"Say since I found out the truth, Paul."
"That, if you will." He bent his head. "I cannot, I dare not deny it. It _is_ the truth, G.o.d help me--G.o.d help us both."
"You and me?" she whispered, faintly.
"Maud and me. I have done her a great wrong, but it shall be the aim of my life to repair it. She shall find me a true and faithful husband----"
"You won"t--you can"t marry her?"
"What?" said Paul, stopping short.
"You do not love her."
"I loved her once--I shall learn to love her again."
"You will be wretched, miserable--and so will she, now that you know the truth. I would have spared you. I meant to give my life to spare you--oh, Paul, you know I did," she wept pa.s.sionately--"but now, now when you yourself would not let me do it----"
"Leo?"
She wept on.
"Try to hear me. Try to understand me. Leo, there is a greater thing than Love."
"No, no, there is not--there is not."
"There is." He drew a breath, a long, deep breath. "There is Honour."
She was silent. The tears hung on her cheeks.
"I have lost all besides," said he, simply, "but I have kept that, and will keep it." He paused, and continued: "If Maud were different, other things might also be different, but you know your sister; to break faith with her would be--she could not endure it. I have taught her to believe that I am wholly hers, and she has never seen nor guessed that--that a change has come. And however acutely Maud would feel that, if she knew--which, so help me G.o.d, she never shall--she would be infinitely more distressed, more humiliated--her pride--her self-respect--no, it is not to be thought of." He was now walking on alone, and so fast that she could scarcely keep pace with him. She could catch only broken utterances--some perhaps not meant for her. It appeared as though he had forgotten her presence.
"Love? Honour?
"Love lost, much lost.
Honour lost, all lost."
Honour is not lost--not yet. Happiness? That"s nothing. Life is short, and there"s another life to look to. A coward turns his back on the fight. A deserter falls out of the ranks. The strong should hold up the weak"--suddenly he looked round for her--"Leo?"
Leo meekly raised her eyes, overmastered, dumb. It was the hardest moment of Paul"s life. One look, one word between them, and she would have been dragged down into the whirlpool from which it was his part to save her. A great convulsion shook his frame, and he set his teeth and swore, then drew her gently to his side.
"My little sister must forget all this. It is a bad dream and it is over and past. She must promise me----"
"What--Paul?"
"She must promise me--solemnly--before G.o.d, in Whose Presence we are"--he looked up, the sky was clear and shining overhead--"that she will never--mark me, Leo, _never_--as long as life lasts, allow herself to think of cutting it short again. Before G.o.d, Leo!"
He lifted her hand, still fast in his, as though invoking the Unseen Presence, and almost inaudibly she repeated after him the words of the promise.
"We must hasten home now," said Paul, with a rapid transition to another tone. "The short cut from Claymount is somewhere hereabouts," looking round--"and we shall get back," he took out his watch, "before the house is shut up, if we walk briskly. You can walk, can"t you? I mean, of course you will have to walk, but can you step out? If you would care to have an arm----"
"I can walk quite well, thank you--but, oh, Paul, just this--mayn"t I say it----?"
"Better not, dear." The word slipped out; he was unconscious of it, but she heard. They hurried home.
CHAPTER XVII.
A KNIGHT TO THE RESCUE.
"No, you don"t--and don"t you think it."
Somebody, and that a formidable personage, had been a witness of the scene just narrated.
We would not for a moment call poor Val Purcell an eavesdropper _au naturel_, but he certainly had a talent for picking up by the wayside things which did not exactly belong to him.
Val, as we know, was not quite like other people.
It was only now and then that he showed this; in the ordinary give and take of society he pa.s.sed muster well enough, and no one would more readily have spurned the notion of doing what others did not do--that being the poor boy"s code of conduct,--yet he is not to be hardly judged if occasionally it failed him at a pinch. Wherefore if when pa.s.sing through the Abbey woods on the afternoon in question, he heard voices and crept near to peep and listen, let it be believed that the feeling which arrested his footsteps was in its way innocent. His curiosity was roused, and he had a hearty sympathy with sylvan lovers; so if Jack and Jill were courting, there was no reason why he should not see which Jack and Jill it was? He would not tell tales, not he.
But when, instead of the expected rustic figures, his starting eyes beheld Paul Foster and--not Paul"s betrothed--not the girl with whom alone he had a right to wander in that dim solitude at that mystic hour--but Leonore, Leonore who was nothing, or should have been nothing to her sister"s lover, curiosity gave place to another feeling.
So how? He would spy if he chose.
He would jolly well discover what the devil those two were about? They were up to no good hiding away by themselves in the woods, and, d.a.m.nation! holding each other"s hands.
That beast Paul--he had always thought him a beast--no, he hadn"t, but he did now--so he was playing a double game, was he? Engaged to Maud, and flirting with Leo under the rose?
Leo could flirt, of course; she had made a fool of himself once,--but he had got it into his head that she rather disliked Paul;--she had never cracked him up as the rest did,--oh, she was a cunning, crafty little jade, and he would put a spoke in her wheel, be hanged if he didn"t!
The undergrowth was so thick at the point to which Paul had half led, half dragged his trembling companion at this juncture, that it was easy for a third person to draw very near unperceived,--and though much that now pa.s.sed was unintelligible to one not possessed of the key of the mystery, Val heard enough.
He did not indeed hear any love-making,--but instinct guided him straight to the mark which another by reasoning might have failed to reach. He was as fully convinced that Maud had been supplanted as if he had heard the fact avowed a hundred times; and though he stole off, afraid to linger, before Paul"s final adjuration which might have puzzled and mystified him, he had got as much as his brain could carry, and got it in very good order.
The next day he presented himself at Boldero Abbey. His plan of campaign, conned over and over with ever-increasing wrath and valour, was not confided to gran. Gran had never liked Maud, and in old days he would often affect a hopeless pa.s.sion for the latter for the sake of getting amus.e.m.e.nt out of the old lady. Then an argument would ensue, and he very nearly felt the pa.s.sion. He could not see that one Boldero was not as good as another; and as he could not be bluntly told that Leonore had money while her sister had not, he held to it that gran was prejudiced to the point of injustice. Accordingly he kept his own counsel now, and plumed himself thereon mightily.
And Fortune favoured him; for though all the ladies were at home, the one he sought was by herself in the drawing-room, when he was ushered in.
"I say, it"s you I want," said Val, immediately. "Look here, Maud, I want to see you alone, and without any one"s knowing. Where are the others?"
"Sue and Sybil are out----"
"But I was told they were in!"
"That"s Grier"s laziness. He has grown intolerably lazy of late. As he is under notice to go, he won"t put himself out of his way for any one of us, and says "At Home" or "Not at Home," just as it suits him, without taking the trouble of finding out."
"Where are they gone?" demanded Val, as usual diverted from his course by any chance observation. Despite the purpose with which he was big, he could not help feeling inquisitive as to which house in the neighbourhood was being honoured.