Reserved people pay dear for their reserve when they are in trouble,
when the iron enters into their soul, and their eyes meet the eyes of
the world tearless, unflinching, making no sign.
Enviable are those whose sorrows are only pen and ink deep, who take
every one into their confidence, who are comforted by sympathy, and fly
to those who will weep with them. There is an utter solitude, a silence
in the grief of a proud, reserved nature, which adds a frightful weight
to its intensity; and when the night comes, and the chamber door is
shut, who shall say what agonies of prayers and tears, what prostrations
of despair, pass like waves over the soul to make the balance even?
As a rule, the kindest and best of people seldom notice any alteration
of appearance or manner in one of their own family. A stranger points it
out, if ever it is pointed out, which, happily, is not often, unless, of
course, in cases where advice has been disregarded, and the first
symptom of ill health is jealously watched for and triumphantly hailed
by those whose mission in life it is to say, "I told you so."
Mrs. Alwynn, whose own complaints were of so slight a nature that they
had to be constantly referred to to give them any importance at all, was
not likely to notice that Ruth's naturally pale complexion had become
several degrees too pale during the last two days, or that she had dark
rings under her eyes. Besides, only the day before, had not Mrs. Alwynn,
in cutting out a child's shirt, cut out at the same time her best
drawing-room table-cloth as well, which calamity had naturally driven
out of her mind every other subject for the time?
Ruth had proved unsympathetic, and Mrs. Alwynn had felt her to be so.
The next day, also, when Mrs. Alwynn had begun to talk over what she
and Ruth were to wear that evening at a dinner-party at Slumberleigh
Hall, Ruth had again shown a decided want of interest, and was not even
to be roused by the various conjectures of her aunt, though repeated
over and over again, as to who would most probably take her in to
dinner, who would be assigned to Mr. Alwynn, and whether Ruth would be
taken in by a married man or a single one. As it was quite impossible
absolutely to settle these interesting points beforehand, Mrs. Alwynn's
mind had a vast field for conjecture opened to her, in which she
disported herself at will, varying the entertainment for herself and
Ruth by speculating as to who would sit on the other side of each of
them; "for," as she justly observed, "everybody has two sides, my dear;
and though, for my part, I can talk to anybody--Members of Parliament,
or bishops, or any one--still it is difficult for a young person, and if
you feel dull, Ruth, you can always turn to the person on the other side
with some easy little remark."
Ruth rose and went to the window. It had rained all yesterday; it had
been raining all the morning to-day, but it was fair now; nay, the sun
was sending out long burnished shafts from the broken gray and blue of
the sky. She was possessed by an unreasoning longing to get out of the
house into the open air--anywhere, no matter where, beyond the reach of
Mrs. Alwynn's voice. She had been fairly patient with her for many
months, but during these two last wet days, a sense of sudden miserable
irritation would seize her on the slightest provocation, which filled
her with remorse and compunction, but into which she would relapse at a
moment's notice. Every morning since her arrival, nine months ago, had
Mrs. Alwynn returned from her house-keeping with the same cheerful
bustle, the same piece of information: "Well, Ruth, I've ordered dinner,
my dear. First one duty, and then another."
Why had that innocent and not unfamiliar phrase become so intolerable
when she heard it again this morning? And when Mrs. Alwynn wound up the
musical-box, and the "Buffalo Girls" tinkled on the ear to relieve the
monotony of a wet morning, why should Ruth have struggled wildly for a
moment with a sudden inclination to laugh and cry at the same time,
which resulted in two large tears falling unexpectedly, to her surprise
and shame, upon her book.
She shut the book, and recovering herself with an effort, listened
patiently to Mrs. Alwynn's remarks until, early in the afternoon, the
sky cleared. Making some excuse about going to see her old nurse at the
lodge at Arleigh, who was still ill, she at last effected her escape out
of the room and out of the house.
The air was fresh and clear, though cold. The familiar fields and beaded
hedge-rows, the red land, new ploughed, where the plovers hovered, the
gray broken sky above, soothed Ruth like the presence of a friend, as
Nature, even in her commonest moods, has ministered to many a one who
has loved her before Ruth's time.
Our human loves partake always of the nature of speculations. We have no
security for our capital (which, fortunately, is seldom so large as we
suppose), but the love of Nature is a sure investment, which she repays
a thousand-fold, which she repays most prodigally when the heart is
bankrupt and full of bitterness, as Ruth's heart was that day. For in
Nature, as Wordsworth says, "there is no bitterness," that worst sting
of human grief. And as Ruth walked among the quiet fields, and up the
yellow aisles of the autumn glades to Arleigh, Nature spoke of peace to
her--not of joy or of happiness as in old days, for she never lies as
human comforters do, and these had gone out of her life; but of the
peace that duty steadfastly adhered to will bring at last--the peace
that after much turmoil will come in the end to those who, amid a Babel
of louder tongues, hear and obey the low-pitched voices of conscience
and of principle.
For it never occurred to Ruth for a moment to throw over Dare and marry
Charles. She had given her word to Dare, and her word was her bond. It
was as much a matter of being true to herself as to him. It was very
simple. There were no two ways about it in her mind. The idea of
breaking off her engagement was not to be thought of. It would be
dishonorable.
We often think that if we had been placed in the same difficulties which
we see overwhelm others, we could have got out of them. Just so; we
might have squeezed, or wriggled, or crept out of a position from which
another who would not stoop could not have escaped. People are
differently constituted. Most persons with common-sense can sink their
principles temporarily at a pinch; but others there are who go through
life prisoners on parole to their sense of honor or duty. If escape
takes the form of a temptation, they do not escape. And Ruth, walking
with bent head beneath the swaying trees, dreamed of no escape.
She soon reached the little lodge, the rusty gates of which barred the
grass-grown drive to the shuttered, tenantless old house at a little
distance. It was a small gray stone house of many gables, and low lines
of windows, that if inhabited would have possessed but little charm,
but which in its deserted state had a certain pathetic interest. The
place had been to let for years, but no one had taken it; no one was
likely to take it in the disrepair which was now fast sliding into ruin.
The garden-beds were almost grown over with weeds, but blots of
nasturtium color showed here and there among the ragged green, and a
Virginia-creeper had done its gorgeous red-and-yellow best to cheer the
gray stone walls. But the place had a dreary appearance even in the
present sunshine; and after looking at it for a moment, Ruth went
in-doors to see her old nurse. After sitting with her, and reading the
usual favorite chapter in the big Bible, and answering the usual
question of "Any news of Master Raymond?" in the usual way, Ruth got up
to go, and the old woman asked her if she wanted the drawing-block which
she had left with her some time ago with an unfinished sketch on it of
the stables. She got it out, and Ruth looked at it. It was a slight
sketch of an octagonal building with wide arches all round it, roofing
in a paved path, on which, in days gone by, it had evidently been the
pernicious custom to exercise the horses, whose stalls and loose boxes
formed the centre of the building. The stable had a certain quaintness,
and the sketch was at that delightful point when no random stroke has as
yet falsified the promise that a finished drawing, however clever, so
seldom fulfils.
Ruth took it up, and looked out of the window. The sun was blazing out,
ashamed of his absence for so long. She might as well finish it now. She
was glad to be out of the way of meeting any one, especially the
shooters, whose guns she had heard in the nearer Slumberleigh coverts
several times that afternoon. The Arleigh woods she knew were to be kept
till later in the month. She took her block and paint-box, and picking
her way along the choked gravel walk and down the side drive to the
stables, sat down on the bench for chopping wood which had been left in
the place to which she had previously dragged it, and set to work. She
was sitting under one of the arches out of the wind, and an obsequious
yellow cat came out of the door of one of the nearest horse-boxes, in
which wood was evidently stacked, and rubbed itself against her dress,
with a reckless expenditure of hair.
As Ruth stopped a moment, bored but courteous, to return its well-meant
attentions by friction behind the ears, she heard a slight crackling
among the wood in the stable. Rats abounded in the place, and she was
just about to recall the cat to its professional duties, when her own
attention was also distracted. She started violently, and grasped the
drawing-block in both hands.
Clear over the gravel, muffled but still distinct across the long wet
grass, she could hear a firm step coming. Then it rang out sharply on
the stone pavement. A tall man came suddenly round the corner, under the
archway, and stood before her. It was Charles.
The yellow cat, which had a leaning towards the aristocracy, left Ruth,
and, picking its way daintily over the round stones towards him, rubbed
off some more of its wardrobe against his heather shooting-stockings.
"I hardly think it is worth while to say anything except the truth,"
said Charles at last. "I have followed you here."
As Ruth could say nothing in reply, it was fortunate that at the moment
she had nothing to say. She continued to mix a little pool of Prussian
blue and Italian pink without looking up.
"I hurt my gun hand after luncheon, and had to stop shooting at Croxton
corner. As I went back to Slumberleigh, across the fields below the
rectory, I thought I saw you in the distance, and followed you."
"Is your hand much hurt?"--with sudden anxiety.
"No," said Charles, reddening a little. "It will stop my shooting for a
day or two, but that is all."
The colors were mixed again. Ruth, contrary to all previous conviction,
added light red to the Italian pink. The sketch had gone rapidly from
bad to worse, but the light red finished it off. It never, so to speak,
held up its head again; but I believe she has it still somewhere, put
away in a locked drawer in tissue-paper, as if it were very valuable.
"I did not come without a reason," said Charles, after a long pause,
speaking with difficulty. "It is no good beating about the bush. I want
to speak to you again about what I told you three weeks ago. Have you
forgotten what that was?"
Ruth shook her head. _She had not forgotten._ Her hand began to tremble,
and he sat down beside her on the bench, and, taking the brush out of
her hand, laid it in its box.
"Ruth," he said, gently, "I have not been very happy during the last
three weeks; but two days ago, when I saw you again, I thought you did
not look as if you had been very happy either. Am I right? Are you happy
in your engagement with--Quite content? Quite satisfied? Still silent.
Am I to have no answer?"
"Some questions have no answers," said Ruth, steadily, looking away from
him. "At least, the questions that ought not to be asked have none."
"I will not ask any more, then. Perhaps, as you say, I have no right.
You won't tell me whether you are unhappy, but your face tells me so in
spite of you. It told me so two days ago, and I have thought of it every
hour of the day and night since."
She gathered herself together for a final effort to stop what she knew
was coming, and said, desperately:
"I don't know how it is. I don't mean it, and yet everything I say to
you seems so harsh and unkind; but I think it would have been better not
to come here, and I think it would be better, better for us both, if you
would go away now."
Charles's face became set and very white. Then he put his fortune to the
touch.
"You are right," he said. "I will go away--for good; I will never
trouble you again, when you have told me that you do not love me."
The color rushed into her face, and then died slowly away again, even
out of the tightly compressed lips.
There was a long silence, in which he waited for a reply that did not
come. At last she turned and looked him in the face. Who has said that
light eyes cannot be impassioned? Her deep eyes, dark with the utter
blankness of despair, fell before the intensity of his. He leaned
towards her, and with gentle strength put his arm round her, and drew
her to him. His voice came in a broken whisper of passionate entreaty
close to her ear.
"Ruth, I love you, and you love me. We belong to each other. We were
made for each other. Life is not possible apart. It must be together,
Ruth, always together, always--" and his voice broke down entirely.
Surely he was right. A love such as theirs overrode all petty barriers
of every-day right and wrong, and was a law unto itself. Surely it was
vain to struggle against Fate, against the soft yet mighty current which
was sweeping her away beyond all landmarks, beyond the sight of land
itself, out towards an infinite sea.
And the eyes she loved looked into hers with an agony of entreaty, and
the voice she loved spoke of love, spoke brokenly of unworthiness, and
an unhappy past, and of a brighter future, a future with _her_.
Her brain reeled; her reason had gone. Let her yield now. Surely, if
only she could think, if the power to think had not deserted her, it
was right to yield. The current was taking her ever swifter whither she
knew not. A moment more and there would be no going back.
She began to tremble, and, wrenching her hands out of his, pressed them
before her eyes to shut out the sight of the earnest face so near her
own. But she could not shut out his voice, and Charles's voice could be
very gentle, very urgent.
But at the eleventh hour another voice broke in on his, and spoke as one
having authority. Conscience, if accustomed to be disregarded on common
occasions, will rarely come to the fore with any decision in emergency;
but the weakest do not put him in a place of command all their lives
without at least one result--that he has learned the habit of speaking
up and making himself attended to in time of need. He spoke now,
urgently, imperatively. Her judgment, her reason were alike gone for the
time, but, when she had paced the solemn aisles of the woods an hour ago
in possession of them, had she then even thought of doing what she was
on the verge of doing now? What had happened during that hour to reverse
the steadfast resolve which she had made then? What she had thought
right an hour ago remained right now. What she would have put far from
her as dishonorable then remained dishonorable now, though she might be
too insane to see it.
Terror seized her, as of one in a dream who is conscious of impending
danger, and struggles to awake before it is too late. She started to her
feet, and, putting forcibly aside the hands that would have held her
back, walked unsteadily towards the nearest pillar, and leaned against
it, trembling violently.
"Do not tempt me," she said, hoarsely. "I cannot bear it."
He came and stood beside her.
"I do not tempt you," he said. "I want to save you and myself from a
great calamity before it is too late."
"It is too late already."
"No," said Charles, in a low voice of intense determination. "It is
not--yet. It will be soon. It is still possible to go back. You are not
married to him, and it is no longer right that you should marry him. You
must give him up. There is no other way."
"Yes," said Ruth, with vehemence. "There is another way. You have made
me forget it; but before you came I saw it clearly. I can't think it out
as I did then; but I know it is there. There is another way"--and her
voice faltered--"to do what is right, and let everything else go."
Charles saw for the first time, with a sudden frightful contraction of
the heart, that her will was as strong as his own. He had staked
everything on one desperate appeal to her feelings; he had carried the
outworks, and now another adversary--her conscience--rose up between him
and her.
"A marriage without love is a sin," he said, quietly. "If you had lived
in the world as long as I have, and had seen what marriage without love
means, and what it generally comes to in the end, you would know that I
am speaking the truth. You have no right to marry Dare if you care for
me. Hesitate, and it will be too late! Break off your engagement now. Do
you suppose," with sudden fire, "that we shall cease to love each other;
that I shall be able to cease to love you for the rest of my life
because you are Dare's wife? What is done can't be undone. Our love for
each other can't. It is no good shutting your eyes to that. Look the
facts in the face, and don't deceive yourself into thinking that the
most difficult course is necessarily the right one."
He turned from her, and sat down on the bench again, his chin in his
hands, his haggard eyes fastened on her face. He had said his last word,
and she felt that when she spoke it would be her last word too. Neither
could bear much more.
"All you say sounds right, _at first_," she said, after a long silence,
and as she spoke Charles's hands dropped from his face and clinched
themselves together; "but I cannot go by what any one thinks unless I
think so myself as well. I can't take other people's judgments. When God
gave us our own, he did not mean us to shirk using it. What you say is
right, but there is something which after a little bit seems more
right--at least, which seems so to me. I cannot look at the future. I
can only see one thing distinctly, now in the present, and that is that
I cannot break my word. I never have been able to see that a woman's
word is less binding than a man's. When I said I would marry him, it was
of my own free-will. I knew what I was doing, and it was not only for
his sake I did it. It is not as if he believed I cared for him very
much. Then, perhaps--but he knows I don't, and--he is different from
other men--he does not seem to mind. I knew at the time that I accepted
him for the sake of other things, which are just the same now as they
were then: because he was poor and I had money; because I felt sure he
would never do much by himself, and I thought I could help him, and my
money would help too; because the people at Vandon are so wretched, and
their cottages are tumbling down, and there is no one who lives among
them and cares about them. I can't make it clear, and I did hesitate;
but at the time it seemed wrong to hesitate. If it seemed so right then,
it cannot be all wrong now, even if it has become hard. I cannot give it
all up. He is building cottages that I am to pay for, that I asked to
pay for. He cannot. And he has promised so many people their houses
shall be put in order, and they all believe him. And he can't do it. If
I don't, it will not be done; and some of them are very old--and--and
the winter is coming." Ruth's voice had become almost inaudible. "Oh,
Charles! Charles!" she said, brokenly, "I cannot bear to hurt you. God
knows I love you. I think I shall always love you, though I shall try
not. But I cannot go back now from what I have undertaken. I cannot
break my word. I cannot do what is wrong, even for you. Oh, God! not
even for you!"
She knelt down beside him, and took his clinched hands between her own;
but he did not stir.
"Not even for you," she whispered, while two hot tears fell upon his
hands. In another moment she had risen swiftly to her feet, and had left
him.