University of Virginia Library

19. XIX.
THE FACE IN THE FLASH.

A WEEK crept through the hushed house,
and the funeral of Mr. Redruth was held
with every honor, a provision settled upon his
widow, and his son installed in his place.
Shocked, but not deeply touched, — which would
have been improbable, — Miriam's elastic spirits
soon regained their equilibrium, and she employed
herself to divert Sir Rohan's mind, and dissipate
the shadow. She was yet too young and free to
own the harvests of sorrow; nor did she know, if
this had been a sorrow admitting such end, how
to follow in the wild, and lead up to clearer
heights; she would seek, instead, to bring one
where he stood before. But Sir Rohan needed
little of either treatment.

It had been scarcely affection so much as custom
that bound him to the old steward, and one

shrinks at the sudden sundering of any tie. With
all his love for his master, Redruth had never
been able to endear himself sufficiently to produce
a real grief at his loss; for through fear of offence,
he had refused those opportunities which, well
used, would have been friendship. The quality
we call moral courage is necessary to finished success,
and poor Redruth's life had been a failure.
Still Sir Rohan felt that he, also, had owed a duty
which he had rejected, and he hoped, proportionately
with that neglect, to meet his responsibility
for the next. He was moved by the old man's
affection and sincerity, no less than by his weakness,
and he knew it would have been monstrous
for him to blame a living being. Thus it did not
take long to heal the wound, and having been
much delayed, the time was once more appointed
for their departure. St. Denys assisted his friend
in such instruction as the new steward required,
and again the hours slipped by too happily for
counting, each one like a drop from the fabled
elixir of life.

One only discord jarred upon this period. At
the close of a certain day which had fled, like the
days of the Blessed Gods, on the vans of inextinguishable

laughter, a milder mood fell, one of deep
quiet and satisfaction. A perfect space where
each, aware of the great love in either's thought,
preserves silence regarding it, and glances only on
indifferent things. Sir Rohan stood at an open
casement, folding Miriam in his arms, and saying
little where a lingering kiss or closer pressure
brimmed the lapse of happy thought. He did not
dream of the surrender St. Denys had made in
giving her to him. She was all his own. The
past lay veiled and blank behind him, to be redeemed
by a future that could multiply nothing
but virtue; with such blessedness, the seed of that
future, into what blossom would it burst!

A dry thunder-cloud had swept over the sky,
and still tinged with the vanished light, was loftily
heaping its cyclopean cumuli in the likeness of
rolling petals, as if assuming shape from some
huge magnolia growing unseen in the lost Atlantis.
In its base silent lightnings pavilioned themselves,
now and then leaping to earth with a rosy
flare, and giving to all things, as the night grew
deeper, a somewhat weird semblance.

Remaining thus, Sir Rohan remembered the
sudden consternation that smote him when first he

knew of the Ghost; the awe and heavy fear, annihilating
doubt and following him like a second
shadow; the stolidity in which he steeled himself
till the edge of his terrors was blunted thereat; the
keen watchfulness of intervening years harassed
by her influence that bred only a ceaseless pain
which he learned to endure; the frantic spasms of
that season which had fevered him. He remembered
all those hours, and compared them with this
where he stood calm and whole, throbbing only
with joy, and possessing the cordial of his transudation,
sovereign, sweet, and inexhaustible. He
wondered if without the past he could have measured
the present; he chafed only that these moments
were not immortal, or that together they
might not slip the knot of life and wander free
through fields of eternity too narrow to drain
such love.

In the swift gleams he looked down at Miriam,
her face on his arm, her lids fallen, glowing,
dreaming, smiling, finding heaven with him as he
with her; and in a stiller, intenser love he bent
above her till she raised the languid splendor of
her eyes and returned that passionate inspection.

Other flashes shot across them there, but if the

sky had shrivelled up, so that it left these two they
would have been regardless; and Miriam in Sir
Rohan's embrace at the open casement, her eyes
dropping in the old bewitching way as the long
succeeding kiss died into peace, did not see the
object that, when Sir Rohan raised his head, in a
more vivid sheet struck his sight and faded in the
darkness rushing back. It was the head and
shoulders of a man leaning one arm upon a horse's
neck, and turned toward them. Was it some
nightmare, or one of those allies of the Ghost, man
and beast, staring at him out of the shadow?
Was it that eldritch vision of Marc Arundel, that
had so persecuted him with her other malicious
enginery? Or was it the real face of Marc Arundel,
white and ghastly in the lightning, and full of
rancorous hate?

Whatever it might have been, it was withdrawn
at the next flash; but notwithstanding, Sir Rohan's
tranquillity was at an end, — swimming in a sea of
rapture, he had suddenly touched shore.

But when morning again poured light into
night, and Miriam met him, fresh and gay as a
new creation, he forgot the face and its terrors,
and again relinquished himself to the spell.

A flock of pigeons — mufflers, rufflers, fantails,
and tumblers — came fluttering and pitchpoling
down from the roofs and gables into the old garden,
catching the sunshine in a thousand dainty
irises, while they were at breakfast.

“Paphian doves?” asked St. Denys mischievously,
tossing them some crumbs.

“And so you must have your fling at them!”
retorted Miriam.

“At them? By no means. They don't do all
the billing and cooing in the house.”

“A noise that annoys some folks.”

“Love is so pathetic to a third, you find, St.
Denys.”

“Especially to a minor third,” assented St.
Denys.

“Not so pathetic as sympathetic,” Miriam subjoined.
“I tremble lest your example incite
papa to match it.”

“O no,” said St. Denys. “I 'm content to
match you.”

“How brilliant you are!” said Sir Rohan.
“Have you drugged the coffee?”

“Your untouched cup looks as if it were a
drug. No, but I made it! There, papa, poor

man, that caps the climax! Shrug your shoulder
and remember nature 's not to be conquered; vines
that twist from right to left can't be made to twist
from left to right. The duckling takes to water, —
or, what is worse, coffee, — and the pursuer takes
a ducking!”

“Miriam, have some mercy!” answered the
horrified listener. “You grow worse as you grow
older.”

“And you don't fancy my bad-in-age! I shall
make a gooseberry fool next, or put my ill-breeding
into a tart, that I may be reproved accordingly.”

“Certainly, I have spoiled you.”

“Which is not my treatment of the coffee. I
wanted some café noir, and, besides, Sir Rohan
takes no breakfast, and who knows the magical
effects of the potent berry? Confess that it
needed oriental hands to brew, and an acquaintance
with continental kitchens prior to one with
Mrs. Redruth's. All a part of my gypsydom. Ah,
you should have taken better care of me; here I
graduate, a cook. But why should n't one make
nectar? Look at this clear stream, pactolian, yellow
as amber and aromatic as Arabia!”

“Aurum potabile,” annotated Sir Rohan.

“Translated shabbily, for euphony, gold makes
the pot boil. I 've heard now of old ladies putting
brandy or rum into their tea, but never into
coffee.”

“O,” groaned St. Denys. “Must I repeat
every day how vulgar it is —”

“Well? How vulgarities what?”

“Incorrigible child!” said Sir Rohan. “Nobody
less severe than a pundit from the Punjaub
will punish you properly for making such a Punchinello
of yourself.”

“Et tu Brute!” she returned, poising her fragrant
cup.

“Similia similibus.”

“And have you come over into Macedonia?
But with what a philippic! A conjunction which
calls to mind Philippi, which calls to mind the
ghost that came to Brutus, which calls to mind,
like a chapter in Numbers, a little odd dream I
dreamed last night, papa. I thought I was standing
at a window, being as small as children are
when they cry for the moon, and looking up I was
trying to make out the face in its desolate circle,
when very clearly and distinctly it became Marc's;

upon which I was frightened, and after the absurd
conduct of dreams tried to get down, nobody
knowing how I got up, wherewith he began to
sing, — the idea, now, of Marc's singing! — sing
the last line of that little Kentish song I used to
go to sleep by, —
And I woke up with the great silent flash skimming
over the sky from some distant ship's gun,
I suppose, hailing a pilot for the channel, or something.
But was n't it hateful?”

“Very. But the moon is made of green cheese,
you know, which produces indigestion, which produces
nightmare, after your manner of induction
and a certain luncheon of yestreen.”

“Dear me, papa, I don't know whose quibbles
are worse.”

“What are you going to do, child? What is that
basket for, and those napkins? and are you the
whole commissariat for an army, with such a battery
of bread and butter; or playing Charlotte to
nobody's Werter?”

“My amazed papa, what an inquiring disposition!
How am I to answer such a mouthful of

questions? Did you ever hear of a picnic? but
off at Abbey ruins, or mineral springs, or ultramontane
forests? Well, I — I, too, shall have a
picnic, to-day; but at lesser ruins, — a fête champêtre
under aged lichen-painted walls, at the foot
of this dear old garden; by the choked spring that
gurgles and sputters and sings and frolics to itself,
whose water drunk from hollow leaves shall afford
us infinite hilarity; and you and Sir Rohan are
to be my guests, and I accept no excuse, and your
only roof is to be blue sky till said roof is gray
as twilight, and we will make one veritable long
Autumn day too short to hold us. Here is the
first chicken that peeped in May, — he plays Werter
well enough; — and here is the tart I spoke
of; and here is a bottle of poison for you, and one
of cream for me; and see these brown pears,
which Midas rex has fingered, and these Hamburg
grapes, great Cleopatrian pearls and amethysts.
Come!

And therewith, to roulade and capriccio, the

imperious Miss Miriam swept the helpless gentlemen
through the casement whose threshold remained
uncrossed till sunset, while every now
and then chimes of gayest laughter and snatches
of sweetest singing pealed hurriedly up the alleys
and startled the pale chrysanthemums and withering
autumn flowers on their sad stems; uncared-for
rusty blossoms, wan and rapt as a Greek chorus,
who looked at each other with melancholy surprise
and then drooped heavily again, as if they
were long ago in the secret, and refused to listen
to this last artifice of fate, the echo of a fragmentary
happiness as brief as shallow.