CHAPTER XLVII.
‘For what wert thou to me?How shall I say?’
‘For what wert thou to me?How shall I say?’
‘For what wert thou to me?How shall I say?’
‘For what wert thou to me?
How shall I say?’
He finds Ella standing, where she had stood throughout her interview with Mrs. Prior, beneath a big horse-chestnut-tree in the garden. She had resisted all Miss Manning’s entreaties to come indoors and lie down and have a cup of tea (that kind woman’s one unfailing recipe for all diseases and griefs under the sun), and had only entreated piteously that she might be left alone.
Now, as she hears Wyndham’s step upon the gravel, she lifts her head, and the white misery of her face, as he sees it, makes his heart swell with wrath within him. Great heavens! what had that fiend said to her?He struggles with an almost ungovernable desire to go to her and press those poor forlorn eyes against his breast, if only to shut them out from his vision; and he struggles, too, it must be confessed—not so successfully—with a wild longing to give way to bad language. A few words escape him, breathed low, but extremely pungent. They bring some faint relief; but still his heart burns within him, and, indeed, he himself is surprised at the intensity of his emotion.
She does not speak, and he does not attempt to shake hands with her. It is impossible for him to forget that it is his own aunt who has thus wantonly insulted her—who has brought this terrible look into her young face. She, who has known so much suffering, who is now, indeed, only slowly recovering from a life unutterably sad.
‘I know it all,’ begins he hurriedly, disconnectedly—he, the cold, clever barrister. ‘I met her just now, just outside the gate. She is a woman of a most vindictive temper. I hope you will not let anything she mayhave said dwell for a moment in your memory. It is not worth it, believe me. She is unscrupulous.’ He is almost out of breath now, but still hurries on. ‘She would do anything to gain a point. She——’
‘You are talking of your aunt,’ says Ella at last in a stifled tone.
‘Yes; and God knows,’ says he, with vehement bitterness, ‘there was never anyone more ashamed to acknowledge anything than I am to acknowledge her. You—you will try to forget what she said——’
‘Forget! Every word,’ says the girl, lifting her hands and pressing the palms against her pretty head, ‘seems beaten in here.’
‘But such words—so false, so meaningless—the words of a malicious woman, used to gain her own purpose——’
‘Still, they are here,’ says she wearily.
‘For the moment; but in time you will forget, not only her words, but her.’
‘Her! I shall never forget her!’ She turns to him with quick questioning in her eyes. ‘Is she really your aunt, Mr. Wyndham?It is strange—it is impossible—but I know I have seen her before. In my dreams sometimes, now, I see her. But in my dreams she does not look as she did to-day.’ She shudders, and presses her fingers against her eyes, as if to shut out something. ‘She is lovely there, and kind, and so beautiful; and she calls me “Ellie.” I must be going mad, I think,’ cries she abruptly. ‘A brain diseased sees queer things; and when I saw her in the Rectory garden yesterday, all at once it came to me that I knew her—that I had seen her before. Perhaps’—she goes closer to him, and examines his face with interest, marking every line, as it were, every feature, until Wyndham begins to wish that his parents had granted him better looks, and then, ‘No, no,’ says she, sighing. ‘I thought perhaps it was her likeness to you that made her face seem familiar. But you are not like her. She’—sighing again—‘is very handsome.’
This is a distinct ‘takedown.’ Wyndham, however, bears up nobly.
‘No,’ says he; ‘I am grateful to say that I resemble my father’s family, plain though they may be. The Burkes, of course, were always considered very handsome.’
‘Burke?’ She looks at him again, and frowns a little, as if again memory is troubling her. ‘The Burkes were——’
‘My mother was a daughter of Sir John Burke.’
‘Yes, yes; I see. And the lady who was here just now, Mrs.——’
‘Prior.’
‘She was a daughter, too?’
‘I regret to say so—yes.’
‘Well, my dreams are wrong,’ says she, as if half to herself. ‘And yet——’ She breaks off.
She moves away from him, and in an idle, inconsequent way, pulls at the shrubs and flowers near her. He can see at once that she is thinking, wrestling with the troubled waters of her mind, and there is something in the dignity and sadness of the young figure that appeals to him, and awakens afresh thateager desire to help her that has been his from the first.
After awhile she comes back to him, her hands full of the late flowers that she nervously pulls from finger to finger in an unconscious fashion.
‘I can’t live here any longer,’ says she. ‘I should not have come here at all. She has quite shown me that.’
‘I have already told you that not one word Mrs. Prior said is worthy of another thought.’
He is alluding to Mrs. Prior’s abominable suggestions as to the real meaning of the girl’s presence in the Cottage.
‘Mr. Wyndham,’ says Ella, resting her earnest eyes on his, ‘perhaps I have never let you fully understand how I regard all you have done for me—how grateful I am to you—a mere waif, a nobody. But I am grateful, and, believe me, the one thing that has cut me to the very heart to-day is the thought that I—I’—with poignant meaning—‘should be the one to cause dissension between you and—and—and her.’
‘Her?’
‘Yes, yes; she told me.’
‘She? Who? Her?’ This involved sentence is taken no notice of.
‘It was your aunt who told me. But you can explain to her——’
‘To her! To whom? My aunt?’
‘Oh, no, no!’ She pauses. ‘Surely you know.’ At this moment something in the girl’s air makes Wyndham feel that she is believing him guilty of a desire to play the hypocrite—to conceal something. ‘It cannot have gone so very far,’ says she miserably. ‘A few words from you to her——’
‘To “her” again? If not my aunt,’ demands he frantically, ‘what her?’
She looks at him with sad astonishment.
‘I see now you wouldn’t trust me,’ says she. Her eyes are suffused with tears. She turns aside, her hands tightly clenched, as if in pain. Then all at once she breaks out. ‘Oh,’ cries she passionately, ‘why didn’t you tell her at first?’ Tell her at first! Who the deuce is ‘her’? ‘Or even me. If’—miserably—‘ifI had known, I should not have come here, and then there would have been no trouble, no wondering, no mystery; and there would have been no misunderstanding between you and’—she draws a sharp breath—‘the girl you love!’
‘Good heavens! Do I find myself in Bedlam?’ cries Wyndham, who is not by any means an even-tempered man, and who now has lost the last rag of self-control. ‘What girl do I love?’
But his burst of rage seems to take small effect on Ella.
‘Of course,’ says she, in a stifled tone, directing her attention now to a bush near her, plucking hurriedly at its leaves, ‘if you wish to keep it a secret—and you know I said you didn’t trust me—and, of course, if you wish to’—her voice here sounds broken—‘to tell me nothing, you are right—quite right. There is no reason why I should be let into your confidence.’
‘Look here,’ says Wyndham roughly. He catches her arm and compels her to turnround. ‘Let’s get to the bottom of this matter. What did my aunt tell you? Come now! Out with it straight and plain.’
He has occasionally entreated his clients to be honest, but usually with very poor results. Now, however, he finds one to answer him even more straightly than he had at all bargained for. Ella flings up her head. Perhaps she had objected to that magisterial ‘Come now.’
‘She said you were in love with her daughter, and that you had meant to marry her, until—my being here interfered with it. She’—the girl pauses, and regards him anxiously, as if looking to him for an explanation—‘didn’t say how I interfered.’
‘She said that?’ Wyndham’s voice is full of suppressed but violent rage.
‘Yes, that, and a great deal more,’ she goes on now vehemently. ‘That my being here would ruin you. That some lord—your uncle—your grand-uncle—Shan—Shanbally or garry was the name’—striving wildly with her memory—‘would disinherit you becauseyou had let your cottage to me. But that wasn’t just, was it? Why shouldn’t you let your house to me as well as to anybody else, Mr. Wyndham?’—with angry intonation. ‘Is that three hundred a year the Professor left me mine really? Did he leave it to me at all? Oh! if he didn’t—if I am indebted to you for all this comfort, this happiness——’ She breaks down.
‘You are entitled to that money; I swear it!’ says Wyndham. ‘His very last words were of you.’
‘You are sure! Of course, if not——That might be the reason for their all being angry with me.’
She is so very far off the actual truth that Wyndham hesitates before replying to her.
‘I am quite sure,’ says he presently. ‘The money is yours.’
‘Then I do not understand your aunt,’ cries she, throwing up her small head proudly. ‘She said a great many other things that I thought very rude—at least, I’m sure they were meant to be rude by her air. But theywere so stupid that no one could understand them. I hardly remember them. I only remember those about——’ She breaks off suddenly; tears rise in her saddened eyes. ‘I wish—I wish,’ cries she, in an agonized tone, ‘you had told me that you loved her.’
‘Loved her! Josephine!’
‘Is that her name—your cousin’s name?’
‘Yes, and a most detestable name it is.’ There is frank disgust in his tone. The girl watches him wistfully.
‘Perhaps, after all,’ says she—she hesitates, and the hand on the rose-bush now trembles, though Wyndham never sees it—‘perhaps it wasn’t your cousin she meant. I misunderstood her, I dare say. It’—she looks at him with eager, searching young eyes—‘it was someone else, perhaps——’
‘Someone else?’
‘You are in love with.’ She draws back a little, almost leaning against the rose-bush now, and looking up at him from under frightened brows.
‘I am in love with no one,’ says Wyndham,with much directness—‘with no one in the wide world.’ He quite believes himself as he says this. But, in spite of this belief, a sensation of discontent pervades him, as, looking at the girl, he sees a smile, wide and happy, spreading over her charming face. Evidently it is nothing to her. She has had no desire that he should be in love with—her. ‘There is one thing,’ says he, a little austerely—that smile is still upon her face—‘if you really desire privacy, you should be careful about letting yourself be seen. Yesterday, in that tree,’ he points towards it, and Ella colours in a little sad, ashamed way that goes to his heart, but does not disturb his determination to read her a lecture, ‘you laid yourself open to discovery, and therefore to insult. The getting up into a tree or looking at people is nothing,’ argues he coldly. ‘It is the fact that, though you wish to look at people, you refuse to let them look at you, that makes the mischief. Anyone in this narrow society of ours who decides on withdrawing herself from the public gaze is open to misconception—togossip—and finally to insult. I warned you of that long ago.’
‘I will not—I cannot. You know I cannot go out of this without great fear and danger,’ says Ella faintly.
‘I know nothing of the kind. This determination of yours to shut yourself away from the world is only a species of madness, and it will grow upon you. Supposing that man found you, what could he do?’
‘Oh, don’t, don’t!’ says she faintly. She covers her eyes with her hands. Then suddenly she takes them down and looks at him. ‘You have never felt fear,’ says she. She says this quickly, reproachfully, almost angrily; but through all the anger and reproach and haste there runs a thread of admiration. ‘But I have. And I tell you if—that man—were to see me again—were to come here and order me to go away with him—I should not dare to refuse.’
‘He knows better than to come here,’ says Wyndham curtly. ‘You may dispose of that fear.’
‘Ah!’ says she, sighing, ‘you don’t know him.’
‘I know—if not him individually—his class,’ says Wyndham confidently. ‘Give up, I counsel you, this secrecy of yours. See what it has brought upon you to-day. And these insults will continue. I warn you’—he looks at her with a frowning brow—‘I warn you they will continue.’
‘She?’ Ella looks at him timidly. ‘You think she will come again?’
‘Mrs. Prior?’—contemptuously; ‘no. But there will be others. What do you think people are saying?’
‘Saying of me?’ She looks frightened. ‘They have heard about that night at the Professor’s?’ questions she. She looks now almost on the verge of fainting. ‘Your aunt—she—did she know? She said nothing.’
‘No. She knows nothing of that,’ says Wyndham hurriedly. After all, it is impossible to explain to her. But Miss Manning will know—she will know what to say.
‘She only saw me in the tree,’ says thegirl, with a voice that is now half sobbing. And then she thought you—that I—oh!’—more wretchedly still—‘I don’t know what she thought! But’—trembling—‘I wish I had never climbed into that tree.’
‘Because she happened to see you? Never mind that. She’s got eyes in the back of her head; no one could escape her,’ says he, touched by her agitation.
‘I am not thinking of her,’ says Ella proudly, making a gesture that might almost be called imperious. ‘I am only vexed because you are angry with me about it. But’—eagerly—‘I never thought anyone would find me out, and I did so want to see what you—what’—quickly correcting herself and colouring faintly—‘you were all doing in the Rectory garden.’
‘If you want so much, and so naturally,’ says he, ‘to see your fellow-people, why didn’t you accept Susan’s invitation? It would have prevented all this.’
‘I know. But I couldn’t,’ says she, hanging her pretty head. ‘You know I tried itonce, and it was only when I got back again here—here into this safe, safe place—that I knew how frightened I had been all the time. And you may remember how I fancied then, on my return, that I had seen——’ She stops as if unable to go on.
‘I know. I remember. But that was a mere hallucination, I am sure. You must try to conquer such absurd fears. Promise me you will try.’
‘I will try,’ cries she impulsively. She holds out to him her hand, and he takes it. ‘I will indeed. You have been so good to me, that I ought to do something for you. But all the same’—shaking her head—‘I know you are vexed with me about this.’
‘For your sake only. This abominable visit of my aunt’s, for example——’
‘Yes; about the girl you——’ She stops and withdraws her hand.
‘I thought I had explained that,’ says he, with a laugh. ‘But what troubles me is the thought that you may be again annoyed in this way. Not by her; I shall see aboutthat’—with force. ‘But there may be others. And of course your welfare is’—he checks himself—‘of some consequence to me.’
‘Is it?’ She has grown cold too. ‘Your aunt’s welfare must be something to you as well.’
‘Do you mean by that that you don’t think I am on your side?’
She lifts her heavy lids and looks at him.
‘You told me that my affairs were nothing to you—that they did not concern you in the smallest degree.’
‘Was that—some time ago?’
‘Yes. Almost at first.’
‘Don’t you think it is a little vindictive to visit one’s former utterances upon one now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, good-bye,’ says he quickly. He turns, wounded more than he could have believed it possible to be by a girl who is positively nothing to him. Nothing! he quite insists on this as he goes down the path.
But now—what is this? Swift feet running after him; a small eager hand upon his arm.
‘Mr. Wyndham! Don’t go away like this. If I have offended you, I am sorry; I’—her lips begin to tremble now, and the eyes that are uplifted to his are dim—‘I am dreadfully sorry. Oh, don’t go away like this! Forgive me!’ Suddenly she bursts into tears. ‘Do forgive me!’
‘Forgive? I? It is you who have to forgive,’ stammers he. ‘Ella!’
He has laid his hand upon hers to draw them from her eyes, but with a sudden movement she breaks from him and runs back to the house. At the door, however, she stops, and glances back at him, and he can see that her face is radiant now, though her eyes are still wet with their late tears.
‘Good-bye! Good-bye!’ cries she. She raises both her hands to her lips, and in the prettiest, the most graceful fashion flings him a last farewell. This manner of hers is new to him. It is full, not only of friendliness,but of the joy of one who has been restored once more to happiness.
On the avenue of Crosby Park Wyndham meets the master of it, who has plainly been strolling this way with a view to meeting him on his return.
‘Well!’ says Crosby. Then, seeing the other’s face, ‘I was right, then?’
‘You were. She had made her way in, and insulted the poor child in the most violent way.’
‘I felt sure she was up to mischief,’ says Crosby, colouring hotly; he, too, is conscious of strong resentment. That anyone should go from his house to deliberately annoy a girl—a young girl, and one so sadly circumstanced—makes his usually easy-going blood boil. ‘I thought her manner to you at breakfast was over-suave. Well?’
‘There is hardly anything to tell you. That she was there, that she spoke as few women would have had the heart to do, is all I am sure of. No; this more: that thatpoor child, thank God! didn’t understand half of her vile insinuations. I could see so much. But she was cut to the heart, for all that. If you could have seen her face, so white, so frightened! I tell you this, Crosby——’
He never told him, however. He broke off short—as if not able to trust his voice, and Crosby, after one sharp glance at him, bestowed all his attention on the gravel at his feet. And as he waited for the other to recover his serenity, he shook his head over the whole affair. Yes, this was always the end of this sort of thing. If Wyndham didn’t know it, he did. Wyndham was desperately in love with this ‘waif’ of his—with this girl who had sprung out of nowhere, who had been flung upon his hands out of the angry tide of life. Presently, seeing Wyndham continuing silent, as if lost in a train of thought, he breaks in.
‘How did you know Mrs. Prior was there?’
‘From herself.’
‘What! you met her?’
‘Just outside the gate.’
‘And’—Crosby here shows signs of hopeful joy—‘had it out with her?’
‘On the spot. She denied nothing. Rather led the attack. One has but a poor vengeance with women, Crosby; but at all events she knows what I think of her. Of course there is an end to all pretence of friendship with her in the future, and I am glad of it.’
‘I hope you didn’t say too much,’ says Crosby, rather taken aback by the sullen rage on the other’s brow.
‘How could I do that? If it had been a man——’
‘She might well congratulate herself that she isn’t, if she could only see your eyes at this moment,’ says Crosby, laughing in spite of himself. ‘But she’ll make mischief out of this, Paul, I’m afraid.’ He is silent a moment, and then: ‘Your uncle is still bent, I suppose, on your marriage with her daughter?’
‘Yes, rather a bore,’ says Wyndham, frowning. ‘I don’t like to disappoint the old man.’
‘You mean?’
‘That I should not marry Josephine Prior if my accession to a throne depended upon it.’
‘So bad as that?’
‘Is what so bad as that?’—struck by a meaning in the other’s tone.
‘Why, your infatuation for your tenant.’
‘My——Oh, of course I might have known you would come to look at it like that,’ says Wyndham, shrugging his shoulders. With another man he might have been offended. But it is hard to be offended with Crosby. ‘Still, you are a sort of fellow one might trust to take a broader view of things.’
‘What broader do you want me to take?’ begins Crosby, slightly amused. ‘But to get back to our argument—mine, rather. I think it will be bad for you if you quarrel with Shangarry over this matter. The title, of course, must be yours—but barren honours are hardly worth getting. And he may leave his money away from you. You have told me before this that he has immense sums in his hands to dispose of—and much of theproperty is not entailed. You should think, Paul—you should think.’ He was the last man in the world to think himself on such an occasion as this.
‘I have thought.’
‘You mean?’
‘I don’t know what I mean,’ says Wyndham; then, with sudden impatience: ‘Is love necessary to marriage?’
Crosby laughs.
‘Is marriage necessary at all?’ says he. ‘Why not elect to do as I do, live and die a jolly old bachelor?’
‘Ah! I don’t believe in you,’ says Paul, with a rather mirthless smile. ‘If I went in for that state of life, depending on you as a companion, I should find myself left—sooner or later.’
‘Well, then,’ says Crosby, who has no prejudices, ‘why not marry her?’
‘Her?’
‘Your tenant—this charming, unhappy, pretty girl, who, believe me, Wyndham’—growing suddenly grave—‘I regard as muchas you do with the very deepest respect.’ Crosby has his charm.
‘You go too far,’ says Wyndham, looking a little agitated, however. ‘I am not in love with her, as you seem to imagine.’ Crosby smothers a smile, as in duty bound. ‘And, besides, even if I did desire to marry her, how could I do it? It would kill Shangarry with his queer, old-fashioned ideas.... A girl with no name.... And our name—so old.... It would kill him, I tell you. And—and besides all that, George, I don’t care for her, and she doesn’t care for me ... not in that way.’
‘Well, you are the best judge of that,’ says Crosby. ‘And if it is as you say, I am sorry you ever saw her. She has brought you into a decidedlyrisquésituation. And she is too good-looking to get out of it—or you either, without scandal.’
‘You have seen her?’ Wyndham’s face is full of rather angry inquiry.
‘My dear fellow, don’t eat me! We all saw her yesterday, if you come to thinkof it, in that tree of hers. You may remember that ass Jones’s remarks about a Hamadryad.’
‘Oh yes, of course. And you thought——’
‘To tell you the truth,’ says Crosby, ‘I thought her the very image of—don’t hit a little one, Wyndham! But I did think her more like Mrs. Prior than even Mrs. Prior’s own daughter is.’
‘What absurd nonsense! And yet, now I remember it, she—Ella—Miss Moore said she felt as if she had seen Mrs. Prior before.’
‘That’s odd. And yet not so odd as it seems. Many families totally unrelated to each other are often very much alike; I dare say Mrs. Prior and Miss Moore’s mother, though in different ranks of life, might have possessed features of the same type, and nature very similar, too. Same features, same manners, you know, very often.’
‘That ends the argument for me,’ says Wyndham, with a frown; ‘Miss Moore’s manners are as far removed from my aunt’s, and as far above them, as is possible.’
He brushes rather hurriedly past his friend. But his friend forgives him. He stands, indeed, in the middle of the avenue, staring after Wyndham’s vanishing form.
‘And to think he doesn’t know he is in love with her!’ says he at last. ‘Any fellow might know when he was in love with a woman. Well,’—with a friendly sigh of deep regret—‘I am afraid it will cost him a good deal.’