Sylvia went to her own room after dinner, still wondering what had happened to her on her birthday. There is an age at which most of us unexpectedly come across the truth about ourselves, and sometimes about others, and it generally happens that in our recollection the change turns upon one day, or even one hour.

The shock is sudden and unexpected. Floating down a quick smooth stream in a boat, a man is aware of motion, as he watches the bank without realizing the strength of the flowing water; but when the skiff is suddenly checked by any obstacle in midstream, the whole force of the river rushes upon it, and past it, and perhaps over it, in an instant.

Something of the same sort happens now and then in our lives. The great illusion of childhood carries us along at a speed of which we have no idea, in the little boat which is the immediate and undeniable reality of near surroundings, the child's cradle afloat upon a fiction which is wide and deep and strong, and sometimes we are grown men and women before our small craft strikes upon a shoal of truth, with a dash that throws us from the thwart, and frightens the bravest of us. There we stick fast upon the rough fact for a while, and the flood that was so smooth and pleasant rushes past us, foaming and seething and breaking against the boat's side and threatening to tear her to pieces. And if the tide is ebbing at the river's mouth, we may be left high and dry upon the sharp reality for a long time; but if not, the high water will presently float us, and off we shall spin again, smoothly and safely, on the bosom of the sweet untrue.

Such accidents happen more than once to most people, and almost every one resents them bitterly. Even in daily living, few men can bear to be roughly roused from sleep. Much more is the waking rude from year-long dreams of fancy.

Sylvia sat at her table and stared at the lamp, as if it were her own heart which she could look into, and watch, and study, and criticise.

For most of all, she was in a humour to find fault with it, as having played her false when she least expected that it could deceive her. She had built on it, as it dictated; she had trusted it, as it suggested; she had lived, and loved to live, for its sake; and now it had betrayed her. It had not been in earnest, all the time, but had somehow made her think that she herself was all earnestness. It was a false and silly little heart, and she hated it, as she looked at it in the lamp, and she wished that it would frizzle and burn like the poor moth that had gone too near the hot gla.s.s while she had been downstairs.

It was positively laughing at her, now, and she set her small mouth angrily. To think that she should ever have fancied herself in love with a man who might have been her grandfather! And it wickedly showed her the colonel as he would be in another ten years, a picture founded upon the tired look she had just seen in his face. She was ashamed of herself, and furious against herself for being ashamed, and she suddenly wished that she were dead, because that would give people a real reason for being sorry for her. It would be very pathetic to die so young! If she did, her heart could not laugh at her.

She thought about it for a while, and among other reflexions she suddenly found herself wondering whether young Knox, the officer on her father's ship, would be very sorry. He had written her a letter from j.a.pan which she had not answered. Indeed, she was not sure that she had read every word of it, for it had only come this morning. Life had been too short for reading letters on that day. But there it was, on the table. She had the evening before her, and though it was a long letter, it could not take more than a quarter of an hour to go through it. She put out her hand to take it and then looked at the lamp again.

A lean, brown young face was suddenly there, and bright eyes that looked straight at her, without anything vastly superior in them, but full of something she liked and understood and instantly longed for. Her heart was not laughing at her any more, for she had forgotten all about it, which is generally the best thing one can do in such cases.

Even the expression of her face changed and softened as she laid her hand upon the letter. For Wimpole's sake, as she had made herself think a few hours earlier, she would gladly have doubled her age, and the forced longing for equality of years between herself and her ideal had fleetingly expressed itself in her face by shadows, where there could not yet be lines. But as the illusion sank down into the storehouse of all impossibilities and all mistakes, the light of early youth fell full and unscreened upon her face again, and she revived unconsciously, as day-flowers do at sunrise, when the night-flowers fold their leaves.

It was surely no thought of love which made the change; or if that were its cause, it was but love's fore-lightening in a waking dream. Much rather it must have been the consciousness of living roused by the thought of youth. For youth is the elixir of life, and the touch of old age is a blight on youth, when youth is longing to be old; but youth that is willingly young has power to give the old a breath of itself again, before the very end. In their children men live again, and in their children's children they remember the loveliness of childhood.

From a very far country, across half a world of land and water, the letter had come to Sylvia on her birthday, as Harmon's had come to Helen. There is something strange and terrible, if we realize it, in man's power to harm or help by written words from any distance. The little bit of paper leaves our hand with its wishing-carpet in the shape of a postage stamp, and swiftly singles out the one man or woman, in two thousand millions, for whom it is meant, going straight to its mark with an aim far more unerring than steel or ball. A man may much more probably miss his enemy with a pistol at ten paces, than with a letter at ten thousand miles. If the fabled inhabitant of Mars could examine our world under an imaginary gla.s.s, as we study a drop of water under a microscope, he would surely be profoundly interested in the movements of the letter-bacillus, as he might call it. He might question whether it is generated spontaneously, or is the result of an act of will, more or less aggressive, but he would marvel at the rapidity of its motion and at the strength of its action upon the human animal through the eye. It would be very inexplicable to him; least of all could he understand the instant impulse of man to tear off the sh.e.l.l of the bacillus as soon as it reaches him, for he would no doubt notice that in a vast number of cases the sight of it produces discontent and pain, and he might even find a few instances in which death followed almost immediately. In others the bacteria produce amazingly exhilarating results, such as laughter and the undignified antics of joy, and even sudden improvements in the animal's health and appearance. He would especially notice that these bacilli are almost perpetually in motion, from the time they leave one human being until they fasten themselves upon another, and that in parts of the world where they are not found at all, or only sporadically, the animals behave in a very different way, are healthier, and are less exposed to the fatal results of their own inventions. If the inhabitant of Mars were given to jumping at conclusions, he would certainly announce to his fellow-beings that he had discovered in Earth the germ of a disease called by Terrenes 'Civilization.' And perhaps that is just what the letter is.

Young Knox wrote to Sylvia because he was in love with her, which is the best of all reasons for writing when love is right, and the worst imaginable when it is wrong. He was so much in love that as soon as she was out of his sight his first impulse was to set down on paper all sorts of things which had very little sense in them, but made up for a famine of wisdom by a corresponding plenty of feeling. There is something almost pathetic in the humbleness of a young man's strength before the object of his first true love. It is the abas.e.m.e.nt of the real before the ideal; but if the ideal fails, the real takes vengeance of the man for having trodden it under.

Young women rarely understand their power; older ones too often overrate what they have. The girl who first breathes the air of the outer world and first sees in a man's eyes that he loves her, knows that he is stronger, better taught, more experienced than she is, and compares herself with him by a measure which he rates as nothing. Man is much more real to woman, when both are very young, than woman is to man; and being real he represents to her a sort of material force. But to him she is an imaginary being, strong with a mystic influence from which he cannot escape when he has come within the pentagram of the spell. It is bad for a man if she comes to know her strength before he has learned his weakness. Then she riots in it, recklessly, for a time, until she has hurt him. She says, 'Do this,' and he does it, like the Centurion's servant; or 'Say this,' and he says it, be the words wise or foolish, and she reckons his wisdom to herself and his folly to him, frankly, and without the least doubt of her own perfection, for a while, rejoicing senselessly in driving him. But by and by, as in a clock, the mainspring feels the gentle regulation of the swaying balance, and the balance takes its motion from the spring, till both together move in perfect time, while each without the other would be but a useless bit of machinery. Sylvia did not know all that, and if she had, she would perhaps not have reasoned about it much. She did not understand why young Knox wrote that he would live for her, die for her, and, if necessary, convulse the solar system for her exclusive pleasure and benefit. It seemed a great deal to promise under the circ.u.mstances, and her moderate maiden vanity could not make her appear, in her own eyes, as an adequate cause of such serious disturbance in the order of things; yet it was not displeasing to be magnified into a possible source of astronomical miracles, though the idea was slightly ridiculous and she was glad that she had it entirely to herself and beyond carping criticism.

She was not in the least in love with the man who wrote to her, and she had not been in love with him when they had parted. That very morning, when she had received the letter, she had been a little inclined to smile at the writer's persistence, and had laid the letter aside, half read, in no great hurry to finish it. But since then, her life had changed. She had gone aground on the shoal of truth and she was already longing for the waters of illusion to rise and float her away.

So she let the breezy memories come back to her, and they brought her a sweet forewarning of her growing life. All at once, she knew that she had never met any one so young who had pleased her so much, any one with such clear eyes and manly ways, frank smile and honest voice, as the young officer who had hated this hollow world with such grave conviction because Sylvia Strahan could not go home in her father's ship. She read on, and felt an unexpected thrill of pleasure when the words told her what she had already known; namely, that the squadron would be far on its way to San Francis...o...b.. the time the letter reached her, that Knox was to come to the capital with her father, and that she was quite certain to meet him there before very long. She was unconscious of looking round at her things just then and wishing that they were already packed for the homeward journey.

She wrote to him before she went to bed. It was a duty of civility to answer him, though she felt herself under no obligation to reply to his numerous questions. On the contrary, she said nothing at all about them, but she gave him her impressions of Lucerne and told him that Aunt Rachel had taken cold, but was now quite well, a piece of information which, though satisfactory in its way, was not calculated to affect her correspondent's happiness in any marked degree. 'It would be nice to see each other again,' she said at the end, with which mild sentiment she signed herself 'sincerely' his.

The only odd thing about it all was that when the letter was finished she had not the slightest idea where to send it, a fact which had not crossed her mind when she had unscrewed her travelling inkstand, but which sufficiently proved that she had acted under an impulse of some sort. She said to herself that it did not matter, but she was disappointed, and the smile faded from her face for a little while.

When she was asleep it came back in the dark and lingered on her lips all night, waning and waxing with her maiden dreams.

Her eighteenth birthday had been a good day in her life, after all.

There are few indeed who fall asleep happily when the first illusion has gone down into darkness with the evening sun.

CHAPTER XI

Helen Harmon went out alone to mail her letter. She would not have done such a thing in any great city of Europe, but there is a sense of safety in the dull, impersonal atmosphere of Lucerne, and it was a relief to her to be out in the open air alone; it would be a still greater relief to have dropped the letter into the mysterious slit which is the first stage on the road to everywhere.

No one ever thinks of the straight little cut, with its metal cover, as being at all tragical. And yet it is as tragic as the jaws of death, in its way. Many a man and woman has stood before it with a letter and hesitated; and every one has, at some time or other, felt the sharp twist at the heart, which is the wrench of the irrevocable, when the envelope has just slipped away into darkness. The words cannot be unwritten any more, after that, nor burned, nor taken back. A telegram may contradict them, or explain them, or ask pardon for them, but the message will inevitably be read, and do its work of peace or war, of challenge or forgiveness, of cruelty, or kindness, or indifference.

Helen did not mean to hesitate, for she hastened towards the moment of looking back upon a deed now hard to do. It was not far to the post office, either, and the thing could soon be done. Yet in her brain there was a surging of uncertainties and a whirling of purposes, in the midst of which she clung hard to her determination, though it should cost ever so dear to carry it out. She had not half thought of all the consequences yet, nor of all it must mean to her to be separated from her son. The results of her action sprang up now, like sudden dangers, and tried to frighten her from her purpose, tried to gain time against her to show themselves, tried to terrify her back to inaction and doubt.

Something asked her roughly whence she had got the conviction that she was doing right at all. Another something, more subtle, whispered that she was sacrificing Archie for the sake of her own morbid conscience, and making herself a martyr's crown, not of her own sufferings only, but of her son's loss in losing her. It told her that the letter she held in her hand was a mistake, but not irrevocable until it should have slipped into the dark entrance of the road to everywhere.

She had still a dozen steps to make before reaching the big white building that stands across the corner of the street, and she was hurrying on, lest she should not reach the door in time. Then she almost ran against Colonel Wimpole, walking slowly along the pavement where there was a half shadow. Both stopped short, and looked at each other in surprise. He saw the letter in her hand, and guessed that she had written to her husband.

"I was only going to the post office," she said, half apologetically, for she thought that he must wonder why she had come out alone at such an hour.

"Will you let me walk with you?" he asked.

"Yes."

He made a step forwards, as though expecting her to turn back from her errand and go with him.

"Not that way," she said. "I must go to the post office first."

"No. Please don't." He placed himself in her way.

"I must."

She spoke emphatically and stood still, facing him, while their eyes met again, and neither spoke again for a few seconds.

"You are ruining your life," he said, after the pause. "When that letter is gone, you will never be able to get it back."

"I know. I shall not wish to."

"You will." His lips set themselves rather firmly as he opposed her, but her face darkened.

"Is this a trial of strength between us?" she asked.

"Yes. I mean to keep you from going back to Henry Harmon."

"I have made up my mind," Helen answered.

"So have I," said Wimpole.

"How can you hinder me? You cannot prevent me from sending this letter, nor from going to him if I choose. And I have chosen to go. That ends it."

"You are mistaken. You are reckoning without me, and I will make it impossible."

"You? How? Even if I send this letter?"

"Yes. Come and walk a little, and we can talk. If you insist upon it, drop your letter into the box. But it will only complicate matters, for you shall not go back to Harmon."

Again she looked at him. He had never spoken in this way, during all the years of their acknowledged friendship and unspoken love. She felt that she resented his words and manner, but at the same time that she loved him better and admired him more. He was stronger and more dominant than she had guessed.

"You have no right to say such things to me," she answered. "But I will walk with you for a few minutes. Of course you can hinder me from sending my letter now. I can take it to the post office by and by."

"You cannot suppose that I mean to prevent you by force," said Wimpole, and he stood aside to let her pa.s.s if she would.

"You said that it was a trial of strength," she answered.