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.