the old castle of domremy stood in a green valley running northward from the mallan, a gray and solemn ruin bosomed in the tranquil shadows of the woods. set in a broad moat as in a shield of silver, its black battlements rose black with their machiolated shadows against the blue background of sky. the clouds cast their shadows over the ruin like ghost memories of the past. there was a wild melancholy about the place, an infinite wistfulness that touched the heart. romance seemed to tread the ruined walls, her sable hair sweeping in the wind, her wild voice weaving enchantments through the listening woods.
gabriel had loved domremy since the first june evening when its gray towers had dreamed to him from their green repose. in later years it had often solaced him with its plaintive loveliness, its eyrie whisperings of the past. its grandeur had served as a bulwark against the prosaic sterility of modern minds. like the dark and mysterious prophecy of some ancient alchemist, it put forth reality from the heart and throned the infinite in its stead.
gabriel had spoken to joan of the place in his letters. she knew domremy well, had dreamed there even as he had done, and looked down upon the white lilies mimicking the face of the moon. the pair had plotted a tryst there, had met one april day on a path that ran from the hills, and wandered through the woods to the gray towers brooding over the water. they had climbed one of the turrets together, leaned upon the battlements, and turned back like children into the past.
the sky was dappled with innumerable isles of snow. the meadows were wondrous green under the blue heavens; the gnarled and naked trees glistened in the sun. joan, her hat laid upon the parapet, stood like a damsel of old, her hair flashing gold in the eyes of romance. gabriel leaned against the battlements two paces away, watching the woods and water and the face of the girl at his side.
“you are content?” he asked her.
she turned her eyes to his and smiled.
“ask your own heart,” was her response.
gabriel covered his eyes with his hand.
“how the past rises up to inspire me,” he said. “i could dream here day by day like a mystic, and know no sin. if we could stride back five centuries and take life like a crystal globe untarnished in our hands! armor should flash in yonder woods; trumpets cry upon these towers. ever should your face look out upon these meadows, like the face of evening out of a cloudless sky. as for me, i should be young again, and a man.”
she looked at him out of her trustful eyes of gray, while her face seemed full of a calm glory of honor. there was no shadow as yet over her soul.
“would you begin life anew?”
the man’s hands gripped the stone.
“would to god it could be so!” he said. “i have sold my soul’s birthright for red pottage, for unlovely ease, and cowardly sloth. life is a battle-field, not a garden; i have been awakened to the truth too late.”
joan pondered his words for a moment.
“is it not possible to begin life anew?” she asked.
“no.”
“why not?”
“we are so hedged by the ethics of the world that no escape is open. fashion, vanity, prejudice, and greed—these are our task-masters. life is like a path spiked on either side with thorns. we toil on in the dust while beyond us gleam the gardens of the blessed, unapproachable and lovely.”
“who, then, are the blessed?”
“the blessed are those who have fought their fight like giants and have conquered. there are they who have scorned the laws of expediency and error. there are they who have lived true to their own souls. there are they who have not fallen to the flesh. liberty is the guerdon, joy, and the light of truth.”
“and yet you are not among them.”
“i—indeed!”
there was a fine self-scorn in his voice that was almost dramatic.
“no,” he said; “i cannot flatter myself with any degree of heroism; it is only great souls who die for an ideal. the noblest life that was ever lived on earth had to end in a martyrdom that it might strike home to the hearts of men. i have been nothing but a martyr to my own egotism. having once struck my colors to that black pirate expediency on the high seas of life, i suppose i must be content to feel my soul in shackles.”
joan was pulling at the moss upon the stones with her long, white fingers. her eyes were on the distant woods; they were dark as with thought, and wondrously pathetic.
“a new sun seemed to swim into the sky,” she said, “when i read of the martyrdom on calvary. that was a great life.”
“a life that changed history,” he answered her. “there have been many theorists, but none save christ who proved his philosophy perfect in his own person.”
joan was silent again for a while. the shadows of thought had deepened in her eyes till they looked like two pools of gloom.
“i have been thinking of that parable,” she said.
“which parable?” he asked her.
“that which tells of the pearl of great price—where the man sold all that he had in order to possess it.”
“yes.”
“there is profound truth to me in the words. cannot a man take his inspiration from such a parable—sell all, dare all, to gain that single pearl. is the present so pleasant to him that he is afraid to fling himself giant-like against custom.”
gabriel looked at her as a man might look at one who prophesies. there was a sudden kindling of courage upon his face, but again a cloud soon covered it.
“no,” he said, slowly, “such a thing cannot be.”
“tell me why.”
“because the world is too strong for us; because it is impious to risk a woman’s honor; because the bonds of society are too rigid.”
“and who forged these bonds of society?”
“man.”
“then cannot man break them also?”
“it demands too great a sacrifice of others; it outrages too grossly the hereditary instincts of the race.”
“cannot a man free himself then from false ties?”
“not always.”
“because—”
“they are often of his own forging.”
“yet he can break them.”
“and his word also?”
“is it not better to break one’s word than to make life one long lie?”
“it would be a sin against society.”
“perhaps you are right,” she said; “but i would rather be an outcast than a hypocrite.”
simple and reflective as her words were, they stung the man like the thongs of a scourge.
“joan!”
his voice startled her; she turned and looked in his face, read pain there and a tumult of thought.
“what have i said?” she asked him.
“you despise me!”
“gabriel!”
she understood him with a sudden flash of sympathy.
“ah! forgive me.”
her fingers touched his and closed upon them with a quick, appealing pressure. her face was turned to his with the rich innocence of truth.
“no,” he said, breathing fast; “do not touch me. ah, god, do you not understand?”
she withdrew her hand, and her face grew pale again, her eyes shadowy even as with tears.
“forgive me,” she said, slowly, as though speaking to her own soul. “i had hurt your heart and—”
“it is nothing,” he said to her.
“it is everything—to me,” she answered, sadly.
“before god—remember that i honor you.”
she looked up at him suddenly with a great light in her eyes.
“gabriel, i will not hurt your heart again. you are a good man, and may god bless you! i will remember our vow.”
tragedy was moving upon the twain with ghastly step, her face muffled in her sable robe. they had created in their dreams a radiant eden for their souls to wander in, yet the ancient dragon had squirmed in amid the leaves. nothing is sacred in this world to the sordid sarcasms of the fool and the libertine. and the fatal chance that first parted the boughs and suffered the world to peer in upon their paradise was mean and prosaic enough in all truth.
that identical afternoon mrs. marjoy had driven a friend over, who was staying with her, to visit domremy. they had left their phaeton at a cottage in the valley and had walked through the woods to the castle. the causeway crossed the moat from the north, and mrs. marjoy and her companion, an australian lady, reached the place unseen by gabriel and joan, who were on one of the southern turrets. thus it befell that at the very moment mrs. marjoy and her guest were standing in the ruins of the chapel the man and the girl passed out from the black yawn of the southern gate and crossed the central court towards the northern entry.
mrs. marjoy’s spectacled vision had doomed gabriel to recognition. herself unseen, that magnanimous lady watched the pair cross the court and disappear beneath the rotting portcullis of the northern gate. there was an intense and malicious satisfaction on mrs. marjoy’s red face. she displayed her teeth in a thin, cracked laugh, and gestured to her companion with her black umbrella.
“did you see those two?” she said.
the australian lady stared.
“that worthy, my dear mrs. grace, is supposed to be our future member of parliament. a horribly profligate creature.”
“indeed!” said the colonial lady, with some austerity.
“i knew we should catch him before long,” continued the doctor’s wife, beaming with the thought of enjoying another woman’s shame. “his wife is staying away. poor mrs. strong, if she could only see her husband gadding about with one of his women from london. i always knew he was a dissolute person. did you ever see such a depraved, loose, dowdy-looking creature as that girl?”
mrs. grace, a kindly woman, displayed some measure of surprise. saltire society was fresh to her, and she was ignorant of the fact that mrs. marjoy considered herself a recording angel, by whose dictates man should stand or fall. nor was mrs. grace in the habit of clutching at such violent conclusions, being herself a mother and a magnanimous woman of the world.
“as a matter of fact,” she remarked, “i thought that girl looked particularly sweet and pretty.”
mrs. marjoy glared and rattled the ribs of her umbrella. she always considered a difference of opinion as a personal affront. only that morning she had declared to dr. marjoy that mrs. grace was a woman without strict convictions as to propriety, one of those flabby persons who never saw the glaring moral inconsistencies of others.
“i have suspected that man for a long while,” she now observed, with her usual sublime and eczematous hauteur. “believe me, he is a most dissolute person.”
“do you always base your conclusions on such slender evidence?” asked the lady from the antipodes.
“i never condemn others wantonly,” said the doctors wife. “i am a christian.”
“and yet you say that a man is a rogue because you happen to see him walking alone with a woman whom you do not know.”
there was a scintillant and vindictive gleam in mrs. marjoy’s brown eyes. she pressed her lips into a tight line and prodded the turf with the point of her umbrella.
“i generally find that my inferences are correct,” she said.
“indeed! i am glad to say we are more generous and healthy in the colonies.”
