| Chapter 27
| 0 | |
| I never could tell just why, but Sunday afternoon during my
old life had been a time when I was peculiarly subject to
melancholy, when the color unaccountably faded out of all the
aspects of life, and everything appeared pathetically uninteresting.
The hours, which in general were wont to bear me easily on
their wings, lost the power of flight, and toward the close of the
day, drooping quite to earth, had fairly to be dragged along by
main strength. Perhaps it was partly owing to the established
association of ideas that, despite the utter change in my
circumstances, I fell into a state of profound depression on the
afternoon of this my first Sunday in the twentieth century.
| 1 | |
| It was not, however, on the present occasion a depression
without specific cause, the mere vague melancholy I have spoken
of, but a sentiment suggested and certainly quite justified by my
position. The sermon of Mr. Barton, with its constant implication
of the vast moral gap between the century to which I
belonged and that in which I found myself, had had an effect
strongly to accentuate my sense of loneliness in it. Considerately
and philosophically as he had spoken, his words could scarcely
have failed to leave upon my mind a strong impression of the
mingled pity, curiosity, and aversion which I, as a representative
of an abhorred epoch, must excite in all around me.
| 2 | |
| The extraordinary kindness with which I had been treated by
Dr. Leete and his family, and especially the goodness of Edith,
had hitherto prevented my fully realizing that their real sentiment
toward me must necessarily be that of the whole generation
to which they belonged. The recognition of this, as regarded
Dr. Leete and his amiable wife, however painful, I might have
endured, but the conviction that Edith must share their feeling
was more than I could bear.
| 3 | |
| The crushing effect with which this belated perception of a
fact so obvious came to me opened my eyes fully to something
which perhaps the reader has already suspected,--I loved Edith.
| 4 | |
| Was it strange that I did? The affecting occasion on which
our intimacy had begun, when her hands had drawn me out of
the whirlpool of madness; the fact that her sympathy was the
vital breath which had set me up in this new life and enabled me
to support it; my habit of looking to her as the mediator
between me and the world around in a sense that even her father
was not,--these were circumstances that had predetermined a
result which her remarkable loveliness of person and disposition
would alone have accounted for. It was quite inevitable that she
should have come to seem to me, in a sense quite different from
the usual experience of lovers, the only woman in this world.
Now that I had become suddenly sensible of the fatuity of the
hopes I had begun to cherish, I suffered not merely what another
lover might, but in addition a desolate loneliness, an utter
forlornness, such as no other lover, however unhappy, could have
felt.
| 5 | |
| My hosts evidently saw that I was depressed in spirits, and did
their best to divert me. Edith especially, I could see, was
distressed for me, but according to the usual perversity of lovers,
having once been so mad as to dream of receiving something
more from her, there was no longer any virtue for me in a
kindness that I knew was only sympathy.
| 6 | |
| Toward nightfall, after secluding myself in my room most of
the afternoon, I went into the garden to walk about. The day
was overcast, with an autumnal flavor in the warm, still air.
Finding myself near the excavation, I entered the subterranean
chamber and sat down there. "This," I muttered to myself, "is
the only home I have. Let me stay here, and not go forth any
more." Seeking aid from the familiar surroundings, I endeavored
to find a sad sort of consolation in reviving the past and
summoning up the forms and faces that were about me in my
former life. It was in vain. There was no longer any life in them.
For nearly one hundred years the stars had been looking down
on Edith Bartlett's grave, and the graves of all my generation.
| 7 | |
| The past was dead, crushed beneath a century's weight, and
from the present I was shut out. There was no place for me
anywhere. I was neither dead nor properly alive.
| 8 | |
| "Forgive me for following you."
| 9 | |
| I looked up. Edith stood in the door of the subterranean
room, regarding me smilingly, but with eyes full of sympathetic
distress.
| 10 | |
| "Send me away if I am intruding on you," she said; "but we
saw that you were out of spirits, and you know you promised to
let me know if that were so. You have not kept your word."
| 11 | |
| I rose and came to the door, trying to smile, but making, I
fancy, rather sorry work of it, for the sight of her loveliness
brought home to me the more poignantly the cause of my
wretchedness.
| 12 | |
| "I was feeling a little lonely, that is all," I said. "Has it never
occurred to you that my position is so much more utterly alone
than any human being's ever was before that a new word is really
needed to describe it?"
| 13 | |
| "Oh, you must not talk that way--you must not let yourself
feel that way--you must not!" she exclaimed, with moistened
eyes. "Are we not your friends? It is your own fault if you will
not let us be. You need not be lonely."
| 14 | |
| "You are good to me beyond my power of understanding," I
said, "but don't you suppose that I know it is pity merely, sweet
pity, but pity only. I should be a fool not to know that I cannot
seem to you as other men of your own generation do, but as
some strange uncanny being, a stranded creature of an unknown
sea, whose forlornness touches your compassion despite its
grotesqueness. I have been so foolish, you were so kind, as to
almost forget that this must needs be so, and to fancy I might in
time become naturalized, as we used to say, in this age, so as to
feel like one of you and to seem to you like the other men about
you. But Mr. Barton's sermon taught me how vain such a fancy
is, how great the gulf between us must seem to you."
| 15 | |
| "Oh that miserable sermon!" she exclaimed, fairly crying now
in her sympathy, "I wanted you not to hear it. What does he
know of you? He has read in old musty books about your times,
that is all. What do you care about him, to let yourself be vexed
by anything he said? Isn't it anything to you, that we who know
you feel differently? Don't you care more about what we think of
you than what he does who never saw you? Oh, Mr. West! you
don't know, you can't think, how it makes me feel to see you so
forlorn. I can't have it so. What can I say to you? How can I
convince you how different our feeling for you is from what you
think?"
| 16 | |
| As before, in that other crisis of my fate when she had come
to me, she extended her hands toward me in a gesture of
helpfulness, and, as then, I caught and held them in my own;
her bosom heaved with strong emotion, and little tremors in the
fingers which I clasped emphasized the depth of her feeling. In
her face, pity contended in a sort of divine spite against the
obstacles which reduced it to impotence. Womanly compassion
surely never wore a guise more lovely.
| 17 | |
| Such beauty and such goodness quite melted me, and it
seemed that the only fitting response I could make was to tell
her just the truth. Of course I had not a spark of hope, but on
the other hand I had no fear that she would be angry. She was
too pitiful for that. So I said presently, "It is very ungrateful in
me not to be satisfied with such kindness as you have shown me,
and are showing me now. But are you so blind as not to see why
they are not enough to make me happy? Don't you see that it is
because I have been mad enough to love you?"
| 18 | |
| At my last words she blushed deeply and her eyes fell before
mine, but she made no effort to withdraw her hands from my
clasp. For some moments she stood so, panting a little. Then
blushing deeper than ever, but with a dazzling smile, she looked
up.
| 19 | |
| "Are you sure it is not you who are blind?" she said.
| 20 | |
| That was all, but it was enough, for it told me that, unaccountable,
incredible as it was, this radiant daughter of a golden
age had bestowed upon me not alone her pity, but her love. Still,
I half believed I must be under some blissful hallucination even
as I clasped her in my arms. "If I am beside myself," I cried, "let
me remain so."
| 21 | |
| "It is I whom you must think beside myself," she panted,
escaping from my arms when I had barely tasted the sweetness
of her lips. "Oh! oh! what must you think of me almost to throw
myself in the arms of one I have known but a week? I did not
mean that you should find it out so soon, but I was so sorry for
you I forgot what I was saying. No, no; you must not touch me
again till you know who I am. After that, sir, you shall apologize
to me very humbly for thinking, as I know you do, that I have
been over quick to fall in love with you. After you know who I
am, you will be bound to confess that it was nothing less than my
duty to fall in love with you at first sight, and that no girl of
proper feeling in my place could do otherwise."
| 22 | |
| As may be supposed, I would have been quite content to
waive explanations, but Edith was resolute that there should be
no more kisses until she had been vindicated from all suspicion
of precipitancy in the bestowal of her affections, and I was fain
to follow the lovely enigma into the house. Having come where
her mother was, she blushingly whispered something in her ear
and ran away, leaving us together.
| 23 | |
| It then appeared that, strange as my experience had been, I
was now first to know what was perhaps its strangest feature.
From Mrs. Leete I learned that Edith was the great-granddaughter
of no other than my lost love, Edith Bartlett. After mourning
me for fourteen years, she had made a marriage of esteem, and
left a son who had been Mrs. Leete's father. Mrs. Leete had
never seen her grandmother, but had heard much of her, and,
when her daughter was born, gave her the name of Edith. This
fact might have tended to increase the interest which the girl
took, as she grew up, in all that concerned her ancestress, and
especially the tragic story of the supposed death of the lover,
whose wife she expected to be, in the conflagration of his house.
It was a tale well calculated to touch the sympathy of a romantic
girl, and the fact that the blood of the unfortunate heroine was
in her own veins naturally heightened Edith's interest in it. A
portrait of Edith Bartlett and some of her papers, including a
packet of my own letters, were among the family heirlooms. The
picture represented a very beautiful young woman about whom
it was easy to imagine all manner of tender and romantic things.
My letters gave Edith some material for forming a distinct idea
of my personality, and both together sufficed to make the sad old
story very real to her. She used to tell her parents, half jestingly,
that she would never marry till she found a lover like Julian
West, and there were none such nowadays.
| 24 | |
| Now all this, of course, was merely the daydreaming of a girl
whose mind had never been taken up by a love affair of her own,
and would have had no serious consequence but for the discovery
that morning of the buried vault in her father's garden and
the revelation of the identity of its inmate. For when the apparently
lifeless form had been borne into the house, the face in the
locket found upon the breast was instantly recognized as that of
Edith Bartlett, and by that fact, taken in connection with the
other circumstances, they knew that I was no other than Julian
West. Even had there been no thought, as at first there was not,
of my resuscitation, Mrs. Leete said she believed that this event
would have affected her daughter in a critical and life-long
manner. The presumption of some subtle ordering of destiny,
involving her fate with mine, would under all circumstances
have possessed an irresistible fascination for almost any woman.
| 25 | |
| Whether when I came back to life a few hours afterward, and
from the first seemed to turn to her with a peculiar dependence
and to find a special solace in her company, she had been too
quick in giving her love at the first sign of mine, I could now,
her mother said, judge for myself. If I thought so, I must
remember that this, after all, was the twentieth and not the
nineteenth century, and love was, no doubt, now quicker in
growth, as well as franker in utterance than then.
| 26 | |
| From Mrs. Leete I went to Edith. When I found her, it was
first of all to take her by both hands and stand a long time in
rapt contemplation of her face. As I gazed, the memory of that
other Edith, which had been affected as with a benumbing
shock by the tremendous experience that had parted us, revived,
and my heart was dissolved with tender and pitiful emotions,
but also very blissful ones. For she who brought to me so
poignantly the sense of my loss was to make that loss good. It
was as if from her eyes Edith Bartlett looked into mine, and
smiled consolation to me. My fate was not alone the strangest,
but the most fortunate that ever befell a man. A double miracle
had been wrought for me. I had not been stranded upon the
shore of this strange world to find myself alone and companionless.
My love, whom I had dreamed lost, had been reembodied
for my consolation. When at last, in an ecstasy of gratitude
and tenderness, I folded the lovely girl in my arms, the
two Ediths were blended in my thought, nor have they ever
since been clearly distinguished. I was not long in finding that
on Edith's part there was a corresponding confusion of identities.
Never, surely, was there between freshly united lovers a
stranger talk than ours that afternoon. She seemed more anxious
to have me speak of Edith Bartlett than of herself, of how I had
loved her than how I loved herself, rewarding my fond words
concerning another woman with tears and tender smiles and
pressures of the hand.
| 27 | |
| "You must not love me too much for myself," she said. "I
shall be very jealous for her. I shall not let you forget her. I am
going to tell you something which you may think strange. Do
you not believe that spirits sometimes come back to the world to
fulfill some work that lay near their hearts? What if I were to
tell you that I have sometimes thought that her spirit lives in
me--that Edith Bartlett, not Edith Leete, is my real name. I
cannot know it; of course none of us can know who we really are;
but I can feel it. Can you wonder that I have such a feeling,
seeing how my life was affected by her and by you, even before
you came. So you see you need not trouble to love me at all, if
only you are true to her. I shall not be likely to be jealous."
| 28 | |
| Dr. Leete had gone out that afternoon, and I did not have an
interview with him till later. He was not, apparently, wholly
unprepared for the intelligence I conveyed, and shook my hand
heartily.
| 29 | |
| "Under any ordinary circumstances, Mr. West, I should say
that this step had been taken on rather short acquaintance; but
these are decidedly not ordinary circumstances. In fairness,
perhaps I ought to tell you," he added smilingly, "that while I
cheerfully consent to the proposed arrangement, you must not
feel too much indebted to me, as I judge my consent is a mere
formality. From the moment the secret of the locket was out, it
had to be, I fancy. Why, bless me, if Edith had not been there
to redeem her great-grandmother's pledge, I really apprehend
that Mrs. Leete's loyalty to me would have suffered a severe
strain."
| 30 | |
| That evening the garden was bathed in moonlight, and till
midnight Edith and I wandered to and fro there, trying to grow
accustomed to our happiness.
| 31 | |
| "What should I have done if you had not cared for me?" she
exclaimed. "I was afraid you were not going to. What should I
have done then, when I felt I was consecrated to you! As soon as
you came back to life, I was as sure as if she had told me that I
was to be to you what she could not be, but that could only be if
you would let me. Oh, how I wanted to tell you that morning,
when you felt so terribly strange among us, who I was, but dared
not open my lips about that, or let father or mother----"
| 32 | |
| "That must have been what you would not let your father tell
me!" I exclaimed, referring to the conversation I had overheard
as I came out of my trance.
| 33 | |
| "Of course it was," Edith laughed. "Did you only just guess
that? Father being only a man, thought that it would make you
feel among friends to tell you who we were. He did not think of
me at all. But mother knew what I meant, and so I had my way.
I could never have looked you in the face if you had known who
I was. It would have been forcing myself on you quite too
boldly. I am afraid you think I did that to-day, as it was. I am
sure I did not mean to, for I know girls were expected to hide
their feelings in your day, and I was dreadfully afraid of shocking
you. Ah me, how hard it must have been for them to have
always had to conceal their love like a fault. Why did they think
it such a shame to love any one till they had been given
permission? It is so odd to think of waiting for permission to fall
in love. Was it because men in those days were angry when girls
loved them? That is not the way women would feel, I am sure,
or men either, I think, now. I don't understand it at all. That
will be one of the curious things about the women of those days
that you will have to explain to me. I don't believe Edith
Bartlett was so foolish as the others."
| 34 | |
| After sundry ineffectual attempts at parting, she finally insisted
that we must say good night. I was about to imprint upon
her lips the positively last kiss, when she said, with an indescribable
archness:
| 35 | |
| "One thing troubles me. Are you sure that you quite forgive
Edith Bartlett for marrying any one else? The books that have
come down to us make out lovers of your time more jealous than
fond, and that is what makes me ask. It would be a great relief to
me if I could feel sure that you were not in the least jealous of
my great-grandfather for marrying your sweetheart. May I tell
my great-grandmother's picture when I go to my room that you
quite forgive her for proving false to you?"
| 36 | |
| Will the reader believe it, this coquettish quip, whether the
speaker herself had any idea of it or not, actually touched and
with the touching cured a preposterous ache of something like
jealousy which I had been vaguely conscious of ever since Mrs.
Leete had told me of Edith Bartlett's marriage. Even while I had
been holding Edith Bartlett's great-granddaughter in my arms, I
had not, till this moment, so illogical are some of our feelings,
distinctly realized that but for that marriage I could not have
done so. The absurdity of this frame of mind could only be
equalled by the abruptness with which it dissolved as Edith's
roguish query cleared the fog from my perceptions. I laughed as
I kissed her.
| 37 | |
| "You may assure her of my entire forgiveness," I said,
"although if it had been any man but your great-grandfather
whom she married, it would have been a very different matter."
| 38 | |
| On reaching my chamber that night I did not open the
musical telephone that I might be lulled to sleep with soothing
tunes, as had become my habit. For once my thoughts made
better music than even twentieth century orchestras discourse,
and it held me enchanted till well toward morning, when I fell
asleep.
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