This description of the meeting of Sylvia’s two lovers after
her marriage to Philip Hepburn is the most dramatic scene in
the story.
Someone stood in the lane just on the other side of the gap; his back
was to the morning sun; all she saw at first was the uniform of a naval
officer, so well known in Monkshaven in those days.
Sylvia went hurrying past him, not looking again, although her clothes
almost brushed his as he stood there still. She had not gone a yard—no,
not half a yard—when her heart leaped up and fell again dead within her,
as if she had been shot.
“Sylvia!” he said, in a voice tremulous with joy and passionate love.
“Sylvia!”
She looked round; he had turned a little, so that the light fell straight
on his face. It was bronzed, and the lines were strengthened; but it was
the same face she had last seen in Haytersbank Gully three long years ago
and had never thought to see in life again.
He was close to her, and held out his fond arms; she went fluttering
towards their embrace, as if drawn by the old fascination; but when she
felt them close round her, she started away, and cried out with a great
pitiful shriek, and put her hands up to her forehead as if trying to
clear away some bewildering mist.
Then she looked at him once more, a terrible story in her eyes, if he
could but have read it.
Twice she opened her stiff lips to speak, and twice the words were
overwhelmed by the surges of her misery, which bore them back into the
depths of her heart.
He thought that he had come upon her too suddenly, and he attempted to
soothe her with soft murmurs of love, and to woo her to his outstretched
hungry arms once more. But when she saw this motion of his, she made a
gesture as though pushing him away; and with an inarticulate moan of
agony she put her hands to her head once more, and turning away, began to
run blindly towards the town for protection.
For a minute or so he was stunned with surprise at her behaviour; and
then he thought it accounted for by the shock of his accost, and that she
needed time to understand the unexpected joy. So he followed her swiftly,
ever keeping her in view, but not trying to overtake her too speedily.
“I have frightened my poor love,” he kept thinking. And by this thought
he tried to repress his impatience and check the speed he longed to use;
yet he was always so near behind that her quickened sense heard his
well-known footsteps following, and a mad notion flashed across her brain
that she would go to the wide full river, and end the hopeless misery
she felt enshrouding her. There was a sure hiding-place from all human
reproach and heavy mortal woe beneath the rushing waters borne landwards
by the morning tide.
No one can tell what changed her course; perhaps the thought of her
sucking child; perhaps her mother; perhaps an angel of God; no one on
earth knows, but as she ran along the quay-side she all at once turned up
an entry, and through an open door.
He, following all the time, came into a quiet, dark parlour, with a
cloth and tea things on the table ready for breakfast; the change from
the bright sunny air out of doors to the deep shadow of this room made
him think for the first moment that she had passed on, and that no one
was there, and he stood for an instant baffled, and hearing no sound but
the beating of his own heart; but an irrepressible sobbing gasp made
him look round, and there he saw her cowered behind the door, her face
covered tight up, and sharp shudders going through her whole frame.
“My love, my darling!” said he, going up to her, and trying to raise
her, and to loosen her hands away from her face. “I have been too sudden
for thee; it was thoughtless in me; but I have so looked forward to this
time, and seeing thee come along the field, and go past me; but I should
ha’ been more tender and careful of thee. Nay! let me have another look
of thy sweet face.”
All this he whispered in the old tones of manœuvring love, in that voice
she had yearned and hungered to hear in life, and had not heard, for all
her longing, save in her dreams.
She tried to crouch more and more into the corner, into the hidden
shadow—to sink into the ground out of sight.
Once more he spoke, beseeching her to lift up her face, to let him hear
her speak.
But she only moaned.
“Sylvia,” said he, thinking he could change his tactics, and pique her
into speaking, that he would make a pretence of suspicion and offence.
“Sylvia! one would think you were not glad to see me back again at
length. I only came in late last night, and my first thought on wakening
was of you; it has been ever since I left you.”
Sylvia took her hands away from her face; it was grey as the face of
death; her awful eyes were passionless in her despair.
“Where have yo’ been?” she asked, in slow, hoarse tones, as if her voice
were half strangled within her.
“Been!” said he, a red light coming into his eyes, as he bent his looks
upon her; now, indeed, a true and not an assumed suspicion entering his
mind.
“Been!” he repeated; then, coming a step nearer to her, and taking her
hand, not tenderly this time, but with a resolution to be satisfied.
“Did not your cousin—Hepburn, I mean—did not he tell you?—he saw the
press-gang seize me—I gave him a message to you—I bade you keep true to
me as I would be to you.”
Between every clause of this speech he paused and gasped for an answer;
but none came. Her eyes dilated and held his steady gaze prisoner as with
a magical charm—neither could look away from the other’s wild, searching
gaze. When he had ended, she was silent for a moment, then she cried out,
shrill and fierce:
“Philip!” No answer.
Wilder and shriller still, “Philip!” she cried.
He was in the distant ware-room completing the last night’s work before
the regular shop hours began; before breakfast, also, that his wife might
not find him waiting and impatient.
He heard her cry; it cut through doors, and still air, and great bales of
woollen stuff; he thought that she had hurt herself, that her mother was
worse, that her baby was ill, and he hastened to the spot whence the cry
proceeded.
On opening the door that separated the shop from the sitting-room, he saw
the back of a naval officer, and his wife on the ground, huddled up in a
heap; when she perceived him come in, she dragged herself up by means of
a chair, groping like a blind person, and came and stood facing him.
The officer turned fiercely round, and would have come towards Philip,
who was so bewildered by the scene that even yet he did not understand
who the stranger was, did not perceive for an instant that he saw the
realisation of his greatest dread.
But Sylvia laid her hand on Kinraid’s arm, and assumed to herself the
right of speech. Philip did not know her voice, it was so changed.
“Philip,” she said, “this is Kinraid come back again to wed me. He is
alive; he has niver been dead, only taken by t’ press-gang. And he says
yo’ saw it, and knew it all t’ time. Speak, was it so?”
Philip knew not what to say, whither to turn, under what refuge of words
or acts to shelter.
Sylvia’s influence was keeping Kinraid silent, but he was rapidly passing
beyond it.
“Speak!” he cried, loosening himself from Sylvia’s light grasp, and
coming towards Philip, with a threatening gesture. “Did I not bid you
tell her how it was? did I not bid you say how I would be faithful to
her, and she was to be faithful to me? Oh! you damned scoundrel! have you
kept it from her all that time, and let her think me dead, or false? Take
that!”
His closed fist was up to strike the man, who hung his head with
bitterest shame and miserable self-reproach; but Sylvia came swift
between the blow and its victim.
“Charley, thou shan’t strike him,” she said. “He is a damned scoundrel”
(this was said in the hardest, quietest tone), “but he is my husband.”
“Oh! thou false heart!” exclaimed Kinraid, turning sharp on her. “If ever
I trusted woman, I trusted you, Sylvia Robson.”
He made as though throwing her from him, with a gesture of contempt that
stung her to life.
“Oh, Charley!” she cried, springing to him, “dunnot cut me to the quick;
have pity on me, though he had none. I did so love thee; it was my very
heart-strings as gave way when they told me thou was drowned—father, and
the Corneys, and all, iverybody. Thy hat and the bit of ribbon I gave
thee were found drenched and dripping wi’ sea-water; and I went mourning
for thee all the day long—dunnot turn away from me; only hearken this
once, and then kill me dead, and I’ll bless you—and have niver been
mysel’ since; niver ceased to feel the sun grow dark and the air chill
and dreary when I thought on the time when thou was alive. I did, my
Charley, my own love! And I thought that thou was dead for iver, and I
wished I were lying beside thee. Oh, Charley! Philip, there where he
stands, could tell you this was true. Philip, wasn’t it so?”
“Would God I were dead!” moaned forth the unhappy, guilty man. But she
had turned to Kinraid, and was speaking again to him, and neither of them
heard or heeded him—they were drawing closer and closer together—she,
with her cheeks and eyes aflame, talking eagerly.
“And father was taken up, and all for setting some free as t’ press-gang
had taken by a foul trick; and he were put in York prison, and tried, and
hung! hung! Charley!—good kind father was hung on a gallows; and mother
lost her sense and grew silly in grief, and we were like to be turned
out on t’ wide world, and poor mother dateless—and I thought yo’ were
dead—oh! I thought yo’ were dead, I did—oh, Charley, Charley!”
By this time they were in each other’s arms, she with her head on his
shoulder, crying as if her heart would break.
Philip came forwards and took hold of her to pull her away; but Charley
held her tight, mutely defying Philip. Unconsciously, she was Philip’s
protection, in that hour of danger, from a blow which might have been his
death if strong will could have aided it to kill.
“Sylvia!” said he, grasping her tight. “Listen to me. He did not love
you as I did. He had loved other women. I, you—you alone. He had loved
other girls before you, and had left off loving them. I—I wish God would
free my heart from the pang; but it will go on till I die, whether you
love me or not. And then—where was I? Oh! that very night that he was
taken, I was a-thinking on you and on him; and I might ha’ given you his
message, but I heard those speaking of him who knew him well; they talked
of his false, fickle ways. How was I to know he would keep true to thee?
It might be a sin in me, I cannot say; my heart and my sense are gone
dead within me. I know this, I have loved you as no man but me ever loved
before. Have some pity and forgiveness on me, if it’s only because I have
been so tormented with my love.”
He looked at her with feverish eager wistfulness; it faded away into
despair as she made no sign of having even heard his words. He let go his
hold of her, and his arm fell loosely by his side.
“I may die,” he said, “for my life is ended!”
“Sylvia!” spoke out Kinraid, bold and fervent, “your marriage is no
marriage. You were tricked into it. You are my wife, not his. I am your
husband; we plighted each other our troth. See! here is my half of the
sixpence.”
He pulled it out from his bosom, tied by a black ribbon round his neck.
“When they stripped me and searched me in the French prison, I managed to
keep this. No lies can break the oath we swore to each other. I can get
your pretence of a marriage set aside. I am in favour with my admiral,
and he will do a deal for me, and will back me out. Come with me; your
marriage shall be set aside, and we’ll be married again, all square and
above-board. Come away. Leave that damned fellow to repent of the trick
he played an honest sailor; we’ll be true, whatever has come and gone.
Come, Sylvia.”
His arm was round her waist, and he was drawing her towards the door, his
face all crimson with eagerness and hope. Just then the baby cried.
“Hark!” said she, starting away from Kinraid, “baby is crying for me. His
child—yes, it is his child—I had forgotten that—forgotten all. I’ll make
my vow now, lest I lose mysel’ again. I’ll niver forgive yon man, nor
live with him as his wife again. All that’s done and ended. He’s spoilt
my life—he’s spoilt it for as long as iver I live on this earth; but
neither you nor him shall spoil my soul. It goes hard wi’ me, Charley,
it does indeed. I’ll just give you one kiss—one little kiss—and then,
so help me God, I’ll niver see nor hear till—no, not that, not that is
needed—I’ll niver see—sure that’s enough—I’ll niver see yo’ again on this
side heaven, so help me God! I’m bound and tied, but I have sworn my oath
to him as well as yo’: there’s things I will do, and there’s things I
won’t. Kiss me once more. God help me, he is gone!”