Читать книгу Splendid Joy - Marguerite Williams - Страница 8

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CLARE sauntered along the cliff path, dreamily trying to balance her gains and her losses. She found the gains so great that in the end the scales were abandoned.

The sun had ceased to shine and there was a slight drizzle, but the damp air was sweet with the scent of bracken and fir; the loss of the sun was forgotten! She was not strong yet, but her arm was free from splint and sling; decided gain! Her money was dwindling fast, but around her were a thousand things that were free;—the grand view of rugged rocks, grey sea, cliffs beautiful in purple and gold, and, through the misty air, the peaceful sound of the church bells calling to worship;—never mind the money! She had no work, but she had her freedom! Down went the scale on the profit side once more. She had not gained Heaven—which side of the scale should that go? She had come back to Earth—and Earth was very beautiful.

The church bells sent their music seawards—an endless Hallelujah!

She sauntered on—joy in her heart. On the one side, the narrow cliff path was bounded by rough rocks, jagged and irregular, which led downwards to the sea, and on the other, by green slopes decked with golden gorse and purple heather that would be a radiant glory when the sun should shine once more. The distant cliffs were wrapped in mist. The path turned and wound continually, and every turn led on to new beauties.

On the top of each ridge Clare met the strong, boisterous wind, then, as the path descended again, the rising slope beyond broke its force. Her strength was still limited and the buffeting nearly exhausted it. She left the path and climbed a little way down on the rocks, to a ridge about fifty feet above the rough, surging waters. The sea was swirling and breaking below, and all around were the jagged, broken boulders, and behind—beyond the path that she had left—rose the green, gold and purple slopes.

She sat on the rock, looking down at the tossing waves and listening to the music of the church bells carried faintly on the breeze—until the bells ceased, and the echo of an Angels’ chorus came to her through the swirling, breaking water below.

Clare’s face was still thin—her eyes a little wistful; but a healthier color was in her cheeks, her eyes were getting back their light, her brown hair was regaining its lustre; and her old keen interest in her fellow creatures, and in the life all around her, was coming back once more. An endless Hallelujah!

The girl had not yet come to recognize that the bringer-in of the new, vital interest to the life that she had wanted to leave, was the man who but a week before had been a stranger—the man whom Wilfred Cavendish had known as able to electrify the most humdrum situation with endless possibilities.

Mrs. Hulbert’s imagination took further flights, her kind eyes smiled more frequently, as she saw the two together, in sunshine and shower. But Clare had no thought of love; she only felt that the world was full of beauty, and life a wonder of new interest, and that her strength was coming back. To her, Martyn’s friendliness was just the kindness of a strong man for a fellow-creature weaker than himself. How did he understand so well? She wondered. For she knew that it had been a keen understanding sympathy, and that only, which had made him stretch out a hand to clasp hers, that day when nervous tremors shook her and returning agony banished the longed-for sleep. She had been sinking into the deeps of pain, and then—he had been beside her; his strong cool hand had closed over hers, and the darkness had lost its terrors.

Now each day he was helping her back to strength, to thrilling, vital life once more. In her heart was a gratitude so great that it brimmed over through her eyes for all to see. The stronger Thing that was growing there beside it she did not recognize. Clare knew that the gorse was a more glorious gold—that a new beauty had been added to the wonder of the sunset—that the bitterness had been taken from past memories—and the fear out of future shadows; the Magician who had wrought these miracles stood by unrecognized. But Love can afford to wait with a smile for he knows that his turn will come.

Clare sat alone in a great peace. Away above the sea there appeared one narrow stretch of blue. She watched it. The blue spread. A silver line appeared on the edge of the mist. The sunlight broadened until it had burst through the clouds. Suddenly it was free. The light came straight and dazzling into the girl’s eyes. She heard a sound of slipping stones behind her, and turned—the light still blinding her, and through that light, indistinct but radiant, she saw Martyn Royce. He sat down at her side. The sunlight had triumphed.

“I thought that you would have gone to church,” he suggested.

“Not to a church with walls,” she explained, still dazzled by the light.

“Why haven’t you?” he demanded.

“I haven’t gone back to old habits yet,” she confessed. “I shall soon, I hope.”

“I’ve given up going. There’s so much rubbish talked there.”

Clare looked at the broadening blue.

“Not in all,” she protested.

“In most,” he declared. “The world has outgrown them.”

He took from her hand the book of verses that she had not opened.

“Some of those are beautiful,” she suggested, not offering her knowledge of a church the world has never seen.

“Seventeenth edition and only published a year! I hear that they are quoted from nearly every pulpit in the land.”

He turned over the pages and read in silence for a few minutes. Clare watched him critically. He looked intellect personified. She was hardly surprised at his verdict.

“Just sentiment!” he remarked concisely—closing the book.

“Sentiment—of the right sort—is essential.”

He laid the book in her lap.

“You don’t get that sort of sentiment in the Bible,” he said unexpectedly. “All our modern religious writings are just piffle by the side of the Sermon on the Mount.” He shaded his eyes with his hand and looked across the sea. “We laugh at that because it is so impossible—it makes us all so paltry. That”—and he looked at the book as he snapped his finger and thumb disdainfully—“Pap!”

Suddenly he turned to her with a smile.

“Are you glad to be alive?” he demanded again.

She returned his smile.

“You asked me that before.” Then she confessed, “I wanted not to be, a little while ago. I wanted to go, more than I wanted anything. I hoped that I should.”

“Ah! There are more who want that than you imagine. But we must stick to our posts till we’ve done our work—and it’s worth while. I don’t expect much for myself when I quit this life—I’m too big a sinner, but there are a few one is given a chance of saving, even if one can’t save oneself, and it’d be mean to leave them in the lurch.”

Clare was silent. This man was continually surprising her—he had so many sides.

“Did you expect to travel by the easy anesthetic route?” he asked suddenly.

“Yes,” she confessed—her color deepening.

His eyes were studying her face with an expression of amusement.

“And did you have a talk with a parson first?”

Clare laughed suddenly.

“I never thought of that!”

“What did you do then?”

“I only had a tussle with the Surgeon and the anesthetist.”

“Unorthodox,” he remarked.

Her eyes grew deeply grave.

“I never thought about that,” she said slowly. “The other world always seems so very near. It’s so natural just to go on, and it must be so exciting!” she added.

She turned back once more from the broadening blue.

“You know we go on?” she questioned, almost wistfully.

“Of course!” he said, emphatically. “But equally of course our bills come in.”

He shifted his position on the rock, and clasped his hands round his knee.

“We’re too sentimental now-a-days,” he insisted. “Everything’s made too easy. Ugly things are smoothed over, when they ought to be brought out into the light and fought.”

“It’s better to emphasize the good than the evil,” suggested Clare—studying the face in which justice predominated over mercy. “Better to show up beauty than ugliness.”

She was surprised at the tragic earnestness in his eyes.

“You think people have only to see virtue to love it?” he exclaimed. “Once Virtue became incarnate and the world drenched It in blood. You imagine the world loves a beautiful character! Don’t you remember that the most beautiful character that this world has ever seen ended on a gibbet?.... And we are all great sinners still.”

Clare looked away with misty eyes. All her achievement of goodness suddenly looked so paltry; all the possibilities for good and evil in man so incomprehensibly great.

They sat in silence for a few moments. When Martyn turned to her again his expression had changed.

“Why did you want to go?” he asked quietly.

Clare hesitated, but his eyes drew her on.

“Do you want to know all about it?” she asked shyly.

“It does one good to talk sometimes,” he explained—“even to a sinner.”

“I don’t think there’s much to say,” she said slowly.

His eyes were on her face. He was looking as if he cared, and so she told him.

“For a good many years my sister and I were alone together. Once there was a big family, but it had grown small. We were not really lonely—though people were always expecting us to be—because we cared so much. She had a post as governess to some small boys. I was secretary to a retired politician who”—she paused—“who was not a gentleman,” she concluded, her eyes steadily fronting the sea.

Martyn’s face darkened. His knowledge and his imagination were so different from hers.

“I told you I made bricks,” she reminded him. “But he didn’t know how to use them. He only decided to be an historian because he failed in politics.”

“Poor old England!” commented Martyn with a short laugh. “And you?”

“I should have left him, but Olive was taken ill. She had to give up her work. After a few weeks she became paralyzed. I had to leave her during the day, but we made it up in the evenings.... I’ve met brothers and sisters who don’t seem to care for each other. They must be poor. We were rich. Of course it hurts more after if you care, but it’s worth it.... I wish you had known her—she was lovely....”

The gulls were crying above the wave-dashed rocks. Clare seemed to be listening.

“Then she was taken. I tried to go on—but I didn’t make a big success of it.... A few months after, I had an accident. I had to go to the Museum in a hurry so I went in the historian’s car. There was a smash up, and my arm got hurt. The consequences were quite out of proportion to the cause. I suppose I was rather tired to begin with.”

“Of course you got compensation?” Martyn’s voice was so fierce that Clare suddenly smiled. It was wonderful to have someone angry for her sake.

“Yes,” she said brightly. “I got rid of the rich man!”

“He paid everything of course?”

“But of course he didn’t! I didn’t want him to.”

“We’ll see about that!”—and Clare smiled again.

“Oh no, I’m better off than he is.”

“You are right there. But—the cad!” Then his voice softened—“Let me see your arm,” he said.

Clare turned back the sleeve and held her arm out towards him. A long scar disfigured it on the inside between the wrist and the elbow.

“It’s very ugly,” she remarked; “but the doctors were so proud of it—and themselves.”

Martyn took her right hand in his, and passed his fingers lightly over the disfiguring scar. Clare felt her pulses beat faster, but she did not draw her hand away.

“You’ve had a rough time, little one!”

He turned down the sleeve, and fastened the cuff for her with a smile. Then he looked away across the sea, still keeping his hand on hers. He knew there was another man. He wanted to hear about him; but he looked away from her—compelling himself not to will her to tell him.

“Do you want to know the rest?” she asked at length.

She had decided. He turned—satisfied.

“My sister wasn’t like me,” she went on—explaining. “She was pretty, and I think she was easier to—love. There was a man.... He was ... handsome—”

“Of course!” growled Martyn, under his breath.

“And ... good.... We both liked him very much, but he fell in love with Olive.... That was natural....”

Martyn said nothing. Clare suddenly twisted her hand palm upwards, and closed her fingers round his. She was making her confession.

“I cared,” she said—a little catch in her voice; “but Olive was so much to me. And of course, if a woman cares for a man, she can’t get in his way. It was a stiff fight but ... there was nothing that the whole world might not have known.... He was good to Olive. She had been so strong until that sudden illness; after that she was an invalid. We thought that she might be with us for many years, but we knew that she wouldn’t walk again. Yet he never failed. I loved him for that. I never thought that he would misunderstand.”

She looked at Martyn with sudden appeal. “How could he have misunderstood?” she said huskily.

Martyn’s grip on her hand tightened.

“She left me.... I had given without counting the cost. He thought I was—cheap, so he went too. His thought hurt more than his going. He thought.... I was trying to win him.... He despised me for that.”

“The brute!” said Royce wrathfully.

A sudden smile transfigured Clare’s wistful eyes. “No, not a brute. He just didn’t understand. Men don’t, you know.”

“There was no excuse for not understanding. He deserves horsewhipping!”

“If I ever let you know his name I shall never forgive myself. He was very good to Olive.”

Martyn had intended to forget the woman who for a little while had charmed him, but as he looked at the girl beside him—slight and fragile in her black and white muslin, with eyes made for laughter but still bearing the aftermath of tears—he thought of Iva Charteris—beautiful and strong—living in the sunshine, and he knew that Iva would never have made such a confession. She might have told of men who had loved her; she would never have told that she had loved unasked.

He captured Clare’s book of verses, put it in his pocket, and got up from the rock.

“It’s time you were having some lunch,” he observed practically.

He held out his hands; she put hers into them, and he drew her up.

“Yet you are glad you are alive,” he reminded her.

She faced his searching look for a moment; then she freed her hands and stooped and plucked a delicate spray of the sea-lavender that grew among the boulders.

“Yes,” she admitted, “I am—now.”

“And so am I,” he said.