A Princess of Thule

“Any of those little sailing boats; it is very good they are, as far as I can see.”

“No, thank you,” said the elder lady, with a smile, “I am not fond of small boats, and the company of the men who go with you might be a little objectionable, I should fancy.”

“But you need not take any men,” said Sheila; “the sailing of one of those little boats, it is very simple.”

“Do you mean to say you could manage the boat by yourself?”

“Oh yes! It is very simple. And my husband he will help me.”

“And what would you do if you went out?”

“We might try the fishing. I do not see where the rocks are, but we would go off to the rocks and put down the anchor and try the lines. You would have some ferry good fish for breakfast in the morning.”

“My dear child,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, “you don’t know what you propose to us. To go and roll about in an open boat in these waves – we should be ill in five minutes. But I suppose you don’t know what seasickness is?”

“No,” said Sheila, “but I will hear my husband speak of it often. And it is only in crossing the Channel that people will get sick.”

“Why, this is the Channel.”

Sheila stared. Then she endeavored to recall her geography. Of course, this must be a part of the Channel, but if the people in the South became ill in this weather, they must be feeble creatures. Her speculations on this point were cut short by the entrance of her husband, who came to announce that he had not only secured a carriage for a month, but that it would be around at the hotel door in half an hour; whereupon the two American ladies said they would be ready, and left the room.

“Now go off and get dressed, Sheila,” said Lavender.

She stood for a moment irresolute.

“If you wouldn’t mind,” she said, after a moment’s hesitation – “if you would allow me to go by myself – if you would go to the driving, and let me go down to the shore!”

“Oh, nonsense!” he said. “You will have people fancying you are only a school-girl. How can you go down to the beach by yourself among all those loafing vagabonds, who would pick your pockets or throw stones at you? You must behave like an ordinary Christian. Now do, like a good girl, get dressed and submit to the restraints of civilized life. It won’t hurt you much.”

So she left, to lay aside, with some regret, her rough blue dress, and he went down-stairs to see about ordering dinner.

Had she come down to the sea, then, only to live the life that had nearly broken her heart in London? It seemed so. They drove up and down the Parade for about an hour and a half, and the roar of the carriages drowned the rush of the waves. Then they dined in the quiet of this still Summer evening, and she could only see the sea as a distant and silent picture through the windows, while the talk of her companions was either about the people whom they had seen while driving, or about matters of which she knew nothing. Then the blinds were drawn and the candles lit, and still their conversation murmured around her unheeding ears. After dinner, her husband went down to the smoking-room of the hotel to have a cigar, and she was left with Mrs. Kavanagh and her daughter. She went to the window, and looked through a chink in the Venetian blinds. There was a beautiful clear twilight abroad, the darkness still of a soft gray, and up in the pale yellow-green of the sky a large planet burned and throbbed. Soon the sea and the sky would darken, the stars would come forth in thousands and tens of thousands, and the moving water would be struck with a million trembling spots of silver as the waves came onward to the beach.

“Mayn’t we go out for a walk till Frank has finished his cigar?” said Sheila.

“You couldn’t go out walking at this time of night,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, in a kindly way, “you would meet the most unpleasant persons. Besides going out into the night air would be most dangerous.”

“It is a beautiful night,” said Sheila, with a sigh. She was still standing at the window.

“Come,” said Mrs. Kavanagh, going over to her, and putting her hand in her arm, “we cannot have any moping, you know. You must be content to be dull with us for one night; and after to-night we shall see what we can do to amuse you.”

“Oh, but I don’t want to be amused!” cried Sheila, almost in terror, for some vision flashed on her mind of a series of parties. “I would much rather be left alone and allowed to go about by myself. But it is very kind of you,” she hastily added, fancying that her speech had been somewhat ungracious – “it is very kind of you, indeed.”

“Come, I promised to teach you cribbage, didn’t I?”

“Yes,” said Sheila, with much resignation, and she walked to the table, and sat down.

Perhaps, after all, she could have spent the rest of the evening with some little equanimity in patiently trying to learn this game, in which she had no interest whatever, but her thoughts and fancies were soon drawn away from cribbage. Her husband returned. Mrs. Lorraine had been for some little time at the big piano at the other side of the room, amusing herself by playing snatches of anything she happened to remember, but when Mr. Lavender returned she seemed to wake up. He went over to her, and sat down by the piano.

“Here,” she said, “I have all the duets and songs you spoke of, and I am quite delighted with those I have tried. I wish mamma would sing a second to me; how can one learn without practising? And there are some of those duets I really should like to learn after what you have said of them.”

“Shall I become a substitute for your mamma?” he said.

“And sing the second, so that I may practise? Your cigar must have left you in a very amiable mood.”

“Well, suppose we try,” he said; and he proceeded to open out the roll of music which she had brought down.

“Which shall we take first?” he asked.

“It does not much matter,” she answered, indifferently, and indeed she took up one of the duets at haphazard.

What was it made Mrs. Kavanagh’s companion suddenly lift her eyes from the cribbage-board and look with surprise to the other end of the room? She had recognized the little prelude to one of her own duets, and it was being played by Mrs. Lorraine. And it was Mrs. Lorraine who began to sing in a sweet, expressive and well-trained voice of no great power —

Love in thine eyes forever plays;

and it was she to whom the answer was given —

He in thy snowy bosom strays;

and then Sheila, sitting stupefied and pained and confused, heard them sing together —

He makes thy rosy lips his care,And walks the mazes of thy hair.

She had not heard the short conversation which had introduced this music; and she could not tell but that her husband had been practising these duets – her duets – with some one else. For presently they sang “When the rosy morn appearing,” and “I would that my love could silently,” and others, all of them, in Sheila’s eyes, sacred to the time when she and Lavender used to sit in the little room in Borva. It was no consolation to her that Mrs. Lorraine had but an imperfect acquaintance with them; that oftentimes she stumbled and went back over a bit of the accompaniment; that her voice was far from being striking. Lavender, at all events, seemed to heed none of these things. It was not as a music master that he sang with her. He put as much expression of love into his voice as ever he had done in the old days when he sang with his future bride. And it seemed so cruel that this woman should have taken Sheila’s own duets from her to sing before her with her own husband.

Sheila learnt little more cribbage that evening. Mrs. Kavanagh could not understand how her pupil had become embarrassed, inattentive, and even sad, and asked her if she was tired. Sheila said she was very tired and would go. And when she got her candle, Mrs. Lorraine and Lavender had just discovered another duet, which they felt bound to try together as the last.

This was not the first time she had been more or less vaguely pained by her husband’s attentions to this young American lady; and yet she would not admit to herself that he was any in the wrong. She would entertain no suspicion of him. She would have no jealousy in her heart, for how could jealousy exist with a perfect faith? And so she had repeatedly reasoned herself out of these tentative feelings, and resolved that she would do neither her husband nor Mrs. Lorraine the injustice of being vexed with them. So it was now. What more natural than that Frank should recommend to any one the duets of which he was particularly fond? What more natural than that this young lady should wish to show her appreciation of those songs by singing them? and who was to sing with her but he? Sheila would have no suspicion of either; and so she came down next morning determined to be very friendly with Mrs. Lorraine.

But that forenoon another thing occurred which nearly broke down all her resolves.

“Sheila,” said her husband, “I don’t think I ever asked you whether you rode?”

“I used to ride many times at home,” she said.

“But I suppose you’d rather not ride here,” he said. “Mrs. Lorraine and I propose to go out presently; you’ll be able to amuse yourself somehow till we come back.”

Mrs. Lorraine had indeed gone to put on her habit, and her mother was with her.

“I suppose I may go out,” said Sheila. “It is so very dull indoors, and Mrs. Kavanagh is afraid of the East wind, and she is not going out.”

“Well, there’s no harm about your going out,” answered Lavender, “but I should have thought you’d have liked the comfort of watching the people pass, from the window.”

She said nothing, but went off to her own room and dressed to go out. Why, she knew not, but she felt that she would rather not see her husband and Mrs. Lorraine start from the hotel-door. She stole down-stairs without going into the sitting-room, and then, going through the great hall and down the steps, found herself free and alone in Brighton.

It was a beautiful, bright, clear day, though the wind was a trifle chilly, and all around her there was a sense of space and light and motion in the shining skies, the far clouds and the heaving and noisy sea. Yet she had none of the gladness of heart with which she used to rush out of the house at Borva to drink in the fresh, salt air, and feel the sunlight on her cheeks. She walked away, with her face wistful and pensive, along the King’s road, scarcely seeing any of the people who passed her; and the noise of the crowd and of the waves hummed in her ears in a distant fashion, even as she walked along the wooden railing over the beach. She stopped and watched some men putting off a heavy fishing-boat, and she still stood and looked long after the boat was launched. She would not confess to herself that she felt lonely and miserable; it was the sight of the sea that was melancholy. It seemed so different from the sea off Borva, that had always to her a familiar and friendly look, even when it was raging and rushing before a Southwest wind. Here this sea looked vast and calm and sad, and the sound of it was not pleasant to her ears, as was the sound of the waves on the rocks at Borva. She walked on, in a blind and unthinking fashion, until she had got far up the Parade, and could see the long line of monotonous white cliff meeting the dull blue plain of the waves until both disappeared in the horizon.

She returned to the King’s road a trifle tired, and sat down on one of the benches there. The passing of the people would amuse her; and now the pavement was thronged with a crowd of gayly-dressed folks, and the centre of the thoroughfare brisk with the constant going and coming of riders. She saw strange old women painted, powdered and bewigged in hideous imitation of youth, pounding up and down the level street, and she wondered what wild hallucinations possessed the brains of these poor creatures. She saw troops of beautiful young girls, with flowing hair, clear eyes and bright complexions, riding by, a goodly company, under charge of a riding-mistress, and the world seemed to grow sweeter when they came into view. But while she was vaguely gazing and wondering and speculating, her eyes were suddenly caught by two riders whose appearance sent a throb to her heart. Frank Lavender rode well, so did Mrs. Lorraine; and, though they were paying no particular attention to the crowd of passers-by, they doubtless knew that they could challenge criticism with an easy confidence. They were laughing and talking to each other as they went rapidly by; neither of them saw Sheila. The girl did not look after them. She rose and walked in the other direction, with a greater pain at her heart than had been there for many a day.

What was this crowd? Some dozen or so of people were standing around a small girl, who, accompanied by a man, was playing a violin, and playing it very well, too. But it was not the music that attracted Sheila to the child, but partly that there was a look about the timid, pretty face and modest and honest eyes that reminded her of little Ailasa, and partly because, just at this moment, her heart seemed to be strangely sensitive and sympathetic. She took no thought of the people looking on. She went forward to the edge of the pavement, and found that the small girl and her companion were about to go away. Sheila stopped the man.

“Will you let your little girl come with me into this shop?”

It was a confectioner’s shop.

“We were going home to dinner,” said the man, while the small girl looked up with wondering eyes.

“Will you let her have dinner with me, and you will come back in a half an hour?”

The man looked at the little girl; he seemed to be really fond of her, and saw that she was very willing to go. Sheila took her hand and led her into the confectioner’s shop, putting her violin on one of the small marble tables while they sat down at another. She was probably not aware that two or three idlers had followed them, and were staring with might and main in at the door of the shop.

What could this child have thought of the beautiful and yet sad-eyed lady who was so kind to her, who got her all sorts of things with her own hands and asked her all manner of questions in a low, gentle and sweet voice? There was not much in Sheila’s appearance to provoke fear or awe. The little girl, shy at first, got to be a little more frank, and told her hostess when she rose in the morning, how she practised, the number of hours they were out during the day, and many of the small incidents of her daily life. She had been photographed, too, and her photograph was sold in one of the shops. She was very well content; she liked playing, the people were kind to her, and she did not often get tired.

“Then I shall see you often if I stay in Brighton?” said Sheila.

“We go out every day when it does not rain very hard.”

“Perhaps some wet day you will come and see me, and you will have some tea with me; would you like that?”

“Yes, very much,” said the small musician, looking up frankly.

Just at this moment, the half hour having fully expired, the man appeared at the door.

“Don’t hurry,” said Sheila to the little girl; “sit still and drink out the lemonade, then I will give you some little parcels which you must put in your pocket.”

She was about to rise to go to the counter when she suddenly met the eyes of her husband, who was calmly staring at her. He had come out, after their ride, with Mrs. Lorraine to have a stroll up and down the pavements, and had, in looking in at the various shops, caught sight of Sheila quietly having luncheon with this girl whom she had picked up in the streets.

“Did you ever see the like of that?” he said to Mrs. Lorraine. “In open day, with people staring in, and she has not even taken the trouble to put the violin out of sight!”

“The poor child means no harm,” said his companion.

“Well, we must get her out of this somehow,” he said; and so they entered the shop.

Sheila knew she was guilty the moment she met her husband’s look, though she had never dreamed of it before. She had, indeed, acted quite thoughtlessly – perhaps chiefly moved by a desire to speak to some one and to befriend some one in her own loneliness.

“Hadn’t you better let this little girl go?” said Lavender to Sheila, somewhat coldly, as soon as he had ordered an ice for his companion.

“When she has finished her lemonade she will go,” said Sheila, meekly. “But I have to buy some things for her, first.”

“You have got a whole lot of people around the door,” he said.

“It is very kind of the people to wait for her,” answered Sheila, with the same composure. “We have been here half an hour. I suppose they will like her music very much.”

The little violiniste was now taken to the counter and her pockets stuffed with packages of sugared fruits and other deadly delicacies; then she was permittted to go with half a crown in her hand. Mrs. Lorraine patted her shoulder in passing, and said she was a pretty little thing.

They went home to luncheon. Nothing was said about the incident of the forenoon, except that Lavender complained to Mrs. Kavanagh in a humorous way, that his wife had a most extraordinary fondness for beggars, and that he never went home of an evening without expecting to find her dining with the nearest scavenger and his family. Lavender, indeed, was in an amiable frame of mind at the meal (during the progress of which Sheila sat by the window, of course, for she had already lunched in company with the tiny violiniste), and was bent on making himself as agreeable as possible to his two companions. Their talk had drifted toward the wanderings of the two ladies on the Continent; from that to the Niebelungen frescoes in Munich; from that to the Niebelungen itself, and then by easy transition to the ballads of Uhland and Heine. Lavender was in one of his most impulsive and brilliant moods – gay and jocular, tender and sympathetic by turns, and so obviously sincere in all that his listeners were delighted with his speeches and assertions and stories, and believed them as implicitly as he did himself.

Sheila, sitting at a distance, saw and heard, and could not help recalling many an evening in the far North when Lavender used to fascinate every one around him by the infection of his warm and poetic enthusiasm. How he talked, too – telling the stories of these quaint and pathetic ballads in his own rough and ready translations – while there was no self-consciousness in his face, but a thorough warmth of earnestness; and sometimes, too, she would notice a quiver of the under lip that she knew of old, when some pathetic point or phrase had to be indicated rather than described. He was drawing pictures for them as well as telling stories – of the three students entering the room in which the landlady’s daughter lay dead – of Barbarossa in his cave – of the child who used to look up at Heine as he passed her in the street, awe-stricken by his pale and strange face – of the last of the band of companions who sat in the solitary room in which they had sat, and drank to their memory – of the King of Thule, and the deserter from Strasburg, and a thousand others.

“But is there any of them – is there anything in the world – more pitiable than that pilgrimage to Kevlaar?” he said. “You know it, of course. No? Oh, you must, surely. Don’t you remember the mother who stood by the bedside of her sick son, and asked him whether he would not rise to see the great procession go by the window; and he tells her that he cannot, he is so ill; his heart is breaking for thinking of his dead Gretchen? You know the story, Sheila. The mother begs him to rise and come with her, and they will join the band of pilgrims going to Kevlaar, to be healed there of their wounds by the Mother of God. Then you find them at Kevlaar, and all the maimed and the lame people have come to the shrine; and whichever limb is diseased, they make a waxen image of that and lay it on the altar, and then they are healed. Well, the mother of this poor lad takes wax and forms a heart out of it, and says to her son, ‘Take that to the Mother of God, and she will heal your pain.’ Sighing, he takes the wax heart in his hand, and, sighing, he goes to the shrine; and there, with tears running down his face, he says: ‘O beautiful Queen of Heaven, I am come to tell you my grief. I lived with my mother in Cologne; near us lived Gretchen, who is dead now. Blessed Mary, I bring you this wax heart, heal the wound in my heart.’ And then – and then – ”

Sheila saw his lip tremble. But he frowned and said impatiently: “What a shame it is to destroy such a beautiful story! You can have no idea of it – of its simplicity and tenderness – ”

“But pray let us hear the rest of it,” said Mrs. Lorraine, gently.

“Well, the last scene, you know, is a small chamber, and the mother and her sick son are asleep. The Blessed Mary glides into the chamber and bends over the young man, and puts her hand lightly on his heart. Then she smiles and disappears. The unhappy mother has seen all this in a dream, and now she awakes, for the dogs are barking loudly. The mother goes over to the bed of her son, and he is dead, and the morning light touches his pale face. And then the mother folds her hands, and says – ”

He rose hastily with a gesture of fretfulness, and walked over to the window at which Sheila sat, and looked out. She put her hand up to his; he took it.

“The next time I try to translate Heine,” he said, making it appear that he had broken off through vexation, “something strange will happen.”

“It is a beautiful story,” said Mrs. Lorraine, who had herself been crying a little bit in a covered way, “I wonder I have not seen a translation of it. Come, mamma, Lady Leveret said we were not to be after four.”

So they rose and left, and Sheila was alone with her husband, and still holding his hand. She looked up at him timidly, wondering, perhaps, in her simple way, as to whether she should not now pour out her heart to him and tell him all her griefs and fears and yearnings. He had obviously been deeply moved by the story he had told so roughly; surely now was a good opportunity of appealing to him, and begging for sympathy and compassion.

“Frank,” she said, and she rose and came close, and bent down her head to hide the color in her face.

“Well?” he answered, a trifle coldly.

“You won’t be vexed with me,” she said, in a low voice, and with her heart beginning to beat rapidly.

“Vexed with you; about what?” he said, abruptly.

Alas! all her hopes had fled. She shrank from the cold stare with which she knew he was regarding her. She felt it to be impossible that she should place before him those confidences with which she had approached him; and so, with a great effort, she merely said: “Are we to go to Lady Leveret’s?”

“Of course we are,” he said, “unless you would rather go to see some blind fiddler or beggar. It is really too bad of you, Sheila, to be so forgetful; what if Lady Leveret, for example, had come into that shop? It seems to me you are never satisfied with meeting the people you ought to meet, but that you must go and associate with all the wretched cripples and beggars you can find. You should remember you are a woman, and not a child – that people will talk about what you do if you go on in this mad way. Do you ever see Mrs. Kavanagh or her daughter do any of these things?”

Sheila had let go his hand; her eyes were still turned toward the ground. She had fancied that a little of that emotion that had been awakened in him by the story of the German mother and her son might warm his heart toward herself, and render it possible for her to talk to him frankly about all that she had been dimly thinking, and more definitely suffering. She was mistaken, that was all.

“I will try to do better, and please you,” she said; and then she went away.

CHAPTER XV.

A FRIEND IN NEED

WAS it a delusion that had grown up in the girl’s mind, and held full possession of it – that she was in a world with which she had no sympathy, that she should never be able to find a home there, that the influences of it were gradually and surely stealing from her her husband’s love and confidence? Or was this longing to get away from the people and the circumstances that surrounded her but the unconscious promptings of an incipient jealousy? She did not question her own mind closely on these points. She only vaguely knew that she was miserable, and that she could not tell her husband of the weight that pressed on her heart.