"He has loved, perhaps; of a surety he has suffered.
Inevitably must he too have heard the 'sounds that
come from the distant country of Splendour and Terror';
and many an evening has he bowed down in silence
before laws that are deeper than the sea."

Love is at once so great and so frail that there is perhaps no thought which can at the same time so appal and uplift us. And there is in love, at times, for some an unfathomed mystery. That which can lead to the stars can lead to the abyss. There is a limit set to mortal joy as well as to mortal suffering, and the flame may overleap itself in one as in the other. The most dread mystery of a love that is overwhelming is its death through its own flame.
This is an "untold story" that I write. None could write it. A few will understand: to most it will be at once as real and as unreal as foam, as no more than the phosphoresence of emotion. One may see, and yet deny: as one may see in the nocturnal wave a flame that is not there, or a star caught momentarily in the travelling hollow, and know that there is no flame but only a sudden gleam of infinitesimal, congregated life; no star, but only a wandering image. But, also, one may deny that which is not phantasmal. He who is colour-blind cannot see colour: he who is blind to that infinite flame of life which creates the blue,mist of youth and love and romance cannot discern in youth or love or romance the names of those primitive ecstasies that in themselves are immortal things, though we see only their fruitions and decays: and he whose soul is obscure, or whose spirit is blind, cannot see those things which pertain to the spirit, or understand those things wherein the spirit expresses itself.
But for the some who care, I write these few words: not because I know a mystery, and would reveal it, but because I have known a mystery, and am to-day as a child before it, and can neither reveal nor interpret it.
They loved each other well, the two of whom I speak. It was no lesser love, though upheld by desires and fed with flame; but knew these, and recognised in them the bodily images of a flame that was not mortal and of desires that were not finite. They knew all of joy and sorrow that can come to man and woman through the mysterious gates of Love, which to some seem of dusk and to some seem of morning or the radiances of noon.
Year by year their love deepened. I know of no love like theirs.
One hears everywhere that passion is but unsatisfied desire, that love is but a fever. So, too, as I have heard, the moles, which can see in twilight and amid the earthly grooms they inhabit, cannot see the stars even as shining points upon the branches of trees, nor these moving branches even, nor their wind-lifted shadows.
Their love did not diminish, but grew,through tragic circumstances. As endurance became harder,---for love deepened and passion became as the bird of prey that God sets famished in the wilderness, while the little and great things of common life came in upon this love like a tide,---it seemed to each that they only withdrew the more into that which was for them not the most great thing in life, but life.
To her, he was not only the man she loved: to whom she had given the inward, unnameable life as well as that which dwelled in the heart and in the mind, in the pulse and the blood and the nerves. He was Love itself; and when sometimes he whispered in her hair, she heard other words, and knew that a greater than he whom she loved spoke with hidden meanings.
How could she tell what she was to him? She was a flame to his mind as well as to his life:that she knew. But he could not tell her what words fail to tell. She could feel his heart beat: his pulse rose to her eyes as a wave to the moon: in those eyes of his she could see that which was in her own heart, but which she had to blind and lead blindfold, because a woman cannot look upon that which is intolerable. Doubtless it was not so with him. This she could not know. But she knew her own heart. The untranslatable call was there. She heard it in those silences where women listen.
Sometimes she looked at him, wondering: at times, even with a sudden fear. She did not fear him whom she loved, but unknown forces behind him. He spoke to her sometimes of that which cannot pass: of love more enduring than the hills, of passion, of the spirit, of deathless things. She feared them. She did not fear with the mind: that leaped, as a doe to the water-springs. She did not fear with the body, for that abhorred death and the ending of dreams. But something within her feared. These things he spoke of were too great and terrible a wind for a little, wandering flame.
Did he not think thus himself? she wondered. Was it because he was a man that he spoke, blithely of these far-off, beautiful and terrible things?
Once they were lying on a grassy slope, on a promontory, on a warm, moonlit night. A single pine-tree grew on the little, rocky buttress: and against this they leaned, and looked through the branches at the pale, uncertain stars, or into the moving, dark, mysterious water.
"It is our love," he whispered to her: "we are on the granite rock: and through the tree of our little world we look at the unchanging stars: and this moving tide is the mystery that is forever about us, and whispers so much, and tells so little."
It was sweet to hear: and she loved him who whispered: and the thought was her own. But that night she lay thinking for hour upon hour, or, rather, her mind was but a swimming thought; a thought that swam idly on still seas in deep darkness. How wonderful were these dreams that love whispered: how . . .
But when at sunrise she woke, it was with a sense that the horizons of life crept closer and closer. She smiled sadly as she thought of how measurable are the mortalities we flatter with infinitude: the sands of the desert, the green hair of the grass, the waves of the sea.
Often, of late, she knew that he who loved her was strangely disquieted. "Too many dreams," he said once, with double meaning, smiling as he looked at her, but with an unexpressed trouble in his eyes.
More and more, because of the great, enduring, pitiless flame of love, she turned to the little things of the hour and the moment. It is the woman's way, and is a law. And more and more, wrought by longings and desires, he whom she loved turned to the inward contemplation of the things that are immortal, to the longings and desires that have their roots in the soul, but whose tendrils reach beyond the stars, and whose flowers grow by the waters of life in Edens beyond dream. It may not be men's way; and he had the fatal gift of the imagination, which is to men what great beauty is to women---a crown of stars and a slaying sword.
They turned the same way, not knowing it. How could they know, being blind? Blind children they were.
He feared the flame would consume them. She feared it would consume itself.
Therein lay the bitterness. But for her, being a woman, the depths were deeper. He had his dreams.
When, at last, the end came---a tragic, an almost incredible end, perhaps, for love did not change, passion was not slain, but translated to a starry dream, and every sweet and lovely intercourse was theirs still-the suffering was too great to be borne. Yet neither death nor tragic mischance came with veiled healing.
Love, won at a supreme hazard (and again, I do not tell the story of these two, who had, and now in the further silences have, their own secret, forever sacred), proved a stronger force than life. Life that can be measured, that is so measurable, is as a child before the other unknown power, that is without measure. The man did not understand. He fed the flame with dreams upon dreams, with hopes upon hopes; with more dreams and more hopes.
Once, dimly foreseeing the end, she said,
"Love can be slain. It is mortal." He answered, almost with anger, that sooner could the soul die. She looked at him, wondering that he, whose imagination was so much greater than hers, could not understand.
She loved to the edge of death by will. Will can control the mortal things of love. Instinct wore her heart by day and by night. She put her frail strength into the balance, then her dreams, then her memories. Before the end, hesitating, but not for herself, she put her whole mind there. Still, life weighed lower and lower the scale.
One day they talked of immaterial things. Suddenly he asked her a question.
She was silent. The room was in darkness, for the fire had burned low. He could see only the ruddy gleam on the white skirt; the two white hands; the little restless flame in an opal.
Then, quietly, she told him. She had not ceased to love: it was not that.
Simply, love had been too great a flame. At the last, at that moment, she had striven to save all: she had already put all in the balance, all but her soul. That, too, she had now put there with swift and terrible suddenness.
The balance trembled, then Life weighed the scale lower, and lower.
It was gone. That had gone away upon the wind, which was light as it, homeless as it, as mysterious. Out of the balance she took back what else she had put there: her mind, quiet, sane, serene now, if that can be serene that neither fears nor cares because it does not feel: and the dreams and desires, that had turned to loosened fragrances and shadows: and hopes, grey as the ashes of wood, that fell away and were no more.
She was the same and yet not the same. He trembled, but dare not understand. In his mind were falling stars.
"I will give you all I have to give," she said; "to you, who have had all I had to give, I give that which is left. It is an image that has no life."
When he walked that night alone under the stars he understood. Love can come, not in his mortal but in his immortal guise: as a spirit of flame. There is no alchemy of life which can change that tameless and fierce thing, that power more intense than fire, that creature whose breath consumes what death only silences.
It had come close and looked at them. Long ago he had prayed that it might be so. In answer, the immortal had come to the mortal. How little of all that was to be he had foreseen when, by a spiritual force, he, accomplished that too intimate, that too close union, in which none may endure! I speak of a mystery. That it may be, that to many, if not all, this thing that I say will be meaningless, I know. But I do not try to explain what is not a matter of words: nay, I could not, for though I believe, I know of this mystery only through those two who broke (or of whom one broke) some occult but imperious spiritual law.
They lived long after this great change. Their love never faltered. Each, as before, came close to the other, as day and night ceaselessly meet in dawns and twilights.
But that came to her no more which had gone. For him, he grew slowly to understand a love more great than his. His had not known the innermost flame, that is pure fire.
Strange and terrible thoughts came to him at times. The waste places of the imagination were peopled.
Often, as he has told me, through sleepless nights a solemn marching as of a vast throng rose and fell, a dreadful pulse. But, for him, life was fulfilled. I know that he had always one changeless hope. I do not know what, in the end clouded or unclouded that faithful spirit. but I, too, who knew them, who loved them, have my assured faith: the more, not the less, now that they are gone to that "distant country of Splendour and Terror." Love is more great than we conceive, and Death is the keeper of unknown redemptions. Of her, I have had often, I have ever, in my mind the words wherewith I begin one of the tales in this book: "It is God that builds the nest of the blind bird."