She took no notice of the compliment. She calmly put it away from her as if it had not reached her ears.
"I have no friend to take care of me," she said simply. "I was sad and sorry this evening, all by myself, and I thought I would go to the Gardens and hear the music, just to amuse me. It is not much to pay at the gate; only a shilling."
"No friend to take care of you?" I repeated. "Surely there must be one happy man who might have been here with you to-night?"
"What man do you mean?" she asked.
"The man," I answered thoughtlessly, "whom we call, in England, a Sweetheart."
I would have given worlds to have recalled those foolish words the moment they pa.s.sed my lips. I felt that I had taken a vulgar liberty with her. Her face saddened; her eyes dropped to the ground. I begged her pardon.
"There is no need to beg my pardon," she said. "If you wish to know, sir--yes, I had once a sweetheart, as you call it in England. He has gone away and left me. No more of him, if you please. I am rested now. I will thank you again, and go home."
She rose to leave me.
I was determined not to part with her in that way. I begged to be allowed to see her safely back to her own door. She hesitated. I took a man"s unfair advantage of her, by appealing to her fears. I said, "Suppose the blackguard who annoyed you should be waiting outside the gates?" That decided her. She took my arm. We went away together by the bank of the Thames, in the balmy summer night.
A walk of half an hour brought us to the house in which she lodged--a shabby little house in a by-street, inhabited evidently by very poor people.
She held out her hand at the door, and wished me good-night. I was too much interested in her to consent to leave my little foreign lady without the hope of seeing her again. I asked permission to call on her the next day. We were standing under the light of the street-lamp. She studied my face with a grave and steady attention before she made any reply.
"Yes," she said at last. "I think I do know a gentleman when I see him.
You may come, sir, if you please, and call upon me to-morrow."
So we parted. So I entered--doubting nothing, foreboding nothing--on a scene in my life which I now look back on with unfeigned repentance and regret.
III.
I AM speaking at this later time in the position of a clergyman, and in the character of a man of mature age. Remember that; and you will understand why I pa.s.s as rapidly as possible over the events of the next year of my life--why I say as little as I can of the errors and the delusions of my youth.
I called on her the next day. I repeated my visits during the days and weeks that followed, until the shabby little house in the by-street had become a second and (I say it with shame and self-reproach) a dearer home to me.
All of herself and her story which she thought fit to confide to me under these circ.u.mstances may be repeated to you in few words.
The name by which letters were addressed to her was "Mademoiselle Jeromette." Among the ignorant people of the house and the small tradesmen of the neighborhood--who found her name not easy of p.r.o.nunciation by the average English tongue--she was known by the friendly nickname of "The French Miss." When I knew her, she was resigned to her lonely life among strangers. Some years had elapsed since she had lost her parents, and had left France. Possessing a small, very small, income of her own, she added to it by coloring miniatures for the photographers. She had relatives still living in France; but she had long since ceased to correspond with them. "Ask me nothing more about my family," she used to say. "I am as good as dead in my own country and among my own people."
This was all--literally all--that she told me of herself. I have never discovered more of her sad story from that day to this.
She never mentioned her family name--never even told me what part of France she came from or how long she had lived in England. That she was by birth and breeding a lady, I could entertain no doubt; her manners, her accomplishments, her ways of thinking and speaking, all proved it.
Looking below the surface, her character showed itself in aspects not common among young women in these days. In her quiet way she was an incurable fatalist, and a firm believer in the ghostly reality of apparitions from the dead. Then again in the matter of money, she had strange views of her own. Whenever my purse was in my hand, she held me resolutely at a distance from first to last. She refused to move into better apartments; the shabby little house was clean inside, and the poor people who lived in it were kind to her--and that was enough. The most expensive present that she ever permitted me to offer her was a little enameled ring, the plainest and cheapest thing of the kind in the jeweler"s shop. In all relations with me she was sincerity itself. On all occasions, and under all circ.u.mstances, she spoke her mind (as the phrase is) with the same uncompromising plainness.
"I like you," she said to me; "I respect you; I shall always be faithful to you while you are faithful to me. But my love has gone from me. There is another man who has taken it away with him, I know not where."
Who was the other man?
She refused to tell me. She kept his rank and his name strict secrets from me. I never discovered how he had met with her, or why he had left her, or whether the guilt was his of making of her an exile from her country and her friends. She despised herself for still loving him; but the pa.s.sion was too strong for her--she owned it and lamented it with the frankness which was so preeminently a part of her character. More than this, she plainly told me, in the early days of our acquaintance, that she believed he would return to her. It might be to-morrow, or it might be years hence. Even if he failed to repent of his own cruel conduct, the man would still miss her, as something lost out of his life; and, sooner or later, he would come back.
"And will you receive him if he does come back?" I asked.
"I shall receive him," she replied, "against my own better judgment--in spite of my own firm persuasion that the day of his return to me will bring with it the darkest days of my life."
I tried to remonstrate with her.
"You have a will of your own," I said. "Exert it if he attempts to return to you."
"I have no will of my own," she answered quietly, "where _he_ is concerned. It is my misfortune to love him." Her eyes rested for a moment on mine, with the utter self-abandonment of despair. "We have said enough about this," she added abruptly. "Let us say no more."
From that time we never spoke again of the unknown man. During the year that followed o ur first meeting, she heard nothing of him directly or indirectly. He might be living, or he might be dead. There came no word of him, or from him. I was fond enough of her to be satisfied with this--he never disturbed us.
IV.
THE year pa.s.sed--and the end came. Not the end as you may have antic.i.p.ated it, or as I might have foreboded it.
You remember the time when your letters from home informed you of the fatal termination of our mother"s illness? It is the time of which I am now speaking. A few hours only before she breathed her last, she called me to her bedside, and desired that we might be left together alone.
Reminding me that her death was near, she spoke of my prospects in life; she noticed my want of interest in the studies which were then supposed to be engaging my attention, and she ended by entreating me to reconsider my refusal to enter the Church.
"Your father"s heart is set upon it," she said. "Do what I ask of you, my dear, and you will help to comfort him when I am gone."
Her strength failed her: she could say no more. Could I refuse the last request she would ever make to me? I knelt at the bedside, and took her wasted hand in mine, and solemnly promised her the respect which a son owes to his mother"s last wishes.
Having bound myself by this sacred engagement, I had no choice but to accept the sacrifice which it imperatively exacted from me. The time had come when I must tear myself free from all unworthy a.s.sociations.
No matter what the effort cost me, I must separate myself at once and forever from the unhappy woman who was not, who never could be, my wife.
At the close of a dull foggy day I set forth with a heavy heart to say the words which were to part us forever.
Her lodging was not far from the banks of the Thames. As I drew near the place the darkness was gathering, and the broad surface of the river was hidden from me in a chill white mist. I stood for a while, with my eyes fixed on the vaporous shroud that brooded over the flowing water--I stood and asked myself in despair the one dreary question: "What am I to say to her?"
The mist chilled me to the bones. I turned from the river-bank, and made my way to her lodgings hard by. "It must be done!" I said to myself, as I took out my key and opened the house door.
She was not at her work, as usual, when I entered her little sitting-room. She was standing by the fire, with her head down and with an open letter in her hand.
The instant she turned to meet me, I saw in her face that something was wrong. Her ordinary manner was the manner of an unusually placid and self-restrained person. Her temperament had little of the liveliness which we a.s.sociate in England with the French nature. She was not ready with her laugh; and in all my previous experience, I had never yet known her to cry. Now, for the first time, I saw the quiet face disturbed; I saw tears in the pretty brown eyes. She ran to meet me, and laid her head on my breast, and burst into a pa.s.sionate fit of weeping that shook her from head to foot.
Could she by any human possibility have heard of the coming change in my life? Was she aware, before I had opened my lips, of the hard necessity which had brought me to the house?
It was simply impossible; the thing could not be.
I waited until her first burst of emotion had worn itself out. Then I asked--with an uneasy conscience, with a sinking heart--what had happened to distress her.
She drew herself away from me, sighing heavily, and gave me the open letter which I had seen in her hand.
"Read that," she said. "And remember I told you what might happen when we first met."
I read the letter.
It was signed in initials only; but the writer plainly revealed himself as the man who had deserted her. He had repented; he had returned to her. In proof of his penitence he was willing to do her the justice which he had hitherto refused--he was willing to marry her, on the condition that she would engage to keep the marriage a secret, so long as his parents lived. Submitting this proposal, he waited to know whether she would consent, on her side, to forgive and forget.
I gave her back the letter in silence. This unknown rival had done me the service of paving the way for our separation. In offering her the atonement of marriage, he had made it, on my part, a matter of duty to _her_, as well as to myself, to say the parting words. I felt this instantly. And yet, I hated him for helping me.