"Save me!" a voice whispered. I clasped a figure in my arms, and, with a strange dis-ease, bore it down the shaking stairs and out into safety.
It was Mildred. I knew _that_ directly I clasped her.
"Stand back," cried the crowd.
"Every one"s safe," cried a fireman.
The flames leaped from every window. The sky grew redder and redder. I sprang from the hands that would have held me. I leaped up the steps. I crawled up the stairs. Suddenly the whole horror of the situation came on me. "_As long as my picture remains in the ebony frame._" What if picture and frame perished together?
I fought with the fire, and with my own choking inability to fight with it. I pushed on. I must save my picture. I reached the drawing-room.
As I sprang in I saw my lady--I swear it--through the smoke and the flames, hold out her arms to me--to me--who came too late to save her, and to save my own life"s joy. I never saw her again.
Before I could reach her, or cry out to her, I felt the floor yield beneath my feet, and I fell into the fiery h.e.l.l below.
How did they save me? What does that matter? They saved me somehow--curse them. Every stick of my aunt"s furniture was destroyed.
My friends pointed out that, as the furniture was heavily insured, the carelessness of a nightly-studious housemaid had done me no harm.
No harm!
That was how I won and lost my only love.
I deny, with all my soul in the denial, that it was a dream. There are no such dreams. Dreams of longing and pain there are in plenty, but dreams of complete, of unspeakable happiness--ah, no--it is the rest of life that is the dream.
But if I think that, why have I married Mildred, and grown stout and dull and prosperous?
I tell you it is all _this_ that is the dream; my dear lady only is the reality. And what does it matter what one does in a dream?
JOHN CHARRINGTON"S WEDDING.
No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington; but he thought differently, and things which John Charrington intended had a queer way of coming to pa.s.s. He asked her to marry him before he went up to Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again next time he came home. Again she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever.
John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of our village _coterie,_ and we were all in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like heliotrope ties or Inverness capes.
Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little local Club--we held it in a loft over the saddler"s, I remember--and invited us all to his wedding.
"Your wedding?"
"You don"t mean it?"
"Who"s the happy fair? When"s it to be?"
John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said--
"I"m sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke--but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September."
"You don"t mean it?"
"He"s got the mitten again, and it"s turned his head."
"No," I said, rising, "I see it"s true. Lend me a pistol some one--or a first-cla.s.s fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love-potion, Jack?"
"Neither, sir, but a gift you"ll never have--perseverance--and the best luck a man ever had in this world."
There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.
The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Forster, she blushed and smiled and dimpled, for all the world as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Upon my word, I think she had. Women are strange creatures.
We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham every one who was anybody knew everybody else who was any one. My sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the _trousseau_ than the bride herself, and I was to be best man. The coming marriage was much canva.s.sed at afternoon tea-tables, and at our little Club over the saddler"s, and the question was always asked: "Does she care for him?"
I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one"s footsteps are noiseless.
I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John Charrington"s voice, and saw Her. May was sitting on a low flat gravestone, her face turned towards the full splendour of the western sun. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of love for him; it was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face.
John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden August evening.
"My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!"
I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and pa.s.sed on into the shadow fully enlightened.
The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the South-Eastern, and as I stood grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom should I see but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking up and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into each other"s eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.
Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before burying myself in the booking-office, and it was not till the train drew up at the platform, that I obtrusively pa.s.sed the pair with my Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-cla.s.s smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an air of not seeing them as I could a.s.sume. I pride myself on my discretion, but if John were travelling alone I wanted his company. I had it.
"Hullo, old man," came his cheery voice as he swung his bag into my carriage; "here"s luck; I was expecting a dull journey!"
"Where are you off to?" I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my eyes away, though I saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed.
"To old Branbridge"s," he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.
"Oh, I wish you wouldn"t go, John," she was saying in a low, earnest voice. "I feel certain something will happen."
"Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after to-morrow our wedding-day?"
"Don"t go," she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent my Gladstone on to the platform and me after it. But she wasn"t speaking to me. John Charrington was made differently; he rarely changed his opinions, never his resolutions.
He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door.
"I must, May. The old boy"s been awfully good to me, and now he"s dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for----" the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.
"You"re sure to come?" she spoke as the train moved.
"Nothing shall keep me," he answered; and we steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept silence for a minute.
When he spoke it was to explain to me that his G.o.dfather, whose heir he was, lay dying at Peasmarsh Place, some fifty miles away, and had sent for John, and John had felt bound to go.