And the pity of it! The poor
white thing lying like a shot dove, bleeding, and
the dreadful blood flowing over the red tiles....
Mr Hare was kneeling by his daughter
when John, rushing forth, stopped and stood aghast.
“What is this? Say speak,
speak man, speak; how did this happen?”
“I cannot say, I do not know;
she did not seem to know me; she ran away. Oh
my God, I do not understand; she seemed as if afraid
of me, and she threw herself out of the window.
But she is not dead ...”
The word rang out in the silence,
ruthlessly brutal in its significance. Mr Hare
looked up, his face a symbol of agony. “Oh,
dead, how can you speak so ...”
John felt his being sink and fade
like a breath, and then, conscious of nothing, he
helped to lift Kitty from the tiles. But it was
her father who carried her upstairs. The blood
flowed from the terrible wound in the head. Dripped.
The walls were stained. When she was laid upon
the bed, the pillow was crimson; and the maid-servant
coming in, strove to staunch the wound with towels.
Kitty did not move.
Both men knew there was no hope.
The maid-servant retired, and she did not close the
door, nor did she ask if the doctor should be sent
for. One man held the bed rail, looking at his
dead daughter; the other sat by the window. That
one was John Norton. His brain was empty, everything
was far away. He saw things moving, moving, but
they were all so far away. He could not re-knit
himself with the weft of life; the thread that had
made him part of it had been snapped, and he was left
struggling in space. He knew that Kitty had thrown
herself out of the window and was dead. The word
shocked him a little, but there was no sense of realisation
to meet it. She had walked with him on the hills,
she had accompanied him as far as the burgh; she had
waved her hand to him before they walked quite out
of each other’s sight. They had been speaking
of Italy ... of Italy where they would have spent their
honeymoon. Now she was dead! There would
be no honeymoon, no wife. How unreal, how impossible
it all did seem, and yet it was real, yes, real enough.
There she lay dead; here is her room, and there is
her book-case; there are the photographs of the Miss
Austins, here is the fuchsia with the pendent blossoms
falling, and her canary is singing. John glanced
at the cage, and the song went to his brain, and he
was horrified, for there was no grief in his heart.
Had he not loved her? Yes, he
was sure of that; then why was there no burning grief
nor any tears? He envied the hard-sobbing father’s
grief, the father who, prostrate by the bedside, held
his dead daughter’s hand, and showed a face
wild with fear a face on which was printed
so deeply the terror of the soul’s emotion,
that John felt a supernatural awe creep upon him;
felt that his presence was a sort of sacrilege.
He crept downstairs. He went into the drawing-room,
and looked about for the place he had last seen her
in. There it was.... There. But his
eyes wandered from the place, for it was there he
had seen the startled face, the half mad face which
he had seen afterwards at the window, quite mad.
On that sofa she usually sat; how
often had he seen her sitting there! And now
he would not see her any more. And only three
days ago she had been sitting in the basket chair.
How well he remembered her words, her laughter, and
now ... now; was it possible he never would hear her
laugh again? How frail a thing is human life,
how shadow-like; one moment it is here, the next it
is gone. Here is her work-basket; and here the
very ball of wool which he had held for her to wind;
and here is a novel which she had lent to him, and
which he had forgotten to take away. He would
never read it now; or perhaps he should read it in
memory of her, of her whom yesterday he parted with
on the hills, her little puritan look,
her external girlishness, her golden brown hair and
the sudden laugh so characteristic of her....
She had lent him this book she who was
now but clay; she who was to have been his wife.
His wife! The thought struck him. Now he
would never have a wife. What was there for him
to do? To turn his house into a Gothic monastery,
and himself into a monk. Very horrible and very
bitter in its sheer grotesqueness was the thought.
It was as if in one moment he saw the whole of his
life summarised in a single symbol, and understood
its vanity and its folly. Ah, there was nothing
for him, no wife, no life.... The tears welled
up in his eyes; the shock which in its suddenness
had frozen his heart, began to thaw, and grief fell
like a penetrating rain.
We learn to suffer as we learn to
love, and it is not to-day, nor yet to-morrow, but
in weeks and months to come, and by slow degrees, that
John Norton will understand the irreparableness of
his loss. There is a man upstairs who crouches
like stone by his dead daughter’s side; he is
motionless and pale as the dead, he is as great in
his grief as an expression of grief by Michael Angelo.
The hours pass, he is unconscious of them; he sees
not the light dying on the sea, he hears not the trilling
of the canary. He knows of nothing but his dead
child, and that the world would be nothing to give
to have her speak to him once again. His is the
humblest and the worthiest sorrow, but such sorrow
cannot affect John Norton. He has dreamed too
much and reflected too much on the meaning of life;
his suffering is too original in himself, too self-centred,
and at the same time too much, based on the inherent
misery of existence, to allow him to project himself
into and suffer with any individual grief, no matter
how nearly it might be allied to him and to his personal
interest. He knew his weakness in this direction,
and now he gladly welcomed the coming of grief, for
indeed he had felt not a little shocked at the aridness
of his heart, and frightened lest his eyes should
remain dry even to the end.
Suddenly he remembered that the Miss
Austins had said that they would call to-morrow early
for Kitty, to take her to Leywood to lunch....
They were going to have some tennis in the afternoon.
He too was expected there. They must be told
what had occurred. It would be terrible if they
came calling for Kitty under her window, and she lying
dead! This slight incident in the tragedy wrung
his heart, and the effort of putting the facts upon
paper brought the truth home to him, and lured and
led him to see down the lifelong range of consequences.
The doctor too, he thought, must be warned of what
had happened. And with the letter telling the
sad story in his hand, and illimitable sorrow in his
soul, he went out in the evening air. It was
just such an evening as yester evening a
little softer, a little lovelier, perhaps; earth,
sea, and sky appeared like an exquisite vision upon
whose lips there is fragrance, yet in whose eyes a
glow of passion still survives.
The beauty of the last hour of light
is upon that crescent of sea, and the ships loll upon
the long strand, the tapering masts and slacking ropes
vanish upon the pallid sky. There is the old town,
dusty, and dreamy, and brown, with neglected wharfs
and quays; there is the new town, vulgar and fresh
with green paint and trees, and looking hungrily on
the broad lands of the Squire, the broad lands and
the rich woods which rise up the hill side to the
barn on the limit of the downs. How beautiful
the great green woods look as they sweep up a small
expanse of the downs, like a wave over a slope of
sand. And there is a house with red gables where
the girls are still on the tennis lawn. John walked
through the town; he told the doctor he must go at
once to the rectory. He walked to Leywood and
left his letter with the lodge-keeper; and then, as
if led by a strange fascination, he passed through
the farm gate and set out to return home across the
hills.
“She was here with me yesterday;
how beautiful she looked, and how graceful were her
laughter and speech,” he said, turning suddenly
and looking down on the landscape; on the massy trees
contrasting with the walls of the town, the spine-like
bridge crossing the marshy shore, the sails of the
mill turning over the crest of the hill. The night
was falling fast, as a blue veil it hung down over
the sea, but the deep pure sky seemed in one spot
to grow clear, and suddenly the pale moon shone and
shimmered upon the sea. The landscape gained in
loveliness, the sheep seemed like phantoms, the solitary
barns like monsters of the night. And the hills
were like giants sleeping, and the long outlines were
prolonged far away into the depths and mistiness of
space. Turning again and looking through a vista
in the hills, John could see Brighton, a pale cloud
of fire, set by the moon-illumined sea, and nearer
was Southwick, grown into separate lines of light,
that wandered into and lost themselves among the outlying
hollows of the hills; and below him and in front of
him Shoreham lay, a blaze of living fire, a thousand
lights; lights everywhere save in one gloomy spot,
and there John knew that his beloved was lying dead.
And further away, past the shadowy marshy shores,
was Worthing, the palest of nebulae in these earthly
constellations; and overhead the stars of heaven shone
as if in pitiless disdain. The blown hawthorn
bush that stands by the burgh leaned out, a ship sailed
slowly across the rays of the moon. Yesterday
they parted here in the glad golden sunlight, parted
for ever, for ever.
“Yesterday I had all things a
sweet wife and happy youthful days to look forward
to. To-day I have nothing; all my hopes are shattered,
all my illusions have fallen. So is it always
with him who places his trust in life. Ah, life,
life, what hast thou for giving save cruel deceptions
and miserable wrongs? Ah, why did I leave my life
of contemplation and prayer to enter into that of
desire.... Ah, I knew, well I knew there was
no happiness save in calm and contemplation. Ah,
well I knew; and she is gone, gone, gone!”
We suffer differently indeed, but
we suffer equally. The death of his sweetheart
forces one man to reflect anew on the slightness of
life’s pleasures and the depth of life’s
griefs. In the peaceful valley of natural instincts
and affections he had slept for a while, now he awoke
on one of the high peaks lit with the rays of intense
consciousness, and he cried aloud, and withdrew in
terror at a too vivid realisation of self. The
other man wept for the daughter that had gone out of
his life, wept for her pretty face and cheerful laughter,
wept for her love, wept for the years he would live
without her. We know which sorrow is the manliest,
which appeals to our sympathy, but who can measure
the depth of John Norton’s suffering? It
was as vast as the night, cold as the stream of moonlit
sea.
He did not arrive home till late,
and having told his mother what had happened, he instantly
retired to his room. Dreams followed him.
The hills were in his dreams. There were enemies
there; he was often pursued by savages, and he often
saw Kitty captured; nor could he ever evade their
wandering vigilance and release her. Again and
again he awoke, and remembered that she was dead.
Next morning John and Mrs Norton drove
to the rectory, and without asking for Mr Hare, they
went up to her room. The windows were open,
and Annie and Mary Austin sat by the bedside watching.
The blood had been washed out of the beautiful hair,
and she lay very white and fair amid the roses her
friends had brought her. She lay as she had lain
in one of her terrible dreams quite still,
the slender body covered by a sheet, moulding it with
sculptured delight and love. From the feet the
linen curved and marked the inflections of the knees;
there were long flowing folds, low-lying like the
wash of retiring water; the rounded shoulders, the
neck, the calm and bloodless face, the little nose,
and the beautiful drawing of the nostrils, the extraordinary
waxen pallor, the eyelids laid like rose leaves upon
the eyes that death has closed for ever. Within
the arm, in the pale hand extended, a great Eucharis
lily had been laid, its carved blossoms bloomed in
unchanging stillness, and the whole scene was like
a sad dream in the whitest marble.
Candles were burning, and the soft
smell of wax mixed with the perfume of the roses.
For there were roses everywhere great snowy
bouquets, and long lines of scattered blossoms, and
single roses there and here, and petals fallen and
falling were as tears shed for the beautiful dead,
and the white flowerage vied with the pallor and the
immaculate stillness of the dead.
The calm chastity, the lonely loveliness,
so sweetly removed from taint of passion, struck John
with all the emotion of art. He reproached himself
for having dreamed of her rather as a wife than as
a sister, and then all art and all conscience went
down as a broken wreck in the wild washing sea of
deep human love: he knelt by her bedside, and
sobbed piteously, a man whose life is broken.
When they next saw her she was in
her coffin. It was almost full of white blossoms jasmine,
Eucharis lilies, white roses, and in the midst of
the flowers you saw the hands folded, and the face
was veiled with some delicate filmy handkerchief.
For the funeral there were crosses
and wreaths of white flowers, roses and stephanotis.
And the Austin girls and their cousins who had come
from Brighton and Worthing carried loose flowers.
How black and sad, how homely and humble they seemed.
Down the short drive, through the iron gate, through
the farm gate, the bearers staggering a little under
the weight of lead, the little cortege passed two
by two. A broken-hearted lover, a grief-stricken
father, and a dozen sweet girls, their eyes and cheeks
streaming with tears. Kitty, their girl-friend
was dead, dead, dead! The words rang in their
hearts in answer to the mournful tolling of the bell.
The little by-way along which they went, the little
green path leading over the hill, under trees shot
through and through with the whiteness of summer seas,
was strewn with blossoms fallen from the bier and
the dolent fingers of the weeping girls.
The old church was all in white; great
lilies in vases, wreaths of stephanotis; and, above
all, roses great garlands of white roses
had been woven, and they hung along and across.
A blossom fell, a sob sounded in the stillness; and
how trivial it all seemed, and how impotent to assuage
the bitter burning of human sorrow: how paltry
and circumscribed the old grey church, with its little
graveyard full of forgotten griefs and aspirations!
This hour of beautiful sorrow and roses, how long
will it be remembered? The coffin sinks out of
sight, out of sight for ever, a snow-drift of delicate
bloom descending into the earth.