CHAPTER XL
Of the three persons whose repose has been disturbed by the amours of Thomas the footman, only one is able to take up again the thread of interrupted slumber. Miss Blessington, having returned to her chamber, and having meditated calmly for a quarter of an hour on the knot in her destiny she has just untied, and having given one great sigh to the memory of the Gerard diamonds, lays down her golden scented head on her pillow again, and sleeps the sleep of the just. Miss Blessington has well nigh mastered the secret of eternal youth and perennial beauty – incapacity for feeling any emotion. It is hardly likely that the god Sleep, who loves a quiet house, will visit two such unquiet temples as the brains of St. John and Esther: he goes away from them utterly, taking his gentle poppyheads with him.
St. John walks miles and miles up and down his bedroom carpet, pondering, deeply and vexedly, not on what his own course of conduct shall be —that he is already determined upon – but on what effect Miss Blessington's coldly sceptical reception of his wildly improbable yet true tale is likely to have upon Esther.
And Esther herself, having conceived a mortal aversion for the shelter of the ginger-canopied pavilion, wraps a great shawl round her, and, sitting down on the deep window-seat, watches for the first streaks of dawn, which, on these winter mornings, are long, long coming. Though it is a winter night, her hands burn hot and dry; for the last few days she has had a sharp pain in her side – to-night it is getting yet sharper; it begins to hurt her to draw her breath. Two thoughts keep buzzing about her brain: "I am going to be ill," and "I am going to be turned away." She throws aside her shawl, but the dry burning still continues. She has sat here for hours now, and the dawn's feet are beginning slowly to climb the steps from the eastern gate. The battle between day and night is yet undecided; almost equally they divide the sky between them. Perhaps it is the night's excitement that has given her this fever; perhaps the cold morning air would refresh her. She waits until day's victory is complete, and then – being already dressed – puts on her hat and jacket, and steals noiselessly downstairs, to the garden door that has been the cause of so much mischief, out into the garden between the brown earthed beds, where the winter aconite's small yellow heads and green tippets are beginning to push themselves into sight, and thence into the park.
There is no wind abroad, only heavy rain-clouds outwalling the infant sun, and the unarmed air has a piercing chillness in it. Esther has not proceeded far, and is standing thoughtful on the brow of a little knoll, from whence one looks down on the dark flag-fringed pool, when she is aware of a footstep behind her; and the next instant St. John Gerard stands by her side.
"What have you come here for? Why have you followed me?" she asks, turning upon him in hasty dismay. "Miss Blessington's windows look this way – she will see us together."
"Let her see us," he answers, doggedly.
"She will never believe that it was by accident we have met," cries poor Esther, in great agitation.
"She will be right, then; it is not accident."
"She will think that it was an appointment!" she says, clasping her hands in unfeigned distress.
"Let her think so!"
"It is very well for you to talk in this way," she says, with passionate reproach. "You are a man – you may defy the opinion of the world; but is it so easy for me?"
"Why should her opinion concern either you or me?" he inquires, gravely. "What is she to either of us? Did not you last night, with your own ears, hear my dismissal pronounced?"
She stoops her head until her hat almost conceals her face from him.
"She was angry," she says, in a low voice; "she will be sorry for the things she said; she will forgive you."
"Will she?" he answers, quietly smiling. "I think not; to tell you the truth, I don't mean to ask her."
She lifts her face, suddenly earnest, to him.
"You must!" she says, eagerly. "You must explain to her, as you tried to do last night, that what happened then" (a painful blush) "is no possible reason why her engagement to you should be broken off. You must convince her of this – you must, indeed; for my sake you must!"
He looks down, frowning heavily.
"When a galley-slave's chains have been knocked off, must he handcuff himself again?"
"Why did you handcuff yourself at first?" she asks, with impulsive vehemence. "Whose doing was it but your own? What madness first impelled you to ask her to marry you?"
"Because," he answers, with emotion, fixing his upbraiding eyes upon her – "because I was smarting miserably under the blow you had just given me – you, who had made me mistrust everything attractive, and womanly, and innocent-seeming. I was obliged to marry some one; that is one of the many curses attached to being an eldest son, and the last male heir of an inconveniently old family. I said to myself, 'She is too dull to deceive me, too passionless to disgrace me.' I chose her because she was, of all the women I knew, the one least capable of calling forth emotion of any kind whatever in me – consequently, the one most powerless to make me suffer."
The words of his defence came quick and hurried. She is silent for a moment; then, uplifting imploring eyes to his: "Mr. Gerard," she says, tremblingly, "the twenty-four hours you asked me to allow you yesterday are nearly expired: have you come to say 'good-bye' to me? If so, it is well; you remember your promise?"
"I remember it," he answers, slowly, "and I am prepared to —break it. Don't look so reproachful, Esther! I am ready to make you as good a one instead. I am ready to swear," he says, his face all kindling in the grey cold morning with eager passion – "I am ready to swear to you that I will never leave you again, unless you send me away, until death do us part. Will that promise do as well as the other?"
She gives a little cry of astonishment. "What do you mean?" she asks, faintly, moving a step farther away from him.
"I mean," he says, solemnly, his countenance all shining with the light of a great new joy, "that I am sick of my life without you, Esther; and you – you are sick of yours without me, aren't you?"
She cannot deny it, and is unwilling to allow it; so keeps a troubled silence.
"There must be some reason," he continues, passionately, "for your failing health, for your thin white cheeks, for your total loss of beauty" (with a smile), "as Constance tersely worded it yesterday. Am I right; or is it my conceit that makes me think that I have some concern in the change?"
"You are mistaken," she cries, hastily – the idea that pity for her miserable appearance has brought him back to her flashing gallingly across her mind. "I was very fond of you —very; it was a great grief to me when you threw me away from you; but I could have done without you, if – if – I had not lost my boy."
She turns away, to hide her quivering lips and swelling tears: it is so seldom that she speaks of her dead, that the mere naming of him seems to make his loss the clearer.
Gerard's face falls a little. "Could you?" he says, simply and sadly. "No doubt! I was unreasonable to suppose that I could be indispensable to any one."
They walk on in silence side by side. It is beginning to rain, heavy drops ushering in a winter storm. The deer-barn is near – the deer-barn, with steep red roof, lichen-painted, standing on a little rise, among a company of ancient hornbeams, whose twisted trunks lean this way and that. For the last twenty years, every young lady that has come to stay at the hall has sketched the deer-barn.
"This is not fit weather for you to be out in," Gerard says, solicitously glancing at his companion's slight figure and fever-bright eyes. "Let us shelter here till the storm is over!"
Having reached it, Esther stands watching Heaven's quick large tears falling heavy on Earth's chill breast; St. John walks up and down on the rough earth-floor, buried in thought. At length, rousing himself, he approaches Esther, and speaks, calmly at first, but with increasing vehemence as he proceeds:
"Esther, I have been thinking what a short section of my life, counting by days and weeks, the time that I have known you forms; that month at Felton, when we had scarcely eyes or ears for any one but each other, and this month here, when we have hardly exchanged two words. I suppose I know very little about you, really; you may be a very bad worthless girl, for all I know to the contrary. God knows I have not had much reason to think you a very good one; and yet, good or bad – well, as you say, and as I have no reason to doubt, that you can get on without me – I cannot, for the life of me, bear any longer the dragging of the endless empty days without you. Esther!" he says, with passionate hunger in his eyes, "I want you! I must have you for my own! Is there now any reason why I should not?"
"Have you forgotten," she asks, with a melancholy smile, "the night when you told me that you would never forgive me, either in this world or the next? What have I done since to make you change your mind? I am no different to what I was then – unless, perhaps, I may be a little wickeder; I have been most unhappy, and adversity makes one wicked."
"I suppose I have lost my senses," he answers, with excitement; "but it seems to me now that, even were you to deceive me again, as you did at Felton – if you were to cheat me, and tell me falsehoods with the same baby-innocent face that you did there – that even then I should not repent of my bargain. Of two evils it would be the least; it would be better than never to have possessed you at all. Only, child, one thing I beg of you," he continues, with reproachful entreaty: "if you mean to trick me a second time, don't let me find it out for a little while! Let me be happy for a year – a month – a week!"
Her eyes rest on the ground, and a painful red spreads on either cheek. Despite the honest yearning love that vibrates along his voice, she cannot cast out from her heart that galling suspicion that has stolen there.
"You are very good," she makes answer, in a constrained voice; "and it is very generous of you trying to hide your real motive; but I can see it: it is pity! You look at me, and think, 'She was a pretty girl once, and now she has grown old and thin and plain, and it is all for love of me!' Yes, it is pity!"
"You are right," he answers, earnestly; "it is pity, profound pity, for the most miserable, discontented fellow upon God's earth – to wit, myself."
She raises her eyes slowly, and fixes them searchingly on his eager flushing face; and, looking, can doubt no longer.
"If I was over-harsh to you that night at Felton," he continues, rapidly, "and I am willing now to own that I was – for, after all, it was not against me that you had most greatly sinned – I have, at all events, paid heavily enough for it. What do you suppose I have suffered during the last month, watching you day by day wearing out your young life in a cold servile drudgery – hearing you strain your poor little tired voice in the interminable readings to that insatiable old man! Essie, I'm not a particularly pleasant fellow to live with – sometimes I believe I am particularly unpleasant – but, at my worst, I'm not so bad as old Blessington."
At that she laughs a little, but shakes her head.
"Why do you shake your head?" he asks, manlike, pursuing the hotlier the more she seems to hold back. "Is it," he says (a heavy fear quickening his pulses, and making his voice come thick and harsh), "that you want to tell me by signs, what you dare not tell me in words to my face, that the old love is dead, killed by my hard words that miserable night at Felton? Oh, love! it must have been but a weakly thing, if a few rough words could kill it."
She does not answer.
"You did love me once, Esther," he continues, vehemently; "I know you did! I knew it then, only, in my blind rage, I affected to disbelieve it. You must have loved me, when you, who had always been so shy, so reserved, so maidenly to me, of your own accord – do you recollect, sweet? – held out your arms to me, and flung yourself upon my breast. God only knows how hard it was for me to put you away!"
At the recollection his speech calls up, her face is stirred with a convulsive emotion; but still she holds her peace.
"Esther, speak! – and yet, perhaps, when you have spoken, I shall wish that you had kept silence. Say anything you will, do anything you will, only don't kill me by telling me that so sweet a thing can be dead!"
She lifts her heavy eyes to him, and in them is the look of a hunted animal. "Why do you torment me with these questions?" she asks, passionately. "If my love for you is dead, you ought to be thankful; for, while it was alive, it brought nothing but misery to either of us."
"If you think so, it must indeed be dead," he answers, deeply wounded.
"Why will you insist on driving me into a corner?" she asks, with the accent of a person rendered irritable by pain. "Why will you force me to make admissions that I don't want to make? What is the good of my owning that I love you still, when I am determined never to marry you?"
"Never to marry me!" he repeats; unable, in his immense surprise, to do more than say her own words after her. A man is always overwhelmed with astonishment at the idea of any woman not being overjoyed to espouse him.
"Never to marry you!" she reiterates, steadily. "I was a bad-enough match for you before – without fortune, position, or connexion; people would have pitied you then for being drawn into such a marriage; but now – "
"But now, what?"
"But now that I am a companion," she continues, with a bitter pride – "an anomalous animal, just two shades higher than the lady's-maid in my own estimation, and probably not that in any one else's – a companion, too, of whom people can say the things that Miss Blessington will say of me now – "
"What do you mean? What sort of things can she say?"
But Esther maintains a shamed red silence.
"That you are completely passée?"
"No, not that! – that would not concern me much."
"That the way you cough in the evening fidgets her to death?"
"No, not that."
"That you are over-sensitive, as these sort of people always are?" (with a faint mimicking of Miss Blessington's slow languor of articulation).
"No, not that."
"What then?"
"You must remember the things she said; you were there, and it is not more than five hours ago," she answers, with some impatience.
"I forget every word she uttered except three."
"And what were they?"
"You are free."
"She did not mean them," says Esther, trying to speak with dispassionate calmness; "she was under an erroneous impression when she said them; she will take you back again."
"Take me back again!" he repeats, angrily. "Good heavens, Esther! are you bent on driving me mad? Not satisfied with refusing me point-blank yourself, are you determined to insult me, by forcing upon me a woman for whom, as you know – as you must have known from the first moment you saw us together – I have never felt anything but the profoundest, coldest indifference?"
"I meant no insult," she replies, apologetically: "I only meant to say what is true – that she is a suitable match for you – that she is your equal."
"Is she?" he retorts ironically. "You are very good, I'm sure; I ask for bread, and you give me a stone. For God's sake, Essie, if you will have nothing to say to me yourself, at least spare me the degradation of listening to your kind and disinterested plans for my welfare!"
Under this severe snub, Miss Craven remains silent.
"Is it," he continues, presently, his indignation being a little cooled, "the mere fact of my being well-off that damns me in your eyes? If so, I think I may plead 'not guilty,' seeing that this oppressive wealth of mine lies on the other side of Sir Thomas's death – an event probably, at least, as distant as the millennium."
She gazes out (not seeing it the while) at the driving rain, while a troubled look flits over her small grave face; but she says neither "Yea" nor "Nay."
"When I am asking you to give me your whole sweet life," he cries, impulsively, snatching one of her little cold hands, "are you so ungenerous as to wish me to have absolutely nothing to offer you in return?"
Still silence.
"Essie!" he says, drawing her nearer to him, and looking resolutely down into her timid reluctant eyes, "I don't ask you to have pity upon me – that is a puling, cowardly way of making love, I always think; if the only road to a woman's heart lies through her compassion, I had rather never get there at all – but I ask you to pity yourself. To be my wife, ill-tempered and jealous as I, no doubt, should often be, would be distinctly a better fate than to be old Blessington's drudge. Child! have you no pity for yourself?"
"None whatever," she answers, with emotion. "I am not in the least sorry for myself; I richly deserve everything that is come to me. As long as I am unhappy myself, I can better bear the recollection of my vile conduct to the best and loyalest lover ever any woman had; if I began to be happy, I think my remorse would kill me."
He drops her hand suddenly, with a gesture of anger.
"I have been sacrificed to him once already," he says, fiercely; "am I to be sacrificed a second time to a sentimental recollection of him – to the mere memory of his perfections?"
She raises her rejected hand and its fellow deprecatingly towards him. "Don't be angry with me," she cries, pleadingly; "this has nothing to say to him; the reason why I will not marry you is that I am a mésalliance for you."
"That is my concern, I imagine," he answers, stiffly.
"I think not," she rejoins, gently. "You have lost your senses, as you told me just now; you are mad, and I am sane; therefore I can judge better than you yourself what is for your good: some day you will agree with me."
"Never!" he replies, emphatically; and with that, she standing nigh, and the temptation being mighty, he flings his arms sans cérémonie about her supple body, and strains her to his breast.
Outside, the rain streams down with a continuous quiet noise; the dappled deer are herding their branchy heads together under the old leafless hornbeams for shelter. For one moment Esther lies passive in her lover's arms, yielding to the bliss of that rough embrace; and, after all, among the blisses that we wot of, what is there so great as,
"After long grief and pain,
To feel the arms of your true love
Round you once again?"
Then her recollected resolution comes back. "Let me go," she says, faintly; "this is not right!"
"Right or wrong," he answers, doggedly, "it is the one moment worth being called 'life' that I have spent since I was fool enough to cut my own throat by parting from you."
"Let me go!" she says, again; and he, holding her still prisoner, but putting her a little farther from him, that he may the more distinctly see the workings of her countenance, says steadily:
"Essie, I am not unjust; I will let you go this instant, to any quarter of the world that you wish, without a word of remonstrance, if you will only look up in my face and say, 'St. John, I don't love you.'"
She lifts, with infinite difficulty, eyes in which pride and shy passion are fighting a duel to the death, and falters: "St. John, I don't – " but, in the mid-utterance of that falsehood, her voice fails suddenly, and she buries her burning shamed face on his breast.
"I knew it," he cries, triumphantly, dropping a light kiss – for has not her hesitation confessed him her owner? – upon her bent head. "I risked my everything upon that test, and it has not failed me. Even your miserable pride, Esther, could not constrain you to such a lie! With your heart beating against mine, as if we had but one between us, your lips did not dare frame those ugly words."
She gives no verbal answer; but, with head shame-drooped, tries, with trembling hands, to push away the arms that so closely, warmly bind her.
"Oh love!" he cries, with an accent of impatient but tender upbraiding, "are you struggling to get away from me still? Am I never to persuade any good thing to stay with me? Will you never forgive me the sin of being an eldest son? God knows it is not my fault – that it was not my choice to be born amongst the drones! Oh, Essie, is it just of you to punish me for what I cannot help?"
"I don't wish to punish you," she answers, trembling (seeing that she wished to be away from him, he has released her from his arms). "The real way to punish you would be to let you have your will – to say, 'I will marry you, St. John!'"
"In God's name punish me, then! No one ever took chastisement meeklier than I will this."
"And what would the end be?" she asks, sadly. "You would be insanely happy for a little while – a month – two months, perhaps – and then you would get tired of me. There is nothing in me, I think," she says, simply, "to keep a man's love after the first madness is over: I never had anything but a pretty face, and now even that is gone in the eyes of every one but you."
"What! in Linley's?" he asks, with a half-jealous smile.
She blushes, but goes on, without heeding the enquiry. "Some day you would wake up and say, 'I have thrown myself away;' and I – I prefer to say it for you now, while it is yet time."
He makes a movement to interrupt her, but she continues. "When a person has once lost confidence in another, they can never get it quite back again; you would never quite trust me. Only the other day you thought hard things of me, because I seemed grateful to Mr. Linley for talking friendly to me: I saw it in your eyes as you rode past us that night: and – which is the last and greatest reason of all – you would not like people to say of your wife the things that Miss Blessington will enable them to say of me."
"Even granting," breaks in Gerard, with indignant violence – "and God forbid my ever granting anything of the kind! – that it is in her or any one else's power to blast your reputation, what pleasure could it possibly give one girl to sully the good name of another, whom she must know in her heart of hearts to be as innocent as herself?"
"None whatever, perhaps, if I remain as I am," she answers, collectedly, though a little bitterly. "As Esther Craven, I am too insignificant to clash with her; but if I were to be your wife – if I were to be her successor in that position for which she is, in her own and her friends' opinion, so well suited – would not she be likely to give her own explanation of the change? She would describe things as they seemed to her, and people would believe her."
"Let them!" he answers scornfully. "If you loved me perfectly, the only people that existed in the world for you would be yourself and me."
"I do not love you perfectly, then, I suppose," she answers, calmly; "for not even the enormous happiness of being with you always, of being half your life, could compensate me for the degradation of bringing you a sullied name."
He turns away, with hands clenched and lips bitten, in the endeavour to be master of his useless surging rage.
"St. John," she says resolutely, laying her hand upon one of his, "you have made me two promises – one that you will go away and leave me to-day, and one that you will leave me never until I send you away. I keep you to the first: I send you away."
"But I will not be sent," he cries fiercely, giving the reins to his passion. "The conditions under which that promise was made are utterly changed; the obstacle that parted us then no longer exists: there is none between us now but what is of your own raising. I am, therefore, no longer bound by that oath; I will not go!"
"Very well," she answers, sighing: "then I must; and when one is to have a foot or a hand cut off, it is best to do it at once. St. John, I will not sleep another night under the same roof with you! Goodbye!"
But he turns away sullenly. "You may say 'goodbye' to me, but I will never say 'goodbye' to you: death is the only 'goodbye' I will accept as valid between us."
She makes no rejoinder, but, slipping from his side out into the wild wintry rain, flies across the park away from him.
"Esther! – Esther!" he calls after her: but the "drip, drip" of the great swollen rain-drops from the eaves of the deer-barn is his only answer.