When the kingfisher had left them tête-à-tête, Mr. Tristram found himself extremely awkwardly placed on the green bench. He felt that he had not sufficiently considered beforehand the peculiar difficulties which, in the language of the law, "had been imported into his case."
Rachel sat beside him in silence. If it could be chronicled that sympathetic sorrow for her companion's predicament was the principal feeling in her mind, she would have been an angel.
Mr. Tristram halted long between two opinions. At last he said, brokenly:
"Can you forgive me?"
What woman, even with her white hair, even after a lifetime spent out of ear-shot, ever forgets the tone her lover's voice takes when he is in trouble? Rachel softened instantly.
"I forgave you long ago," she said, gently.
Something indefinable in the clear, full gaze that met his daunted him. He stared apprehensively at her. It seemed to him as if he were standing in cold and darkness looking in through the windows of her untroubled eyes at the warm, sunlit home which had once been his, when it had been exceeding well with him, but of which he had lost the key.
A single yellow leaf, crisped and hollowed to a fairy boat, came sailing on an imperceptible current of air to rest on Rachel's knee.
"I was angry at first," she said, her voice falling across the silence like another leaf. "And then, after a time, I forgave you. And later still, much later, I found out that you had never injured me—that I had nothing to forgive."
He did not understand, and as he did not understand he explained volubly—for here he felt he was on sure ground—that, on the contrary, she had much to forgive, that he had acted like an infernal blackguard, that men were coarse brutes, not fit to kiss a good woman's shoe-latchet, etc., etc. He identified his conduct with that of the whole sex, without alluding to it as that of the individual Tristram. He made it clear that he did not claim to have behaved better than most men.
Rachel listened attentively. "And I actually loved him," she said to herself.
"But the divine quality of woman is her power of forgiving. Her love raises a man, transfigures him, ennobles his whole life," etc., etc.
"My love did not appear to have quite that effect upon you at the time," said Rachel, regretting the words the moment they were spoken.
Mr. Tristram felt relieved. Here at last; was the reproach he had been expecting.
He assured her she did well to be angry. He accused himself once more. He denounced the accursed morals of the day, above which he ought to have risen, the morals, if she did but know it, of all unmarried men.
"That is a hit at Mr. Scarlett," she said, scornfully, to herself, and then her cheek blanched as she remembered that Hugh was not exempt, after all. She became suddenly tired, impatient; but she waited quietly for the inevitable proposal.
Mr. Tristram, who had the gift of emphatic and facile utterance, which the conventional consider to be the sign-manual of genius, had become so entangled in the morals of the age that it took him some time to extricate himself from the subject before he could pass on to plead, in an impassioned manner, the cause of the man, unworthy though he might be, who had long loved her, loved her now, and would always love her, in this world and the next.
It was the longest proposal Rachel had ever had, and she had had many. But if the proposal was long, the refusal was longer. Rachel, who had a good memory, led up to it by opining that the artistic life made great demands, that the true artist must live entirely for his art, that domestic life might prove a hinderance. She had read somewhere that high hopes fainted on warm hearthstones. Mr. Tristram demolished these objections as ruthlessly as ducks peck their own ducklings if they have not seen them for a day or two.
Even when she was forced to become more explicit, it was at first impossible to Mr. Tristram to believe she would finally reject him. But the knowledge, deep-rooted as a forest oak, that she had loved him devotedly could not at last prevail against the odious conviction that she was determined not to marry him.
"Then, in that case, you never loved me?"
"I do not love you now."
"You are determined not to marry?"
"On the contrary, I hope to do so."
Rachel's words took her by surprise. She had no idea till that moment that she hoped anything of the kind.
"You prefer some one else. That is the real truth."
"I prefer several others."
Mr. Tristram looked suspiciously at her. Her answers did not tally with his previous knowledge of her. Perhaps he forgot that he had set his docile pupil rather a long holiday task to learn in his absence, and she had learned it.
"You think you would be happier with some fortune-hunter of an aristocrat than with a plain man of your own class, who, whatever his faults may be, loves you for yourself."
Why is it that the word aristocrat as applied to a gentleman is as offensive as that of flunkey applied to a footman?
Rachel drew herself up imperceptibly.
"That depends upon the fortune-hunter," she said, with that touch of hauteur which, when the vulgar have at last drawn it upon themselves by the insolence which is the under side of their courtesy, always has the same effect on them as a red rag on a bull.
In their own language they invariably "stand up to it." Mr. Tristram stood up physically and mentally. He also raised his voice, causing two rabbits to hurry back into their holes.
Women, he said, were incalculable. He would never believe in one again. His disbelief in woman rose even to the rookery in the high elms close at hand. That she, Rachel, whom he had always regarded as the first among women, should be dazzled by the empty glamour of rank, now that her fortune put such marriages within her reach, was incredible. He should have repudiated such an idea with scorn, if he had not heard it from her own lips. Well, he would leave her to the life she had chosen. It only remained for him to thank her for stripping his last illusions from him and to bid her good-bye.
"We shall never meet again," he said, holding her hand, and looking very much the same without his illusions as he did when he had them on. He had read somewhere a little poem about "A Woman's No," which at the last moment meant "Yes." And then there was another which chronicled how, after several stanzas of upbraiding, "we rushed into each other's arms." Both recurred to him now. He had often thought how true they were.
"I do not think we shall meet again," said Rachel, who apparently had an unpoetic nature; "but I am glad for my own sake that we have met this once, and have had this conversation. I think we owed it to each other and to our—former attachment."
"Well, good-bye." He still held her hand. If she was not careful she would lose him.
"Good-bye."
"You understand it is for always?"
"I do."
He became suddenly livid. He loved her more than ever. Would she really let him go?
"I am not the kind of man to be whistled back," he said, fiercely. It was an appeal and a defiance, for he was just the kind of man, and they both knew it.
"Of course not."
"That is your last word?"
"My last word."
He dropped her hand and half turned to go.
She made no sign.
Then he strode violently out of the wood without looking behind him. At the little gate he stopped a moment, listening intently. No recalling voice reached him. Poets did not know what they were talking about. With a trembling hand he slammed the gate and departed.
Rachel remained a long time sitting on the wooden bench, so long that the stooping sun found out the solemn, outstretched arms of the cedar, and touched them till they gleamed green as a beetle's wing. Each little twig and twiglet was made manifest, raw gold against the twilight that lurked beneath the heavy boughs.
She sat so still that a squirrel came tiptoeing across the moss, and struck tail momentarily to observe her. He looked critically at her, first with one round eye, and then, turning his sleek head, with the other, and decided that she was h
armless.
Presently a robin dropped down close to her, flashing up his gray under wing as he alighted, and then flew up into the cedar, and from its sun-stirred depths said his say.
The robin never forgets. In the autumn afternoons, when the shadows are lengthening, he sings sadness into your heart. If you are joyful shut your ears against him, for you may keep peace, but never joy, while he is singing. He knows all about it, "love's labor lost," the gray face of young Love dead, the hard-wrought grave in the live rock where he is buried. And he tells of it again and again and again, as if Love's sharp sword had indeed reddened his little breast, until the heart aches to hear him. But he tells also that consolation is folded not in forgetfulness, but in remembrance. That is why he sings in the silence of the autumn dawn, before Memory closes her eyes, and again near sunset, when Memory wakes.
Still Rachel sat motionless.
She had labored with dumb unreasoning passion to forget, as a man works his hand to the bone night after night, week after week, month after month, to file through the bars of his prison. She found at last that forgetfulness came not of prayer and fasting; that it was not in her to forget. The past had seemed to stretch its cruel, desecrating hand over all the future, cutting her off from the possibility of love and marriage, and from the children whom in dreams she held in her arms. As she had said to Hester, she thought she "had nothing left to give."
But now the dead past had risen from its grave in her meeting with her former lover, and in a moment, in two short days and wakeful nights, the past relinquished its false claim upon her life. She saw that it was false, that she had been frightened where no fear was, that her deliverance lay in remembrance itself, not in the handcuffs with which until now she had bound her deliverer.
Mr. Tristram had come back into her life, and with his own hands had destroyed the overthrown image of himself, which lay like a barrier across her heart. He had replaced it by an accurate presentment of himself as he really was.
"Only that which is replaced is destroyed," and it is often our real self in its native rags, and not, as we jealously imagine, another king in richer purple who has replaced us in the throne-room of the heart that loved us. To the end of life Rachel never forgot Mr. Tristram, any more than the amber forgets its fly. But she was vaguely conscious as he left her that he had set her free. She listened to his retreating step hardly daring to breathe. It was too good to be true. At last there was dead silence. No echo of a footfall. Quite gone. He had departed not only out of her presence, but out of her life.
She breathed again. A tremor, like that which shakes the first green leaf against the March sky, stole across her crushed heart, empty at last, empty at last. She raised her hand timidly in the sunshine. She was free. She looked round dazzled, bewildered. The little world of sunshine and the turquoises of sky strewn among the golden net-work of the trees smiled at her, as one who brings good tidings.
A certain familiar hold on life and nature, so old that it was almost new, which she had forgotten, but which her former self used to feel, came back suddenly upon her, like a lost friend from over-seas. Scales seemed to fall from her eyes. The light was too much for her. She had forgotten how beautiful the world was. Everything was possible.
Some, in the night of their desolation, can take comfort when they see the morning-star shuddering white in the east, and can say, "Courage, the day is at hand."
But others never realize that their night is over till the sun is up. Rachel had sat in a long stupor. The message writ large for her comfort in the stars that the night was surely waning had not reached her, bowed, as she thought, beneath God's hand. And the sure return of the sun at last came upon her like a miracle.
Chapter XXVI
*
"'Tis not for every one to catch a salmon."
Every one who knows Middleshire knows that the little lake of Beaumere is bounded on the one side by the Westhope and on the other by the Wilderleigh property, the boundary being the ubiquitous Drone, which traverses the mere in a desultory fashion, and with the assistance of several springs makes Beaumere what it is, namely (to quote from the local guide-book), "the noblest expanse of water surrounded by some of the most picturesque scenery in Middleshire."
Thither Doll and Hugh took their way in the leisurely manner of men whose orthodoxy obliges them to regard Sunday as a day of rest.
Doll pointed out to Hugh the coppice which his predecessor, Mr. George Loftus, had planted. Hugh regarded it without excitement. Both agreed that it was coming on nicely. Hugh thought that he ought to do a little planting at his own place. Doll said, "You can't do everything at once." A large new farm was the next object of interest. "Uncle George rebuilt Greenfields from the ground," remarked Doll, as they crossed the high road and took to the harvesting fields, where "the ricks stood gray to the sun."
Hugh nodded. Doll thought he was a very decent chap, though rather low-spirited. Hugh thought that if Mr. George Loftus had been alive he might have consulted him. In an amicable silence, broken occasionally by whistling for Crack, who hurried blear-eyed and asthmatic out of rabbit-holes, the pair reached Beaumere; and, after following the path through the wood, came suddenly upon the little lake locked in the heart of the steeply climbing forest.
Doll stood still and pointed with his stick for fear Hugh might overlook it. "I come here every Sunday," he remarked.
A sense of unreality and foreboding seized on Hugh, as the still face of the water looked up at him. Where had he seen it before, this sea of glass reflecting the yellow woods that stooped to its very edge? What had it to do with him?
"I've been here before," he said, involuntarily.
"I dare say," said Doll. "Newhaven marches with me here. The boundary is by that clump of silver birch. The Drone comes in there, but you can't see it. The Newhavens are friends of yours, aren't they?"
"Acquaintances," said Hugh, absently, looking hard at the water. He had never been here before. Memory groped blindly for a lost link, as one who momentarily recognizes a face in a crowd, and tries to put a name to it and fails. As the face disappears, so the sudden impression passed from Hugh's mind.
"I expect you have been here with them," said Doll. "Good man, Newhaven."
"I used to see a good deal of them at one time," said Hugh; "but they seem to have forgotten me of late."
"Oh, that's her!" said Doll. "She is always off and on with people. Takes a fancy one day and a dislike the next. But he's not like that. You always know where to find him. Solid man, Newhaven. He doesn't say much, but what he says he sticks to."
"He gives one that impression," said Hugh.
"I rather think he is there now," said Doll, pointing to the farther shore. "I see a figure moving, and two little specks. I should not wonder if it were him and the boys. They often come here on Sunday afternoons."
"You have long sight," said Hugh. He had met Lord Newhaven several times since the drawing of lots, and they had always greeted each other with cold civility. But Hugh avoided him when he could without drawing attention to the fact that he did so.
"Are you going over to his side?" he asked.
"Rather not," said Doll. "I have never set a single trimmer or fired a shot beyond that clump of birch, or Uncle George before me."
The two men picked their way down the hill-side among the tall, thin tree-trunks. There was no one except the dogs at the keeper's cottage, in a clearing half-way down. Doll took the key of the boat-house from a little hole under the eaves.
"I think Withers must be out," he remarked at last, after knocking and calling at the locked door and peering through the closed window. Hugh had been of that opinion for some time. "Gone out with his wife, I expect. Never mind, we can do without him."
They went slipping over the dry beech-mast to the boat-house. Doll unlocked the door and climbed into one of the boats; Hugh and Crack followed. They got a perch-rod off a long shelf, and half a dozen trimmers. Then they pulled out a little way and stopped near an archip
elago of water-lily leaves.
Doll got out the perch-rod and float and made a cast.
"It's not fishing," he said, apologetically, half to his guest and half to his Maker. "But we are bound to get some baits."
Hugh nodded, and gazed down at the thin forest below. He could see the perch moving in little companies in the still water beyond the water-trees. Presently a perch, a very small one, out alone for the first time, came up, all stiff head and shoulders and wagging tail, to the carelessly covered hook.
"Don't, don't, you young idiot!" said Hugh, below his breath. But the perch knew that the time had come when a perch must judge for himself.
The float curtesied and went under, and in another second the little independent was in the boat.
"There are other fools in the world besides me, it seems," said Hugh to himself.
"He'll do; but I wish he was a dace," said Doll, slipping the victim into a tin with holes in the top. "Half a dozen will be enough."
They got half a dozen, baited and set the trimmers white side up, and were turning to row back, when Doll's eyes became suddenly fixed.
"By Jove! there's something at it," he said, pointing to a trimmer at some distance.
Both men looked intently at it. Crack felt that something was happening, and left off smelling the empty fish-can.
The trimmer began to nod, to tilt, and then turned suddenly upsidedown, and remained motionless.
"He's running the line off it," said Doll.
As he spoke the trimmer gave one jerk and went under. Then it reappeared, awkwardly bustling out into the open.
"Oh, hang it all! it's Sunday," said Doll, with a groan. "We can't be catching pike on a Sunday." And he caught up the oars and rowed swiftly towards the trimmer.
As soon as they were within a boat's length it disappeared again, came up again, and went pecking along the top of the water. Doll pursued warily, and got hold of it.
"Gently, now," he said, as he shipped the oars. "He'll go under the boat and break us if we don't look out. I'll play him, and you shove the net under him. Damn!—God forgive me!—we've come out without a landing-net. Good Lord, Scarlett, you can't gaff him with a champagne-opener. There, you pull him in, and I'll grab him somehow. I've done it before. Crack, lie down, you infernal fool! Scarlett, if you pull him like that you'll lose him to a certainty. By George, he's a big one!" Doll tore off his coat and turned up his shirt-sleeves. "He's going under the boat. If you let him go under the boat, I tell you, he'll break us. I'm quite ready." Doll was rubbing his waistcoat-buttons against the gunwale. "Bring him in gradually. For goodness' sake, keep your feet off the line, or, if he makes a dash, he'll break you! Give him line. Keep your elbows out. Keep your hands free. Don't let him jerk you. If you don't give him more line when he runs, you'll lose him. He's not half done yet. Confound you, Scarlett! hold on for all you're worth. All right, old chap, all right. Don't mind me. You're doing it first-class. Right as rain. Now, now. By George! did you see him that time? He's a nailer! Steady on him! Bring him in gently. Keep an even pull on him. Keep steady!"
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