its exceeding beauty. Ah it was an exquisite scene, a rare scene, mountain melting into mountain and meadow vanishing into meadow, till the flow of silver waters was lost in a horizon of azure mist. No wonder that a child without snares to set or nuts to gather, should pause a moment to gaze upon it, as even he in the days gone by would sometimes stop on Sabbath eves to snatch a kiss from his mother's lips.
"It is like a fairy land, is it not?" quoth the child looking up into his face with a wistful glance. "Do you know what it is that makes me feel so?"
He smiled and sat down by her side. Somehow he felt as if a talk with this innocent one would restore him more than a walk on the hills. "It is the spirit of beauty, my child, you are moved by the loveliness of the scene; is it a new one to you?"
"No, oh no, but I always feel the same. As if something here was hungry, don't you know?" and she laid her little hand on her breast.
He did not know, but he smiled upon her notwithstanding, and made her talk and talk till the gush of the sweet child spirit with its hidden longings and but half understood aspirations, bathed his whole being in a reviving shower, and he felt as if he had wandered into a new world where the languors of the tropics were unknown, and passion, if there was such, had the wings of an eagle instead of the siren's voice and fascination.
Her name was Paula, she said, and before leaving he found that she was a relative of the woman he loved. This was a slight shock to him. The lily and the cactus abloom on one stalk! How could that be? and for a moment he felt as if the splendors of the glorious woman paled before the lustre of the innocent child. But the feeling, if it was strong enough to be called such, soon passed. As the days swept by bringing evenings with light and music and whispered words beneath the vine-leaves, the remembrance of the pure, sweet hour beside the river, gradually faded till only a vague memory of that gentle uplifted face sweet with its childish dimples, remained to hallow now and then a passing reverie or a fevered dream.
But to-night its every lineament filled his soul, vying with the memories of his mother in its vividness and power. O why had he not learned the lesson it taught. Why had he turned his back upon the high things of life to yield himself to a current that swept him on and on until the power of resistance left him and—O dwell not here wild thoughts! Pause not on the threshold of the one dark memory that blasts the soul and sears the heart in the secret hours of night. Let the dead past bury its dead and if one must think, let it be of the hope, which the remembrance of that short glimpse into a pure if infantile soul has given to his long darkened spirit.
One, two, three, FOUR; and the fire is dead and the night has grown chill, but he heeds it not. He has asked himself if his life's book is quite closed to the higher joys of existence? whether money getting and money holding is to absorb him body and soul forever; and with the question a great yearning seizes him to look upon that sweet child again, if haply in the gleam of her pure spirit, something of the noble and the pure that lay beneath the crust of life might be again revealed to his longing sight.
"She must be a great girl now," murmured he to himself, "as old as if not older than she whom Bertram adores so passionately, but she will always be a child to me, a sweet pure child whose innocence is my teacher and whose ignorance is my better wisdom. If anything will save me—"
But here the shadow settled again; when it lifted, the morning ray lay cool and ghostly over the hearthstone.
IX.
PAULA.
"The stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face."—Wordsworth.
A wintry scene. Snow-piled hills stretching beyond a frozen river. On the bank a solitary figure tall, dark and commanding, standing with eyes bent sadly on a long narrow mound at his feet. It is Edward Sylvester and the mound is the grave of his mother.
It is ten years since he stood upon that spot. In all that time no memories of his childhood's home, no recollection of that lonely grave among the pines, had been sufficient to allure him from the city and its busy round of daily cares. Indeed he had always shrunk at the very name of the place and never of his own will alluded to it, but the reveries of a night had awakened a longing that was not to be appeased, and in the face of his wife's cold look of astonishment and a secret dread in his own heart, had left his comfortable fireside, for the scenes of his early life and marriage, and was now standing, in the bleak December air, gazing down upon the stone that marked his mother's grave.
But tender as were the chords that reverberated at this sight, it was not to revisit this tomb he had returned to Grotewell. No, that other vision, the vision of young sweet appreciative life has drawn him more strongly than the memory of the dead. It was to search out and gaze again upon the innocent girl, whose eloquent eyes and lofty spirit had so deeply moved him in the past, that he had braved the chill of the Connecticut hills and incurred the displeasure of his wife.
Yet when he turned away from that simple headstone and set his face towards the village streets it was with a sinking of the heart that first revealed to him the severity of the ordeal to which he had thus wantonly subjected himself. Not that the wintry trees and snow covered roofs appealed to him as strongly as the same trees and homes would have done in their summer aspect. The land was bright with verdure when that shadow fell whose gloom resting upon all the landscape, made a walk down this quiet road even at this remote day, a matter of such pain to him. But scenes that have caught the reflection of a life's joy or a heart's sorrow, lose not their power of appeal, with the leaves they shake from their trees, and nothing that had met the eyes of this man from the hour he left this spot, no, not the glance of his wife as his child fell back dead in his arms, had shot such a pang to his soul as the sight of that long street with its array of quiet homes, stretching out before him into the dim grey distance.
But for all that he was determined to traverse it, ay to the very end, though his steps must pass the house whose ghostly portals were fraught with memories dismal as death to him. On then he proceeded,