He looked at her steadily as he replied,
"It does seem at this moment as though a great deal were possible."
There was an eloquent pause, during which the hall clock struck loudly.
Its sound roused Percivale, and he began his questioning.
"First of all, I want to know exactly what happened during your walk with your brother yesterday. Can you remember, and will you tell me carefully, what time you started, where you went, and how you parted?
For all these things are of great importance."
"Yes; I will tell you exactly what happened. It was about half-past-two o"clock when my aunts said I was to go out with G.o.dfrey. I did not want to go--for two reasons, both of which I will tell you. The first was that I was feeling very miserable because I had just said good-bye to my friends the Allonbys, who were gone to London----"
"You will forgive me interrupting you one moment," he said, in a very still voice, and with a fixed expression, "but Mrs. Orton this morning said that you were going to be married. May I ask if you are engaged to Mr. Allonby, because if so I think he ought to be telegraphed for--it would not be my place--I am not privileged----"
He broke off and waited. After a moment she said,
"I am not engaged to Mr. Allonby."
"Thank you. I hope you did not think I was unnecessarily curious?"
"No."
"And now to continue. What other reason had you for not wishing to go out with G.o.dfrey?"
"He had been very rude a fortnight before, and Mr. Allonby punished him.
I knew he would try to revenge himself on me as soon as Mr. Allonby was gone--he said so."
"Exactly; but you went?"
"Yes, I was obliged to go. So we started along the Quarry Road, and when we got some way we began to quarrel. I had a book with me that Mr.
Allonby had given me, and G.o.dfrey tried to take it away. I would not let him, and he grew very angry. I held it above my head, and he sprung up and hung on me, and managed somehow to get his foot underneath mine, so that I slipped on the road, and he got the book. I was feeling very low-spirited, and so weary of his tiresome ways that I began to cry. We were on the road leading to the cliff from the quarries, close to the cottage where Mrs. Parker lives. She has a son called Saul who is an idiot, and he hates G.o.dfrey, because he used to set his bull-dog at him.
The other day Saul threw a stone at G.o.dfrey from behind a tree, and hit his leg, and so G.o.dfrey was determined to pay him out. When he saw the cottage it reminded him of this, so he said he should run home to the stable-yard, and get Venom, his dog. He turned back, and ran along the road towards home, and I was too tired and too unhappy to follow him. I thought I would give him the slip, so I just went off and hid myself in the woods by Boveney Hollow. I sat in the woods and cried for a long time, and at last the wind had risen so, and the sky looked so black and threatening, that I was frightened, and I guessed that G.o.dfrey had gone home by that time, so I came out of the woods by the shortest way, and when I reached the high-road I met Mr. Fowler and Mr. Cranmer, so I went home with them."
"And that was the last you saw of your brother?"
"Yes."
"He ran home to fetch his dog, in order to set it at Saul Parker the idiot?"
"Yes. He had done it before. He said it was to teach Saul to behave himself; for you know poor Saul doesn"t know any manners, and he is always rude to strangers, he hates them so. If he so much as sees the back of a person he does not know, he begins to scream with rage."
"Is he--this idiot--considered dangerous?"
"Dangerous? Oh, no, I think he is quite gentle, unless you tease him. At least, I do remember Clara Battishill saying that he was growing cruel.
He is a big boy. Mr. Fowler tried to persuade his mother to let him go to a home, where they would teach him to occupy himself; but she cried so bitterly at the idea of losing him; he is all she has to love."
Mr. Percivale was silent; his eyes perused the pattern of the worn carpet.
Furtively Elsa lifted her eyelids, and critically examined his face. A high, n.o.ble-looking head, the eyes of a dreamer, the chin of a poet, the mouth of a man both resolute and pure.
His fair moustache did not obscure the firm sweet line between the lips; something there was about him which did not belong to the nineteenth century; an atmosphere of lofty purpose and ideal simplicity. His expression was quite unlike anything one is accustomed to see. There was no cynicism, no spite, no half-amused, half-bored tolerance of a trivial world--none of that air of being exactly equipped for the circ.u.mstances in which he found himself, which belonged so completely to Claud Cranmer.
This was a nature quite apart from its surroundings--a nature which had formed an ideal, and would never mingle but with the realization of this ideal. For this man the chances of happiness were terribly few; he could never adapt himself, never consent to put up with anything lower or less than he had dreamed of. If by the mysterious workings of fate he could meet and win a woman whose soul was as pure, whose standard as lofty as his own, he would enjoy a happiness undreamed of here below by the many thousands who soar not above mediocrity; but if--if, as was so terribly probable, he should make a mistake; if, after all, he took Leah instead of Rachel, he would touch a depth of misery and despair equally unknown to the generality of mankind. For him existed no possibility of compromise; his one hope of felicity rested upon the simple accident of whom he should fall in love with. And, by a strange paradox, the very loftiness of his nature and singleness of his mind rendered him far less capable of forming a true judgment than a man like Claud, who had "dipped in life"s struggle and out again," had many times
"... tried in a crucible To what "speeches like gold" were reducible, And found that the bravest prove copper."
It seems a necessity, more or less, to judge human nature from one"s own standpoint; and not only the bent of his mind, but the circ.u.mstances of his life, had held Percivale always aloof from the hurrying rush of modern society, from intrigue, or deceptions, or, in fact, from what is called knowledge of the world in any form.
Hence the statuesque simplicity of his expression. Meanness, pa.s.sion, compet.i.tion were words of which he understood the meaning but had never felt the force. His face was like Thorwaldsen"s sculptures--chivalrous, calm, steadfast.
The reddish gold of his soft hair and short beard, the deep violet blue of his deep-set eyes, and the delicate character of his profile were all in harmony with this idea. He was artistic and picturesque with the unconsciousness of a by-gone age, not with the studied straining after effect which obtains to-day.
He did not feel Elsa"s eyes as they studied him so intently and so ignorantly. Not one of the characteristics above indicated was visible to the girl; she only wondered how he could be so handsome and so interesting with that strange-colored hair; and how old he was; and what he thought of her; and whether he would be able to cleave through the terrible net of horror and suspicion and fear which was drawing so closely round her.
At last he raised his head, met her fixed regard, and, meeting it, smiled.
"You have told me just what I wanted--what I hoped to hear," said he.
"Now I must take leave for the present. I shall come up the first thing to-morrow morning to report progress."
CHAPTER XXIX.
The pride Of the day--my Swan--that a first fleck"s fall On her wonder of white must unswan, undo!
_The Worst of It._
It was evening when Percivale left Edge Willoughby, and walked slowly down the terrace, accompanied by dear little Miss f.a.n.n.y, who had undertaken to show him the stile leading to the foot-path which was the nearest way to the quarries.
Jackie, the chough, was strutting along the gravel in much self-importance, his body all sideways, his bright eye fixed on the stranger, and uttering his unmusical cry of, "Jack-ee! Jack-ee!"
The young man paused, bent down, and caressed the bird, spite of the formidable-looking orange beak.
"What a queer old chap!" he said.
"Yes, he is quite a pet. Elsa is very fond of him," said Miss f.a.n.n.y, seizing as eagerly as he had done on any topic of conversation which was not too heavily charged with emotion to be possible.
Of the terrible issues so near at hand neither dared to speak. As if nothing more unusual than an afternoon call had transpired, Percivale asked of Jacky"s age and extraction, learned that he was a Cornishman by birth, and of eccentric disposition, and so travelled safely along the wide gravel-walk, on one side of which the garden rose abruptly up, whilst on the other it sloped as suddenly down, losing itself in a maze of chrysanthemums, gooseberry-bushes, potatoes, and scarlet-runners, till a tall thorn hedge intervened to separate the garden from the cornfield, where the "mows" lay scattered about in every direction, dispersed and driven by the tempest of last night.
So they gained the stile, and here Miss f.a.n.n.y paused.
"If you go down the hill by the foot-path, you will come out on the main road," she said, pointing with her dear little fat finger.
"Thank you. Mr. Cranmer will meet me somewhere on the road--he said he would. I--I shall see you again as soon as--directly--as I said to your sister," stammered the young man, in an unfinished, fragmentary way.
He took her hand, with the graceful gravity which characterized all his greetings of women.