During these latter evenings Mr Blessington has been very alert and wakeful—has insisted on being read to from tea to bed-time—a liberal hour. But, however hoarse and voiceless the young reader may be, Gerard never now comes to the rescue, never interferes, though the frequent teasing cough of the "damnable flirt" goes through his heart like a sword. With steady certainty, through frost and thaw, rain and shine, through all the alternations of an English winter, the young girl's health declines. To all but herself is this fact evident, and she, unaccustomed to illness—never having seen the signs of premature decay in others—thinks it is but a little weariness, a little languor, a nothing. It will pass when the swooned world revives into spring and the buttercups come.
Sunday is here again, the initial letter in the week's alphabet:
"The Sundays of man's life,Threaded together on Time's string,Make bracelets to adorn the wifeOf the eternal glorious King."
Ah me! the languid, yawning Sundays of most of us will make but sorry bracelets for any one, methinks. Sunday—the day on which the Shelford shopboys and shopgirls walk about gloriously apparelled, arm-in-arm, man and maid, filling their lungs with country air,—day on which the gentlefolks, such as are men of them, debarred from horse and hound and cue, smoke a cigar or two more than usual over the instructive pages of Messieurs De Kock, Sue, Balzac, &c.; while such as are women, being for the most part piously disposed, hold Goulburn's "Thoughts on Personal Religion," or Hannay's "Last Day of Our Lord's Passion," open on their velvet laps, and kill a reputation between each paragraph.
On this especial Sunday Esther has risen, feeling feebler, more nerveless than usual. Something in the influence of the weather—soft, sodden, sunless—weighs upon her with untold oppression. She would fain not go to church, remain at home, and lie on her bed; but this cannot be. Foremost in importance, in indispensability, among her duties are these Sunday ones. If the weather be tolerable, Mr. Blessington is always scrupulously punctual in attending Divine worship. Leaning on his valet's arm, he totters up the church, in his old tail-coat, tightly buttoned over his sunken chest, and, arrived at the Blessington pew, is deposited in a little nook thereof, partitioned (in some quirk of his, while he could yet see) from the rest. In this nook there is room for two people—to wit, for Mr. Blessington, and for the happy person who is to guide his devotions. And to conduct Mr. Blessington's prayers and praises is, I assure you, no sinecure. Almost entirely deaf, almost entirely blind, he is yet resolute to take a part in the services by no means less prominent than the clerk's. It is, therefore, his attendant's duty to shout the responses in his ear, in order to give him some clue to the portion of the ritual which has been arrived at and to check him with elbowings and nudgings, when his aberrations from the right path become so flagrantly noticeable as to distract the attention of the other worshippers. But too often, however, the attempts at repression on the part of the acolyte are so much labour lost. In the region of darkness and silence in which his infirmities have placed him, the old man frequently becomes impatient of the slow progress of the service as notified to him by the roars of his companion. Not seldom he proclaims, in a voice distinctly audible throughout the building, the point at which, according to his reckoning, priest and people should have arrived. "And with thy spirit," cries the squire, with unction in his deep, tremulous bass, while the sleek young rector's gentle "The Lord be with you" does not follow till five minutes later. In the Creed there is but one course to pursue: to start him, if possible, fair—happy, indeed, if he does not insist on turning to the altar somewhere towards the close of the second lesson or beginning of the Jubilate,—to start him fair, I say, and then in despair, give him his head. Fervently, loudly, rapidly, he announces his belief in the articles of the Christian faith, while parson, clerk, and congregation toil after him in vain. Occasionally—especially at such portions of the service as refer to our need of forgiveness, our sinfulness, our mortality,—he breaks out into senile tears; too deaf to hear his own penitent sobs, he has no idea of the loudness with which they reverberate through the church. Strangers, hearing, perk their heads up above their pews, and then fling them down again on their pocket-handkerchiefs convulsed with inextinguishable laughter; but the greater part of the assemblage are used to these spasms of grotesque devotion—it is only "t'oud squoire."
Esther always draws a long breath of relief when
"Lord, have mercy upon us!Christ, have mercy upon us!Lord, have mercy upon us!"
has been safely tided over without any unusually noisy burst of lamentation.
On the Sunday I speak of "t'oud squoire's" prayers were more unruly than usual. Whether it was that Esther's weakened voice was unable to guide them into the right channel, or to whatever other cause assignable, certain it is that his vagaries were more painfully evident—ludicrously to the congregation, distressingly to his family—than on any former Sunday within the memory of man. Many heads turn towards the Blessington pew; even the rector—meekest among M.A.s—looks now and again with gentle reproach at the old man, who is, with such aggressive loudness, usurping his office of leading the devotions of his flock. A proud woman is Esther Craven when the Liturgy comes to a close. In the sermon there are, thank God, no responses for the congregation to make; it is not even customary to cry, "Hear, hear!" "Hallelujah!" "More power to you!" at intervals. In the sermon, therefore, the old gentleman composes himself to sleep, and there is peace.
The Blessington pulpit is to-day occupied by a stranger—a Boanerges, or Son of Thunder, in the shape of a muscular, half-educated, fluent Irishman—a divine who would fainfloghis hearers to heaven, show them the way upwards by the light of hell's flambeaux—one of that too numerous class who revel in disgusting descriptions, and similes drawn from our mortality. It is impossible to help listening to him, and difficult to help being sick. Esther listens, trembling, while he descants with minute relish on "the worm that never dies." The worm that never dies! Surely, a terrible picture enough, in its simple bareness, without enlargement thereupon! With imagination rendered more vivid, and reason weakened by sickness, the unhappy girl pictures that worm gnawing at her brother's heart—gnawing, crawling, torturing eternally. She covers her face with her hands; it is too horrible! A sort of sick feeling comes over her—a giddy faintness. If she can but reach the open air! She rises unsteadily, opens the pew-door, and walks as in a mist down the aisle, between the two rows of questioning faces, and so out. As she passes through the church-door she staggers slightly, and catches at the wall for support. Gerard, watching her anxiously, sees her unsteady gait, and the involuntary gesture of reaching out for some stay for her tottering figure. Instantly, without giving thought to the light in which his beloved may regard his proceeding, he, rising, quickly follows the young girl. She has just managed to reach a flat tombstone, and there sits, with her face turned thirstily westwards, whence a small soft wind blows fitfully.
"You are ill," he says, bending solicitously over her, and laying aside in that compassionate moment the armour of his coldness.
She does not answer for awhile; then, drawing a long breath, and trying to smile: "The church was so close," she says, sighingly; "and that smell of escaped gas always makes me feel faint, and—and" (with a shudder)—"that dreadful man—with his metaphors all taken from the charnelhouse!"
"I wish he were there himself, with all my heart," answers Gerard, devoutly; "he might there frame metaphors to his taste at his leisure."
"And it is so terrible to think that it is alltrue, isn't it?" she says, fixing her great awestruck eyes upon, his face, as if trying to find comfort and reassurance there; "that the reality exceeds even his revolting word-painting; that weshallbeloathsome, all of us!—you and I and everybody—young and old, beautiful and ugly! HowcouldGod be so cruel as to let us know it beforehand?"
"Knowing it beforehand is better than knowing it at the time, which, at least, we are spared," replies St. John, composedly.
"But are we?" she cries, eagerly: "that is the question! Latterly I have been beset by a fearful idea that death is but a long catalepsy. In a catalepsy, you know, a person seems utterly without consciousness or volition; breath is suspended, and all the vital functions; and yet he feels and sees and hears more acutely than when in strong health. Why may not death, too, be a catalepsy?"
"Absurd!" he says. "My poor child, it is thoughts like these, gone wild, that fill madhouses. According to your theory, at what point of time does your catalepsy end? When we are dissolved into minutest particles of dust does each atom still feel and suffer?"
"My theory, as you call it, will not hold water, I know," she answers gravely, "but it does not haunt me any the less. There are times when one cannot reason—one can onlyfear."
"You should not give way to these morbid fancies," he says, chidingly; "they are making you ill."
"Am I ill, do you think? Do I look ill?" she asks, with startled eagerness.
The havoc worked in face and figure by the last few months is too directly under his eyes for him to answer anything but truthfully. "Very ill."
"You don't think I'm going todie?" she says, lowering her voice, and laying her hand on his arm, while her great feverish eyes burn into his very soul. "People are not any the more likely to die for being thin and weak, are they? Creaky doors hang the longest."
"Die!—God forbid!" he replies, trying to speak lightly. "Let us banish death from our talk. I suppose it is this place of tombs that has made him take such a leading part in it. Come, you are not at all fit to go back into church, and I am not anxious to hear the tail-end of that wormy discourse. The smell of brimstone is quite strong enough in my nostrils already. Let us go home!"
So they return to the house, and he still shows no inclination to leave her. He draws a chair for her near an open window, and stands with his hand resting on the back. It is almost like the old times—the old times that he thinks of,
"As dead men of good days,Ere the wrong side of death was theirs, when GodWas friends with them."
Something in the recollection of those days makes soft his voice, which is not wont to be soft. "You are not fit for this life," he says, stooping down his face towards her small wan one. "It requires a tough seasoned woman, in middle life. Tell me why you have undertaken it? Why are you not—not married?"
She turns away, crimsoning painfully. "Because no one has asked me, I suppose," she answers, trying to speak banteringly.
"But you were engaged when—when we parted?"
"Yes."
"And you are not now?"
With ungovernable, unaccountable impatience, he awaits the slow brief answer.
"No."
"Had he then—h'm! h'm!—discoveredanything?" Gerard asks, finding some difficulty in framing the question politely.
She fires up quickly. "Discoveredanything!" she repeats, indignantly. "Do you think it is impossible for me to be honest evenoncein my life? I told him myself."
"Youbroke it off, then?"
"No, I didn't."
"Hedid?"
"Yes."
"Poor fellow! he had good cause to be angry," says St. John; the old bitterness surging back upon him, as he reflects on the cowardly duplicity that had made waste two honest lives.
"But he wasnotangry," she cries, eagerly: "he was grieved—oh,sogrieved! Shall I ever forgive myself when I think of how he looked when I told him?" (her eyes gazing out abstractedly at the "Rape of the Sabines," as her thoughts fly back to that quarried nook on the bleak autumnal hillside, where she had broken a brave man's heart). "But he was not angry. Oh, no! he never thought of himself! he thought only about me! Ah!that waslove!"
"He would not marry you, however?" says St. John, exasperated at these laudations, which he imagines levelled as reproaches against himself.
"No," she answered quietly, "you are right; he would not marry me, though I begged him. But that was for my sake, too—not his own; he told me that he could not make me happy, for that I did not love him. He was wrong, though. I did love him—I love him now. If I did not love the one friend I have in all this great empty world, what should I be made of?" she concludes, while the tears come into her eyes.
"You have a great capacity for loving," says St. John, who, though not usually an ungenerous fellow, is maddened by the expressions of affection, the tears and regretful looks bestowed upon his rival. "I envy, though I despair of emulating you."
"Men have butoneway of loving," she answers, gently; "women have several. I love him as the one completely unselfish being I ever met. I agree with you, that the way of loving you mean comes but once in a lifetime."
At her words, and the fidelity to himself which they so innocently imply, a fierce bright joy upleaps in his heart—a joy that clamours for utterance in violent fond words, in the wild closeness of forbidden embraces; but honour, that strong gaoler that keeps so many under lock and key, keeps him too.
"For Love himself took part against himselfTo warn us off; and Duty, loved of love—Oh! this world's curse, beloved but hated—came,Like death, betwixt thy dear embrace and mine,And crying, 'Who is this? Behold thy bride!'She push'd me from thee."
He only holds out his hand to her. "Esther, let us be friends. I am tired of this silence and estrangement; let there be peace between us!"
"I have always wished for it," she answers meekly, laying her little trembling hand in his—"you know I have; but let us be at peaceapart, and nottogether; that will be better. How long," she asks, impulsively, lifting quivering red lips and dew-soft eyes to his—"how long—how much longer—do you mean to stay here?"
"Why do you ask?" he says, in a troubled voice, hurt pride and hot passion struggling together. "Surely in this great wide house there is room for you and me; I am not much in your way, surely?"
"You are," she answers, feverishly—"you are in my way; you would be, in the widest house that ever was built. Every day I long more and more to be a great way off from you. I think I could breathe better if I were."
He does not answer: leaning still over her in a dumb agonised yearning, that—with the chains of another still dragging about him—may not be outspoken.
"That day we met upon the stairs," she continues, eyes and cheeks aflame and lustrous with the consuming fire within her, "you promised me you would avail yourself of the first opportunity to leave this place; a month or more is gone since then. Surely the most exacting mistress could spare you for awhile now? Why have you broken your word, then? Why are you here?"
He is silent for a few moments, questioning his own soul—questioning that conscience whose monitions he has hitherto so stoutly resisted. Then he speaks, a flush of shame making red his bronzed cheek: "Because I have been dishonest to myself and to you. This place has had an attraction for me which I see now it would not have had hadsheonly been here. I linger about it as a man lingers about the churchyard where his one hope lies buried."
"Don't linger any longer, then," she cries, passionately, taking his hand between both hers; "don't be dishonest any more! Tellyourselfthe truth, if you tell no one else, and goat once, before it is too late; for if you won't,Imust!"
She is weeping freely as she speaks; her tears drop hot and slow, one after another, upon his hand.
He flings himself on his knees beside her, his mastery over himself reeling in the strong rush of long-pent passion.
"You tell me to go," he says, in a voice choked and altered with emotion, "and in the very act of telling me you cry. Which am I to believe, your words or your tears?"
"My words," she answers, trying to speak collectedly, and by gaining calmness herself to bring it back to him. "I have been dishonourable once—you know it; don't let me have the remorse of thinking that I made an honourable man palter with temptation—made him sully his honour for me. IfIam the inducement that keeps you here,go; for my sake, go!I say it a hundred times; promise me you will go—soon, this week.Let me hear you swear it; you will not break your oath, I know!"
He is silent; hesitating to take that step of irrevocable banishment—banishment from the woman that he cast away in righteous wrath, and in whose frail life his own now seems to be bound up.
"Swear!" she says again, earnestly, with a resolute look in her soft face. "I beg it of you as a favour; for if you won't, though my only chance of daily bread lies here, I must go to-night."
The determination in her voice recalls him to his senses. "I will not drive you to such extremities," he says, coldly. "Give me only till to-morrow morning—twenty-four hours cannot make much difference to you, and a man going to be hanged likes to have a little respite—give me till to-morrow, and I will swear whatever you wish."
"That is right," she answers, trying to smile through her tears. "Some day you will thank me; you will say, 'She was a bad girl, but she did me one good turn!'"
The people are flocking out of church; the squire, in a low pony-chaise, driven by a groom as old and toothless as himself, and drawn by a pony (considering the comparative ages of horses and men) also nearly as old, is bowling gently up the drive.
"I must go," Esther says, rising hastily; "Mrs. Blessington hates red eyes as she hates a black dress, and for the same reason!"
At Blessington no one goes to church twice. It is the bounden duty of every Christian man, woman, and child to go to church in the morning; it is the duty of only the clergyman, the school-children, and the organist to go to church in the afternoon. The old people sleep side by side in the blaze of the saloon-fire; being, both of them, happily deaf, they are undisturbed by each other's grunts and snores.
Since the beginning of St. John's visit, the north drawing-room has been made over to him and his betrothed to be affectionate in, so that they may enjoy, uninterrupted, those fits of affection to which all engaged people are supposed, and sometimes unjustly supposed, to be liable. Whether they have reached the requisite pitch of warmth on the afternoon I speak of is, to say the least, doubtful; but, all the same, in the north drawing-room they are. Constance leans back in an armchair, rather listless. She is fond of work, and it is not right to work on Sunday: her feet repose on a foot-stool before her—her eyes are fixed upon them: she is thinking profoundly whether steel buckles a size smaller than the ones she is at present wearing would not be more becoming to the feet. St. John sits by the table; his left hand supports his head; his right scribbles idly, on a bit of paper, horses taking impossible fences, prize pigs, ballet-girls, little skeleton men squaring up at one another. He, too, is thinking—but not of shoe-buckles. He has got something to say to Miss Blessington—something unpleasant, unpolite; and he cannot, for the life of him, imagine how to begin to say it. Chance favours him. Miss Blessington, happening to look up, catches her lover's eyes fixed, with an expression she had never before seen in them—not on herself, as she, for the first second imagines, but (as a second glance informs her) on some object outside the window. Her gaze follows his, and lights upon "nobody very particular—only poor Miss Craven!" who, with head rather bent, is trudging by towards the garden. "How ill that girl looks!" she says, pettishly. "I really believe those sort of people take a pleasure in looking as sickly and woebegone as possible, in order to put one out of spirits,"
The opening he has been looking for has come. "Constance," ho says, bending his head, and speaking in a low voice, "what fatuity induced you not to send me word when you found that that girl was here?"
"You forbad me ever to mention her name to you," she answers, coldly; "and, to tell you the truth, I thought it was a good thing that you should see her. If you had not met again, you might have carried a sentimental recollection of her throughout life, which you can hardly do now that you have seen with your own eyes how completely she has lost her beauty."
St. John lifts his head, and stares at her in blank astonishment. "Lost its beauty!"—that
"Face that one would see,And then fall blind, and die, with sight of it,Held fast between the eyelids."
"Lost her beauty!" he repeats, in a sort of stupefaction.
"Well," she replies, languidly, "why do you repeat my words? You know I never admired her much. I never can admire those black women, but that is a matter of taste, of course. It is not matter of taste, however—it is matter of fact, that whatever good looks she once had are gone—gone."
Gerard smiles contemptuously. "I do believe that you women lose the sight of your eyes when you look at one another."
"What do you mean?" she asks, with some animation. "Is it possible that you don't agree with me as to her being quitepassée?"
"I think her, as I always thought her," he answers, steadily, "the loveliest woman I ever beheld; a little additional thinness or paleness does not affect her much. Hers is not mere skin beauty: as you say, tastes differ, and I likethose black women."
"That is a civil speech to make to me!" she answers, reddening—an insult to her appearance or her clothes being the one weapon that has power to pierce the scales of her armour of proof.
St. John smiles again. "When we engaged to marry one another, did we also engage to think each other the handsomest specimens of the human animal Providence ever framed?"
"It is, at least, not usual for a man to express an open preference for another woman to the girl to whom he is engaged."
"It is no question ofpreference," he answers, quietly. "I had no thought of drawing any comparison between you and Miss Craven at the moment; I was not thinking of you."
"You said she wastheloveliest girl you had ever seen!" objects Constance, pouting.
"So I did—I do think her so," he rejoins, calmly. "If there is some defect in my eyes, hindering me from seeing things as they are, it is my misfortune, not my fault. Cannot you be content," he asks, banteringly, "with being thenext loveliest?"
She turns away her head, too indignant to answer.
He changes his tone. "Constance," he says, gravely, "when I proposed to you, did not I tell you, honestly, what I could give you and what I could not? Love (odd as it may sound between engaged people), and the blind admiration that accompanies love, I had not got to offer you; this is true, is not it?"
"Perfectly true," she answers, resentfully; "and as I am not, nor ever was, one of those inflammable young ladies, who think thatburning, andconsuming, andmeltingare essential to married happiness, I did not much regret its absence. I have always been brought up to think," she continues, having recourse to the high moral tone which is her last sure refuge, "that respect and esteem are the best basis for two people to go upon, and I think so still."
"But do you and I respect and esteem one another?" he asks, half-cynically, half-mournfully. "Is it possible that I can respect you, who, though you did not care, or affect to care, two straws about me personally—though you knew, at the time I asked you to marry me, that I was madly in love with another woman—were yet willing to give yourself to me, soul and body—to be bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, because I was a goodparti, as the vile phrase goes? And as for me," he ends, in bitter self-contempt, "what is there in all my idle wasted life, from beginning to end, that any one can respect or esteem?"
"Has this struck you now for the first time?" she asks, drily. "I am not aware of any change in our relative circumstances since our marriage was arranged; I suppose our feelings towards each other are much what they were then, when you were troubled with none of these scruples."
"And whatwereour feelings then?" he asks, bitterly; "what brought us together? Was not it that our properties dovetailed conveniently into one another, as Sir Thomas says—that it was advisable for both of us to marry some one—that we were of suitable age, and had no positive distaste for one another: was not this so?"
"I suppose so," she answers, sulkily.
"And yet," he continues, sternly, "although I had laid bare to you all my wretched story—although you were well aware that I was utterly without the safeguard of any love to yourself—you yet let me fall into this temptation—the cruelest I could have been exposed to—without a word of warning. Was this fair? Was this right?"
"Since you put me on my defence," she answers, with anger, "I must repeat to you what I said before, that it seemed to me the best method of curing you of your ill-placed fancy for Esther Craven—a fancy which she repaid with such disgraceful deceit and duplicity—was to let you see for yourself what a wreck she had become!"
"You meant well, perhaps," he rejoins, with a sigh that is more than half a groan; "but it was terribly mistaken—terribly ill-judged; it has done us both an irreparable injury."
"I am not aware that it has done me any injury whatever," she answers, coldly, mistaking his meaning
"I was not alluding to you," he replies, curtly.
She makes no rejoinder, and he, rising, begins to walk up and down the room with his hands in his pockets. He has made his meaning clear enough, surely, and yet she does not appear to see it. As she continues resolutely silent, he stops opposite to her, and speaks earnestly, and yet with some embarrassment, as one who knows that what he says will be unpleasing to his listener.
"Constance, I must tell you the truth, though I suppose it is hardly of the complexion of the pretty flattering truths or untruths that you have been used to all your life. But, at least, it is better that you should hear it now, than that we should tell it one another a year hence, with mutual, useless recriminations; there is no use in disguising the fact that you and I do not feel towards each other as husband and wife should feel."
"Pshaw!" she says, pettishly, turning her head aside; "we feel much the same as other people do, I daresay."
"If," he continues, very gravely, "marriage were a temporary connection, that lasted a year—five years say—or that could be dissolved at pleasure, there might be no great harm in entering upon it with the sort of negative liking, the absence of repugnance for one another, which is all that we can boast; but since it is a bargain for all time, and that there is no getting out of it except by the gate of death or disgrace, I think we ought both to reflect on it more seriously than we have yet done before undertaking it."
"It is rather late in the day to say all this," retorts she, indignantly. "You have known me all my life; you must have been well aware that I never could enter into those highflown, romantic notions, which I have heard you yourself ridicule a hundred times. These objections should have occurred to you before you proposed to me, and not now, when we have been engaged two months, and when our marriage has been discussed as a settled thing by all our acquaintance."
"You are right," he answers, quietly. "They should have occurred to me before; but, in justice to myself, I must say that they would never have occurred to me: I should have remained in the same state of supine indifference to everything in which I came here, had not you yourself thrown me in the way of Esther Craven."
She sits upright in her chair; her pale, handsome face paler, harder than usual, in her great anger. "The drift of this long tirade, when translated into plain English, is, I suppose, that you wish to marry Esther Craven instead of me?"
He is silent.
"Is it so?" she repeats, her voice raised several notes above its wonted low key.
"When I am engaged to one woman," he answers, slowly, reluctantly, yet steadily, "I hope I am not dishonourable enough willingly to harbour the thought of marriage with any other."
The Gerard diamonds flash before her mind's eye: they are so big, and numerous—necklace, aigrette, stomacher. The idea of seeing them gleam restless in Esther's hair, on Esther's fair neck, is insupportable to her. She will not release him, ardently as he wishes it; she will hold him by a strong chain that will not snap—his honour.
"I am glad to hear it," she answers, coldly. "In common fairness to me, you could hardly have entertained such an idea. It is a great disadvantage to a girl to be engaged, to have her engagement as widely known as mine has been, and then to have it broken off; people never think the same of her again."
He turns to the window, to hide his bitter disappointment. "Very well," he answers, calmly; "things will remain as they are, I suppose, then? I only thought it right to warn you how small a chance of happiness there is in a marriage so loveless as ours: for the rest you must blame yourself."
Night's black sheet drawn off the other half of the world is thrown over us; the dark side of the lantern is turned towards us. Esther has fallen asleep, with almost a happy smile upon her soft, parted lips. She is forgiven; and is there any sweetness like the sweetness of being pardoned, having sinned? He no longer hates her! That was not hate that looked out of his quick, keen eyes to-day, as he leant over her while she sat, dizzy and faint, on that churchyard slab, or as he knelt in strong emotion at her knees. And now, though at her own telling, he is going away from her to-morrow—though, when next they meet, either they will have put off mortality's tatters, God will have laid
"Death, like a kiss, across their lips;"
or else, to look and lean as he looked and leant to-day will be deadly sin—yet creeps there a sorrowful joy about her heart. He has given her back the past—the short, happy Felton past; no one can take it from her again; not even Miss Blessington, who has taken all else—present and future and all. She is dreaming of him now—dreaming that she is sitting in the library at Felton, in the fragrant gloom made by the lowered Venetian blinds, by dark oak bookshelves, by plentiful sweet flowers, and so sitting hears the sound of his quick feet coming along the passage. He is at the door—he is opening it. But, ah! what is this?—it will not open; it is stiff on its hinges. He is pushing it—pushing gently, pushing hard—but it will not move. What a stealthy noise it is he makes, as if he were afraid of some one hearing him! She starts up, broad awake; it is not all dream; there is some one pushing stealthily, yet audibly, against a door. For the first bewildered moment of sick fear she imagines that it is her own door on which this attempt is being made; but a moment's listening undeceives her. The sound comes from underneath her window, apparently. It is not rats this time; a rat, with all its ingenuity, would be puzzled to make a noise so distinctly human. Upon her mind there flashes suddenly the recollection of a door leading into the garden beneath her casement, but not so immediately beneath but that she can see it; a door that stands wide open all the summer through, when people step from house to garden, from garden to house, a hundred times a day, but which in winter is rarely used. She sits up motionless, while round her utter darkness surges. The noise is repeated: push—push! creak—creak! it is as if some one, with hand and knee, were attempting to obtain entrance. When light is withdrawn hearing becomes preternaturally sharpened; in an instant she has jumped out of bed, and run barefoot over the cold boards to the window. There, pulling aside the blind, she, trembling all over, peeps out. Moon is there none, but the joint light of countless star-squadrons, faint though it be, is yet strong enough to enable her distinctly to make out the figure of a man pressing itself against the door in question. With bodily eyes she at length looks upon that burglar, whom, with the terrified eyes of imagination, she had so often beheld. Whether he wear a crape mask or not it is too dark to discern. Whatisshe to do?—she, in all probability, the only wakeful, conscious being in all that great house. For a minute she stands irresolute, while a rushing sound fills her ears, and her teeth chatter dismally in the cold. Shall she alarm the servants? But how to reach them? She does not even know the way to their sleeping-places. They are miles away, in the other wing of the house, where she has never been. Shall she go to Miss Blessington? At least she knows the way thither, though it is some distance off. But of what avail would that be? Of what use would two girls be, any more than one, against the onslaught of daring unscrupulous robbers? Shall she betake herself to St. John, whose room is but two doors off? No sooner does this idea suggest itself to her, than she puts it into practice. Hastily striking a light, and wrapping her dressing-gown round her, she opens her door, and, flying down the passage, knocks loudly at Mr. Gerard's. But Gerard, having a not particularly bad conscience, and a particularly good digestion, is a sound sleeper. She knocks again, more violently, almost to the flaying of her knuckles: "Mr. Gerard!—Mr. Gerard!"
"Hullo! who's there?" responds a sleepy voice.
"It's I! Esther!" she cries pantingly. "Open the door, please—this minute—quick!"
"Esther!—you!" says the voice, perfectly awake this time. "What on earth is the matter?—wait one second!"
He hurries on his clothes, and then hastens to accede to her request of opening the door.
"Are you ill?" he asks, anxiously, seeing her lean against the door-post, with death-white cheeks and terror-struck eyes.
"No—no!" she answers, hoarse and breathless, while St. John, candle, and door, all seem to be dancing a jig round her. "It is not I, but there's a man—getting into the house—by the garden-door. I saw him!"
"The devil there is!" replies the young man, with animation. "Here, give me your candle, and I'll go and see what he wants."
"No—no!" she cries, with all a woman's unreason. "Don't go; you must not!" (though for what other purpose she had sought his assistance she would have been puzzled to say). "I won't let you; you'll be killed!" and so, gasping, stretches out her white arms towards him, and, letting drop her candle, falls insensible, in the total darkness, into his embrace.
For a month past or more, the dream that has pursued Gerard night and day—unchecked in sleep, in waking faintly repressed by considerations of honour—is to hold that fair woman's form in his arms; and now he so holds her in reality. And yet, as the fulfilment of our wishes seldom affords us the gratification we had anticipated, so it is with him. Now that he has got her, he does not quite know what to do with her. Shall he, encumbered by his beautiful burden, grope his way back into his room, and lay her down there, while he goes and investigates into the cause of her terror and swoon? But the household, being alarmed, may find her there; and, so finding, would not the reputation of her, most innocent, be endangered? Her head droops heavy in its perfect lifelessness on his shoulder; her soft warm hair caresses his cheek in the blackness of the night. He looks down the passage. From Esther's open door a flood of light streams; at all events there is a candle left burning there. In a moment he has borne her into her own chamber, and has laid her most gently down upon the ginger-moreen bed. He has no time to try and revive her now. "Perhaps it was only her own imagination, poor child!—her own imagination, and those infernal rats!" is the hasty thought that has crossed his mind; but looking through the window, as she had done, he sees, as she had seen, a man's dim figure in the starlight. Without a moment's delay, without casting another thought even to the fair swooned woman he leaves behind him, Gerard runs down the corridor, his blood pleasantly astir with the thought of a possible adventure—through interminable dark galleries, down the gleaming cold of white stone stairs, through hall, saloon, north drawing-room, and justicing-room—till he reaches a narrow short passage that leads to the garden door. As he and his light draw near, the noise suddenly ceases. He stands still for a moment, expecting to hear it repeated, but it is not. Setting down his candle, therefore, he advances towards the door and unfastens it—it is secured by an old-fashioned catch inside—opens it, and looks out into the night. At first he can discern nothing but the chill wintry garden, and the million stars scattered broadcast over God's one great unenclosed field of the sky; but a second glance reveals to him a dim figure crouching indistinct in the shadow of a projecting buttress.
"Who's there?" he cries, in a loud clear voice.
No answer.
"Who's there?" he repeats. "If you don't answer, I'll fire."
Firing, in this instance, must mean using the flat candlestick as a projectile, for other weapon has Mr. Gerard none. Hardly have the words left his mouth, however, before the figure springs forth from its hiding-place, and stands erect before him.
"Don't fire, sir, please; it's I."
Livery-buttons flash in the starlight: behold the culprit revealed!—a young and lighthearted footman, who has on one or two previous occasions been suspected of a too great proclivity towards the nocturnal festivities of the "Chequers." A sense of infuriation at the bald tame end of the adventure gets possession of St. John.
"What the devil do you mean, sir, skulking here, alarming the whole household, and frightening the young ladies out of their senses?" he asks, with a gruff asperity not unworthy of his papa.
"If you please, sir, I was only—only—taking a bit of a walk in the park, sir."
"A likely tale!" cries St. John, angrily. "A walk in the park at this time of night! Come, don't let us have any lies, my good fellow; that is covering a small fault with a much greater one. You were at the 'Chequers,' I suppose? Come, out with it!"
"If you please, sir," replies the man, hanging his head, and looking very sheepish, "there was a young woman, as come all the way from Shelford, and as she was a bit timid, I promised to send her home."
"A young woman!" repeats St. John, repressing an inclination to smile. "Well, next time, you must be good enough to choose more seasonable hours for your meetings with young women."
"And when I come back, sir, I found all the house made up for the night, and I could not get no one to hear me; and I thought as how, very like, I might find this 'ere door open, if so be as Betsy had forgot to bolt it, as she mostly does, only it is so plaguy stiff on its 'inges——"
"And, for a wonder, Betsy had not forgotten to bolt it," interrupts Gerard, drily. "Well, don't let us have anything of this kind again, or, I warn you, you'll be packed off without a character."
Relieved at being let off so easily, the young fellow slinks away, and Gerard retraces his steps upstairs again. He cannot help laughing as he thinks of poor Esther's tragic fears, of her agonised pleadings: "Youmustnot go! I won't let you go! you'll be killed!"
"If I'm never in nearer peril of death than I was to-night," he thinks, "I have every chance of outliving Methuselah. Was ever mountain delivered of so contemptible a mouse?" He laughs again. "'I won't let you! you'll be killed!' Poor little thing! I wonder has she come to herself yet! I must let her know that this bloodthirsty villain has not slain me outright this time." Having reached her door, he pauses and listens. There is no sound within. He knocks gently—no answer: knocks again—still no reply. Half-hesitating, as one that stands doubtful on the threshold of a church, he opens the door and enters. The light burns on the dressing-table, and she lies still prone, where he had laid her, on the bed, still completely insensible. This swoon is horribly deathlike:
"...................But she liesNot in the embrace of loyal death, who keepsHis bride for ever, but in treacherous armsOf sleep, that sated, will restore to griefHer snatch'd a sweet space from his cruel clutch."
Her head is thrown back, and her round chin slightly raised. Over the tossed pillow wander the tangled riches of her swart hair; nerveless on the counterpane lie the white, carven hands and blue-veined wrists, on which the faint fine lines make a tender network. Half-shadowed by her dressing-gown, half-emerging from it gleam bare feet,
"That make the blown foam neither swift nor white."
He leans over her, gazing with passionate admiration at the heavy shut lids and upward curling lashes—with passionate admiration mixed with sharp pain; for he can see, plainlier now in this long quiet look than in the hasty, stolen glances he has hitherto given her, the purple stains under closed eyes, the little depressions in the rounded cheek, the droop of the sweet sorrowful mouth. Iachimo's words recur to him—Iachimo's, as he gazed in his treachery upon the sleeping beauty of Imogen:
"................. Cytherea!How bravely thou becom'st thy bed! fresh lily!And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch!But kiss—one kiss! Bubies unparagon'd,How dearly they do't!—'Tis her breathing thatPerfumes the chamber thus. The flame o' the taperBows towards her, and would underpeep her lidsTo see the enclosed lights now canopiedUnder those windows......................"
But looking at a person with ever such warm approbation will not recover them from a swoon. What is he to do? He is horribly puzzled, so seldom before has he seen a fainted fellow-Christian. Vague ideas of having heard of burnt feathers held under nostrils recur to his mind. But whence to obtain feathers, unless he takes a pair of scissors and snips a hole in the feather-bed? There is nothing in all the great room more feathery than the stumpy end of an old quill pen, with which Miss Craven is wont to indite her small accounts. Another specific flashes before his mental eye. Smelling-salts! He walks to the dressing-table, and carefully overlooks its slender load: brushes and combs, a Bible, and a fat pincushion—neither essence, unguent, nor scent of any kind. Esther's toilette apparatus is but meagre. Shall he throw cold water over her? What! and deluge all the ginger moreen bed, thereby making it an even more undesirable resting-place than it is at present? Quite at a loss what to do, he returns to the bedside, and begins to chafe her cold hands between his two warm ones. Then he stoops over her, trying to discover any smallest sign of returning consciousness. When his lips are so close to hers, how can he help laying them yet closer? Men seldom do resist any temptation, unless it is very weak, and the objections to it very overwhelming. This temptation is not weak, and there are absolutely no objections to it. No one will ever know of this theft—not even the person upon whom it is committed: it will do her no harm, and to kiss her even thus unknowing, unreturning, gives him a bitter joy. But, having once kissed her, he refrains himself, nor lays his lips a second time upon hers. Something of shame comes over him, as one that has taken advantage of another's helplessness—one that, for an instant, has let the brute within him get the upper hand of the man. Only he caresses gently her two cold hands, and his eyes dwell on her face, watching longingly for the first small symptom of back-coming life. His patience is rewarded, after a time; after a time there comes a quivering about the eyelids, a tremor about the mouth—then a deep-drawn sighing respiration. Always with a sigh does the soul come back to its dark cottage, having journeyed away from it for awhile. The curtain-lids sweep back from the spirit's windows; and, pale and clear, her eyes' dark glories shine upon him, conscious yet bewildered. Then a little stealing red, like the tint that dwelt in a sea-shell's lips, flows into each pure cheek; then comes full consciousness, and with it recollected terrors. "Where is he?" she asks, in a low frightened voice. "Is he gone?—did he get in?—did he hurt you?"
"He was not a very formidable burglar, after all," Gerard answers, with a reassuring smile: "it was only Thomas, who had been seeing his sweetheart home, and was trying to get into the house without being heard."
"Oh, I'm so glad! But" (her eyes straying confusedly round the room) "how did I get here? When last I remember any thing I was in the passage."
"I carried you here."
"And then went and found out about this man?"
"Yes."
"And then came back here?"
"Yes. I hope you don't think me very impertinent," he says, apologetically; "but I could not bear the idea of your lying here, insensible, without any one making an attempt to bring you round."
Recollecting what his own method of bringing her round had been, his conscience gives him a compunctious stab. She blushes furiously, and, raising herself into a sitting posture, begins to twist up her hair with both hands.
"You are better now," he says, tenderly, but with perfect respect; "I will go."
He moves towards the door, but, before he can reach it, it flies open hastily, and Constance, dishevelled, dressing-gowned, flurried out of all likeness to herself, bursts in. "Oh, Miss Craven! I'm so frightened! I heard people talking outside——St. John!!"
Mrs. Siddons might have been defied to crowd more solemnly tragic emphasis into one word than does Miss Blessington into the innocent dissyllable, "St. John!"
"Well!" replies St. John, tartly, vexed past speaking at being discovered in such an utterly false position.
"I suppose I may be allowed to ask what bringsyouhere?" she says, drawing herself up to her stately height.
"You certainly may," he answers, endeavouring to recover his self-possession; "and I have not the slightest objection to telling you. What brought me here was the endeavour to recover Miss Craven from a faint into which she fell on coming to tell me—as the only person within her reach—that a man was, as she imagined, endeavouring to break into the house."
Even to his own ears this tale, as he tells it, sounds wofully improbable.
"And you took no steps to prevent him?" cries Constance, quickly; her fears for her personal safety, for the moment, outweighing the claims of outraged virtue.
"Pardon me! I did; but having discovered that it was only one of the footmen, who had been accidentally locked out, I came back to tell Miss Craven so, if she were recovered! and, if not, to give her that assistance which anyone human being may render to another without being called to account for it."
Having spoken, he folds his arms, and confronts her, calm and stately as herself.
"I should hardly have imagined it wasyourbusiness," she replies, with scarce-concealed incredulity. "May I ask why you could not ring for the servants?"
"Because, as you are well aware," he answers, trying to quell his rising anger, "if I were to ring from now till doomsday, not a soul would hear me; all the bells ring downstairs, and the servants' bedrooms are at least a quarter of a mile distant up-stairs."
"Why could not you have come to me, then?"
"The impropriety would, in that case, have been at least equal," he answers, sarcastically; "and, to tell you the truth, such a course never occurred to me."
Something in his tone irritates her. "It is, of course, no concern of mine," she says, with icy coldness. "If Miss Craven chooses to receive the visits of gentlemen, HERE, at two o'clock in the morning, it doesmeno harm!"
She moves towards the door, but he places himself between her and it; and, grasping her wrist with unconscious roughness, speaks in a voice low and hoarse with anger, while his roused wrath glances upon her from out of his grey eyes—the eyes that hitherto have looked upon her only with indifference.
"Constance! what do you mean by these insults? How dare you give utterance to them? Is your own mind so impure that you cannot believe in the purity of others?"
"You must allow that it is at least an equivocal position," she answers, half-frightened by his stern looks, but keeping resolutely to her text.
"It is," he answers, remorsefully; "I allow it—I bitterly feel it. And yet, if it were only myself that were concerned, I should scorn to descend to any more explanation than that I have already given you; but for the sake of this most innocent girl, whom by my folly I have compromised, I swear to you, Constance—I solemnly take God to witness!—that it is exactly and simply as I have told you. Miss Craven had not recovered from her insensibility more than two minutes before you came into the room; I was in the act of leaving it as you entered. This is the whole plain truth: do you believe it?"
She does not answer.
"Do you believe it?" he repeats, earnestly.
The mulish look comes into her face—the look he has begun to know so well.
"It cannot be of much consequence to you whether I believe it or not," she answers, still with that freezing calm of voice and face. "You have, at all events, adopted the best method of obtaining your release from that engagement, which you so broadly hinted, only yesterday afternoon, that you wished to be free from. You have your wish—you are free!"
"As you will," he answers, gloomily. "God knows there never was much love in our connection; an iller-mated pair never came together; it was a mere matter of business on both sides. But, as to saying that the pure accident which has brought Miss Craven and me into slight and transient collision to-night can have any influence upon the conclusion or continuance of our engagement—it is tantamount to telling me that what I have sworn to you, upon my honour as a gentleman, to be true, is false!" he says, his face growing white and fierce.
"Is it?" she says, with a quietly enraging smile; having that confidence in the shield of womanhood, which makes so many a woman gall a man to the uttermost, and expect him to stand by, serene, polite, and smiling. "Unfortunately," she continues, "I am behind the spirit of the age; I am shackled with obsolete old notions of propriety and decency; and therefore—as you have no longer any smallest control over my actions—will you be so good as to allow me to go?"
He drops her hand instantly, and, opening the door for her, bows his head haughtily, saying, "Go! I have neither the wish nor the power to detain you;" and as he so speaks she passes out.
Meanwhile Esther, having slidden from her bed, stands with trembling limbs, grasping the back of a chair, and gazing from speaker to speaker with a world of surprise and horror in her great innocent eyes. As Miss Blessington leaves the room, St. John turns to her:
"My darling!" he says, with an accent of passionate remorse, "how will you ever forgive me for having exposed you to this!"
She turns away from him, and covers her burning face with her hands. "Go!" she says, faintly—"go, this minute! Don't say another word! Don't give her any more reason for her wicked slanders! Go!"
And he goes.
Of the three persons whose repose has been disturbed by the amours of Thomas the footman, only one is able to take up again the thread of interrupted slumber. Miss Blessington, having returned to her chamber, and having meditated calmly for a quarter of an hour on the knot in her destiny she has just untied, and having given one great sigh to the memory of the Gerard diamonds, lays down her golden scented head on her pillow again, and sleeps the sleep of the just. Miss Blessington has well nigh mastered the secret of eternal youth and perennial beauty—incapacity for feeling any emotion. It is hardly likely that the god Sleep, who loves a quiet house, will visit two such unquiet temples as the brains of St. John and Esther: he goes away from them utterly, taking his gentle poppyheads with him.
St. John walks miles and miles up and down his bedroom carpet, pondering, deeply and vexedly, not on what his own course of conduct shall be—thathe is already determined upon—but on what effect Miss Blessington's coldly sceptical reception of his wildly improbable yet true tale is likely to have upon Esther.
And Esther herself, having conceived a mortal aversion for the shelter of the ginger-canopied pavilion, wraps a great shawl round her, and, sitting down on the deep window-seat, watches for the first streaks of dawn, which, on these winter mornings, are long, long coming. Though it is a winter night, her hands burn hot and dry; for the last few days she has had a sharp pain in her side—to-night it is getting yet sharper; it begins to hurt her to draw her breath. Two thoughts keep buzzing about her brain: "I am going to be ill," and "I am going to be turned away." She throws aside her shawl, but the dry burning still continues. She has sat here for hours now, and the dawn's feet are beginning slowly to climb the steps from the eastern gate. The battle between day and night is yet undecided; almost equally they divide the sky between them. Perhaps it is the night's excitement that has given her this fever; perhaps the cold morning air would refresh her. She waits until day's victory is complete, and then—being already dressed—puts on her hat and jacket, and steals noiselessly downstairs, to the garden door that has been the cause of so much mischief, out into the garden between the brown earthed beds, where the winter aconite's small yellow heads and green tippets are beginning to push themselves into sight, and thence into the park.
There is no wind abroad, only heavy rain-clouds outwalling the infant sun, and the unarmed air has a piercing chillness in it. Esther has not proceeded far, and is standing thoughtful on the brow of a little knoll, from whence one looks down on the dark flag-fringed pool, when she is aware of a footstep behind her; and the next instant St. John Gerard stands by her side.
"What have you come here for? Why have you followed me?" she asks, turning upon him in hasty dismay. "Miss Blessington's windows look this way—she will see us together."
"Let her see us," he answers, doggedly.
"She will never believe that it was by accident we have met," cries poor Esther, in great agitation.
"She will be right, then; it is not accident."
"She will think that it was an appointment!" she says, clasping her hands in unfeigned distress.
"Let her think so!"
"It is very well for you to talk in this way," she says, with passionate reproach. "You are a man—you may defy the opinion of the world; but is it so easy for me?"
"Why should her opinion concern either you or me?" he inquires, gravely. "What is she to either of us? Did not you last night, with your own ears, hear my dismissal pronounced?"
She stoops her head until her hat almost conceals her face from him.
"She was angry," she says, in a low voice; "she will be sorry for the things she said; she will forgive you."
"Will she?" he answers, quietly smiling. "I think not; to tell you the truth, I don't mean to ask her."
She lifts her face, suddenly earnest, to him.
"Youmust!" she says, eagerly. "You must explain to her, as you tried to do last night, that what happened then" (a painful blush) "is no possible reason why her engagement to you should be broken off. You must convince her of this—you must, indeed; for my sakeyou must!"
He looks down, frowning heavily.
"When a galley-slave's chains have been knocked off, must he handcuff himself again?"
"Why did you handcuff yourself at first?" she asks, with impulsive vehemence. "Whose doing was it but your own? What madness first impelled you to ask her to marry you?"
"Because," he answers, with emotion, fixing his upbraiding eyes upon her—"because I was smarting miserably under the blow you had just given me—you, who had made me mistrust everything attractive, and womanly, and innocent-seeming. I was obliged to marry some one; that is one of the many curses attached to being an eldest son, and the last male heir of an inconveniently old family. I said to myself, 'She is too dull to deceive me, too passionless to disgrace me.' I chose her because she was, of all the women I knew, the one least capable of calling forth emotion of any kind whatever in me—consequently, the one most powerless to make me suffer."
The words of his defence came quick and hurried. She is silent for a moment; then, uplifting imploring eyes to his: "Mr. Gerard," she says, tremblingly, "the twenty-four hours you asked me to allow you yesterday are nearly expired: have you come to say 'good-bye' to me? If so, it is well; you remember your promise?"
"I remember it," he answers, slowly, "and I am prepared to—breakit. Don't look so reproachful, Esther! I am ready to make you as good a one instead. I am ready to swear," he says, his face all kindling in the grey cold morning with eager passion—"I am ready to swear to you that I will never leave you again, unless you send me away, until death do us part. Will that promise do as well as the other?"
She gives a little cry of astonishment. "What do you mean?" she asks, faintly, moving a step farther away from him.
"I mean," he says, solemnly, his countenance all shining with the light of a great new joy, "that I am sick of my life without you, Esther; and you—you are sick of yours without me, aren't you?"
She cannot deny it, and is unwilling to allow it; so keeps a troubled silence.
"There must be some reason," he continues, passionately, "for your failing health, for your thin white cheeks, for your total loss of beauty" (with a smile), "as Constance tersely worded it yesterday. Am I right; or is it my conceit that makes me think that I have some concern in the change?"
"You are mistaken," she cries, hastily—the idea that pity for her miserable appearance has brought him back to her flashing gallingly across her mind. "I was very fond of you—very;it was a great grief to me when you threw me away from you; but I could have done without you, if—if—I had not lost my boy."
She turns away, to hide her quivering lips and swelling tears: it is so seldom that she speaks of her dead, that the mere naming of him seems to make his loss the clearer.
Gerard's face falls a little. "Could you?" he says, simply and sadly. "No doubt! I was unreasonable to suppose thatIcould be indispensable to any one."
They walk on in silence side by side. It is beginning to rain, heavy drops ushering in a winter storm. The deer-barn is near—the deer-barn, with steep red roof, lichen-painted, standing on a little rise, among a company of ancient hornbeams, whose twisted trunks lean this way and that. For the last twenty years, every young lady that has come to stay at the hall has sketched the deer-barn.
"This is not fit weather for you to be out in," Gerard says, solicitously glancing at his companion's slight figure and fever-bright eyes. "Let us shelter here till the storm is over!"
Having reached it, Esther stands watching Heaven's quick large tears falling heavy on Earth's chill breast; St. John walks up and down on the rough earth-floor, buried in thought. At length, rousing himself, he approaches Esther, and speaks, calmly at first, but with increasing vehemence as he proceeds:
"Esther, I have been thinking what a short section of my life, counting by days and weeks, the time that I have known you forms; that month at Felton, when we had scarcely eyes or ears for any one but each other, and this month here, when we have hardly exchanged two words. I suppose I know very little about you,really;you may be a very bad worthless girl, for all I know to the contrary. God knows I have not had much reason to think you a very good one; and yet, good or bad—well, as you say, and as I have no reason to doubt, that you can get on without me—I cannot, for the life of me, bear any longer the dragging of the endless empty days without you. Esther!" he says, with passionate hunger in his eyes, "Iwantyou! Imusthave you for my own! Is there now any reason why I should not?"
"Have you forgotten," she asks, with a melancholy smile, "the night when you told me that you would never forgive me, either in this world or the next? What have I done since to make you change your mind? I am no different to what I was then—unless, perhaps, I may be a little wickeder; I have been most unhappy, and adversity makes one wicked."
"I suppose I have lost my senses," he answers, with excitement; "but it seems to me now that, even were you to deceive me again, as you did at Felton—if you were to cheat me, and tell me falsehoods with the same baby-innocent face that you did there—that even then I should not repent of my bargain. Of two evils it would be the least; it would be better than never to have possessed you at all. Only, child, one thing I beg of you," he continues, with reproachful entreaty: "if you mean to trick me a second time, don't let me find it out for a little while! Let me be happy for a year—a month—a week!"
Her eyes rest on the ground, and a painful red spreads on either cheek. Despite the honest yearning love that vibrates along his voice, she cannot cast out from her heart that galling suspicion that has stolen there.
"You are very good," she makes answer, in a constrained voice; "and it is very generous of you trying to hide your real motive; but I can see it: it ispity!You look at me, and think, 'She was a pretty girl once, and now she has grown old and thin and plain, and it is all for love of me!' Yes, it is pity!"
"You are right," he answers, earnestly; "it is pity, profound pity, for the most miserable, discontented fellow upon God's earth—to wit, myself."
She raises her eyes slowly, and fixes them searchingly on his eager flushing face; and, looking, can doubt no longer.
"If I was over-harsh to you that night at Felton," he continues, rapidly, "and I am willing now to own that I was—for, after all, it was not against me that you had most greatly sinned—I have, at all events, paid heavily enough for it. What do you suppose I have suffered during the last month, watching you day by day wearing out your young life in a cold servile drudgery—hearing you strain your poor little tired voice in the interminable readings to that insatiable old man! Essie, I'm not a particularly pleasant fellow to live with—sometimes I believe I am particularly unpleasant—but, atmy worst, I'm not so bad as old Blessington."
At that she laughs a little, but shakes her head.
"Why do you shake your head?" he asks, manlike, pursuing the hotlier the more she seems to hold back. "Is it," he says (a heavy fear quickening his pulses, and making his voice come thick and harsh), "that you want to tell me by signs, what you dare not tell me in words to my face, that the old love isdead, killed by my hard words that miserable night at Felton? Oh, love! it must have been but a weakly thing, if a few rough words could kill it."
She does not answer.
"Youdidlove me once, Esther," he continues, vehemently; "I know you did! I knew it then, only, in my blind rage, I affected to disbelieve it. Youmusthave loved me, when you, who had always been so shy, so reserved, so maidenly to me, of your own accord—do you recollect, sweet?—held out your arms to me, and flung yourself upon my breast. God only knows how hard it was for me to put you away!"
At the recollection his speech calls up, her face is stirred with a convulsive emotion; but still she holds her peace.
"Esther, speak!—and yet, perhaps, when you have spoken, I shall wish that you had kept silence. Say anything you will, do anything you will, only don't kill me by telling me that so sweet a thing can bedead!"
She lifts her heavy eyes to him, and in them is the look of a hunted animal. "Why do you torment me with these questions?" she asks, passionately. "If my love for you is dead, you ought to be thankful; for, while it was alive, it brought nothing but misery to either of us."
"If you think so, it must indeed be dead," he answers, deeply wounded.
"Why will you insist on driving me into a corner?" she asks, with the accent of a person rendered irritable by pain. "Why will you force me to make admissions that I don't want to make? What is the good of my owning that I love you still, when I am determined never to marry you?"
"Never to marry me!" he repeats; unable, in his immense surprise, to do more than say her own words after her. A man is always overwhelmed with astonishment at the idea of any woman not being overjoyed to espouse him.
"Never to marry you!" she reiterates, steadily. "I was a bad-enough match for you before—without fortune, position, or connexion; people would have pitied you then for being drawn into such a marriage; but now——"
"But now, what?"
"But now that I am acompanion," she continues, with a bitter pride—"an anomalous animal, just two shades higher than the lady's-maid in my own estimation, and probably not that in any one else's—a companion, too, of whom people can say the things that Miss Blessington will say of me now——"
"What do you mean? What sort of thingscanshe say?"
But Esther maintains a shamed red silence.
"That you are completelypassée?"
"No, not that!—that would not concern me much."
"That the way you cough in the evening fidgets her to death?"
"No, not that."
"That you are over-sensitive, as these sort of people always are?" (with a faint mimicking of Miss Blessington's slow languor of articulation).
"No, not that."
"What then?"
"Youmustremember the things she said; you were there, and it is not more than five hours ago," she answers, with some impatience.
"I forget every word she uttered except three."
"And what were they?"
"You are free."
"She did not mean them," says Esther, trying to speak with dispassionate calmness; "she was under an erroneous impression when she said them; she will take you back again."
"Take me back again!" he repeats, angrily. "Good heavens, Esther! are you bent on driving me mad? Not satisfied with refusing me point-blank yourself, are you determined to insult me, by forcing upon me a woman for whom, as you know—as you must have known from the first moment you saw us together—I have never felt anything but the profoundest, coldest indifference?"
"I meant no insult," she replies, apologetically: "I only meant to say what is true—thatsheis a suitable match for you—thatsheis your equal."
"Is she?" he retorts ironically. "You are very good, I'm sure; I ask for bread, and you give me a stone. For God's sake, Essie, if you will have nothing to say to me yourself, at least spare me the degradation of listening to your kind and disinterested plans for my welfare!"
Under this severe snub, Miss Craven remains silent.
"Is it," he continues, presently, his indignation being a little cooled, "the mere fact of my being well-off that damns me in your eyes? If so, I think I may plead 'not guilty,' seeing that this oppressive wealth of mine lies on the other side of Sir Thomas's death—an event probably, at least, as distant as the millennium."
She gazes out (not seeing it the while) at the driving rain, while a troubled look flits over her small grave face; but she says neither "Yea" nor "Nay."
"When I am asking you to give me your whole sweet life," he cries, impulsively, snatching one of her little cold hands, "are you so ungenerous as to wish me to have absolutely nothing to offer you in return?"
Still silence.
"Essie!" he says, drawing her nearer to him, and looking resolutely down into her timid reluctant eyes, "I don't ask you to have pity upon me—that is a puling, cowardly way of making love, I always think; if the only road to a woman's heart lies through her compassion, I had rather never get there at all—but I ask you to pityyourself. To be my wife, ill-tempered and jealous as I, no doubt, should often be, would be distinctly a better fate than to be old Blessington's drudge. Child! have you no pity for yourself?"
"None whatever," she answers, with emotion. "I am not in the least sorry for myself; I richly deserve everything that is come to me. As long as I am unhappy myself, I can better bear the recollection of my vile conduct to the best and loyalest lover ever any woman had; if I began to be happy, I think my remorse would kill me."