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Chapter XVI.
A Moonlight Effect.

A Few stars twinkled softly in the grey-blue sky. The twilight was luminous, and the white blossoms of the clematis looked like a light snowfall on the dark tree-tops. The great hills were distinctly outlined against the pale vault; house and barns stood out like black shadows. The air was fragrant with roses and lilac blossoms—sultry with accomplished day, still with consciousness of coming night. Through the stillness, the voice of Nature could be heard. A bird sitting in the dense brushwood; the distant cry of the mor-poke; the munching of the kine among the grass; the splash and startled “quack” of a belated duck; the lewd crowing of an inexperienced rooster, whose instinct was to turn night into day; and the gentle rush of the gorge over boulder and fern.

Upon the margin of the stream, David kept his page 189 tryst. As the white figure of the girl glided into view, like a sprite of the night, he sprang forward amid the shadows to meet her. Joan stopped a little short of meeting, but he came on.

“I'm glad you've come,” he said softly, and with gratitude; he had feared that she might not.

He led the way to the plains, bending to look into Joan's face once or twice with interrogative and eager glances. She looked straight on, stepping lightly. She appeared to be in another world, and to see other objects than those at hand. David, too, was plunged into inner consciousness—the joy of love at the nearness of the creature loved. In that glad moment he scarcely realised that he was a separate personality; his love held dominion over all circumstance; joy was in the fact of his love, which, while impersonal, put him in touch with the universe. He roused at last.

“Where are you?” he asked, bending lower to arrest her glance.

She turned to him quietly, and answered in matter-of-fact tones, lifting her hand while she spoke to push the clustering curls away from her forehead:

“We came to see the moon rise.”

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Her tones roused him also; brought him back to earth and circumstance. His freedom of spirit vanished; he consciously measured his progress with the girl beside him; calculated his strength.

They had passed through a field gate, and the homestead was behind them, open space in front. At their back were high hedges of gorse and sweetbriar in full bloom. Never again did David or Joan see the moon rise over land or sea without recollection of the pungent odour of the mingled fragrance.

A flock of clouds, like huddled sheep, whitened in the sky; a vivid silver flash, with answering signal from the snow-peaks and upper air; a gleaming arc, which lit the topmost branches of the dark trees, and a full-orbed moon sailed into a surf of cloud waves, and passed through to the blue zenith, touching with magic the weird, majestic roll of tussock-land, chastening, half-revealing distances, hinting at space unseen; then, the light falling nearer, slashed with steel the meandering stream, and made every near object discernible and transparent silver-blue.

“Superb!” said David, with a deep breath.

“Chaste—and severe,” answered the girl.

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“Severe?” he queried.

“In its revelation,” she replied.

She spoke like one who was scourging herself, and awakening from a trance. This was a new mood. She was adorable, the young man thought. He liked her better so than when cold and haughty. The silver light gleamed upon her white gown and head-dress, and showed the roses in her hair and at her breast. David's eyes grew large with longing; he almost succumbed to the temptation to fold her in his arms.

“I am nothing; I have little except my love to offer you,” he said, with sudden impulse, taking her hand. “I am an ignorant beggar beside you, but my love will last till death. It may be presumption to say so; but, dear, it is true. If it is wrong of me to tell you this, forgive me; but, right or wrong, it is true.”

She had started forward while he spoke, as though in answer to the lash, and they went on together, hand in hand.

“You draw me to you as to a magnet,” he went on, pressing the fingers he held, and speaking hurriedly, as though fearing a check. “My whole thought and force is concentrated on you; but I page 192 have yielded in opposition to will and pride; for, sweetheart, you have scorned me without scruple. No, don't speak. Let me speak this once, if for ever after I must hold my peace. You must not crush me; my heart needs you. While your love is a matter of uncertainty, all other things are in doubt for me. I feel timid of action, lest it should lead me away from you—of speech, lest it offend. Put me in harmony with life, dear; love me. I surrender myself; purify and ennoble me.”

The ardour of his voice, the humility of his look, penetrated to the girl's senses only dimly. She gave a little shudder in the warm summer air. It was their last walk together, and she was going to hurt him. She wished she might have left him with an easy heart. How disastrously for his contentment her holiday had ended! She looked helplessly at the sunburnt hands that held her own, and thought stupidly how the moonlight contrasted the white of her skin with the brown of his.

“You will let me try my very best to win your love?” he urged.

“No, no!” cried the girl—“no, no!”

David's face fell; the look of expectation died from it.

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“Are you punishing me for my audacity?”

“No, no!” cried the girl again, meeting his gaze with eyes that were full of trouble. “You must put such thoughts away from you. We may only be friends.”

Was she acting? Her voice and eyes spoke of pain.

“Friends?” he asked slowly—“you and I?” Then he went on impetuously, “Do you think that I can bear to have you go away, having once known you, and not be sure that I shall see your face again?”

Joan roused herself with a strong effort. What was she permitting this man to say?—to show her his heart without reserve, while she stood by, unable to check his fervid speech. Her breath came fast; she drew away her trembling hands. The emotion that invaded her at his touch was so unlike anything she had experienced before, that she felt compelled to shake it off. If she was not to become a creature swayed by the accidental happening of the hour, she must show decision—offer resistance to this weakness which oppressed her.

“I am the promised wife of Professor Stanton,” she said desperately, in accents of self-depreciation and apology.

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A painful silence followed her words. A tide of self-scorn swept over her, despite her belief that she had acted wisely. Her arms hung helplessly by her side; she could not meet David's eyes. She had never promised him anything, she reiterated to herself. It was better they should part; this recurring struggle between duty and inclination would then be over. She had not anticipated how difficult life made it to conform to a given law of action.

“Since when—has this been true?” he asked jerkily.

She battled against her sense of deadness—fought for an assumption of indifference. He was taking the lead; she tried vainly to realise the position in which she found herself, and to shake off the consciousness of his mastery. It was new to her. Until this hour she had held the reins. While she stood motionless, thinking words of resistance, but not able to pronounce them, she felt David's hand upon her shoulder. He turned her face to the light.

“I beg your pardon,” he said, after a moment's silent scrutiny, letting go his hold, and speaking in frozen tones. “Your announcement was sudden—I was not prepared for it. Hadn't we better return?”

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His manner condemned her; he despised her. Fierce invective would have been easier to bear, would have given her a loophole of escape through anger. But he held his head high; he seemed to tower beside her as they paced back silently. She had treated him as one of inferior strength; it was she who was undergoing disenchantment in his eyes. Half an hour earlier his eyes had read her countenance; it was she now who cast beseeching glances upon him. She wanted to soften the blow to him, to explain.

He opened the field-gate for her to pass through, and, as she did so, he caught sight of her drawn brow and tremulous lips. A passionate protest rose in his heart against her decree; but he forced it back in stubborn harshness. It was easier to let go than to hold on at the cost of self-esteem. Joan felt his anger in every inch of flesh. Acting upon an impulse, she put a hand upon his arm.

“Doesn't it seem clear to you that what you wish could never be?” She steadied her voice and went on after an almost imperceptible pause, “We are little suited to each other; after the first we should regard each other as strangers. Neither you nor I would be able to get rid of old habits, nor to ignore page 196 their claims, and we could not throw each other off; it would be misery. Can't you see?”

She turned to him with a faint smile on her lips, struggling hard to keep her composure. A protest rose in him against the calculation of her words.

“Our opinions on marriage are evidently dissimilar, as upon other questions. I have no more to say. If you were my promised wife, I should expect another man to protect you from himself.”

She made no answer. He held her to her bond. Well, it was honourable, and she appreciated honour; yet how easily he resigned her. She recollected that she was being swayed by emotion again, and drew herself up. If she suffered, it was by her own voluntary act; but she was not suffering! Suffering lay in the violation of duty. She wished she could make David understand that duty had determined her choice; that she had been educated all along to take this step; that to branch off suddenly into a new way of life would be a breaking of mental law.

Instead of speaking, David buried his face in his hands. She heard his breath coming loud and fast. She was not prepared to stand such a test.

“Don't,” she said softly, “don't, David!”

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He made no answer, nor did he look up. Her mouth quivered; her voice was soft and musical.

“This is a phase—it will pass,” she said. “An obligation is laid upon us to conform to the laws of life.”

“Is not natural truth one of those laws?” he demanded, standing erect. “Your arguments are sophistry; but I would not, if I could, reason them away. My wife must come to me of her own free will. You'll know in your heart one day whether your love is mine or not. If it is mine—and, Johnnie, sometimes I think it is—you cannot perpetrate the awful lie of marriage with another man. I want you, will and body. To-day you are under other influence; no man on earth must come between my love and me. No woman has ever feared me; no woman shall ever feel her love for me unclean. But do what you will, put a thousand miles between us—if you are mine, full knowledge will come. I will not contend. I need not. I shall suffer while I wait; but let me say, once for all, that I shall be loyal.”

“I shall never come,” she said, with conviction, “never.”

His head went down again upon his folded arms.

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“Then fare-you-well,” he said brokenly. “You have taken my heart and strung it—strung it with clumsy art; you have played some melody on it; tuned it to passionate music; but to-night you have broken a string.”

As she turned to go, the roses fell from her hair. He stooped and picked them up.

“No, I shall never return,” Joan reiterated, as she stood at her window that looked over the way they had walked. “It will not be possible that I should prove so weak. If I acted from caprice it would be another matter. Life has requirements in excess of passion. I cannot love as the women of fiction love. If I did I should let everything else go, and think the end of existence gained.”

A footstep roused her. She turned and saw Mother coming towards her through the moonlit space between the window and the door. The woman put her arms about the girl and kissed her, and Joan felt that she was trembling. There was chastened agitation in the faded face; she was eager to speak, but hesitated. Joan had taken off her wrap; her clustering curls were tumbled, her cheeks looked pale. There was something in her attitude half defiant, half wistful, that reminded Janet of her page 199 child as she had known her long ago—as she had looked when standing on the rug that night after her flight.

“Dearie,” said Mother suddenly, looking anxiously into the moved face, “you are here in your mother's home. If there is anything that troubles you, tell me. Tell me now, dear.”

“It is all well,” replied the girl, not shrinking as usual from the soft caressing hands.

Mother's face was doubtful. She drew the girl closer, and they stood with linked arms looking out into the silvered world.

“Has the Professor told you?” asked Joan, in tones which, in spite of all her efforts, quavered.

The woman nodded, and then sighed.

“It is true, then? I thought it mightn't be. It don't seem real. I thought maybe he'd got muddled in his mind; he does seem so at times. Perhaps I grudge you to him, and that makes me see things awry; the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked, as Father and the Bible says. And yet it seems to me that I can't grudge you, for I've been planning your wedding in my own mind ever since you were a baby in long clothes. Still, it's struck me like a blow. I hadn't thought of page 200 him; it's upset me. There's nothing more difficult than to re-arrange ideas; and mine seem all topsyturvy, like the store-room after an earthquake. I've been building up romances, dear.”

Joan's face gave no indication that her mother had touched upon a truth. The woman shook her head disappointedly.

“Girls have different tastes nowadays,” she went on, with another prodigious sigh; “there don't seem to be the same romance in their love-making as there used to be.”

She came to another stop, but received neither affirmation nor contradiction from the silent girl.

“A vision haunts me of my little grandchildren,” she said, with gentle plaintiveness; “for the life of me, I can't help seeing them bald-headed and wearing spectacles.”

Joan drew herself apart, with cold reserve.

“Ah, my dear,” said Mother, with sad eyes on the averted face, “that's where marriage leads. If a girl cannot love the man as the father of her children, marriage is a secret shame. When the man's blood cools, and he tries a woman as a man will, it's a poor thing if the wife can't be glad that, with all his faults, page 201 he, and not any other man, is the father of her sons and daughters.”

Joan turned her face further away.

“It takes the sweetness from a woman's fondest hours to know she never loved the man it is her duty to teach her children to love. How can she show another when she doesn't know the way? And a house divided, dear, is sure to fall—”

“Who's talkin' of divided houses?” broke in Father's strong voice. “You're a born pessimist, you are, Mother!”

His entrance had given both women a shock. Joan felt relief; she turned to her father gratefully.

“Father, tell me, have I done right?”

Father flung a protecting arm about her shoulders.

“Wilt thou have this man … to love … honour … and obey?” he asked, with almost stern emphasis, pausing between each phrase, the more to impress.

“I honour him; where one honours, obedience follows!”

“Well said, Joan Jefferies; an' love is the outcome of respect—the real foundation of it. The love that doesn't take its rise in honour is a shallow stream that the heat of life soon scorches dry.”

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“Please leave me now,” pleaded the girl. “I want to think.”

Left alone, she knelt at her open window. Her meditations were prolonged.

“I must escape from trifles and caprices,” she said at last. “I am not deceiving myself—I am not. There is only one way of escape from oneself—work.”

In the days that followed, Father's face shone with satisfaction. He conducted the Professor over the farm, talking loudly, drawing attention to its beauties with confident expectation of appreciation. But the student of literature had not learned to read Nature at first sight—she distracted attention from her interpreters; he could not see her charm except through the spectacles of art. Set free from cornfields, he had resource to Keats, and, with a sigh of relief, lingered with ecstasy over the pictures of the poet. The physical eye failed to detect colour, his sense to appreciate the subtle suggestions of beauty, until choice words objectified the picture to his brain. As a looker-on, he missed the phenomena.

Almost as unexpectedly as he had appeared, the Professor took his departure. He came and went page 203 a stranger. Mother eyed him with suspicion, and something of fear. Father, in his most optimistic mood, could not affirm that he joyed in his presence, independent of external and material influences. Joan moved like an automaton, regulated to a conformity to duty. David only appeared to act from internal liberty. The family affair of the Jefferies did not seem to hamper his movements; he admitted, by no sign or word, that he was hurt; he offered no resistance, did not struggle against events. So completely did he put them aside, that Joan, with private scorn, took comfort in the thought that she had not allowed the temptation of an hour to influence her, the agreeable to outweigh reason.

But some other instinct did not tamely accept David's acquiescence. If he had rebelled, solicited for his desire, her sympathy would have, at least, been his; but his quick recognition of the rights of another man, his refusal to combat those rights, his perfect conformity to good breeding, irritated the girl, and piqued her. Her gentler inclinations froze. She did this thing, and did not do the other, to prove that reason, and not susceptibility, impelled her.

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Mother alone obeyed her instincts, taking no cognisance of why or wherefore.

“I thought,” she said to David, one night when they were alone in the sitting-room, “that it might have been different. I hoped that you cared.”

David laughed. The warm, ingenuous nature that the woman had learned to love, seemed indifferent. If he had bared his pain, she would have tried to comfort him—a man's sorrow has first rights over women. Instead of lamenting, he said quietly: “Joan has willed; we follow her lead.”