Read Ebook: The Deceased Wife's Sister and My Beautiful Neighbour v. 3 by Russell William Clark

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Ebook has 958 lines and 35987 words, and 20 pages

"I have seen my apparition," said I cheerfully.

"I guessed so by the time you were absent," he answered, looking at the clock.

"I hope my resolute behaviour vindicates my courage, or at least excuses my former fears."

"You have renewed the pretty ancient legend, and have changed your shape of marble into a breathing woman. It certainly shows some hardihood and much tact to have penetrated into her presence. She seems, by your account, to have taken the white veil of solitude, and is dead to all the world."

"No, Sir; the rate is not changed; it is a only temporary eclipse--a shadow dimming a light."

"Well," said I, "for my part, I adore black eyes; I refer particularly to Mrs. Fraser's. If I were called upon to name the most harmonious contrast in the world, I should say black eyes and yellow hair. Oh! she is the loveliest, the most fascinating, the wildest, sweetest, strangest woman in the wide world!"

"Your interview has been satisfactory, I presume?" he remarked drily. "She must have been prepared for your visit and met you with the most polished and facile of her arts.

"There was nothing polished or facile about her. On the contrary, she was rude."

"Indeed!"

"'We forgive in proportion as we love,' says Rochefoucauld, a man of the world."

"There is nothing to forgive--but there is much to love. There is a shrewd sweetness about her that took me mightily. Solitude has made her primitive. Had Byron met her we should have had a poem on the beautiful savage, with her coy and mutinous manners, with the light of golden sands upon her hair and the shine of torrid suns upon her eyes. Hear me now, Martelli, and marvel!" I continued, striking a heroic attitude. "When she speaks she looks like liberty incarnate; there is freedom in her royal gestures; pliancy and power in her step; her exquisite form undulates to her thoughts like the shadow of a dryad seen in a breezy pool!"

"This, Sir, is love. Your language has about it the poetic ambiguity that no other passion would dictate."

"It is love! I avow it. I am in love with this woman."

"I think I can understand you, Sir. You have cultivated this emotion for the purpose of utilising it. You are giving it full licence that you may properly observe its operation. When fully developed, you will anatomise it, study its conformation, and having enlarged your knowledge of human nature by the examination, bury the corpse of the passion as the doctors bury the subjects they have dissected."

"No, this is not my intention," I answered, laughing heartily; "emotion is too valuable to be wasted in the pursuit of knowledge."

"Pardon me, Sir, but--do you propose to marry her?"

"If she will have me."

"She is to be congratulated on her beauty. It must be of a rare and powerful kind to strike love at one blow into a heart which I thought was surfeited with this sort of thing."

"Her beauty is rare and powerful too."

"It must be, to achieve such a victory over the experience that had driven you into the cool and calm dominion of intellectual love."

"Can I not occupy both dominions? Must intellect be denied me because I fall in love?" I asked, attributing the sarcastic emphasis of his language to a fear that my marriage would lose him his situation.

"I think not," he answered. "My experience of knowledge is, that it is a jealous god. Surely, Sir, your resolution is abrupt! You have declared your intention only to excite my wonder!"

"On the contrary, I am quite sincere when I tell you that I am head over heels in love with this woman, and that I would marry her to-morrow if I thought she would accept me."

He rose, went to the window, stared out for some moments, and then approached me.

"If I understood you aright, Mr. Thorburn, your object in residing here was to enable you to lay in such a stock of knowledge as would enable you to contest for fame with a good promise of success?"

I nodded.

"You even went, Sir, to the expense of furnishing this house, that you might burden yourself with obligations which should not be got rid of without inconvenience and loss."

"True."

"That you did, that your resolution, should it grow impaired by fatigue or caprice, would still be hampered with difficulties enough to make its decay slow or even impossible."

"Well?" said I, wondering at his solemnity and long preamble.

"Is it possible, Sir, I ask respectfully, that you will abandon your large and dignified enterprise for a lady of whom you know nothing?"

"You only make me sensible of the capriciousness of my character," I answered, laughing; "but you could not shake the love this lady has inspired."

"Sir," he said courteously, "nothing would justify the freedom of my language but the knowledge that one of the duties you desired me to discharge, was to stimulate your energies when I found them flagging. But as you have determined to alter your views, I shall of course consider those duties at an end."

"Why?" I asked. "What avenues in life would be closed to me as a married man that are opened to me as a bachelor? A man is not bound to be idle, is not prohibited from meditating as ambitiously as he chooses, because he gives his name to a woman."

"I do not say, Sir, that you may not recur hereafter to your schemes; but you may reckon on being very indisposed for study for a good time now. This lady will occupy your thoughts to the exclusion of all things else, before marriage and for long after. Love-making is an absorbing occupation. To a poor man it may be a stimulus, for he may have to work in order to wed; but to a rich man it is usually a soporific."

"My good friend," I exclaimed, "you speak as though my marriage were a fixed matter. Let us look at the truth. I am in love with this lady, it is true--but she is not in love with me. I may have to be importunate to procure her consent--should she ever vouchsafe her consent, which, between you and me, I have no earthly reason to suppose likely; and importunities, to be successful, must be often delayed and never vehement. I should regret your leaving me; and should regret it the more if you resolve to go before my future takes a more definite character. My wishes will of course impel me to bring this love of mine to an issue as speedily as she will let me; but I really like your company too well to wish you to regulate your conduct by a contingency which, I fear, may prove the reverse of inevitable."

He paced the room, eyeing me from time to time with a gaze uncertain and agitated. His brow was clouded.

"I am very grateful to you for your kindness to me," he said, "and I will avail myself of it to think a little before I decide. I shall be selfish enough to hope that your marriage will not happen. We have been going on well--very well. It would be a pity that this pleasant life should be disturbed. I am much obliged to you for your courtesy," he repeated, "and you are very kind to have listened to my plain-speaking so good-naturedly."

To this I made some reply, and the subject dropped.

"Here," thought I, "is an illustration of the genuine southern character: the warm and sudden humours; the irritable pets and fumes; the querulous misgivings; the effusive gratitude; the morbid distrust. Here too, is a living example of the penalty of thought. The brain of this smart little man has been playing so long and so remorselessly on his nerves, that they have at last grown unfit for use. Coffee and tobacco, too, have done their part, and have converted this sallow being into a bundle of shuddering sensibilities. Because I talk of being in love, because I dare to dream of marrying, he believes that I wish him to be gone. He transforms my hopes into hints; and fearful, perhaps, of a direct dismissal which would convulse his dignity with mortification, and leave his nerves flabby and toneless for ever, he bids me understand that he considers his duties at an end. But he'll get over this pique. Those keen eyes, that pungent tongue, are the harbingers of no silly spirit. He will contrast this house with his attic in Berners Street, this sweet air with the yellow element of London, his meagre meals with his present bountiful repasts, and will discover no urgent necessity to depart. For myself, I doubt if I could better him. Use has fathered one or two angularities, and I find him now not only agreeable, but necessary."

But, to be candid, these thoughts did not long trouble me. I had my beautiful neighbour to muse on, and she was an inspiration that fully filled my mind.

Three days passed before I saw her again.

Martelli had gone to Cliffegate for a walk: I amused myself in the garden. The grounds were now in complete order. In the front the fountain had been repaired and redecorated, and now tossed its pearl-shower in the sun, circling the cool and brimming basin with a rainbow. In the back, the trees hung heavy with fruit. The beds were draped with flowers. The lawn, shorn and trimmed to velvet smoothness, offered a pleasant relief to the eye.

"She who loves flowers so well, what would she think of this brilliant show? Were I to ask her to come and see my grounds, would she come?"

At that moment I heard her voice calling to the servant from the garden. An idea struck me. I pushed open the gate and entered the fields. Through the gate of her own garden I could see her. She was raking a bed of geraniums. Her fair face was shadowed by a hat, broad-brimmed and high-crowned; inelegant it would have looked on many a woman; but the most fastidious taste would have been ravished by its becoming elegance on her. The skirt of her dress, pinned up, disclosed a foot matchless in its turn and shape. What grace was in the movement of her arms! how delicate the outline of her inclined form! A long curl of gold had slipped from the blue ribbon that bound her hair and reposed like a sunbeam on her back. I stood watching her with all my soul in my gaze. A lark rose shrilling from the fields, and soared, pouring its throat in a strain chastened by the nimble air. She drew herself erect, and protecting her eyes, sought the bird in the blue. Her full and shapely form, her black and luminous eyes, shaded by her hand of snow, her yellow hair, her looped skirt, her firm small feet, made, as she stood among the flowers, such a picture of colour, beauty, and sunshine as I must never hope to see again.

I drew to the gate.

"Good afternoon, Mrs. Fraser," I said gently.

She started, and seeing me, stared without speaking.

"I hope I have not alarmed you," I said, observing the startled expression of her eyes to brighten with a sudden angry light: "I was attracted by the sound of your voice, and would not miss this chance of seeing you."

She let fall the rake and came to the gate.

"How long have you been there?" she asked.

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