_ THERE was, then, you will remember, but an interval of minutes between
the accident and the temporary recovery of consciousness, between
that recovery again and the moment when the head fell forward on my
knee and she was gone. That "recovery" of consciousness I feel bound
to question, as you shall shortly hear. Among such curious things I
am at sea admittedly, yet I must doubt for ever that the eyes which
peered so strangely into mine were those of Marion herself--as I had
always known her. You will, at any rate, allow the confession, and
believe it true, that I--did not recognize her quite. Consciousness
there was, indubitably, but whether it was "recovery" of
consciousness is another matter, and a problem that I must for ever
question though I cannot ever set it confidently at rest. It almost
seemed as though a larger, grander, yet somehow a less personal, soul
looked forth through the fading eyes and used the troubled breath.
In those brief minutes, at any rate, the mind was clear as day, the
faculties not only unobscured, but marvellously enhanced. In the eyes
at first shone unveiled fire; she smiled, gazing into my own with
love and eager yearning too. There was a radiance in her face I must
call glory. Her head was in my lap upon the bed of rugs we had
improvised inside the field: the broken motor posed in a monstrous
heap ten yards away; and the doctor, summoned by a passing stranger,
was in the act of administrating the anaesthetic, so that we might
bear her without pain to the nearest hospital--when, suddenly, she
held up a warning finger, beckoning to me that I should listen
closely.
I bent my head to catch the words. There was such authority in the
gesture, and in the eyes an expression so extraordinarily appealing,
and yet so touched with the awe of a final privacy beyond language,
that the doctor stepped backwards on the instant, the needle shaking
in his hand--while I bent down to catch the whispered words that at
once began to pass her lips.
The wind in the poplar overhead mingled with the little sentences, as
though the breath of the clear blue sky, calmly shining, was mingled
with her own.
But the words I heard both troubled and amazed me:
"Help me! For I am in the dark still!" went through me like a sword.
"And I do not know how long."
I took her face in both my hands; I kissed her. "You are with
friends," I said. "You are safe with us, with me--Marion!" And I
apparently tried to put into my smile the tenderness that clumsy
words forswore. Her next words shocked me inexpressibly: "You
laugh," she said, "but I----" she sighed--"I weep."
I stroked her face and hair. No words came to me.
"You call me Marion," she went on in an eager tone that surely belied
her pain and weakness, "but I do not remember that. I have forgotten
names." Then, as I kissed her, I heard her add in the clearest
whisper possible, as though no cloud lay upon her mind: "Yet Marion
will do--if by that you know me now"
There came a pause then, but after it such singular words that I could
hardly believe I heard aright, although each syllable sank into my
brain as with pointed steel:
"You come to me again when I lie dying. Even in the dark I hear--how
long I do not know--I hear your words."
She gave me suddenly then a most piercing look, raising her face a
little towards my own. I saw earnest entreaty in them. "Tell me," I
murmured; "you are nearer, closer to me than ever before. Tell me
what it is?"
"Music," she whispered, "I want music----"
I knew not what to answer, what to say. Can you blame me that, in my
troubled, aching heart, I found but commonplaces? For I thought of
the harp, or of some stringed instrument that seemed part of her.
"You shall have it," I said gently, "and very soon. We shall carry you
now into comfort, safety. You shall have no pain. Another moment
and----"
"Music," she repeated, interrupting, "music as of long ago."
It was terrible. I said such stupid things. My mind seemed frozen.
"I would hear music," she whispered, "before I go again."
"Marion, you shall," I stammered. "Beethoven, Schumann,--what would
please you most? You shall have all."
"Yes, play to me. But those names"--she shook her head--"I do not
know."
I remember that my face was streaming, my hands so hot that her head
seemed more than I could hold. I shifted my knees so that she might
lie more easily a little.
"God's music!" she cried aloud with startling abruptness; then,
lowering her voice again and smiling sadly as though something came
back to her that she would fain forget, she added slowly, with
something of mournful emphasis:
"I was a singer . . ."
As though a flash of light had passed, some inner darkness was cleft
asunder in me. Some heaviness shifted from my brain. It seemed the
years, the centuries, turned over like a wind-blown page. And out of
some hidden inmost part of me involuntary words rose instantly:
"You sang God's music then . . ."
The strange, unbidden sentence stirred her. Her head moved slightly;
she smiled. Gazing into my eyes intently, as though to dispel a mist
that shrouded both our minds, she went on in a whisper that yet was
startlingly distinct, though with little pauses drawn out between the
phrases: "I was a singer. . . in the Temple. I sang--men--into evil.
You . . . I sang into . . . evil."
There was a moment's pause, as a spasm of inexplicable pain passed
through my heart like fire, and a sense of haunting things whereof no
conscious memory remained came over me. The scene about me wavered
before my eyes as if it would disappear.
"Yet you came to me when I lay dying at the last," I caught her thin
clear whisper. "You said, 'Turn to God!'"
The whisper died away. The darkness flowed back upon my mind and
thought. A silence followed. I heard the wind in the poplar overhead.
The doctor moved impatiently, coming a few steps nearer, then turning
away again. I heard the sounds of tinkering with metal that the
driver made ten yards behind us. I turned angrily to make a
sign--when Marion's low voice, again more like the murmur of the wind
than a living voice, rose into the still evening air:
"I have failed. And I shall try again."
She gazed up at me with that patient, generous love that seemed
inexhaustible, and hardly knowing what to answer, nor how to comfort
her in that afflicting moment, I bent lower--or, rather, she drew my
ear closer to her lips. I think her great desire just then was to
utter her own thought more fully before she passed. Certainly it was
no avowal or consolation from myself she sought.
"Your forgiveness," I heard distinctly, "I need your full
forgiveness."
It was for me a terrible and poignant moment. The emptiness of my pity
betrayed itself too mercilessly for me to bear; yet, before my
bewilderment enabled me to frame an answer, she went on hurriedly,
though with a faultless certainty: the meaning to her was clear as
day:
"Born of love . . . the only true forgiveness. . ."
A film formed slowly. Her eyes began to close, her breath died off
into a sigh; she smiled, but her head sank lower with her fading
strength. And her final words went by me in that sigh:
"Yet love in you lies unawakened still. . . and I must try again. . . ."
There was one more effort, painful with unexpressed fulfilment. A
flicker of awful yearning took her paling eyes. Life seemed to
stammer, pause, then flush as with this last deep impulse to yield a
secret she discerned for the first time fully, in the very act of
passing out. The face, with its soft loveliness, turned grey in death.
Upon the edge of a great disclosure--she was gone.
I remember that for a space of time there was silence all about us.
The doctor still kept his back to us, the driver had ceased his
wretched hammering, I heard the wind in the poplar and the hum of
insects. A bird sang loudly on a branch above; it seemed miles away,
across an empty world. . . . Then, of a sudden, I became aware that the
weight of the head and shoulders had dreadfully increased. I dared not
turn my face lest I should look upon her whom I had deeply
wronged--the forsaken tenement of this woman whose matchless love now
begged with her dying breath for my forgiveness!
A cowardly desire to lose consciousness ran through me, to forget
myself, to hide my shame with her in death; yet, even while this was
so, I sought most desperately through the depths of my anguished pity
to find some hint, if only the tiniest seed, of love--and found it
not. . . . The rest belonged to things unrealized. . . .
I remember a hand being laid upon me. I lifted my head which had
fallen close against her cheek. The doctor stood beside me, his grave
and kindly face bent low. He spoke some gentle words. I saw him
replacing the needle in its little leathern case, unused.
Marion was dead, her deep secret undisclosed. That which she yearned
to tell me was something which, in her brief period of devotion, she
had lived, had faithfully acted out, yet herself only dimly aware of
why it had to be. The solution of this problem of unrequited love lay
at last within her grasp; of a love that only asked to give of its
unquenched and unquenchable store, undismayed by the total absence of
response.
She passed from the world of speech and action with this intense
desire unsatisfied, and at the very moment--as with a drowning man
who sees his past--when the solution lay ready to her hand. She saw
clearly, she understood, she burned to tell me. Upon the edge of full
disclosure, she was gone, leaving me alone with my aching pity and
with my shame of unawakened love.
"I have failed, but I shall try again. . . ." _