A Princess of Thule

The other could not speak, but he went into the house, and Ingram, shutting the door and following him, found that the man’s face was deadly pale.

“Sheila – ” he said, and stopped.

“Well, what about her?” said Ingram, keeping quite calm, but with wild fancies about some terrible accident almost stopping the pulsations of his heart.

“Sheila has gone away.”

Ingram did not seem to understand.

“Sheila has gone away, Ingram,” said Lavender, in an excited way. “You don’t know anything about it? You don’t know where she has gone? What am I to do, Ingram? How am I to find her? Good God! don’t you understand what I tell you? And now it is past midnight, and my poor girl may be wandering about the streets!”

He was walking up and down the room, paying almost no attention, in his excitement, to the small, sallow-faced man who stood quite quiet, a trifle afraid, perhaps, but with his heart full of a blaze of anger.

“She has gone away from your house?” he said, slowly. “What made her do that?”

“I did,” said Lavender, in a hurried way. “I have acted like a brute to her – that is true enough. You needn’t say anything to me, Ingram; I feel myself far more guilty than anything you could say. You may heap reproaches on me afterward, but tell me, Ingram, what am I to do? You know what a proud spirit she has; who can tell what she might do? She wouldn’t go home – she would be too proud. She may have gone and drowned herself.”

“If you don’t control yourself and tell me what has happened, how am I to help you?” said Ingram, stiffly, and yet disposed somehow – perhaps for the sake of Sheila, perhaps because he saw that the young man’s self-embarrassment and distress were genuine enough not to be too rough with him.

“Well, you know, Mairi – ” said Lavender, still walking up and down the room in an excited way. “Sheila had got the girl up here without telling me; some friends of mine were coming home to luncheon; we had some disagreement about Mairi being present, and then Sheila said something about not remaining in the house if Mairi did not; something of that sort. I don’t know what it was, but I know it was all my fault, and if she has been driven from the house I did it; that is true enough. And where do you think she has gone, Ingram? If I could only see her for three minutes I would explain everything; I would tell her how sorry I am for everything that has happened, and she would see, when she went back, how everything would be right again. I had no idea that she would go away. It was mere peevishness that made me object to Mairi meeting those people; and I had no idea that Sheila would take it so much to heart. Now tell me what you think should be done, Ingram. All I want is to see her just for three minutes to tell her it was all a mistake and that she will never have to fear anything like that again.”

Ingram heard him out, and said with some precision, “Do you mean to say that you fancy all this trouble is to be got over that way? Do you know so little of Sheila, after the time you have been married to her, as to imagine that she has taken this step out of some momentary caprice, and that a few words of apology and promise will cause her to rescind it? You must be crazed, Lavender, or else you are actually as ignorant of the nature of that girl as you were up in the Highlands.”

The young man seemed to calm down his excitement and impatience, but it was because of a new fear that had struck him, and that was visible in his face.

“Do you think she will never come back, Ingram?” he said, looking aghast.

“I don’t know; she may not. At all events, you may be quite sure that, once having resolved to leave your house, she is not to be pacified and cajoled by a few phrases and a promise of repentance on your part. That is quite sure. And what is quite as sure, is this, that if you knew just now where she was, the most foolish thing you could do would be to go and see her.”

“But I must go and see her – I must find her out, Ingram,” he said, passionately. “I don’t care what becomes of me. If she won’t go back home, so much the worse for me; but I must find her out, and know that she is safe. Think of it, Ingram! Perhaps she is walking about the streets somewhere at this moment; and you know her proud spirit. If she were to go near the river – ”

“She won’t go near the river,” said Ingram, quietly, “and she won’t be walking about the streets. She is either in the Scotch mail-train, going up to Glasgow, or else she has got some lodgings somewhere, along with Mairi. Has she any money?”

“No,” said Lavender. And then he thought for a minute. “There was some money her father gave her in case she might want it at a pinch; she may have that – I hope she has that. I was to have given her money to-morrow morning. But hadn’t I better go to the police-stations, and see, just by way of precaution, that she has not been heard of? I may as well do that as nothing. I could not go home to that empty house – I could not sleep.”

“Sheila is a sensible girl: she is safe enough,” said Ingram. “And if you don’t care about going home, you may as well remain here. I can give you a room up-stairs when you want it. In the meantime, if you will pull a chair to the table and calm yourself, and take it for granted that you will soon be assured of Sheila’s safety, I will tell you what I think you should do. Here is a cigar to keep you occupied; there are whiskey and cold water back there if you like. You will do no good by punishing yourself in small matters, for your trouble is likely to be serious enough, I can tell you, before you get Sheila back, if ever you get her back. Take the chair with the cushion.”

It was so like the old days when these two used to be companions! Many and many a time had the younger man come down to these lodgings, with all his troubles and wild impulses and pangs of contrition ready to be revealed. And then Ingram, concealing the liking he had for the lad’s generous waywardness, his brilliant and facile cleverness and his dashes of honest self depreciation, would gravely lecture him and put him right and send him off comforted. Frank Lavender had changed much since then. The handsome boy had grown into a man of the world: there was less self-revelations in his manner, and he was less sensitive to the opinions and criticisms of his old friend; but Ingram, who was not prone to idealism of any sort, had never ceased to believe that this change was but superficial, and that, in different circumstances and with different aims, Lavender might still fulfill the best promise of his youth.

“You have been a good friend to me, Ingram,” he said, with a hot blush, “and I have treated you as badly as I have treated – by Jove! what a chance I had at one time!”

He was looking back on all the fair pictures his imagination had drawn while yet Sheila and he were wandering about that island in the Northern seas.

“You had,” said Ingram, decisively. “At one time I thought you the most fortunate man in the world. There was nothing left for you to desire, so far as I could see. You were young and strong, with plenty of good spirits and sufficient ability to earn yourself an honorable living, and you had won the love of the most beautiful and best-hearted woman I have known. You never seemed to me to know what that meant. Men marry women – there is no difficulty about that – and you can generally get an amiable sort of person to become your wife and have a sort of affection for you, and so on. But how many have bestowed on them the pure and exalted passion of a young and innocent girl, who is ready to worship with all the fervor of a warmly imaginative and emotional nature the man she has chosen to love? And suppose he is young, too, and capable of understanding all the tender sentiments of a high-spirited, sensitive and loyal woman, and suppose that he fancies himself as much in love with her as she with him? These conditions are not often fulfilled, I can tell you. It is a happy fluke when they are. Many a day ago I told you that you should consider yourself more fortunate than if you had been made an emperor; and indeed it seemed to me that you had everything in the shape of worldly happiness easily within your reach. How you came to kick away the ball from your feet – well, God only knows. The thing is inconceivable to me. You are sitting here as you used to sit two or three years ago, and in the interval you have had every chance in life; and now, if you are not the most wretched man in London, you ought at least to be the most ashamed and repentant.”

Lavender’s head was buried in his hands: he did not speak.

“And it is not only your own happiness you have destroyed. When you saw that girl first she was as light-hearted and contented with her lot as any human being could be. From one week’s end to the other not the slightest care disturbed her mind. And then, when she intrusted her whole life to you – when she staked her faith in human nature on you, and gave you all the treasures of hope and reverence and love that lay in her pure and innocent soul – my God! what have you done with these? It is not that you have shamed and insulted her as a wife, and driven her out of her home – there are other homes than yours where she would be welcome a thousand times over – but you have destroyed her belief in everything she had taught herself to trust, you have outraged the tenderest sentiments of her heart, you have killed her faith as well as ruined her life. I talk plainly; I cannot do otherwise. If I help you now, don’t imagine I condone what you have done; I would cut my right hand off first. For Sheila’s sake I will try to help you.”

He stopped just then, however, and checked the indignation that had got the better of his ordinarily restrained manner and curt speech. The man before him was crying bitterly, his face hidden in his hands.

“Look here, Lavender,” he said presently, “I don’t want to be hard on you. I tell you plainly what I think of your conduct, so that no delusions may exist between us. And I will say this for you, that the only excuse you have – ”

“There is no excuse,” said the other, sadly enough. “I have no excuse, and I know it.”

“The only thing, then, you can say in mitigation of what you have done is that you never seem to have understood the girl whom you married. You started with giving her a fancy character when you first went to the Lewis, and once you had got the bit in your teeth, there was no stopping you. If you seek now to get Sheila back to you, the best thing you can do, I presume, would be to try to see her as she is, to win her regard that way, to abandon that operatic business, and learn to know her as a thoroughly good woman, who has her own ways and notions about things, and who has a very definite character underlying that extreme gentleness which she fancies to be one of her duties. The child did her dead best to accommodate herself to your idea of her, and failed. When she would rather have been living a brisk and active life in the country or by the seaside, running wild about a hillside, or reading strange stories in the evening, or nursing some fisherman’s child that had got ill, you had her dragged into a sort of society with which she had no sympathy whatever. And the odd thing to me is that you yourself seemed to be making an effort that way. You did not always devote yourself to fashionable life. Where are all the old ambitions you used to talk about in the very chair you are now sitting in?”

“Is there any hope of my getting Sheila back?” he said, looking up at last. There was a vague and bewildered look in his eyes. He seemed incapable of thinking of anything but that.

“I don’t know,” said Ingram. “But one thing is certain: you will never get her back to repeat the experiment that has just ended in this desperate way.”

“I should not ask that,” he said, hurriedly; “I should not ask that at all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes.”

“If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises,” said Ingram. “Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then go to her?”

“You mean – ” said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on his face. “You don’t mean that I am to remain away from her a long time – go into banishment, as it were – and then some day come back to Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?”

“I mean something very like that,” said Ingram, with composure. “I don’t know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what Sheila would think of such a project – whether she would think that she could ever live with you again.”

Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possibility of Sheila’s resolving never to see him again, and began to recall what Ingram had many a time said about the strength of purpose she could show when occasion needed.

“If her faith in you is wholly destroyed, your case is hopeless. A woman may cling to her belief in a man through good report and evil report, but if she once loses it, she never recovers it. But there is this hope for you: I know very well that Sheila had a much more accurate notion of you than you ever had of her; and I happen to know, also, that at the very time when you were most deeply distressing her here in London, she held the firm conviction that your conduct toward her – your habits, your very self – would alter if you could only be persuaded to get out of the life you have been leading. That was true, at least up to the time of your leaving Brighton. She believed in you then. She believed that if you were to cut society altogether, and go and live a hardworking life somewhere, you would soon become once more the man she fell in love with up in Lewis. Perhaps she was mistaken: I don’t say anything about it myself.”

The terribly cool way in which Ingram talked – separating, defining, exhibiting, so that he and his companion should get as near as possible to what he believed to be the truth of the situation – was oddly in contrast with the blind and passionate yearning of the other for some glimpse of hope. His whole nature seemed to go out in a cry to Sheila that she would come back and give him a chance of atoning for the past. At length he rose. He looked strangely haggard, and his eyes scarcely seemed to see the things around him. “I must go home,” he said.

Ingram saw that he merely wanted to get outside and walk about in order to find some relief from this anxiety and unrest, and said: “You ought, I think, to stop here and go to bed. But if you would rather go home, I will walk up with you, if you like.”

When the two men went out the night air smelt sweet and moist, for rain had fallen, and the city trees were still dripping with the wet, and rustling in the wind. The weather had changed suddenly, and now, in the deep blue overhead, they knew the clouds were passing swiftly by. Was it the coming light of the morning that seemed to give depth and richness to that dark-blue vault, while the pavements of the streets and the houses grew vaguely distinct and gray? Suddenly, in turning the corner into Piccadilly, they saw the moon appear in a rift of those passing clouds, but it was not the moonlight that shed this pale and wan grayness down the lonely streets. It is just at this moment, when the dawn of the new day begins to tell, that a great city seems at its deadest; and in the profound silence and amid the strange transformations of the cold and growing light a man is thrown in upon himself, and holds communion with himself, as though he and his own thoughts were all that was left in the world. Not a word passed between the two men, and Lavender, keenly sensitive to all such impressions, and now and again shivering slightly, either from cold or nervous excitement, walked blindly along the deserted streets, seeing far other things than the tall houses and the drooping trees and the growing light of the sky.

It seemed to him at this moment that he was looking at Sheila’s funeral. There was a great stillness in that small house at Borvapost. There was a boat – Sheila’s own boat – down at the shore there, and there were two or three figures in black in it. The day was gray and rainy; the sea washed along the melancholy shores; the far hills were hidden in mist. And now he saw some people come out of the house into the rain, and the bronze and bearded men had oars with them, and on the crossed oars there was a coffin placed. They went down the hillside. They put the coffin in the stern of the boat, and in absolute silence, except for the wailing of the women, they pulled away down the dreary Loch Roag till they came to the island where the burial ground is. They carried the coffin up to that small enclosure, with its rank grass growing green and the rain falling on the rude stones and memorials. How often had he leaned on that low stone wall, and read the strange inscriptions in various tongues over the graves of mariners from distant countries who had met with their death on this rocky coast? Had not Sheila herself pointed out to him, with a sad air, how many of these memorials bore the words, “who was drowned;” and that, too, was the burden of the rudely spelt legends beginning “Heir rutt in Gott,” or “Her under hviler stovit,” and sometimes ending with the pathetic “Wunderschen ist unsre Hoffnung.” The fishermen brought the coffin to the newly-made grave, the women standing back a bit, old Scarlett Macdonald stroking Mairi’s hair, and bidding the girl control her frantic grief, though the old woman herself could hardly speak for her tears and lamentations. He could read the words “Sheila Mackenzie” on the small silver plate; she had been taken away from all association with him and his name. And who was this old man with the white hair and the white beard, whose hands were tightly clenched, and his lips firm, and a look as of death in the sunken and wild eyes? Mackenzie was gray a year before —

“Ingram,” he said, suddenly, and his voice startled his companion, “do you think it is possible to make Sheila happy again?”

“How can I tell?” said Ingram.

“You used to know everything she could wish – everything she was thinking about. If you find her out now, will you get to know? Will you see what I can do – not by asking her to come back, not by trying to get back my own happiness, but anything, it does not matter what it is, I can do for her? If she would rather not see me again, I will stay away. Will you ask her, Ingram?”

“We have got to find her first,” said his companion.

“A young girl like that,” said Lavender, taking no heed of the objection, “surely she cannot always be unhappy. She is so young and beautiful, and takes so much interest in many things; surely she may have a happy life.”

“She might have had.”

“I don’t mean with me,” said Lavender, with his haggard face looking still more haggard in the increasing light. “I mean anything that can be done – any way of life that will make her comfortable and contented again – anything that I can do for that. Will you try to find it out, Ingram?”

“Oh, yes, I will,” said the other, who had been thinking with much foreboding of all those possibilities ever since they left Sloane Street, his only gleam of hope being a consciousness that this time at least there could be no doubt of Frank Lavender’s absolute sincerity, of his remorse, and his almost morbid craving to make reparation if that were still possible.

They reached the house at last. There was a dim orange-colored light shining in the passage. Lavender went on and threw open the door of the small room which Sheila had adorned, asking Ingram to follow him. How wild and strange this chamber looked, with the wan glare of the dawn shining on its barbaric decorations from the sea-coast – on the shells and skins and feathers that Sheila had placed around! That white light of the morning was now shining everywhere into the silent and desolate house. Lavender found Ingram a bedroom, and then he turned away, not knowing what to do. He looked into Sheila’s room; there were dresses, bits of finery, and what not, that he knew so well, but there was no light breathing audible in the silent and empty chamber. He shut the door as reverently as though he were shutting it on the dead, and went down stairs and threw himself, almost fainting with despair and fatigue on the sofa, while the world outside awoke to a new day with all its countless and joyous activities and duties.