Reserved people pay dear for their reserve when they are in trouble, when the iron enters into their soul, and their eyes meet the eyes of the world tearless, unflinching, making no sign.
Enviable are those whose sorrows are only pen and ink deep, who take every one into their confidence, who are comforted by sympathy, and fly to those who will weep with them. There is an utter solitude, a silence in the grief of a proud, reserved nature, which adds a frightful weight to its intensity; and when the night comes, and the chamber door is shut, who shall say what agonies of prayers and tears, what prostrations of despair, pass like waves over the soul to make the balance even?
As a rule, the kindest and best of people seldom notice any alteration of appearance or manner in one of their own family. A stranger points it out, if ever it is pointed out, which, happily, is not often, unless, of course, in cases where advice has been disregarded, and the first symptom of ill health is jealously watched for and triumphantly hailed by those whose mission in life it is to say, "I told you so."
Mrs. Alwynn, whose own complaints were of so slight a nature that they had to be constantly referred to to give them any importance at all, was not likely to notice that Ruth's naturally pale complexion had become several degrees too pale during the last two days, or that she had dark rings under her eyes. Besides, only the day before, had not Mrs. Alwynn, in cutting out a child's shirt, cut out at the same time her best drawing-room table-cloth as well, which calamity had naturally driven out of her mind every other subject for the time?
Ruth had proved unsympathetic, and Mrs. Alwynn had felt her to be so. The next day, also, when Mrs. Alwynn had begun to talkover what she and Ruth were to wear that evening at a dinner-party at Slumberleigh Hall, Ruth had again shown a decided want of interest, and was not even to be roused by the various conjectures of her aunt, though repeated over and over again, as to who would most probably take her in to dinner, who would be assigned to Mr. Alwynn, and whether Ruth would be taken in by a married man or a single one. As it was quite impossible absolutely to settle these interesting points beforehand, Mrs. Alwynn's mind had a vast field for conjecture opened to her, in which she disported herself at will, varying the entertainment for herself and Ruth by speculating as to who would sit on the other side of each of them; "for," as she justly observed, "everybody has two sides, my dear; and though, for my part, I can talk to anybody—Members of Parliament, or bishops, or any one—still it is difficult for a young person, and if you feel dull, Ruth, you can always turn to the person on the other side with some easy little remark."
Ruth rose and went to the window. It had rained all yesterday; it had been raining all the morning to-day, but it was fair now; nay, the sun was sending out long burnished shafts from the broken gray and blue of the sky. She was possessed by an unreasoning longing to get out of the house into the open air—anywhere, no matter where, beyond the reach of Mrs. Alwynn's voice. She had been fairly patient with her for many months, but during these two last wet days, a sense of sudden miserable irritation would seize her on the slightest provocation, which filled her with remorse and compunction, but into which she would relapse at a moment's notice. Every morning since her arrival, nine months ago, had Mrs. Alwynn returned from her house-keeping with the same cheerful bustle, the same piece of information: "Well, Ruth, I've ordered dinner, my dear. First one duty, and then another."
Why had that innocent and not unfamiliar phrase become so intolerable when she heard it again this morning? And when Mrs. Alwynn wound up the musical-box, and the "Buffalo Girls" tinkled on the ear to relieve the monotony of a wet morning, why should Ruth have struggled wildly for a moment with a sudden inclination to laugh and cry at the same time, which resulted in two large tears falling unexpectedly, to her surprise and shame, upon her book.
She shut the book, and recovering herself with an effort, listened patiently to Mrs. Alwynn's remarks until, early in the afternoon, the sky cleared. Making some excuse about going to see her old nurseat the lodge at Arleigh, who was still ill, she at last effected her escape out of the room and out of the house.
The air was fresh and clear, though cold. The familiar fields and beaded hedge-rows, the red land, new ploughed, where the plovers hovered, the gray broken sky above, soothed Ruth like the presence of a friend, as Nature, even in her commonest moods, has ministered to many a one who has loved her before Ruth's time.
Our human loves partake always of the nature of speculations. We have no security for our capital (which, fortunately, is seldom so large as we suppose), but the love of Nature is a sure investment, which she repays a thousand-fold, which she repays most prodigally when the heart is bankrupt and full of bitterness, as Ruth's heart was that day. For in Nature, as Wordsworth says, "there is no bitterness," that worst sting of human grief. And as Ruth walked among the quiet fields, and up the yellow aisles of the autumn glades to Arleigh, Nature spoke of peace to her—not of joy or of happiness as in old days, for she never lies as human comforters do, and these had gone out of her life; but of the peace that duty steadfastly adhered to will bring at last—the peace that after much turmoil will come in the end to those who, amid a Babel of louder tongues, hear and obey the low-pitched voices of conscience and of principle.
For it never occurred to Ruth for a moment to throw over Dare and marry Charles. She had given her word to Dare, and her word was her bond. It was as much a matter of being true to herself as to him. It was very simple. There were no two ways about it in her mind. The idea of breaking off her engagement was not to be thought of. It would be dishonorable.
We often think that if we had been placed in the same difficulties which we see overwhelm others, we could have got out of them. Just so; we might have squeezed, or wriggled, or crept out of a position from which another who would not stoop could not have escaped. People are differently constituted. Most persons with common-sense can sink their principles temporarily at a pinch; but others there are who go through life prisoners on parole to their sense of honor or duty. If escape takes the form of a temptation, they do not escape. And Ruth, walking with bent head beneath the swaying trees, dreamed of no escape.
She soon reached the little lodge, the rusty gates of which barred the grass-grown drive to the shuttered, tenantless old house at a little distance. It was a small gray stone house of many gables, and low lines of windows, that if inhabited would have possessed butlittle charm, but which in its deserted state had a certain pathetic interest. The place had been to let for years, but no one had taken it; no one was likely to take it in the disrepair which was now fast sliding into ruin.
The garden-beds were almost grown over with weeds, but blots of nasturtium color showed here and there among the ragged green, and a Virginia-creeper had done its gorgeous red-and-yellow best to cheer the gray stone walls. But the place had a dreary appearance even in the present sunshine; and after looking at it for a moment, Ruth went in-doors to see her old nurse. After sitting with her, and reading the usual favorite chapter in the big Bible, and answering the usual question of "Any news of Master Raymond?" in the usual way, Ruth got up to go, and the old woman asked her if she wanted the drawing-block which she had left with her some time ago with an unfinished sketch on it of the stables. She got it out, and Ruth looked at it. It was a slight sketch of an octagonal building with wide arches all round it, roofing in a paved path, on which, in days gone by, it had evidently been the pernicious custom to exercise the horses, whose stalls and loose boxes formed the centre of the building. The stable had a certain quaintness, and the sketch was at that delightful point when no random stroke has as yet falsified the promise that a finished drawing, however clever, so seldom fulfils.
Ruth took it up, and looked out of the window. The sun was blazing out, ashamed of his absence for so long. She might as well finish it now. She was glad to be out of the way of meeting any one, especially the shooters, whose guns she had heard in the nearer Slumberleigh coverts several times that afternoon. The Arleigh woods she knew were to be kept till later in the month. She took her block and paint-box, and picking her way along the choked gravel walk and down the side drive to the stables, sat down on the bench for chopping wood which had been left in the place to which she had previously dragged it, and set to work. She was sitting under one of the arches out of the wind, and an obsequious yellow cat came out of the door of one of the nearest horse-boxes, in which wood was evidently stacked, and rubbed itself against her dress, with a reckless expenditure of hair.
As Ruth stopped a moment, bored but courteous, to return its well-meant attentions by friction behind the ears, she heard a slight crackling among the wood in the stable. Rats abounded in the place, and she was just about to recall the cat to its professional duties,when her own attention was also distracted. She started violently, and grasped the drawing-block in both hands.
Clear over the gravel, muffled but still distinct across the long wet grass, she could hear a firm step coming. Then it rang out sharply on the stone pavement. A tall man came suddenly round the corner, under the archway, and stood before her. It was Charles.
The yellow cat, which had a leaning towards the aristocracy, left Ruth, and, picking its way daintily over the round stones towards him, rubbed off some more of its wardrobe against his heather shooting-stockings.
"I hardly think it is worth while to say anything except the truth," said Charles at last. "I have followed you here."
As Ruth could say nothing in reply, it was fortunate that at the moment she had nothing to say. She continued to mix a little pool of Prussian blue and Italian pink without looking up.
"I hurt my gun hand after luncheon, and had to stop shooting at Croxton corner. As I went back to Slumberleigh, across the fields below the rectory, I thought I saw you in the distance, and followed you."
"Is your hand much hurt?"—with sudden anxiety.
"No," said Charles, reddening a little. "It will stop my shooting for a day or two, but that is all."
The colors were mixed again. Ruth, contrary to all previous conviction, added light red to the Italian pink. The sketch had gone rapidly from bad to worse, but the light red finished it off. It never, so to speak, held up its head again; but I believe she has it still somewhere, put away in a locked drawer in tissue-paper, as if it were very valuable.
"I did not come without a reason," said Charles, after a long pause, speaking with difficulty. "It is no good beating about the bush. I want to speak to you again about what I told you three weeks ago. Have you forgotten what that was?"
Ruth shook her head.She had not forgotten.Her hand began to tremble, and he sat down beside her on the bench, and, taking the brush out of her hand, laid it in its box.
"Ruth," he said, gently, "I have not been very happy during the last three weeks; but two days ago, when I saw you again, I thought you did not look as if you had been very happy either. Am I right? Are you happy in your engagement with—Quite content? Quite satisfied? Still silent. Am I to have no answer?"
"Some questions have no answers," said Ruth, steadily, looking away from him. "At least, the questions that ought not to be asked have none."
"I will not ask any more, then. Perhaps, as you say, I have no right. You won't tell me whether you are unhappy, but your face tells me so in spite of you. It told me so two days ago, and I have thought of it every hour of the day and night since."
She gathered herself together for a final effort to stop what she knew was coming, and said, desperately:
"I don't know how it is. I don't mean it, and yet everything I say to you seems so harsh and unkind; but I think it would have been better not to come here, and I think it would be better, better for us both, if you would go away now."
Charles's face became set and very white. Then he put his fortune to the touch.
"You are right," he said. "I will go away—for good; I will never trouble you again, when you have told me that you do not love me."
The color rushed into her face, and then died slowly away again, even out of the tightly compressed lips.
There was a long silence, in which he waited for a reply that did not come. At last she turned and looked him in the face. Who has said that light eyes cannot be impassioned? Her deep eyes, dark with the utter blankness of despair, fell before the intensity of his. He leaned towards her, and with gentle strength put his arm round her, and drew her to him. His voice came in a broken whisper of passionate entreaty close to her ear.
"Ruth, I love you, and you love me. We belong to each other. We were made for each other. Life is not possible apart. It must be together, Ruth, always together, always—" and his voice broke down entirely.
Surely he was right. A love such as theirs overrode all petty barriers of every-day right and wrong, and was a law unto itself. Surely it was vain to struggle against Fate, against the soft yet mighty current which was sweeping her away beyond all landmarks, beyond the sight of land itself, out towards an infinite sea.
And the eyes she loved looked into hers with an agony of entreaty, and the voice she loved spoke of love, spoke brokenly of unworthiness, and an unhappy past, and of a brighter future, a future withher.
Her brain reeled; her reason had gone. Let her yield now. Surely, if only she could think, if the power to think had not desertedher, it was right to yield. The current was taking her ever swifter whither she knew not. A moment more and there would be no going back.
She began to tremble, and, wrenching her hands out of his, pressed them before her eyes to shut out the sight of the earnest face so near her own. But she could not shut out his voice, and Charles's voice could be very gentle, very urgent.
But at the eleventh hour another voice broke in on his, and spoke as one having authority. Conscience, if accustomed to be disregarded on common occasions, will rarely come to the fore with any decision in emergency; but the weakest do not put him in a place of command all their lives without at least one result—that he has learned the habit of speaking up and making himself attended to in time of need. He spoke now, urgently, imperatively. Her judgment, her reason were alike gone for the time, but, when she had paced the solemn aisles of the woods an hour ago in possession of them, had she then even thought of doing what she was on the verge of doing now? What had happened during that hour to reverse the steadfast resolve which she had made then? What she had thought right an hour ago remained right now. What she would have put far from her as dishonorable then remained dishonorable now, though she might be too insane to see it.
Terror seized her, as of one in a dream who is conscious of impending danger, and struggles to awake before it is too late. She started to her feet, and, putting forcibly aside the hands that would have held her back, walked unsteadily towards the nearest pillar, and leaned against it, trembling violently.
"Do not tempt me," she said, hoarsely. "I cannot bear it."
He came and stood beside her.
"I do not tempt you," he said. "I want to save you and myself from a great calamity before it is too late."
"It is too late already."
"No," said Charles, in a low voice of intense determination. "It is not—yet. It will be soon. It is still possible to go back. You are not married to him, and it is no longer right that you should marry him. You must give him up. There is no other way."
"Yes," said Ruth, with vehemence. "There is another way. You have made me forget it; but before you came I saw it clearly. I can't think it out as I did then; but I know it is there. There is another way"—and her voice faltered—"to do what is right, and let everything else go."
Charles saw for the first time, with a sudden frightful contraction of the heart, that her will was as strong as his own. He had staked everything on one desperate appeal to her feelings; he had carried the outworks, and now another adversary—her conscience—rose up between him and her.
"A marriage without love is a sin," he said, quietly. "If you had lived in the world as long as I have, and had seen what marriage without love means, and what it generally comes to in the end, you would know that I am speaking the truth. You have no right to marry Dare if you care for me. Hesitate, and it will be too late! Break off your engagement now. Do you suppose," with sudden fire, "that we shall cease to love each other; that I shall be able to cease to love you for the rest of my life because you are Dare's wife? What is done can't be undone. Our love for each other can't. It is no good shutting your eyes to that. Look the facts in the face, and don't deceive yourself into thinking that the most difficult course is necessarily the right one."
He turned from her, and sat down on the bench again, his chin in his hands, his haggard eyes fastened on her face. He had said his last word, and she felt that when she spoke it would be her last word too. Neither could bear much more.
"All you say sounds right,at first," she said, after a long silence, and as she spoke Charles's hands dropped from his face and clinched themselves together; "but I cannot go by what any one thinks unless I think so myself as well. I can't take other people's judgments. When God gave us our own, he did not mean us to shirk using it. What you say is right, but there is something which after a little bit seems more right—at least, which seems so to me. I cannot look at the future. I can only see one thing distinctly, now in the present, and that is that I cannot break my word. I never have been able to see that a woman's word is less binding than a man's. When I said I would marry him, it was of my own free-will. I knew what I was doing, and it was not only for his sake I did it. It is not as if he believed I cared for him very much. Then, perhaps—but he knows I don't, and—he is different from other men—he does not seem to mind. I knew at the time that I accepted him for the sake of other things, which are just the same now as they were then: because he was poor and I had money; because I felt sure he would never do much by himself, and I thought I could help him, and my money would help too; because the people at Vandon are so wretched, and their cottages are tumbling down, and there is no one wholives among them and cares about them. I can't make it clear, and I did hesitate; but at the time it seemed wrong to hesitate. If it seemed so right then, it cannot be all wrong now, even if it has become hard. I cannot give it all up. He is building cottages that I am to pay for, that I asked to pay for. He cannot. And he has promised so many people their houses shall be put in order, and they all believe him. And he can't do it. If I don't, it will not be done; and some of them are very old—and—and the winter is coming." Ruth's voice had become almost inaudible. "Oh, Charles! Charles!" she said, brokenly, "I cannot bear to hurt you. God knows I love you. I think I shall always love you, though I shall try not. But I cannot go back now from what I have undertaken. I cannot break my word. I cannot do what is wrong, even for you. Oh, God! not even for you!"
She knelt down beside him, and took his clinched hands between her own; but he did not stir.
"Not even for you," she whispered, while two hot tears fell upon his hands. In another moment she had risen swiftly to her feet, and had left him.
Charles sat quite still where Ruth had left him, looking straight in front of him. He had not thought for a moment of following her, of speaking to her again. Her decision was final, and he knew it. And now he also knew how much he had built upon the wild new hope of the last two days.
Presently a slight discreet cough broke upon his ear, apparently close at hand.
He started up, and, wheeling round in the direction of the sound, called out, in sudden anger, "Who is there?"
If there is a time when we feel that a fellow-creature is entirely out of harmony with ourselves, it is when we discover that he has overheard or overseen us at a moment when we imagined we were alone, or—almost alone.
Charles was furious.
"Come out!" he said, in a tone that would have made any ordinary creature stay as farinas it could. And hearing a slight crackling in the nearest horse-box, of which the door stood open, he shook the door violently.
"Come out," he repeated, "this instant!"
"Stop that noise, then," said a voice sharply from the inside, "and keep quiet. By ——, a violent temper, what a thing it is; always raising a dust, and kicking up a row, just when it's least wanted."
The voice made Charles start.
"Great God!" he said, "it's not—"
"Yes, it is," was the reply; "and when you have taken a seat on the farther end of that bench, and recovered your temper, I'll show, and not before."
Charles walked to the bench and sat down.
"You can come out," he said, in a carefully lowered voice, in which there was contempt as well as anger.
Accordingly there was a little more crackling among the fagots, and a slight, shabbily dressed man came to the door and peered warily out, shading his blinking eyes with his hand.
"If there is a thing I hate," he said, with a curious mixture of recklessness and anxiety, "it is a noise. Sit so that you face the left, will you, and I'll look after the right, and if you see any one coming you may as well mention it. I am only at home to old friends."
He took his hand from his eyes as they became more accustomed to the light, and showed a shrewd, dissipated face, that yet had a kind of ruined good looks about it, and, what was more hateful to Charles than anything else, a decided resemblance to Ruth. Though he was shabby in the extreme, his clothes sat upon him as they always and only do sit upon a gentleman; and, though his face and voice showed that he had severed himself effectually from the class in which he had been born, a certain unsuitability remained between his appearance and his evidently disreputable circumstances. When Charles looked at him he was somehow reminded of a broken-down thorough-bred in a hansom cab.
"It is a quiet spot," remarked Raymond Deyncourt, for he it was, standing in the door-way, his watchful eyes scanning the deserted court-yard and strip of green. "A retired and peaceful spot. I'm sorry if my cough annoyed you, coming when it did, but I thought you seemed before to be engaged in conversation which I felt a certain diffidence in interrupting."
"So you listened, I suppose?"
"Yes, I listened. I did not hear as much as I could have wished, but it was your best manner, Danvers. You certainly have a gift, though you dropped your voice unnecessarily once or twice, I thought. If I had had your talents, I should not be here now. Eh? Dear me! you can swear still, can you? How refreshing. I fancied you had quite reformed."
"Why are you here now?" asked Charles, sternly.
Raymond shrugged his shoulders.
"Why are you here?" continued Charles, bitterly, "when you swore to me in July that if I would pay your passage out again to America you would let her alone in future? Why are you here, when I wrote to tell you that she had promised me she would never give you money again without advice? But I might have known you could break a promise as easily as make one. I might have known you would only keep it as long as it suited yourself."
"Well, now, I'm glad to hear you say that," said Raymond, airily, "because it takes off any feeling of surprise I was afraid you might feel at seeing me back here. There's nothing like a good understanding between friends. I'm precious hard up, I can tell you, or I should not have come; and when a fellow has got into as tight a place as I have he has got to think of other things besides keeping promises. Have you seen to-day's papers?" with sudden eagerness.
"Yes."
"Any news about the 'Frisco forgery case?" and Raymond leaned forward through the door, and spoke in a whisper.
"Nothing much," said Charles, trying to recollect. "Nothing new to-day, I think. You know they got one of them two days ago, followed him down to Birmingham, and took him in the train."
Raymond drew in his breath.
"I don't hold with trains," he said, after a pause; "at least, not with passengers. I told him as much at the time. And the—the other one—Stephens? Any news of him?"
"Nothing more about him, as far as I can remember. They were both traced together from Boston to London, but there they parted company. Stephens is at large still."
"Is he?" said Raymond. "By George, I'm glad to hear it! I hope he'll keep so, that's all. I am glad I left that fool. He'd not my notions at all. We split two days ago, and I made tracks for the old diggings; got down as far as Tarbury under a tarpaulin in a goods train—there's some sense in a goods train—and then lay close by a weir of the canal, and got aboard a barge after dark. Nothingbreaks a scent like a barge. And it went the right way for my business too, and travelled all night. I kept close all next day, and then struck across country for this place at night. If I hadn't known the lie of the land from a boy, when I used to spend the holidays with old Alwynn, I couldn't have done it, or if I'd been as dog lame as I was in July; but I was pushed for time, and I footed it up here, and got in just before dawn. And not too soon either, for I'm cleaned out, and food is precious hard to come by if you don't care to go shopping for it. I am only waiting till it's dark to go and get something from the old woman at the lodge. She looked after me before, but it wasn't so serious then as it is now."
"It will be penal servitude for life this time for—Stephens," said Charles.
"Yes," said Raymond, thoughtfully. "It's playing deuced high. I knew that at the time, but I thought it was worth it. It was a beautiful thing, and there was a mint of money in it if it had gone straight—a mint of money;" and he shook his head regretfully. "But the luck is bound to change in the end," he went on, after a moment of mournful retrospection. "You'll see, I shall make my pile yet, Danvers. One can't go on turning up tails all the time."
"You will turn them up once too often," said Charles, "and get your affairs wound up for you some day in a way you won't like. But I suppose it's no earthly use my saying anything."
"Not much," replied the other. "I guess I've heard it all before. Don't you remember how you held forth that night in the wood? You came out too strong. I felt as if I were in church; but you forked out handsomely at the collection afterwards. I will say that for you."
"And what are you going to do now you've got here?" interrupted Charles, sharply.
"Lie by."
"How long?"
"Perhaps a week, perhaps ten days. Can't say."
"And after that?"
"After that, some one, I don't say who, but some one will have to provide me with the 'ready' to nip across to France. I have friends in Paris where I can manage to scratch along for a bit till things have blown over."
Charles considered for a few moments, and then said:
"Are you going to dun your sister for money again, or give her another fright by lying in wait for her? Of course, if you brokeyour word about coming back, you might break it about trying to get money out of her."
"I might," assented Raymond; "in fact, I was on the point of making my presence known to her, and suggesting a pecuniary advance, when you came up. I don't know at present what I shall do, as I let that opportunity slip. It just depends."
Charles considered again.
"It's a pity to trouble her, isn't it?" said Raymond, his shrewd eyes watching him; "and women are best out of money-matters. Besides, if she has promised you she won't pay up without advice, she'll stick to it. Nothing will turn her when she once settles on anything, if she is at all like what she used to be. She has got dollars of her own. You had better settle with me, and pay yourself back when you are married. Dear me! There's no occasion to look so murderous. I suppose I'm at liberty to draw my own conclusions."
"You had better draw them a little more carefully in future," said Charles, savagely. "Your sister is engaged to be married to a man without a sixpence."
"By George," said Raymond, "that won't suit my book at all. I'd rather"—with another glance at Charles—"I'd rather she'd marry a man with money."
If Charles was of the same opinion he did not express it. He remained silent for a few minutes to give weight to his last remark, and then said, slowly:
"So you see you won't get anything more from that quarter. You had better make the most you can out of me."
Raymond nodded.
"The most you will get, in fact, I may sayallyou will get from me, is enough ready money to carry you to Paris, and a check for twenty pounds to follow, when I hear you have arrived there."
"It's mean," said Raymond; "it's cursed mean; and from a man like you, too, whom I feel for as a brother. I'd rather try my luck with Ruth. She's not married yet, anyway."
"You will do as you like," said Charles, getting up. "If I find you have been trying your luck with her, as you call it, you won't get a farthing from me afterwards. And you may remember, she can't help you without consulting her friends. And your complaint is one that requires absolute quiet, or I'm very much mistaken."
Raymond bit his finger, and looked irresolute.
"To-day is Wednesday," said Charles; "on Saturday I shall comeback here in the afternoon, and if you have come to my terms by that time you can cough after I do. I shall have the money on me. If you make any attempt to write or speak to your sister, I shall take care to hear of it, and you need not expect me on Saturday. That is the last remark I have to make, so good-afternoon;" and, without waiting for a reply, Charles walked away, conscious that Raymond would not dare either to call or run after him.
He walked slowly along the grass-grown road that led into the carriage-drive, and was about to let himself out of the grounds by a crazy gate, which rather took away from the usefulness of the large iron locked ones at the lodge, when he perceived an old man with a pail of water fumbling at it. He did not turn as Charles drew near, and even when the latter came up with him, and said "Good-afternoon," he made no sign. Charles watched him groping for the hasp, and, when he had got the gate open, feel about for the pail of water, which when he found he struck against the gate-post as he carried it through. Charles looked after the old man as he shambled off in the direction of the lodge.
"Blind and deaf! He'll tell no tales, at any rate," he said to himself. "Raymond is in luck there."
It had turned very cold; and, suddenly remembering that his absence might be noticed, he set off through the woods to Slumberleigh at a good pace. His nearest way took him through the church-yard and across the adjoining high-road, on the farther side of which stood the little red-faced lodge, which belonged to the great new red-faced seat of the Thursbys at a short distance. He came rapidly round the corner of the old church tower, and was already swinging down the worn sandstone steps which led into the road, when he saw below him at the foot of the steps a little group of people standing talking. It was Mr. Alwynn and Ruth and Dare, who had evidently met them on his return from shooting, and who, standing at ease with one elegantly gaitered leg on the lowest step, and a cartridge-bag slung over his shoulders in a way that had aroused Charles's indignation earlier in the day, was recounting to them, with vivid action of the hands on an imaginary gun, his own performances to right and left at some particularly hot corner.
Mr. Alwynn was listening with a benignant smile. Charles saw that Ruth was leaning heavily against the low stone-wall. Before he had time to turn back, Mr. Alwynn had seen him, and had gone forward a step to meet him, holding out a welcoming hand. Charles was obliged to stop a moment while his hand was inquired after, anda new treatment, which Mr. Alwynn had found useful on a similar occasion, was enjoined upon him. As they stood together on the church steps a fly, heavily laden with luggage, came slowly up the road towards them.
"What," said Mr. Alwynn, "more visitors! I thought all the Slumberleigh party arrived yesterday."
The fly plodded past the Slumberleigh lodge, however, and as it reached the steps a shrill voice suddenly called to the driver to stop. As it came grinding to a stand-still, the glass was hastily put down, and a little woman with a very bold pair of black eyes, and a somewhat laced-in figure, got out and came towards them.
"Well, Mr. Dare!" she said, in a high distinct voice, with a strong American accent. "I guess you did not expect to see me riding up this way, or you'd have sent the carriage to bring your wife up from the station. But I'm not one to bear malice; so if you want a lift home to—what's the name of your fine new place?—you can get in, and ride up along with me."
Dare looked straight in front of him. No one spoke. Her quick eye glanced from one to another of the little group, and she gave a short constrained laugh.
"Well," she said, "if you ain't coming, you can stop with your friends. I've had a deal of travelling one way and another, and I'll go on without you." And, turning quickly away, she told the driver in the same distinct high key to go on to Vandon, and got into the fly again.
The grinning man chucked at the horse's bridle, and the fly rattled heavily away.
No one spoke as it drove away. Charles glanced once at Ruth; but her set white face told him nothing. As the fly disappeared up the road, Dare moved a step forward. His face under his brown skin was ashen gray. He took off his cap, and extending it at arm's-length, not towards the sky, but, like a good churchman, towards the church, outside of which, as he knew, his Maker was not to be found, he said, solemnly, "I swear before God what she says is one—great—lie!"
If conformity to type is indeed the one great mark towards which humanity should press, Mrs. Thursby may honestly be said to have attained to it. Everything she said or did had been said or done before, or she would never have thought of saying or doing it. Her whole life was a feeble imitation of the imitative lives of others; in short, it was the life of the ordinary country gentlewoman, who lives on her husband's property, and who, as Augustus Hare says, "has never looked over the garden-wall."
We do not mean to insinuate for a moment that the utmost energy and culture are not occasionally to be met with in the female portion of that interesting mass of our fellow-creatures who swell the large volumes of the "Landed Gentry." Among their ranks are those who come boldly forward into the full glare of public life; and, conscious of a genius for enterprise, to which an unmarried condition perhaps affords ampler scope, and which a local paper is ready to immortalize, become secretaries of ladies' societies, patronesses of flower shows, breeders of choice poultry, or even associates of floral leagues of the highest political importance. That such women should and do exist among us, the conscious salt-cellars of otherwise flavorless communities, is a fact for which we cannot be too thankful; and if Mrs. Thursby was not one of these aspiring spirits, with a yearning after "the mystical better things," which one of the above pursuits alone can adequately satisfy, it was her misfortune and not her fault.
It was her nature, as we have said, servilely to copy others. Her conversation was all that she could remember of what she had heard from others, her present dinner-party, as regards food, was a cross between the two last dinner-parties she had been to. The dessert, however, conspicuous by its absence, conformed strictly to a type which she had seen in a London house in June.
Her dinner-party gave her complete satisfaction, which was fortunate, for to the greater number of the eighteen or twenty people who had been indiscriminately herded together to form it, it was (with the exception of Mrs. Alwynn) a dreary or at best an uninteresting ordeal; while to four people among the number, the four who had met last on the church steps, it was a period of slow torture, endured with varying degrees of patience by each, from the two soups in the beginning, to the peaches and grapes at the long-delayed and bitter end.
Ruth, whose self-possession never wholly deserted her, had reached a depth of exhausted stupor, in which the mind is perfectly oblivious of the impression it is producing on others. By an unceasing effort she listened and answered and smiled at intervals, and looked exceedingly distinguished in the pale red gown which she had put on to please her aunt; but the color of which only intensified the unnatural pallor of her complexion. The two men whom she sat between found her a disappointing companion, cold and formal in manner. At any other time she would have been humiliated and astonished to hear herself make such cut-and-dried remarks, such little trite observations. She was sitting opposite Charles, and she vaguely wondered once or twice, when she saw him making others laugh, and heard snatches of the flippant talk which was with him, as she knew now, a sort of defensive armor, how he could manage to produce it; while Charles, half wild with a mad surging hope that would not be kept down by any word of Dare's, looked across at her as often as he dared, and wondered in his turn at the tranquil dignity, the quiet ordered smile of the face which a few hours ago he had seen shaken with emotion.
Her eyes met his for a moment. Were they the same eyes that but now had met his, half blind with tears? He felt still the touch of those tears upon his hand. He hastily looked away again, and plunged headlong into an answer to something Mabel was saying to him on her favorite subject of evolution. All well-brought-up young ladies have a subject nowadays, which makes their conversation the delightful thing it is; and Mabel, of course, was not behind the fashion.
"Yes," Ruth heard Charles reply, "I believe with you we go through many lives, each being a higher state than the last, and nearer perfection. So a man passes gradually through all the various grades of the nobility, soaring from the lowly honorable upward into the duke, and thence by an easy transition into an angel. Courtesy titles, of course, present a difficulty to the more thoughtful; but, as I am sure you will have found, to be thoughtful always implies difficulty of some kind."
"It does, indeed," said Mabel, puzzled but not a little flattered."I sometimes think one reads too much; one longs so for deep books—Korans, and things. I must confess,"—with a sigh—"I can't interest myself in the usual young lady's library that other girls read."
"Can't you?" replied Charles. "Now, I can. I study that department of literature whenever I have the chance, and I have generally found that the most interesting part of a young lady's library is to be found in that portion of the book-shelf which lies between the rows of books and the wall. Don't you think so, Lady Carmian?" (to the lady on his other side). "I assure you I have made the most delightful discoveries of this description. Cheap editions of Ouida, Balzac's works, yellow backs of the most advanced order, will, as a rule, reward the inquirer, who otherwise might have had to content himself with 'The Heir of Redclyffe,' the Lily Series, and Miss Strickland's 'Queens of England.'"
Charles's last speech had been made in a momentary silence, and directly it was finished every woman, old and young, except Lady Carmian and Ruth, simultaneously raised a disclaiming voice, which by its vehemence at once showed what an unfounded assertion Charles had made. Lady Carmian, a handsome young married woman, only smiled languidly, and, turning the bracelet on her arm, told Charles he was a cynic, and that for her own part, when in robust health, she liked what little she read "strong;" but in illness, or when Lord Carmian had been unusually trying, she always fell back on a milk-and-water diet. Mrs. Thursby, however, felt that Charles had struck a blow at the sanctity of home life, and (for she was one of those persons whose single talent is that of giving a personal turn to any remark) began a long monotonous recital of the books she allowed her own daughters to read, and how they were kept, which proved the extensive range of her library, not in book-shelves, but in a sliding book-stand, which contracted or expanded at will.
Long before she had finished, however, the conversation at the other end of the table had drifted away to the topic of the season among sporting men, namely the poachers, who, since their raid on Dare's property, had kept fairly quiet, but who were sure to start afresh now that the pheasant shooting had begun; and from thence to the recent forgery case in America, which was exciting every day greater attention in England, especially since one of the accomplices had been arrested the day before in Birmingham station, and the principal offender, though still at large, was, according to the papers, being traced "by means of a clew in the possession of the police."
Charles knew how little that sentence meant, but he found that itrequired an effort to listen unmoved to the various conjectures as to the whereabouts of Stephens, in which Ruth, as the conversation became general, also joined, volunteering a suggestion that perhaps he might be lurking somewhere in Slumberleigh woods, which were certainly very lonely in places, and where, as she said, she had been very much alarmed by a tramp in the summer.
Mrs. Thursby, like an echo, began from the other end of the table something vague about girls being allowed to walk alone, her own daughters, etc., and so the long dinner wore itself out. Dare was the only one of the little party who had met on the church steps who succumbed entirely. Mr. Alwynn, who looked at him and Ruth with pathetic interest from time to time, made laudable efforts, but Dare made none. He had taken in to dinner the younger Thursby girl, a meek creature, without form and void, not yet out, but trembling in a high muslin, on the verge, who kept her large and burning hands clutched together under the table-cloth, and whose conversation was upon bees. Dare pleaded a gun headache, and hardly spoke. His eyes constantly wandered to the other end of the table, where, far away on the opposite side, half hidden by ferns and flowers, he could catch a glimpse of Ruth. After dinner he did not come into the drawing-room, but went off to the smoking-room, where he paced by himself up and down, up and down, writhing under the torment of a horrible suspense.
Outside the moon shone clear and high, making a long picturesque shadow of the great prosaic house upon the wide gravel drive. Dare leaned against the window-sill and looked out. "Would she give him up?" he asked himself. Would she believe this vile calumny? Would she give him up? And as he stood the Alwynns' brougham came with two gleaming eyes along the drive and drew up before the door. He resolved to learn his fate at once. There had been no possibility of a word with Ruth on the church steps. Before he had known where he was, he and Charles had been walking up to the Hall together, Charles discoursing lengthily on the impropriety of wire fencing in a hunting country. But now he must and would see her. He rushed down-stairs into the hall, where young Thursby was wrapping Ruth in her white furs, while Mr. Thursby senior was encasing Mrs. Alwynn in a species of glorified ulster of red plush which she had lately acquired. Dare hastily drew Mr. Alwynn aside and spoke a few words to him. Mr. Alwynn turned to his wife, after one rueful glance at his thin shoes, and said:
"I will walk up. It is a fine night, and quite dry underfoot."
"And a very pleasant party it has been," said Mrs. Alwynn, as she and Ruth drove away together, "though Mrs. Thursby has not such a knack with her table as some. Not that I did not think the chrysanthemums and white china swans were nice, very nice; but, you see, as I told her, I had just been to Stoke Moreton, where things were very different. And you looked very well, my dear, though not so bright and chatty as Mabel; and Mrs. Thursby said she only hoped your waist was natural. The idea! And I saw Lady Carmian notice your gown particularly, and I heard her ask who you were, and Mrs. Thursby said—so like her—you were their clergyman's niece. And so, my dear, I was not going to have you spoken of like that, and a little later on I just went and sat down by Lady Carmian, just went across the room, you know, as if I wanted to be nearer the music, and we got talking, and she was rather silent at first, but presently, when I began to tell her all about you, and who you were, she became quite interested, and asked such funny questions, and laughed, and we had quite a nice talk."
And so Mrs. Alwynn chatted on, and Ruth, happily hearing nothing, leaned back in her corner and wondered whether the evening were ever going to end. Even when she had bidden her aunt "Good-night," and, having previously told her maid not to sit up for her, found herself alone in her own room at last—even then it seemed that this interminable day was not quite over. She was standing by the dim fire, trying to gather up sufficient energy to undress, when a quiet step came cautiously along the passage, followed by a low tap at her door. She opened it noiselessly, and found Mr. Alwynn standing without.
"Ruth," he said, "Dare has walked up with me. He is in the most dreadful state. I am sure I don't know what to think. He has said nothing further to me, but he is bent on seeing you for a moment. It's very late, but still—could you? He's in the drawing-room now. My poor child, how ill you look! Shall I tell him you are too tired to-night to see any one?"
"I would rather see him," said Ruth, her voice trembling a little; and they went down-stairs together. In the hall she hesitated a moment. She was going to learn her fate. Had her release come? Had it come at the eleventh hour? Her uncle looked at her with kind, compassionate eyes, and hers fell before his as she thought how different her suspense was to what he imagined. Suddenly—and such demonstrations were very rare with her—she put her arms round his neck and pressed her cheek against his.
"Oh, Uncle John! Uncle John!" she gasped, "it is not what you think."
"I pray God it may not be what I suppose," he said, sadly, stroking her head. "One is too ready to think evil, I know. God forgive me if I have judged him harshly. But go in, my dear;" and he pushed her gently towards the drawing-room.
She went in and closed the door quietly behind her.
Dare was leaning against the mantle-piece, which was draped in Mrs. Alwynn's best manner, with Oriental hangings having bits of glass woven in them. He was looking into the curtained fire, and did not turn when she entered. Even at that moment she noticed, as she went towards him, that his elbow had displaced the little family of china hares on a plush stand which Mrs. Alwynn had lately added to her other treasures.
"I think you wished to see me," she said, as calmly as she could.
He faced suddenly round, his eyes wild, his face quivering, and coming close up to her, caught her hand and grasped it so tightly that the pain was almost more than she could bear.
"Are you going to give me up?" he asked, hoarsely.
"I don't know," she said; "it depends on yourself, on what you are, and what you have been. You say she is not your wife?"
"I swear it."
"You need not do so. Your word is enough."
"I swear she is not my wife."
"One question remains," said Ruth, firmly, a flame of color mounting to her neck and face. "You say she is not your wife. Ought you to make her so?"
"No," said Dare, passionately; "I owe her nothing. She has no claim upon me. I swear—"
"Don't swear. I said your word was enough."
But Dare preferred to embellish his speech with divers weighty expressions, feeling that a simple affirmation would never carry so much conviction to his own mind, or, consequently, to another, as an oath.
A momentary silence followed.
"You believe what I say, Ruth?"
"Yes," with an effort.
"And you won't give me up because evil is spoken against me?"
"No."
"And all is the same as before between us?"
"Yes."
Dare burst into a torrent of gratitude, but she broke suddenly away from him, and went swiftly up-stairs again to her own room.
The release had not come. She laid her head down upon the table, and Hope, which had ventured back to her for one moment, took her lamp and went quite away, leaving the world very dark.
There are turning-points in life when a natural instinct is a surer guide than noble motive or high aspiration, and consequently the more thoughtful and introspective nature will sometimes fall just where a commonplace one would have passed in safety. Ruth had acted for the best. When for the first time in her life she had been brought into close contact with a life spent for others, its beauty had appealed to her with irresistible force, and she had willingly sacrificed herself to an ideal life of devotion to others.