Evelyn Innes. George Moore

She flung her arms about him, and then recoiled from him in a sudden revulsion of feeling.

      "When you go away I shall be miserable; I shall repent of all this … I'm horrid." She covered her face in her hands. "I didn't know I was like this."

      A moment after she reached out her hand to him saying—

      "You're not angry with me? I can't help it if I'm like this. I should like to go and see you; it would be so much to me. But I must not. But why mustn't I?"

      "I know no reason, except that you don't care for me."

      "But you know that isn't so."

      "Come, dearest, be reasonable. You're not going to stop here all your life playing the viola da gamba. The hour of departure has come," he said, perceiving her very thought; "be reasonable, come and see me to-morrow. Come to lunch, and I'll arrange. You know that you—"

      "Yes, I believe that," she said, in response to a change which had come into her appreciation. "But can I trust myself? Suppose I did go away, and repented and left you. Where should I go? I could not come back here. Father would forgive me, I daresay, but I could not come back here."

      "'Repented,' Those are fairy tales," he said lifting her gold hair from her ear and kissing it. "A woman does not leave the man who adores her."

      "You told me they often did."

      "How funny you are. … They do sometimes, but not because they repent."

      Her head was on his shoulder, and she stood looking at him a long while without speaking.

      "Then you do love me, dearest? Tell me so again."

      Kissing her gently on the mouth and eyes, he answered—

      "You know very well that I do. Come and see me to-morrow. Say you will, for I must go now."

      "Go now!"

      "Do you know what time it is? It is past seven."

      She followed him to the gate of the little garden. The lamps were lighted far away in the suburbs. Again he asked her to come and see him.

      "I cannot to-morrow; to-morrow will be Sunday."

      His footsteps echoed through the chill twilight, and seeing a thin moon afloat like a feather in the sky, she thought of Omar's moon, that used to seek the lovers in their garden, and that one evening sought one of them in vain.

CHAPTER EIGHT

       Table of Contents

      There was no other place except the picture gallery where they could see each other alone. But the dignity of Velasquez and the opulence of Rubens distracted their thoughts, and they were ill at ease on a backless seat in front of a masterpiece. Owen regretted the Hobbema; it was less aggressive than the colonnade. A sun-lit clearing in a wood and a water mill raised no moral question. He turned his eyes from the dancers, but however he resisted them, their frivolous life found its way into the conversation. They were the wise ones, he said. They lived for art and love, and what else was there in life? A few sonatas, a few operas, a few pictures, a few books, and a love story; we had always to come back to that in the end. He spoke with conviction, his only insincerity being the alteration of a plural into a singular. But no, he did not think he had lied; he had spoken what seemed to him the truth at the present moment. Had he used the singular instead of the plural a fortnight ago, he would have lied, but within the last week his feelings for Evelyn had changed. If she had broken with him a week ago, he would have found easy consolation in the list, but now it was not women, but a woman that he desired. A mere sexual curiosity, and the artistic desire to save a beautiful voice from being wasted, had given way to a more personal emotion in which affection was beginning. Looking at him, thinking over what he had just said, unable to stifle the hope that those women in the picture were the wise ones, she heard life calling her. The art call and the love call, subtly interwoven, were modulated now on the violins now on the flutes of an invisible orchestra. At the same moment his immeshed senses, like greedy fish, swam hither and thither, perplexed and terrified, finding no way of escape, and he dreaded lest he had lost his balance and fallen into the net he had cast so often. He had begun to see that she was afraid of the sin, and not at all of him. She had never asked him if he would always love her—that she seemed to take for granted—and he had, or fancied he had, begun to feel that he would never cease to love her. He looked into the future far enough to see that it would be she who would tire of him, and that another would appear two or three years hence who would appeal to her sensual imagination just as he did to-day. She would strive to resist it, she would argue with herself, but the enticing illusion would draw her as in a silken net. He was now engaged in the destruction of her moral scruples—in other words, making the way easy for his successor.

      They were in the gallery alone, and, taking her hand, he considered in detail the trouble this liaison would bring in its train. He no longer doubted that she would go abroad with him sooner or later. He hoped it would be sooner, for he had begun to perceive the absurdity of his visits to Dulwich. The question was whether she was worth an exile in a foreign country. He would have to devote himself to her and to her interests. She would have a chaperon. There would be no use in their openly living together—that he could not stand. But at that moment the exquisite happiness of seeing her every day, coming into the room where she was reading or singing, and kissing her as he leaned over her chair affectionately, as a matter of course, deriving his enjoyment from the prescriptive right to do so, and then talking to her about ordinary affairs of life, came upon him suddenly like a vision; and this imagined life was so intense that for one moment it was equivalent to the reality. He saw himself taking her home from the theatre at night in the brougham. In the next instant they were in the train going to Bayreuth. In the next he saw her as Kundry rush on to the stage. He felt that, whatever it cost him, that was the life he must obtain. He felt that he could not live if he did not acquire it, and so intense was the vision that, unable to endure its torment, he got up and proposed they should go into the garden and sit under the cedar.

      They were alone in the garden as they were in the gallery, but lovers are averse to open spaces, and Owen felt that their appearance coincided too closely with that of lovers in many popular engravings. He hoped he was not observed, and regretted he had often spoken of the picture gallery to his friends. An unlucky chance might bring one of them down.

      It was in this garden, amid the scent and colour of May, that the most beautiful part of their love story was woven. It was in this garden that they talked about love and happiness, and the mystery of the attraction of one person to another, and whilst listening to him, a poignant memory of the afternoon when he had first kissed her often crossed her mind. Little faintnesses took her in the eyes and heart. Their voices broke, and it seemed that they could not continue to talk any longer of life and art. It was in this garden that they forgot each other. Their thoughts wandered far away, and then, when one called the other's attention, he or she relinquished scenes and sensations and came back appearing suddenly like someone out of a mist. Each asked the other what he or she had been dreaming. Once he told her his dream. It was of a villa in the middle of a large garden surrounded by chestnut trees and planted with rhododendrons. In this villa there dwelt a great singer whose name was a glory in the world, and to this villa there came very often a tall, thin, ugly man, and, seeing the beautiful singer walking with him, the folk wondered how she could love him.

      It was a sort of delicious death, a swooning ecstasy, an absorption of her individuality in his. Just as the spring gradually displaced the winter by a new branch of blossom, and in that corner of the garden by the winsome mauve of a lilac bush, without her knowing it his ideas caught root in her. New thoughts and perceptions were in growth within her, and every day she discovered the new where she had been accustomed to meet the familiar idea. She seemed to be slipping out of herself as out of a soft, white garment, unconsciously, without any effort on her part.

      Very often they discussed whether sacrifice of self is not the first of the sins against life. "That is the sin," he said, "that cries loudest to Nature for