Dead-Sea Fruit · III

CHAPTER I. VALE.

“AT my own quarters trouble unutterable awaited me. While I had amused myself with the more piquant society of Gulnare, my sad sweet love—my Medora—had fled from her solitary bower. I found my household gods shattered; and standing among their ruins, I was fain to confess that I had deserved the stroke. She was gone. The poor child had borne my absence so uncomplainingly that I had been almost inclined to resent a patience that seemed like coldness. Had she been more demonstrative—had her affection or her jealousy assumed a more dramatic and soul-stirring form—it might have been better for both of us. But the poor child locked all her feelings so closely in her breast, that she had of late seemed to me the tamest and dullest of womankind—an automaton with a woe-begone face.

“The woman who waited upon her in that rude mountain home told me that she was gone. She had gone out early in the day—soon after my own departure—and had not been seen since that time. She had seen me in a carriage with a strange lady, and had, by some means, possessed herself of the secret of my visits to the lodge in the valley. This very woman had, perhaps, been C.’s informant, though she stoutly denied the fact when I taxed her with it.

“She was gone. It mattered little how she had obtained the information that had prompted her to this mad act. For some minutes I stood motionless on the spot where I had heard these tidings, powerless to decide what I ought to do. And then, sudden as a shaft of Apollo the destroyer, there darted into my brain the idea of suicide. That poor benighted child had left her cheerless home to destroy herself.

“I rushed from the house, pausing only to bid the woman send her husband after me with a lantern and a rope. What I was going to do I knew not. My first impulse was to seek her myself, along that desolate coast. She might wander for hours by the sea she loved so well, shrinking from that cold refuge, loth to fling herself into the strong arms of that stern lover for whom she would fain forsake me.

“I waited only till I saw D. emerge with his dimly-twinkling light, called to him to follow me, and then ran down the craggy winding way—the Devil’s Staircase—to the sands below.

“And then I remembered the heights above me—the little classic temple in which we had so often sat—and I shivered as I thought what a fearful leap madness might take from that rocky headland. I had told C. the story of Sappho,—of course giving her the ideal Sappho of modern poesy, and not the flaunting, wine-bibbing, strong-minded, wrong-minded Mitylenean lady of Attic comedy,—and we had agreed that Phaon—if indeed there ever existed such a person—was a monster.

“As I hurried along those lonely sands, dark with the shadows of the heights above, I remembered the soft spring sunset in which I had related the well-worn fable, and I could almost feel my love’s little hand clinging tenderly to my arm—the hand whose gentle touch I never was to feel again.

“I will not excruciate thee, reader, or bore thee, as the case may be, by one of those prolonged intervals of suspense whereby the venal hack of the Minerva Press would attempt to harrow thy feelings, and eke out his tale of strawless brick. For thee, too, life has had its fond hopes and idle dreams, its bitter disappointments, chilling disillusions, dark hours of remorse.

“Enough that in this crisis I suffered—suffered as I have never suffered since that day. My search was in vain; nor were the efforts of the men whom I sent in all directions of the coast—by the cliff and by the sands—of more avail. For two days and two nights I suffered the tortures of Cain. I told myself that this girl’s blood was upon my head; and if, in that hour when the thought of her untimely death was so keen and unendurable an agony, she could have appeared suddenly before me, I think I should have thrown myself at her feet and offered her the devotion of my life, the legal right to bear my name.

“She did not so appear, and the hour passed. Upon the third morning, after a delay that had seemed an eternity of torture, the post brought me a letter from C. She was at E——, whither she had gone, after long brooding upon my inconstancy.

‘I will not try to tell you all I have suffered,’ she wrote; ‘my most passionate words would seem to you cold and meaningless when measured against those Greek poets whose verse is your standard for every feeling. I will only say you have broken my heart. My story begins and ends in that one sentence. There must come an end even to such worship as mine. Oh! H., you have been very cruel to me! I have seen you with the beautiful foreign lady, whose society has been pleasanter to you than mine. Your carriage drove past me one day, as I stood half-hidden by the bushes upon a sloping bank above the road, and I heard her joyous laugh, and saw your head bent over her long dark ringlets, and knew that you were happy with her.

‘From the hour in which I discovered how utterly you had deceived me, my life has been one continued struggle with despair. You do not know how I loved those whom I left for your sake. In all the passion and pain of your Greek poetry, I doubt if there is a sentence strong enough to express the agony that I feel when I think of those dear friends, and stretch out my arms to them across the gulf that yawns between us. You read me a description of the ghosts in the dark under-world one day, before you had grown too weary of me to let me share your thoughts. I feel like those ghosts, H.

‘Why should I tire you with a long letter? I leave you free to find happiness with the lady whose name even I do not know.

‘Perhaps some day, when you are growing old, and have become weary of all the pleasures upon earth, you will think a little more tenderly of her who thought it a small thing to peril her soul in the hope of giving you happiness, and who awoke from her fond, foolish dream, to find, with anguish unspeakable, that the sacrifice had been as vain as it was wicked.’

“This letter melted me; and yet I was inclined to be angry with C. for the unnecessary pain her abrupt disappearance had inflicted upon me. I was divided between this feeling and the relief of mind afforded by the knowledge that my folly had not resulted in any fatal event. She had gone to E—— in a fit of jealousy, and she favoured me with the usual feminine reproaches so natural to the narrow female intellect—imagine a man reminding his friend at every turn of the sacrifices he had made for friendship!—and she sent me the address of that humble inn where she had taken up her abode, and of course expected me to hasten thither as fast as post-horses could convey me.