"I noticed you talked to me a good deal; but I thought you did exactly the same to Lady Grace, and others."
"You could not imagine that I talked to others--to any other woman in the world--as I did to you."
"I supposed," said Ruth, simply, "that you talked gayly to Lady Grace because it suited her; and more gravely to me, because I am naturally grave. I thought at the time you were rather clever in adapting yourself to different people so easily; and I was glad that I understood your manner better than some of the others."
"Better!" said Charles, bitterly. "Better, when you thought that of me!
No, you need not say anything. I was in fault, not you. I don"t know what right I had to imagine you understood me--you seemed to understand me--to fancy that we had anything in common, that in time--" He broke into a low wretched laugh. "And all the while you were engaged to another man! Good G.o.d, what a farce! what a miserable mistake from first to last!"
Ruth said nothing. It was indeed a miserable mistake.
He rose wearily to his feet.
"I was forgetting," he said; "it is time to go home." And they went back together in silence, which was more bearable than speech just then.
The peac.o.c.ks were still pirouetting and minuetting on the stone bal.u.s.trade as they came back to the garden. The gong began to sound as they entered the piazza.
To Ruth it was a dreadful meal. She tried to listen to Mr. Conway"s account of the gray cob, or to the placid conversation of Mr. Alwynn about the beloved ma.n.u.scripts. Fortunately the morning papers were full of a recent forgery in America, and a murder in London, which furnished topics when these were exhausted, and Charles used them to the utmost.
At last the carriage came. Mr. Alwynn and Mr. Conway simultaneously broke into incoherent e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns respecting the pleasure of their visit; Ruth"s hand met Charles"s for an embarra.s.sed second; and a moment later they were whirling down the straight wide approach, between the columns of fantastically clipped hollies, leaving Charles standing in the door-way. He was still standing there when the carriage rolled under the arched gate-way with its rampant stone lions. Ruth glanced back once, as they turned into the road, at the stately old house, with its pointed gables and forests of chimneys cutting the gray sky-line. She saw the owner turn slowly and go up the steps, and looked hastily away again.
"Poor Danvers!" said Mr. Alwynn, cheerfully, also looking, and putting Ruth"s thoughts into words. "He must be desperately lonely in that house all by himself; but I suppose he is not often there."
And Mr. Alwynn, whose mind had been entirely relieved since Ruth"s engagement from the dark suspicion he had once harbored respecting Charles, proceeded to dilate upon the merits of the charters, and of the owner of the charters, until he began to think Ruth had a headache, and finding it to be the case, talked no more till they reached, at the end of their little journey, the door of Slumberleigh Rectory.
"Is it very bad?" he asked, kindly, as he helped her out of the carriage.
Ruth a.s.sented, fortunately with some faint vestige of truth, for her hat hurt her forehead.
"Then run up straight to your own room, and I will tell your aunt that you will come and have a chat with her later on, perhaps after tea, when the post will be gone." Mr. Alwynn spoke in the whisper of stratagem.
Ruth was only too thankful to be allowed to slip on tiptoe to her own room, but she had not been there many minutes when a tap came to the door.
"There, my dear," said Mr. Alwynn, putting his head in, and holding some letters towards her. "Your aunt ought to have forwarded them. I brought them up at once. And there is nearly an hour to post-time, and she won"t expect you to come down till then. I think the headache will be better now, eh?"
He nodded kindly to her, and closed the door again. Ruth sat down mechanically, and began to sort the packet he had put into her hands.
The first three letters were in the same handwriting, Dare"s large vague handwriting, that ran from one end of the envelope to the other, and partly hid itself under the stamp.
She looked at them, but did not open them. A feeling of intense la.s.situde and fatigue had succeeded to the unconscious excitement of the morning. She could not read them now. They must wait with the others.
Presently she could feel an interest in them; not now.
She leaned her head upon her hand, and a rush of pity swept away every other feeling as she recalled that last look at Stoke Moreton, and how Charles had turned so slowly and wearily to go in-doors. There was an ache at her heart as she thought of him, a sense of regret and loss. And he had loved her all the time!
"If I had only known!" she said to herself, pressing her hands against her forehead. "But how could I tell--how could I tell?"
She raised her head with a sudden movement, and began with nervous fingers to open Dare"s letters, and read them carefully.
CHAPTER XIX.
In the long evening that followed Ruth"s departure from Stoke Moreton, Charles was alone for once in his own home. He was leaving again early on the morrow, but for the time he was alone, and heavy at heart. He sat for hours without stirring, looking into the fire. He had no power or will to control his thoughts. They wandered hither and thither, and up and down, never for a moment easing the dull miserable pain that lay beneath them all.
Fool! fool that he had been!
To have found her after all these years, and to have lost her without a stroke! To have let another take her, and such a man as Dare! To have such a fool"s manner that he was thought to be in earnest when he was least so; that now, when his whole future hung in the balance, retribution had overtaken him, and with bitter irony had mocked at his earnestness and made it of none effect. She had thought it was his natural manner to all! His cursed folly had lost her to him. If she had known, surely it would have been, it must have been different. At heart Charles was a very humble man, though it was not to be expected many would think so; but nevertheless he had a deep, ever-deepening consciousness (common to the experience of the humblest once in a lifetime) that between him and Ruth that mysterious link of mutual understanding and sympathy existed which cannot be accounted for, which eludes a.n.a.lysis, which yet makes, when the s.e.x happens to be identical, the indissoluble friendship of a David and a Jonathan, a Karlos and a Posa; and, where there is a difference of s.e.x, brings about that rarest wonder of the world, a happy marriage.
Like cleaves to like. He knew she would have loved him. She was his by right. The same law of attraction which had lifted them at once out of the dreary flats of ordinary acquaintanceship would have drawn them ever closer and closer together till they were knit in one. He knew, with a certainty that nothing could shake, that he could have made her love him, even as he loved her; unconsciously at first, slowly perhaps--for the current of strong natures, like that of deep rivers, is sometimes slow. Still the end would have been the same.
And he had lost her by his own act, by his own heedless folly; her want of vanity having lent a hand the while to put her beyond his reach forever.
It was a bitter hour.
And as he sat late into the night beside the fire, that died down to dust and ashes before his absent eyes, ghosts of other heavy hours, ghosts of the past, which he had long since buried out of his sight, came back and would not be denied.
To live much in the past, is a want of faith in the Power that gives the present. Comparatively few men walk through their lives looking backward. Women more frequently do so from a false estimate of life fostered by romantic feeling in youth, which leads them, if the life of the affections is ended, resolutely to refuse to regard existence in any other maturer aspect, and to persist in wandering aimlessly forward, with eyes turned ever on the dim flowery paths of former days.
"Let the dead past bury its dead."
But there comes a time, when the gra.s.s has grown over those graves, when we may do well to go and look at them once more; to stand once again in that solitary burial-ground, "where," as an earnest man has said, "are buried broken vows, worn-out hopes, joys blind and deaf, faiths betrayed or gone astray--lost, lost love; silent s.p.a.ces where only one mourner ever comes."
And to the last retrospective of us our dead past yet speaks at times, and speaks as one having authority.
Such a time had come for Charles now. From the open grave of his love for Ruth he turned to look at others by which he had stood long ago, in grief as sharp, but which yet in all its bitterness had never struck as deep as this.
Memory pointed back to a time twenty years ago, when he had hurried home through a long summer night to arrive at Stoke Moreton too late; to find only the solemn shadow of the mother whom he had loved, and whom he had grieved; too late to ask for forgiveness; too late for anything but a wild pa.s.sion of grief and remorse, and frantic self-accusation.
The scene shifted to ten years later. It was a sultry July evening of the day on which the woman whom he had loved for years had married his brother. He was standing on the deck of the steamer which was taking him from England, looking back at the gray town dwindling against the tawny curtain of the sunset. In his brain was a wild clamor of wedding-bells, and across the water, marking the pulse of the sea, came to his outward ears the slow tolling of a bell on a sunken rock near the harbor mouth.
It seemed to be tolling for the death of all that remained of good in him. In losing Evelyn, whom he had loved with all the idealism and reverence of a reckless man for a good woman, he believed, in the bitterness of his spirit, that he had lost all; that he had been cut adrift from the last mooring to a better future, that nothing could hold him back now. And for a time it had been so, and he had drowned his trouble in a sea in which he wellnigh drowned himself as well.
Once more memory pointed--pointed across five dark years to an evening when he had sat as he was sitting now, alone by the wide stone hearth in the hall at Stoke Moreton, after his father"s death, and after the reading of the will. He was the possessor of the old home, which he had always pa.s.sionately loved, from which he had been virtually banished so long. His father, who had never liked him, but who of late years had hated him as men only hate their eldest sons, had left all in his power to his second son, had entailed every acre of the Stoke Moreton and other family properties upon him and his children. Charles could touch nothing, and over him hung a millstone of debt, from which there was now no escape. He sat with his head in his hands--the man whom his friends were envying on his accession to supposed wealth and position--ruined.
A few days later he was summoned to London by a friend whom he had known for many years. He remembered well that last meeting with the stern old man whom he had found sitting in his arm-chair with death in his face.
He had once or twice remonstrated with Charles in earlier days, and as he came into his presence now for the last time, and met his severe glance, he supposed, with the callousness that comes from suffering which has reached its lowest depths, that he was about to rebuke him again.
"And so," said General Marston, sternly, "you have come into your kingdom; into what you deserve."
"Yes," said Charles. "If it is any pleasure to you to know that what you prophesied on several occasions has come true, you can enjoy it. I am ruined!"
"You fool!" said the sick man slowly. "To have come to five-and-thirty, and to have used up everything which makes life worth having. I am not speaking only of money. There is a bankruptcy in your face that money will never pay. And you had talent and a good heart and the making of a man in you once. I saw that when your father turned you adrift. I saw that when you were at your worst after your brother"s marriage. Yes, you need not start. I knew your secret and kept it as well as you did yourself. I tried to stop you; but you went your own way."
Charles was silent. It was true, and he knew it.
"And so you thought, I suppose, that if your father had made a just will you could have retrieved yourself?"
"I know I could," said Charles, firmly; "but he left the ----shire property to Ralph, and every shilling of his capital; and Ralph had my mother"s fortune already. I have Stoke Moreton and the place in Surrey, which he could not take from me, but everything is entailed, down to the trees in the park. I have nominally a large income; but I am in the hands of the Jews. I can"t settle with them as I expected, and they will squeeze me to the uttermost. However, as you say, I have the consolation of knowing I brought it on myself."