He could say no more for some moments. He was almost hoarse and speechless, without breath. Then relief came and he poured out his brief tale of love. He adored her, and wanted her to marry him. She only of all the world of women must be his wife, she and none other. He had been living in Paradise. He had never known what joy meant till he came to this dear wood.
Her answer was scarcely audible, the low grave voice he loved was lower than he had ever heard it and faintly tremulous.
“That can never be!” she said slowly. “No husband will ever call me wife.”
“What do you mean?”
“My fate was fixed years ago. I shall never marry.”
“Why not?”
“I cannot give you my reasons. They are good reasons. Pray never speak of this again, Mr. Bertram. You have taken me by surprise. We have been such good friends through all that happy summer weather, and I thought you might always be my friend, just as your cousin is, though no one could ever be to me what he is — for I can never owe any man as much as I owe him.”
“Let him have your friendship, your gratitude if you like. I want neither — I want you. I want you for my wife, the better part of my life, the other half of my soul. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you when I came here — I didn’t mean? Why, I was in love with you already — steeped in love, enchanted, possessed. From those delicious days in Venice I was yours, yours only — I belonged to you.”
“You were rather rude to me sometimes,” she said, with a faint smile.
She was very pale, and she could not speak without that trembling of her lips. They were trembling slightly, even when she was silent — parted a little as if for want of breath, and the hands that he was holding were deadly cold.
“I was fighting my battle. I began to fight from that first day, when I saw you carrying my uncle his tea. I knew my danger in those first moments when I looked at you and saw how different you were from the image I had conjured up when I was told about you. I began to struggle against your charm, sweet enchantress — and I was rude, boorish, an unutterable brute. And how patient you were — how dignified, girdled round with the armour of womanly pride, unconscious of my existence. That was your tone, Mary — you did not know that I was there — your lovely eyes looked past me — looked always beyond me — at the water — at the palaces, at anything rather than the vulgar beast who had not even begun to understand you.”
“Please let me go,” she said very gently. “It is time I went back to your uncle. It is time for his tea.”
“He shall wait till you have given me a better answer. You shall not leave this spot till you have given me your promise. You don’t know what passionate love means in the heart of a man. No woman knows. In all those lovers’ suicides in low life it is the man who kills himself, not the woman. If he jilts her, she bears it somehow and waits for the next chance. He can’t bear it, and kills himself — perhaps after he has killed her. He must have blood. Mary, why do you reject me? Who is that other man who stands between us?”
“I can tell you nothing. You have no right to question me.”
“Only the right of a breaking heart if you refuse to be my wife. I tell you, Mary, you don’t know what love means for a man like me. I won’t tell you I never loved woman till I loved you. When I was three-and-twenty, fresh from the’Varsity, and a fool, as most young men are, unless they are cold-blooded egoists, I was passionately in love — with beauty, just beauty — and the shallow creature I worshipped tore my heart to rags as such creatures do. Cheated, disillusioned, believing myself heart-broken after that worthless love — while the best years of my manhood went by — nothing but vain regrets, futile longing — and you worked your miracle. Ten wretched, wasted years were wiped out in a week. You see, I do not lie to you and swear you were the first — you are the second — the good angel who rescued me from the bad angel, from her whose breath was a destroying fire. Your love is the flame that purifies — for see, my good angel, I know that you love me. You may reject me, but I shall still believe that I am loved. I could not love you as I do if there were no answering warmth in your heart. Be kind, dear. Put your hand in mine and give me the other half of my soul—”
“It cannot be.”
He had released her, and she was moving away from him in wordless misery. She had no answer — nothing to deny — nothing to confess. It was true that she loved him.
He dropped upon the fallen tree where he had been sitting while he sketched, his drawing-board on his knee. Board and paint-box were lying on the grass, where they had fallen before he caught her in his arms and forced her to sit beside him. He rested his elbows on his knees and hid his face in his hands — the strong hands, with the dark veins standing out — and she thought that he was crying. Then something black came leaping across the grass and sprang upon her lover’s knees, and nestled against him, licking his hidden face. It was Zamiel who had been hunting rabbits — a badly behaved poodle — and had come back and found the dear man he loved in some great trouble.
George took the dog in his arms and hugged him, before he stood up, pale to the lips, and turned to Mary with one long look of reproach.
“Zamiel has a warmer heart than you have,” he said. “Good-bye, cruel girl — good-bye, kind dog. I am going back to the world where men live without love.”
He ran along the glade, Zamiel running after him — ran to the little iron gate in the shrubbery, and by the nearest way to the house; but not to the morning-room where Mary was to wait upon his uncle at tea. He went straight to his own rooms, gave some directions to his man, and began to arrange his papers in the attaché box that just held them.
It was nearly six o’clock, and Mary was sitting in shadow reading to Mr. Field, when George looked in at the door.
“Good-bye, Uncle Conway, I have changed my mind and am going to London to-night. Father says I ought to be in chambers at ten o’clock to-morrow morning. I’ll write and thank you for your kindness and my happy holiday when I get home.”
There was a break in his voice as he said the last words. The door shut and Mr. Field heard quick footsteps crossing the hall, and then the sound of wheels driving away from the door.
“Something has happened to that young man, Mary. The face at the door was not the face I saw at lunch. Has he been making love to you?”
“He asked me to marry him. I hope you are not angry.”
“No, child. I wanted it to be. And you refused him! Why were you so unkind?”
“How could I marry him? How could I marry anyone?”
“You think that other man will come back and claim you?”
“I know he will — because I dread it so much.”
“Then you never loved him?”
“I don’t know. Yes, I suppose I loved him once — but I don’t remember. When I look back it seems as if I were looking into the mind of some silly girl who was a stranger to me. I can see her giddy with the rapture of this new love — the first she had ever known of love, happy to feel a strong arm holding her, and to be told that she was beautiful — she who was accustomed only to be told she was a fool, and who had been made to feel that she was an encumbrance. I suppose that foolish girl loved him. He was so strong — so full of energy — so like a conqueror — like the men she had read of and dreamt of and idealized. Drake, Hawkins, Raleigh — all those great men of the West that had seemed so vivid and so near, because she trod the soil that they had trodden. Yes, Mr. Field, I was a fool, and I loved him as fools love — without understanding!”
“And if he should come back a free man — the tiresome wife disposed of — and want you to marry him? What would you do?”
“Everything I had power to do to hold myself free from him. But it would be difficult. He told me that he was born to conquer, that no one had ever resisted him — in business — in friendship — in love. The hardest-headed men had been his slaves, the hardest-hearted women had loved him, if he wanted their love.”
“If you married my nep
hew you would be safe.”
“Safe! Crushed, humiliated, in the dust at my husband’s feet.”
“Have you told George your story?”
“I would rather die than tell him.”
“Oh, my dear girl, you are more foolish now than that romantic girl of seventeen. Why do you shut the door upon the vista of a happy and honourable life?”
“You would not like your nephew to marry me?”
“It is the thing I would like. I would take you to my heart as my niece — and you should be to me as a daughter — as you are now, by the way — but the world would recognize a stronger link.”
Mary burst into tears. She had passed dry-eyed through the flame of George’s passion, but this old man’s affection moved the depths of her heart.
“How good you are,” she gasped, “how generous, how noble-minded! Oh, my dear kind friend, how can I ever honour you enough? What do I want in this life but to be happy with you, and to try to be of some use and comfort to you?”
“You are all the world to me, my dear. Till you came I was very lonely. Books are good to live with — delightful companions — and one’s interest in them lasts. But there comes a day when one longs for a living presence — some creature who will be always in sympathy, who will breathe the breath of life into one’s books — share one’s opinions or fight against them. I look back and think my books were dead before you came, and that they woke from their dull sleep and came to life when we read them together.”
“Let me stay with you, sir. Let me learn more and more of the learning you love — the old unfamiliar philosophers — the learning of all the world. I could never be happier than I have been in your library.”
In moments of respect and gratitude, it seemed natural to her to call him “Sir,” and even to talk of him to Austin or George as her master.
“Yes, we have been happy together, Mary, but we have to think of the future. Your friend is an old man — a broken man, whose length of days, still short of the scriptural standard, has been accounted a miracle — the triumph of what science can achieve for wealth. Had I been poor I should hardly have survived that wretched fall by a year.”
XVII
THE glory of summer faded. Evening came sooner, and the golden shafts that slanted through the forest trees faded before the two footmen had begun to wheel their master’s chair back to the house. Mary watched the fading of that wonderful summer with melancholy eyes. Venice or Hampshire, it had been a season of beauty and delight. There had been magic in it — something that could never come again. She had lived with a fuller lie than she had ever known before — she had been happy!
And then had come one hour in that exquisite season, when the cup of joy had been offered to her, pressed upon her, held to lips that longed to drink, and she had put it from her, obstinately, implacably, though she had seen angry despair in the face she loved.
Yes, she had loved him. Those days of close companionship when they had thought the same thoughts and lived only for the tranquil delight of being together; hours over which no cloud of difference or satiety had ever darkened; days that were never long enough for friends who seemed to have a world of thought to confide to each other, so much that a lifetime spent together could not exhaust.
It was hardly possible for a woman who had never known the deep thoughtfulness and delicate sensibility of such a man as George Bertram to be cold to the love he had offered her. Over and over again her mind went back to that scene in the wood, and she wondered at her courage in putting such a lover away from her. How could she see that pale distress in his face, those tears, and make her heart adamant in her inflexible resolve to suffer any loss rather than to run the risk of being put to shame in the eyes of the man she loved?
He had told her that he would take her on trust, that he would ask no questions now, or in the time to come; and still she had refused him — nothing could move her — no promise made in that impassioned hour could stand against the chances of the future. Sooner or later the man who had wrecked her girlhood would come back into her life, and bring shame upon her womanhood. She knew him resolute, unprincipled, reckless, arrogant, and she knew that if he wanted her he would let nothing stand between her and his will. If he ever thought of the woman he had deserted he would think of her as his goods, his chattels, his slave to be called back at the master’s bidding. And to find her another man’s wife, happy and honoured, would give a zest to his pursuit, would change the caprice of an hour into an indomitable resolve.
There were splashes of red gold on the sunward side of the beeches, when Conway Field gave his orders for the return to London.
“You look as if you were glad to go,’ he said to Mary. “Are you one of those people who only like the country in summer?”
“Zamiel and I could be happy here all the year round, if you liked to stay. The poodle would be happier in these woods than in London.”
“Yes — he would have rabbits and squirrels to run after — he would have the pleasures of the chase. Sometimes we might hear the hounds in dull cry on the other side of the wood — and I should remember days when I was almost as happy as a dog.”
Mary never replied upon any melancholy speech of her master’s, nor ever made an obvious attempt to change the subject. She just went on with her embroidery and waited till his mood changed and he spoke again.
“It will be good to have all our books about us,” he said. “We have a pretty good supply here, but there is always something one misses — some page in some out of the way corner of literature one wants to go back to. And I am something like Anatole France’s old librarian with his priceless Lucretius annotated by Voltaire — I have my gems, books that just to handle is enough to brighten a gloomy hour.”
“I love to bring you your favourites and to hear you talk of them,” Mary said.
How many hours she had spent in that sumptuous library standing beside his chair, while he turned the leaves slowly, stopping to praise, to object, to tear an author to rags, perhaps; for a man who broods long over what he reads can always find something to cavil at, something even to condemn. She had never tired of hearing him talk, and he knew that he did not bore her, so could ramble on with quiet self-satisfaction. She was never weary while the low thoughtful voice went on, a voice out of which the power had gone but not the beauty. She never had to pretend because she was always interested. If she spoke, it was always to the point. If she asked a question it went to the heart of the subject. This was Mary’s secondary education. To read the books he chose — to hear him talk. What more could she need?
In her father’s literary workshop she had learnt a good deal from the books he had from the London Library, his tools as he called them, when he was mugging up for a tough article in one of the quarterlies. She had copied long extracts for him, and been useful when he was writing against time, but he had never opened his mind to her, never troubled himself to explain or discuss a difficult subject, never appeared to understand that she had an understanding. He had treated her as a child who was just clever enough to be useful, and only towards the last was he beginning to soften towards her, beginning to show faint signs of an awakening affection; so that Mary said to herself with a thrill of gladness, “I think my father is beginning to care for me.”
But that was just before the destroyer came, and the new hope was blighted.
Time went on in those two solitary lives — a long time in Warburton House, to the end of the year that had seen them in the Dream City; and in all that time from the end of August to the beginning of the new year George Bertram had only once crossed his uncle’s threshold. Only once, and then he came in obedience to a reproachful letter from Conway Field.
“I take infinite pains to keep would-be visitors at bay,” he wrote. “My servants are trained to hold my street door as if it were the gate of a fortress. Pious footmen hardly like to tell the lies that are required of them. It preys upon their minds, Mrs. Tredgold tells me. But I have two nephews whose comp
any never bores me, and I like to see them often and not to have to think that I bore them. Austin comes often and never seems bored; you come so seldom that I am forced to think—”
The letter broke off abruptly. Conway signed it with his hasty “C. F.” and gave it to Mary.
“Read that,” he said. “It is your fault if I have an unnatural nephew.”
Mary gave him back the letter without a word, but it was difficult not to break down before she had done her work as secretary and written George’s address on the envelope.
He would know her hand perhaps, though she had never written to him. He had seen letters she had written at his uncle’s dictation; for she was sometimes writing girl as well as reading girl.
He came on the following day in the wintry afternoon, just as the shadows were gathering in the corners of the library. Where it was so easy to switch on two or three brackets and flood the room with brightness it was only natural to enjoy the quiet time between lights. It was the hour when Conway Field liked to talk discursively, egotistically even, enlarging upon subjects over which he had brooded in the sleepless nights. And Mary was always sympathetic, loving to humour the whim of the moment.
George came into the room unannounced, and walked straight to his uncle’s chair.
Mary was sitting in the shadow of a tall Indian screen, and she thought that he would not see her; but the lights that rose and fell on the low hearth touched her pale grey gown and flickered upon the white forehead under the soft brown hair, and he stopped suddenly in the midst of his apology for needing to be summoned:
“I beg your pardon, Miss Smith, I did not know that you were there.”
Nothing could be more coldly formal than his manner. Mary rose hastily, and Zamiel, who had been lying asleep on her gown, jumped up and ran to his old friend with joyous greeting.
“The poodle has not forgotten you,” Mr. Field said.
“Zamiel has a heart,” George said, stooping to fondle his old friend.
Delphi Works of M. E. Braddon Page 1019