Watersprings by Arthur Christopher Benson (read more books txt) 📕

Furnishing even an official house for a life of graceful simplicity involved intolerable lists, bills, letters, catalogues of things which it seemed inconceivable that anyone should need. The very number and variety of brushes required seemed to Howard an outrage on the love of cheap beauty, so epigrammatically praised by Thucydides; he said with a groan to Maud that it was indeed true that the Nineteenth Century would stand out to all time as the period of the world's history in which more useless things had been made than at any epoch before!

But this morning, for some blessed reason, all his vexations seemed to slip off from him. They were to start in the afternoon; but at about eleven Maud in cloak and furred stole stepped into the library and demanded a little walk. Howard looked approvingly, admiringly, adoringly at his wife. She had regained a look of health and lightness more marked than he had ever before seen in her. Her illness had proved a rest, in spite of all the trouble she had passed through. Some new beauty, the beauty of experience, had passed into her face without making havoc of the youthful contours and the girlish freshness, and the beautiful line of her cheek outlined upon the dark fur, with the wide-open eye above it, came upon Howard with an almost tormenting sense of loveliness, like a chord of far-off music. He flung down his pen, and took his wife in his arms for an instant. "Yes," he said in answer to her look, "it's all right, darling--I can manage anything with you near me, looking like that--that's all I want!"

They went out into the garden with its frost-crisped grass and leafless shrubberies, with the high-standing down behind. "How it blows!" said Howard:

"''Twould blow like this through holt and hanger
When Uricon the city stood:
'Tis the old wind, in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood!'

How beautiful that is--'the old wind, in the old anger!'--but it isn't true, for all that. If one thing changes, everything changes; and the wind has got to march on, like you and me: there's nothing pathetic about it. The weak thing is to want to stay as we are!"

"Oh yes," said Maud; "one wastes pity. I was inclined myself to be pathetic about it all yesterday, when I went up home and looked into my little old room. The furniture and books and pictures seemed to me to reproach me with having deserted them; but, oh dear, what a fantastic, foolish, anxious little wretch I was, with all my plans for uplifting everyone! You don't know, dearest, you can't know, out of what a stagnant little pool you fished me up!"

"And yet _I_ feel," said Howard, "as if it was you who had saved me from a sort of death--what a charming picture! two people who can't swim saving each other from drowning."

"Well, that's the way that things are done!" said Maud decisively.

They left the garden, and betook themselves to the pool; the waters welled up, green and cold, from the depth, and hurried away down their bare channel.

"This is the scene of my life," said Howard; "I WILL be sentimental about this! This is where my ghost will walk, if anywhere; good heavens, to think that it was not three years ago that I came here first, and thought in a solemn way that it was going to have a strange significance for me. 'Significance,' that is the mischief! But it is all very well, now that every minute is full of happiness, to laugh at the old fears--they were very real at the time,--'the old wind, in the old anger'--one can't sit and dream, though it's pleasant, it's pleasant."

"It was the only time in my life," said Maud, "when I was ever brave! Why isn't one braver? It is agreeable at the time, and it is almost overpaid!"

"It is like what a doctor told me once," said Howard, "that he had never in his life seen a patient go to the operating table other than calm and brave. Face to face with things one is all right; and yet one never learns not to waste time in dreading them."

They went on in silence up the valley, Maud walking beside him with all her old lightness. Howard thought he had never seen anything more beautiful. They were out of the wind now, but could hear it hiss in the grasses above them.

"What about Cambridge?" said Maud. "I think it will be rather fun. I haven't wanted to go; but do you know, if someone came to me and said I might just unpack everything, I should be dreadfully disappointed!"

"I believe I should be too," said Howard. "My only fear is that I shall not be interested--I shall be always wanting to get back to you--and yet how inexplicable that used to seem to me, that Dons who married should really prefer to steal back home, instead of living the free and joyous life of the sympathetic and bachelor; and even now it seems difficult to suppose that other men can feel as I do about THEIR wives."

"Like the boy in Punch," said Maud, "who couldn't believe that the two earwigs could care about each other."

A faint music of bells came to them on the wind. "Hark!" said Howard; "the Sherborne chime! Do you remember when we first heard that? It gave me a delightful sense of other people being busy when I was unoccupied. To-day it seems as if it was warning me that I have got to be busy."

They turned at last and retraced their steps. Presently Howard said, "There's just one more thing, child, I want to say. I haven't ever spoken to you since about the vision--whatever it was--which you described to me--the child and you. But I took you at your word!"

"Yes," said Maud, "I have always been glad that you did that!"

"But I have wanted to speak," said Howard, "simply because I did not want you to think that it wasn't in my mind--that I had cast it all lightly away. I haven't tried to force myself into any belief about it--it's a mystery--but it has grown into my mind somehow, and become real; and I do feel more and more that there is something very true and great about it, linking us with a life beyond. It does seem to me life, and not silence; love, and not emptiness. It has not come in between us, as I feared it might--or rather it HAS come in between us, and seems to be holding both our hands. I don't say that my reason tells me this--but something has outrun my reason, and something stronger and better than reason. It is near and dear: and, dearest, you will believe me when I say that this isn't said to please you or to woo you--I wouldn't do that! I am not in sight of the reality yet, as you have been; but it IS a reality, and not a sweet dream."

Maud looked at him, her eyes brimming with sudden tears. "Ah, my beloved," she said, "that is all and more than I had hoped. Let it just stay there! I am not foolish about it, and indeed the further away that it gets, the less I am sure what happened. I shall not want you to speak of it: it isn't that it is too sacred--nothing is too sacred--but it is just a fact I can't reckon with, like the fact of one's own birth and death. All I just hoped was that you might not think it only a girl's fancy; but indeed I should not have cared if you HAD thought that. The TRUTH--that is what matters; and nothing that you or I or anyone, in any passion of love or sorrow, can believe about the truth, can alter it; the only thing is to try to see it all clearly, not to give false reasons, not to let one's imagination go."

"Yes, yes," said Howard, "that's the secret of love and life and everything; and yet it seems a hard thing to believe; because if it were not for your illusions about me, for instance--if you could really see me as I am--you couldn't feel as you do; one comes back to trusting one's heart after all--that is the only power we have of reading the writing on the wall. And yet that is not all; it IS possible to read it, to spell it out; but it is the interpretation that one needs, and for that one must trust love, and love only."

They went back to the house in a happy silence; but Maud slipped out again, and went to the little churchyard. There behind the chancel, in a corner of the buttress, was a little mound. Maud laid a single white flower upon it. "No," she said softly, as if speaking in the ear of a child, "no, my darling, I am not making any mistake. I don't think of you as sleeping here, though I love the place where the little limbs are laid. You are awake, alive, about your business, I don't doubt. I'd have loved you, guarded you, helped you along; but you have made love live for me, and that, and hope, are enough now for us both! I don't claim you, sweet; I don't even ask you to remember and understand."


THE END

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Publication Date: 08-23-2010

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