Complete Story. The Cloisters of Friendship.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue XX, 15 November 1902, Page 1223

Complete Story. The Cloisters of Friendship.

"1 he sort of winter’s day when you only remember autumn and anticipate the spring; you look for the violets of tile one, and the snowdrops of the ether. In the hearts of the two who walked together in that winter afternoon under leafless elms there was just that touch of autumn with a certain recollecting reviving of spring. Recollecting, because with I hem it hail once been spring, and love, and all fair things. Then there had been a long pause, an interval in wiiieh there hail come other interests, i ther loves. In one heart at least love had died down, her heart crushed. sore and wounded had turned with a pathetic- longing to friendship That cold half-sister of love. 1 ove was dead yet friendship might stil- Im- hers, friendship might light the dark places of life, holding up a lamp which might light, though it e hi Id not warm. Those are bitter days when friendsi ip takes love’s place. had found love a delusion, and she hoped much from friendship. But the woman who loves and is love inspiring is not satisfied with friendship. With her usual perversity she sought to turn the man who had been ’.er lover into her friend. They passed slowly together, both Lad .-aid good-bye to youth, but goodbye does not mean oblivion. She knew the futility of trying to revive the ashes of a dying love, or to relight a dead one. Better, far better to ! ight a new fire, with fresh sticks and straw and coal. But from verv

force of habit she turned to her dead fires, end sought to rekindle them. This man. who had long all but passed out of her life, seemed inclined to revise the friendship as it had been at the beginning before it had become love. Why had lo\e died? Because the woman could not give what the man’s human nature <lesired. and which his higher nature would have despised after the gilt. Men long for their goddess to descend. but if she descends they long to make her a goddess again. That is to say. the manner of woman who is as a goddess, and the manner of man who loves such. But friendship had then been impossible where love’* completion was dei.ied. nor could love linger. All this had been years ago. ami now on a winter afternoon these tv. > had met and had been talking and walking together as of old. “I think.” she said—nothing can equal the pathos of the words? “\\ sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things." Tennyson said it last. Dante said it but Chaucer said it first.” "Is that so?” he answered. "Dante has said it immortally, whoever mav have thought it first' Those lovers. Francesca and Paolo (they had been together to see Watts’ picture of those lovers who. clasped in each other’s arms, float through space), were punished very sweetly for their short sin. Short sin! yes! and one sin only. Think how Dante’s stern

eyes would have looked on the ligat and many loves of to-day.” "Yet even Ihmte gave them a sweet punishment!” "Was it sweet?" he answered. "Is it sweet to be tantalised?” Most sweet, she said, "for who tantalise unless they love. Love teases in one of his sweetest moods, but friendship ”s| - paused. ’’Well!” he said, expectantly, "Friendship- " friendship is too serious to ”<»r please?" "Or please, wholly," she sighed, “it pleases at the beginning, onlv towards the middle it begins to "And then?" "Why then, it leaves the safe cloister and becomes—a nun bloke loose!" "Like the nun in Davidson’s ballad? But she came back.” "Oh. yes. they all come back, in the i ml." ‘So that is the beginning and mid<di and end of a friendship," he said, sadly. \ little sorrow, a little sinning!" Oh. there need not be that " she -.-. id. I ut always sorrow in any ease?" ”'ies, in any case!” 1 hey had wandered out of the < rowded street down a quiet lane, “'ershadowed by elms which in Mimmer made a green and shady place; < ■ one side lay the shadow v stret- -■ and at this season wastes of lynsington Gardens: on'the other 'he backs of artists’ houses were Lindens and shrubberies am! littl - summer houses, tiny oases in the wilderness of London. The greyness of the footpath under the elms, the s r ‘*.'- smoke-grimed tree stems, the -•Teel blue of the sky blurred through the overlacing bare branches the quiet, unbroken except for the passing of carriage wheels in the distance,

gave to this lane a grave suggestion of a cloister.

The two walked gravely as those who have long ago left behind them the heartburnings and the desires ol life, and yet in truth he was a man in whom passion was strong and who saw the body hiding the soul as much as he realised the soul behind the body, and she, for all her talk of cloisters, her persistent striving after satisfying friendships, was at heart as she described it; only a nun joyfully and a little fearfully breaking loose at moments. She moved quickly as the wind stirred her hair, and waved her long skirts about her feet, and brought a soft Hush to a face men called lovely, not for any regularity or perfection of beauty, but because of a subtle appeal to a man s emotions always lurking there, hiding in the corners of her lips, and always ready, only half hiding, in her pretty eyes. In his heart the man was saying, “How much I loved you once, how much 1 love you again.’ “How peaceful it is,” she said; “just to-day we two walking together, talking together, as in the past.” She was always hovering on the brink of dangerous allusion. She was always like a child longing to play with lire. The man believed himself proof against her elusive seductiveness. She knew that at any rate, though he no longer loved her. that she was a woman whom a man would not easilv turn into a friend.

“I ‘think.*’ he said, “that what is far sadder than the memory of the once has been is the curse of the thought of what might have been.” Then she wondered if he was thinking of all life might have been had they but met before it was Un, late. But with a woman's tact she forebore to speak. After all it was well she did not speak, for he was thinking almost as r.uch of another woman! And yet he was thinking of her too. And she was the one walking beside him now. They were both trying to persuade t hemselves and each other that the cloister of friendship was a sweeter, happier abode than the bve-wavs of love.

And all the time they were both disloyal, he to the woman be was going to marry, to whom he had long been secretly engaged, though the woman he walked with this winter afternoon knew it not. And she? She was only partially disloyal, for the ache of her heart at the coldness of the man for whose sake she had given up the friendship of the man beside her now. “We will have many such afternoons." he said. “Our tastes suit.” “They used to!” “Why not now?” “Autres temps autres moeures.” Iler voice had that pretty accent of mockery which had been her safeguard. her curse, perhaps, all her life He had no idea that she had an idea. The intuitions of the most inconsequent women are often keener than thereasons and arguments of the most intellectual men. He (his name was lan) looked at her. She

(her name was Iris) was well aware of that glance. ‘•I don't understand. Which ‘autres temps?' ” “Oh. if you forget it is not for me to remember!" Nor was it. How could he guess that rivers of tears had flowed from her lovely eyes to swell the ocean called “Love's Grave.” The grave where all loves drown themselves sooner or later.

“Our tastes are the same,” he resumed after a pause. "I think our tastes suit better than mine and Lilian's!”

Lilian was his other friend. Theirs was a close friendship; Iris knew the fact of his friendship with Lilian and imagined the rest. lan naturally, being a man. imagined neither Iris nor Lilian guessed at his feelings for both. Iris'represented forbidden fruit of love frustrated by honour to another man, and that man bis friend.

Lilian represented peaceful domestic love—the light at eventide, the haven of the storm-tossed boat. Yet man-like he sometimes looked back to the stormy gleam lit sea, where

two, and one was Iris, were together in a wave-rocked boat. He looked at his long-past danger with yearning. Iris had been so very sweet to be in danger with, to be endangered for. They walked back to her home in the twilight. Both were in that silent state of excited nerves which lead to danger had either willed it. As she poured out his tea, and he lying back against her silk cushions received it from her hands with the

intimacy of old, he. with something of the old passion rising in thought, were it well to speak? And she—moving about the room after giving him bis tea, taking off her hat and gloves, looked with eyes suddenly filling with tears, at the picture of the man she loved. There had been years when he loved her—years that made her oblivious to everything else—oblivious to friends, to everything on earth except him, and to keep as she had won his love.

And now the coldness, the awful coldness, that had succeeded to those sweet years of warmth and love. And now, to hope against hope, and now to eheat herself with idle dreams

from which her intuition told her that there could be but one awakening. had tossed her back from the stormy sea of love to the shore of friendship.

Could she find in her lover of long ago a friend for to-day? She won dered!

lan looked at her sitting in the shaded lamplight beside him. He remembered without an effort how seductive she had been to him. How he had reluctanly torn himself from her because of honour, and because she had willed it so, and he remem bered her tears—and his own, for some men do shed tears, when all life is a great upheaval because of a woman's scruples. And how he had found comfort with Lilian! .And after a while he had found that his friendship with Lilian meant love. Lilian, worth twenty frivolous Irises

“Shall I tell her now about Lilian *>** In his man's vanity he imagined— not imagined, but perhaps fancied—that she wished to light up the ashes of a dead love. Was he so very unwilling that they should be rekindled?

Iris said softly. “Is it not just like old days, our having tea together in a winter afternoon? It is so long ago, and yet I never forget!” “I do not forget!” he said. “They were sweet,” she persisted, "those days, they were sweet!” He could not answer. Why did she persist? She ought to know. She must be told about Lilian, or he might be disloyal—to Lilian. “I sometimes regret those days.” she said, with her tantalising sweetness. "Oh, don’t regret! Why should you regret?” "Oh. why should I?” she said. He fancied she was weary of her love of years: he was so unworthy as to fancy she wished to lure him back. Lure him back? Could he have seen into her heart just then! "He’s welcome to all the love all the Lilians in the world can give him if only I had not lost the love I have lived for.” And in her anguish- she would not have heeded whose heart she broke, now her own was broken, this man or another’s. But for him she had no thought, nor for anything-, except that his friendship might console her in her desolation. She did not consider that he was not free to give either love or friendship—as she meant friendship—as he meant it perhaps. She wondered at his reluctance. vaguely wondered. "We will have many such afternoons.” he said, as he at last rose to go. Her hand lay in his in lingering good-bye. Her eyes looked into his as of old. He remembered Lilian's eyes, probably glancing at the clock at that moment, wondering why he was so late.

“Yes. many, many such afternoons.” she said. Her sweet face was very near his. But he remembered Lilian, and Iris remembered—oh! when did she ever forget—another.

As he went down the lamp-lit street and looked up. in and afar, at the starry sky. he thought of the star-like eyes of Iris. They had been

full of friendship, he thought, with a pang of remorse. Her gentle, “Yea, many, many afternoons,” rang in his ears, the sweet scent of the violets she had worn followed him all the way. “She ought to be told,” he said to himself. “It’s not fair to her.”

He rang the bell of Lilian's door. He knew there would be no violets there—at any rate no violets of the senses whether in silver bowls or elsewhere. Poor Iris! He was abstracted in his manner that evening. Lilian observed it and he only said, •‘God bless you, dear, for not having your rooms and your clothes scented. Some people over-do it!"

Lilian, as she gave her chaste cheek for his evening kiss, noticed the scent of violets. And Iris

She went straight to the table where stood the picture of the man she loved, the man whose coldness had tempted her for a moment to seek consolation in friendship. “Oh, Love!” she said, “what man's friendship could compensate for the loss of your love? What other man’s love?” Then she kissed the picture.

And far a*way in another country that man whose love she doubted kissed the beautiful picture of Iris.