The Flight of the Shadow

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"Just because it was such a night, uncle, and you were out in it," I
answered. "Ain't I your own little girl? I hope you ain't sorry I came,
uncle! I am glad; and I shouldn't like ever to be glad at what made you
sorry."

"What are you glad of?"

"That I came--because I've found you. I came to look for you."

"Why did you come to-night more than any other night?"

"Because I wanted so much to see you. I thought I might be of use to
you."

"You are always of use to me; but why did you think of it just to-night?"

"I don't know.--I am older than I was last night," I replied.

He seemed to understand me, and asked me no more questions.

All the time, we had been standing still in the storm. He took Zoe's head
and turned it toward home. The dear creature set out with slow leisurely
step, heedless apparently of storm and stable. She knew who was by her
side, and he must set the pace!

As we went my uncle seemed lost in thought--and no wonder! for how could
the sight we had seen be accounted for! Or what might it indicate?

Many were the strange tales I had read, and my conviction was that the
vision belonged to the inexplicable. It grew upon me that I had seen my
uncle's double. That he should see his own double would not in itself
have much surprised me--or, indeed, that I should see it; but I had never
read of another person seeing a double at the same time with the person
doubled. During the next few days I sought hard for some possible
explanation of what had occurred, but could find nothing parallel to it
within the scope of my knowledge. I tried _fata morgana, mirage,
parhelion_, and whatever I had learned of recognized illusion, but in
vain sought satisfaction, or anything pointing in the direction of
satisfaction. I was compelled to leave the thing alone. My uncle kept
silence about it, but seemed to brood more than usual. I think he too was
convinced that it must have another explanation than present science
would afford him. Once I ventured to ask if he had come to any
conclusion; with a sad smile, he answered,

"I am waiting, little one. There is much we have to wait for. Where would
be the good of having your mind made up wrong? It only stands in the way
of getting it made up right!"

By degrees the thing went into the distance, and I ceased even
speculating upon it. But one little fact I may mention ere I leave
it--that, just as I was reaching a state of quiet mental prorogation, I
suddenly remembered that, the moment after the flash, my Zoe, startled as
she was, gave out a low whinny; I remembered the quiver of it under me:
she too must have seen her master's double!

CHAPTER IX.

THE GARDEN.

I remember nothing more to disturb the even flow of my life till I was
nearly seventeen. Many pleasant things had come and gone; many pleasant
things kept coming and going. I had studied tolerably well--at least my
uncle showed himself pleased with the progress I had made and was making.
I know even yet a good deal more than would be required for one of these
modern degrees feminine. I had besides read more of the older literature
of my country than any one I have met except my uncle. I had also this
advantage over most students, that my knowledge was gained without the
slightest prick of the spur of emulation--purely in following the same
delight in myself that shone radiant in the eyes of my uncle as he read
with me. I had this advantage also over many, that, perhaps from
impression of the higher mind, I saw and learned a thing not merely as a
fact whose glory lay in the mystery of its undeveloped harmonics, but as
the harbinger of an unknown advent. For as long as I can remember, my
heart was given to expectation, was tuned to long waiting. I constantly
felt--felt without thinking--that something was coming. I feel it now.
Were I young I dared not say so. How could I, compassed about with so
great a cloud of witnesses to the common-place! Do I not see their
superior smile, as, with voices sweetly acidulous, they quote in reply--

"Love is well on the way;
He'll be here to-day,
Or, at latest, the end of the week;
Too soon you will find him,
And the sorrow behind him
You will not go out to seek!"

Would they not tell me that such expectation was but the shadow of the
cloud called love, hanging no bigger than a man's hand on the far
horizon, but fraught with storm for mind and soul, which, when it
withdrew, would carry with it the glow and the glory and the hope of
life; being at best but the mirage of an unattainable paradise, therefore
direst of deceptions! Little do such suspect that their own behaviour has
withered their faith, and their unbelief dried up their life. They can
now no more believe in what they once felt, than a cloud can believe in
the rainbow it once bore on its bosom. But I am old, therefore dare to
say that I expect more and better and higher and lovelier things than I
have ever had. I am not going home to God to say--"Father, I have
imagined more beautiful things than thou art able to make true! They were
so good that thou thyself art either not good enough to will them, or not
strong enough to make them. Thou couldst but make thy creature dream of
them, because thou canst but dream of them thyself." Nay, nay! In the
faith of him to whom the Father shows all things he does, I expect
lovelier gifts than I ever have been, ever shall be able to dream of
asleep, or imagine awake.

I was now approaching the verge of woman-hood. What lay beyond it I could
ill descry, though surely a vague power of undeveloped prophecy dwells in
every created thing--even in the bird ere he chips his shell.

Should I dare, or could I endure to write of what lies now to my hand, if
I did not believe that not our worst but our best moments, not our low
but our lofty moods, not our times logical and scientific, but our times
instinctive and imaginative, are those in which we perceive the truth! In
them we behold it with a beholding which is one with believing. And,

"Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower",

could not Wordsworth, and cannot we, call up the vision of that hour? and
has not its memory almost, or even altogether, the potency of its
presence? Is not the very thought of any certain flower enough to make me
believe in that flower--believe it to mean all it ever seemed to mean?
That _these_ eyes may never more rest upon it with the old delight, means
little, and matters nothing. I have other eyes, and shall have yet
others. If I thought, as so many have degraded themselves to think, that
the glory of things in the morning of love was a glamour cast upon the
world, no outshine of indwelling radiance, should I care to breathe one
day more the air of this or of any world? Nay, nay, but there dwells in
everything the Father hath made, the fire of the burning bush, as at home
in his son dwelt the glory that, set free, broke out from him on the
mount of his transfiguration. The happy-making vision of things that
floods the gaze of the youth, when first he lives in the marvel of
loving, and being loved by, a woman, is the true vision--and the more
likely to be the true one, that, when he gives way to selfishness, he
loses faith in the vision, and sinks back into the commonplace unfaith of
the beggarly world--a disappointed, sneering worshipper of power and
money--with this remnant of the light yet in him, that he grumbles at the
gloom its departure has left behind. He confesses by his soreness that
the illusion ought to have been true; he seldom confesses that he loved
himself more than the woman, and so lost her. He lays the blame on God,
on the woman, on the soullessness of the universe--anywhere but on the
one being in which he is interested enough to be sure it exists--his own
precious, greedy, vulgar self. Would I dare to write of love, if I did
not believe it a true, that is, an eternal thing!

It was a summer of exceptional splendour in which my eyes were opened to
"the glory of the sum of things." It was not so hot of the sun as summers
I have known, but there were so many gentle and loving winds about, with
never point or knife-edge in them, that it seemed all the housework of
the universe was being done by ladies. Then the way the odours went and
came on those sweet winds! and the way the twilight fell asleep into the
dark! and the way the sun rushed up in the morning, as if he cried, like
a boy, "Here I am! The Father has sent me! Isn't it jolly!" I saw more
sun-rises that year than any year before or since. And the grass was so
thick and soft! There must be grass in heaven! And the roses, both wild
and tame, that grew together in the wilderness!--I think you would like
to hear about the wilderness.

When I grew to notice, and think, and put things together, I began to
wonder how the wilderness came there. I could understand that the
solemn garden, with its great yew-hedges and alleys, and its oddly cut
box-trees, was a survival of the stately old gardens haunted by ruffs and
farthingales; but the wilderness looked so much younger that I was
perplexed with it, especially as I saw nothing like it anywhere else. I
asked my uncle about it, and he explained that it was indeed after an old
fashion, but that he had himself made the wilderness, mostly with his own
hands, when he was young. This surprised me, for I had never seen him
touch a spade, and hardly ever saw him in the garden: when I did, I
always felt as if something was going to happen. He said he had in it
tried to copy the wilderness laid out by lord St. Alban's in his essays.
I found the volume, and soon came upon the essay, On Gardens. The passage
concerning the wilderness, gave me, and still gives me so much delight,
that I will transplant it like a rose-bush into this wilderness of mine,
hoping it will give like pleasure to my reader.

"For the heath, which was the third part of our plot, I wish it to be
framed, as much as may be, to a natural wildness. Trees I would have none
in it; but some thickets, made only of sweetbriar, and honnysuckle, and
some wild vine amongst; and the ground set with violets, strawberries,
and primroses. For these are sweet, and prosper in the shade. And these
to be in the heath, here and there not in any order. I like also little
heapes, in the nature of mole-hills (such as are in wild heaths) to be
set, some with wild thyme; some with pincks; some with germander, that
gives a good flower to the eye; some with periwinkle; some with violets;
some with strawberries; some with couslips; some with daisies; some with
red roses; some with lilium convallium; some with sweet-williams red;
some with beares-foot; and the like low flowers, being withall sweet and
sightly. Part of which heapes, to be with standards, of little bushes,
prickt upon their top, and part without. The standards to be roses;
juniper; holly; beareberries (but here and there, because of the smell of
their blossom;) red currans; gooseberries; rosemary; bayes; sweetbriar;
and such like. But these standards, to be kept with cutting, that they
grow not out of course."

Just such, in all but the gooseberries and currants, was the wilderness
of our garden: you came on it by a sudden labyrinthine twist at the end
of a narrow alley of yew, and a sudden door in the high wall. My uncle
said he liked well to see roses in the kitchen-garden, but not
gooseberries in the flower-garden, especially a wild flower-garden.
Wherein lies the difference, I never quite made out, but I feel a
difference. My main delight in the wilderness was to see the roses among
the heather--particularly the wild roses. When I was grown up, the
wilderness always affected me like one of Blake's, or one of Beddoes's
yet wilder lyrics. To make it, my uncle had taken in a part of the heath,
which came close up to the garden, leaving plenty of the heather and
ling. The protecting fence enclosed a good bit of the heath just as it
was, so that the wilderness melted away into the heath, and into the wide
moor--the fence, though contrived so as to be difficult to cross, being
so low that one had to look for it.

Everywhere the inner garden was surrounded with brick walls, and hedges
of yew within them; but immediately behind the house, the wall to the
lane was not very high.

CHAPTER X.

ONCE MORE A SECRET.

One day in June I had gone into the garden about one o'clock, whether
with or without object I forget. I had just seen my uncle start for
Wittenage. Hearing a horse's hoofs in the lane that ran along the outside
of the wall, I looked up. The same moment the horse stopped, and the face
of his rider appeared over the wall, between two stems of yew, and two
great flowers of purple lilac, in shape like two perfect bunches of
swarming bees. It was the face of a youth of eighteen, and beautiful with
a right manly beauty.

The moment I looked on this face, I fell into a sort of trance--that is,
I entered for a moment some condition of existence beyond the ramparts of
what commonly we call life. Love at first sight it was that initiated the
strange experience. But understand me: real as what immediately followed
was to the consciousness, there was no actual fact in it.

I stood gazing. My eyes seemed drawn, and drawing my person toward the
vision. Isolate over the garden-wall was the face; the rest of the man
and all the horse were hidden behind it. Betwixt the yew stems and the
two great lilac flowers--how heart and brain are yet filled with the old
scent of them!--my face, my mouth, my lips met his. I grew blind as with
all my heart I kissed him. Then came a flash of icy terror, and a shudder
which it frights me even now to recall. Instantly I knew that but a
moment had passed, and that I had not moved an inch from the spot where
first my eyes met his.

But my eyes yet rested on his; I could not draw them away. I could not
free myself. Helplessness was growing agony. His voice broke the spell.
He lifted his hunting-cap, and begged me to tell him the way to the next
village. My self-possession returned, and the joy of its restoration
drove from me any lingering embarrassment. I went forward, and without a
faltering tone, I believe, gave him detailed directions. He told me
afterwards that, himself in a state of bewildered surprise, he thought me
the coolest young person he had ever had the fortune to meet. Why should
one be pleased to know that she looked quite different from what she
felt? There is something wrong there, surely! I acknowledge the something
wrong, but do not understand it. He lifted his cap again, and rode away.

I stood still at the foot of the lilac-tree, and, from a vapour,
condensed, not to a stone, but to a world, in which a new Flora was about
to be developed. If no new spiritual sense was awakened in me, at least I
was aware of a new consciousness. I had never been to myself what I was
now.

Terror again seized me: the face might once more look over the wall, and
find me where it had left me! I turned, and went slowly away from the
house, gravitating to the darkest part of the garden.

"What has come to me," I said, "that I seek the darkness? Is this another
secret? Am I in the grasp of a new enemy?"

And with that came the whirlwind of perplexity. Must I go the first
moment I knew I could find him, and tell my uncle what had happened, and
how I felt? or must I have, and hold, and cherish in silent heart, a
thing so wondrous, so precious, so absorbing? Had I not deliberately
promised--of my own will and at my own instance--never again to have a
secret from him? Was this a secret? Was it not a secret?

The storm was up, and went on. The wonder is that, in the fire of the
new torment, I did not come to loathe the very thought of the young
man--which would have delivered me, if not from the necessity of
confession, yet from the main difficulty in confessing.

I said to myself that the old secret was of a wrong done to my uncle;
that what had made me miserable then was a bad secret. The perception of
this difference gave me comfort for a time, but not for long. The fact
remained, that I knew something concerning myself which my best friend
did not know. It was, and I could not prevent it from being, a barrier
between us!

Yet what was it I was concealing from him? What had I to tell him? How
was I to represent a thing of which I knew neither the name nor the
nature, a thing I could not describe? Could I confess what I did not
understand? The thing might be what, in the tales I had read, was called
love, but I did not know that it was. It might be something new, peculiar
to myself; something for which there was no word in the language! How was
I to tell? I saw plainly that, if I tried to convey my new experience, I
should not get beyond the statement that I had a new experience. It did
not occur to me that the thing might be so well known, that a mere hint
of the feelings concerned, would enable any older person to classify the
consciousness. I said to myself I should merely perplex my uncle. And in
truth I believe that love, in every mind in which it arises, will vary in
colour and form--will always partake of that mind's individual isolation
in difference. This, however, is nothing to the present point.

Comfort myself as I might, that the impossible was required of no one,
and granted that the thing was impossible, it was none the less a cause
of misery, a present disaster: I was aware, and soon my uncle would be
aware, of an impenetrable something separating us. I felt that we had
already begun to grow strange to each other, and the feeling lay like
death at my heart.

Our lessons together were still going on; that I was no longer a child
had made only the difference that progress must make; and I had no
thought that they would not thus go on always. They were never for a
moment irksome to me; I might be tired by them, but never of them. We
were regularly at work together by seven, and after half an hour for
breakfast, resumed work; at half-past eleven our lessons were over. But
although the day was then clear of the imperative, much the greater part
of it was in general passed in each other's company. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together in the study. We might not speak a
word, but we would be hours together on horseback.

For this day, then, our lessons were over, and my uncle was from home.
This was an indisputable relief, yet the fact that it was so, pained me
keenly, for I recognized in it the first of the schism. How I got through
the day, I cannot tell. I was in a dream, not all a dream of delight.
Haunted with the face I had seen, and living in the new consciousness it
had waked in me, I spent most of it in the garden, now in the glooms of
the yew-walks, and now in the smiling wilderness. It was odd, however,
that, although I was not _expected_ to be in my uncle's room at any time
but that of lessons, all the morning I had a feeling as if I ought to be
there, while yet glad that my uncle was not there.

It was late before he returned, and I went to bed. Perhaps I retired so
soon that I might not have to look into his eyes. Usually, I sat now
until he came home. I was long in getting to sleep, and then I dreamed. I
thought I was out in the storm, and the flash came which revealed the
horse and his rider, but they were both different. The horse in the dream
was black as coal, as if carved out of the night itself; and the man
upon him was the beautiful stranger whose horse I had not seen for the
garden-wall. The darkness fell, and the voice of my uncle called to me. I
waited for him in the storm with a troubled heart, for I knew he had not
seen that vision, and I could no more tell him of it, than could
Christabel tell her father what she had seen after she lay down. I woke,
but my waking was no relief.

CHAPTER XI.

THE MOLE BURROWS.

I slept again after my dream, and do not know whether he came into my
room as he generally did when he had not said good-night to me. Of course
I woke unhappy, and the morning-world had lost something of its natural
glow, its lovely freshness: it was not this time a thing new-born of the
creating word. I dawdled with my dressing. The face kept coming, and
brought me no peace, yet brought me something for which it seemed worth
while even to lose my peace. But I did not know then, and do not yet know
what the loss of peace actually means. I only know that it must be
something far more terrible than anything I have ever known. I remained
so far true to my uncle, however, that not even for what the face seemed
to promise me, would I have consented to cause him trouble. For what I
saw in the face, I would do anything, I thought, except that.

I went to him at the usual hour, determined that nothing should distract
me from my work--that he should perceive no difference in me. I was not
at the moment awake to the fact that here again were love and deception
hand in hand. But another love than mine was there: my uncle loved me
immeasurably more than I yet loved that heavenly vision. True love is
keen-sighted as the eagle, and my uncle's love was love true, therefore
he saw what I sought to hide. It is only the shadow of love, generally a
grotesque, ugly thing, like so many other shadows, that is blind either
to the troubles or the faults of the shadow it seems to love. The moment
our eyes met, I saw that he saw something in mine that was not there when
last we parted. But he said nothing, and we sat down to our lessons.
Every now and then as they proceeded, however, I felt rather than saw his
eyes rest on me for a moment, questioning. I had never known them rest on
me so before. Plainly he was aware of some change; and could there be
anything different in the relation of two who so long had loved each
other, without something being less well and good than before? Nor was it
indeed wonderful he should see a difference; for, with all the might of
my resolve to do even better than usual, I would now and then find myself
unconscious of what either of us had last been saying. The face had come
yet again, and driven everything from its presence! I grew angry--not
with the youth, but with his face, for appearing so often when I did not
invite it. Once I caught myself on the verge of crying out, "Can't you
wait? I will come presently!" and my uncle looked up as if I had spoken.
Perhaps he had as good as heard the words; he possessed what almost
seemed a supernatural faculty of divining the thought of another--not, I
was sure, by any effort to perceive it, but by involuntary intuition. He
uttered no inquiring word, but a light sigh escaped him, which all but
made me burst into tears. I was on one side of a widening gulf, and he on
the other!

Our lessons ended, he rose immediately and left the room. Five minutes
passed, and then came the clatter of his horse's feet on the stones of
the yard. A moment more, and I heard him ride away at a quick trot. I
burst into tears where I still sat beside my uncle's empty chair. I was
weary like one in a dream searching in vain for a spot whereupon to set
down her heart-breaking burden. There was no one but my uncle to whom I
could tell any trouble, and the trouble I could not have told him had
hitherto been unimaginable! From this my reader may judge what a trouble
it was that I could not tell him my trouble. I was a traitor to my only
friend! Had I begun to love him less? had I begun to turn away from him?
I dared not believe it. That would have been to give eternity to my
misery. But it might be that at heart I was a bad, treacherous girl! I
had again a secret from him! I was not _with_ him!

I went into the garden. The day was sultry and oppressive. Coolness or
comfort was nowhere. I sought the shadow of the live yew-walls; there was
shelter in the shadow, but it oppressed the lungs while it comforted the
eyes. Not a breath of wind breathed; the atmosphere seemed to have lost
its life-giving. I went out into the wilderness. There the air was filled
and heaped with the odours of the heavenly plants that crowded its humble
floor, but they gave me no welcome. Between two bushes that flamed out
roses, I lay down, and the heather and the rose-trees closed above me. My
mind was in such a confusion of pain and pleasure--not without a hope of
deliverance somewhere in its clouded sky--that I could think no more, and
fell asleep.

I imagine that, had I never again seen the young man, I should not have
suffered. I think that, by slow natural degrees, his phantasmal presence
would have ceased to haunt me, and gradually I should have returned to my
former condition. I do not mean I should have forgotten him, but neither
should I have been troubled when I thought of him. I know I should never
have regretted having seen him. In that, I had nothing to blame myself
for, and should have felt--not that a glory had passed away from the
earth, but that I had had a vision of bliss. What it was, I should not
have had the power to recall, but it would have left with me the faith
that I had beheld something too ethereal for my memory to store. I should
have consoled myself both with the dream, and with the conviction that I
should not dream it again. The peaceful sense of recovered nearness to my
uncle would have been far more precious than the dream. The sudden fire
of transfiguration that had for a moment flamed out of the All, and
straightway withdrawn, would have become a memory only; but none the less
would that enlargement of the child way of seeing things have remained
with me. I do not think that would ever have left me: it is the care of
the prudent wise that bleaches the grass, and is as the fumes of sulphur
to the red rose of life.

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