"I cannot tell you."
"You mean that you refuse?"
"I refuse because I am not permitted, and further, I--"
"You what?"
"I should be revealing to you his secret."
"And what of that?"
"If you knew everything, you would certainly go to the police and tell
them the truth. They would arrest him, and I--I should die."
"Die? What do you mean?" I asked quickly.
"I could not live to face the exposure and the shame. He would seek to
revenge himself by making counter-charges against me--a terrible
allegation--but--but before he could do so they would find me dead."
"And I?"
"Ah! you, dear one! Yes, I know all that you must suffer. Your heart
is torn like my own. You love just as fondly as I do, and you have
mourned just as bitterly. To you, the parting is as hard as to myself.
My life had been one of darkness and despair ever since that night in
London when I was forced to lie to you. I wrecked your happiness
because circumstances conspired against us--because it was my duty as a
daughter to save my father from ruin and penury. Have you really in
your heart forgiven me, Godfrey?"
"Yes, my darling. How can I blame you for what was, after all, the
noblest sacrifice a woman could make?"
"Then let me go," she urged, speaking in a low, distinct voice, pale
almost to the lips. "We must part--therefore perhaps the sooner the
better, and the sooner my life is ended the more swiftly will peace and
happiness come to me. For me the grave holds no terrors. Only because
I leave you alone shall I regret," she sobbed.
"And yet I must in future be alone," I said, swallowing the lump that
arose in my throat. "No, Ella!" I cried, "I cannot bear it. I cannot
again live without your presence."
"Alas! you must," was her hoarse reply. "You must--you must."
Wandering full of grief and bitter thoughts, vivid and yet confused, the
hours sped by uncounted.
To the cosmopolitan, like I had grown to be, green plains have a certain
likeness, whether in Belgium, Germany or Britain. A row of poplars
quivering in the sunshine looks much alike in Normandy or in
Northamptonshire. A deep forest all aglow with red and gold in autumn
tints is the same thing, after all, in Tuscany, as in Yorkshire.
But England, our own dear old England, has also a physiognomy that is
all her own; that is like nothing else in all the world; pastures
intensely green, high hawthorn hedges and muddy lanes, which to some
minds is sad and strange and desolate and painful, and which to others
is beautiful, but which, be it what else it may, is always wholly and
solely English, can never be met with elsewhere, and has a smile of
peace and prosperity upon it, and a sigh in it that make other lands
beside it seem as though they were soulless and were dumb.
We had unconsciously taken a path that, skirting a wood, ran up over a
low hill southward. To our left lay the beautiful Cornish country in
the sweet misty grey of the morning light. The sun was shining and the
tremulous wood smoke curled up in the rosy air from a cottage chimney.
Was that to be our last walk together, I wondered? I sighed when I
recollected how utterly we were the children of circumstance.
Beside her I walked with a swelling heart. I consumed my soul in
muteness and bitterness, my eyes set before me to the grey hills behind
which the sun had risen.