‘No, we are not; yet I think I should have forborne to press you on any matter you thought it needless to speak of.’
She put on her hat. Wilfrid felt his anger rising—our natural emotion when we are disagreeably in the wrong, yet cannot condemn the cause which has made us so. He sat to the table again, as if his part in the discussion were at an end.
Beatrice stood for some moments, then came quickly to his side.
‘Wilfrid, have you secrets from me?’ she asked, the tremor of her voice betraying the anguish that her suspicions cost her. ‘Say I am ill-mannered. It was so, at first; I oughtn’t to have said anything. But now it has become something different. However trifling the matter, I can’t bear that you should refuse to treat me as yourself. There is nothing, nothing I could keep from you. I have not a secret in my life to hide from you. It is not because they are letters—or not only that. You put a distance between us you say there are affairs of yours in which I have no concern. I cannot bear that! If I leave you, I shall suffer more than you dream. I thought we were one. Is not your love as complete as mine?’
He rose and moved away, saying—
‘Open it! Look at the letters!’
‘No, that I can’t do. What can it be that troubles you so? Are they letters that I ought not to see?’
He could bear it no longer.
‘Yes,’ he answered, brusquely, ‘I suppose they are.’
‘You mean that you have preserved letters which, as often as you open that drawer, remind you of someone else?—that you purposely keep them so near your hand?’
‘Beatrice, I had no right to destroy them.’
‘No right!’ Her eyes flashed, and her tongue trembled with its scorn. ‘You mean you had no wish.’
‘If I had no right, I could scarcely have the wish.’
Wilfrid was amazed at his own contemptible quibbling, but in truth he was not equal to the occasion. He could not defend himself in choice phrases; in a sort of desperate carelessness he flung out the first retort that offered itself. He was on the point of throwing over everything, of declaring that all must be at an end between them; yet courage failed for that. Nor courage only; the woman before him was very grand in her indignation, her pale face was surpassingly beautiful. The past faded in comparison with her; in his heart he doubted of its power.
Beatrice was gazing at him in resentful wonder.
‘Why have you done this?’ she asked. ‘Why did you come to me and speak those words? What necessity was there to pretend what you did not feel?’
He met her eyes.
‘I have not spoken falsely to you,’ he said, with calmness which did not strengthen the impression his words were meant to convey.
‘When you said that you loved me? If it were true, you could not have borne to have those letters under your eyes. You say you had no right to destroy them. You knew that it was your duty to do so. Could you have kept them?’
Wilfrid had become almost absent-minded. His heart was torn in two ways. He wished to take the letters from their case and destroy them at once; probably it was masculine pride which now kept him from doing it.
‘I think you must believe what I say, Beatrice,’ was his answer. ‘I am not capable of deliberately lying to you.’
‘You are not. But you are capable of deceiving yourself; I accuse you of nothing more. You have deceived yourself, and I have been the cause of it; for I had so little of woman’s pride that I let you see my love; it was as if I begged for your love in return. My own heart should have taught me better; there can be no second love. You pitied me!’
Wilfrid was in no state of mind to weigh phrases; at a later time, when he could look back with calmness, and with the advantage of extended knowledge, he recognised in these words the uttermost confession of love of ‘which a woman is capable. In hearing them, he simply took them as a reproach.
‘If such a thing had been possible,’ he said, ‘it would have been a horrible injustice to you. I asked you to be my wife because I loved you. The existence of these letters is no proof that I misunderstood my own feeling. There are many things we cannot explain to another on the moment. You must judge the facts as you will, but no hasty and obvious judgment will hit the truth.’
She was not listening to him. Her eyes were fixed upon the letters, and over her heart there crept a desire which all but expelled other feeling, a desire to know what was there written. She would have given her hand to be alone in the room with that pocket-book, now that she knew what it contained; no scruple would have withheld her. The impossibility that her longing could ever be satisfied frenzied her with jealousy.
‘I will leave you with them,’ she exclaimed, speaking her’ thought. ‘You do not want me; I come between you and her. Read, and forget me; read them once more, and see then if you do not understand yourself. I know now why you have often been so cold, why it cost you an effort to reply to me. You shall never have that trouble again.’
She moved to quit the room. Wilfrid called her.
‘Beatrice! Stay and listen to me. These letters are nothing, and mean nothing; Stay, and see me burn them.’
Irrational as it was, she could not bear to see them destroyed. In her distracted mind there was a sort of crazy hope that he would at last give them to her to burn; she might even perhaps have brought herself to take them away.
‘That is childish,’ she said. ‘You know them by heart; the burning of the paper would alter nothing.’
‘Then I can say and do no more.’
It had been like a rending of his heartstrings to offer to destroy these memories of Emily, though he at the same time persuaded himself that, once done, he would be a stronger and a happier man. In truth, they had made the chief strength of the link between him and the past; every day they had reminded him how much of the old feeling lingered in his being; the sanctity with which these relics were invested testified to the holiness of the worship which had bequeathed them. He had not opened the case since his betrothal to Beatrice, and scarcely a day passed that he did not purpose hiding it somewhere away for ever—not destroying. Beatrice’s answer to his offer caused him half to repent that he had made it. He turned away from her.
She, after looking at the pocket-book still for some moments, seemed to force herself away. He heard her open the door, and did not try to stay her.
Half an hour later, Wilfrid restored the letters to their place in the drawer. If they were to be destroyed, it must now be in Beatrice’s presence. With something like joy he turned the key upon them, feeling that they were preserved, that the last farewell was once again postponed. Wilfrid was not a very strong man where sacrifice ‘was demanded of him.
He neither saw nor heard from Beatrice till the evening of the following day. Then it happened that they had to dine at the same house. On meeting her in the drawing-room, he gave her his hand as usual; hers returned no pressure. She seemed as cheerful as ever in her talk with others; him she kept apart from. He could not make up his mind to write. She had refused to accept such proof of his sincerity as it wag in his power to offer, and Wilfrid made this an excuse—idle as he knew it to be—for maintaining a dignified silence. Dignified, he allowed himself to name it; yet he knew perfectly well that his attitude had one very ignoble aspect, since he all but consciously counted upon Beatrice’s love to bring her back to his feet. He said to himself: Let her interpret my silence as she will; if she regard it as evidence of inability to face her—well, I make no objection. The conviction all the while grew in him that he did veritably love her, for he felt that, but for his knowledge of her utter devotedness, he would now be in fear lest he should lose her. Such fear need not occupy a thought; a word, and she flew to him. He enjoyed this sense of power; to draw out the misunderstanding a little would make reconciliation all the pleasanter. Then the letters should flame into ashes, and with them vanish even the regret for the blessedness they had promised.
Wednesday morning, and still no letter from Beatrice. Mr. Athel j
oked about her speedy resignation of the secretaryship. Wilfrid joined in the joke, and decided that he would wait one more day, knowing not what a day might bring forth.
CHAPTER XXII
HER PATH IN THE SHADOW
Yielding to the urgency of Beatrice, who was supported in her entreaty by Mrs. Birks, Wilfrid had, a little ere this, consented to sit for his portrait to an artist, a friend of the family, who had already made a very successful picture of Beatrice herself. The artist resided at Teddington. Wilfrid was due for a sitting this Wednesday morning, and he went down into the country, intending to be back for lunch and the House of Commons. But the weather was magnificent, and, the sitting over, truant thoughts began to assail the young legislator. Bushey Park was at hand, with its chestnut avenue leading to Hampton Court. A ramble of indefinite duration was, in his present frame of mind, much more attractive than the eloquence of independent members. He determined to take a holiday.
A very leisurely stroll across the park brought him to the King’s Arms, and the sight of the hostelry suggested pleasant thoughts of sundry refreshing viands and cooling liquors. He entered and lunched. It was a holiday, and a truant holiday; he allowed himself champagne. When he came forth again, his intention to stroll through the galleries of the Palace had given way before the remembered shadow of the chestnuts; he returned to the park, and, after idly watching the fish in the shallow water of the round lake, strayed away into cool retreats, where the grass irresistibly invited to recumbency. He threw himself down, and let his eyes dream upon the delicate blades and stalks and leafage which one so seldom regards. If he chose to gaze further, there were fair tracts of shadowed sward, with sunny gleamings scattered where the trees were thinner, and above him the heaven of clustering leaves, here of impenetrable dark-green, there translucent-golden. A rustling whisper, in the air and on the ground, was the only voice that came thither.
He had set himself to think of Beatrice. He purposed writing her a long letter to-night, wherein he would do his best to make her understand the light in which the past appeared to him, and how little those memories had to do with the present and its love and its duty. To be sure, he could not use the words of very truth. He would much have preferred to speak with unflinching honesty, to confess that he had, even of late, often dwelt on the thought of Emily with tenderness, with something of heartache; but that the new love had, for all that, triumphed over the old, and would henceforth grow to perfectness. But the character of Beatrice would not allow this; in her, feeling was too predominant over intellect; she could not recognise in this very frankness the assurance of an affection which would end by being no less than the utmost she demanded. He had to seek for subtleties of explanation, for ingenuities of argument, which, unsatisfactory as they seemed to himself, might yet, he thought, help her to the reconciliation he knew she desired. He was scarcely less anxious for it. For Beatrice he would never know that limitless passion, that infinite yearning alike of spirit and of sense, which had been his love for Emily; but she was very dear to him, and with all his heart he desired to make her happiness. He imaged her beauty and her talent with pride which made his veins warmer. Her husband, he would be loyal to his last breath. Community of life would establish that intimate alliance of heart and soul which every year makes more enduring. Were they not young flesh and blood, he and she? And could a bodiless ghost come between them, a mere voice of long-vanished time, insubstantial, unseizable, as the murmur in these chestnut-leaves?
He grew tired of the attitude which at first had been reposeful, and rose to wander further. Someone else, it seemed, had been tempted to this quiet corner, away from the road; a woman was walking at a little distance, and reading as she walked. The thought passed through his mind that a woman never looked more graceful than when walking with her head bent over a book. When he looked that way again, he found that she had come much nearer, still very intent upon her reading. She had, in truth, a comely figure, one which suggested a face of the nobler kind. She would look up presently.
Did not that form, that movement as she walked, stir memories? Yes, he had known someone who might well have paced thus beneath spreading trees, with her eyes upon a book of poetry; not unlike this stranger, outwardly. In what black, skyless, leafless town was she pursuing her lonely life?—Lonely? why should it be so? Emily could not go on her way without meeting one whom her sweetness and her power would enthral, and the reasons, whatever they were, that had forbidden her marriage six or seven years ago, were not likely to resist time. He tried to hope that the happier lot had by this solaced her. Do we not change so? His own love—see how it had faded!
Half purposely, he had turned so as to pass near the reader. At the distance of a few yards from her, he stayed his step. A little nearer she came, then something made her aware of his presence. She raised her eyes, the eyes of Emily Hood.
Her hands fell, one still holding the book open. He, who was prepared already, could watch her countenance change from placid, if grave, thought, to the awakening of surprise, to startled recognition; he could see the colour die upon her cheeks, flee from her lips; he could observe the great heartthrobs which shook her and left her bosom quivering. He did not uncover his head; conventional courtesies have their season. It seemed very long before they ceased to look into each other’s eyes, but at length hers fell.
‘Is it possible that you are living in London?’ were Wilfrid’s first words. He could affect no distance of manner. To him all at once it was as though they had parted a few days ago.
‘Yes,’ she answered simply. ‘In a far part of London.’
‘And we meet here, where I seemed to find myself by the merest chance. I saw a stranger in the distance, and thought of yourself; I knew you long before you looked up from your reading.’
Emily tried to smile.
‘How little you are changed!’ Wilfrid continued, his voice keeping still its awed quietness, with under-notes of feeling. ‘Rather, you are not changed at all.’
It was not true, but in the few minutes that he had gazed at her, past and present had so blended that he could not see what another would have noticed. Emily was appreciably older, and ill-health had set marks upon her face. A stranger looking at her now would have found it hard to imagine her with the light of joy in her eyes; her features had set themselves in sorrow. Her cheeks were very thin; her eyes were dark and sunken. Wilfrid saw only the soul in her gaze at him, and that was as it had ever been.
She was unable to speak; Wilfrid found words.
‘Do you often walk here? Is your home near?’
‘Not very near. I came by the river,’ she answered.
‘I am very glad that I have met you.’ The words sounded insufficient, but Wilfrid was by this time at battle with himself, and succeeded in saying less than he felt. ‘You will let me walk on a little way with you? We can’t shake hands at once and say good-bye, can we, after such a long time?’
He spoke in the tone one uses to jest over bygone sadness. Emily made no verbal answer, but walked along by his side.
‘You still have your old habits,’ he said, casting an eye at the book. ‘Are your tastes still the same, I wonder?’
‘It is Dante,’ she replied.
The name brought another to Wilfrid’s consciousness; he averted his eyes for a moment, but spoke again without much delay.
‘Still faithful to the great names. This is a lovely place to make one’s study. Were you here when the chestnuts flowered?’
‘Yes, once or twice.’
‘I did not see them this year. And you have been walking here so often,’ he added, wondering again, half to himself. ‘I have been to Teddington several times lately, but only today came into the park.’
‘I have not been here for a month,’ Emily said, speaking at length with more case. The shock had affected her physically more than she had allowed to be seen; it was only now that her voice was perfectly at her command. Her face remained grave, but she spoke in a tone free from suggest
ion of melancholy. ‘I teach in a school, and to-day there is a holiday.’
‘Do you live at the school?’
‘No. I have my own lodgings.’
He was on the point of asking whether Mrs. Baxendale knew she was in London, but it seemed better to suppress the question.
‘Have you been there long?’ he asked instead.
‘Half a year.’
As he kept silence, Emily continued with a question, the first she had put.
‘What have you chosen for your life’s work?’
Wilfrid could not overcome the tendency of blood to his cheeks. He was more than half ashamed to tell her the truth.
‘You will laugh at me,’ he said. ‘I am in Parliament.’
‘You are? I never see newspapers.’
She added it as if to excuse herself for not being aware of his public activity.
‘Oh, I am still far from being a subject of leading-articles,’ Wilfrid exclaimed. ‘Indeed, I gave you no answer to your question. My life’s work is non-existent. All my old plans have come to nothing, and I have formed no new ones, no serious plans. My life will be a failure, I suppose.’
‘But you aim at success in politics?’
‘I suppose so. I was thinking of the other things we used to speak of.’
Emily hazarded a glance at him, as if to examine him again in this new light.
‘You used to say,’ she continued, ‘that you felt in many ways suited for a political life.’
‘Did I? You mean at home, when I talked in a foolish way. It was not my serious thought. I never said it to you.’
She murmured a ‘No.’ They walked on in silence.
‘You didn’t read Italian then,’ Wilfrid said. ‘You, I feel sure, have not wasted your time. How much you must have read since we talked over our favourite authors.’
‘I have tried to keep up the habit of study,’ Emily replied, unaffectedly, ‘but of course most of my time is occupied in teaching.’
Their walk had brought them from under the trees, and the lake was just before them.
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