Death the Knight and the Lady/Chapter 15

night I went up to my room early. I took pens, ink, and paper with me—why I took them I had no notion—I took them. I lit all the wax lights on the mantel, and the wax lights that stood on the dressing-table. Then I stood before the dressing-table mirror looking at myself. I can see the reflection of my face still, a pale face with dark sombre eyes, and lips that curled in a sneer. That was how Gerald Wilder looked when he was in a rage. I could see now Gerald Wilder, the assassin and the suicide. I was Gerald Wilder.

Geraldine and I were inextricably entangled—she in the body of a boy, I in the body of a woman. Was this my punishment for that murder and that suicide committed long, long ago, this blind maze of the flesh into which I had been led? I could do one of two things. Leave Geraldine to-morrow morning, never to see her again, or—stay. If I left her she would break her heart, and die. I would break my heart, and die. Then perhaps we might meet, and be happy for ever. Surely, if all those stars were suns, and if there were worlds round them like our world, God might give us some little place, some tiny garden out of all His splendour. He was rich, and owned the whole of space, and He would give something to two ghosts who had left the world for the love of each other. That was what would happen if we left each other—we would grow sick and die, but we would meet on the other side. If we remained together, I knew that something would happen to separate us for ever, how I knew this I cannot tell, perhaps it was by instinct.

I turned from the mirror to the table, where I had placed the writing things. Now I knew why I had brought them up: it seems to me that we often think when we don't know we are thinking.

I sat down, and took one of the thick sheets of paper stamped in red with

and I wrote. This is what I wrote—

",—I know now why you have sent me down here. I have seen your Geraldine, and I love her, but I must leave her. It will kill us both, but I have chosen to die. Can you not see that I am your kith and kin, that I am Gerald Wilder? You have no claim on Geraldine, for she is a Sinclair, she is the dead Beatrice returned as a Wilder. I think I see it all now, if one may see anything in such awful darkness. I know, without knowing exactly how I know it, that if we part we shall dream of each other till we die, and that then we shall meet never to be separated, but if we remain together some fearful thing will happen and divide us, so that we may never meet again.

If I loved your son all would be right, but it is not Gerald I love, but Geraldine—Beatrice.

I am leaving here early to-morrow morning, going, I don't know where. I shall write to you.

."

Then I directed an envelope—

I put the letter in. I gummed it. Then I began to search for a stamp. I felt that I must stamp it to add a kind of security to my purpose, though the post did not leave until noon on the morrow. What a search I had for that stamp. I rummaged all my dress pockets; at last I found my purse,—there were two stamps in it.

I stamped the letter carefully. I held it in my hands as I sat over the fire. Then, without any apparent reason, I tore the letter slowly up into four pieces, then into eight. Then I placed the pieces carefully on the burning coals in the grate. I watched the stamp burning and thought it was a pity to see it burn, for it was worth a penny. I saw the d e r letters of Wilder stand out white on a bit of the burnt envelope.

Then I took the poker and poked at the bits of paper ash.

I was thinking.

All my life long I have loved everything beautiful: colours have a strange fascination for me, you could make me sad quicker with a colour than a story or a poem; scents and sounds have the same effect, the smell of violets suddenly transports me to somewhere, I don't know where, I only know it is elsewhere. I have heard things in music that no one has ever heard, notes that come up again and again as the harmony moves to the end of its story, sombre notes full of fate. I have seen people listening to music and their faces had no more expression than jugs; I have heard women talking of the opera, utterly unconscious of the story the music they were listening to was telling them.

I was sitting by the fire thinking; the bits of burnt paper had flown up the chimney in a hurry, perhaps the devil had called them. I was thinking in pictures, and I felt unutterably happy and relieved now that I had written my letter to James Wilder—and burnt it.

I saw my room in Crescent. The creature that had inhabited that room was not I. I saw the room so distinctly that I saw on a shelf an old tattered book—Dumas' "Three Musketeers." I used to read it sometimes at nights, and I used to wonder how it was possible that the Duke of Buckingham could have loved Anne of Austria in the insane manner in which he did; now I saw at a glance that such love was quite possible, and no fable. He loved her because she was unattainable, she was a Queen; he could never have loved an ordinary woman like that. A soap bubble is the most beautiful thing in the world because it is so unattainable, you cannot put it in your pocket.

Then Geraldine suddenly appeared before my mind. Not only Geraldine, but the thousand and one things that made her up. I have told you before that colour and scent and sound seem to act as food and drink to me. This Geraldine had all these in their fullest perfection, like some strange tropical fruit that no one could imagine till they had seen. At no point was she imperfect; she was an utter little dunce, but that was her last and crowning fascination: she could not spell A B ab, and the problem of what twice thirteen was would have filled her small brown head with distraction. She could not tell you where Asia was, nor whether Japan was the capital of China; but neither could one of those delightful things we read of in the old stories, things that come out of a fountain and turn into a shower of spray when spoken to.

I was going to stay, then. What on earth made me dream of leaving Geraldine? Did that idea really occur to me? To leave here and get into a railway train and go back to a place called London—to turn back out of the seventeenth century into the horrible nineteenth century, with its railroads and smoke, and telegraphs, just because a hideous old woman called Reason had told me to do so or it would be wrong.

I took another sheet of paper and wrote.

Dear James,—I know now the reason why you sent me here. I have fallen in love with your mysterious Gerald. Leave us together and have no fear, lovers never hurt each other, except, perhaps, with kisses. I shall write to you every other day.— Yours affectionately, .

This letter I gummed up in an envelope. I had no trouble to find a stamp for it; my purse lay on the table and in it the other stamp. Then I put the letter on the mantel, and went to bed.