There is a dead silence. Sir James says nothing. He walks on beside her with an unfaltering footstep, his head erect as ever, his hands clasped in their old att.i.tude behind his back. The sun is shining; some birds are warbling faintly (as though under protest) in some neighboring thicket; yet, I think Scrope neither sees the sun, nor heeds the birds, nor knows for the moment that life flows within him, after that little, low-toned speech of hers.
Then he awakes from his stupor, and, rousing himself, says, huskily, yet with a certain amount of self-possession that deceives her,--
"You were saying----?"
"Only that I am going to be married," repeats Clarissa, in a somewhat changed tone. The nervousness had gone out of it, and the natural hesitation; she is speaking now quite composedly and clearly, as if some surprise betrays itself in her voice.
Scrope is aware that his heart is beating madly. He has stopped, and is leaning against the trunk of an apple-tree, facing Clarissa, who is standing in the middle of the path. His face is ashen gray, but his manner is quite calm.
"Who is it?" he asks, presently, very slowly.
"Mr. Brans...o...b..,"--coldly.
"Dorian?"
"No. Horace."
"I wish it had been Dorian," he says, impulsively.
It is the last straw.
"And why?" demands she, angrily. She is feeling wounded, disappointed at his reception of her news; and now the climax has come. Like her father, he, too, prefers Dorian,--nay, by his tone, casts a slur upon Horace. The implied dislike cuts her bitterly to the heart.
"What evil thing have you to say of Horace," she goes on, vehemently, "that you so emphatically declare in favor of Dorian? When you are with him you profess great friendship for him, and now behind his back you seek to malign him to the woman he loves."
"You are unjust," says Scrope, wearily. "I know nothing bad of Horace.
I merely said I wished it had been Dorian. No, I have nothing to say against Horace."
"Then why do you look as if you had?" says Miss Peyton, pettishly, frowning a little, and letting her eyes rest on him for a moment only, to withdraw them again with a deeper frown. "Your manner suggests many things. You are like papa--" She pauses, feeling she has made a false move, and wishes vainly her last words unsaid.
"Does your father disapprove, then?" asks he, more through idleness than a desire to know.
Instinctively he feels that, no matter what obstacles may be thrown in this girl"s way, still she will carry her point and marry the man she has elected to love. Nay, will not difficulties but increase her steadfastness, and make strong the devotion that is growing in her heart?
Not until now, this moment, when hope has died and despair sprung into life, does he know how freely, how altogether, he has lavished the entire affection of his soul upon her. During all these past few months he has lived and thought and hoped but for her; and now--all this is at an end.
Like a heavy blow from some unseen hand this terrible news has fallen upon him, leaving him spent and broken, and filled with something that is agonized surprise at the depth of the misfortune that has overtaken him. It is as a revelation, the awakening to a sense of the longing that has been his,--to the knowledge of the cruel strength of the tenderness that binds his heart to hers.
With a slow wonder he lifts his eyes and gazes at her. There is a petulant expression round her mobile lips, a faint bending of her brows that bespeaks discontent, bordering upon anger, yet, withal, she is quite lovely,--so sweet, yet so unsympathetic; so gentle, yet so ignorant of all he is at present feeling.
With a sickening dread he looks forward to the future that still may lie before him. It seems to him that he can view, lying stretched out in the far distance, a lonely cheerless road, over which he must travel whether he will or not,--a road bare and dusty and companionless, devoid of shade, or rest, or joy, or that love that could transform the barrenness into a "flowery mead."
"He that loses hope"--says Congreve--"may part with anything." To Scrope, just now, it seems as though hope and he have parted company forever. The past has been so dear, with all its vague beliefs and uncertain dreamings,--all too sweet for realization,--that the present appears unbearable.
The very air seems dark, the sky leaden, the clouds sad and lowering.
Vainly he tries to understand how he has come to love, with such a boundless pa.s.sion, this girl, who loves him not at all, but has surrendered herself wholly to one unworthy of her,--one utterly incapable of comprehending the n.o.bility and truthfulness of her nature.
The world, that only yesterday seemed so desirable a place, to-day has lost its charm.
"What is life, when stripped of its disguise? A thing to be desired it cannot be." With him it seems almost at an end. An unsatisfactory thing, too, at its best,--a mere "glimpse into the world of might have been."
Some words read a week ago come to him now, and ring their changes on his brain. "Rien ne va plus,"--the hateful words return to him with a pertinacity not to be subdued. It is with difficulty he refrains from uttering them aloud.
"No; he does not disapprove," says Clarissa, interrupting his reflections at this moment: "he has given his full consent to my engagement." She speaks somewhat slowly, as if remembrance weighs upon her. "And, even if he had not, there is still something that must give me happiness: it is the certainty that Horace loves me, and that I love him."
Though unmeant, this is a cruel blow. Sir James turns away, and, paling visibly,--had she cared to see it,--plucks a tiny piece of bark from the old tree against which he is leaning.
There is something in his face that, though she understands it not, moves Clarissa to pity.
"You will wish me some good wish, after all, Jim, won"t you?" she says, very sweetly, almost pathetically.
"No, I cannot," returns he with a brusquerie foreign to him. "To do so would be actual hypocrisy."
There is silence for a moment: Clarissa grows a little pale, in her turn. In _his_ turn, he takes no notice of her emotion, having his face averted. Then, in a low, faint, choked voice, she breaks the silence.
"If I had been wise," she says, "I should have stayed at home this morning, and kept my confidences to myself. Yet I wanted to tell you.
So I came, thinking, believing, I should receive sympathy from you; and now what have I got? Only harsh and cruel words! If I had known--"
"Clarissa!"
"Yes! If any one had told me you would so treat me, I should--should--"
It is this supreme moment she chooses to burst out crying; and she cries heartily (by which I mean that she gives way to grief of the most vehement and agonized description) for at least five minutes, without a cessation, making her lament openly, and in a carefully unreserved fashion, intended to reduce his heart to water. And not in vain is _her_ "weak endeavor."
Sir James, when the first sob falls upon his ear, turns from her, and, as though unable to endure the sound, deliberately walks away from her down the garden path.
When he gets quite to the end of it, however, and knows the next turn will hide him from sight of her tears or sound of her woe, he hesitates, then is lost, and finally coming back again to where she is standing, hidden by a cambric handkerchief, lays his hand upon her arm. At his touch her sobs increase.
"Don"t do that!" he says, so roughly that she knows his heart is bleeding. "Do you hear me, Clarissa? Stop crying. It isn"t doing you any good, and it is driving me mad. What has happened?--what is making you so unhappy?"
"_You_ are," says Miss Peyton, with a final sob, and a whole octave of reproach in her voice. "Anything so unkind I never knew. And just when I had come all the way over here to tell you what I would tell n.o.body else except papa! There was a time, Jim" (with a soft but upbraiding glance), "when you would have been sweet and kind and good to me on an occasion like this."
She moves a step nearer to him, and lays her hand--the little, warm, pulsing hand he loves so pa.s.sionately--upon his arm. Her glance is half offended, half beseeching: Scrope"s strength of will gives way, and, metaphorically speaking, he lays himself at her feet.
"If I have been uncivil to you, forgive me," he says, taking her hand from his arm, and holding it closely in his own. "You do not know; you cannot understand; and I am glad you do not. Be happy! There is no substantial reason why you should not extract from life every sweet it can afford: you are young, the world is before you, and the love you desire is yours. Dry your eyes, Clarissa: your tears pierce my heart."
He has quite regained his self-control by this time, and having conquered emotion, speaks dispa.s.sionately. Clarissa, as he has said, does not understand the terrible struggle it costs him to utter these words in an ordinary tone, and with a face which, if still pale, betrays no mental excitement.
She smiles. Her tears vanish. She sighs contentedly, and moves the hand that rests in his.
"I am so glad we are friends again," she says. "And now tell me why you were so horrid at first: you might just as well have begun as you have ended: it would have saved trouble and time, and" (reproachfully) "all my tears."
"Perhaps I value you so highly that I hate the thought of losing you,"
says Scrope, palliating the ugliness of his conduct as best he may.
His voice is very earnest.
"How fond you are of me!" says Miss Peyton, with some wonder and much pleasure.
To this he finds it impossible to make any answer.