CHAPTER XXIII.
The common stretches, long and stony, at the top of the hill that backsGlan-yr-Afon. To reach it they have to climb through the waving woods,where the beeches and sycamores emulously cast down their crimsonand amber leaves to strew the path before their feet. To reach it,they have to pass the woodman's stone cottage, his pigstye, and hislittle yap-yapping rude dog. From the common you may look upwards ordownwards--northwards, to the valley-head; southwards, to the sea.
From among the scant brown mountain-grass, the limestone cropsfrequent, in peaks, and slabs, and riven rock-fragments. Far down inchinks and crevices little black-stemmed ferns grow darkling, and overthe rock's rough face, the lichens, drab and yellow, make their littleplans and charts. One may fancy some former people of strong giantssleeping very sweetly beneath those unchiselled tombstones, with theirepitaphs written out fairly in Nature's hand in green mosses and rainfurrows. In spring the hill's harsh front is crowned with a yellowsplendour of gorse-flowers, but now a single blossom blows here andthere desolate, just to hinder the old saying from being quite a lie.Below, in the valley, the mists roll greyly; and out above them Naullanchurch spire rises, pointing heavenwards, as if showing the way to thedead flock gathered round its feet; points heavenwards, like the fingerof some sculptured saint.
The autumn winds are piping bleakly, singing an ugly peevish dirge forthe gone summer, bending the frost-seared brake-fern all one way, andwith rough hands pushing back Robert and Esther, saying, "This is _our_territory; what brings you here?"
Esther shivers.
"You are cold, I'm afraid," says Brandon, anxiously, putting his headon one side, not out of sentimentality, but in the endeavour to keephis hat on.
"Yes," she answers, rapidly; "and I'm glad of it. I should _hate_ tofeel warm and comfortable; I want to be cold, and faint, and miserable_always_. Do you know," she continues, excitedly, laying her hand onhis arm, "yesterday I _laughed?_--yes! I actually _laughed!_ and itis only a fortnight since--wasn't it horrible of me? I want the daysand the weeks to go by quickly: I want it to be a long time since Jackdied!"
Brandon makes no answer--partly because he is utterly at a loss for areply, partly because he is still wrestling with his hat. Presentlythey come to a disused quarry, where the quarrymen have hewn outrock-ledges into comfortable seats for them. The wind howls above them,angry and sad, and flings hither and thither the flowerless broom-pikesthat look over the cliffs, but it cannot reach them.
"Esther," says Bob, taking up a sharp stone, and beginning to drawwhite lines on the rock's smooth surface, "it seems as if I had noother occupation nowadays than to say disagreeable things to you, butI cannot help it: do you think you can bear to leave Glan-yr-Afon inthree weeks or so?"
"Bear!" she repeats, bitterly; "I can bear anything--I have proved thatalready, I think. Any one that had had any feeling would have died of_this;_ but I--I sleep and eat as well as ever: I am like the baker whorefused Christ the loaf--I _cannot_ die!"
"Hush!" he says, eagerly; "don't want to go before your time, orperhaps the Almighty might take you at your word."
There is silence for a moment or two, then Brandon speaks again: "Atthe end of three weeks you will come to us then?"
No answer.
Thinking that the wind has carried away his words, he repeats hisquestion: "At the end of three weeks you will come to us, then?"
She turns her head round slowly. "Could not I live in some hovel bymyself?"
He shakes his head. "Impossible! You see," he says, speaking with slowreluctance, "he--poor dear fellow!--laid out a great deal of money onall the latest improvements in farming implements, and things of thatkind, and they did not bring him anything back; they would have done,no doubt, if he had been given time," he adds, quickly, afraid ofseeming to cast the faintest slur upon the dead boy.
"You mean to say that I have no money--that I am a beggar," she says,fixing her clear, steadfast eyes upon him: and in them is none of thatdismay which her words seem to imply.
"I mean to say," he answers, heartily, "that henceforth you are to beone of us, and that we are very, _very_ glad of it."
She does not say "Thank you;" she neither assents nor refuses; sheonly looks away, and watches the distant trees tossing violent arms, inriotous fight with the wind.
Something in her manner makes Brandon uneasy. "It is agreed, then?" heasks, eagerly.
No reply.
"Why don't you answer me, Esther?" (with a slight natural impatience inhis tone).
She turns her face slowly round towards him--a face paled by her lateagonies, thinned by long fastings, and by thousands of great tears."Because," she replies, "I have one friend in the world now; and when Ihave answered you, I shall have none!"
"What _do_ you mean?"
"If I were to come to you, I should come as your supposed future wife,shouldn't I? Well, I should be an impostor."
A great sickening fear whitens his brown face, but he contains himself,and speaks quietly: "Do you think I meant to _bargain_ with you? Do youthink I meant to make a profit for myself out of your troubles? Whathave I ever done to make you think me so mean?" he asks, reproachfully.
She draws a heavy sighing breath. "Why am I beating about the bush?"she says, chiding herself; "it must out, sooner or later! Oh, Bob! Bob!if I had it in me to be sorry about anything, I should be sorry aboutthis!"
"About what?" he asks, cruelly excited. "Look this way, Esther. Isit--is it what I have been afraid of all along?"
Her head sinks in shamed dejection on her breast. "Yes, it is," sheanswers, faintly.
There will be a great storm at sea to-night; the gulls are circlingabout, calling wildly to one another--here, twenty miles inland.
"Who is it?" asks Bob, in a husky whisper, presently.
She sighs again, profoundly. "Do you remember," she says, "before Iwent to the Gerards'--how many hundred years ago was that?--your sayingone day that you wished they had not got a son, and my laughing at youabout it? Well! you were right!--it is he!"
Brandon turns away his head, speaks not, nor gives any sign. It is insilence that a good brave man meetliest takes his deathblow.
"I don't think he would have cared much about me, if I had let himalone," says Esther, taking a sort of gloomy pleasure in paintingherself as black as possible.
There is a pause--a pause, during which Brandon is fighting one ofthose duels in which most men have to engage at least once in theirlives--the duel with a mortal agony, that says, tauntingly, "I am yourmaster! I have conquered you!" to which one that is valiant makesanswer, "You are strong, you are terrible; but you are _not_ my master.I will keep you under!"
"You will go to him then, of course, instead of coming to us?" he says,presently, speaking in some one else's voice (for it certainly is nothis own), and keeping his head turned away; for no one is willing toparade their death-pangs before others' eyes.
She laughs derisively. "Go to him! Hardly! I should get but anindifferent welcome if I did. You know I never told him a word aboutyou--ladylike and honourable of me, wasn't it?--but some one else didhim that good office; and now, if he were to see me falling over theedge of that cliff, he would not put out a finger to save me. That ishis sort of love!" She ends, bitterly, "And I think he is right."
Another longer silence. Brandon is wrestling with that adversary ofhis, that deadly anger and pain; that riotous, tigerish jealousy,that makes us all murderers for the time, in thought at least; thatmad, wild longing--madder, wilder than any love ardour, than anyparoxysm of religious zeal--to have his hands, for one moment of strongecstasy, about the throat of the rich man that has robbed him of hisone ewe lamb. The sweat of that combat stands cold upon his brow, buthe overcomes. After a while he speaks gently, as one would speak to alittle sick child: "Were you very fond of him, Esther?"
"I suppose so," she answers with reflective calmness, looking straightbefore her. "I must have been, or I should not have said and done themean things I did. I should not have de
graded myself into begging himto take me back again, when I might as well have begged of this rock"(thrusting her soft hand against it) "to turn to grass and flowers. Hetold me that he would never forgive me, either in this world or thenext! I thought it very dreadful at the time, but I don't much care nowwhether he forgives me or not."
"Have you forgotten him so completely already?" asks Bob, forgettinghis own misery for the moment, in sheer blank amazement.
"Forgotten him!" she repeats thoughtfully. "No, not that! not that! Imight as well try to forget myself. I remember every line of his face,his voice, and his ways, and every word he said almost; but if I wereto see him standing close to us here, I should not feel the slightestinclination to go to him, or to call him to come to me. I feel all deadeverywhere." They remain in the same attitude for several minutes,neither of them stirring nor uttering a word. Then Esther speaks, witha certain uneasy abruptness. "Well!" she says, "I am waiting!--waitingfor you to call me a murderess and a bad woman, and all the other namesthat St. John gave me, on much less provocation. Make haste!" shesays, with a nervous forced laugh; "I am in a hurry to hear that I havesucceeded in getting rid of my last friend. Quick! quick!--tell me thatyou hate me, and have done with it!"
"_Hate_ you!" he repeats, tenderly; his brave voice trembling a littlein spite of himself, and the meekness of a great heroism ennobling hisface. "You, poor soul! Why should I hate you because another man isbetter and more loveable than I, and because you have eyes to see it?"
The eyes he speaks of turn upon him, wide and startled, in astonisheddisbelief of his great generosity.
"You don't understand!" she says, quickly. "You don't take it in. I was_engaged_ to him; I was going to marry him, and all the time I neveronce mentioned your name to him, of my own accord; and when he asked meabout you, I said you were only a common acquaintance. You _must_ hateme!" she ends, vehemently; "don't pretend that you don't!"
"Hush!" he answers sorrowfully, but very gently, "that is nonsense!I don't even hate him; at least" (pausing a moment, to thrust downand trample under foot one more spasm of that intolerable burningjealousy)--"at least, I try not. It was my own fault. I knew all alongthat I was poor, and stupid, and awkward, that I had nothing but sheerlove to give you, and I hoped against hope that that might win youat last. We all set our affections upon some one thing, I suppose,"he says, with a patient, pitiful smile, "and I daresay it is all thebetter for us in the end that we don't often get it: but oh, love!love! you might have told me!" Then his resolution breaks a little,and, covering his face with his hands, he groans aloud, in a man'sdry-eyed agony--how much awfuller to see than a woman's little tears,that flow indifferently for a dead pet dog, or a dead husband! Esthersits looking at him during several minutes, awestruck, as a child thathas made a grown-up person cry; then one of those quick impulses thatcarry some women away seizes her.
"Bob!" she says, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, while hergentle, vibrating voice thrills down to his stricken soul, "I have beenvery bad to you, but I will make up for it!"
"Will you?" he says, looking up with a mournful, sceptical smile; "how?"
"I'll marry you, if you'll have me, and make a very good wife to you,"she says, simply, with unblushing calmness, eyelids unlowered, andvoice unwavering.
"Child!" he cries, "you are very generous, but do you think I cannot begenerous too?"
"It is not generosity," she says, eagerly; "I _wish_ to marry you!"
He shakes his head sadly. "You don't know what you are saying," heanswers, taking her little hand between both his--holding it almostfatherly, in a tender prison. "You don't know what marriage is. Youdon't understand that a union so close with a person you don't lovewould be infinitely worse than being tied to a dead body; the one couldnot last very long, the other might for years."
She looks at him silently, with her grave, innocent eyes, for aninstant or two while she tries to get down to the depth of her ownheart--tries to feel something besides that numb vague indifferenceto everything. "If I don't love you," she says, doubtfully, "I lovenobody; I like you better than anyone else in the world! Didn't Jackdie in your arms?" she says, breaking out into sudden and violenttears. "Wasn't his head resting on your shoulder when he went away? Oh,dear, dear shoulder!" she cries, kissing it passionately. "How can Ihelp loving you for that?"
At the touch of her soft mouth, that has been to him hitherto, despitehis nominal betrothal, a sealed book, his steadfast heart begins topulse frantically fast: if a river of flame instead of blood werepoured through his veins, they could not have throbbed with an insanerheat: his sober head swims as one that is dizzy with strong drink;reels in the overpowering passion of a man that has not frittered awayhis heart in little bits, after our nineteenth-century fashion, but hascast it down, _whole_, unscarred by any other smallest wound, at onewoman's feet. Oh, if he might but take her at her word! Or, if theremust be no marriage between them, why may not there be a brief sweetmarriage of the lips? It would do her no harm--since kisses, happilyfor the reputation of ninety-nine hundredths of the female world, leaveno mark--and it would set him for an instant on a pinnacle of blissthat would equal him with the high gods.
But the paroxysm is short. Before she who has caused it has guessed atits existence, it is put down, held down strongly. Women are very oftenlike naughty children, putting a lighted match to a train of gunpowder,and then surprised and frightened because there is an explosion.
"You are deceiving yourself," he says, speaking almost coldly. "Youthink you like me, because I happened to be the last person that waswith the dear fellow that's gone--because you knew that I was grievedabout him too: but think of me as you thought of me when you were atthe Gerards', and you'll know how much you love me for myself."
"Love!" she repeats, dreamily--"love! love!" saying over and over againthe familiar, common word, until by very dint of frequent repetition itgrows unfamiliar, odd, void of meaning. "I have used up all I ever hadof that: perhaps I never had much, but I think you the very best manthat ever lived. Is not that enough to go upon?"
He shakes his head with a slight smile. "Worse and worse! that would bea difficult character to live up to. No!" he says, looking at her, withthe nobility of an utter self-abnegation in his sorrowful blue eyes. "Iwill _never_ marry you, Essie! never!--I swear it! If you were to godown on your knees to me, I would not: I should deserve that God shouldstrike me dead if I could be guilty of such unmanly selfishness!"
"You refuse me then?" she says, with a sigh of half-unconscious relief."Was ever such a thing heard of? And I have not even the satisfactionof being able to be angry with you."
"I refuse you!" he answers, steadily, taking her two little hands inhis. "But--look at me, dear, and believe me--as I said to you before,so I say now, I shall love you to-day, and to-morrow, and always!"
The two young people sit silent; each looking down, as it were withinner eyes, on the wreck of their own destiny--wrecked already! thoughtheir ships have so lately left the port. The vapours still curl aboutthe dun hills: the clouds stoop low, as if to mingle with their sistermists. With many a sigh, and with many a shiver, the trees shower downthe ruddy rain of their leaves; earth is stripping her fair body forthe winter sleep. Then Brandon speaks:
"Promise me one thing, Essie!"
"_Anything_ almost."
"That this--this--_talk_ we have had shall make no difference as toyour coming to us!"
"What!" she cries, suddenly springing to her feet, tears of remorse andmortification rushing to her eyes. "After having done you the worstinjury a woman can do a man, am I to be indebted to you for dailybread--for food, and clothes, and firing? How much lower do you wish meto fall? Have you _no_ pity on me?"
"You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyesfixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging fromits strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to_me_ for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back toBermuda."
"Gone!" she rep
eats, blankly. "Are _you_ going too? Is everybody goingaway from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that itwill be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your motherand sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!'to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sellmatches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"
He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says,looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face,"you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matcheseither; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!"
"That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I ampretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" shecries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "whatbusiness have people to bring children into the world only to starve,or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliamentagainst it! Oh, why--why is not one allowed to have a look into lifebefore one is born--to have one's choice whether one will come into itat all or no? But, if one had, who _would_ come?--who would?"
"I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a badplace, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though itdoes do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," headds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long,and there's a better at the other end of it."
"Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy theworld without one, can one?" she continues, following out her ownideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there _was_, and not long hencethere _will be_, no _I_; but one cannot realize it!"
"Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy.
"The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly,without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, allwith some reference to _oneself:_ one cannot understand their all goingon when oneself has stopped!"
Reflections of this character are not much in Bob's way. Pensivemusings upon the caducity of the human race are, generally, ratherfeminine than masculine. A woman dreams over the shortness of life,while a man crowds it with doings that make it, in effect, long.Brandon turns the conversation back into a more practical channel.
"Have you any friends that you have known longer than you have us,Essie?"
"None."
"Any to whom it would be less irksome to you to lie under anobligation, as you call it?"
"None."
"Any that you like better, in short?"
"None," she answers, with a little impatience, as if, in a way, ashamedof her own destitution. "Good or bad, I have _no_ friends, _none_, andyou know it."
He looks at her with a sort of shocked amazement. "Good God! what is tobecome of you, then?" he asks, bluntly.
"I don't know."
"How are you to live?"
"I don't know."
"Have you never once thought about it?"
"Never. I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiverpiteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it,straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "_we_" liessleeping--"I thought that we should have lived to be old together: mostpeople live to be old!"
A great yearning pity--purer, nobler, with less of the satyr and moreof the god in it, than in any access of human passion between man andwoman--seizes him as he looks at her, sitting there so forlorn, withone thin hand lifted to shield her weary purple-lidded eyes, that havegrown dim with weeping for "her boy."
"Poor little soul!" he says, compassionately; and he takes, withbrotherly intimacy, the other hand, that lies listless in her lap, andlays fond lips upon it.
When one is on the verge of a burst of crying, a harsh word may avertthe catastrophe, but a kind one inevitably precipitates it. With howunjust, unreasonable a hatred does one often regard the person whoill-advisedly speaks that kind word! As for Esther, she buries her faceon his shoulder and begins to sob hysterically. Her hat falls off,and her bare, defenceless head leans on his breast, while the autumnwind wafts one long lock of her scented hair against his face. She hasforgotten that he _was_ her lover, has forgotten that he is a man; sheremembers only that he is a friend, which is a sexless thing--that heis the one being who cares about her, in all the great, full, crowdedworld. Despite the utter abandonment of her attitude, despite theclinging closeness of her soft supple form to his, he feels none of thepainful stings of passion that so lately beset him. They are tamed, forthe moment, by a nobler emotion: they dare as little assail him now, asthey dare assail the holy saints in Paradise. With any other man suchabandonment might have been dangerous: with him she is safe. He layshis kind broad hand on her ruffled head, and strokes it, just as Jackused to do, in the pleasant days before he went.
"Come to us, Essie!" he says, with persuasive tenderness; "we'll begood to you; we won't plague you; you would have come to us as my wife,why won't you come as my sister?"
"Because I like buying things better than being given them!" sheanswers, vehemently, though still incoherent from her tears. "IfI had come as your wife, I should have given you something inexchange,--_myself_, body and soul, my whole life. It would have beenof no value _really_, but you would have thought it something; as yoursister, I shall give you absolutely nothing!"
"Child! child! why are you so proud?" he asks, with mournfulreproachfulness. "Why are you so bent on standing alone? Which of us_can_ stand alone in this world? We all have to lean upon one another,more or less, and the strongest of us upon God!"
"Yes, I know that!--I know that!" she answers, hastily; "but I wouldfar rather beg, and have to be obliged to any common stranger that Ihad never seen before, and that most probably I should never see again,than to you. With them I should, at all events, start fair: I shouldhave no old debts to weigh me down; but to you I owe so much already,that I am racking my brain to think how I can pay some part of it,instead of contracting new ones."
"You would contract no new ones," he rejoins, earnestly; "on thecontrary. Essie, you told me just now that you would be very glad to beable to make up to me for any pain you may have made me suffer: _now_is your time!--_now_ is your opportunity!"
"How?" she sobs, lifting up her head, and speaking with a slow,plaintive intonation. "You will be at the other side of the world,thousands of miles away! How will it affect _you?_"
"I _shall_ be at the other side of the world," he answers, steadily;"better that I should be so! better so! But do you think that my beingso far away will make it pleasanter for me to think of the one creatureI love above all others on the face of the earth, starving, or worsethan starving, at home?"
"Worse than starving!" she repeats, opening her great, wide eyes inastonishment. "What _can_ be worse than starving? Oh! I see what youmean" (a light breaking in upon her, and the colour flushing faintlyinto her face). "You think I should go to the bad--do somethingdisgraceful, if I had nobody to look after me: I am sorry you have sucha bad opinion of me, but I don't wonder at it," she ends, with resigneddepression.
"I have no bad opinion of you!" he answers, eagerly; "but I know theend that women, originally as pure and good as you, have come to beforenow. I know how hard it is for a beautiful poor girl to live _honestly_in this world, how frightfully easy to live _dis_honestly!"
"Well!" she says, recklessly; "and if I did live dishonestly, whatmatter? Whom have I got to be ashamed of? Whom have I got to disgrace?"
Brandon looks inexpressibly shocked. "Hush!" he says, putting his handbefore her mouth; "you don't know what you are saying! For Heaven'ssake, talk in that strain to no one but me! Any one that knew you lesswell than I do might misunderstand you."
She looks up at him, half-frightened. "One does say dreadful thingswithout intending it," she says, apologetically; "but I only meant toexpress, as forcibly as possible, how little consequence it was whathappened to me."
"For God's sake, word it differently then!" he says, almost sternly;"or, better still, don't say it
or think it at all! It is morbid, andit is not true. If it is of no consequence to any one else what becomesof you, it is of intense, unspeakable consequence to me: how many timesmust I tell you that before you mean to believe it?"
"To _you!_ in _Bermuda?_" she says, with a little doubting sigh.
"Yes, to _me_, in _Bermuda_," he answers, firmly. "Perhaps you thinkthat it was only because I looked upon you as my own, my _property_,that I took so great an interest in you: it was not as _mine_, it wasas _yourself_, that I cared about you. You are _yourself_ still, thoughyou are not nor ever will be mine."
Then, like Guinevere's, "his voice brake suddenly."
"Then, as a stream, that spouting from a cliff Fails in mid-air, but gathering at the base, Remakes itself and flashes down the vale, Went on in passionate utterance."
"Essie! they say that women are more capable of self-sacrifice thanmen. Prove it to me now! Sacrifice this pride of yours; consent to theone thing that would make me leave England with almost a light, insteadof _such_ a heavy heart!"
She is silent for a minute or two, halting between two opinions;hesitating, struggling with herself: then she speaks, rapidly, but noteasily--
"I cannot, Bob--I cannot! Ask me anything, not quite so hard, and I'lldo it! Just think how young I am, seventeen last birthday, I haveprobably forty or fifty more years to live; do you wish me to promiseto be a pensioner for _half a century_ on your mother's charity?"
He does not answer.
"Don't be angry with me for having a little self-respect!" she cries,passionately, snatching his hand. "I will go and stay with your peopletill I have found something to do, if they will have me. I will getyour mother to help me in looking for work; I will take her advice in_everything_, do whatever she tells me; I will do anything--anything inlife to please you, except----"
"Except the one thing I wish," he answers, sadly and coldly.
"If you speak in that tone I shall have to promise you _anything_,"she says, despairingly; "but it will only be perjury, for I shallinfallibly break my promise again. Why should not I work?" she goes on,in a sort of indignation at his silence. "Am I a cripple, or an idiot?Let me wait till I am either the one or the other, before I _come uponthe parish!_" she says, with the bitter pride of poverty; "at allevents, let us call things by their right names."
"As you will," he answers, deeply wounded. "If you take it as a greatindignity to be offered a home with the oldest friends you have in theworld, of course I can say no more; but oh, child! you are wrong--youare wrong!"