IT was evening, and Joan and Gabriel walked together under the great cedar-trees in the garden where the slanting sun streaked the long lawns with gold. The slim cypresses glittered under the sombre spirelets of the yews. Above, the garden, with its dreamy tapestries wrought out of living color, stretched towards the old house whose casements gleamed towards the sea.

Under the hoary and massive trees Gabriel and Joan walked hand-in-hand. Beauty seemed with them, as though they had stepped into some dim legend-land, where romance breathed over rich meadows and through waving woods. An Arthurian tenderness lived in the hour; envy and strife seemed banished even from thought.

Joan, radiant as faith, leaned within the hollow of Gabriel’s arm.

“Then even dreams come true,” she said to him.

There was an ardent light in the man’s eyes, such a light as kindles in the eyes of a seer.

“Was I not once tempted,” he answered her, “to embrace the thing that men call pessimism. For I was wounded of my fellows and knew not where to look for help. And there seemed so much horror in the world that even I half learned to jeer with those who mocked at my ideals.”

“No true man is a mocker, Gabriel.”

“Ay, and those who sneer betray the emptiness of their own mean minds.”

For a while they stood in silence, looking out towards the west. There was calm joy in the woman’s face, the joy of a woman whose love had conquered.

“The wise man ignores the vain, self-seeking, jealous horde,” she said, “where the envious intellect has stifled honor. Give me life where hearts are warm, where dissolute sophistry is unknown.”

Gabriel smiled at her, a lover’s smile.

“And once I doubted whether happiness could be found,” he said, “but now—”

“But now?” she asked.

“In a good woman’s love man comes near heaven. Give me simplicity: a quiet home, no matter how humble it may be, books, a few honest friends, some poor whom I may help.”

“Ah!” Joan said, “the city taught us that.”

“Vast Babel where every soul’s cry clashes. God, how my heart sickened in that place, where men scramble like swine over an unclean trough, gnashing against each other, wounding that they may live. Oh, material necessity, base need of gold! Happy are they who strive not but are content.”

The sun sank low behind the trees and the east was purpled with the night. So great was the silence that the very dew seemed to murmur as it fell from out the heavens. The utter azure was untroubled by a cloud; the windless west stood a vast sheet of gold.

“Have we not learned our lesson,” said the man—“to trust and labor and aspire?”

“Ah, Gabriel,” she answered, “to stand aside from those who bicker and deride, from those who stab their rivals with a lie, defaming truth in securing their own ends.”

“Yet, lest we forget—”

“Those whom prejudice has poisoned and gross greed crushed.”

“Ah, wife, God keep us children, blessed ever with an ever generous youth.”

Upon Joan’s face there shone an immortal glory, a look that was not begotten of the world.

“To help others,” she said. “May many a tired face brighten to my own; may weary eyes speak to me of the Christ; may Heaven descend in every good deed done.”

“Poverty and pain have taught us much.”

“To love pure living, the clean wind blowing from the sea, the scent of meadows streaming towards the dawn. To succor the unfortunate! To give, even as God has given to us!”

Transcriber’s Notes:

Spelling and hyphenation have been left as in the original. A few obvious typesetting errors have been corrected without note.

[The end of The Slanderers by Warwick Deeping]