A STRANGE MEETING
Grayness reigned everywhere--in the sky, on the hillside, and on the
bare moor, no longer made resplendent by the gleaming beauty of the
purple heather and fainter flashes of yellow gorse. The dry, springy
turf had become a swamp, and phantom-like wreaths of mist blurred and
saddened the landscape. The sweet stirring of the summer wind amongst
the pine trees had given place to the melancholy drip of raindrops
falling from their heavy, drooping branches on to the soddened ground.
Every vestige of coloring had died out of the landscape--from the sea,
the clouds, and the heath. It was the earth's mourning season, when the
air has neither the keen freshness of winter, the buoyancy of spring,
the sweet drowsy languor of summer, or the bracing exhilaration of
autumn. It was November.
Daylight was fast fading away; but the reign of twilight had not yet
commenced. After a blustering morning, a sudden stillness had fallen
upon the earth. The wild north wind had ceased its moaning in the pine
trees, and no longer came booming across the level moorland. The dull
gray clouds which all day long had been driven across the leaden sky in
flying haste, hung low down upon the sad earth, and from over the water
a sea fog rose to meet them. Nature had nothing more cheerful to offer
than silence, a dim light, and indescribable desolation.
A solitary man, with his figure carved out in sharp relief against the
vaporous sky, stood on the highest point of the cliff. Everything in his
attitude betokened the deepest dejection--in which at least he was in
sympathy with his surroundings. His head drooped upon his bent
shoulders, and his dark, weary eyes were fixed upon the rising sea fog
in a vacant gaze. Warmly clad as he was, he seemed chilled through his
whole being by the raw lifelessness of the air. Yet he did not move.
The utter silence was suddenly broken by the rising of a little flock of
gulls from among the stunted firs hanging down over the cliff. Almost
immediately afterwards there came another sound, denoting the advance of
a human being. The little hand gate leading out of the plantation was
opened and shut, and light footsteps began to ascend the ridge of the
cliffs on which he was standing, hesitating now and then, but always
advancing. As soon as he became sure of this, he turned his head in the
direction from which they came, and found himself face to face with
Helen Thurwell.
It was the first time they had come together since the terrible night at
Thurwell Court, when their eyes had met for an awful moment over the
dead body of Rachel Kynaston. The memory of that scene flashed into the
minds of both of them; from hers, indeed, it had seldom been absent. She
stood face to face with the man whom she had been charged, by the
passionate prayers of a dying woman, to hunt down and denounce as a
murderer. They looked at one another with the same thoughts in the minds
of both. The first step she had already taken. Henceforth he would be
watched and dogged, his past life raked up, and his every action
recorded. And she it was who had set the underhand machinery at work,
she it was whom he, guilty or innocent, would think of as the woman who
had hunted him down. If he should be innocent, and the time should come
when he discovered all, what would he think of her? If he could have
seen her a few days back in the office of Messrs. Levy & Son, would he
look at her as he was doing now? The thought sent a shiver through her.
At that moment she hated herself.
It was no ordinary meeting this, for him or for her. Had she been able
to look him steadily in the face, she might have seen something of her
own nervousness reflected there. But that was just what at first she was
unable to do. One rapid glance into his pale features, which suffering
and intellectual labor seemed in some measure to have etherealized, was
sufficient. She had all the poignant sense of a culprit before an
injured but merciful judge, and at that moment the memory of those dying
words was faint within her. And so, though it is not usually the case,
it was he who appeared the least disturbed, and he it was who broke that
strange silence which had lasted several moments after she had come to a
standstill before him.
"You do not mind speaking to me, Miss Thurwell?"
"No; I do not mind," she answered in a low, hesitating tone.
"Then may I take it that Miss Kynaston's words have not--damaged me in
your esteem?" he went on, his voice quivering a little with suppressed
anxiety. "You do not--believe--that----"
"I neither believe nor disbelieve!" she interrupted. "Remember that you
had an opportunity of denying it which you did not accept!"
"That is true!" he answered slowly. "Let it remain like that, then. It
is best."
She had turned a little away as though to watch a screaming curlew fly
low down and vanish in the fog. From where he stood on slightly higher
ground he looked down at her curiously, for in more than one sense she
was a puzzle to him. There was a certain indefiniteness in her manner
toward him which he felt a passionate desire to construe. She seemed at
once merciful and merciless, sympathetic and hard. Then, as he looked at
her, he almost forgot all this wilderness of suffering and doubt. All
his intense love for physical beauty, ministered to by the whole manner
of his life, seemed rekindled in her presence. The tragedy of the
present seemed to pass away into the background. From the moment when he
had first caught a glimpse of her in the courtyard of the Palazzo Vechi,
he had chosen her face and presence with which to endow his artist's
ideal--and, since that time, what change there had been in her had been
for the better. The animal spirits of light-hearted girlhood had become
toned down into the more refined and delicate softness of thoughtful
womanhood. In her thin supple figure there was still just the suspicion
of incomplete development, which is in itself a fascination; and her
country attire, the well-cut brown tweed ulster, the cloth cap from
beneath which many little waves of fair silky hair had escaped, the trim
gloves and short skirts--the most insignificant article of her
attire--all seemed to bespeak that peculiar and subtle daintiness which
is at the same time the sweetest and the hardest to define of nature's
gifts to women.
Even in the most acute crisis, woman's care for the physical welfare of
man seems almost an instinct with her. Suddenly turning round, she saw
how ill-protected he was against the weather, and a look of concern
stole into her face.
"How ridiculous of you to come out without an overcoat or anything on
such a day as this!" she exclaimed. "Why, you must be wet through!--and
how cold you look!"
He smiled grimly. That she should think of such a thing just at that
moment, seemed to him to be a peculiar satire upon what had been passing
through his mind concerning her. Then a sudden thrill shook every limb
in his body--his very pulses quickened. She had laid her gloved hand
upon his arm, and, having withdrawn it, was regarding it ruefully. It
was stained with wet.
"You must go home at once!" she said, with a decision in her tone which
was almost suggestive of authority. "You must change all your things,
and get before a warm fire. Come, I will walk with you as far as
Falcon's Nest. I am going round that way, and home by the footpath."
They started off side by side. The first emotion of their meeting having
passed away, he found it easier to talk to her, and he did so in an odd
monosyllabic way which she yet found interesting. All her life she had
been somewhat peculiarly situated with regard to companionship. Her
father, having once taken her abroad and once to London for the season,
considered that he had done his duty to her, and having himself long ago
settled down to the life of a country squire, had expected her to be
content with her position as his daughter and the mistress of his
establishment. There was nothing particularly revolting to her in the
prospect. She was not by any means emancipated. The "new woman" would
have been a horror to her. But, unfortunately, although she was content
to accept a comparatively narrow view of life, she was slightly
epicurean in her tastes. She would have been quite willing to give up
her life to a round of such pleasures as society and wealth can procure,
but the society must be good and entertaining, and its pleasures must be
refined and free from monotony. In some parts of England she might have
found what would have satisfied her, and under the influence of a
pleasure-seeking life, she would in due course have become the woman of
a type. As she grew older the horizon of her life would have become more
limited and her ideas narrower. She would have lived without tasting
either the full sweetness or the full bitterness of life. She would have
filled her place in society admirably, and there would have been nothing
to distinguish her either for better or worse from other women in a
similar position. But it happened that round Thurwell Court the people
were singularly uninteresting. The girls were dull, and the men bucolic.
Before she had spent two years in the country, Helen was intensely
bored. A sort of chronic languor seemed to creep over her, and in a fit
of desperation she had permitted herself to become engaged to Sir
Geoffrey Kynaston, for the simple reason that he was different from the
other men. Then, just as she was beginning to tremble at the idea of
marriage with a man for whom she had never felt a single spark of love,
there had come this tragedy, and, following close upon it, the vague
consciousness of an utter change hovering over her life. What that
change meant she was slow to discover. She was still unconscious of it
as she walked over the cliffs with the grey mists hanging around them,
side by side with her father's tenant. She knew that life had somehow
become a fairer thing to her, and that for many years she had been
living in darkness. And it was her companion, this mysterious stranger
with his wan young face and sad thoughtful eyes, who had brought the
light. She could see it flashing across the whole landscape of her
future, revealing the promise of a larger life than any she had ever
dreamed of, full of brilliant possibilities and more perfect happiness
than any she had ever imagined. She told herself that he was the
Columbus who had shown her the new land of culture, with all its fair
places, intellectual and artistic. This was the whole meaning of the
change in her. There could be nothing else.