Death the Knight and the Lady/Chapter 13

old clergyman who lives at Ashworth has just been. He comes twice a week and eats a biscuit and drinks a glass of wine, and tells me we should all think on the future life, or the life to come. He asked me what I was writing, and I said—nothing.

Well—that day I had luncheon all alone. Where that other strange being had luncheon, or whether she had luncheon at all, I don't know; I had luncheon alone, and I had chops for luncheon.

What did James Wilder mean by sending me here to be driven mad? What was driving me mad? Why, Geraldine was. I had sprung at one bound into the most fabulous world of love. I could have eaten that snail she lifted on to the leaf, just because she touched it.

The old butler was meandering round the room with a dish of vegetables in his hand.

"James," I said.

"Ma'am."

"I have fallen in love with your Miss Geraldine."

"May God be thanked, ma'am."

"James," in a coaxing voice, "I want to go out for a drive with him—I mean with her—with Miss Geraldine. Do you understand?"

"Yes, ma'am, and so shall I tell the horses to be put in?"

"Why, yes, after luncheon, that is, if Miss Geraldine likes; do you think she would like?"

"Ma'am," in a voice like the voice of a ghost, "Miss Geraldine has been a-speaking of you to me; she comes to me, ma'am, to tell any little trouble that may happen like as she was a boy, which she is, may God in Heaven bless her; and she came to me last night after you'd a-gone to bed, and she said, 'James, who is Beatrice Sinclair?' Lord, ma'am, you might ha knocked me down with your finger. 'Why,' I says, Miss Geraldine, 'she's the lady just come.' Then she says 'James,' and she held down her head and all her little face grew red, 'Will she ever go away again?' 'Why, Miss Geraldine?' said I. 'Because if she does,' said she, 'I shall die; I've been waiting for her and thinking of her for years, and if she leaves me now I shall die:' those were her words."

A bucket of vitriol emptied into a furnace those words were to me.

"The horses," I cried, rising from the table, "ring for the horses; go and tell Miss Geraldine to dress, for I am going to take her for a drive. Go." I stamped my foot, I was speaking like a man. I was suddenly intoxicated. I felt hat, boots and belt upon me; the falcon was on my wrist. I clapped my hand on my left hip and was astonished to find—no sword. That, somehow, brought me to, and I sat down at the table again feeling shrunk—shrunk? do you understand that word?—shrunk like an apple that has been all winter in the cellar—shrunk like a warrior who wakes to find himself a woman. "She hung down her head and all her little face grew red," how exactly those words brought her image before me. This little milksop. I was sitting at the table; the old butler had gone to order the carriage; the light of the autumn day came greyly through the great double windows, a spray of withered wistaria was tapping at one of the panes like the hand of a ghost. Before me, on the opposite wall, hung a convex Venetian mirror, one of those strange mirrors that are made so perfectly and so truly that they reflect everything just as it is, even the atmosphere, so that a room reflected by them seems like a real room. I was staring at my own reflection in the mirror, and wondering over again at my own likeness to the portrait of Gerald Wilder—when—the door in the mirror opened, a figure the size of my thumb entered the mirror room, a figure lithe and more gorgeously clad than any caterpillar. I knew quite well that it was only Geraldine who had opened the door behind me, and was therefore reflected in the mirror. I knew that quite well, yet I watched the mirror without moving: the little figure seemed to hold me in a spell. It came up softly behind the woman seated at the table—the woman with the face so like Gerald Wilder; it paused as if undecided. I watched.

Geraldine evidently was utterly ignorant of the mirror and its picture. Geraldine the observed imagined herself unobserved: then, like a little thief, she bent her lips to kiss the woman's hair without the woman knowing. I threw my head back and caught the kiss upon my lips, I threw my arms back and caught her round the neck; never was a thief so caught in his own trap.

Then I turned round, and let her go, and confronted her, all at the same time. And there she stood, "with her head hung down and all her little face grown red."

Love has never been described properly: all that about roses and altars is nonsense. Love is like being in a beautiful and mysterious room, and you push a curtain aside and you find a more mysterious and more beautiful room, and you see another curtain. How that comparison would shock the people who write poetry. Imagine comparing love to a suite of rooms.

I shall never forget that drive; the horses were those Russian horses that go as if they were mad; the air was all filled with the smell of autumn, and the earth seemed as silent as the leaden-coloured sky. The park lay all dull-coloured and damp, the great trees were standing with their leaves hanging down.

Miles and miles of park we passed through; there were sober and sad-coloured hills in the distance that seemed to watch us with a mournful air. The country had for me the aspect of fate as it lay around us, silent as a dream, the trees dropped their withered leaves, the clouds passed by, the wind blew, and clouds and wind and trees all said to me in their own language, the past, the past, the past. Once Geraldine said, "When I saw you before, so long ago, you were not dressed as you are now."

No, Geraldine, I said to myself, when you saw me before, so long ago, I was dressed as a man. But I did not answer her in words.