Marcella

She looked astonished, and drew herself up nervously, turning at the same time to leave the room. But before she could reply he hurried on:

"He--may escape his risk. Give your pity, Miss Boyce, rather to one--who has not escaped!"

"I don"t know what you mean," she said, unconsciously laying a hand on one of the old chairs beside her to steady herself. "But it is too late to talk. Good-night, Mr. Wharton."

"Good-bye," he said quietly, yet with a low emphasis, at the same time moving out of her path. She stopped, hesitating. Beneath the lace and faded flowers on her breast he could see how her heart beat.

"Not good-bye? You are coming back after the meeting?"

"I think not. I must not inflict myself--on Mrs. Boyce--any more. You will all be very busy during the next three weeks. It would be an intrusion if I were to come back at such a time--especially--considering the fact"--he spoke slowly--"that I am as distasteful as I now know myself to be, to your future husband. Since you all left to-night the house has been very quiet. I sat over the fire thinking. It grew clear to me. I must go, and go at once. Besides--a lonely man as I am must not risk his nerve. His task is set him, and there are none to stand by him if he fails."

She trembled all over. Weariness and excitement made normal self-control almost impossible.

"Well, then, I must say thank you," she said indistinctly, "for you have taught me a great deal."

"You will unlearn it!" he said gaily, recovering his self-possession, so it seemed, as she lost hers. "Besides, before many weeks are over you will have heard hard things of me. I know that very well. I can say nothing to meet them. Nor should I attempt anything. It may sound brazen, but that past of mine, which I can see perpetually present in Aldous Raeburn"s mind, for instance, and which means so much to his good aunt, means to me just nothing at all! The doctrine of ident.i.ty must be true--I must be the same person I was then. But, all the same, what I did then does not matter a straw to me now. To all practical purposes I am another man. I was then a youth, idle, _desoeuvre_, playing with all the keys of life in turn. I have now unlocked the path that suits me.

Its quest has transformed me--as I believe, enn.o.bled me. I do not ask Raeburn or any one else to believe it. It is my own affair. Only, if we ever meet again in life, you and I, and you think you have reason to ask humiliation of me, do not ask it, do not expect it. The man you will have in your mind has nothing to do with me. I will not be answerable for his sins."

As he said these things he was leaning lightly forward, looking up at her, his arms resting on the back of one of the old chairs, one foot crossed over the other. The att.i.tude was easy calm itself. The tone--indomitable, a.n.a.lytic, reflective--matched it. Yet, all the same, her woman"s instinct divined a hidden agitation, and, woman-like, responded to that and that only.

"Mr. Raeburn will never tell me old stories about anybody," she said proudly. "I asked him once, out--out of curiosity--about you, and he would tell me nothing."

"Generous!" said Wharton, drily. "I am grateful."

"No!" cried Marcella, indignantly, rushing blindly at the outlet for emotion. "No!--you are not grateful; you are always judging him harshly--criticising, despising what he does."

Wharton was silent a moment. Even in the moonlight she could see the reddening of his cheek.

"So be it," he said at last. "I submit. You must know best. But you? are you always content? Does this _milieu_ into which you are pa.s.sing always satisfy you? To-night, did your royalty please you? will it soon be enough for you?"

"You know it is not enough," she broke out, hotly; "it is insulting that you should ask in that tone. It means that you think me a hypocrite!--and I have given you no cause--"

"Good heavens, no!" he exclaimed, interrupting her, and speaking in a low, hurried voice. "I had no motive, no reason for what I said--none--but this, that you are going--that we are parting. I spoke in gibes to make you speak--somehow to strike--to reach you. To-morrow it will be too late!"

And before, almost, she knew that he had moved, he had stooped forward, caught a fold of her dress, pressed it to his lips, and dropped it.

"Don"t speak," he said brokenly, springing up, and standing before her in her path. "You shall forgive me--I will compel it! See! here we are on this moonlit s.p.a.ce of floor, alone, in the night. Very probably we shall never meet again, except as strangers. Put off convention, and speak to me, soul to soul! You are not happy altogether in this marriage. I know it. You have as good as confessed it. Yet you will go through with it. You have given your word--your honour holds you. I recognise that it holds you. I say nothing, not a syllable, against your bond! But here, to-night, tell me, promise me that you will make this marriage of yours serve _our_ hopes and ends, the ends that you and I have foreseen together--that it shall be your instrument, not your chain. We have been six weeks together. You say you have learnt from me; you have! you have given me your mind, your heart to write on, and I have written. Henceforward you will never look at life as you might have done if I had not been here. Do you think I triumph, that I boast? Ah!"

he drew in his breath--"What if in helping you, and teaching you--for I have helped and taught you!--I have undone myself? What if I came here the slave of impersonal causes, of ends not my own? What if I leave--maimed--in face of the battle? Not your fault? No, perhaps not!

but, at least, you owe me some gentleness now, in these last words--some kindness in farewell."

He came closer, held out his hands. With one of her own she put his back, and lifted the other dizzily to her forehead.

"Don"t come near me!" she said, tottering. "What is it? I cannot see.

Go!"

And guiding herself, as though blindfold, to a chair, she sank upon it, and her head dropped. It was the natural result of a moment of intense excitement coming upon nerves already strained and tried to their utmost. She fought desperately against her weakness; but there was a moment when all around her swam, and she knew nothing.

Then came a strange awakening. What was this room, this weird light, these unfamiliar forms of things, this warm support against which her cheek lay? She opened her eyes languidly. They met Wharton"s half in wonder. He was kneeling beside her, holding her. But for an instant she realised nothing except his look, to which her own helplessly replied.

"Once!" she heard him whisper. "Once! Then nothing more--for ever."

And stooping, slowly, deliberately, he kissed her.

In a stinging flow, life, shame, returned upon her. She struggled to her feet, pushing him from her.

"You dared," she said, "_dared_ such a thing!"

She could say no more; but her att.i.tude, fiercely instinct, through all her physical weakness, with her roused best self, was speech enough. He did not venture to approach her. She walked away. He heard the door close, hurrying steps on the little stairs, then silence.

He remained where she had left him, leaning against the latticed wall for some time. When he moved it was to pick up a piece of maidenhair which had dropped from her dress.

"That was a scene!" he said, looking at it, and at the trembling of his own hand. "It carries one back to the days of the Romantics. Was I Alfred de Musset?--and she George Sand? Did any of them ever taste a more poignant moment than I--when she--lay upon my breast? To be helpless--yet yield nothing--it challenged me! Yet I took no advantage--none. When she _looked_--when her eye, her _soul_, was, for that instant, mine, then!--Well!--the world has rushed with me since I saw her on the stairs; life can bring me nothing of such a quality again. What did I say?--how much did I mean? My G.o.d! how can I tell? I began as an actor, did I finish as a man?"

He paced up and down, thinking; gradually, by the help of an iron will quieting down each rebellious pulse.

"That poacher fellow did me a good turn. _Dare_! the word galled. But, after all, what woman could say less? And what matter? I have held her in my arms, in a setting--under a moon--worthy of her. Is not life enriched thereby beyond robbery? And what harm? Raeburn is not injured.

_She_ will never tell--and neither of us will ever forget. Ah!--what was that?"

He walked quickly to the window. What he had heard had been a dull report coming apparently from the woods beyond the eastern side of the avenue. As he reached the window it was followed by a second.

"That poacher"s gun?--no doubt!"--he strained his eyes in vain--"Collision perhaps--and mischief? No matter! I have nothing to do with it. The world is all lyric for me to-night. I can hear in it no other rhythm."

The night pa.s.sed away. When the winter morning broke, Marcella was lying with wide sleepless eyes, waiting and pining for it. Her candle still burnt beside her; she had had no courage for darkness, nor the smallest desire for sleep. She had gone through shame and anguish. But she would have scorned to pity herself. Was it not her natural, inevitable portion?

"I will tell Aldous everything--_everything_," she said to herself for the hundredth time, as the light penetrated. "Was _that_ only seven striking--_seven_--impossible!"

She sat up haggard and restless, hardly able to bear the thought of the hours that must pa.s.s before she could see Aldous--put all to the touch.

Suddenly she remembered Hurd--then old Patton.

"He was dying last night," she thought, in her moral torment--her pa.s.sion to get away from herself. "Is he gone? This is the hour when old people die--the dawn. I will go and see--go at once."

She sprang up. To baffle this ache within her by some act of repentance, of social amends, however small, however futile--to propitiate herself, if but by a hairbreadth--this, no doubt, was the instinct at work. She dressed hastily, glad of the cold, glad of the effort she had to make against the stiffness of her own young bones--glad of her hunger and faintness, of everything physically hard that had to be fought and conquered.

In a very short time she had pa.s.sed quietly downstairs and through the hall, greatly to the amazement of William, who opened the front door for her. Once in the village road the damp raw air revived her greatly. She lifted her hot temples to it, welcoming the waves of wet mist that swept along the road, feeling her youth come back to her.

Suddenly as she was nearing the end of a narrow bit of lane between high hedges, and the first houses of the village were in sight, she was stopped by a noise behind her--a strange unaccountable noise as of women"s voices, calling and wailing. It startled and frightened her, and she stood in the middle of the road waiting.

Then she saw coming towards her two women running at full speed, crying and shouting, their ap.r.o.ns up to their faces.

"What is it? What is the matter?" she asked, going to meet them, and recognising two labourers" wives she knew.

"Oh! miss--oh! miss!" said the foremost, too wrapt up in her news to be surprised at the sight of her. "They"ve just found him--they"re bringin"

ov "im home; they"ve got a shutter from Muster Wellin! "im at Disley Farm. It wor close by Disley wood they found "em. And there"s one ov "is men they"ve sent off ridin" for the inspector--here he come, miss! Come out o" th" way!"

They dragged her back, and a young labourer galloped past them on a farm colt, urging it on to its full pace, his face red and set.