'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,When every little bird shall be a Cupid,And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blowsAnd curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,When every little bird shall be a Cupid,And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blowsAnd curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
'We'll lose ourselves in Venus' Groves of Mirtle,When every little bird shall be a Cupid,And sing of Love and Youth; each wind that blowsAnd curls the velvet leaves shall breathe Delights,The wanton springs shall call us to their Banks,And on the perfum'd Flowers we'll feast our Senses;Yet we'll walk by, untainted of their Pleasures,And, as they were pure Temples, we'll talk in them.'
The shadows have put on their evening length. Even Minky, as he stands with his little face pushed through the bars of his gate, barking at the servants as they return from church—a mere civility on his part, an asking them, as it were, how they enjoyed the sermon—boasts one that would not disgrace a greyhound or a giraffe.
'Are you there, Prue?' softly asks a voice, coming out of the darkening green world outside; coming with an atmosphere of freshness, of dew, of hawthorn, into the little hall, and peering toward the fireside-settle, which, both from the waning light and its own position, hints but dimly that it has an occupant. 'Are you asleep?'
'I do not know,' replies a disconsolate small treble. 'I tried to go to sleep, to get over some of the time. Oh dear, what a long Sunday it has been! Is he gone?' struggling up into a sitting posture out of her enveloping shawls.
'Yes.'
'And you did not sit under our tree?'
'No.'
'How laconic you are!' cries Prue fretfully; 'and I have not exchanged words with a creature since luncheon. Do come here; turn your face to the light. What have you and Mr. Talbot been talking of for the last four hours? John Talbot, as those horrid children call him. I think it is so impertinent of them; but I suppose their mother taught them.'
A slight contraction passes over the radiant, dewy face, so docilely turned towards the western shining.
'Peggy!' cries the younger girl in an altered tone, forgetting her invalidhood, and springing off the settle; 'how odd you look! You do not mean to say—is it possible? You do not suppose that I do not see—that you can hide anything from me!'
'There is nothing that I want to hide,' replies Peggy with dignity, though the blood careers under the pure skin to cheek, and brow, and lily throat; then, with a sudden change of tone to utmost tender deprecation, 'Oh, Prue, you do not mind? You are not vexed? It will not make any difference to you!'
Prue is silent.
'It will make no difference to you,' repeats Peggy, rather faltering at the total dumbness in which her tidings are received. 'Of course you will go on living with me just as you have always done.'
For all answer, Prue bursts into a passion of tears.
'Oh, do not say so!' she cries vehemently. 'You talk as if I never were going to have a home of my own! Oh, it would be too cruel, too cruel!'
Her sobs arrest her utterance. She has collapsed upon the settle, and sits there a disconsolate heap, with its hands over its face. Peggy stands beside her; a sudden coldness slackening the pulsations of her leaping heart.
'You will not care any longer about him and me,'pursues Prue weepingly. 'You will have your own affairs to think of. Oh, I never thought that I should have to give upyou. It was the last thing that ever would have entered my head. Whatever happened, I always counted upon havingyouto fall back upon!'
The dusk is deepening. Peggy still stands motionless and rigid.
'I know that I am not taking it well,' pursues Prue a minute later, dropping the fingers wetted with her trickling tears, and wiping her eyes; while her breath still comes unevenly, interrupted by sobs. 'I know that I ought to pretend to be glad; but it is so sudden, such a surprise—he is such a stranger!'
The cold hand at Peggy's heart seems to intensify its chill. Is there not some truth in her sister's words? Is not he indeed a stranger? Has not she been too hasty in snatching at the great boon of love that has been suddenly held out to her—she, whose life has not hitherto been furnished with over-much of love's sweetness?
'I know that you must think me very selfish,' continues the younger girl, still with that running commentary of sobs. 'Iamselfish, though he says that I am not—that he never knew any one who had such an instinct of self-abnegation; but then he always sees the best side of people. Yes, Iamselfish; but I will try to be glad by and by—only,' with a redoublement of weeping, 'do not expect it of me to-night.'
And, with this not excessive measure of congratulation, poor Peggy has to be content, on the night of her betrothal. She goes to bed with the cold hand still at her heart; but in the morning it has gone. Who can have a cold hand still at her heart when she wakes at early morning at lilac-tide, to find a little round wren, with tiny tail set on perfectly upright, singing to her from a swaying bough outside her casement, with a voice big enough for anostrich, and to know that a lover is only waiting for the sun to be well above the meadows to lift the latch of her garden-gate.
Before the dew is off the grass they have met. It is presumable that familiarity with her new position will come in time to Peggy; but for the present she cannot get over the extraordinariness of being—instead of anxiously watching for some one else's tardy lover—going to meet her own. And when they have met and greeted, the incredulity, instead of lessening, deepens. Is it conceivable that it can beherwhom any one is so extravagantly glad to see? All through the day—all through several after-days—the misty feeling lingers that there must be some mistake; that it must be some one else; that it cannot be the workaday Peggy, whom she has always known, who is being thus unbelievably set on high and done obeisance to.
'Have you told Prue?' asks Talbot, when he has enough got over the ecstasy of that new morning meeting, to speak connectedly.
'Yes.'
'And what did she say?'
Margaret hesitates a moment.
'She—she was very much upset.'
'Upset!' repeats Talbot, his tone evidencing the revulsion of feeling of one who had imagined that all Creation must be rejoicing with him. 'What was there in it to upset her?'
'She said it was such a surprise; she was not at all prepared for it. In that,' blushing, 'she was like me.'
He is silent. It is a mere speck in his heaven; but he would have liked Prue to have been glad too.
'She said that you are such a stranger,' continues Peggy, looking half-shyly up at him, with a sort of light veil of trouble over her limpid eyes. 'When I come to think of it, so you are; if it were not,' laughing a little, 'that I amalways hearing the children call you by it, I should not even know what your Christian name was.'
'A stranger!' repeats Talbot, in a rather dashed voice.
'Never mind; you will not be a stranger long,' returns Peggy, laughing. 'She will soon grow used to you; and so' (again with that flitting blush)—'and so shall I. You must tell me all about yourself,' she goes on, a few moments later, when, in order to escape from the aggressive din that Jacob is making with the mowing-machine, as if to assert his exclusive right to that engine, they have passed beyond the garden bounds into the green sea of the adjoining park. 'You must begin at the very beginning; you must tell meall.'
Is it his fancy that she lays a slight but perceptible emphasis on that concluding word, which insists on the entirety of his confession? Whether it be so, or that the stress exists only in his own imagination, he winces. They have sat down under a horse-chestnut tree, whose hundreds of blossom-pyramids point like altar tapers to the fleckless sky; at their feet the bracken, so tardy to come, so in haste to go, is beginning to spring and straighten its creases. Far as the eye can reach, the park's green dips and rises are flushed with the rose and cream of flowering thorn-bushes.
'Will you?' with a soft persistency.
'Of course I will,' replies Talbot; 'only,' with a laugh that does not ring quite naturally, 'you do not know what you are bringing upon yourself. Well, where am I to begin? At the very beginning?'
'At the very beginning,' repeats she, with a sigh of satisfaction, settling herself more comfortably with her back against the tree-trunk to listen. 'Tell me where you were born, and,' laughing, 'what sort of a baby you were.'
And so he begins at the very beginning; and for a while goes on glibly enough.
There are worse occupations for a summer's morning than to sit on juicy May grass, with the woman you love beside you; and to read in the variations of her rapt blue eyes her divine compassion for you. For the you, the innocent distant you of six, who had the whooping-cough so badly; her elate pride in the scarcely less distant you of sixteen, carrying home your school-prizes to your mother; her tearful sympathy with the nearer you—the you who still ache at the memory of the loss you sustained when full manhood had given you your utmost capacity for feeling it. Up to the date of his sister's death he goes on swimmingly; but with that date there coincides, or almost coincides, another. It was during the physical collapse that followed that crushing blow that Betty, with her basket of red roses, had first come tripping into his life. He stops abruptly.
'Well?' she says expectantly, looking towards him, and wiping the sympathetic tears from her soft eyes.
'Well!' he repeats, with an uneasy laugh. 'Have not I dosed you with myself enough for one morning? I—I think that is about all.'
'But that was more than five—nearly six years ago,' objects she.
'Nearly six years ago,' he echoes, in a tone of almost astonishment; 'so it was. But—but, as I need not tell you, the importance of time is not measured by its length; there are moments that bring an empire, and there are years that bring nothing, or less than nothing.'
'They cannot have broughtnothing,' replies she, her luminous eyes, in whose pupils he can see himself mirrored in little, still interrogating his; 'they must have broughtsomething, good or bad; they must have brought something.'
'You know that there has been no change of Ministry since then,' he goes on, speaking rather fast, and wincingunder the steadiness of her look. 'I have been ——'s secretary ever since—a mere machine, a scribbling machine; and you know that machines have no history.'
She is silent, and her eyes leave his face, as if it were useless any longer to explore it. She presses him no further. It would be both ungenerous and bootless to urge him to a confession which he would never make, and in the effort to evade which he would writhe, as he is doing now. Her breast heaves in a long slow sigh. There is nothing for it. She must submit to the fact of the existence for ever, for as long as her own and his being last, of that five years' abyss between them; an abyss which, though she may skirt it round, or lightly overskim it, will none the less ever,everbe there.
There is one subject that, in their moments of closest confidence, must ever be tabooed to them; one tract of time across which, indeed, they may stretch their hands, but which their feet can never together tread; one five years out of the life of him who should be wholly hers, locked away from her to all eternity. Her hand has fallen absently to fondling Minky's poor little gray head, no bigger than a rabbit's. Minky, who has followed them to their love-retreat, and has now come simperingly to offer them his little cut-and-dried remarks upon the fine day.
Talbot's eye jealously follows that long hand in its stroking movement. He would like to take it, and lay its palm across his hot lips. Why should not he? It is his. But that five years' gulf prevents him. A little milky blossom with its tiny stain of red, wind-loosened, has floated down from the horse-chestnut tree, and now rests upon her hair. He would like to brush it off with a kiss. Why should not he? Whose but his is now all that blonde hair? But again the gulf stretches between them.
The sun, steadily soaring zenithwards, sends a warmdart through their tree, which, thick-roofed as it is, is not proof against the vigour of his May strength. The deer gather for shade under the young-leaved oaks. The whole earth simmers in the vivifying heat, and yet they both lightly shiver. Upon Talbot there lies a horrible fancy, as of Betty sitting between them. It seems to him as though, if he stretched out his arm to enfold his new love, it would instead enwrap his old one. Is there no spell by which he can exorcise this persistent vision? Will it always be between them? He is still putting this bitter question to himself, when Peggy speaks:
'Well,' she says, stifling the end of a sigh, and without any trace of resentment in her tone, 'I am very much obliged to you for having told me all that you have. I know that you are not fond of talking of yourself, and if—if'—the carnation mounting even to her forehead—'there is anything in your life that you had rather not tell me, why we—we will let it alone; we—we will not think of it any more.'
Perhaps her words may contain the spell he has been praying for; since, in a moment, the Betty phantom has vanished, and his new sweetheart lies, live and real, in his arms.
'At all events,' she whispers, 'I can contradict Prue, next time that she says you are such a perfect stranger.'
She smiles as she speaks. How lovely her smile is, when he sees it as close as he is doing now! It is not perhaps quite so radiant as the one with which she met him at the gate—but her eyes! He lets himself drown—drown in those heavenly blue lakes. Why should he ever come to the surface again?
'There they are, Franky!' cries a piercing little voice, cutting the summer air from a few hundred yards' distance, 'under that horse-chestnut tree; how close together they are sitting!'
Another minute has brought the owner of the voice, and of another voice more lisping and less shrill, up to their eagerly sought, if not quite so eagerly seeking, friends.
'You are not sitting so close together as you were,' chirps Franky innocently. 'Mammy used——'
'What do you want? What have you come for?' asks Talbot, in a voice a good deal rougher than his littleprotégésare apt to hear from him, and breaking into the middle of a sentence, whose close he can only horrifiedly conjecture, before more than its two initial words have had time to leave its small speaker's lips.
At the extreme and unusual want of welcome in his tone, both children stand for a moment silenced. Then Lily, with an offended hoist of her shoulders, turns pointedly to Margaret.
'Nanny says that my tongue is white,' cries she; 'she is always telling me so. I came to ask you; I thought that you would not mind telling me,' with an insinuating air, 'if it really is.'
'And is not mine white too?' inquires Franky eagerly, and in a minute both red tongues are protruded for inspection; and Talbot bursts, against his will, into a vexed laugh.
It is not always, indeed, to have their tongues looked at; but during the ensuing days of his courtship Talbot finds that he must hold himself in continual readiness against onslaughts in unexpected directions from Miss and Master Harborough, who, finding the little Red House more amusing than the empty Manor, and being troubled with no doubts as to their acceptableness, arrive from every point of the compass at each likeliest and unlikeliest hour of the summer day. The only thing for which he has to be thankful is that their arrival is generally heralded by their eager treble voices; so that he has just time to stepdown out of his seventh heaven before they are upon him. Perhaps if it were not for this, and for one or two other slight abatements from its complete felicity, the tuliped garden, with its lilac breath, its come pansies, and its coming pinks, would be too like that one when the first he and she felt the heavenly surprise of their new kisses.
For the children's intrusions are not quite the only cloud in Talbot's Whitsun sky. It is oftener than once or twice that the phantom of the past has seated itself between them. It is oftener than once or twice that he has found Peggy looking at him in a pained astonishment, at his having suddenly broken off in the middle of some fond phrase. She cannot know, and he can never tell her, that it is because there has suddenly flashed upon him the recollection, vivid as reality, of some occasion on which he had showered the same words of fire upon her who has had precedence over Peggy in his heart. He would fain cut all such words out of his vocabulary; employ in this new worship nothing that had been desecrated by having been offered on the altars of the old. But it is impossible. He had poured out all his heart's best before the first love. How then can he have anything fresh for the second? The thought cuts him like a knife; but none the less, all the more rather—since it is our knife-thoughts that cling most pertinaciously to us—does it come back and back again. In return for all the wealth of her fresh firstfruits, he has nothing to give her but what is stale, threadbare, sullied. This is a reflection that would sit easily upon most men. If it were not so, there would be but few unembittered love-makings. But upon Talbot's palate it is wormwood. And lest there should be any chance of his escaping from his past, there is always some innocent reminiscence, allusion, or appeal on the part of Lily or Franky to bring it back to him.
Prue, too! On the blue of his heaven, Prue formsanother little cloud. Prue makes no pretence of pleasure in the prospect of his brotherhood; and to Prue he is sacrificed oftener than he thinks just. It is, thanks to Prue, that he has so often been sent back prematurely to his pot-house; that he has had prematurely to break off his trance of wonder at the eyes, the only blackness under which springs from some slight and fugitive fatigue; at the cheek, which his doubting finger may rub as hard as it chooses without any other result than that of intensifying its damask; at the hair, from which he has been allowed once to withdraw the pins in order to convince himself by ocular demonstration that though it may comedown, it can never comeoff.
'I think you had better go now. She has been alone all day,' is a formula whose recurrence he has now learnt to dread.
He shrugs his shoulders.
'I have been alone for thirty-two years.'
'I think if you would not mind going now——'
'I should mind extremely.'
She laughs softly, the happy low laugh of the consciously well-beloved, rich in the prospect of a whole lifetime of love ahead.
'Whether you mind it or not, I am afraid youmustgo. She had been crying this morning.'
'More shame for her. What has she to cry about? Now ifIwere to cry—Peggy, you like her much better than you do me' (taking her half angrily in his arms). 'Pah!' with a change of tone, perceiving, for the first time, a gardenia pinned upon the breast of her gown; 'why do you wear that horrid thing?'
'Franky gave it me. He begged it from the gardener at the Manor for me.'
'Throw it away!' cries Talbot, with more energy than the occasion seems to warrant. 'I detest the smell. It is like a fungus.'
'It will hurt his feelings if I do.'
'It will hurt mine if you do not,' returns Talbot with emphasis; and suiting the action to the word, he snatches the blossom almost violently from her breast, and tosses it away.
She looks at him, her eyes tinged with a faint surprise.
'What a thing it is to have rival admirers!' she says, laughing; and then she sends him reluctantly away.
If it were a scheme of the most deep-laid coquetry, instead of the result of a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice, she could not have hit upon a better method of inflaming his passion. All through the long light evening, whose yellow at this sweetest season is so late in changing to night's blue, he prowls about outside her garden-fence, peering between her lilac-clusters and laburnum-droops for a glint of her white gown; shaking his fist at Prue's selfish little head, and counting, through the fevered night, the strokes of the leisurely church clock as they carry him nearer and nearer to the dewy morning hour, when he may again hold his red rose of Lancaster in his hungry arms.
And meanwhile his short holiday is racing away. Scarcely has it seemed to have begun when the end is already at hand. The date of the reassembling of Parliament, of his chief's return to Downing Street, and his own consequent reappearance there, looms nearer and nearer.
To return to Downing Street without her! He has been without her all his life, and until the last six months has never looked upon himself as particularly an object of commiseration on that score; butnowhis whole soul swells with a disgusted self-pity at the idea of his lonely return to his Bury Street lodgings.
He has extracted from Peggy without much difficulty a promise that his last evening shall be indeed and wholly his; that for once it shall be Prue, not he, that goes to the wall; that he shall neither be dismissed to his public-house,nor left to disconsolate moonings about the inhospitable roads and fields, until it is time to betake himself to his truckle-bed; that, on the contrary, he may for once have his fill of her fair company, that should by rights be always his; may sit, and saunter, and sweetly stray with her; and at length, when the stars ride high, may leisurely bid 'God bless her!' at the garden gate, and dismiss her to dream of him.
But lovers propose, and freakish chance disposes.
Talbot has returned to his inn to dress for dinner, and has jumped into his dress-clothes, in miserly grudging of the moments stolen from his final hours. He had left Peggy with eager injunctions to be equally quick, so that a few more moments may be squeezed out before Sarah, with her clamorous dinner-bell, breaks, with life's loud prose, into the whispered poetry of theirtête-à-tête. And apparently she has been obedient to his behest, for she is—though he would have thought it impossible—beforehand with him, and stands awaiting him, with arms resting on the top of the gate.
But how is this? She has made no change in her dress, but is still in her morning cotton.
As he draws near to her she stretches out her hand to him deprecatingly.
'I hope you will not be very angry!'
A slight chill of apprehension passes over him.
'But I am sure that I shall,' he answers, with a hasty instinct to ward off the impending blow. 'What is it? What do you mean? Not,' with an accent of incredulous indignation, 'Prue again?'
'It is not her fault,' replies Peggy apologetically, and yet defensively too; 'nobodyenjoysbeing ill. But you know how finely strung she is; something must have upset her.'
'Something is always upsetting her!' returns Talbot brutally.
'I am afraid she must have taken a chill,' pursues Peggy, wrinkling up her forehead into anxious lines. 'I am sure I do not know how, but I think she must; she has had to go to bed.'
The young man's brow clears. If Prue's illness involves only her absence from the dinner-table, he will not very violently quarrel with it after all.
'Very wise of her,' he says in a lighter voice; 'the best place for her! Poor Prue!'
'But——,' begins Peggy, whose brow has not smoothed itself in sympathy with her lover.
'But what?' inquires he sharply, his apprehensions returning. 'You are not going to tell me that on my last evening I am to be sacrificed to amalade imaginaire!'
'She is not amalade imaginaire,' answers Margaret half indignantly; 'her cheeks are as hot as fire, and her pulse has run up to ninety.'
'I believe she runs it up on purpose. Are you barring the gate for fear I should force my way in?'
'Oh, no, no!' cries she, hastily dropping her arms from their resting-place on the top rail, and flinging her portals hospitably wide. 'Come in! come in! how could you dream of such a thing? Do you suppose that I am going to send you away without your dinner? But after dinner——'
'After dinner?'
'When she is ill, she likes me to sit beside her, bathing her forehead and her hands. I have always done it, ever since she was a baby. When you are ill, I will bathe your forehead and your hands. Oh!' clasping her fingers soft and fast upon his arm, and looking up with brimful eyes into his angry face, 'do not look so cross at me! Do not you think that it is hard enough for me without that?'
The dinner is over—the firsttête-à-têtedinner that John and Peggy have ever shared. To dinetête-à-têtewith her in her own still house, amid her old and homely surroundings, with the summer evening tossing them in its lavish perfumes through the wide-opened windows, would have seemed to him, a month ago, the realisation of his fairest and most hopeless dream. But in their translation into the bald language of reality—the jejune prose of fact—our dreams have a way of losing their finer essence. It has escaped, without our being able to tell whither or by what channel. Over both a sort of wet blanket has fallen. Try as he may, Talbot's temper cannot recover from the poignant disappointment of his lost last evening; and try as she may—broken in, as she is, by a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice—Peggy cannot hinder the lump from rising in her throat, and the tears from crowding into her eyes, at the reflection that her own hand has cut off, and flung away, the blossoms of these final crowning hours. How many things she had saved to say to him on this last evening—things too tender for her shamefacedness to utter, save under the justification of an imminent severance—things that he would have liked to have heard all through these days, but that she had laid up in the storehouse of her heart as too close and sacred for aught but to sweeten their parting! How can she say them now across a dinner-table, with Sarah coming out and in, Prue sending peevish messages to her, a score of trivialinterruptions forbidding any but the most banal talk? It was only with her head on her love's breast, in the dusk of the starshine, that she could ever have found courage to utter them. When will they be uttered now? The present, the brave solid present, is our own, to caress or misuse; but who dares say to the future, that formless form wrapped in uncertain gray, 'Thou art mine'?
And now the dinner is over, and they have separated, with spurious coldness. Peggy has vanished upstairs to her sister, and Talbot is left to employ the hours of his last evening as he best may. It is true that Margaret has eagerly begged him to take possession of house and garden, and has held out tearful hopes of snatching here and there a moment from Prue's sick exactions to give him. But his ireful restlessness will not allow him to accept this concession. It would be worse to be within apparent reach of her, yet just beyond her eye and touch, than to be quite outside her domain. He tells her so, half harshly; and opening the gate into the park, takes himself and his ill-temper to the oaks and the deer for consolation.
At first he walks along over the dew-freshened sward, under the isolated oak giants, or between the more gregarious beeches and limes of spinny and copse, without seeing them. He has no eyes, save those angry inward ones that are turned upon his own disappointment. His last evening!—his last evening! If it had been any but the last! Henceforth, in retrospect, this holiday of his will take all its colour from this bitter last evening. It is the end that stamps anything as bad or good. Oh, cruel Peggy! He has had so few really good hours in his life; and now she has ruthlessly robbed him of his best. And for what?
With the answer which he is compelled to give himself to this question comes his first dawn of consolation. Certainly to no personal gratification has she sacrificed him.He can hardly, in his most aggrieved moments, picture her as better amused than himself as she stoops—with the tears called up by his ill-tempered words scarcely dried upon her cheek—over her equally ill-tempered invalid, bathing her forehead, holding her jealous hands.
Poor Peggy! He will go back at once, and beg her pardon. But no. The consciousness of his being hanging wrathfully about will only further complicate her difficulties. He will take a lesson out of her book, and efface himself wholly for this one evening, even though it is the last. The last in one sense, but in another——?
He has sat down on a felled trunk, stripped of its branches, but not yet removed by the wood-cutter's cart. The hawthorn comes inâcrewhiffs to him. His heart, though he is alone for the whole evening—though he will probably have to go back to his alehouse without one more glimpse of her damask-textured face, gives a great bound. The last? For him and her there will be no last evening until—for God, who has given him so much, will surely give him, too, the supreme boon to die first—until, bending over him as she now bends over Prue, her voice and her hands smooth his passage to the easy grave.
The revulsion of feeling from his earlier ill-humour, produced by this thought, brings the moisture to his eyes. What is this parting in comparison with that six-months-ago one—when he had taken leave of her with no rational hope of ever having his eyes enriched by her again—when he had been afraid to trust his tongue to any speech, lest it should drift into tendernesses he had believed for ever prohibited to it? That parting in the walled garden! Why should not he go thither now, so that, surrounded by the mute witnesses of his former despair, he may the better gauge the extent of his new felicity? The idea, once conceived, approves itself so instantly to his imagination that he starts up; and, exchanging his former purposelesssaunter for a quick walk, sets off in the direction of the Manor gardens.
The evening is falling, in late May's best serenity, weighted with the innocent sweetness of country odours. The deer—their mottled sides growing indistinct—are browsing wakefully among the bracken. The throstles have reached their song's last verse.
He has gained the pleasure-grounds, just as the vanguard of the stars take possession of the emptied sky. He hastens along, almost as hurriedly as if it were to a rendezvous with the real Peggy, instead of with the six-months-old memory of her, that he were speeding; between the burnished laurels; past the fresh-blown splendours of the great rhododendron-beds, on fire with red, and pale with cream and blush and lilac; narcissus and may taking his nostrils by storm as he brushes past them to his goal, the still walled garden.
As he nears it, a misgiving seizes him that he may perhaps find himself locked out—that he may perhaps have to content himself with the mutilated satisfaction of peering in at it, between the wrought iron of its gate; and it is with a trepidating hand that, standing at last before it, he tries the handle with fingers not very confident of success. But for the first time to-night Fate is kind to him. The gate yields to his touch; and pushing it, he walks in. He has not been inside the enclosure's quiet precincts since the night of that parting, whose bitterness he has now come, in the wantonness of his new joy, purposely to revive. He must indeed be happy that goes, of his own accord, courting a dead misery. He draws a long luxurious breath, as he looks round in search of the landmarks of that past woe. They are here, but they wear a changed aspect. Through the wrought-iron railing, indeed, the church tower and the yews, its brothers in age and gentle gravity, still rise in the friendly dusk; but another race of flowers has sprung inthe place of those that witnessed his despair. The ghostly white gladioli are gone, and the autumn-faced asters. The winter winds have dispersed the down of the traveller's joy; and the penetrating breath of the mignonette has long ago died off the air. But in their place another nation has arisen; a better, he says to himself, as he stands with all spring's scented hopefulness crowded about his feet.
He walks slowly along, seeking to recover the exact spot where that parting had taken place; seeking to recover it by the aid of the small landmarks that bear upon it. There had been a moon, a section of a moon, to light it. There is none now.
He is glad. She has been the accomplice of half the world's crimes. He wishes that the outward conditions should be as altogether changed as the inward ones. He is glad that the trees, then wrapped in the heavy uniformity of late summer, are now showing the juicy variety of their early leafage. He is glad that the creepers are in bud, instead of in lavish flower; glad of the fresher quality of the light air; glad of anything that marks the fact that that bad old night has gone, and this good young new one come. For so changed is his mood since the time that he set off from the Red House gate, that his evening, though spent in solitude, does seem eminently good to him, and his heart bounds with almost as high an elation as if she were pacing beside him in the starlight, with her head on his shoulder, as she will do in the future, many hundred happy times.
He has paused in his walk. It was here that she stood—just here. He knows the exact spot, by a comparison of the distance from the long bed of violets, which, alone unchanged of all the flowers, still stretches beneath the south wall, and mingles its odours with that of the new-come flowers, as it had done with the departed ones. Just here! And he himself had stood here. She hadbeen facing the gate, and he with his back to it. Thus, thus. The little crafty half-moon had shone into her eyes, as she made him her last wistful speech:
'Since you are so determined to go downhill, I suppose that I dare not say I hope our roads will ever cross again.'
Six months ago, only six months between the moment when he had in dumb hopelessness acquiesced in the fact that their paths must for ever diverge, and this in which they are, for all eternity, merged in one. His eyes have dropped to the gravel, as if seeking the print of her dear feet, that he may stoop and kiss it. His back is, as on that former occasion that his imagination has so potently summoned from its grave, turned towards the gate. He is alone. There are no witnesses to make him ridiculous. Why may not he be as foolish as he pleases? He has actually dropped on his knees, and is stooping his lips towards the pebbles, which may or may not be the very ones her light step pressed half a year ago, when the sound of the click of a latch behind him makes him raise his head and spring to his feet. Who, at this late hour of the evening, can be turning the handle of the gate? Who but one? She has forsaken Prue for him after all. Love's instinct has told her the path he took; and here, on the spot where he had for ever renounced her, she has come to him under the stars. What welcome can he give her that will be thankful and joyful enough for such an unlooked-for grace? He turns—his whole face alight with ecstasy—towards her, but his feet do not move to meet her.
By a refinement of love's cunning he will await her here; and, on the very foot of ground that witnessed their separation, he will receive her into his arms again. She has pushed the gate now, and, like himself, she is within the enclosure; her white gown (he has often praised her in white, and she must have put it on since he left her)flitting like a snow-winged dove, along the dusky walk towards him.
'What an odd place you have chosen to say your prayers in!' cries a high-pitched voice.
'Betty!' For, by one of Fate's juggles, it is the old and not the new love to whom his radiant greeting is addressed. It is the old and not the new love whom, if his arms clasp any woman under the stars to-night, they must enfold. They do not, indeed, show much readiness to do so. They hang as if palsy-struck at his sides, while his voice repeats in a horrified whisper that he would fain, if he could, make one of incredulity, 'Betty!'
'Do not trouble yourself to repeat it a third time,' says she, with a flighty laugh that has yet no tinge of mirth in it. 'I do not need convincing thatIamI, nor need you.'
'Youhere?'
'I may return the compliment—youhere?'
He is staring at her with wide, shocked eyes that are also full of an astonishment he is powerless to master. Isthisthe Betty he had parted from on that awful Christmas morning?thisthe wretched woman, clammy-handed, dishevelled, reckless of all save her own mastering agony, who—her haggard mother-eyes unable to attain the boon of any tears—had hoarsely forbidden him her presence for ever? Can this be she—this hovering vision of lace and gauze—that has floated towards him on the wings of the night, and now lifts to his, eyes that in this light look as clear as Peggy's—cheeks whose carnations seem no less lovely and real? Before his confused consciousness, the two visions—ofthatBetty and ofthis—inextricably entangled, and yet irrevocably separated, pass and repass; and he continues standing, wordlessly, stupidly staring, in a horror and a wonder that are beyond the weight of his volition to conquer, at the woman before him.
After her last sentence she is wordless too, and alsostands looking at him, mute and full, as if she had forgotten his face, and were learning it off by heart again, her factitious gaiety for the moment died down and gone in the silent starlight. It is he who first speaks.
'You—you came here to see your children?'
'To see my children?' repeats she. 'Ha! ha! Yes, that was the reason I gave at home; and a very pretty and laudable one too, was not it? To see my children! But, as it happens, a woman has often more than one reason. I had more than one.'
She has lapsed into her flippant gaiety again, and now pauses as if expecting him to inquire into the nature of the other reason to which she alludes; but if so, he does not gratify her. He is still fighting with the horror of that double consciousness. Can this be the woman to whom in that icy winter dawning his whole soul had gone out in such an overpowering passion of pity? And if it be indeed she, has she clean forgotten the sacred agony of their last farewell? Her laugh is still dissonantly jarring on his stunned ear, when, finding it hopeless any longer to wait for questioning on his part, she resumes:
'It is always well to kill two birds with one stone—is not it?' says she, looking hardily into his eyes. 'Pardon the homeliness of the expression! You know that reports reach even quiet places—Harborough, for instance. Well, such a report—acanardprobably, but still there was something oddly circumstantial about it—was spreading there yesterday about a—person—I—used—to know—rather well—have some interest in—in fact——'
She pauses again; her words have, for the last half of her speech, come draggingly, with a little break between each, and not for one instant does her eye release him. But again he makes no comment. Her breath is coming perceptibly quicker when she next takes up her theme.
'You do not ask what the report was? No? I fearmy little tale does not interest you. It would perhaps be civiller on your part if you could pretend that it did; perhaps you will think that it improves as it goes on. Well, the subject of the report is a man; and the report itself—do not you think that it was the simplest plan on my part to come and verify it in person?—is that he is going to take to his bosom a—ha! ha! I never can help laughing when I think of it—a—guess! No; you would never guess—a sack of pota——'
'Do not call her names,' says Talbot, for the first time finding his voice, and stretching out his hands, but now hanging so nervelessly at his sides, in authoritative wrathful prohibition; 'do not dare to call her names!'
'Then itistrue?'
Her laugh, little kin as it had ever had with real merriment, is dead—strangled in her throbbing throat; and she puts up her hand as if she were choking.
'Until you can speak of her with the respect that is her due, I will answer no questions,' he replies sternly.
The next moment he sees her stagger in the starlight, and his heart smites him for his cruelty. He makes a hasty movement towards her, thinking that she is going to fall; but before he can reach her she has steadied herself, and faces him, livid, it is true, under her paint, but firm and collected beneath the stars. She has even recovered her laugh.
'Thank you,' she says, in a low but distinct voice, 'for the information that you have incidentally given me, even though you refused to let me have it direct. I have no further occasion to trouble you, and need only offer you my congratulations and my hopes that you and your bride will meet with some one to sweeten your married lives as you have sweetened mine.'
So saying, she turns to leave him. If he were wise he would let her go—would set no hindrance in her way; butwhich of us, in the crucial moment of our lives, is wise? Before his reason can arrest him, following only the impulse that forbids him to let the woman who for five years had sat crowned and sceptred in his heart thus leave him, he makes two hasty steps after her.
'Betty!'
At the sound of his voice, there comes a sort of wavering; but she does not stop or turn her head.
'Betty!' he repeats, overtaking her, and preventing her egress by setting his back against the wrought-iron gate; 'after all that has come and gone, are we to part like this?'
'How else do you wish us to part?' she inquires in a steely voice of the bitterest irony, while her eyes glitter, but not with tears; 'do you expect me to dance at your wedding?'
'There is no reason why you should not,' he answers firmly, looking steadily back at her. 'I have done you no wrong. Have you forgotten how, and with what solemnity, you sent me away from you for ever?'
'So I did,' cries she, breaking into a hard laugh. 'Do not tell any of my friends, or I should never hear the last of it. What anaccèsof superstition I had that cold morning! I will do myself the justice to say, the first and last of its kind. I thought to save Franky by renouncing you, was not that it? If I had known how little there was to renounce, I might have spared myself the pains, might not I?—ha! ha!'
Again her merriment rings harshly on the soft air, and he can find no word of rejoinder.
'How you must have been laughing in your sleeve!' pursues she, still with that arid, withering mirth. 'Though the joke is against me, I cannot help laughing at myself when I think of it.'
But at that he breaks in:
'I looked so like laughing in my sleeve, did not I?' he asks, panting, and in a voice which emotion of the most painful quality he has ever felt renders indistinct.
'No one would believe it,' she goes on, unheeding, apparently unaware of his interruption, 'of a woman of my age, and who, as they say, has lived every minute of her life—Ihavedone that, have not I? But it is nevertheless Gospel truth that I was such a greenhorn as to be almost as sorry for you as I was for myself. I suppose,' with a sort of break in her dry voice, 'one gets into a stupid habit of thinking one's self indispensable!'
She pauses, and making no further effort to depart, stands silent, with set teeth and hands that unconsciously twist and tear the slight lace pocket-handkerchief between her fingers.
What can he say to her? By what words—save words of entreaty to her to put again the chain about his neck and the fetters upon his limbs—can he appease or comfort her? And sooner than utter such words, he would fall dead at her feet.
'Wretched superstition!' she says between her teeth, still rending the morsel of lawn in her fingers; 'how couldI, of all people, have been such a fool as to be conquered by it? What did it matter to the Powers above—what did they care whether I kept or threw away the one miserable bit of consolation I had in my hideous life? The child would have got well all the same, while I—I—but perhaps' (her tone changing to one of alert suspicion), 'perhaps even then you had come to an understanding, you and she. Perhaps even then you were hoodwinking me. I was so easy to hoodwink—I, of all people, who had always thought myself so wide awake—ha! ha!'
Again that dreadful laugh assails his ear, and makes him shiver as if it were December's blasts that were biting, not May's breezes kissing his cheek.
'I never hoodwinked you!' he answers, in an agitation hardly inferior to her own; 'it was always plain-sailing between us. I went away because you sent me.'
'And you took me at my word?' cries she wildly. 'Yes, I know that then, at that moment, I meant you to take me at it; but I was out of my mind. Hundreds of people less mad than I was then are in Bedlam. You might as well have listened to the ravings of a lunatic as to mine that day; and—you—took—me—at—my word!'
Her speech, which in its beginning was shrill and rapid, ends almost in a whisper.
'I thought you meant it,' he says miserably; 'before God, I thought you meant it!'
'The wish was father to the thought,' she says, again breaking into that laugh which jars upon him far more than would any tears or revilings; 'you believed it because you wished it. I showed you a handsome way out of your dilemma. I played into your hands. Without knowing it—oh, I think that you will believe it was without knowing it—I played into your hands. Without hurting my feelings—without quite giving the lie to all your glib vows—without any disagreeable shuffling—you were free! I set you free!I!Oh, the humour of it! I wonder how you could have kept any decent countenance that morning! and I—I—never saw it. Oh, I must have been blinder than any mole or bat not to have seen it, but I did not!'
She pauses, as if suffocated; but in a moment or two has recovered breath and composure enough to resume:
'And I wassorryfor you. I do not know why I have a pleasure in showing up my own folly to you; but, as you say, it has always been plain-sailing between us, and one does not easily shake off an old habit. Yes,sorryfor you! Not at first. At first I could think of nothing buthim; but he took a turn for the better very soon—God bless him! As long as he was only getting well, it wasenough for me to think that I had him back—oh, quite enough!' some tears stealing, for the first time, into her scorching eyes; 'but when he was on his legs again, and everything going on as usual, then I began to see what I had done.'
Her voice has sunk to a low, lagging key of utter dispiritedness.
'You never sent for me; you never wrote to me,' says Talbot hoarsely.
'Did you expect it?' she cries, a sudden eager light breaking all over her face. 'Were you waiting for me to write? Did you watch the post for a letter from me? Oh, if I had only known! Did you—did you?'
She has laid her hand convulsively on his coat-sleeve, and is looking up, with all her miserable soul in her eyes, into his face. What can he answer? He had watched the post indeed; but with how different a motive from that with which her passionate hopes have credited him!
'No! I see that you did not,' she says, dropping her hand from his arm with a gesture of disgust, as if she had touched a snake, a horrible revulsion of feeling darkening all her features; 'or, if you did, it was with dread that I should make some effort to get you back. At every post that came in, without bringing you a specimen of my handwriting, you drew a long breath, and said: "It is incredible! I could not have believed it of her; but she has let me go, really!" Come, now,' with a spurious air of gaiety, in ghastly contrast with her drawn features and burning eyes, 'you were always such an advocate for truth; you used to be so severe upon my little harmless falsehoods. Truth! truth! Let us have the truth!'
'Have it, then!' he says desperately, stretching out his arms towards her, as if transferring from his keeping to hers the weight of that murderous confession. 'Iwasglad!'
Again, as once before, she reels, as though it were someheavy physical blow that he had struck her; and again his heart smites him.
'I—I—thought that we had both come to our right minds,' he says, stammering, and seeking vainly for words that will soften the edge of that bitter sword-thrust, and yet not incur the deeper cruelty of bringing again that illusory radiance over her face; 'I—I—thought we might begin our lives again—different, better! We had been most unhappy!'
'Unhappy!' she repeats, in a voice that, if he did not with his own eyes see the words issuing from her lips, he could never have believed to be hers—'unhappy!Are you telling me that you were unhappy all my five years? Has she made you believe even this?' She stops, and fixes her glittering look upon him with an expression so withering that he involuntarily turns his away with a sensation as of one scorched. 'No!' she continues, her voice rising, and growing in clearness as she goes on; 'she may persuadeherselfof that—what do I care what she persuadesherselfof?—but she will never really persuade you. No! no! no!' a ring of triumph mixing with the exceeding bitterness of her tones. 'There is one superiority that I shall always, to all eternity, have over her; one that neither she nor you, do what you will, can ever rob me of: I shall always—always have beenfirst! There is nothing you can give her that will not be second-hand!'
He has clenched his hands in his misery till the finger-nails bite the palms. Is not this the very reflection that has been mingling its drop of earth's gall with the honeyed sweetness of his heaven?
'Yes!' he says, panting; 'do I deny it? I can never give any one better love than I gave you.'
'Gave!' she repeats, her voice dropping again to a husky whisper, and casting her parched eyes up to heaven, as if calling on the stilly constellations to be witness to hergreat woe—'gave! He himself saidgave! And I am alive after hearing it. Oh, poor I!'
Her voice shudders away in a sigh of intense self-pity; and she hurriedly covers her face with her hands as if to shut out the view of her own fate, as too hideous to be looked upon with sanity; while long, dry sobs shake her from head to foot. The sight of her anguish is more than Talbot can bear. Two steps bring him to her side; and before he can realise what he is doing, he has taken her two hands and drawn them forcibly away from her face.
'Betty!'
'Well!' she says dully, leaving them in his, as if it no longer mattered where, or in whose keeping, they lay; 'what about Betty?'
'Betty!' convulsively pressing her small, burning fingers, 'you break my heart!'
'I wish I could!' rejoins she fiercely. 'I wish to heavens I could! But I must leave that toher. Tell me about her!' changing her tone to one of factitious temperate interest. 'She is a good soul, I am told;bonne comme du pain. There is nothing so pleasant as complete change, is there? How does she show her goodness, by the bye? Does she say her prayers every night, and make a flannel petticoat for the poor every day, eh?'
He attempts no answer to her gibes; only, in his intense and mistakenly shown compassion, he still holds her hands, and looks down, with a pity beyond speech's plummet-line to sound, into the eyes whose beauty he has long ceased to see, but whose agony has still power to stab him.
'I suppose,' she goes on, her mood changing—it is never the same for two minutes together, and her mockery giving way to a tone of condensed resentful wretchedness—'that if I loved you properly, as people love in books, I should be glad to see you march off triumphantly, with drums beating and colours flying, to be happy ever after; but Iam not! I tell you fairly I am not! If I had my will you should be as miserable—no,thatyou never could be; I would let you off with less than that—as I am!'
He looks at her sadly.
'Even if I were so happy as you fear, a couple of hours ago, I think you have cured me of it.'
'You used to be a kind-hearted man,' she says, scanning, as if in dispassionate search, his sorrowful features; 'perhaps you are still, if happiness has not hardened your heart. It does harden the heart sometimes, they tell me; it is a long time since I have had a chance of judging by experience. But, if you are, try not to let me hear much of your happiness—try to keep it as quiet as you can.'
Her last words are almost inaudible through the excess of the emotion that has dictated them.
'Perhaps you will have your wish,' he says gloomily, for the last half-hour seems to have shaken all the fabric of his prospective Elysium; 'perhaps there will not be much to hide.'
'That is a very civil suggestion on your part,' she answers, relapsing into biting sarcasm; 'so likely, too. Go on. I am cheered already: find out some more equally probable topics of consolation for me. Why do not you remind me that I still have my husband—my husband whose societyyouhave taught me so much to enjoy; my visiting-book; my—my——'
'You have yourboy,' he interrupts sternly, goaded into anger out of compassion by her tone.
Her hands drop from his, and a light shiver runs over her shuddering body.
'I—have—my—boy,' she repeats slowly; 'so I have. God forgive me for having even for one moment forgotten him! Yes, I have him—bless him! but for how long? Even if he lives—oh, hewilllive! God cannot takehimtoo from me—I was a fool ever to fear it; but even if helives to grow up, he too will go from me. People will tell him things about me; or if they do not tell him, he will pick up hints. I shall see it in his eyes, and then he—too—will—go—from me!' breaking into a long moaning sob. 'I suppose,' looking in utter revolt up to heaven, 'thatTheywill be satisfied then. I shall have nothing—nothing—NOTHINGleft!'
She has broken into a storm of frantic tears, that rain from her eyes and career unheeded down her white gown. He can only look on miserably.
'But at least,' she says deliriously, every word marking a higher stage in the rising sea of her frenzy, 'I shall always have beenfirst! Neither you nor she can take that from me. It may make you both mad to think so, but youcannot. I shall always—always have been there first. You may tell her so from me, if you like,' with one last burst of dreadful laughter; 'it will be no breach of confidence, for I give you leave.'
Then, in a moment, before he can divine her intention, or—even if he had the heart to do so—arrest her, she has flung her arms convulsively about his neck; and in a moment more she is gone, leaving him there dazed and staggering in the starlight, with the agony of her good-bye kiss on his lips, and his face wet with her scorching tears.
If there is one hour of the day at which the little Red House looks conspicuously better than another, it is that young one when the garden grass is still wet to the travelling foot, and the great fire-rose in the east has not yet soared high enough to swallow the shadows. So Talbot thinks, as he takes his way next morning to his love's little russet-coloured home. She has promised over-night to rise betimes, to give him an early tryst before he sets off on his dusty journey back into the world without her. He is of course by much too early; and though he tries to hasten the passage of time by looking at his watch every two minutes, yet he is compelled, if he would not be at her door long before it is opened to him, to journey towards her at a very different rate from that at which his heart is doing. He walks along, drawing in refreshment of soul and body with every breath. He has not slept all night, and his eyes are dry and feverish; but the air, moist with the tears of the dawn, beats his lids with its soft pinions, and all the lovely common sights of early morning touch healingly upon his bruised brain, and heart still jarred and aching with the ignoble pain of that late encounter.
At every step he takes some sweet or gently harmonious sight or sound steals away a parcel of that ugly ache, and gives him an atom of pure joy instead. Now it is a stray wood-pigeon beginning its day-long sweethearting in the copse. Now it is a merry din of quiring finches, all talkingtogether. Now it is a glimpse of a sprinkle of cowslips in an old pasture, shaking off their drowsiness. Now it is only a stout thrush lustily banging its morning snail against a stone, the one instance of gross cruelty amongst the many that the scheme of nature offers, which the most tender-hearted cannot fail to admire. And now a turn of the road has given him to view her house, and the tears, cleansing as those of the morning, leap to his eyes at the sight of it. Dear little wholesome, innocent house, giving back the sun's smile from each one of its shining panes; giving it back, ashermirroring face will give back his own love-look, when she comes—so soon now, oh, so soon!—across the dew-drunk daisies to his arms. With what a feeling of homecoming does his heart embrace it—he that, for so many arid years, has had no better home than Bury Street lodgings, or Betty's boudoir!
He looks eagerly to see whether, by some blessed accident, she may even now be ahead of him in time, awaiting him with sunshiny face uplifted, and firm, fair arms resting on the top-rail of the gate. He knows how early she rises, and that no coquettish punctilio as to being first at the rendezvous will hinder her, if she is sooner ready than he. But apparently to-day she is not. There is no trace of her.
A slight misgiving as to Prue's illness, which until this moment he had indignantly dismissed from his memory as imaginary, having a more serious character than he had credited it with, makes him glance apprehensively towards the young girl's casement. The blind is down, it is true; but over all the rest of the house there is such a cheerful air of everyday serenity, that, considering the earliness of the hour, he cannot attach much importance to the circumstance.
Prue is always—how unlike his fresh Peggy!—a lie-a-bed. Mink and the cat are standing airing themselves onthe door-step, and, by the suavity of their manner, obviously invite him to enter.
The hall-door is open, and he passes through it. It is the first time that he has had to push uninvited into her sanctuary—the first day that she has not met him at the gate. He checks the rising chill that the reflection calls forth, and hurries on into the hall; meaning to hurry through it, for surely it will be in the garden that he will find her. Perhaps, by one of love's subtilties, she has chosen to bid him farewell under the very hawthorn-tree where he had first called her his. But he has not made two steps into the hall before he discovers that his calculations have erred. Can it be by another of love's subtilties that she is sitting here indoors, away from the morning's radiance, sitting quite idle apparently by the table; and that, on his entry, she does not even turn her head?
'Peggy!' he cries, thinking that she cannot have heard his step, though it has rung not more noiselessly than usual on the old oak boards; and that Mink, with a friendly afterthought, is firing off little shrill 'good mornings' at his heels.
There is no change of posture in the sitting figure, no movement, unless, if his eyes do not deceive him, a slight shiver running over it.
'Peggy!' he repeats, alarmed; and, in a second, has overleaped the intervening distance—has fallen on his knees at her feet, and grasped her hands. 'What is it? Quick—speak to me! Is Prue worse?'
There is no answer. She has averted her face, so that he can see only the outline of her cheek's oval, at his approach; and—what is this? She is drawing her hands with slow decision, not with any petulance or coquetry, but as one irrevocably resolved, out of his. Then she rises slowly to her feet, and, having put three paces between them, turns and looks full at him. Looks full at him, thistall, risen woman, who will not lend him the custody of her hand! But who is she—this woman? Not his Peggy! Nay, surely not his Peggy! His Peggy, cheeked like the dawn, with eyes made out of sapphires and morning dew—his kindly, loving Peggy—what has she in common with this pale austerity that is facing him?
'What is it?' he repeats huskily, a vague horror making his knees knock together; 'is she——'
He breaks off. The idea has flashed across him that Prue is dead! What lesser catastrophe can account for this horrible unnamed change?
'She is better,' replies Peggy hoarsely.
'Better!—thank God for that!' drawing a long breath of relief. 'What do you mean by looking like this? You made me think—I do not know what; but,' his agony of perplexity returning in profounder flood, 'if so—if she is better, what is it?—what else? For mercy's sake answer me!—answer me quickly! Do not keep me waiting! You do not know what it is to be kept waiting like this!'
He has risen from his kneeling attitude; but that unaccountable something in her face hinders him from making any effort to bridge the distance she has set between them. Across that distance comes her reply, in a voice that seems to set her continents and seas away from him:
'Are you—quite—sure—that—I—need answer you?'
'Sure that you need answer me?' repeats he bewildered, struggling against the ice that is sweeping up over his heart; 'why, of course I am! Why else should I have asked you? We must be playing at cross-purposes,' with an attempted smile. 'Of course I am sure!'—reading the disbelief in her white face—'quite sure! What can I say to asseverate it? As sure as that I stand here—as sure as——'
'Oh, stop!—stop!' she cries vehemently, thrusting outher hands towards him as if in passionate prohibition, while a surge of colour coming into her face restores her to some likeness to his Peggy; 'do not—do not let me have to think that I have been the cause of your telling any more falsehoods!'
'Anymore?' echoes he, putting up his hand to his forehead, and feeling as if she had struck him across the eyes.
'Yes,' she says, gasping, while he sees her hand go out in unconscious quest of the table-edge, as if to steady herself. 'Yes!—do not I speak plainly? Anymore!'
Again he passes his hand over that brow that feels cut and furrowed by the lash of her words.
'You—must—explain,' he says slowly; 'apparently I am dull this morning. What other falsehoods have I told you?'
Both her hands are clutching the table now; nor is its support unneeded, for her body sways. Only for a moment, however. In a moment she is standing firm again.
'What other?' she repeats, half under her breath; 'what other? Oh!' with a long shuddering groan, 'how many, many you must have told before you could grow to do it with a face that looks so like truth!'
But at that the insulted manhood of him awakes, goaded into life, and shakes off the paralysis engendered by his horrible astonishment.
'Come!' he exclaims, disregarding her unspoken veto, going close up to her and standing before her, with folded arms and flashing eyes; 'this is intolerable!—this is more than man can bear! Let me hear what you have to say—speak your accusation; but do not tell me to my face that I am a liar, without bringing a rag of evidence to support it!'
She looks back at him, taking in, with a startled air, his changed demeanour—the command of his attitude—the authority of his eyes. Then—
'You—are—right,' she says, panting, while he sees herpoor heart miserably leap under the pink cotton gown he had praised yesterday—was it yesterday, or before Noah's flood? 'I—have no right to bring vague accusations, as you say. Will you—will you—let me wait a minute?'
She sinks upon a chair as she speaks; and, resting her elbow upon the table, passes her pocket-handkerchief once or twice over her face, wiping away the cold drops of anguish that, despite the morning's radiant warmth, are gathering upon it. He waits beside her, in a black suspense, pushing away from him the fear that he refuses to formulate.
'There!' she says, after a year's interval, which the clock falsely calls sixty seconds; 'I—I—beg your pardon for keeping you waiting.' She has banished, as far as she can, all signs of emotion, and begins in a level low voice. 'Prue got better almost immediately after you went away last night—was it really only last night?' with a bewildered look; then, immediately recovering herself, 'so decidedly better, that I thought I might safely leave her.' She pauses. 'I—I—thought I—I—would follow you.'
Another pause. It is evidently killing work to get on at all. Angry as he is with her, clearly as he now sees what is coming, he cannot help a compassionate wish to help her, and make it easier for her.
'I—did not know which way you had gone,' she resumes, after another battle with herself; 'no one had seen you. But I thought—I guessed—I fancied that it might have been to the walled garden, because—because we had—had—said good-bye there last year.' Her voice wavers so distressingly that he thinks she is about to lose all control over it; but no!—in a moment she has recovered her self-mastery, and taken up her thread again. 'As I drew near the garden, I saw that the gate was a little open, so I knew that I had guessed right. I—looked—in; I—saw—oh!' with a burst of indignant agony, 'are you going to make me tell you what I saw?'
'Yes,' he says breathlessly, 'tell me!—what?' A hope, faint, and yet tenacious, lingers in his mind that it may have been any one moment of his last night's interview except that of the supreme embrace which she had witnessed. He has not long to wait before this last prop is knocked from under him.
'I—I—saw—you holding—a woman in your arms, and, a moment after, she ran past me—and I saw—who she was!'
The answer he has insisted upon reaches him in a broken whisper; and her strained eyes are fastened upon him, as if, in the teeth of a certainty as absolute as that of her own identity, she were nourishing the hopeless hope of his uttering some impossible, yet convincing, denial. But he attempts none such. He stands before her silent, with his arms still folded and the tide of a shoreless despair washing over his heart. Betty has put the crowning touch to her work.