Beyond The Rocks, Elinor Glyn [reading e books .txt] 📗

"Once upon a time there was a fairy prince and princess, and a witch had enchanted them and put them in a green forest, but had set a watch-dog over Love—so that the poor Cupid with his bow and arrows might not shoot at them, and they were told they might live and enjoy the green wood and find what they could of sport and joy. But Cupid laughed. 'As if,' he said, 'there is anything in a green wood of good without me—and my shafts!' So while the watch-dog slept—it was a warm, warm day in May, just such as this—he shot an arrow at the prince and it entered his heart. Then he ran off laughing. 'That is enough for one day,' he said. And the poor prince suffered and suffered because he was wounded and the princess had not received a dart, too—and could not feel for him."

"Was she not even sympathetic?" asked Theodora, and again there was that catch in her breath.

"Yes, she was sympathetic," he continued, "but this was not enough for the prince; he wanted her to be wounded, too."

"How very, very cruel of him," said Theodora.

"But men are cruel, and the prince was only a man, you know, although he was in a green forest with a lovely princess."

"And what happened?" asked Theodora.

"Well, the watch-dog slept on, so that a friendly zephyr could come, and it whispered to the prince: 'At the end of all these allées, which lead into the future, there is only one thing, and that is Love; he bars their gates. As soon as you start down one, no matter which, you will find him, and when he sees your princess he will shoot an arrow at her, too.'"

"Oh, then the princess of course never went down an allée," said Theodora—and she smiled radiantly to hide how her heart was beating—"did she?"

"The end of the story I do not know," said Lord Bracondale; "the fairy who told it to me would not say what happened to them, only that the prince was wounded, deeply wounded, with Love's arrow. Aren't you sorry for the prince, beautiful princess?"

Theodora opened her blue parasol, although no ray of sunshine fell upon her there. She was going through the first moment of this sort in her life. She was quite unaccustomed to fencing, or to any intercourse with men—especially men of his world. She understood this story had himself and herself for hero and heroine; she felt she must continue the badinage—anything to keep the tone as light as it could be, with all these new emotions flooding her being and making her heart beat. It was almost pain she experienced, the sensation was so intense, and Hector read of these things in her eyes and was content. So he let his voice grow softer still, and almost whispered again:

"And aren't you sorry for the prince—beautiful princess?"

"I am sorry for any one who suffers," said Theodora, gently, "even in a fairy story."

And as he looked at her he thought to himself, here was a rare thing, a beautiful woman with a tender heart. He knew she would be gentle and kind to the meanest of God's creatures. And again the vision of her at Bracondale came to him—his mother would grow to love her perhaps even more than Morella Winmarleigh! How she would glorify everything commonplace with those tender ways of hers! To look at her was like looking up into the vast, pure sky, with the light of heaven beyond. And yet he lay on the grass at her feet with his mind full of thoughts and plans and desires to drag this angel down from her high heaven—into his arms!

Because he was a man, you see, and the time of his awakening was not yet.

Man is a hunter—a hunter always. He may be a poor thing and hunt only a few puny aims, or he may be a strong man and choose big game. But he is hunting, hunting—something—always.

And primitive life seems like the spectrum of light—composed of three primary colors, and white and black at the beginning and ending of it. And the three colors of blue, red, and yellow have their counterparts in the three great passions in man—to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.

And white and black seem like birth and death—and there is the sun, which is the soul and makes the colors, and allows of all combinations and graduations of beautiful other shades from them for parallels to all other qualities and instincts, only the original are those great primary forces—to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his enemy.

And if this is so to the end of time, man will be the same, I suppose, until civilization has emasculated the whole of nature and so ends the world! Or until this wonderful new scientist has perfected his researches to the point of creating human life by chemical process, as well as his present discovery of animating jellyfish!

Who knows? But by that time it will not matter to any of us!

Meanwhile, man is at the stage that when he loves a woman he wishes to possess her, and, in a modified form, he wishes to steal her, if necessary, from another, or kill the enemy who steals her from him.

But the Sun of the Soul is there, too, so the poor old world is not in such a very bad case after all.

And how the bon Dieu must smile sadly to Himself when He looks down on priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas. Trying to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and glorifying it all with the Sun of the Soul.

And all of you who are great reasoners and arguers will laugh at this ridiculous little simile of life drawn by a woman; but I do not care. I have had my outburst, and said what I wanted to. So now we can get back to the two—who were not yet lovers—under their green tree in the Forest of Marly.

"But you must be able to guess the end," Theodora was saying; "and oh, I want to know, if all the roads were barred by love—how did they get out of the wood?"

"They took him with them," said Lord Bracondale, and he touched the edge of her dress gently with a wild flower he had picked in the grass, while into his eyes crept all the passion he felt and into his voice all the tenderness.

Now if Theodora had ever read La Faute de L'Abbé Mouret she would have known just what proximity and the spring-time was doing for them both.

But she had not read, and did not know. All she was conscious of was a wild thrilling of her pulses, an extraordinary magnetic force that seemed to draw her—draw her nearer—nearer to what? Even that she did not know or ask herself. Beyond that it was danger, and she must fly from it.

"I do not want to talk of any of those things to-day," she said, suddenly dropping her parasol between them. "I only want to laugh and be amused, and as you were to devise schemes for my happiness, you must amuse me."

He looked up at her again and he noticed, for all this brave speech, that her hands were trembling as she clutched the handle of her blue parasol.

Triumph and joy ran through him. He could afford to wait a little longer now, since he knew that he must mean something, even perhaps a great deal, to her.

And so for the next half-hour he played with her, he skimmed over the surface of danger, he enthralled her fancy, and with every sentence he threw the glamour of his love around her, and fascinated her soul. All his powers of attraction—and they were many—were employed for her undoing.

And Theodora sat as one in a dream.

At last she felt she must wake—must realize that she was not a happy princess, but Theodora, who must live her dull life—and this—and this—where was it leading her to?

So she clasped her hands together suddenly, and she said:

"But do you know we have grown serious, and I asked you to amuse me, Lord Bracondale!"

"I cannot amuse you," he said, lazily, "but shall I tell you about my home, which I should like to show you some day?" And again he began to caress the farthest edge of her dress with his wild flower. Just the smallest movement of smoothing it up and down that no one could resent, but which was disturbing to Theodora. She did not wish him to stop, on the contrary—and yet—

"Yes, I would like to hear of that," she said. "Is it an old, old house?"

"Oh, moderately so, and it has nooks and corners and views that might appeal to you. I believe I should find them all endowed with fresh charm myself, if I could see them with you"—and he made the turning-point of his flower a few inches nearer her hand.

Theodora said nothing; but she took courage and peeped at him again. And she thought how powerful he looked, and how beautifully shaped; and she liked the fineness of the silk of his socks and his shirt, and the cut of his clothes, and the wave of his hair—and last of all, his brown, strong, well-shaped hands.

And then she fell to wondering what the general scheme of things could be that made husbands possess none of