The Argosy — page 306: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

i) cy? \O ERNA. By THE AUTHOR OF ‘*OuR LADy OF TEARS.” — blue eyes, large and tender and dreamy, a shining of golden hair, lips as exquisite as ever were sung by poet, and lending by their great beauty the crowning charm to an almost perfect face. This vision that brightened for me my life in the dim old manor- house might have been Psyche, lighted upon English ground in her search for Cupid, but a Psyche to whom Love, as yet, was nothing but a name. I would have given life itself to have heard her in the last hour of it confess me dear to her, to have had one kiss from those perfect lips, as I lay dying, pressed on mine. But when I had half-hinted at my madness, half-looked it, she had shrunk from me ; and snatching her hand from the clasp in which I prisoned it, had said to me very decidedly: ““No, Gerald. If you would not have me remember how very distant our cousinship is, never dare speak of this to me again.” And I never had, being in my love for her very much of a coward ; but the eager hunger was always there. And she saw it, I think, and seemed sometimes half to mock at, sometimes to resent my love. , It was happiness—a happiness, though, that came strangely near to pain—to be thrown so much in her society as in the summer that followed her curt rejection of my suit. I had been flung in a wrestle for honours at Cambridge, and had reaped a fever instead, which had very nearly landed me where failure cannot disturb. When I had tottered a few feeble steps back from death’s door into the way of life again, there came to me a great happiness. Erna and I had met until now only during the rare visits that her father paid to the pretty villa, west from London, where my mother had lived quietly during the ten years of her widowhood. ‘They were distant cousins, and had been lovers long ago; or rather on his side there had been love, faintly responded to on hers; and at last she had broken off the en- gagement with a plea of relationship. He left her, and for many years they did not meet again; but I think he was never able either to forgive or to forget. How is it when into our life there comes a bitterness like his—when we marry, and waking in the dead of night see not the face that lies on the marriage-pillow beside us, but other eyes that look on us tenderly and sweetly out of the darkness of the long ago ? I put questions of this kind to myself many times, I well remember, in the summer when the happiness I speak of came to me—that time when her father’s invita- tion to visit the old Devon manor-house being given and accepted, Erna and I lived week after week under the same grey roof, and I VOL. XXXII CORnaicloooks (CO)