CHAPTER XXIV.FAREWELL.
While she lived Lady Hermione never forgot the look of anguish that he gave her; a long, lingering, steady gaze such as a dying man fixes at times on the face of a beloved wife or child. Then he came a step nearer to her.
“I did not know, Hermione,” he said, “that life could be harder than I have hitherto found it. It will be harder now.”
“Why?” she asked, gently.
“Because I shall ever have before my mind what I have lost. Until now existence has been tolerable, because Ihave tried to fill it with bitter thoughts of you. In my own mind a hundred times a day I have called you treacherous, false, cruel, and now my angel stands in her place again, the truest and dearest of women, the woman I have loved, and who has loved me! Hermione, my life will be so hard to bear that, if it please Heaven, I could fain die standing here before you now.”
“Brave men do not seek refuge in death,” she replied, “rather in active duties of life.”
“Some men. You see, I have thrown my whole existence on one stake; that stake was you, and I have lost you! Now I have to gather up the broken threads of my life and do with them as best I can.”
She was weeping silently. He saw the teardrops falling, and a mad impulse seized him to clasp her in his arms and kiss them away. That he trampled the impulse under foot showed how dearly he loved her.
“I am glad that we have met. Once more the sun of pure womanhood shines for me. While I thought you false, Hermione, all heaven and earth seemed false, too. But there is one thing more—you may speak freely to me, Hermione; it is but as though one or the other of us was dying—was there no truth in the rumor that you were engaged to Kenelm Eyrle?”
“No; none. Mr. Eyrle has never loved or cared for me in his life.”
“Clarice believed it,” he said, musingly, and the pale face before him grew whiter.
“She was deceived,” said Lady Hermione, briefly; “and now, Ronald, it seems to me that we must say farewell; it must be for the last time. We cannot meet as friends. Honor is dearer than life to both of us; therefore, we must not meet again.”
“Oh, my lost love,” he moaned, stretching out his hands to her, “how shall I bear it?”
She went up to him, and there was an expression of pity and love on her face that made it divine. She took both his hands in her own and held them there.
“You will be brave and true to yourself, Ronald. Do not let me have the smart all my life long of knowing that love for me has led you further from heaven; let it, rather, take you nearer. I have some quaint thoughts, and one is that in another world God makes our lives complete. Perhaps there, in that land where the gates are of jasper and the walls of pearl, we may be together—who knows? Looking to that time, we will forget the darkness and sorrow of this.”
He said to himself, bitterly, that such thoughts might comfort angels and women; they brought no consolation to him.
“You must remember Clarice,” she pleaded; “Clarice, who loves you so well.”
“I remember all. Hermione, if I send for you when I am dying, should it be soon or should it be in twenty years, you will come to me?”
“Yes,” she replied, with a deep-drawn, bitter sob. “I will come, Ronald. Now, farewell.”
She was pure and innocent as the white doves that fed from her hand. She saw no wrong in bending her sweet, sad face over him for that last, most sorrowful embrace.
Once more his lips touched hers, but the chill upon them was the chill of death.
“Good-by, my love, my dear, lost love, good-by,” he said, and the words died away in a moan. Another minute and she had passed out of sight.
When the hour of death came it was not so bitter for him as that in which Hermione Lorriston passed out of his sight. He flung himself on the ground, praying the skies might fall and cover him; that he might never rise to meet the sunlight again.
From that day he was a changed man; he felt it and knew it himself. The quiet, resigned content for which he had been trying so hard was further from him than ever. The resignation arriving from philosophy had forsaken him. Night and day he brooded over the one idea that she had loved him, and he had lost her. Day and night he pondered over the mystery of that letter.
But for his wife’s sake he would have made the whole matter public and would have insisted on having it thoroughly sifted; but a “still, small voice” pleaded for Clarice. It would be so hard for her to see and know that his thoughts were still all of the past.
That did not prevent him from making a private investigation of the matter. On the first day that he saw Conyers, the groom, he called him.
“I want you,” he said. “There are some questions I wish to ask you that, if you answer truthfully, will be of inestimable benefit to me; if you answer them falsely, I shall be still further deceived. Perhaps experience has embittered me; I have little faith left in man’s honesty. I will buy your truth, Conyers, if you swear to me, on your oath, to say nothing but what is perfectly, strictly correct. I will give you ten pounds, and, should you be able to discover that which I wish to know, I will hereafter give you fifty.”
Conyers was an honest man, and Sir Ronald’s words hurt him more than he cared to own.
“If you offered me twice fifty pounds, Sir Ronald, to tell a willful lie, I would not do it for you or for any one else. You can please yourself about believing whether I tell you the truth or not.”
His bluntness did not displease the master of Aldenmere, who looked at the groom’s face with a grim smile.
“If ever the world does to you what it has done to me,” he said, quietly, “you will either doubt your own sanityor the truth of your fellowmen. Come out here a few minutes; I want to talk to you.”
And the groom, laying down the work on which he was engaged, followed his master out of the stable.