Then, in a moment, before he can divine her intention, or – even if he had the heart to do so – arrest her, she has flung her arms convulsively about his neck; and in a moment more she is gone, leaving him there dazed and staggering in the starlight, with the agony of her good-bye kiss on his lips, and his face wet with her scorching tears.
CHAPTER XXIX
If there is one hour of the day at which the little Red House looks conspicuously better than another, it is that young one when the garden grass is still wet to the travelling foot, and the great fire-rose in the east has not yet soared high enough to swallow the shadows. So Talbot thinks, as he takes his way next morning to his love's little russet-coloured home. She has promised over-night to rise betimes, to give him an early tryst before he sets off on his dusty journey back into the world without her. He is of course by much too early; and though he tries to hasten the passage of time by looking at his watch every two minutes, yet he is compelled, if he would not be at her door long before it is opened to him, to journey towards her at a very different rate from that at which his heart is doing. He walks along, drawing in refreshment of soul and body with every breath. He has not slept all night, and his eyes are dry and feverish; but the air, moist with the tears of the dawn, beats his lids with its soft pinions, and all the lovely common sights of early morning touch healingly upon his bruised brain, and heart still jarred and aching with the ignoble pain of that late encounter.
At every step he takes some sweet or gently harmonious sight or sound steals away a parcel of that ugly ache, and gives him an atom of pure joy instead. Now it is a stray wood-pigeon beginning its day-long sweethearting in the copse. Now it is a merry din of quiring finches, all talking together. Now it is a glimpse of a sprinkle of cowslips in an old pasture, shaking off their drowsiness. Now it is only a stout thrush lustily banging its morning snail against a stone, the one instance of gross cruelty amongst the many that the scheme of nature offers, which the most tender-hearted cannot fail to admire. And now a turn of the road has given him to view her house, and the tears, cleansing as those of the morning, leap to his eyes at the sight of it. Dear little wholesome, innocent house, giving back the sun's smile from each one of its shining panes; giving it back, as her mirroring face will give back his own love-look, when she comes – so soon now, oh, so soon! – across the dew-drunk daisies to his arms. With what a feeling of homecoming does his heart embrace it – he that, for so many arid years, has had no better home than Bury Street lodgings, or Betty's boudoir!
He looks eagerly to see whether, by some blessed accident, she may even now be ahead of him in time, awaiting him with sunshiny face uplifted, and firm, fair arms resting on the top-rail of the gate. He knows how early she rises, and that no coquettish punctilio as to being first at the rendezvous will hinder her, if she is sooner ready than he. But apparently to-day she is not. There is no trace of her.
A slight misgiving as to Prue's illness, which until this moment he had indignantly dismissed from his memory as imaginary, having a more serious character than he had credited it with, makes him glance apprehensively towards the young girl's casement. The blind is down, it is true; but over all the rest of the house there is such a cheerful air of everyday serenity, that, considering the earliness of the hour, he cannot attach much importance to the circumstance.
Prue is always – how unlike his fresh Peggy! – a lie-a-bed. Mink and the cat are standing airing themselves on the door-step, and, by the suavity of their manner, obviously invite him to enter.
The hall-door is open, and he passes through it. It is the first time that he has had to push uninvited into her sanctuary – the first day that she has not met him at the gate. He checks the rising chill that the reflection calls forth, and hurries on into the hall; meaning to hurry through it, for surely it will be in the garden that he will find her. Perhaps, by one of love's subtilties, she has chosen to bid him farewell under the very hawthorn-tree where he had first called her his. But he has not made two steps into the hall before he discovers that his calculations have erred. Can it be by another of love's subtilties that she is sitting here indoors, away from the morning's radiance, sitting quite idle apparently by the table; and that, on his entry, she does not even turn her head?
'Peggy!' he cries, thinking that she cannot have heard his step, though it has rung not more noiselessly than usual on the old oak boards; and that Mink, with a friendly afterthought, is firing off little shrill 'good mornings' at his heels.
There is no change of posture in the sitting figure, no movement, unless, if his eyes do not deceive him, a slight shiver running over it.
'Peggy!' he repeats, alarmed; and, in a second, has overleaped the intervening distance – has fallen on his knees at her feet, and grasped her hands. 'What is it? Quick – speak to me! Is Prue worse?'
There is no answer. She has averted her face, so that he can see only the outline of her cheek's oval, at his approach; and – what is this? She is drawing her hands with slow decision, not with any petulance or coquetry, but as one irrevocably resolved, out of his. Then she rises slowly to her feet, and, having put three paces between them, turns and looks full at him. Looks full at him, this tall, risen woman, who will not lend him the custody of her hand! But who is she – this woman? Not his Peggy! Nay, surely not his Peggy! His Peggy, cheeked like the dawn, with eyes made out of sapphires and morning dew – his kindly, loving Peggy – what has she in common with this pale austerity that is facing him?
'What is it?' he repeats huskily, a vague horror making his knees knock together; 'is she – '
He breaks off. The idea has flashed across him that Prue is dead! What lesser catastrophe can account for this horrible unnamed change?
'She is better,' replies Peggy hoarsely.
'Better! – thank God for that!' drawing a long breath of relief. 'What do you mean by looking like this? You made me think – I do not know what; but,' his agony of perplexity returning in profounder flood, 'if so – if she is better, what is it? – what else? For mercy's sake answer me! – answer me quickly! Do not keep me waiting! You do not know what it is to be kept waiting like this!'
He has risen from his kneeling attitude; but that unaccountable something in her face hinders him from making any effort to bridge the distance she has set between them. Across that distance comes her reply, in a voice that seems to set her continents and seas away from him:
'Are you – quite – sure – that – I – need answer you?'
'Sure that you need answer me?' repeats he bewildered, struggling against the ice that is sweeping up over his heart; 'why, of course I am! Why else should I have asked you? We must be playing at cross-purposes,' with an attempted smile. 'Of course I am sure!' – reading the disbelief in her white face – 'quite sure! What can I say to asseverate it? As sure as that I stand here – as sure as – '
'Oh, stop! – stop!' she cries vehemently, thrusting out her hands towards him as if in passionate prohibition, while a surge of colour coming into her face restores her to some likeness to his Peggy; 'do not – do not let me have to think that I have been the cause of your telling any more falsehoods!'
'Any more?' echoes he, putting up his hand to his forehead, and feeling as if she had struck him across the eyes.
'Yes,' she says, gasping, while he sees her hand go out in unconscious quest of the table-edge, as if to steady herself. 'Yes! – do not I speak plainly? Any more!'
Again he passes his hand over that brow that feels cut and furrowed by the lash of her words.
'You – must – explain,' he says slowly; 'apparently I am dull this morning. What other falsehoods have I told you?'
Both her hands are clutching the table now; nor is its support unneeded, for her body sways. Only for a moment, however. In a moment she is standing firm again.
'What other?' she repeats, half under her breath; 'what other? Oh!' with a long shuddering groan, 'how many, many you must have told before you could grow to do it with a face that looks so like truth!'
But at that the insulted manhood of him awakes, goaded into life, and shakes off the paralysis engendered by his horrible astonishment.
'Come!' he exclaims, disregarding her unspoken veto, going close up to her and standing before her, with folded arms and flashing eyes; 'this is intolerable! – this is more than man can bear! Let me hear what you have to say – speak your accusation; but do not tell me to my face that I am a liar, without bringing a rag of evidence to support it!'
She looks back at him, taking in, with a startled air, his changed demeanour – the command of his attitude – the authority of his eyes. Then —
'You – are – right,' she says, panting, while he sees her poor heart miserably leap under the pink cotton gown he had praised yesterday – was it yesterday, or before Noah's flood? 'I – have no right to bring vague accusations, as you say. Will you – will you – let me wait a minute?'
She sinks upon a chair as she speaks; and, resting her elbow upon the table, passes her pocket-handkerchief once or twice over her face, wiping away the cold drops of anguish that, despite the morning's radiant warmth, are gathering upon it. He waits beside her, in a black suspense, pushing away from him the fear that he refuses to formulate.
'There!' she says, after a year's interval, which the clock falsely calls sixty seconds; 'I – I – beg your pardon for keeping you waiting.' She has banished, as far as she can, all signs of emotion, and begins in a level low voice. 'Prue got better almost immediately after you went away last night – was it really only last night?' with a bewildered look; then, immediately recovering herself, 'so decidedly better, that I thought I might safely leave her.' She pauses. 'I – I – thought I – I – would follow you.'
Another pause. It is evidently killing work to get on at all. Angry as he is with her, clearly as he now sees what is coming, he cannot help a compassionate wish to help her, and make it easier for her.
'I – did not know which way you had gone,' she resumes, after another battle with herself; 'no one had seen you. But I thought – I guessed – I fancied that it might have been to the walled garden, because – because we had – had – said good-bye there last year.' Her voice wavers so distressingly that he thinks she is about to lose all control over it; but no! – in a moment she has recovered her self-mastery, and taken up her thread again. 'As I drew near the garden, I saw that the gate was a little open, so I knew that I had guessed right. I – looked – in; I – saw – oh!' with a burst of indignant agony, 'are you going to make me tell you what I saw?'
'Yes,' he says breathlessly, 'tell me! – what?' A hope, faint, and yet tenacious, lingers in his mind that it may have been any one moment of his last night's interview except that of the supreme embrace which she had witnessed. He has not long to wait before this last prop is knocked from under him.
'I – I – saw – you holding – a woman in your arms, and, a moment after, she ran past me – and I saw – who she was!'
The answer he has insisted upon reaches him in a broken whisper; and her strained eyes are fastened upon him, as if, in the teeth of a certainty as absolute as that of her own identity, she were nourishing the hopeless hope of his uttering some impossible, yet convincing, denial. But he attempts none such. He stands before her silent, with his arms still folded and the tide of a shoreless despair washing over his heart. Betty has put the crowning touch to her work.
'It is true then?' Peggy asks, in a voice of such bitter suffering as if she were realising it for the first time; as if she had not already known it for twelve endless hours.
'What is the use of denying it?' he replies blankly; 'you say that you saw her!'
She has risen to her feet again, risen to her full height (how tall she is!); and once again stands confronting him, not even asking the table-edge for any support.
'And – you – told – me – that – you – were – free!'
The words drop wonderingly from her mouth, barbed with an icy contempt that makes him writhe. But at least he thanks God that she does not treat him to such mirth as Betty's.
'I told you the truth,' rejoins the poor fellow doggedly – 'I was free; I am free!'
But the consciousness of the impossibility of really clearing his character, save at the expense of her whom he must for ever shield, lends a flatness and unreality to his assertion, which, as he feels through every aching fibre, will only serve the more deeply to convince Peggy of his guilt. It is not long before he sees that he has divined justly.
'You need not make a laughing-stock of me,' she says with dignity, turning towards the door. But at that, the despair which has been paralysing him awakes, and cries out loud, giving him motion and a voice.
'You are not going!' he cries in a tone whose agony stabs her like a knife, flinging himself upon her passage.
'What is there to stay for?' she answers, choked. But she pauses. Can he, even yet, have anything to say?
'Do you think that I met her there on purpose?' he asks, his words pouring out in a hoarse eager flood, as if he had but little hope of commanding her attention for long to them – 'by appointment? Ask yourself whether it is possible? Was I so anxious to leave you? Was not it you that drove me away? I tell you I had no more idea of meeting her than I had of meeting – ' he hesitates, seeking for a comparison strong enough to emphasise his denial – 'as I had of meeting one of the dead. I did not even know that she was in the neighbourhood. I had held no communication with her for months. It was an accident – a mere accident!'
He breaks off suffocated. At the intense sincerity of his tone, a sincerity which it is difficult to believe feigned, a sort of stir has come over her face; but in a moment it has gone again.
'Was it,' she asks with a quietness that makes his hopes sink lower than would any noisy tears or tantrums, 'was it by accident that she was in your arms?'
He is silent. In point of fact, he is as innocent of that embrace as Peggy herself; but from telling her so he is, being a man and an Englishman, for ever debarred. He must stand there, and bear the consequences of that supposed guilt, whatever those consequences may be. There is a little stillness while he waits his sentence – a little stillness broken only by the eight-day clock's tick-tack, and by the distance-mellowed sounds of the village rising to go about its daily work.
'Have you nothing to say for yourself, then?' she asks at last, in a voice which she dares not raise above a whisper for fear of its betraying her by altogether breaking down – 'no explanation to give?'
'I tell you that it was all an accident,' he repeats, with a doggedness born of his despair. 'I can give no other explanation.'
'And that is none,' she replies, a wave of indignation sending back the colour to her ashy cheeks, and steadying her shaking limbs as she again turns to leave the room.
He does not, as before, throw himself in her way; he remains standing where he is, and only says in a dull voice:
'Are you going?'
'Why should I stay?'
'Going without saying good-bye?'
'I will say good-bye if you wish.'
'Going for —for good?'
'Yes.'
He makes no effort to change her resolution – vents no protest – if that indeed be not one, and the strongest he could utter, that long groan with which he flings himself on a chair beside the table, and covers his face with his hands. She has reached the door. No one hinders her from opening it and leaving him, and yet she hesitates. Her sunk blue eyes look back at him half relentingly.
'Are you sure,' she says quaveringly, while her pale lips tremble piteously – 'are you sure that you have nothing to say – nothing extenuating? I – I should be glad to hear it if you had. I – I – I – would try my very best to believe you.'
There is no answer. Only the mute appeal conveyed by that prone figure, with its despairing brown head fallen forwards on its clenched hands. Is it possible that he has not heard her? After a moment's vacillation, she retraces her uncertain steps till she stands beside him. Feeling her proximity, he looks up. At the sight of his face, she gives a start. Can it be she herself – she that had thought to have loved him so kindly – who has scored these new deep lines on brow and cheek? At the relenting evidenced by her back-coming, his dead hopes revive a little.
'Do you know what I did when I reached the walled garden last night? – I am afraid that you will not think the better of my common sense – I knelt down and kissed the place where I thought that your feet might have trod last year.'
'You did?' she says, with a catch in the breath; 'you did? and yet five minutes afterwards you were – oh!' breaking off with a low cry; 'and this is what men are like!'
He sees that his poor plea, instead of, as he had faintly hoped, a little bettering his position with her, has, read by the light of her mistaken knowledge, only served to intensify in her eyes the blackness of his inconstancy. Well, it is only one more added to the heap of earth's unnumbered injustices. It is only that Betty has done her work thoroughly this time. But he cannot bear to meet the reproachful anguish of the face that is bent above him, knowing that never on this side the grave can he set himself right with her. If only it might be for ever, instead of for these few hurrying moments, that he could shut out the light of day! The clock ticks on evenly. It sounds unnaturally loud and brutal in his singing ears; but its tick is not mixed with any light noise of retreating footsteps. She is still lingering near him, and by and by a long sob shudders out on the air.
'If you could persuade me that I was wrong,' she wails; 'if you could persuade me that it was some hideous delusion of my eyes – people have had such before now – that it existed only in my wicked fancy! Oh, if you could – if you could!'
'I cannot,' he replies hoarsely; 'you know that I cannot. Why do you torment me?' He has answered without looking up, still maintaining the attitude dictated by his despair; but when a little rustle of drapery tells him that she is really departing, he can no longer contain himself, but falls at her feet, crying out, 'Tell me how bad my punishment is to be!'
For a moment she looks down on him silently, her face all quivering as with some fiery pain; then in a very low voice:
'Punishment!' she says; 'punishment! There is no question of punishment. It is only that you have killed my heart.'
'Killed – your – heart!' he repeats blankly, as if too stunned to take in the meaning of the phrase.
'Yes,' she says, breathing fast and heavily; 'yes. I do not think you knew what you were doing. I believe it was a sudden madness that seized you – such a madness as,' with a touch of scorn, 'may be common to men. I know but little of them and their ways; but – but – what security have I against its seizing you a second time?'
He writhes. A second time? Oh, if she did but know how little it had seized him the first!
'If I married you now,' she goes on, her voice gaining a greater firmness, and a new and forlorn stability coming into her white face, 'I should love you, certainly. Yes,' with a melancholy shake of her head, 'I think that I shall never leave off loving you now. But if I married you, I should make you very unhappy; I should not take things easily – I should not be patient. And however happy we might be when we were together, since you have killed my trust in you, you would never be out of sight that I should not be fancying that you were – as – as – as I saw you last night.'
Her voice has dropped to an almost inaudible pitch. He has risen to his feet again, and some instinct of self-respect helping him, stands silently before her, accepting the doom which, as he hopelessly feels, can be averted by no words that he has leave to utter.
To her ears has come the noise of nearing wheels – the wheels of the fly he had ordered over-night to take him to the station, allowing the smallest possible margin of time in which to get there, so that as little as possible might be robbed from the poignant sweetness of his last farewells.
The poignant sweetness! He almost laughs. That sound must have hit her ears too, judging by the long sob that swells her throat, and by the added rush of anguish in her next words:
'I ought to have believed what they told me of you, but I would not; I would believe only you – only you; and this is how you have rewarded me!'
He locks his teeth together hard. For how much longer can he bear this? There comes over him a rushing temptation to try to buy one soft look from her to take with him, by the hypocrisy of asking her forgiveness; he whose whole smitten soul stands up in protest against the need of any forgiveness.
But no. Sooner than descend to such an equivocation he will depart on his lonely way uncomforted.
'I must go,' he says steadily, though his lips are livid. 'Will you – would you mind shaking hands with me?'
He is going. She had known what the wheels meant, and yet there seems a murderous novelty in the idea. She has put her death-cold hand into his; speech is almost beyond her; but she mutters some poor syllables about not wishing him ill.
'Peggy,' he says, with a solemnity such as that of those who are spending their last breath in some sacred utterance; 'Peggy, you are wrong! Any one to whom you told your story – any one who had to judge between you and me, would say that you were right; but you – are – wrong! If I have killed your heart, you have killed mine, so we are quits. Good-bye!'
The next moment she is alone in the room.