Sister Teresa. George Moore

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СКАЧАТЬ but between waking and sleeping thoughts are unusually distinct."

      "You don't believe in miracles, Owen?" And she told him of her dream and her sudden awaking, and the voices heard in her ears at first, then in the room, and then about the house. "So you see the nuns kept us apart."

      "And you believe in these things?"

      "How can I do otherwise?"

      Owen sighed, and they walked on a few paces. The last leaves were dancing; the woods were cold and wet, the heavy branches of the fir-trees dripping with cold rain, and in the walks a litter of chestnut-leaves.

      "Not a space of blue in the sky, only grey. It will be drearier still in Glasgow; you had better stay here," he said, as they walked round the little lake, watching the water-fowl moving in and out of the reeds, and they talked for some time of Riversdale, of the lake there, and the ducks which rose in great numbers and flew round and round the park, dropping one by one into the water. "You will never see Riversdale again, perhaps?"

      "Perhaps not," she answered; and hearing her say it, his future life seemed to him as forlorn as the landscape.

      "What will you do? What will become of you? What strange transformation has taken place in you?"

      "If—But what is the use of going over it again?"

      "If what?"

      "What would you have me do? Marriage would only ruin you, Owen, make you very unhappy. Why do you want me to enter on a life which I feel isn't mine, and which could only end in disaster for both of us." He asked her why it would end in disaster, and she answered, "It is impossible to lay bare one's whole heart. When one changes one's ideas one changes one's friends."

      "Because one's friends are only the embodiment of one's ideas. But I cannot admit that you would be unhappy as my wife."

      "Everybody is unhappy when they are not doing what Nature intended them to do."

      "And what did Nature intend you to do? Only to sing operas?"

      "I should be sorry to think Nature intended me for nothing else. Would you have me go on singing operas? I don't want to appear unreasonable, but how could I go on singing even if I wished to go on? The taste has changed; you will admit that light opera is the fashion, and I shouldn't succeed in light opera. Whatever I do you praise, but you know in the bottom of your heart there are only a few parts which I play well. You may deceive yourself, you do so because you wish to do so, but I have no wish to deceive myself and I know that I was never a great singer; a good singer, an interesting singer in certain parts if you like, but no more. You will admit that?"

      "No, I don't admit anything of the kind. If you leave the stage what will you do with your time? Your art, your friends—"

      "No one can figure anybody else's life: everybody has interests and occupations, not things that interest one's neighbour, but things that interest herself."

      "So it is because light opera has come into fashion again that you are going to give up singing? Such a thing never happened before: a woman who succeeded on the stage, who has not yet failed, whose voice is still fresh, who is in full possession of her art, to say suddenly, 'Money and applause are nothing to me, I prefer a few simple nuns to art and society.' Nothing seems to happen in life, life is always the same; rien ne change mais pourtant tout arrive, even the rare event of a successful actress relinquishing the stage."

      "It is odd," she said as they followed the path through the wintry wood, startled now and again by a rabbit at the end of the alley, by a cock pheasant rising up suddenly out of the yew hedges, and, beguiled by the beauty of the trees, they passed on slowly, pausing to think what a splendid sight a certain wild cherry must be in the spring-time. At the end of the wood Owen returned to the subject of their conversation.

      "Yes, it is strange that an actress should give up her art."

      "But, Owen, it isn't so strange in my case as in any other; for you know I was always a hothouse flower. You took me away to Paris and had me trained regardless of expense, and with your money it was easy to get an engagement."

      "My money had nothing to do with your engagements."

      "Perhaps not; but I only sang when it pleased me; I could always say, 'Well, my good man, go to So-and-so, she will sing for you any parts you please'; but I can only sing the parts I like."

      "You think, then, that if you had lived the life of a real actress, working your way up from the bottom, what has happened wouldn't have happened; is that what you mean?"

      "It is impossible for me to answer you. One would have to live one's life over again."

      "I suppose no one will ever know how much depends upon the gift we bring into the world with us, and how much upon circumstances," and Owen compared the gift to the father's seed and circumstances to the mother's womb.

      "So you are quite determined?" And they philosophised as they went, on life and its meaning, on death and love, admiring the temples which an eighteenth-century generation had built on the hillsides. "Here are eight pillars on either side and four at either end, serving no purpose whatever, not even shelter from the rain. Never again in this world will people build things for mere beauty," Owen said, and they passed into the depths of the wood, discovering another temple, and in it a lad and lass.

      "You see these temples do serve for something. Why are we not lovers?" And they passed on again, Owen's heart filled with his sorrow and Evelyn's with her determination.

      She was leaving by the one train, and when they got back to the house the carriage was waiting for her.

      "Good-bye, Owen."

      "Am I not to see you again?"

      "Yes, you will see me one of these days."

      "And that was all the promise she could make me," he said, rushing into Lady Ascott's boudoir, disturbing her in the midst of her letters. "So ends a liaison which has lasted for more than ten years. Good God, had I known that she would have spoken to me like this when I saw her in Dulwich!"

      Even so he felt he would have acted just as he had acted, and he went to his room thinking that the rest of his life would be recollection. "She is still in the train, going away from me, intent on her project, absorbed in her desire of a new life … this haunting which has come upon her."

III

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      And so it was. Evelyn lay back in the corner of the railway carriage thinking about the poor people, and about the nuns, about herself, about the new life which she was entering upon, and which was dearer to her than anything else. She grew a little frightened at the hardness of her heart. "It certainly does harden one's heart," she said; "my heart is as hard as a diamond. But is my heart as hard as a diamond?" The thought awoke a little alarm, and she sat looking into the receding landscape. "Even so I cannot help it." And she wondered how it was that only one thing in the world seemed to matter—to extricate the nuns from their difficulties, that was all. Her poor people, of course she liked them; her voice, she liked it too, without, however, being able to feel certain that it interested her as much as it used to, or that she was not prepared to sacrifice СКАЧАТЬ