NOW you know why it is I was crying,” said Clare, and as she spoke she laughed. “Oh, I am crying because I am the happiest girl in the world,” she continued. “Was there ever any one so fortunate in the world? I don't believe it. I thought that the idea of my hoping that he would ever come to love me was too ridiculous—and it is ridiculous, you know, when you think of it—when you think of me—me—a mere nobody—and of him—him—the man whose name is in every one's mouth. Ah! I think it must be some curious dream—no, I feel that I have read something like it somewhere—there is a memory of King Cophetua in the story. Was he here—was he really here? Why do you stare at me in that way? Ah, I suppose you think that I have suddenly gone mad? Well, I don't blame you. The whole story sounds absurd, doesn't it?”
Agnes had taken a step or two back from the girl and was gazing at her. The expression that was on her face as she gazed had something of amazement in it and something of fear. Her lips moved as if she were trying to speak; but at first her words failed to come. When, at last, they became audible, there was a gasp between each word.
“You said—you told me—twice—yes, twice—that you loved some one else—some one—Oh, my God! I never guessed that it was he—he”—“Why, who else should it be? When he came beside me aboard the steamer—yes, on the very first day we met—I knew that my fate was bound up with his.”
“Fate—Fate—that was his word, too. Fate!”
“I felt it. I felt that even if he had never thought of me I should still be forced to follow him till I died. And how strange it was—but then, everything about love is a mystery—he told me just now, in this very room, that he had just the same feeling. He said he felt that Fate”—
“Ah, Fate again—Fate!”
“And why not? My dearest Agnes, there is a good Fate as well as an evil one. How unjust men are! When anything unhappy takes place, they cry out against Fate: but when anything good happens, they never think of giving Fate the credit of it! We are going to change all that. I have already begun. I feel that I could compose the Fate theme—something joyous—ah, what did I say the other evening?—something with trumpets in it—that is what my Fate theme would be: pæans of joy rushing through it.”
“That is what the lover thinks, the lover who has not got the eyes of Fate—the eyes that see the end of the love and not merely the beginning.”
“But love—love—our love—can have no end. Love is immortal; if it were anything less it would cease to be love.”
“Poor child! Poor child! You have fathomed the mystery of Fate, and now you would fathom the mystery of Love. You will tell me in a few minutes all there is to be known of Love and Fate.”
“My dearest Agnes, your words have a chili about them, or is it that I am sensitive at this moment? A whisper of an east wind over a garden of June roses—those were your words—I am the June roses. Oh no; I am not in the least conceited—only June roses.”
She laughed as she made a gesture of dancing down the room.
Agnes's gesture was not one of merriment. She put her hands up to her face with a little cry that turned the girl's rapture of life to stone.
“What—what can you mean?” she said, after a long silence.
Agnes looked at her for a moment, then turned away from her, and walked slowly and with bowed head to the fire.
“Punishment—his punishment—I meant it to be his punishment,” she whispered. “I did not think of her—I did not mean her to share it—she is guiltless.”
She bent her head down upon the coloured marbles of the high mantelpiece, and looked into the fire.
Clare came behind her, laying a hand carelessly upon her shoulder.
Agnes started and shrank from the touch of her hand.
“Do not caress me,” she sad. “I was to blame. It was I who should have seen all that every one else must have seen; I should have seen and warned you. I should have sent you away—taken you away before it was too late. I should have stood between you and him. But I was selfish—blinded by my own selfishness.”
“Why should you have stood between us?” asked the girl, with a puzzled expression. “Oh, you cannot possibly be talking about him and me: no one in one's senses would talk about standing between us. Heavens above! Ah, tell me that you do not mean him and me—to stand between Claude and me? I warn you before you speak that nothing that lives—no power of life or death—shall stand between us. If he were to die I should die too. I know what love is.”
“And I know what Fate is. My poor child, my poor child! You have done no wrong. You are wholly innocent. If you go away you may still save yourself—yourself and him.”
The girl laughed again.
“For God's sake don't laugh; let me entreat of you,” cried Agnes, almost piteously.
“My poor Agnes,” said Clare, “I pity you if you have any thought that you can separate us now. I will not ask you what is on your mind—what foolish notion you have abouta mésalliance. Of course I know as well as you can tell me that yesterday I was a nobody; but I am different to-day. I am the woman that Claude Westwood loves, and if you fancy that that woman is a nobody you are sadly mistaken.”
“Child—child—if you knew all!”
“I don't want to know all—I don't want to know anything,” said Clare. “I assure you, my dear Agnes, that I have no curiosity in my nature on this particular point. He loves me—that is enough for me. I don't want to become acquainted with any other fact in the universe. Any one who fancies that—that—Oh, my dear Agnes, do you really suppose that Claude Westwood—the man who fought his way from the clutches of those savages—the most terrible in the world—the man who fought his way through the long forest of wild animals, deadly serpents, horrible poisonous unshapely creatures never before seen by the eye of man—and the swamps—a world of miasma, every breath meaning death—do you really suppose that such a man would allow any power to stand between him and the woman whom he loves? Think of it—think of the man and what he has done, and then talk to me if you can of any obstruction lying in our way to happiness.”
“I pity you—I pity you! That's all I can say.”
“You have no reason to pity me. I am the happiest girl in this world—in this world?—in any world. Heaven holds no happiness that is greater than mine. Ah, my dearest, you have been so kind to me—you and Fate—I have no thought for you that is not full of love. What woman would do as you have done for me? Who would be so kind to a stranger—perhaps an impostor?”
“I wish to show my kindness now; that is why I entreat of you, with all my soul, to leave this place—never to see Claude Westwood again.”
Clare was at the further end of the room, but when Agnes had spoken she returned slowly to her side.
“Agnes,” she said, in a low and serious voice, “Agnes, if you wish me to leave your house I shall do so at once—this very evening. You have the right to turn me out—no, I do not wish to make use of such a phrase. I should say that you have a right to tell me that your plans do not admit of my being your visiter longer than to-night; and, believe me, I will not accuse you of any lack of courtesy or kindness toward me. I shall simply go away. But if you tell me that I am to forsake the man who loves me and whom I love, I shall simply tell you that you know me as imperfectly as you know him.”
“As imperfectly as I know him!” said Agnes, slowly. Her eyes were upon Clare as she spoke; then she went to the window and looked out. There was a pause of long duration before the girl once again moved to her side, saying:
“Dear Agnes, cannot you see that in this matter nothing that you might do or say could move me? If you were to tell me that he is a criminal—that he is the wickedest man living, I should not change in my love for him.”
“I pity you, with all my soul,” said Agnes. “And if the time comes when you will, with bitterness and tears, admit that I warned you—that I advised you to place between you the broadest and deepest ocean that flows—you will hold me blameless.”
“I will admit that you have done your best to separate us,” said Clare, smiling, as she put an arm round Agnes. Her smile was that of an elder sister humouring a younger. “And now we will say no more about this horrid affair, if you please. We shall be to each other what we were before Claude Westwood came here to disturb us.”
“God help you!” said Agnes, suffering her cheek to be kissed by the girl.
She went into another room, and as she went she fancied that she could hear Clare laughing—actually laughing at the idea of anything coming between her and love for Claude Westwood. She sank down upon a sofa and stared at a picture that hung on the opposite wall.
“She will not hear me—she will not hear me; and now it is too late to make any move,” she said. “I meant that he should be punished, but God knows that I never meant that his punishment should be like this! And she—poor child! poor child! Why should she be punished?”
She remained seated there for a long time thinking her thoughts, racked with self-upbraiding at first, whispering, “If I had but known—if I could but have known!” But at the end of an hour she had become more calm. The darkness of the evening obscured everything in the room in which she sat, but she did not ring for a light. It was in the darkness that she stood up, saying, as if to reassure herself:
“It is not my punishment, but the punishment of Heaven that has fallen on him. It is not I, but Heaven, whose hand is ready to strike. It is the justice of God. I will not come between him and God.”
She dined, as usual, face to face with Clare, and there was nothing in the girl's manner to suggest that she had taken in the smallest measure to heart anything that Agnes had said. She did not even seem to have thought it worth her while to consider the possibility of her warnings having some foundation. She had simply smiled at them—the smile of the indulgent, elder sister. Her warning had produced no impression upon her.
She was full of the details of her work. She had not been idle during the afternoon, she said. Oh no; every hour was precious. And then she went on to tell of the fear that had been haunting good Mr. Shackles—the fear lest the Arctic winter might be less rigorous than the best friends of Mr. Westwood (and Mr. Shackles) could wish, thereby making possible the return to England of the distinguished explorer, who, it was understood had been devoting all his spare time and tallow in the region of ninety degrees north latitude—or as near to it as he could get—to the writing of a book. Mr. Shackles's dread was lest the Arctic regions should shoulder Central Africa out of the market—a truly appalling cataclysm, Clare said, and one which should be averted at any sacrifice.
Agnes listened to her, as the doctor listens to the prattle of the patient who, he knows, will not be alive at the end of the week. She listened to her, making her own remarks from time to time as usual, but, even when she and Clare were left alone together, alluding in no way to the fact that they had had a conversation in the afternoon on the subject of Mr. Westwood.
The next day Claude appeared at The Knoll. He did not go through the hall into the studio. He thought it only polite to turn into the drawingroom, where the butler said Miss Mowbray was to be found.
She had scarcely shaken hands with him before he said:
“Clare has told you all, I suppose?”
“She told me that you had confessed to her what you confessed to me,” said Agnes.
“What I confessed to you?” he repeated in a somewhat startled tone. “What I confessed—long ago?”
“Well, that is not just what I meant to say,” replied Agnes. “You confessed to me a few days ago that you had fallen in love with her. But curiously enough, the way you took me up serves to lead in the same direction. Only you were, of course, a different person altogether in those days: we change every seven years, don't we?”
“I am the luckiest man alive!” said he, ignoring her disagreeable reminiscence. “I am no longer young and my adventures have told on me, and yet—I am sure you told her that you considered me the luckiest man living!”
“I told her that if she wished to be happy she should put an ocean between you and herself.”
His voice was full of reproach—a kind of grieved reproach, as he said:
“You told her that? Why should you tell her that? Is it because of the past—that foolish past of a boy and girl”—
“No: I was not thinking of the past; it was of the future I was thinking,” she said.
“The future?”
“Yes; and that is what I am thinking of now when I implore of you to leave her—to leave your book—everything—and fly to the uttermost ends of the earth to escape the blow which is about to fall upon you.”
“I am sorry that I cannot see my way to take your advice,” said he. “I do not share your fears for the future. But whatever Fate may have in store for me, of one thing I am assured: the hardest blow will seem as the falling of a feather when she is beside me. I am sorry that you, my oldest friend—But I am sure that later on you will change your views. No one knows better than I do that such a girl as she might reasonably expect to have a younger man at her feet; but I think I know myself, and I am sure that I shall be to her a sympathetic husband.”
He had gone to the door while he was speaking.
“You will wish that you had never seen her,” said Agnes.
“Will you force me to wish that I had never seen you?” he said, in a low voice. He had not yet lost the tone of reproach which he conceived to be appropriate to the conversation that had originated with her.
This last sentence stung her. For a moment she felt as she had done on that night when she had flung down his miniature and trampled on it. Her face became deathly pale. But she controlled herself.
“I will answer that question of yours another time,” she said quietly.
He returned to her.
“Forgive me for having said what I did,” he cried. “I spoke thoughtlessly—brutally.”
“But I promise you that I will answer you, all the same,” said she. “Clare is in her studio.”
It seemed as if Clare had resolved to treat the singular words which Agnes had said to her as soon as she had told her of Claude Westwood's confession and her reply, as though they had never been uttered. Whatever impression they produced upon the girl she certainly gave no sign that she attached even the smallest amount of importance to them. Her mood was that of the rapturous lover for some days. She had never been out of temper since she had come to The Knoll, except for a few moments after her friend Signor Rodani had visited her; but she had never been in the rapturous mood which now possessed her. Her life was a song—a lover's song.
The labour of love at which she was engaged daily kept her indoors. Drawing after drawing she executed for the book, and even those task-masters, Messrs. Skekels & Shackles, expressed themselves thoroughly satisfied with the progress of the book and the “blocks.” The latter were found to be admirable; in fact, the reproductions were, Clare affirmed, better than the originals. She was not mistaken. Mr. Shackles was acquainted with a young artist of striking skill in the art of preparing effective “blocks,” and he treated Miss Tristram's drawings with the utmost freedom. He regarded them as an excellent and suggestive basis for really striking pictures, and he took care that, by the time the picture reached the “block” stage, it possessed some striking elements.
Claude Westwood also seemed to think that he could scarcely do better than ignore the words that Agnes had spoken to him when he had come to her for congratulations. He made an effort to resume his former friendly relations with her, but he never quite succeeded in his efforts in this direction. Agnes, he felt, did not respond to him as he had expected she would, and she gave him now and again the impression that she still regarded their relations as somewhat strained. He was obliged to see Clare frequently, and he was too polite to ignore the presence of Agnes, though she would have much preferred him to do so, and he knew it. The fact of his knowing it made him feel a little uncomfortable.
A week had passed in this unsatisfactory way, when one afternoon, Agnes, having come in from her drive, sat down with Clare to their tea and hot cakes. The girl was not quite so lively as she had been during the week, and Agnes noticed the change, inquiring the cause of it.
Clare coloured slightly, and laughed uneasily.
“Somehow I feel a little startled,” said she. “Claude has been here.”
“What, you consider that a sufficient explanation?” said Agnes.
Clare laughed more uneasily still.
“He has been saying something that startled me. The fact is that he—well, he thinks that I—that he—I should rather say that we, he and I, would complete the book more satisfactorily if we were—You see, Agnes dear, he does not like coming here so frequently; he feels that he is trespassing upon your patience.”
“He is wrong, then,” said Agnes. “But what is the alternative that he proposes?”
“He thinks that we should get married at once and go to the Court together,” replied Clare, in a low voice.
“And what do you say to that proposal?”
“Well, you know, dearest Agnes, it is not six months since my dear mother's death: still—ah, dear, would she not wish to see me happy?”
“Yes; but is that saying that she would wish to see you married?”
“He is coming to talk to you about it after dinner to-night.”
Clare spoke quietly as she rose from her seat and left the room.
He came very late. Agnes only was in the drawing-room, for Clare had gone to her studio after dinner, saying she wished to finish one of the pictures.
He was as uneasy in addressing her as Clare had been. He began to speak the moment he entered the room. Agnes interrupted him.
“You have not yet seen Clare,” she said.
“I have not come to see her. It is you whom I have come to see,” said he. “The fact is, my dear Agnes”—
“Go to her,” said Agnes. “Go to her and kiss her; it will be for the last time.”
She spoke almost sorrowfully. He was impressed by the tone.
“For the last time—to-night, you mean to say,” he suggested.
“For the last time on earth!” said she.
“You are mad,” he cried, after a pause, during which he stared at her. “You are mad; you do not know me—you do not know her.”
“You will not go to her?”
“I will not go to her—I will not leave this room until you have told me what you mean by saying these words. You shall tell me what these words mean—if they have any meaning.”
“Very well, I will tell you. A week ago you said some words to me. You put a question to me which I promised to answer at my own time. You said, 'Will you force me to wish that I had never seen you?' You said that to me—you—Claude Westwood—to me.”
“I admit that I was cruel—I know that I was cruel.”
“Oh no; you were not cruel. You have shown me since your return that you regard women as too humble an organisation to be susceptible of great suffering. You are a scientific man, and one of your theories is that the lower in the scheme of creation is any form of life, the less capable it is of suffering. You cleave your worm in twain—there is a little wriggle—no more—each half goes off quite briskly in its own way. You chop off a lizard's tail without causing it any particular inconvenience; I wonder if you think of me as a little better than the worm, a little higher than the lizard. How could any man say words of such cruelty to a woman whom he had once promised to love, if he had not believed her to be dead to all sense of suffering?”
She stood before him with her hands clenched and her eyes flashing; but only for a few moments. Then she made a gesture of contempt—she gave a little shudder as she turned away from him.
He remained motionless for a brief space, then went without a word to the door. The sound of his fingers on the handle caused her to look round.
“Don't go away for a moment,” she said. “You will pardon that tirade of mine, I am sure. I don't know how it was forced from me. I shall not be so foolish again.”
“I think I had better go: you are scarcely yourself to-night,” said he.
“Scarcely myself? Well, perhaps I am not. I must confess that that outburst of mine surprised me. It will not occur again, I promise you.”
“I think I had better leave you.”
He still stood at the door. In his voice there was again a tone of reproach. There was some sadness in the little shake of his head, as though he meant to suggest that he was greatly pained at not being able to trust her.
His attitude stung her. She became white once more. She put up her hand to her throat. She was making a great effort to calm herself. Still it was some moments before she was able to say:
“Very well, very well. Do not come any nearer to me. You came to talk business. Continue. You were about to tell me that you mean to go to London to-morrow in order to get the document that will enable you to marry some one without delay. The name of Claude Westwood will appear at one part of that document. What name is to appear beside yours?”
“Why do you ask that?” he said, removing his hand from the handle of the door.
“In order to prevent any mistake,” said she. “You have probably sent forward to the proper authorities the name of Clare Tristram.”
He was grave. He shook his head sadly, and put his hand upon the lock of the door once again. He somehow suggested that he expected her to tell him that it was not the name of Clare Tristram but of Agnes Mowbray which should by right be or the special licence, beside his name.
She took a step toward him, as if she were about to speak angrily; but she checked herself.
“There is no such person as Clare Tristram,” she said.
He gave a single glance toward her. Then he sighed and shook his head gently as before. He turned the handle of the door.
“Don't open that door, for God's sake! She is the daughter of Carton Standish, who killed your brother.”
He did not give a start nor did he utter a cry as she whispered those words. He only turned and looked at her. He looked at her for a long time—several seconds. The silence was awful. The clock on the bracket chimed the second quarter.
“My God! mad—this woman is mad!” he said, in a whisper that sounded like a gasp.
She made no attempt to reply. He went to her.
“What have you said?” he asked. “I don't seem to recollect. Did you say anything?”
“I stated a fact,” she replied. “I am sincere when I say that I would to God it were not true.”
“She—she—my beloved—the daughter—it is a lie—you have told me a lie—confess that it is a lie!”
“I cannot, even though you should make your fingers meet upon my arm!”
He almost flung her away from him. He had grasped her by the wrist. He covered his face with his hands. She looked at her wrist—the red marks over the white flesh.
“I'll not believe it!” he cried suddenly. “Agnes, Agnes; you will confess that it is a falsehood?”
“Alas! Alas!” she cried,
“I'll not believe it. Proofs—where are your proofs?”
“This is the letter which she brought to me from her mother—the letter written by her mother on her deathbed.”
She unlocked an escritoire, and took out a letter. He glanced at it, and gave a cry of agony.
“O God—my God! And I cursed him—I cursed him and every one belonging to him!”
He threw himself into a chair and bowed his head down to his hands.
“I prayed that evil might fall upon all that pertained to him,” he cried. “My prayer has been heard. The curse has fallen!”
“Is there any tragedy in life like the answering of a prayer? I prayed for your safe return, and—you returned.”
She spoke without bitterness. There was no bitterness in her heart at that moment.
There was a long pause before he looked up.
“And you—you—knowing all—avowed us to be together—you did not keep us apart. You brought this misery upon us!”
“I thought you were safe from such a fate; it was only when we were at the Court that I learned that you loved her; even then I believed that she loved another man. When I said those words of warning to you a week ago, what was your reply tome? 'Do not make me wish that I had never seen you.' Those were your words.”
“And what shall my words be now?”
A little thrill went through her. She turned upon him.
“You wish you had never seen me?” she said, her voice tremulous with emotion. “But if that is your wish, what do you think is mine? Nine years—my God!—nine years out of a woman's life! Ruin—you have made my life a ruin! Was there ever such truth as mine? Was there ever such falsehood as yours? Do you remember nothing of the past? Do you remember nothing of the words which you spoke in my hearing in this very room nearly nine years ago? 'I will be true to you for ever—I shall make a name that will in some degree be worthy of you.' Those were your words as we parted. Not a tear would I shed until you had gone away, though my tears were choking me. But then—then—oh, my God! what then? What voice is there that can tell a man of the agony of a constant woman? The days, the months, the years of that terrible constancy! nights of terror when I saw you lying dead among the wild places of that unknown world—nights when a passion of tears followed a passion ot prayer for your safety! Oh, the agony of those long years that robbed me of my youth—that scarred my face with lines of care! Well, they came to an end, my prayer was answered, you returned in safety; but instead of having some pity for the woman who had wasted her life in waiting for you, you flung me aside with scarcely a word, and now you reproach me—you reproach me! Give me back those years of my life that you robbed me of—give me back my youth that I wasted upon you—give me back the tears that I shed for you—and then I will listen to your reproaches.”
“I deserve your worst reproaches,” said he, his head still bowed down. “I deserve the worst, and you have not spared me.”
“Ah, I have spared you,” she said. “I might have allowed you to marry the daughter of that man, and to find out the terrible truth afterwards.”
“It is just that I should suffer; but she—she—my beloved—is it just that she should suffer?”
He had risen and was walking to and fro with clasped hands.
“Alas! alas! Her judgment comes from you. It was you yourself who repeated those dreadful words—'unto the third and fourth generation.'”
“She is guiltless—she shall never know of her father's crime.”
He had stopped in the centre of the room and was looking toward the door.
“She shall not hear of it from me,” said Agnes. “She shall at least be spared that pain, in addition to the pain of parting from you.”
“She shall be spared ever, that,” said he in a low voice.
“What?”
“I cannot part from her It is too late now.”
“You do not mean that”—
“I mean that I shall marry her.”
A cry came from Agnes before he had quite spoken.
“Ah, you will not be so pitiless,” she said. “You will not do her that injustice. You will not wreck her life, too.”
“I will marry her,” said he doggedly.
“You will marry her to make her happy for a month—happy in a fool's paradise—happy till you begin to think that the face beside you may be the same as the face that watched your brother lying in his blood—that the hand which you caress—Oh, Claude, cannot you see that every day, every hour, she could not but feel that you are nursing a secret that separates you more completely from her than if an ocean were between you? Can you hope to keep that secret from her? Do you know nothing of woman? Claude, she will read your secret in a month.”
“God help me, I will marry her and let the worst come upon us!”
“You shall not do her this injustice if I can help it.”
“You cannot help it.”
“I will tell her that she is the daughter of Carton Standish; and then, if she chooses to marry you, she will do so with her eyes open.”
She went to the door.
“No—no; not that—not that,” he cried.
She opened the door and called the girl's name. He threw himself once more down on a chair and bowed his head.
The answering voice of Clare was heard, and then the sound of her feet on the oak floor of the passage.
“You will come here for a few moments, Clare,” said Agnes, and the girl entered the room.
He kept his face bowed down almost to his knees, as he cried:
“No, no; don't tell her that. Take her away; I cannot look at her. Take her away; tell her anything but that.”
Clare gasped. She caught the arm which Agnes held out to her.
“Clare,” said Agnes, “you must nerve yourself for the worst. Mr. Westwood wishes to be released from his engagement to you. He has heard something; that is to say, he has come to the conclusion that—that he must leave this country without delay—in short, to-morrow he sets out for Africa once more.”
“That is not true!” cried Clare. “I can hear the false ring in your words. Claude—Claude, you do not mean”—
“Take her away—take her away! I cannot look at her. I see him—him in the room.”
The girl gave a start, and looked from the one to the other. She straightened herself and the expression on her face was one of defiance.
“Very well,” she said. “Yes, it is very well.”
She gave a long sigh, then a gasp. Her face became deathly white. She did not fall. Agnes had caught her in her arms.
The blow had fallen. His punishment had come, and Agnes, lying on her bed that night, felt that she would have given everything that she possessed to avert it. If there had been any thought of revenge in her heart originally—and she felt that perhaps there had been some such thought the moment that Sir Percival Hope had told her what she should have seen for herself long before, namely, that Claude Westwood was in love with Clare—there was now nothing in her heart but pity for the girl whom she had left sleeping in the next room.
She felt that she had been amply revenged upon the man who had treated her so cruelly. She had crushed him with a completeness that would have satisfied even the most revengeful of women. She had seen him flying from the house without waiting for the girl to recover consciousness. What finer scheme of vengeance could any woman hope for—and she had always heard that women were revengeful—than that which had been placed within her reach?
And yet she lay awake in her tears, feeling that she would give up all she had in the world if by so doing, she could compass the happiness of the man who had treated her so basely, and of the girl who had supplanted her in his love. She felt that revenge was not sweet but bitter.
When she had been standing before him in the room downstairs and had felt stung to the soul by that horrible question of his, “Will you make me wish that I had never seen you?” she had had a moment of womanly pleasure, thinking of the power she had to crush him utterly; but all her passion had amounted to no more than was susceptible of being exhausted in half-a-dozen phrases. Her passion of reproach, which found expression in those words that had been forced from her, had not lasted beyond the speaking of those words. So soon as they were spoken she found herself face to face not with the delight of revenge, but with the grief of self-reproach.
She was actually ready to heap reproaches upon herself for having failed to see within the first hour of the arrival of Clare that the man loved her. How was it that she had failed to see that their meeting aboard the steamer had resulted in love? She felt that she must have been blinder than all manner of women to fail to perceive that this was so. Was she not to blame for having allowed them to be together day after day, while she had in her desk that letter which told her that no two people in the world should be kept wider apart than Claude Westwood and Clare Tristram?
She recollected that at first her impulse had been to send the girl away; but when she found that she and Claude were already acquainted, and that the terrible secret was known to neither of them, the panic which had seized her subsided.
That was, she felt, where she had been to blame. She should not have wilfully closed her eyes to the possibility of their falling in love. Even though the advice which Sir Percival had given to her—the advice to wait patiently until Claude's old love for her returned—was still in her mind, she now felt that if she had been like other women she would have foreseen the possibility, nay, the likelihood, that Claude would come to love the girl by whom he had clearly been impressed.
She even went the length of blaming herself for feeling, as she had felt on Sir Percival's suggesting to her that Claude had come to love Clare, that it was the decree of Heaven that she should punish the man for his cruelty to her. She knew that it had been a grim satisfaction for her to reflect that his punishment was coming. She had, in her blindness, fancied that it was to assume the form of his rejection by Clare, and she had hoped to see him crushed as he had crushed her.
“Ah, if I had not been so willing to see him humiliated I might still have had a chance of averting the blow which has fallen on both of them—that is the worst of it, on both of them!”
This was actually the direction which was taken by her self-reproaches as she lay in her tears with no hope of sleep for her that night.
She felt, however, that though she had been to blame in some measure for the catastrophe which had come about, she could not in the supreme moment have acted otherwise than she had done.
Claude had said truly that the girl at least was innocent. He who a few weeks before had attempted to justify his thirst for revenge by quoting the awful curse “unto the third and fourth generation” had, when it suited him, talked about the innocence of the girl—about the injustice of visiting upon her head the sins of her father. But Agnes knew that she had done what was right in refusing to allow him to see Clare again unless to tell her the truth about her father.
The way he had shrunk from her at the moment of her entering the room, not daring even to glance at her—the way he had cried those words, “Take her away, take her away,” convinced Agnes that she had acted rightly and that she had saved Clare from a lifetime of sorrow. Before the end of a month he would have come to look at her with horror. He would seem to see in her features those of her father—the man who had crept behind Dick Westwood in the dark and shot him dead.
But then she began to ask herself if she had been equally right in telling Claude Westwood what was the true name of Clare. She reflected upon the fact that only she knew that Clare was the daughter of the man Standish, who was undergoing his life-sentence of penal servitude for the murder of Dick Westwood. If she had kept that dreadful secret to herself, Claude would have married the girl, and they might have lived happily in ignorance of all that she, Agnes, knew.
Yes, but how was she to be certain that no one else in the world shared her secret? How was she to know that the unhappy woman who had been married to Carton Standish, and had in consequence become estranged from all her friends in England—for the man, though of a good family, had been from the first an unscrupulous scamp—was right when she had told her in the letter, which Clare had delivered with her own hand, that no one knew the secret?
Perhaps a dozen people had recognised in Carton Standish the man with whom the Clare Tristram of twenty-two years before had run away, although no one had come forward to state that the man who had been found guilty of the murder of Mr. Westwood was the same person. Agnes knew enough of the world to be well aware of the fact that not only in Brackenshire but in every county in England the question “Who is she?” would be asked, so soon as it became known that Claude Westwood had got married.
Claude Westwood, the African explorer, was the man on whom all eyes had been turned for some months, and he could not hope to keep his marriage a secret even if he desired to do so. It would be outside the bounds of possibility that no one should recognise in the name Clare Tristram the name of the girl who, twenty-two years before, had married a man named Carton Standish; so that even if Agnes had kept her secret it would eventually have been revealed to Claude, when it would be too late to prevent a catastrophe.
“If I had wished to be revenged I would have let him marry and find out afterwards that she was the daughter of Carton Standish,” cried Agnes, as she lay awake through the hours of that long night. She felt that she had some reason for self-reproach, but not because she had sought to be revenged upon the man who had so cruelly treated her. Only for an hour had the thought of revenge been in her heart, and it had not been sweet to her, but bitter.
Once she rose from her bed and stole softly into Clare's room. The girl was lying asleep; and the light in the room was not too dim to allow of Agnes's seeing that her pillow was wet with tears. Still, she was now asleep and unconscious of any trouble. It was Agnes who had been unable to find comfort in the oblivion of sleep, and she returned to her bed to lie waiting for the dawn.
It stole between the spaces of the blinds, the grey dawn of the winter's day—-the cheerless dawn that drew nigh without the herald of a bird's song—a dawn that was more cheerless than night.
She rose and went to the window, looking out over the valley that she knew so well. She saw in the far distance the splendid woods of Branksome Abbey, Sir Percival Hope's home, and somehow she felt comforted by letting her eyes rest upon the grey side of the Abbey wall which was visible above the trees. She had a feeling that Sir Percival might be trusted to bring happiness into her life. From the first day on which he had come to Brackenshire she had trusted him. She had gone to him in her emergencies—first when she had wished to have Lizzie Dangan taken care of, and afterwards when she had wanted that large sum of money which had saved the Westwoods' bank. He had shown himself upon both those occasions to be worthy of her trust, and then—then—
She wondered if he had known how great was her temptation to throw herself into his arms upon that morning when he had stood before her to tell her in his own fashion that he loved her. Such a temptation had indeed been hers, and though during the weeks that passed between the arrival of the telegram that told her of Claude's safety and his return, she had often reproached herself for having had that temptation even for a moment, yet now the thought that she had had it brought her comfort. She thought of Claude Westwood by the side of Sir Percival, and she knew which of them was the true man.
Noble, honourable, self-sacrificing, Sir Percival had never once spoken to her of his love since that morning, though he had seen how she had been treated by the man to whom she had been faithful with a constancy passing all the constancy of women. So far from speaking to her of his love for her, he had done his best to comfort her when he had seen that Claude on his return treated her with indifference, giving himself up to the savage thoughts that possessed him—the savage thirst for blood that he had acquired among the savages.
She remembered how Sir Percival had told her that Claude was not himself—that he had not recovered from the shock which he had received on learning of the death of the brother whom he loved so well, and that so soon as he recovered she would find that he had been as constant to her as she had been to him.
It was to this effect Sir Percival had spoken, and she, alas! had felt comforted in the hope that she would be able to win him back to her. That had been her thought for weeks; but now.... Well, now her thought was:
“Why did I not yield to that temptation to throw myself into his arms and trust my future with him on that day when he confessed his love to me?”
It was a passionate regret that took possession of her for a moment as she let fall the curtain through which she had been looking over the still grey landscape, with a touch of mist clinging here and there to the sides of the valley, and giving a semblance of foliage to the low alders that bordered the meadows.
“Why—why—why?” was the question that was ringing round her while her maid was brushing her hair. She had ceased to think of her constancy as a virtue. She was beginning to yield to the impression that only grief could follow those who elected to be constant, when every impulse of Nature was in the direction of inconstancy. One does not mourn for ever over the dead; when a woman has been inconstant in her love for a man, the man is chagrined for a while, but he soon consoles himself by loving another woman.
Yes, she felt that Claude Westwood had spoken quite truthfully and reasonably when he said that in affairs of the heart Nature had decreed that there shall be an automatic Statute of Limitations. He had spoken from experience, and to that theory—it sounded cynical to her at first, but now her experience had found that it was true—she was ready to give her cordial assent. To such a point had she been brought by the bitterness of her experience of the previous month, she actually believed that she wished she had failed in her constancy to the man whom she had promised to love.
She was surprised to find Clare awaiting her in the breakfast-room. The girl was pale and nervous, for Agnes noticed how she gave a start when she entered. In the room there was a servant, who had brought in a breakfast-dish, but the moment she disappeared, Clare almost rushed across the room to Agnes.
“Tell me what has happened,” she said imploringly. “Something has happened—something terrible; but somehow I cannot recollect what it was. I have the sensation of awaking from a horrible dream. Can it be that I fainted? Can it be that I entered the drawing-room, and that he told you to take me away? Oh, my God! If it is not a dream I shall die. 'Take her away—take her away'—those were the words which I recollect, but my recollection is like that of a dream. Why don't you speak. Agnes? Why do you stand there looking at me with such painful sadness? Why don't you speak? Say something—something—anything. A word from you will save me from death, and you will not speak it!”
She flung away Agnes's hand which she had been holding, and threw herself on a chair that was at the table, burying her face in her hands.
Agnes came behind her and laid her hand gently on her head. She drew her head away with a motion of impatience.
“I don't want you to touch me!” she cried, almost pettishly. “I want you to tell me what has happened. Oh, Agnes, he did not cry out for you to take me away—that Would be impossible—he could never say those words!”
She had sprung up from the table once more and had gone to the fireplace, against which she leant.
“My poor child! My poor child!” said Agnes.
“Do not say that,” cried Clare impatiently. “Your calling me that seems to me part of my dream. Good heavens! are we living in a dream?”
“You have been living in one, Clare; but the awaking has come,” said Agnes.
Clare looked at her with wide eyes for more than a whole minute. Her look was so vacant that Agnes shuddered. The girl gave a laugh that made Agnes shudder again, before she moved away from the mantelpiece, saying:
“How is it that we haven't sat down to breakfast? I'm quite hungry.”