A young man, named Giovanni Guasconti, came, very long ago, from the more southern region of Italy, to pursue his studies at the University of Padua. Giovanni, who did not have very many gold ducats in his pocket, took lodgings in a high and gloomy room of an old house which looked worthy to have been the palace of a Paduan noble, in fact, a family mansion. Being heartbroken, which was natural to a young man for the first time out of his native places, Giovanni sighed heavily as he looked around the empty and ill-furnished apartment.

“Holy Virgin,[1] signor!” cried old Signora Lisabetta, who, won by the youth’s remarkable beauty, was kindly trying to give the room a habitable air.[2] “Why should[3] a young man sigh like that? Do you find this old mansion gloomy? Then, put your head out of the window, and you will see as bright sunshine as you have left in Naples.”

Guasconti mechanically did as the old woman advised, but could not quite agree with her that the Paduan sunshine was as cheerful as that of southern Italy. Such as it was, however, it fell upon a garden beneath the window with a variety of plants, which seemed to have been cultivated with exceeding care.[4]

“Does this garden belong to the house?” asked Giovanni.

“No; that garden is cultivated by the own hands of Signor Giacomo Rappaccini, the famous doctor, who has been heard of as far as Naples. It is said that he turns these plants into medicines that are as strong as a charm. Often you may see the signor doctor at work, and perhaps the signora, his daughter, too, gathering the flowers that grow in the garden,” answered old Lisabetta.

The old woman had now done what she could to make the room look better; and left.

Giovanni looked down into the garden beneath his window. From its appearance, he judged it to be one of those botanic gardens which had been in Padua earlier than anywhere in Italy or in the world. Or, probably, it might once have been the garden of a rich family; for there was the ruin of a marble fountain in the centre, but so shattered that it was impossible to see the original design from the chaos of remaining fragments. The water, however, continued to sparkle in the sun. All about the pool into which the water fell grew various plants, that seemed to require plenty of moisture for the gigantic leaves and gorgeous flowers. There was one shrub in particular, set in a marble vase in the middle of the pool, that had purple blossoms, each of which seemed bright enough to illuminate the garden. Every portion of the garden had plants and herbs, carefully cultivated.

While Giovanni stood at the window he heard a rustling behind a screen of leaves, and became aware that a person was at work in the garden. His figure soon came into view. It was a tall, emaciated, and sickly-looking man, dressed in a scholar’s black cloak. He was elderly, with gray hair, a thin, gray beard, and a face singularly marked with intellect, but which could never, even in his more younger days, have expressed much warmth of heart.

This scientific gardener examined every shrub with great care: it seemed as if he was looking into their nature, and discovering why one leaf grew in this shape and another in that, and why such and such flowers differed among themselves in color and perfume. Nevertheless, in spite of his deep interest, there was no intimacy between himself and these plants. On the contrary, he avoided their actual touch or the direct inhaling of their odors with a caution that impressed Giovanni most disagreeably. The man behavior was as if he was walking among savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality. The young man was frightened to see such an attitude in a person cultivating a garden, the most simple and innocent of human actions. Was this garden, the Eden of the present world? And this man, seeing harm in what his own hands grew, – was he the Adam?

The gardener, while plucking away the dead leaves or pruning the shrubs, defended his hands with a pair of thick gloves. When he came to the magnificent plant that hung its purple blossoms beside the marble fountain, he placed a mask over his mouth and nose. Finding his task still too dangerous, he drew back, and called loudly, “Beatrice! Beatrice!”

“Here am I, my father. What do you want?” cried a rich and young voice from the window of the opposite house. “Are you in the garden?”

“Yes, Beatrice,” answered the gardener, “and I need your help.”

Soon there emerged from under a portal the figure of a young girl, dressed with taste like a flower, beautiful as the day. She looked full of life, health, and energy. Yet Giovanni looked down into the garden; he had an impression as if here was another flower, as beautiful as other flowers, more beautiful than the richest of them, but still to be touched only with a glove, not to be approached without a mask. As Beatrice came down the garden path, he saw her inhale the odor of several of the plants which her father had avoided.

“Here, Beatrice,” said the father, “much work must be done to our chief treasure. Yet, I am not strong enough for it. I fear, this plant must be consigned to your sole charge.[5]”

“And will gladly I do it,” cried again the rich tones of the young lady, as she came up to the magnificent plant and opened her arms as if to embrace it. “Yes, my sister, it will be Beatrice’s task to serve you; and you will reward her with your kisses and perfumed breath.”

Then, with all the tenderness in her manner, she took care of the plant.

In the morning, Giovanni’s first movement was to throw open the window and gaze down into the garden which had seemed so mysterious in the previous evening. He was surprised and a little ashamed to find how real and matter-of-fact the garden proved to be.[6] The young man was happy that, in the heart of the city, he had the privilege of enjoying this place of lovely vegetation. Neither Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini, nor his brilliant daughter, were now visible.

On that day he paid a visit to Signor Pietro Baglioni, professor of medicine in the university, a physician of eminent reputation to whom Giovanni had brought a letter of introduction.[7] The professor was an elderly person, apparently good-natured. He kept the young man to dinner, and they had a very nice conversation, especially when warmed by wine. Giovanni, thinking that men of science, living in the same city, must be familiar with one another, mentioned the name of Dr. Rappaccini. But the professor did not respond with so much cordiality as he had expected.

“It will not do[8] for a teacher of the art of medicine,” said Professor Pietro Baglioni, in answer to a question of Giovanni, “not to respect such a well-known physician as Rappaccini; but, on the other hand,[9] I should not permit a worthy young man like you, Signor Giovanni, the son of an old friend, to get wrong ideas. Dr. Rappaccini has as much science as any member of the faculty in Padua, or all Italy; but there are certain grave objections to his professional character.”

“And what are they?” asked the young man.

“Has my friend Giovanni any disease of body or heart, that he is so interested in physicians?” said the professor, with a smile. “But as for Rappaccini, it is said of him – and I, who know the man well, can answer for its truth – that he cares more for science than for man. His patients are interesting to him only as subjects for some new experiment. He would sacrifice human life, his own among others for the sake of adding a grain to his accumulated knowledge.”

“I think he is an awful man,” remarked Guasconti. “Are there many men capable of such a love of science?”

“God forbid,[10]” answered the professor. “It is his theory that all medicinal virtues are in those substances which we call vegetable poisons. He cultivates them with his own hands, and they say he has even produced new varieties of poison. Now and then,[11] he has effected a marvellous cure;[12] but such instances of success, – to my mind, are probably the work of chance – but he should be responsible for his failures, which may justly be considered his own work.”

“I do not know, most learned professor,” said Giovanni, – “how dearly this physician may love his art; but there is one object more dear to him. He has a daughter.”

“Aha!” cried the professor, with a laugh. “So now our friend Giovanni’s secret is out. You have heard of this daughter, whom all the young men in Padua are wild about, though not half a dozen have ever had a chance to see her face. I know little of the Signora Beatrice save that Rappaccini is said to have instructed her deeply in his science, and that she already can fill a professor’s chair. Perhaps her father is preparing her for mine!”

Guasconti returned to his lodgings a little heated with the wine he had drunk, and which caused his brain to swim with strange fantasies about Dr. Rappaccini and the beautiful Beatrice. On his way he bought a bouquet of flowers.

Going up to his room, he seated himself near the window, so that he could look down into the garden with little risk of being discovered. In the sunshine, the strange plants were now and then nodding gently to one another. In the middle, by the shattered fountain, grew the magnificent shrub, with its purple flowers all over it; they looked back again out of the pool. At first there was nobody in the garden. Soon, however, – as Giovanni had half hoped, half feared – a figure appeared beneath the portal, and came down between the rows of plants, inhaling their various perfumes as if she were one of those beings of an old tale that lived upon sweet odors. On seeing Beatrice again, the young man was startled how much her beauty exceeded his recollection of it; so brilliant, its character was so vivid. Seeing her face better than on the former occasion, he was struck by its sweetness. He observed, or imagined, an analogy between the beautiful girl and the gorgeous shrub that hung its wonderful flowers over the fountain, – probably due to the color of her dress.

Approaching the shrub, she threw open her arms, and embraced its branches.

“Give me your breath, my sister,” exclaimed Beatrice; “for I am faint with common air. And give me this flower of yours, which I shall place close beside my heart.”

With these words the beautiful daughter of Rappaccini plucked one of the richest blossoms of the shrub, and was about to fasten it in her bosom.[13] But now a singular incident occurred. A small orange-colored lizard was running along the path, just at the feet of Beatrice. It appeared to Giovanni, – but, at the distance from which he looked, he could scarcely see anything so small, – it appeared to him, however, that a drop or two of moisture from the broken stem of the flower fell upon the lizard’s head. For an instant the lizard started violently, and then lay motionless in the sunshine. Beatrice observed this remarkable phenomenon and crossed herself, sadly, but without surprise; nor did she hesitate to fasten the fatal flower in her bosom. Giovanni shrank back and trembled.

“Am I awake? Am I sane?” said he to himself. “What is this being? Shall I call her beautiful or terrible?”

Beatrice now walked through the garden, approaching closer beneath Giovanni’s window, so that he could see her quite well. At this moment there came a beautiful insect over the garden wall; it had, perhaps, been attracted from the city by the heavy perfumes of Dr. Rappaccini’s shrubs. Without sitting on the flowers, it flew to Beatrice, and lingered in the air above her head. Now, while Beatrice was gazing at the insect with childish delight, it grew faint and fell at her feet; it was dead – from no cause that he could see, unless it was the atmosphere of her breath. Again Beatrice crossed herself and sighed heavily as she bent over the dead insect.

An impulsive movement of Giovanni drew her eyes to the window. There she saw the beautiful head of the young man – rather a Grecian than an Italian head, with regular features, and golden hair – gazing down upon her. Scarcely knowing what he did, Giovanni threw down the bouquet which he had held in his hand.

“Signora,” said he, “Wear them for the sake of Giovanni Guasconti.”

“Thanks, signor,” replied Beatrice, with her rich voice, that sounded like music. “I accept your gift, and would reward you with this precious purple flower; but if I throw it into the air it will not reach you. So Signor Guasconti must content himself with my thanks.”

She lifted the bouquet from the ground, and then passed through the garden. But few as the moments were,[14] it seemed to Giovanni, when she was entering the portal, that his beautiful bouquet was already beginning to fade in her hand.

For many days after this incident the young man avoided the window that looked into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden, as if he could see something ugly and monstrous there. The wisest thing to do would be, if his heart were in any real danger, to leave his lodgings and Padua at once. But Guasconti had not a deep heart; but he had a quick fancy, and a southern temperament, which rose every instant to a higher pitch. Whether or no Beatrice possessed that fatal breath, that Giovanni had witnessed, she had got a fierce poison into his system. It was not love, although her rich beauty was a madness to him; nor horror; but a wild mixture of both love and horror. Giovanni did not know what to fear; still less did he know what to hope; yet hope and fear kept a warfare in his heart.

Sometimes he had a walk through the streets of Padua or beyond its gates. One day he felt his arm seized by a person, who had recognized the young man.

“Signor Giovanni! Stay, my young friend!” cried he. “Have you forgotten me? That might happen if I were as much changed as you are.”

It was Baglioni, whom Giovanni had avoided ever since their first meeting, fearing that the professor would look too deeply into his secrets.

“Yes; I am Giovanni Guasconti. You are Professor Pietro Baglioni. Now let me pass!”

“Not yet, not yet, Signor Giovanni Guasconti,” said the professor, smiling, but at the same time watching the young man closely. “Didn’t I grow up side by side with your father? and shall his son pass me like a stranger in these old streets of Padua? Stand still, Signor Giovanni; for we must have a word or two before we part.”

Now, while they were speaking there came a man in black along the street, moving like a person in poor health. His face wore an expression of such active intellect that an observer might easily overlook his physical weakness and see only this wonderful energy. As he passed, this person exchanged a cold salutation with Baglioni, but fixed his eyes upon[15] Giovanni. Nevertheless, his look did not show any human interest in the young man.

“It is Dr. Rappaccini!” whispered the professor when the stranger had passed. “Has he ever seen your face before?”

“Not that I know,” answered Giovanni, starting at the name.

“He HAS seen you! he must have seen you![16]” said Baglioni. “For some purpose or other, this man of science is making a study of you. I know that look of his! It is the same as he bends over a bird, a mouse, or a butterfly, which, in some experiment, he has killed by the perfume of a flower; a look as deep as Nature itself, but without Nature’s warmth of love. Signor Giovanni, you are the subject of one of Rappaccini’s experiments!”

“Will you make a fool of me?” cried Giovanni, passionately.

“I tell you, my poor Giovanni, that Rappaccini has a scientific interest in you. You have fallen into terrible hands! And the Signora Beatrice, – what part does she act in this mystery?”

But Guasconti, finding Baglioni intolerable, broke away, and was gone before the professor could again seize his arm. He looked after the young man and shook his head.

“This must not be,” said Baglioni to himself. “He is the son of my old friend, and must not suffer from any harm from which the medical science can preserve him. Besides, why should Rappaccini take the boy out of my own hands, as I may say, and use him for his experiments. This daughter of his! It shall be looked to![17]”

Giovanni, after a short walk, found himself at the door of his lodgings. As he crossed the threshold he was met by old Lisabetta, who smiled, and was evidently eager to attract his attention.

“Signor! signor!” whispered she. “Listen, signor! There is a private entrance into the garden!”

“What do you say?” exclaimed Giovanni, turning quickly about. “A private entrance into Dr. Rappaccini’s garden?”

“Hush! hush! not so loud!” whispered Lisabetta, putting her hand over his mouth. “Yes; into the doctor’s garden, where you may see all his fine plants. Many young men in Padua would give gold to be admitted among those flowers.”

Giovanni put a piece of gold into her hand.

“Show me the way,” said he.

His conversation with Baglioni made him think that this might be connected with the intrigue, in which Dr. Rappaccini was involving him. But such a suspicion, though it disturbed Giovanni, it did not stop him. The instant that he was aware of the possibility of approaching Beatrice, it seemed necessary to do so. It did not matter whether she were angel or demon; he was within her sphere; and yet, strange to say, there came across him a sudden doubt whether this intense interest was really so deep and positive; whether it was not the fantasy of a young man.

He paused, hesitated, but again went on. His guide led him to a door, through which, as it was opened, he saw leaves, and sunshine glimmering among them. Giovanni stepped and stood beneath his own window in Dr. Rappaccini’s garden.

He looked around the garden to discover if Beatrice or her father were present, and, seeing that he was alone, began a critical observation of the plants.

The look of them dissatisfied him; their gorgeousness seemed fierce, passionate, and even unnatural. Several also might shock one by an artificial appearance indicating that there had been a mixture of various vegetable species, that the production was no longer of God’s making, but of man’s fancy. They were probably the result of experiment. Giovanni recognized two or three plants that he knew to be poisonous. While busy with these thoughts he heard the rustling of a silk dress and, turning, saw Beatrice emerging from beneath the portal.

She came along the path and met him near the broken fountain. There was surprise in her face, but also a simple and kind expression of pleasure.

“You are a connoisseur in flowers, signor,” said Beatrice, with a smile, meaning the bouquet which he had thrown her from the window. “It is no marvel, therefore, if you have come to take a nearer view of my father’s rare collection. If he were here, he could tell you many strange and interesting facts as to the nature and habits of these shrubs; for he has spent a lifetime in such studies, and this garden is his world.”

“And yourself, lady,” observed Giovanni, “they say, – you are skilled in growing plants with these rich blossoms and these perfumes. If you were my instructress, I should be a better pupil than if taught by Signor Rappaccini himself.”

“Do they say so?” asked Beatrice, with a pleasant laugh. “Do people say that I am skilled in my father’s science of plants? No; though I have grown up among these flowers, I know no more of them than their color and perfume. Signor, do not believe these stories about my science.”

“And must I believe all that I have seen with my own eyes?” asked Giovanni, while the recollection of former scenes made him shrink.

“Forget what you may have fancied about me. But the words of Beatrice Rappaccini’s lips are true. You may believe them.”

While she spoke there was a fragrance in the atmosphere around her, rich and delightful. Could it be Beatrice’s breath which had the odor of the flowers? Giovanni felt faint for an instant.

Beatrice asked Giovanni about his distant home, his friends, his mother, and his sisters. He was surprised that he was walking side by side with the girl, whom he had idealized in such terror, in whom he had witnessed such dreadful abilities, – that he was talking with Beatrice like a brother, and found her so human and so womanly.

They came to the shattered fountain, beside which grew the magnificent shrub, with its purple blossoms. There was a fragrance around it which Giovanni recognized as identical with that of to Beatrice’s breath, but more powerful. As her eyes fell upon it, Giovanni saw her press her hand to her bosom.

“For the first time in my life,” murmured she, addressing the shrub, “I had forgotten you.”

“I remember, signora,” said Giovanni, “that you once promised to reward me with one of these living treasures for the bouquet which I threw to your feet. Let me now pluck it to remember this interview.”

He made a step towards the shrub; but Beatrice rushed forward, with a shriek that went through his heart like a dagger. She caught his hand and drew it back.

“Do not touch it!” exclaimed she, in a voice of agony. “It is fatal!”

Then, she fled from him and disappeared beneath the portal. As Giovanni followed her with his eyes, he saw Dr. Rappaccini, who had been watching the scene, he did not know how long, within the shadow of the entrance.

No sooner was Guasconti alone in his room than[18] the image of Beatrice came back to his mind. She was human, gentle and womanly; she was capable of the heroism of love. Her frightful abilities were now either forgotten, or, even made her more unique. What had looked ugly was now beautiful; or it hid itself among other half ideas at the back of his mind.[19] Thus did he spend the night. Up rose the sun, and the young man woke up with pain in his hand – in his right hand – the very hand which Beatrice had taken in her own when he was about to pluck one of the purple flowers. On the back of that hand there was now a purple print like that of four small fingers, and the print of a thumb upon his wrist.

Oh, how stubbornly does love hold its faith until the moment comes when it cannot do so any more! Giovanni wrapped a handkerchief about his hand and wondered what insect had stung him, and soon forgot his pain thinking of Beatrice.

After the first interview, there was a second. A third; a fourth; and a meeting with Beatrice in the garden was no longer an incident in Giovanni’s daily life, but the space in which he lived. Nor was it otherwise[20] with the daughter of Rappaccini. She waited for the young man’s appearance. If, by any chance, he failed to come at the appointed moment, she stood beneath the window and sent up her rich voice: “Giovanni! Giovanni! Come down!” And down he went into that Eden of poisonous flowers.

But there was still such a reserve in Beatrice’s behavior, that the idea of breaking through it scarcely occurred to his mind. They loved; their eyes conveyed the holy secret from one soul to the other; and yet there had been no touch of lips, or hands. He had never touched one of the ringlets of her hair or dress – so great was the physical barrier between them. On the few occasions when Giovanni was about to overstep the limit, Beatrice grew so sad, that not a word was necessary to stop him. At such times he was startled at the horrible suspicions that rose, monster-like, in his heart; his love grew thin and faint as the morning mist. But, when Beatrice’s face brightened again, she was no longer the mysterious, questionable being whom he had watched with so much horror; she was now the beautiful girl whom he knew.

A considerable time had now passed since Giovanni’s last meeting with Baglioni. One morning, however, he was unpleasantly surprised by a visit from the professor, whom he had scarcely thought of for whole weeks, and would gladly forget still longer. He could tolerate no companions except those having sympathy with his present feeling. Such sympathy was not to be expected from Professor Baglioni.

The visitor talked carelessly for a few moments about the gossip of the city and the university, and then took up another topic.

“I have been reading an old classic author lately,” said he, “and met with a story that strangely interested me. Possibly you may remember it. It is of an Indian prince, who sent a beautiful woman as a present to Alexander the Great. She was as lovely as the dawn and gorgeous as the sunset; but what was special about her was a certain rich perfume in her breath – richer than a garden of Persian roses. Alexander fell in love at first sight with this magnificent stranger; but a physician, happening to be present,[21] discovered a terrible secret of her.”

“And what was that?” asked Giovanni, turning his eyes down to avoid those of the professor.

“That this lovely woman,” continued Baglioni, “had been fed with poisons from her birth upward,[22] until her whole body was so full of them that she herself had become the deadliest poison in the world. Poison was her element of life. With the rich perfume of her breath she poisoned the very air. Her love would have been poison – her embrace death. Is not this a marvellous tale?”

“A childish tale,” answered Giovanni, nervously starting from his chair. “I marvel how you, Professor, find time to read such nonsense among your studies.”

“By the way,” said the professor, looking about him, “what singular fragrance is this in your apartment? Is it the perfume of your gloves? It is faint, but delicious; and yet, after all, not pleasant. Were I to breathe it long,[23] I think it would make me ill. It is like the breath of a flower; but I see no flowers in the room.”

“There are not any,” replied Giovanni, who had turned pale as the professor spoke; “I do not think, there is any fragrance except in your imagination. The recollection of a perfume, the idea of it, may easily be mistaken for a present reality.”

“Ay; but my sober imagination does not often play such tricks,” said Baglioni. “Our friend Rappaccini, as I have heard, makes medicines with rich odors. Doubtless, the learned Signora Beatrice would give her patients draughts as sweet as a girl’s breath; but woe to him that sips them![24]”

Giovanni’s face showed many emotions. The tone in which the professor spoke of the lovely daughter of Rappaccini was hard for him to hear; and yet the view of her character opposite to his own gave way to a thousand suspicions. But he tried hard not to pay attention to them and to respond to Baglioni with a true lover’s perfect faith.

“Signor professor,” said he, “you were my father’s friend; perhaps, too, you want to behave like a true friend of his son. I should feel nothing towards you save respect; but, signor, there is one subject on which we must not speak. You do not know the Signora Beatrice.”

“Giovanni! my poor Giovanni!” answered the professor, with an expression of pity, “I know this girl better than yourself. You must hear the truth about the poisoner Rappaccini and his poisonous daughter; yes, as poisonous as she is beautiful. Listen; for, even should you do violence to my gray hairs, it shall not silence me.[25] That old tale of the Indian woman has become a truth by the deadly science of Rappaccini and in the person of the lovely Beatrice.”

Giovanni hid his face.

“Her father’s natural love for his child,” continued Baglioni, “did not stop him from making her the victim of his insane zeal for science; for, let us do him justice,[26] he is as true a man of science. What, then, will be your fate? Beyond a doubt you are selected as the material of some new experiment. Perhaps the result is to be death; perhaps a fate more awful still. Rappaccini, with what he calls the interest of science, will hesitate at nothing.”

“It is a dream,” murmured Giovanni to himself; “it must be a dream.”

“But,” said the professor, “cheer up, son of my friend. It is not yet too late for the rescue. Possibly we may even bring back this miserable child within the limits of ordinary nature, from which her father’s madness has taken her. Look at this little silver vase! It was made by the hands of the famous Benvenuto Cellini,[27] and is worthy to be a love gift to the most beautiful girl in Italy. But its contents are invaluable. One little sip of this antidote would make the most virulent poisons of the Borgias[28] harmless. I do not doubt that it will be as effective against those of Rappaccini. Give the vase to your Beatrice, and wait for the result.”

Baglioni put a small silver vase on the table and went out, leaving what he had said to produce its effect upon the young man’s mind.

“We will fight Rappaccini,” thought he, as he went down the stairs; “but, to tell the truth of him, he is a wonderful man – a wonderful man not to be tolerated by those[29] who respect the good old rules of the medical profession.”

As long as Giovanni had known Beatrice, he had had some doubts as to her character; yet she seemed to him such a simple and natural girl, that the image now held up by Professor Baglioni looked strange and incredible. True, he could not quite forget the bouquet that faded in her hands, and the insect killed in the air by the fragrance of her breath. These incidents, however, were now taken as mistaken fantasies. There is something truer and more real than what we can see with the eyes and touch with the finger. On such better evidence had Giovanni built his faith in Beatrice. But now he was not able to stay at the height to which the early enthusiasm of passion had raised him; he fell down, suffering from doubts. Not that he gave her up; he did but distrust.[30] He decided to make a test that would satisfy him, once for all,[31] whether there was something dreadful in her physical nature and something monstrous in her soul. His eyes, gazing down afar, might have deceived him as to the lizard, the insect, and the flowers; but if he could witness, at the distance of a few steps, the sudden fading of one fresh flower in Beatrice’s hand, there would be room for no further question.[32] With this idea he bought a bouquet of fresh flowers cut only that morning.

It was now the usual hour of his daily interview with Beatrice. Before going down into the garden, Giovanni looked at his figure in the mirror, – only natural for a beautiful young man, yet this, probably, proved a certain shallowness of feeling and insincerity of character. He said to himself that his features had never before been so good, nor his eyes so bright.

“At least,” thought he, “her poison has not yet got into my system. I am no flower to die in her hands.”

With that thought he turned his eyes on the bouquet, which he had held in his hand for some time. A thrill of horror shot through him when he saw that those flowers were already beginning to fade. Giovanni grew white as marble, and stood motionless before the mirror, staring at his own reflection there as at something frightful. He remembered Baglioni’s remark about the fragrance that he felt in the room. It must have been the poison in his breath! Recovering from his stupor, he began to look for a spider in the corners of his room. He saw an active spider and breathed at it. The spider suddenly stopped moving; the web vibrated together with its body, and the spider hung dead in the web.

“Cursed! cursed!” murmured Giovanni, addressing himself. “Have you grown so poisonous that this deadly insect is killed by your breath?”

At that moment a rich, sweet voice came up from the garden.

“Giovanni! Giovanni! Come down!”

“Yes,” murmured Giovanni again. “She is the only being whom my breath may not kill! Would that it might![33]”

He rushed down, and in an instant was standing before the bright and loving eyes of Beatrice. A moment ago his rage and despair had been so fierce that he desired nothing so much as to kill her by a glance; but in her presence all this ugly mystery seemed an illusion, and he believed that the real Beatrice was an angel. He was not able to reach such high faith, still her presence had not lost its magic for him. Giovanni’s rage had left him, but the young man was gloomy. Beatrice immediately felt that there was blackness between them which neither he nor she could pass. They walked on together, sad and silent, and came to the marble fountain and to its pool of water on the ground, where grew the shrub with the purple blossoms. Giovanni was frightened by his delight – the appetite – with which he was inhaling the fragrance of the flowers.

“Beatrice,” asked he, “where did this shrub come from?”

“My father created it,” answered she simply.

“Created it! created it!” repeated Giovanni. “What do you mean, Beatrice?”

“He knows the secrets of Nature,” replied Beatrice; “and, at the hour when I was born, this plant sprang from the ground, the child of his science, of his intellect, while I was but his human child. Do not approach it!” continued she, observing with terror that Giovanni was coming nearer to the shrub. “I, dearest Giovanni, – I grew up and blossomed with the plant, and I inhaled its breath. It was my sister, and I loved it as if it were human. Alas! – did you not suspect it?”

Here Giovanni looked so darkly upon her that Beatrice paused and trembled. But her faith in his love was so great that she had no doubt for an instant.

“There was an awful doom,” she continued, “the effect of my father’s fatal love of science, which estranged me from all society of my kind.[34] Until Heaven sent you, dearest Giovanni, oh, how lonely was your poor Beatrice!”

“Was it a hard doom?” asked Giovanni, fixing his eyes upon her.

“Only lately have I known how hard it was,” answered she, tenderly. “Oh, yes; but my heart was quiet.”

Giovanni’s rage broke through like a lightning out of a dark cloud.

“The cursed one!” cried he with anger. “You have cut me also from all the warmth of life and dragged me into your region of horror!”

“Giovanni!” exclaimed Beatrice, turning her large bright eyes upon his face.

“Yes, poisonous thing!” repeated Giovanni, beside himself with passion. “You have done it! You have filled my veins with poison! You have made me as hateful, as ugly and deadly as yourself – a world’s monster! Now, if our breath is as fatal to ourselves as to all others, let us join our lips in one kiss of hatred, and so die!”

“What has happened to me?” murmured Beatrice. “Holy Virgin,[35] pity me, a poor heart-broken child!”

“Do you pray?” cried Giovanni, still with the same rage. “Your prayers, as they come from your lips, fill the atmosphere with death. Yes, yes; let us pray! Let us go to church! They that come after us will be killed!”

“Giovanni,” said Beatrice, “why do you join yourself with me in those terrible words? I, it is true, am horrible, as you say. But you, – you can go out of the garden and forget there ever was on earth such a monster as poor Beatrice?”

“Do you pretend ignorance?[36]” asked Giovanni. “Look! I have received this power from the daughter of Rappaccini.”

There were some insects flying through the air, and round Giovanni’s head, and were evidently attracted towards him by the same fragrance as that of the shrubs. He breathed at them, and smiled bitterly at Beatrice as some of the insects fell dead upon the ground.

“I see it! I see it!” shrieked Beatrice. “It is my father’s fatal science! No, no, Giovanni; it was not I! Never! never! I dreamed only to love you and be with you a little time, and to let you go away, leaving your image in my heart; for, Giovanni, believe it, though my body is filled with poison, my soul belongs to God, and wants love as its daily food. Kill me! Oh, what is death after such words as yours? But it was not I. I would never have done it.”

They stood, cut off from all the human race. If they were cruel to one another, who would be kind to them? Besides, thought Giovanni, there was still a hope of his returning within the limits of ordinary nature, and leading Beatrice by the hand? O, weak, and selfish, and unworthy man, that could dream of an earthly happiness, after such deep love had been shattered as was Beatrice’s love by Giovanni’s cruel words! No, no; there could be no such hope. She must pass heavily, with that broken heart, across the borders of Time – she must forget her grief in the light of immortality.

But Giovanni did not know it.

“Dear Beatrice,” said he, approaching her, while she shrank away as always at his approach, but now with a different impulse, “dearest Beatrice, our fate is not yet so desperate. Look! there is a medicine, made up of ingredients opposite to those by which your awful father has brought this trouble upon you and me. Let us take it together and be saved!”

“Give it me!” said Beatrice. She added, “I will drink it; wait for the result.”

She put Baglioni’s antidote to her lips; and, at the same moment, the figure of Rappaccini emerged from the portal and came slowly towards the marble fountain. As he came near, the pale man of science seemed to gaze with a triumphant expression at the beautiful young man and girl, as might an artist who had spent his life in painting a picture and finally was satisfied with his success. He paused; he held his hands over them; and those were the same hands that had thrown poison into their veins. Giovanni trembled. Beatrice pressed her hand upon her heart.

“My daughter,” said Rappaccini, “you are no longer lonely in the world. Pluck one of those flowers from your sister shrub and let your bridegroom wear it. It will not harm him now. My science and the sympathy between you and him have so changed his system that he now is different from common men, as you are from ordinary women. Pass on through the world, most dear to one another and dreadful to all others!”

“My father,” said Beatrice, weakly, – and still as she spoke she kept her hand upon her heart, “why did you bring this doom upon your child?”

“Doom!” exclaimed Rappaccini. “What do you mean, foolish girl? Do you call doom the power that no enemy has – doom, to be as terrible as you are beautiful? Would you prefer to be a weak woman?”

“I would prefer to be loved, not feared,” murmured Beatrice, sinking down upon the ground. “But now it does not matter. I am going, father, where the evil which you put in me will pass away like a dream – like the fragrance of these poisonous flowers, which will no longer poison my breath among the flowers of Eden. Farewell, Giovanni! Your words of hatred are like lead within my heart; but they, too, will fall away as I go up. Oh, was there not, from the first, more poison in your nature than in mine?”

To Beatrice, for whom poison had been life, the powerful antidote was death; and thus the poor victim of man’s zeal for science died there, at the feet of her father and Giovanni.

When William Marchmill had finished looking for lodgings at the well-known watering-place of Solentsea in Upper Wessex,[37] he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had walked along the shore, and Marchmill followed them there.

“How far you’ve gone!” Marchmill said, when he came up to his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children were considerably further ahead with the nurse.

Mrs. Marchmill started out of the thoughts into which the book had thrown her. “Yes,” she said, “you’ve been such a long time. I was tired of staying in the hotel.”

“Well, I have had trouble to find rooms. Will you come and see if what I’ve chosen on will do?[38] There is not much room, I am afraid; but I couldn’t find anything better. The town is rather full.”

The couple left the children and nurse to continue their walk, and went back together.

Well-balanced in age, matched in personal appearance, and having the same domestic requirements, this couple differed in temper, though even here they did not often clash. They did not have common tastes. Marchmill considered his wife’s likes and interests silly; she considered his sordid and material. The husband was a manufacturer of weapons in a city in the north, and his soul was in that business always; the lady was sensitive and romantic. Ella, shrank from detailed knowledge of her husband’s business whenever she thought that everything he manufactured was for the destruction of life. She could only recover her balance by thinking that some, at least, of his weapons were sooner or later used for killing animals almost as cruel to others in their species as human beings were to theirs.

She had never considered this occupation of his as any objection to having him for a husband. Indeed, the necessity of getting married at all cost, which all good mothers teach, kept her from thinking of it at all till she had married William and had passed the honeymoon. Then, like a person who has stumbled upon something in the dark, she wondered what she had got; mentally walked round it, estimated it; whether it was rare or common; contained gold, silver, or lead; was everything to her or nothing.

She came to some vague conclusions, and since then had pitied her husband for want of refinement, pitying herself, and daydreaming, which perhaps would not much have disturbed William if he had known of it.

Her figure was small, elegant, she was dark-eyed, and quick in movement. Her husband was a tall, long-faced man, with a brown beard; he was, it must be added, usually kind and tolerant to her. He spoke short sentences, and was highly satisfied that weapons were a necessity.

Husband and wife walked till they had reached a house, which stood in a terrace facing the sea, and had a small garden in front, stone steps led up to the porch.

The landlady, who had been watching for the gentleman’s return, met them and showed the rooms. Mrs. Marchmill said that she liked the house; but as it was small, they would take it only if they could have all the rooms.

The landlady was disappointed. She wanted the visitors to be her tenants very badly, she said. But unfortunately two of the rooms were occupied permanently by a bachelor gentleman. As he kept on his apartment all the year round and was a very nice and interesting young man, who gave no trouble, she did not like to turn him out for a month because of them. “Perhaps, however,” she added, “he might offer to go for some time.”

They would not hear of this,[39] and went back to the hotel to look for other lodgings. Hardly had they sat down to tea[40] when the landlady called. Her gentleman, she said, had offered to give up his rooms for three or four weeks.

“It is very kind, but we won’t inconvenience him in that way,” said the Marchmills.

“O, it won’t inconvenience him!” said the landlady. “You see, he’s a different sort of young man from most – dreamy, solitary, rather melancholy – and he cares more to be here when there’s not a soul in the place, than now in the season. He’s going to a little cottage on the Island opposite, for a change.”

The Marchmill family moved into the house next day, and it seemed to suit them very well. After lunch Mr. Marchmill walked toward the pier, and Mrs. Marchmill, having sent the children to the shore, looked round the rooms more closely.

In the small back sitting room, which had been the young bachelor’s, she found a lot of books.

“I’ll make this my own little room,” said Mrs. Marchmill to the landlady, “because the books are here. By the way, the person who has left seems to have very many. He won’t mind my reading some of them, Mrs. Hooper, I hope?”

“O, dear no, ma’am. Yes, he has a good many. You see, he is a poet – yes, really a poet – and he has a little income of his own, which is enough to write verses on.”

“A Poet! O, I did not know that.”

Mrs. Marchmill opened one of the books, and saw the owner’s name written on the title-page. “Dear me!” she continued; “I know his name very well – Robert Trewe – of course I do; and his writings! And it is his rooms we have taken, and him we have turned out of his home?”

Ella Marchmill, sitting down alone a few minutes later, thought with interested surprise of Robert Trewe. Her own history will best explain that interest. Herself the only daughter of a writer, she had during the last year or two begun writing poems, in an attempt to find to express her painful emotions caused by the routine of daily life and of bearing children to a weapons manufacturer. These poems, under male pseudonym, had appeared in various small magazines, and in two cases in rather well-known ones. In one of the well-known ones the page which had her poem at the bottom had at the top a few verses by this very man, Robert Trewe. After that Ella, otherwise “John Ivy,” had watched with much attention the appearance of verse of Robert Trewe.

Trewe’s verse contrasted with that of most other poets. With sad and hopeless envy Ella Marchmill often read the rival poet’s work, always so much stronger than her own lines. She imitated him, and her inability to reach his level sent her into fits of depression. Months passed away thus, till she observed that Trewe had collected his pieces into a volume, which was published, and was praised, and had a sale quite sufficient to pay for the printing.

This suggested to John Ivy the idea of collecting her pieces also and making up a book of her verses. Her husband paid for the publication; a few reviews noticed her poor little volume; but nobody talked of it, nobody bought it.

The author’s thoughts were interrupted by the discovery that she was going to have a third child, and her failure as a poet had perhaps less effect upon her mind than it might have done if she had more time for thinking. But, though less than a poet of her century, Ella was more than a mother and wife, and lately she had begun to feel the old dissatisfaction once more. And now by chance she found herself in the rooms of Robert Trewe.

She rose from her chair and searched the rooms with the interest of a fellow-tradesman.[41] Yes, the volume of his verse was among the rest. Though quite familiar with its contents, she read it here as if it spoke aloud to her, then called up Mrs. Hooper, the landlady, and asked her again about the young man.

“Well, I’m sure you’d be interested in him, ma’am, if you could see him, only he’s so shy that I don’t suppose you will.” Mrs. Hooper was not surprised at Mrs. Marchmill’s interest in her tenant. “Lived here long? Yes, nearly two years. He keeps on his rooms even when he’s not here: the soft air of this place suits him, and he likes to be able to come back at any time. He is mostly writing or reading, and doesn’t see many people, though he is such a good, kind young fellow that people would only be too glad to be friendly with him if they knew him. You don’t meet kind-hearted people every day.”

“Ah, he’s kind-hearted… and good.”

“Yes. ‘Mr. Trewe,’ I say to him sometimes, ‘you are rather out of spirits.’ ‘Well, I am, Mrs. Hooper,’ he’ll say. ‘Why not take a little change?’ I ask. Then in a day or two he’ll say that he will take a trip to Paris, or Norway, or somewhere; and he comes back all the better for it.[42]”

“Ah, indeed! His is sensitive, no doubt.”

“Yes. Still he’s odd in some things… But we get on very well.”

This was the beginning of a series of conversations about the poet as the days went on. On one of these occasions Mrs. Hooper drew Ella’s attention to what she had not noticed before: lines in pencil on the wallpaper behind the curtains at the head of the bed.

“O! let me look,” said Mrs. Marchmill, as she bent her pretty face close to the wall.

“These,” said Mrs. Hooper, “are the very beginnings and first thoughts of his verses. He has tried to rub most of them out, but you can read them still. I believe that he wakes up in the night, you know, with some line in his head, and puts it down there on the wall not to forget it by the morning. Some of these very lines you see here I have seen afterwards in the magazines. Some are newer; indeed, I have not seen that one before. I think it was done only a few days ago.”

“O, yes!..”

Ella Marchmill flushed without knowing why, and suddenly wished Mrs. Hooper to go away. She realised it was personal interest rather than literary and wanted to read the lines alone.

Ella’s husband found it much pleasanter to go sailing without his wife, who was a bad sailor,[43] than with her. Thus, while the manufacturer got a great deal of change and sea-air, the life of Ella was monotonous enough, she spent some hours each day in bathing and walking up and down the shore. But the poetic impulse grew strong, she was burnt by an inner flame and hardly noticed what was going on around her.

She had read till she knew by heart Trewe’s last little volume of verses, and spent a great deal of time in attempting to write something like that, till, in her failure, she burst into tears. The personal element in the magnetic attraction Mr. Trewe had for her was so much stronger than the intellectual one and she could not understand it. She lived among his things and his verses; but he was a man she had never seen.

In the natural way of passion, her husband’s love for her had not survived, except in the form of friendship, any more than her own for him. Being a woman of strong emotions, she required something to support her feelings. By chance she got this material, which was far better than chance usually offers.

One day the children had been playing hide-and-seek in a closet, where they took a coat. Mrs. Hooper explained that it belonged to Mr. Trewe, and put it in the closet again. Ella went later in the afternoon, when nobody was in that part of the house, opened the closet, took the coat, and put it on, with the hat belonging to it.

“It might inspire me to rival him, even though he is a genius!” she said.

Her eyes always grew wet when she thought like that, and she turned to look at herself in the glass. His heart had beaten inside that coat, and his brain had worked under that hat at levels of thought she would never reach. The idea of her weakness beside him made her feel quite sick. Before she took the things off her the door opened, and her husband entered the room.

“What the devil – ”

She blushed, and took them off.

“I found them in the closet here,” she said, “and put them on as a joke. What else do I have to do? You are always away!”

“Always away? Well…”

That evening she had a further talk with the landlady, who might herself have some tender feelings for the poet, so ready was she to speak about him.

“You are interested in Mr. Trewe, I know, ma’am,” she said; “and he has just sent a note to say that he is going to call tomorrow afternoon to look up some books of his that he wants. May he take them from your room?”

“O, yes!”

“You could very well meet Mr. Trewe then, if you’d like to!”

She went to bed dreaming about him.

Next morning her husband observed: “I’ve been thinking of what you said, Ell: that I have gone about a good deal and left you without much attention. Perhaps it’s true. Today I’ll take you with me on board the yacht.”

For the first time in her life Ella was not glad at such an offer. She stood thinking. The desire to see the poet she was now in love with did not let her accept the offer.

“I don’t want to go,” she said to herself. “I can’t bear to be away! And I won’t go.”

She told her husband that she had changed her mind and would rather stay at home.[44] He did not mind, and went away.

For the rest of the day the house was quiet, as the children had gone out to the shore. There was a knock at the door.

Mrs. Marchmill did not hear any servant go to answer it, and she became impatient. The books were in the room where she sat; but nobody came up. She rang the bell.

“There is some person waiting at the door,” she said.

“O, no, ma’am. He’s gone long ago. I answered it,” the servant replied, and Mrs. Hooper came in herself.

“So disappointing!” she said. “Mr. Trewe not coming after all!”

“But I heard him knock!”

“No; that was somebody looking for lodgings. I tell you that Mr. Trewe sent a note just before lunch to say I needn’t get any tea for him, as he would not require the books, and wouldn’t come to take them.”

Ella was miserable, and for a long time could not even re-read his verse, so heartbroken she was. When the children came in, and ran up to her to tell her of their adventures, she could not feel that she cared about them half as much as usual.

“Mrs. Hooper, have you a photograph of – the gentleman who lived here?” She was shy in mentioning his name.

“Why, yes. It’s in the frame in your own bedroom, ma’am.”

“No; the Royal Duke and Duchess are in that.”

“Yes, but he’s behind them. As he went away he said: “Cover me up from those strangers that are coming. I don’t want them to look at me, and I am sure they won’t want me to look at them.” So I put the Duke and Duchess in front of him. If you take ’em out you’ll see him under. Lord, ma’am, he wouldn’t mind if he knew it! He didn’t think the next tenant would be such an attractive lady as you.”

“Is he handsome?” she asked timidly.

“I call him so. Some, perhaps, wouldn’t. I think you would, though some would say he’s more striking than handsome; a large-eyed thoughtful fellow, you know, such as you’d expect a poet to be.”

“How old is he?”

“Several years older than yourself, ma’am; about thirty-one or two, I think.”

Ella was a few months over thirty herself; but she did not look so much. Though quite young, she was entering that stage of life in which emotional women begin to suspect that last love may be stronger than first love. She thought of Mrs. Hooper’s remark, and said no more about age.

Just then a telegram was brought up. It came from her husband, who had gone down the Channel[45] with his friends in the yacht, and would not be able to get back till next day.

After her light dinner Ella walked about the shore with the children, thinking of the yet uncovered photograph in her room. On learning[46] that her husband was to be absent that night she had not rushed upstairs and opened the picture-frame, but waited till she could be alone, and the occasion could be made more romantic by silence, candles, sea and stars outside.

The children had been sent to bed, and Ella soon followed, though it was not yet ten o’clock. She now made her preparations, reading several pages of Trewe’s tenderest verses. Next she took the portrait-frame to the light, opened the back, and took out the portrait.

It was a striking face. The large dark eyes described by the landlady showed his misery, they looked out from beneath well-shaped brows as if they were reading your face, and were not happy at what they saw.

Ella murmured in her tenderest tone: “And it’s you who’ve so cruelly beaten me so many times!”

Her eyes filled with tears, and she touched the photograph with her lips. Then she laughed nervously.

She thought how wicked she was, a woman having a husband and three children, to let herself think of a stranger in this manner. No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the same thoughts and feelings as hers.

“He’s nearer my soul, he’s closer to real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said.

She laid his book and picture on the table and re-read those of Robert Trewe’s verses which she had marked from time to time as most touching and true. Then she read the lines on the wallpaper beside her head. There they were – phrases, beginnings and middles of lines, ideas so intense, so sweet, that it seemed as if she heard his breath.

“Forms more real than living man” were, no doubt, the thoughts which had come to him at night, when he could let himself have no fear of criticism. And now her hair was where his arm had been; she was sleeping on a poet’s lips.

While she was dreaming, she heard her husband’s heavy step on the stairs.

“Ell, where are you?”

With an instinctive objection to let her husband know what she had been doing, she put the photograph under the pillow just as he opened the door.

“O, I beg your pardon,” said William Marchmill. “Have you a headache? I am afraid I have disturbed you.”

“No, I’ve not got a headache,” said she. “Why did you come?”

“Well, we found we could get back in very good time after all, and I didn’t want to make another day of it, because of going somewhere else tomorrow.”

“Shall I come down again?”

“O, no. I’m as tired as a dog. I’ve had a good dinner, and I shall go to bed. I want to get out at six o’clock tomorrow if I can… I shan’t disturb you by my getting up; it will be long before you get up.” And he came into the room.

While her eyes followed his movements, Ella softly pushed the photograph further out of sight.

“Sure you’re not ill?” he asked, bending over her.

“No, only wicked!”

“Never mind that.[47]” And he kissed her. “I wanted to be with you tonight.”

Next morning Marchmill woke up muttering to himself. “What the deuce is this that’s been crackling under me so?[48]” He searched round him and found something. Through her half-opened eyes Ella saw it was Mr. Trewe.

“Well, I’m damned!” her husband exclaimed.

“What, dear?” said she.

“Ha! ha!”

“What do you mean?”

“Some fellow’s photograph – a friend of our landlady’s, I suppose. I wonder how it came here.”

“I was looking at it yesterday, and it must have dropped then.”

“O, he’s a friend of yours?”

“He’s a clever man!” she said, her gentle voice trembling. “He is a rising poet – the gentleman who had two of these rooms before we came, though I’ve never seen him.”

“How do you know, if you’ve never seen him?”

“Mrs. Hooper told me when she showed me the photograph.”

“O, well, I must be off. I shall be home rather early. Sorry I can’t take you today dear.”

That day Mrs. Marchmill asked if Mr. Trewe would call at any other time.

“Yes,” said Mrs. Hooper. “He’s coming this week to stay with a friend near here till you leave. He’ll be sure to call.[49]”

Marchmill returned quite early in the afternoon; and, opening some letters which had arrived in his absence, declared suddenly that he and his family would have to leave a week earlier than they had expected to do – in three days.

“Can we stay a week longer?” she asked. “I like it here.”

“I don’t.”

“Then you might leave me and the children!”

“And I’ll have to come for you! No: we’ll all return together; and we’ll go to North Wales or Brighton a little later on. Besides, you’ve three days more.”

It seemed to be her doom not to meet the man for whose talent she had an admiration. Yet she decided to make a last effort; and having learned from her landlady that Trewe was living in a lonely place not far from the town on the Island opposite, she crossed over in the boat from the pier the following afternoon.

What a useless journey it was! Ella did not know where the house stood, and when she thought she had found it, and asked a passer-by if he lived there, the answer was that he did not know. And if he lived there, how could she call upon him? How crazy he would think her. She returned to the town, reaching home for dinner.

At the last moment, unexpectedly, her husband said that he would have no objection to her and the children staying on till the end of the week, since she wished to do so, if she felt herself able to get home without him; and Marchmill went off the next morning alone.

But the week passed, and Trewe did not call.

On Saturday morning the remaining members of the Marchmill family left the place which had produced such strong emotions in her. On the train, heavy-hearted, she tried to read, and cried instead.

Mr. Marchmill was in business, and he and his family lived in a large new house, which stood in rather large grounds a few miles outside the city. Ella’s life was lonely here; and she had a lot of time for lyric composition. She had hardly got back when she saw a piece by Robert Trewe in her favourite magazine, which must have been written almost immediately before her visit to Solentsea, for it contained the very lines she had seen on the wallpaper by the bed, and Mrs. Hooper had declared they were new. Ella seized a pen impulsively and wrote to him as a brother-poet, using the name of John Ivy, congratulating him in her letter on his triumphant expression of thoughts that moved his soul.

To this address there came an answer in a few days – a note, in which the young poet wrote that, though he did not know Mr. Ivy’s verse very well, he recalled some very promising pieces of his; that he was glad to get a letter from Mr. Ivy, and would certainly look with much interest for his verse in the future.

He had replied; he had written to her with his own hand from that very room she knew so well, for he was now back again in his lodgings.

The correspondence was continued for two months or more, Ella Marchmill sending him from time to time some of her best pieces, which he very kindly accepted, though he did not say he read them, and he did not send her any of his own in return. Ella would have been more hurt at this if she had not known that Trewe thought that she was a man.

Yet the situation was unsatisfactory. Something told her that, if he only saw her, matters would be different. She thought of telling him she was a woman, to begin with, but something happened to make it unnecessary. A friend of her husband’s, the editor of the most important newspaper in their city, who was having dinner with them one day, observed during their conversation about the poet that his (the editor’s) brother the landscape-painter was a friend of Mr. Trewe’s, and that the two men were at that very moment in Wales together.

Ella knew the editor’s brother. The next morning she sat down and wrote, inviting him to stay at her house for a short time on his way back, and to bring with him, if possible, his companion Mr. Trewe, whom she was anxious to meet. The answer arrived after some days. Her correspondent and his friend Trewe accepted her invitation on their way to the south, which would be on such and such a day in the following week.

Ella was happy. Her scheme had succeeded; her beloved though as yet unseen was coming.[50]

But it was necessary to consider the details of receiving him. This she did most carefully, and waited for the day of his visit.

It was about five in the afternoon when she heard a ring at the door and the editor’s brother’s voice in the hall. Although she was a poetess, she took the trouble to dress in a fashionable robe of rich material, in the Greek style just then in fashion among ladies of an artistic and romantic temper, which had been made by Ella’s Bond Street dressmaker when she was last in London. Her visitor entered the room. She looked behind him; nobody else came through the door. Where, in the name of the God, was Robert Trewe?

“O, I’m sorry,” said the painter, after the first words had been spoken. “Trewe is an odd fellow, you know, Mrs. Marchmill. He said he’d come; then he said he couldn’t. He’s rather dirty. We’ve been walking a few miles, you know; and he wanted to get home.”

“He – he’s not coming?”

“He’s not; and he asked me to make his apologies.”

She wanted to run away from this dreadful bore and cry her eyes out.

“When did you p-p-part from him?” she asked.

“Just now, in the road over there.”

“What! he has actually gone past my gates?”

“Yes. When we got to them – handsome gates they are, too – when we came to them we stopped, talking there a little while, and then he wished me goodbye and went on. The truth is, he’s a little depressed just now, and doesn’t want to see anybody. He’s a very good fellow, and a warm friend, but a little gloomy sometimes; he thinks too much of things. His poetry is rather too erotic and passionate, you know, for some tastes; and he has been upset by the Review that was published yesterday; he saw a copy of it at the station by accident. Perhaps you’ve read it?”

“No.”

“So much the better.[51] O, it is not worth thinking of; just one of those articles written to order. But he’s upset by it. That’s just Trewe’s weak point. He lives so much by himself that these things affect him much more than they would if he were in the middle of fashionable or commercial life. So he didn’t come here, making the excuse that it all looked so new and monied.[52]”

“But he knows there is sympathy here! Has he never said anything about getting letters from this address?”

“Yes, yes, he has, from John Ivy – perhaps a relative of yours, he thought, visiting here at the time?”

“Did he – like Ivy, did he say?”

“Well, I don’t think that he took any great interest in Ivy.”

“Or in his poems?”

“Or in his poems – so far as I know.[53]”

Robert Trewe took no interest in her house, in her poems, or in their writer.

The landscape-painter never realised from her conversation that it was only Trewe she wanted, and not himself.

The painter had been gone only a day or two when, while sitting upstairs alone one morning, she looked through the London paper, and read the following paragraph:

The paper also published his letter to a friend:

Ella sat for a while motionless, then rushed into her room and fell upon her face on the bed.

Her grief shook her to pieces; and she lay in sorrow for more than an hour. Broken words came every now and then[54] from her: “O, if he had only known of me – known of me – me!.. O, if I had only once met him – only once; and kissed him – let him know how I loved him! Perhaps it would have saved his dear life!… But no – it was not allowed! God did not allow; and happiness was not for him and me!”

From this moment on her life was barren.

She wrote to the landlady at Solentsea, and informing Mrs. Hooper that Mrs. Marchmill had seen in the papers the sad account of the poet’s death, and as she had been much interested in Mr. Trewe during her stay at Solentsea, she asked Mrs. Hooper to obtain a small portion of his hair, and send it her as a memorial of him, as also the photograph that was in the frame.

By the return-post a letter arrived containing what had been asked. Ella cried over the portrait; she tied the lock of hair with white ribbon and put in her bosom, and she kissed it every now and then.

“What’s the matter?” said her husband, looking up from his newspaper on one of these occasions. “Crying over something? A lock of hair? Whose is it?”

“He’s dead!” she murmured.

“Who?”

“I don’t want to tell you, Will, just now!” she said.

“O, all right.”

He walked away; and when he got down to his factory in the city Marchmill thought of it again.

He, too, was aware that a suicide had taken place recently at the house where they had stayed at Solentsea. Having seen the volume of poems in his wife’s hand, and heard fragments of the landlady’s conversation about Trewe when they were her tenants, he at once said to himself, “Why of course it’s he! How the devil did she get to know him?[55]”

Then he went on with his daily affairs. By this time Ella at home had made a decision to attend the funeral. Thinking very little now what her husband or any one else might think of her, she wrote Marchmill a note, saying that she was called away for the afternoon and evening, but would return on the following morning. This she left on his desk, and having given the same information to the servants, went out of the house on foot.

When Mr. Marchmill reached home early in the afternoon the servants looked anxious. The nurse told him that her mistress’s sadness during the past few days had been such that she feared she had gone out to drown herself. Marchmill thought that she had not done that. He drove to the railway-station, and took a ticket for Solentsea.

It was dark when he reached the place. He asked the way to the cemetery, and soon reached it. The man told him where one or two funerals on the day had taken place. He walked in the direction and saw someone beside a newly made grave. She heard him, and sprang up.

“Ell, how silly this is!” he said indignantly. “Running away from home – I’ve never heard such a thing! How could you, a married woman with three children and a fourth coming, go losing your head like this over a dead lover!”

She did not answer.

“I hope it didn’t go far between you and him. I won’t have any more of this sort of thing; do you hear?”

“Very well,” she said.

He conducted her out of the cemetery. It was impossible to get back that night; and he took her to a miserable little hotel close to the station which they left early in the morning.

The months passed, and neither of them dared start a conversation about this episode. Ella seemed to be often sad. The time was approaching when she would have the fourth baby.

“I don’t think I shall get over it this time!” she said one day.

“Pooh! what childish fear! Why shouldn’t it be as well now as ever?[56]”

She shook her head. “I feel almost sure I am going to die; and I should be glad, if it were not for[57] Nelly, and Frank, and Tiny.”

“And me!”

“You’ll soon find somebody to fill my place,” she murmured, with a sad smile. “I am not going to get over it this time,” she repeated. “Something tells me I shan’t.”

This view of the situation was rather a bad beginning; and, in fact, six weeks later, in May, she was lying in her room, pulseless and bloodless, and the baby for whose unnecessary life she was slowly parting with her own was fat and well. Just before her death she spoke to Marchmill softly:

“Will, I want to speak to you – about you know what – that time we visited Solentsea. I can’t tell how I could forget you so, my husband! But I thought you were unkind; that you neglected me; that you weren’t up to my intellectual level, while he was, and far above it – ”

She could get no further then; and she died a few hours later, without having said anything more to her husband about her love for the poet.

But when she had been dead a couple of years it happened one day that, in turning over some forgotten papers that he wished to destroy before his second wife entered the house, William Marchmill found a lock of hair in an envelope, with the photograph of the poet, and a date was written on the back in his wife’s hand. It was the time they had spent at Solentsea.

Marchmill looked long and thoughtfully at the hair and portrait, for something struck him. Bringing the little boy who had been the death of his mother, now a noisy toddler, he took him on his knee, held the lock of hair against the child’s head, and set up the photograph on the table behind, so that he could closely compare the features of the two faces. By a trick of Nature there was undoubtedly strong likeness to the man Ella had never seen; the dreamy expression of the poet’s face was like the child’s, and the hair was of the same colour.

“I’m damned if I didn’t think so![58]» murmured Marchmill. “Then she had an affair with that fellow at the lodgings! Let me see: the dates – the second week in August… the third week in May. Yes… yes… Get away, you poor little brat! You are nothing to me!”

Kennedy is a country doctor, and lives in Colebrook, on the shores of Eastbay. The High Street[59] of the little town stretches along the wall which defends it from the sea. Beyond the sea-wall there are miles of the barren beach, with the village of Brenzett standing across the water; and still further out the column of a lighthouse, looking in the distance no bigger than a pencil, marks the end of the land. The country at the back of Brenzett is low and flat, but the bay is fairly well sheltered from the seas, and occasionally a big ship stops a mile and a half to the north from the “Ship Inn” in Brenzett.

If you walk from the Colebrook Church up the road, you will see a broad valley. In this valley with Brenzett, Colebrook and Darnford, the market town fourteen miles away, lies the practice of my friend Kennedy. He had begun life as surgeon in the Navy, and afterwards was the companion of a famous traveler. His papers on the fauna and flora made him known to scientific societies. And now he had come to a country practice.

Many years ago, he invited me to stay with him. I came readily, and as he could not neglect his patients to keep me company, he took me on his rounds – thirty miles or so of an afternoon, sometimes. I waited for him on the roads; the horse reached after the leafy branches, and, sitting in the dogcart, I could hear Kennedy’s laugh through the half-open door left open of some cottage. He had the talent of making people talk to him freely, and a patience in listening to their tales.

One day, as we were leaving a large village, I saw on our left a low, black cottage, with some roses climbing on the porch. Kennedy pulled up. A woman, in full sunlight, was throwing a dripping blanket over a line stretched between two old apple-trees. The doctor raised his voice over the hedge: “How’s your child, Amy?”

I had the time to see her dull face, red, as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped, the squat figure, the thin brown hair drawn into a knot at the back of the head. She looked quite young. Her voice sounded low and timid.

“He’s well, thank you.”

We trotted again. “A young patient of yours,” I said; and the doctor muttered, “Her husband used to be.[60]”

“She seems a dull creature,” I remarked.

“Yes,” said Kennedy. “She is very passive. It’s enough to look at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind – an inertness that is safe from all the surprises of imagination. And yet which of us is safe? She had enough imagination to fall in love. She’s the daughter of Isaac Foster, who from a small farmer has sunk into a shepherd. His misfortunes began from his runaway marriage with the cook of his father, who passionately struck his name off his will.[61]”

Kennedy continued.

“She’s the eldest of a large family. At the age of fifteen they put her out to service[62] at the New Barns Farm. I attended Mrs. Smith, and saw that girl there for the first time. Mrs. Smith, a kind person with a sharp nose, made her put on a black dress every afternoon. I don’t know what made me notice her at all. There are faces that call your attention by a curious want of definiteness.[63] When sharply spoken to,[64] she was able to lose her head at once; but her heart was very kind. She had never expressed a dislike for anybody, and she was tender to every living creature. She was devoted to Mrs. Smith, to Mr. Smith, to their dogs, cats, canaries, to Mrs. Smith’s gray parrot. Nevertheless, when that outlandish bird, attacked by the cat, shrieked for help in human accents, she ran out into the yard stopping her ears, and did not prevent the crime. For Mrs. Smith this was another evidence of her stupidity. Her short-sighted eyes would swim with pity[65] for a poor mouse in a trap, and she had been seen once by some boys on her knees in the wet grass helping a toad in difficulties. There is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination. She had some. She had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity. She fell in love under circumstances that leave no room for doubt[66] about it; for you need imagination to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.

“How this ability came to her is a mystery. She was born in the village, and had never been further away from it than Colebrook or perhaps Darnford. She lived for four years with the Smiths. New Barns is an isolated farmhouse a mile away from the road, and she was content to look day after day at the same fields and hills; at the trees and the hedges; at the faces of the four men about the farm, always the same – day after day, month after month, year after year. She never showed a desire for conversation, and, as it seemed to me, she did not know how to smile. Sometimes of a fine Sunday afternoon she would put on her best dress, a pair of stout boots, a large gray hat with a black feather, climb over two hills, walk over three fields and along two hundred yards of road – never further. There stood Foster’s cottage. She would help her mother to give their tea to the younger children, wash up, kiss the little ones, and go back to the farm. That was all. All the rest, all the change, all the relaxation. She never seemed to want anything more. And then she fell in love. She fell in love silently, obstinately – perhaps helplessly. It came slowly, but when it came it worked like a powerful charm…”

With the sun hanging low in the west, the men we met walked past slow and unsmiling.

“Yes,” said the doctor to my remark about them, “but here on this same road, among these heavy men you could see a light man with long legs and arms, straight like a pine, and vigorous as though the heart within him was beating faster than in others. Perhaps it was by the contrast, but when he was passing one of these villagers here, his feet did not seem to me to touch the road. I could notice him at a great distance. And he had lustrous black eyes. He was so different from the men around that, with his freedom of movement, his soft – a little startled – glance and his olive complexion. He came from there.”

The doctor pointed at the sea.

“Shipwrecked in the bay?” I said.

“Yes; he was a poor emigrant from Central Europe bound to America and washed ashore[67] here in a storm. And as for him, England was an unknown country. It was some time before he learned its name. He climbed in the dark over the sea-wall, and struggled out into a field. Later on, in his broken English that was like the speech of a young child, he told me himself that he put his trust in God, believing he was no longer in this world. And – he would add – how was he to know? He made his way against the rain and the wind on all fours,[68] and crawled at last among some sheep under the hedge. They ran off in all directions, bleating in the darkness, and he welcomed the first familiar sound he heard on this shore. It must have been two in the morning then. And this is all we know of his landing, though he did not arrive alone. Only his company did not begin to come ashore till much later in the day…”

We trotted down the hill. Then turning into the High Street, we arrived home.

Late in the evening Kennedy returned to the story. Smoking his pipe, he walked the long room from end to end. A reading-lamp concentrated all its light upon the papers on his desk; and, sitting by the open window, I saw the sea lying motionless under the moon.

“He did not know the name of his ship. Indeed, later we discovered he did not even know that ships had names – ‘like Christian people’; and when, one day, from the top of the Talfourd Hill, he saw the sea lying open before him, there was wild surprise in his eyes, as though he had never seen such a sight before. And probably he had not. As far as I could make out,[69] he had been brought together with many others on board an emigrant-ship lying at the mouth of the Elbe, too bewildered to see his surroundings, too tired to see anything. They were driven below and shut up from the very start. It was a low wooden dwelling – he would say – with wooden beams overhead, like the houses in his country, but you went into it down a ladder. It was very large, very cold and damp, with places like wooden boxes where people had to sleep, one above another, and it kept on rocking[70] all the time. He got into one of these boxes and laid down there in the clothes in which he had left his home many days before, keeping his bundle and his stick by his side. People groaned, children cried, water dripped, the lights went out, the walls of the place creaked, and everything was shaken so that in his little box he did not dare lift his head. He had lost touch with his only companion (a young man from the same valley, he said), and all the time a great noise of wind went on outside and heavy blows fell – boom! boom! He was awfully sick, he even neglected his prayers. Besides, he could not tell whether it was morning or evening. It seemed always to be night in that place.

“Before that he had been travelling a long, long time on the railway. He looked out of the window, which had a wonderfully clear glass in it, and the trees, the houses, the fields, and the long roads seemed to fly round and round about him till his head swam. He gave me to understand that he had seen a lot of people – whole nations – all dressed in such clothes as the rich[71] wear. Once he was made to get out of the carriage, and slept through a night on a bench in a house with his bundle under his head; and once for many hours he had to sit on a floor with his bundle between his feet. There was a roof over him, which seemed made of glass, and was so high that the tallest mountain-pine he had ever seen would have had room to grow under it. Steam-machines[72] rolled in at one end and out at the other. He could not give me an idea of how large and full of noise and smoke the place was, but someone had told him it was called Berlin. Then they rang a bell, and another steam-machine came in, and again he was taken on and on through a land without a single hill anywhere. One more night he spent shut up in a building like a good stable among a lot of men, of whom not one could understand a single word he said. In the morning they were all led down to the shores of a very broad muddy river, flowing not between hills but between houses that seemed very big. There was a steam-machine that went on the water, and they all stood upon it, only now there were with them many women and children who made much noise. A cold rain fell, the wind blew in his face; he was wet through. He and the young man from the same valley took each other by the hand.

“They thought they were being taken to America straight away, but suddenly the steam-machine bumped against the side of a thing like a house on the water. This was the ship that was going to swim all the way to America. He went up on his hands and knees fearing to fall into the water below. He got separated from his companion, and when he got into the bottom of that ship his heart sank.

“It was then also, as he told me, that he lost contact with one of those three men who the summer before had been going about through all the little towns in his country. They would arrive on market days in a peasant’s cart, and would set up an office in an inn. There were three of them; and they had red collars round their necks and gold lace on their sleeves like Government officials. They sat behind a long table; and in the next room, so that the common people shouldn’t hear, they kept a telegraph machine, through which they could talk to the Emperor of America. The young men of the mountains would come up to the table asking many questions, for there was work all the year round at three dollars a day in America, and no military service to do.

“But the American Kaiser would not take everybody. Oh, no! He himself had a great difficulty in getting accepted,[73] and the man in uniform had to go out of the room several times to work the telegraph for him. The American Kaiser engaged him at last at three dollars, for he was young and strong. Besides, those only who had some money could be taken. There were some who sold their huts and their land because it cost a lot of money to get to America; but you had three dollars a day, and if you were clever you could find places where true gold could be picked up on the ground. His father’s house was getting over full.[74] Two of his brothers were married and had children. He promised to send money home from America by post twice a year. His father sold an old cow, a pair of mountain ponies, and a plot of good pasture land in order to pay the people of the ship that took men to America to get rich in a short time.

“He must have been a real adventurer at heart! I have been telling you more or less in my own words what I learned fragmentarily in two or three years, during which I often had an opportunity of a friendly chat with him. He told me this story of his adventure with many smiles and lively glances of black eyes, at first in a sort of baby-talk, then, as he learned the language, with great fluency. No doubt he must have been awfully sea-sick and awfully unhappy – this soft and passionate adventurer with a highly sensitive nature. Through the rumors of the countryside, which lasted for many days after his arrival, we know that the fishermen of West Colebrook had been disturbed by heavy knocks against the walls of cottages, and by a voice crying strange words in the night. Several of them looked out even, but, no doubt, he had fled hearing their angry voices speaking to each other in the darkness. It was he, no doubt, who early the following morning was seen lying on the roadside grass under the rain. Later in the day, some children came running into school at Norton in such a fear that the schoolmistress went out and spoke indignantly to a ‘horrid-looking man’ on the road. He listened to her, hanging his head, and then suddenly ran off. The driver of Mr. Bradley’s milk-cart made no secret of it that he had lashed with his whip at a hairy sort of gypsy fellow,[75] right over the face, that made him drop down in the mud. Maybe that in his desperate attempts to get help, and in his need to get in touch with someone, the poor devil had tried to stop the cart. Also three boys said afterwards they had thrown stones at a funny tramp, all wet and muddy. All this was the talk of three villages for days. Mrs. Finn (the wife of Smith’s wagoner) said that she had seen run straight at her, talking aloud in a voice that was enough to make one die of fear. Having the baby with her, Mrs. Finn called out to him to go away, and as he came nearer, she hit him with her umbrella over the head and ran like the wind with the baby as far as the first house in the village. She stopped then, out of breath, and spoke to old Lewis; and the old man looked where she pointed. Together they followed with their eyes the figure of the man running over a field; they saw him fall down, pick himself up, and run on again in the direction of the New Barns Farm. There is no doubt after this of what happened to him. All is certain now: Mrs. Smith’s terror; Amy Foster’s conviction that the man ‘meant no harm’; Smith’s (on his return from Darnford Market) finding the back-door locked, his wife in hysterics; and all for[76] a dirty tramp, hiding in his stackyard. He would teach him to frighten women.[77]

“Smith is hot-tempered, but the sight of a creature sitting among a lot of straw, and swinging itself to and fro like a bear in a cage, made him pause. Then this tramp stood up silently before him, one mass of mud from head to foot. Smith, alone with this creature felt strange fear. When that creature parted with his black hands the long hair that hung before his face, as you part the two halves of a curtain, looked out at him with wild, black-and-white eyes, he made more than one step backwards.

“As the creature approached him, making strange sounds, Smith (unaware that he was being addressed as ‘gracious lord,’ and adjured in God’s name to afford food and shelter)[78] kept on retreating all the time. At last, watching his chance, he pushed him into the wood-lodge, and shut him up there. He had done his duty by shutting up a dangerous maniac. Smith isn’t a hard man at all, but he had only one idea – this was a lunatic. He was not imaginative enough to ask himself whether the man might not be suffering from cold and hunger. At first, the maniac made a great deal of noise in the wood-lodge. Mrs. Smith was screaming upstairs, where she had locked herself in her bedroom; but Amy Foster cried at the kitchen door, muttering, ‘Don’t! don’t!’ Smith had a hard time that evening with this insane, disturbing voice crying obstinately through the door. He didn’t connect this lunatic with the sinking of a ship in Eastbay, of which there had been a rumor in the Darnford market-place. And I believe the man inside was very near to insanity on that night.

“He was a mountaineer of the eastern Carpathians, and the ship sunk the night before in Eastbay was the Hamburg emigrant-ship Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea.

“A few months later we could read in the papers the accounts of the bogus ‘Emigration Agencies’ among peasants in the remote provinces of Austria. The object of these scoundrels was to get the poor ignorant people’s money, and they were in league with some local people. They exported their victims through Hamburg mostly. As to the ship, I watched her[79] out of this very window, coming into the bay on a dark, windy afternoon. I remember before the night fell looking out again at her. In the evening the wind rose. At midnight I could hear in my bed the terrible wind and the sounds of heavy rain.

“About that time the people saw the lights of a steamer in the bay. It is clear that another ship tried for find shelter in the bay on that awful night. It hit the German ship, and then went out, unknown and unseen. Of her nothing ever came to light.

“The wind, probably, prevented the loudest cries from reaching the shore; there had been evidently no time for signals of trouble. The Hamburg ship, filling with water all at once, sank, and at daylight there nothing to be seen above water. She was missed, of course, and at first they thought that she had been blown out to sea during the night. By the afternoon, however, you could see along three miles of the beach dead bodies of men, women with hard faces, and children, mostly fair-haired. They were laid out under the north wall of the Brenzett Church.

“It is possible that the man (if he happened to be on deck[80] at the time of the accident) could be washed ashore on a piece of wood. I admit it is possible, but for days, no, for weeks – it didn’t enter our heads that we had among us the only living soul that had escaped from that accident. The man himself, even when he learned to speak English, could tell us very little. He remembered the darkness, the horrible wind, and the rain. This looks as if he had been on deck some time during that night. But we mustn’t forget, that he had no idea of a ship or of the sea, and therefore could not understand what was happening to him. The rain, the wind, the darkness he knew; he understood the bleating of the sheep, and he remembered his misery, his astonishment that he was not understood, his indignation at finding all the men angry and all the women fierce. He approached them as a beggar, it is true, he said; but in his country, even if they gave nothing, they spoke gently to beggars. The children in his country were not taught to throw stones at those who asked for help. Smith’s behaviour struck him. The wood-lodge seemed a prison to him. What would be done to him next?… No wonder that Amy Foster appeared to his eyes with the aureole of an angel. The girl was not able to sleep for thinking of the poor man, and in the morning, before the Smiths were up, she opened the door of the wood-lodge, she looked in and gave to him half a loaf of white bread – ‘such bread as the rich eat in my country,’ he said.

“At this he got up slowly from among all sorts of rubbish, hungry, trembling, miserable. ‘Can you eat this?’ she asked in her soft and timid voice. He must have taken her for a ‘gracious lady.’[81] He ate the bread, and tears were falling on it. Suddenly he dropped the bread, seized her hand and kissed it. She was not frightened. Through his awful condition she observed that he was good-looking. She shut the door and walked back slowly to the kitchen.

“That morning old Mr. Swaffer (Smith’s nearest neighbor) came over and ended by carrying him off. He stood, meek, covered with dried mud, while the two men talked around him in an unknown language. Mrs. Smith had refused to come downstairs till the lunatic was off the farm; Amy Foster watched through the open back door; and he obeyed the signs that were made to him. When Mr. Swaffer started the cart, the awful creature sitting by his side nearly fell out. Swaffer took him straight home. And it is then that I come upon the scene.

“I was called as I happened to be driving past. I got down, of course.

“‘I’ve got something here,’ Swaffer said, leading the way to an outhouse at a little distance from his other farm-buildings.

“It was there that I saw him first, in a long low room that was a coach-house. It was bare, with a small window at its further end. He was lying on his back upon a straw pallet; they had given him a couple of horse-blankets, and he seemed to have spent all his strength in an attempt of cleaning himself. He was almost speechless; his quick breathing, his restless black eyes reminded me of a wild bird caught in a snare. While I was examining him, old Swaffer stood silently by the door. I gave some directions, promised to send a bottle of medicine, and naturally asked some questions.

“‘Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns,’ said the old man as if the other had been indeed a sort of wild animal. ‘That’s how I came by him.[82] Now tell me, doctor – you’ve been all over the world – don’t you think that he’s a Hindoo.’

“I was greatly surprised. His long black hair contrasted with the olive complexion of his face. It occurred to me he might be a Basque.[83] It didn’t mean that he understood Spanish; but I said a few words I know, and also some French. The whispered sounds I caught by bending my ear to his lips puzzled me. That afternoon the young ladies from the Rectory (one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years), coming to see Miss Swaffer, tried their German and Italian on him from the doorway. They retreated, frightened by the passionate speech he made. They admitted that the sound was pleasant, soft, musical – but so unlike anything one had ever heard. Everybody was wondering what Mr. Swaffer would do with him.

“He simply kept him.

“Swaffer would be called eccentric if he were not so much respected. They will tell you that Mr. Swaffer sits up as late as ten o’clock at night to read books, and they will tell you also that he can write a check for two hundred pounds without thinking twice about it. He himself would tell you that the Swaffers had owned land between this and Darnford for these three hundred years. He must be eighty-five to-day, but he does not look a bit older than when I first came here. He is a great breeder of sheep, and has a lot of cattle. He attends market days for miles around in every sort of weather. He can drive miles in the rain to see a new kind of rose in somebody’s garden, or a monstrous cabbage grown by someone. He loves to hear of or to be shown something that he calls ‘outlandish.’ Perhaps it was just that outlandishness of the man which influenced old Swaffer. All I know is that at the end of three weeks I saw Smith’s lunatic digging in Swaffer’s kitchen garden. They had found out he could dig very well.

“His black hair flowed over his shoulders. I suppose it was Swaffer who had given him the old cotton shirt; but he wore still the national brown trousers (in which he had been washed ashore)[84] fitting to the leg almost like tights. And he had never yet gone into the village. The land he looked upon seemed to him well kept, like the grounds round a landowner’s house; the size of the cart-horses struck him with astonishment; and the appearance of the people, especially on Sundays, spoke of wealth. He wondered what made them and their children so hardhearted. He got his food at the back door, carried it in both hands carefully to his outhouse, and made the sign of the cross before he began. Kneeling at the end of the day, he recited aloud the Lord’s Prayer[85] before he slept. Whenever he saw old Swaffer he would bow. He bowed also to Miss Swaffer, who kept house for her father – a broad-shouldered, big woman of forty-five, with the pocket of her dress full of keys. She wore a little steel cross at her waist. She dressed in black, in memory of a boy to whom she had been engaged some twenty-five years ago – a young farmer who broke his neck out hunting on the eve of the wedding day. She spoke very seldom.

“These were the people who gave him food and shelter. All the faces were sad. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody. It was as if these were the faces of people from the other world – dead people – he used to tell me years afterwards. I wonder he did not go mad. He didn’t know where he was. Somewhere very far from his mountains – somewhere over the water. Was this America, he wondered?

“If it hadn’t been for the steel cross[86] at Miss Swaffer’s waist he would not, he said, have known whether he was in a Christian country at all. There was nothing here the same as in his country! The earth and the water were different. The very grass was different, and the trees. All the trees except the three old Norway pines before Swaffer’s house, and these reminded him of his country. He was seen once with his head against one of them, crying, and talking to himself. They were like brothers to him at that time, he said. Everything else was strange. At night, when he could not sleep, he kept on thinking of the girl who gave him the first piece of bread he had eaten in this foreign land. She had been neither fierce nor angry, nor frightened. Her face he remembered as the only kind face among all these faces that were as closed, as mysterious, as the faces of the dead.

“He did the work which was given him with an intelligence which surprised old Swaffer. By-and-by it was discovered that he could help at the ploughing, could milk the cows, feed the cattle, and was of some use with the sheep. He began to pick up words, too, very fast; and suddenly, one fine morning in spring, he rescued from death a grand-child of old Swaffer.

“Swaffer’s younger daughter is married to Willcox, a solicitor in Colebrook. Regularly twice a year they come to stay with the old man for a few days. Their only child, a little girl not three years old at the time, ran out of the house alone in her little white dress, and fell into the pond in the yard.

“Our man was out with the wagoner and the plough in the field nearest to the house, and he saw something white in the pond. But he had quick, far-reaching eyes. Leaving the horses, he ran over the ploughed ground, and suddenly appeared before the mother, put the child into her arms, and ran away.

“The pond was not very deep; but still, if he had not had such good eyes, the child would have been drowned in the foot or so of mud at the bottom. Old Swaffer walked out slowly into the field, waited till the plough came over to his side, had a good look at him, and without saying a word went back to the house. But from that time they laid out his meals on the kitchen table; and at first, Miss Swaffer, all in black, would come and stand in the doorway of the living-room to see him make a big sign of the cross before he started his meal. I believe that from that day, too, Swaffer began to pay him regular wages.

“I can’t follow step by step his development. He cut his hair short, was seen in the village and along the road going to and fro to his work like any other man. Children no longer shouted after him. He learned of social differences, but remained for a long time surprised at the bare poverty of the churches among so much wealth. He couldn’t understand why they were kept shut up on week days. Was it to keep people from praying too often? He did not, however, give up his habit of crossing himself, and he was still heard every evening reciting the Lord’s Prayer, as he had heard his old father do at the head of all the kneeling family, big and little, on every evening of his life. At last people became used to see him. But they never became used to him, his rapid walk; his swarthy complexion; his habit, on warm evenings, of wearing his coat over one shoulder. They wouldn’t in their dinner hour lie on their backs on the grass to stare at the sky. Neither did they go about the fields singing loudly foreign tunes. Ah! He was different: full of good will, which nobody wanted, like a man transplanted into another planet. One evening, in the Coach and Horses[87] (having drunk some whisky), he upset them all by singing a love song of his country. They told him to shut up, for they wanted to drink their evening beer in peace. He was pained. On another occasion he tried to show them how to dance. The landlord interfered. He didn’t want any ‘acrobat tricks in the room.’ They laid their hands on him and he got a black eye.[88]

“I believe he felt the hostility of the local people. His home was far away; and he did not want now to go to America. I had often explained to him that there is no place on earth where true gold can be found lying ready for anybody to pick it up. How then, he asked, could he ever return home with empty hands when they had sold a cow, two ponies, and a plot of land to pay for his going? His eyes would fill with tears, and he would throw himself face down on the grass. But he found his bit of true gold. That was Amy Foster’s heart; which was ‘a golden heart, and soft to people’s misery,’ he would say with conviction.

“He was called Yanko. He had explained that this meant little John; but as he would also repeat very often that he was a mountaineer (some word sounding in the dialect of his country like Goorall) he got it for his surname. And this is the only trace of him in the marriage register of our church. There it stands – Yanko Goorall – in the rector’s handwriting.

“His courtship had lasted some time. It began by his buying for Amy Foster a green ribbon in Darnford. This was what you did in his country. You bought a ribbon for a girl. I don’t suppose the girl knew what to do with it, but he showed her his serious intentions.

“When he declared he wanted to get married, everyone was up against him.[89] Smith, coming upon him near the farm, promised to break his head if he found him near his place. He also told the girl that she must be mad to take up with a man who was surely wrong in his head.[90] All the same, when she heard him whistling from beyond the garden, she would leave Mrs. Smith in the middle of a sentence, and she would run out to his call. Mrs. Smith called her a fool. She answered nothing. She said nothing at all to anybody, and went on her way as if she were deaf. Only she and I, I believe, could see his real beauty. He was very good-looking, and most graceful like a wild creature from the woods. Her mother moaned over her whenever the girl came to see her on her day off. The father was angry; and Mrs. Finn once told her that ‘this man, my dear, will do you some harm some day yet.’ And so it went on. They could be seen on the roads, she walked in a gray dress, black feather, stout boots, white cotton gloves that caught your eye a hundred yards away; and he, his coat over one shoulder, walking by her side, looking tenderly at the girl with the golden heart. I wonder whether he saw how plain she was. Perhaps among women so different from what he had ever seen, he was not able to judge; or perhaps he was attracted by her pity.

“Yanko was in great trouble now. He did not know how to propose marriage. However, one day in the middle of sheep in a field he took off his hat to the father and declared his intentions. ‘She’s fool enough to marry you,’ was all Foster said. And then, he put his hat on his head, looked black at him as if he wanted to cut his throat, and off he went. The Fosters, of course, didn’t like to lose the girl’s wages: Amy gave all her money to her mother. But Foster did not like the idea of this marriage in general. He said that the fellow was very good with sheep, but was not fit for any girl to marry, for he used to go along the hedges muttering to himself like a fool; and then, perhaps he would want to carry her off somewhere – or run off himself. It was not safe. He said so to his daughter. She made no answer. People discussed the matter. It was quite an excitement, and the two went on ‘walking out’ together. Then something unexpected happened.

“I don’t know whether old Swaffer ever understood how much he was seen as a father by his foreign worker. So when Yanko asked formally for an interview – ‘and the Miss too’ (he called Miss Swaffer simply Miss) – it was to get their permission to marry. Swaffer heard him in silence. Miss Swaffer showed no surprise, and only remarked, ‘He certainly won’t get any other girl to marry him.’

“In a few days it became known that Mr. Swaffer had presented Yanko with a cottage (the cottage you’ve seen this morning) and an acre of ground – had given it over to him in absolute property. In the document it was written: ‘In consideration of[91] saving the life of my grandchild, Bertha Willcox.’

“Of course, after that no power on earth could prevent them from getting married.

“Her passion still grew. People saw her going out to meet him in the evening. She stared up the road where he was expected to appear, walking freely, and singing one of the love-tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he got drunk at the ‘Coach and Horses,’ sang and danced, and was again thrown out. People expressed their sympathy for a woman married to that fool. He didn’t care. There was a man now (he told me) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.

“But I don’t know. One day I met him. He told me that ‘women were funny.’ I had heard already of domestic differences. People were saying that Amy Foster was beginning to find out what sort of man she had married. His wife had snatched the child out of his arms one day as he sat singing to him a song such as the mothers sing to babies in his mountains. She seemed to think he was doing the baby some harm. Women are funny. And she had objected to him praying aloud in the evening. Why? He expected the boy to repeat the prayer aloud after him by-and-by, as he used to do after his old father when he was a child – in his own country. And I discovered he wanted their boy to grow up so that he could have a man to talk with in that language that to our ears sounded so disturbing, and so strange. Why his wife disliked the idea he couldn’t tell. But that would pass, he said. She was not hard, not fierce, open to other people!

“I walked away thoughtfully; I wondered whether his difference, his strangeness were not becoming hateful to the dull nature of his wife. I wondered…”

The Doctor came to the window and looked out at the sea.

“It was possible,” he said, turning away, “it was possible.”

He remained silent. Then went on –

“The next time I saw him he was ill – lung trouble. He was strong, but he was not acclimatized as well as I had supposed. It was a bad winter; and, of course, these mountaineers have home sickness; and depression might make him weaker. He was lying half dressed on a couch downstairs. A table took up all the middle of the room. There was a cradle on the floor. The room was warm, but the door opens right into the garden, as you noticed perhaps.

“He had a fever, and kept on muttering to himself. She sat on a chair and looked at him across the table with her brown eyes. ‘Why don’t you have him upstairs?’ I asked. She said, ‘Oh! ah! I couldn’t sit with him upstairs, Sir.’

“I gave her certain directions; and going outside, I said again that he ought to be in bed upstairs. ‘Oh no, no. He keeps on saying something – I don’t know what.’ With the memory of all the talk against the man that had been put into her ears, I looked at her closely. I looked into her short-sighted eyes, that once in her life had seen something that attracted her, but seemed to see nothing at all now. I saw she was uneasy.

“‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked. ‘He doesn’t look very ill. I’ve never seen anybody look like this before…’

“‘Do you think,’ I asked indignantly, ‘he is pretending?’

“‘I can’t help it,[92] sir,’ she said. And suddenly she looked right and left. ‘And there’s the baby. I am so frightened. He wanted me just now to give him the baby. I can’t understand what he says to him.’

“‘Can’t you ask a neighbor to come in tonight?’ I asked.

“‘Please, sir, nobody will agree to come,’ she muttered.

“I told her the greatest care was necessary, and then had to go. There was a good deal of sickness that winter. ‘Oh, I hope he won’t talk!’ she exclaimed softly just as I was going away.

“I don’t know how it is I did not see – but I didn’t.

“Towards the night his fever increased.

“He tossed and moaned. And she sat with the table between her and the couch, watching every movement and every sound, with the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she could not understand. She had drawn the cradle close to her feet. There was nothing in her now but the maternal instinct and that unreasonable fear.

“Suddenly coming to himself he demanded a drink of water. She did not move. She did not understand, though he may have thought he was speaking in English. He waited, looking at her, burning with fever, amazed at her silence and immobility, and then he shouted impatiently, ‘Water! Give me water!’

“She jumped to her feet, snatched up the child, and stood still. He spoke to her, and his passionate speech only increased her fear of that strange man. I believe he spoke to her for a long time. She says she bore it as long as she could. And then rage came over him.

“He sat up and called out terribly one word – some word. Then he got up as though he hadn’t been ill at all, she says. And as in indignation, and wonder he tried to get to her round the table, she simply opened the door and ran out with the child in her arms. She heard him call twice after her down the road in a terrible voice – and fled… Ah! She ran on that night three miles and a half to the door of Foster’s cottage!

“And it was I who found him lying face down and his body near the little gate.

“I had been called out that night to a patient in the village, and saw him on my way home by the cottage. The door stood open. My man helped me to carry him in. We laid him on the couch. The fire was out. ‘Amy!’ I called aloud, and my voice seemed to lose itself in the emptiness of this small house as if I had cried in a desert. He opened his eyes. ‘Gone!’ he said. ‘I had only asked for water – only for a little water…’

“He was muddy. I covered him with a blanket and stood waiting in silence, catching a word now and then. They were no longer in his own language. The fever had left him, taking with it the heat of life. She had left him – sick – helpless – thirsty. The spear of the hunter had entered his very soul. ‘Why?’ he cried in the indignant voice of a man calling to the Maker.[93]

“And as I turned away to shut the door he said the word ‘Merciful!’ and died.

“I certified heart-failure as the immediate cause of death.[94] His heart must have indeed failed him, too. I closed his eyes and drove away. Not very far from the cottage I met Foster walking with his dog.

“‘Do you know where your daughter is?’ I asked.

“‘Don’t I!’ he cried. ‘I am going to talk to him a bit. Frightening a poor woman like this.’

“‘He won’t frighten her any more,’ I said. ‘He is dead.’

“‘It is for the best.’

“That’s what he said. And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image as gone from her mind as his figure, his singing voice are gone from our fields? He is no longer before her eyes to excite her imagination into a passion of love or fear; and his memory seems to have vanished from her dull brain as a shadow passes away upon a white screen. She lives in the cottage and works for Miss Swaffer. She is Amy Foster for everybody, and the child is ‘Amy Foster’s boy.’ She calls him Johnny – which means Little John.

“It is impossible to say whether this name means anything to her. Does she ever think of the past? I have seen her standing near the boy’s bed in a passion of maternal tenderness. The little fellow was lying on his back, a little frightened at me, but very still, with his big black eyes, like a bird in a snare. And looking at him I seemed to see again the other one – the father, washed out mysteriously by the sea to die in loneliness and despair.”

Carquinez had relaxed finally. He glanced at the rattling windows and listened for a moment to the savage roar of the south-eastern wind as it caught the bungalow in its jaws. Then he held his glass between him and the fire and laughed for joy through the golden wine.

“It is beautiful,” he said. “It is sweet. It is a woman’s wine, and it was made for saints to drink.”

“We grow it on our own hills,” I said, with California pride. “You rode up yesterday through the vines from which it was made.”

It was worth while to get Carquinez to loosen up.[96] He was not really himself until he felt the warmth of the vine singing in his blood. He was an artist, it is true, always an artist; but somehow, sober, the high pitch went out of his thought-processes and he was likely to be as deadly dull as a British Sunday – not dull as other men are dull, but dull when compared with Monte Carquinez when he was really himself.

From all this it must not be inferred that Carquinez, who is my dear friend and dearer comrade, was a sot. Far from it. As I have said, he was an artist. He knew when he had enough, and enough, with him, was equilibrium – the equilibrium that is yours and mine when we are sober.

His was wise like the Greek. Yet he was far from Greek. “I am Aztec, I am Inca, I am Spaniard,” I have heard him say. And in truth he looked it, a compound of strange and ancient races, with his swarthy skin and the asymmetry and primitiveness of his features. His eyes, under massively arched brows, were wide apart and black with the blackness that is barbaric, while before them was falling down a great black mop of hair through which he looked like a satyr from a thicket. He always wore a soft flannel shirt under his velvet-corduroy jacket, and his necktie was red. This latter stood for the red flag (he had once lived with the socialists of Paris), and it symbolized the blood and brotherhood of man. Also, he had never been known to wear anything on his head save a leather-banded sombrero.[97] It was even said that he had been born with this particular hat. I was also delighted to see that Mexican sombrero hailing a cab in Piccadilly.

As I have said, Carquinez was made quick by wine – “as the clay was made quick when God breathed the breath of life into it,” was his way of saying it. He was at all times honest, and, because he was compounded of paradoxes, he was greatly misunderstood by those who did not know him.

And now I must ask pardon for the space I have given him. (He is my friend, and I love him.) The house was shaking to the storm, as he drew closer to the fire and laughed at it through his wine. He looked at me, and demanded:

“And so you think you’ve won out against the gods?”

“Why the gods?”

“Whose will but theirs has put satiety upon man?[98]” he cried.

“And whence the will in me to escape satiety?” I asked triumphantly.

“Again the gods,” he laughed. “It is their game we play. Don’t think that you have escaped by fleeing from the mad cities. You with your vine hills, your sunsets and your sunrises, your simple way of living!

“I’ve watched you ever since I came. You have not won. You have surrendered. You have said that you are tired. You have run away from life. You have played a trick. You refuse to play.”

He tossed his straight hair back from his flashing eyes.

“But the gods know. It is an old trick. All the generations of man have tried it… and lost. The gods know how to deal with such as you. To pursue is to possess, and to possess is to be sated. And so you, in your wisdom, have refused any longer to pursue. Very well. You will become sated with your peace. You say you have escaped satiety! But the gods always win. I have watched men play for years what seemed a winning game. In the end they lost,” he said.

“Don’t you ever make mistakes?” I asked.

He paused before replying.

“Yes, I was nearly fooled, once. Let me tell you. There was Marvin Fiske. You remember him? And his Dantesque[99] face and poet’s soul, singing his song of the flesh, the very priest of Love? And there was Ethel Baird, whom also you must remember.”

“A saint,” I said.

“That is she! Holy as Love, and sweeter! Just a woman, made for love; and yet— Well, they married. They played with the gods— ”

“And they won!” I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly.

“They lost. They colossally lost.”

“But the world believes otherwise,” I replied coldly.

“The world sees only the face of things. But I know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,[100] buried herself in that convent of the living dead?[101]”

“Because she loved him so, and when he died…”

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez’s laughter.

“A machine-made answer,” he said. “The world’s judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled from life. She was beaten.

“Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I know. They had considered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They knew the value of Love. They loved him[102] so well that they intended to keep him always in their hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.[103]

“Love was desire. He was seeking easement, and when he found that, he died. Love without easement was Love alive. Do you follow me? They saw people could not be hungry after they have eaten. To eat and still be hungry is impossible. The problem of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the appetite. This was their problem, for they loved Love. Often did they discuss it.

“How do I know all this? I saw much. More I learned from her diary.

“How to keep him? To feast him was to lose him.[104] Their love for each other was a great love. Yet they wanted to keep their love sharp.

“They were not youngsters theorizing on the threshold of Love. They had loved before, with others, in the days before they met; and in those days they had lost Love through caresses, and killed him with kisses.

“They were not cold, this man and woman. They were warm human. They had no Saxon coldness in their blood. The colour of it was sunset-red. They had the French joy in the flesh. They were idealists, but their idealism was Gallic. They did not have the cold fluid that for the English serves as blood. There was no stoicism about them.

“They were all what I have said, and they were made for joy, only they had an idea. A curse on ideas! They played with logic, and this was their logic. But first let me tell you of a talk we had one night. It was of Gautier’s Madeline de Maupin.[105] You remember the girl? She kissed once, only once, and she wanted to have no more kisses. Not that[106] she found kisses were not sweet, but that she feared with repetition they would lose their sweetness. Satiety again! She tried to play against the gods.

“Well, the man and the woman argued thus: Why kiss once only? If to kiss once were wise, was it not wiser not to kiss at all? Thus could they keep Love alive. Fasting, he would knock forever at their hearts.

“As he said (I read it later in one of his letters to her): ‘To hold you in my arms, close, and yet not close. To desire you, and never to have you, and so always to have you.’ And she: ‘For you to be always just beyond my reach.[107] To be ever desiring you, and yet never reaching you, and for this to last forever, always fresh and new.’

“And they were right, as far as they went. Everything is good… as long as it cannot be possessed. Satiety and possession are Death’s horses.

“They got that from a sonnet of Alfred Austin’s.[109] It was called ‘Love’s Wisdom.’ It was the one kiss of Madeline de Maupin. How did it run?

“But they were wiser. They would not kiss and part. They would not kiss at all, and thus they planned to stay at Love’s topmost peak. They married. You were in England at the time. And never was there such a marriage. They kept their secret to themselves. I did not know, then. Their warmth did not cool. Their love burned with increasing brightness. Never was there anything like it. The time passed, the months, the years, and their love grew more and more.

“Everybody marvelled. They became the wonderful lovers, and they were greatly envied. Sometimes women pitied her because she was childless; it is the form the envy.

“And I did not know their secret. I thought and I marvelled. At first I had expected the passing of their love. Then I became aware that it was Time that passed and Love that remained. Then I became curious. What was their secret? How did they hold Love? What elixir of eternal love had they drunk together?

“As I say, I was curious, and I watched them. They were love-mad. They saturated themselves in the art and poetry of Love. No, they were not neurotics. They were sane and healthy, and they were artists. But they had done the impossible. They had achieved deathless desire.

“And I? I saw much of them and their everlasting miracle of Love. I wondered, and then one day – ”

Carquinez broke off abruptly and asked, “Have you ever read, ‘Love’s Waiting Time’?”

I shook my head.

“Page wrote it – Curtis Hidden Page,[111] I think. Well, it was that verse that gave me the clue. One day, I was sitting near the big piano – you remember how she could play? What a voice he had! When he sang I believed in immortality.

“It was a spectacle for God, that man and woman, years married, and singing love-songs with a freshness of new-born Love, with a ripeness that young lovers can never know. Young lovers were pale and anaemic beside that long-married pair. To see them, all fire and tenderness, caresses of eye and voice, through every silence – their love driving them toward each other, and they revolving each about the other! It seemed more powerful than gravitation and more subtle, they melted each into each there before my very eyes. It was not strange they were called the wonderful lovers.

“Now to the clue. One day at their place I found a book of verse. It opened of itself, betraying long habit, to ‘Love’s Waiting Time’,[112] and there I read:

“I closed the book and sat there silent and without moving for a long time. I was stunned by the clearness of vision the verse had given me. It was illumination.

“I repeated the lines over in my mind – ‘Not yet, sometime’ – ‘O Love, not yet’ – ‘Feed it with lipless kisses, let it sleep.’ And I laughed aloud, ha, ha! I saw their blameless souls. They were children. They did not understand. They played with Nature’s fire and bedded with a naked sword.[114] They laughed at the gods. They had invented a system, and expected to win out. ‘Beware!’ I cried. ‘The gods make new rules for every system. You have no chance to win.’

“But I did not so cry to them. I waited. They would learn that their system was worthless and throw it away. They would be content with whatever happiness the gods gave them and not try to get more away.

“I watched. I said nothing. The months continued to come and go, and still their love grew sharper. This went on until even I doubted. Did the gods sleep? I wondered. Or were they dead? I laughed to myself. The man and the woman had made a miracle. They had outwitted God. They were themselves gods.

“Yet in this, my latest wisdom, I was wrong. They were not gods. They were man and woman – soft clay that sighed, shot through with desire, having strange weaknesses which the gods have not.”

Carquinez laughed harshly. It was not a pretty laugh; it was like the mockery of a devil, and it rose over the roar of the storm that came to our ears from the outside world.

“How were they to understand? They were artists, not biologists. They knew the clay of the studio, but they did not know the clay of which they themselves were made. Never was there such a game before, and I doubt if there will ever be such a game again.

“Never was lovers’ ecstasy like theirs. They had not killed Love with kisses. They had quickened him with denial. And by denial they drove him on till he was bursting with desire.

“They desired, with all sweet delicious agonies, with an intensity never felt by lovers before nor since.

“And then one day the drowsy gods aroused and looked at the man and woman who had made a mock of them. And the man and woman looked into each other’s eyes one morning and knew that something was gone. It was Love. He had fled, silently, in the night, from them.

“They looked into each other’s eyes and knew that they did not care. Desire was dead. Do you understand? Desire was dead. And they had never kissed. Not once had they kissed. Love was gone. They would never desire and burn again. For them there was nothing left. Desire was dead. It had died in the night, on a cold bed.

“The gods may not be kind, but they are often merciful. All that remained was the man and woman gazing into each other’s cold eyes. And then he died. That was the mercy. Within the week Marvin Fiske was dead – you remember the accident.

“Oh, the irony of it!” I cried out.

And Carquinez looked at me with his black eyes.

“And they won, you said? The world’s judgment! I have told you, and I know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills.”

“But you,” I demanded hotly; “you with your mad cities and madder orgies – do you think that you win?”

He shook his head slowly. “Because you with your sober bucolic regime, lose, is no reason that I should win.[115] We never win. Sometimes we think we win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods.”