In the long evening that followed Ruth's departure from Stoke Moreton,
Charles was alone for once in his own home. He was leaving again early
on the morrow, but for the time he was alone, and heavy at heart. He sat
for hours without stirring, looking into the fire. He had no power or
will to control his thoughts. They wandered hither and thither, and up
and down, never for a moment easing the dull miserable pain that lay
beneath them all.
Fool! fool that he had been!
To have found her after all these years, and to have lost her without a
stroke! To have let another take her, and such a man as Dare! To have
such a fool's manner that he was thought to be in earnest when he was
least so; that now, when his whole future hung in the balance,
retribution had overtaken him, and with bitter irony had mocked at his
earnestness and made it of none effect. She had thought it was his
natural manner to all! His cursed folly had lost her to him. If she had
known, surely it would have been, it must have been different. At heart
Charles was a very humble man, though it was not to be expected many
would think so; but nevertheless he had a deep, ever-deepening
consciousness (common to the experience of the humblest once in a
lifetime) that between him and Ruth that mysterious link of mutual
understanding and sympathy existed which cannot be accounted for, which
eludes analysis, which yet makes, when the sex happens to be identical,
the indissoluble friendship of a David and a Jonathan, a Karlos and a
Posa; and, where there is a difference of sex, brings about that rarest
wonder of the world, a happy marriage.
Like cleaves to like. He knew she would have loved him. She was his by
right. The same law of attraction which had lifted them at once out of
the dreary flats of ordinary acquaintanceship would have drawn them ever
closer and closer together till they were knit in one. He knew, with a
certainty that nothing could shake, that he could have made her love
him, even as he loved her; unconsciously at first, slowly perhaps--for
the current of strong natures, like that of deep rivers, is sometimes
slow. Still the end would have been the same.
And he had lost her by his own act, by his own heedless folly; her want
of vanity having lent a hand the while to put her beyond his reach
forever.
It was a bitter hour.
And as he sat late into the night beside the fire, that died down to
dust and ashes before his absent eyes, ghosts of other heavy hours,
ghosts of the past, which he had long since buried out of his sight,
came back and would not be denied.
To live much in the past, is a want of faith in the Power that gives the
present. Comparatively few men walk through their lives looking
backward. Women more frequently do so from a false estimate of life
fostered by romantic feeling in youth, which leads them, if the life of
the affections is ended, resolutely to refuse to regard existence in any
other maturer aspect, and to persist in wandering aimlessly forward,
with eyes turned ever on the dim flowery paths of former days.
"Let the dead past bury its dead."
But there comes a time, when the grass has grown over those graves, when
we may do well to go and look at them once more; to stand once again in
that solitary burial-ground, "where," as an earnest man has said, "are
buried broken vows, worn-out hopes, joys blind and deaf, faiths betrayed
or gone astray--lost, lost love; silent spaces where only one mourner
ever comes."
And to the last retrospective of us our dead past yet speaks at times,
and speaks as one having authority.
Such a time had come for Charles now. From the open grave of his love
for Ruth he turned to look at others by which he had stood long ago, in
grief as sharp, but which yet in all its bitterness had never struck as
deep as this.
Memory pointed back to a time twenty years ago, when he had hurried home
through a long summer night to arrive at Stoke Moreton too late; to find
only the solemn shadow of the mother whom he had loved, and whom he had
grieved; too late to ask for forgiveness; too late for anything but a
wild passion of grief and remorse, and frantic self-accusation.
The scene shifted to ten years later. It was a sultry July evening of
the day on which the woman whom he had loved for years had married his
brother. He was standing on the deck of the steamer which was taking him
from England, looking back at the gray town dwindling against the tawny
curtain of the sunset. In his brain was a wild clamor of wedding-bells,
and across the water, marking the pulse of the sea, came to his outward
ears the slow tolling of a bell on a sunken rock near the harbor mouth.
It seemed to be tolling for the death of all that remained of good in
him. In losing Evelyn, whom he had loved with all the idealism and
reverence of a reckless man for a good woman, he believed, in the
bitterness of his spirit, that he had lost all; that he had been cut
adrift from the last mooring to a better future, that nothing could hold
him back now. And for a time it had been so, and he had drowned his
trouble in a sea in which he wellnigh drowned himself as well.
Once more memory pointed--pointed across five dark years to an evening
when he had sat as he was sitting now, alone by the wide stone hearth in
the hall at Stoke Moreton, after his father's death, and after the
reading of the will. He was the possessor of the old home, which he had
always passionately loved, from which he had been virtually banished so
long. His father, who had never liked him, but who of late years had
hated him as men only hate their eldest sons, had left all in his power
to his second son, had entailed every acre of the Stoke Moreton and
other family properties upon him and his children. Charles could touch
nothing, and over him hung a millstone of debt, from which there was now
no escape. He sat with his head in his hands--the man whom his friends
were envying on his accession to supposed wealth and position--ruined.
A few days later he was summoned to London by a friend whom he had known
for many years. He remembered well that last meeting with the stern old
man whom he had found sitting in his arm-chair with death in his face.
He had once or twice remonstrated with Charles in earlier days, and as
he came into his presence now for the last time, and met his severe
glance, he supposed, with the callousness that comes from suffering
which has reached its lowest depths, that he was about to rebuke him
again.
"And so," said General Marston, sternly, "you have come into your
kingdom; into what you deserve."
"Yes," said Charles. "If it is any pleasure to you to know that what you
prophesied on several occasions has come true, you can enjoy it. I am
ruined!"
"You fool!" said the sick man slowly. "To have come to five-and-thirty,
and to have used up everything which makes life worth having. I am not
speaking only of money. There is a bankruptcy in your face that money
will never pay. And you had talent and a good heart and the making of a
man in you once. I saw that when your father turned you adrift. I saw
that when you were at your worst after your brother's marriage. Yes, you
need not start. I knew your secret and kept it as well as you did
yourself. I tried to stop you; but you went your own way."
Charles was silent. It was true, and he knew it.
"And so you thought, I suppose, that if your father had made a just will
you could have retrieved yourself?"
"I know I could," said Charles, firmly; "but he left the ----shire
property to Ralph, and every shilling of his capital; and Ralph had my
mother's fortune already. I have Stoke Moreton and the place in Surrey,
which he could not take from me, but everything is entailed, down to the
trees in the park. I have nominally a large income; but I am in the
hands of the Jews. I can't settle with them as I expected, and they will
squeeze me to the uttermost. However, as you say, I have the
consolation of knowing I brought it on myself."
"And if your father acted justly, as you would call it, which I knew he
never would, you would have run through everything in five years' time."
"No, I should not. I know I have been a fool; but there are two kinds of
fools--the kind that sticks to folly all its life, and the kind that has
its fling, and has done with it. I belong to the second kind. My father
had no right to take my last chance from me. If he had left it me, I
should have used it."
"You look tired of your fling," said the elder man. "Very tired. And you
think money would set you right, do you?" He looked critically at the
worn, desperate face opposite him. "I made my will the other day," he
went on, his eyes still fixed on Charles. "I had not much to leave, and
I have no near relations, so I divided it among various charitable
institutions. I see no reason to alter my will. If one leaves money,
however small the sum may be, one likes to think it has been left to
some purpose, with some prospect of doing good. A few days ago I had a
surprise. I fancy it was to be my last surprise in this world. I
inherited from a distant relation, who died intestate, a large fortune.
After being a poor man all my days, wealth comes to me when I am on the
point of going where money won't follow. Curious, isn't it? I am going
to leave this second sum in the same spirit as the first, but in rather
a different manner. I like to know what I am doing, so I sent for you. I
am of opinion that the best thing I can do with it, is to set you on
your legs again. What do you owe?"
Charles turned very red, and then very white.
"What do you owe?" repeated the sick man, testily. "I am getting tired.
How much is it?" He got out a check-book, and began filling it in. "Have
you no tongue?" he said, angrily, looking up. "Tell me the exact figure.
Well? Keep nothing back."
"I won't be given the whole," said Charles, with an oath. "Give me
enough to settle the Jews, and I will do the rest out of my income. I
won't get off scot free."
"Well, then, have your own way, as usual, and name the sum you want.
There, take it," he said, feebly, when Charles had mentioned with shame
a certain hideous figure, "and go. I shall never know what you do with
it, so you can play ducks and drakes with it if you like. But you won't
like. You have burned your fingers too severely to play with fire again.
You have turned over so many new leaves that now you have come to the
last in the book. I have given you another chance, Charles; but one man
can't do much to help another. The only person who can really help you
is yourself. Give yourself a chance, too."
How memory brought back every word of that strange interview. Charles
saw again the face of the dying man; heard again the stern, feeble
voice, "Give yourself a chance."
He had given himself a chance. "Some natures, like comets, make strange
orbits, and return from far." Charles had returned at last. The old
man's investment had been a wise one. But, as Charles looked back, after
three years, he saw that his friend had been right. His money debts had
been the least part of what he owed. There were other long-standing
accounts which he had paid in full during these three years, paid in the
restless weariness and disappointment that underlay his life, in the
loneliness in which he lived, in his contempt for all his former
pursuits, which had left him at first devoid of any pursuits at all.
He had had, as was natural, very little happiness in his life, but all
the bitterness of all his bitter past seemed as nothing to the agony of
this moment. He had loved Evelyn with his imagination, but he loved Ruth
with his whole heart and soul, and--he had lost her.
The night was far advanced. The dawn was already making faint bars over
the tops of the shutters, was looking in at him as he sat motionless by
his dim lamp and his dead fire. And, in spite of the growing dawn, it
was a dark hour.