A Spirit in Prison. Robert Hichens

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “I have believed so.”

      She was silent. Then she added, quietly, “I do believe so.”

      He did not speak, but sat looking down at the sea, which was full of dim color in the cave.

      “I think you are doubting that it would have been so?” she said, at last.

      “Yes, that is true. I am doubting.”

      “I wonder why?”

      “I cannot help feeling that there is passion in you, such passion as could not be satisfied in any strict, maternal relationship.”

      “But I am old, dear Emile,” she said, very simply.

      “When I was standing by that window, looking at the mountains of Ischia, I was saying to myself, ‘This is an old, tired world, suitable for me—and for you. We are in our right environment to-day.’ I was saying that, Hermione, but was I believing it, really? I don’t think I was. And I am ten years older than you, and I have been given a nature that was, I think, always older than yours could ever be.”

      “I wonder if that is so.”

      She looked at him very directly, even searchingly, not with eager curiosity, but with deep inquiry.

      “You know, Emile,” she added, “I tell you very much, but you tell me very little. Not that I wish to ask anything—no. I respect all your reserve. And about your work: you tell me all that. It is a great thing in my life, your work. Perhaps you don’t realize how sometimes I live in the book that you are doing, almost as if I were writing it myself. But your inner life—”

      “But I have been frankness itself with you,” said Artois. “To no one have I ever said so much as to you.”

      “Yes, I know, about many things. But about emotion, love—not friendship, the other love—do you get on without that? When you say your nature has always been older than mine, do you mean that it has always been harder to move by love, that it has had less need of love?”

      “I think so. For many years in my life I think that work has filled the place love occupies in many, perhaps in most men’s lives. Everything comes second to work. I know that, because if any one attempts to interfere with my work, or to usurp any of the time that should be given to it, any regard I may have for that person turns at once to irritation, almost to hatred.”

      “I have never done that?”

      “You—no. Of course, I have been like other men. When I was young—well, Hermione, after all I am a Frenchman, and though I am of Normandy, still I passed many years in Paris, as you know.”

      “All that I understand. But the real thing? Such as I have known?”

      “I have never broken my heart for any one, though I have known agitations. But even those were long ago. And since I was thirty-five I have never felt really dominated by any one. Before that time I occasionally passed under the yoke, I believe, like other men. Why do you fix your eyes on me like that?”

      “I was wondering if you could ever pass under the yoke again.”

      “Honestly, I do not think so. I am not sure. When can one be certain that one will never be, or do, this or that? Surely,”—he smiled—“you are not afraid for me?”

      “I do not say that. But I think you have forces in you not fully exercised even by your work.”

      “Possibly. But there the years do really step in and count for something, even for much. There is no doubt that as the years increase, the man who cares at all for intellectual pleasures is able to care for them more, is able to substitute them, without keen regret, without wailing and gnashing of teeth, for certain other pleasures, to which, perhaps, formerly he clung. That is why the man who is mentally and bodily—you know what I mean?”

      “Yes.”

      “Has such an immense advantage in years of decline over the man who is merely a bodily man.”

      “I am sure that is true. But—”

      “What is it?”

      “The heart? What about that?”

      “Perhaps there are some hearts that can fulfil themselves sufficiently in friendship.”

      As Artois said this his eyes rested upon Hermione with an expression in them that revealed much that he never spoke in words. She put out her hand, and took his, and pressed it, holding hers over it upon the oar.

      “Emile,” she said, “sometimes you make me feel unworthy and ungrateful because—because I still need, I dare to need more than I have been given. Without you I don’t know how I should have faced it.”

      “Without me you would never have had to face it.”

      That was the cry that rose up perpetually in the heart of Artois, the cry that Hermione must never hear. He said to her now:

      “Without you, Hermione, I should be dust in the dust of Africa!”

      “Perhaps we each owe something to the other,” she said. “It is blessed to have a debt to a friend.”

      “Would to God that I could pay all my debt to you!” Artois exclaimed.

      Again the cavern took up his voice and threw it back to the sea in confused and hollow mutterings. They both looked up, as if some one were above them, warning them or rebuking them. At that instant they had the feeling that they were being watched. But there was only the empty gray sea about them, and over their heads the rugged, weary rock that had leaned over the sea for countless years.

      “Hark!” said Artois, “it is telling me that my debt to you can never be paid: only in one way could it be partially discharged. If I could show you a path to happiness, the happiness you long for, and need, the passionate happiness of the heart that is giving where it rejoices to give—for your happiness must always be in generosity—I should have partially paid my debt to you. But that is impossible.”

      “I’ve made you sad to-day by my complaining,” she said, with self-rebuke; “I’m sorry. You didn’t realize?”

      “How it was with you? No, not quite—I thought you were more at peace than you are.”

      “Till to-day I believe I was half deceived too.”

      “That singing boy, that—what is his name?”

      “Ruffo.”

      “That Ruffo, I should like to run a knife into him under the left shoulder-blade. How dare he, a ragamuffin from some hovel of Naples, make you know that you are unhappy?”

      “How strange it is what outside things, or people who have no connection with us or with our lives, can do to us unconsciously!” she said. “I have heard a hundred boys sing on the Bay, seen a hundred rowing their boats into the Pool—and just this one touches some chord, and all the strings of my soul quiver.”

      “Some people act upon СКАЧАТЬ