YORKE IN LOVE.
The great changes of our lives come suddenly. Swift as the lightning's
flash is the revelation to Yorke that he loves the girl who sits beside
him.
Half-unconsciously he had uttered the words which are still ringing in
her ears, but he knows that his heart has been saying "dearest" all day
long.
He knows now what that strange, peaceful happiness meant which made him
feel as if he would be content to pass the rest of his life by her side
in the hermit's cell.
And he knows that this is no transient passion which will have its day,
and pass, leaving not a wreck behind, as so many passions alas! have
passed with him. To every one of the sons of men, it is said, comes
once in his life, the great all-absorbing love which wipes out all
others, and which shall make of all his days an endless misery or a
surpassing happiness; and this love has come to Yorke.
In an instant, as it were, it seems to have wrought a change in him.
Gay, reckless, thoughtless, an hour ago, he is serious enough now.
His heart is beating quickly, furiously; his strong hands tremble as he
holds the terrified horses, and urges them on with whip and voice; and
yet, though apparently engrossed with them, thinking more of the silent
girl beside him.
She is so silent! She scarcely seems to move, but sits, with the rug
concealing her face, her head bent down.
"What have I said?" he asks himself; in truth he scarcely knows. It
is as if his heart had suddenly become the master of his voice and
actions, and had made a helpless slave of him.
If she would only speak! He longs past all description to hear her
voice, even though it should be in anger and indignation; but she does
not speak. He lifts his face to the sweeping rain and almost welcomes
it. The storm is in harmony with the tempest of awakened passion
which rages in his breast. He does not dare to speak to her, scarcely
ventures to look her way, and he sits as silent as herself, while the
horses dash along the streaming road and up the Portmaris street.
"We might have come by boat, there is water enough," says the duke,
dryly. "Miss Lisle, I am afraid you are wet through. Pray get in at
once, or you will catch cold."
She stands up on the box, and Yorke goes to unfasten the wrap, but she
is too quick for him, and, taking out the hairpin, lets the rug fall,
and stands before his eyes, her slim, graceful figure swayed a little
away from him as if she did not want him to touch her.
He gets down, and offers her his hand, but she springs from the box
lightly, stands a moment, then with a low-voiced "Good-night--and thank
you," follows her father into the house.
The duke looks after her.
"The poor child is wet through and chilled," he says, sympathetically.
"It's a pity you didn't think of a mackintosh, Yorke. What are you
going to do with the rig and horses?"
Yorke looks down at him as if he scarcely heard or understood, for a
moment; then he says, absently, like a man only half recovered from a
stunning blow:
"The horses--oh, I'll find a place for them."
"You might take them to the station, your grace; they could put them up
there in the good stable," suggests Grey.
"Yes, yes; and look sharp," says the duke. "We'll have some dinner by
the time you are back. Will you have a glass of whisky and water before
you go?"
But Yorke shakes his head almost impatiently.
"I'm all right," he says, curtly, and he drives off.
He sees the horses made comfortable in the stable at the station, and
helps to rub them down and litter them; then he turns back.
But at the top of the street he pauses. He cannot face the duke just
yet. There is that in his face, in his voice, he knows, which will
reveal his secret.
He turns off to the right, and makes his way along a little used road
toward the sea.
He is wet through, but he does not notice it; he scarcely knows where
he is going until he stands on the edge of the sea.
"I love her!" he murmurs. "Yes, I love her. There is no woman in all
the world like her! So good, so gentle, so beautiful."
He thinks of all the girls he has seen, talked with, danced with, and
flirted with; but there is none like Leslie.
"I am a lost man if I do not get her!" he says to himself. "And how can
I get her?" He groans, and pushes his hat off his brow, that is hot and
burning. "She cares nothing for me; why should she? If I was to ask her
to be my wife--my wife! How can I?" And he shudders as if some black
thought had swept down upon him, and crushed the hope out of him. "How
can I? Oh, what a mad, senseless fool I have been! How we chuck our
lives away to find out, when it is too late, what it is we've lost. If
I had met her a year ago----." He breaks off, and sighs, as he tramps up
and down in the rain. "If I could only wipe out that year! But I can't,
I can't, though I'd give ten years of the life that's left in me to be
able to do it! What would she think--say--if she knew, if I told her?
With all her sweet, childlike ways, and all her innocence and purity,
she is a woman, and the very goodness for which I love her would fight
against me! She looked and spoke like an angel when she was telling me
that story about the hermit. An angel! I'm a nice kind of man to fall
in love with an angel, and want to marry her! I might as well fall in
love with one of those stars." And he looks up despairingly at the
diamond lights that are peering through the rift in the clouds.
"Besides," he mutters, "even if--if that other woman weren't in the
question," and he sets his teeth, "how could I ask her to marry me?
Even if she'd have me--and why should I dare to think that I could win
her love? I'm a pauper and worse. And she thinks me a duke! That's
another thing! I forgot that idiotic business! Oh, I've tied myself up
in every way, and haven't a chance! And yet I love her--I love her!
Leslie!" he repeats the name, as Romeo might have repeated Juliet's,
finding a torturing joy in its music. "No, there's no hope! Yorke, my
boy, you are badly hit. You've laughed at this kind of thing often
enough, but your turn has come. And as there is no hope for you, you
have got to bear it. The best thing you can do is to clear out in the
morning, and blot Portmaris out of the map of England. I mustn't see
her again--never again!"
All his nature protests against this resolve, and his heart aches
badly, very badly; but he squares his shoulders and sets his teeth hard.
"Yes, that's the only thing to do; to cut and run. There's one comfort,
she won't mind. She won't miss me. God knows what I said when I felt
her face against my breast; but whatever it was, I've offended her past
forgiveness. She wouldn't see me again, I dare say, if I stayed, and
so----." He heaves a sigh, which is very much like a groan, and turns
homeward.
He finds Grey alone in the room when he enters; the dinner things are
still on the table, and Grey looks at him with a rather grave and
startled expression.
"I've saved some dinner, your grace," he says.
"'Your grace' be da--hanged!" says Yorke, almost fiercely.
"Yes, my lord," murmurs Grey. "The duke waited for over an hour, and he
has gone to bed; I was afraid of a chill, my lord. And your lordship is
wet, very wet, still----."
"All right," says Yorke, as politely as he can. "Never mind. Go and see
after the duke, and dinner--oh, yes. Thanks, you need not wait."
He tries to eat, but for once his faithful appetite fails him, and he
pushes his plate away and gets his pipe, that great consoler in all
times of trouble; and this is the worst trouble Yorke Auchester has
ever had.
It is well on into the small hours when weary, but oppressed by a
ghastly wakefulness, he goes to bed, and there he lies, open-eyed and
thoughtful, until the sun floods the room.
He gets up, and as he looks in the glass after his bath, he smiles
grimly.
"Only one night of it!" he says. "And a great many similar ones
lie before me before I get over this! I wonder whether she has been
thinking of me? Why should she? And if she should have been they
wouldn't be pleasant thoughts."
He pulls the blinds aside and looks at the house opposite, wondering
which is her window; and as he does so, the lover's heart-hunger for a
sight of his loved one assails him.
It has still strong possession of him when he goes down the stairs
and into the street; but he fights against it. The best thing he can
do is not to see Leslie Lisle, but to drive Vinson's horses back to
Northcliffe, and take the train from there to London, and--stop there;
stop there till in a round of the folly which has suddenly grown so
senseless and worthless in his eyes, he has dulled the pain of this,
his first real love.
It is early, but Portmaris is alive and very much in evidence. The
fishermen are out on the beach, the women are bustling about, the
children are playing in the road-way. Some with a huge slice of bread
and butter or treacle in their fists; breakfast is evidently a very
movable feast with the entire population.
Yorke stands a moment and looks round with a pang of regret.
"I shall think of this place," he says. "Think of it too often to be
comfortable. Why couldn't I have come here--and to her--a year ago?
What's that song about 'the might have been'? That's how I feel this
morning. Oh, lord!"
He strides on with his head drooping, in an attitude very unlike that
of Yorke Auchester's usual one; and without the last night's opera song
on his lips as is ordinarily the case; and he is near the station, when
he hears the laughter of children ahead of him, and looking up, sees a
group that make his heart leap, and the blood rush to his face.
Under a great oak in the pretty lane stands no other than Leslie
herself, with a child upheld in her arms, and two others clinging to
the skirts of her pretty, simple morning dress. The child borne aloft
has pulled off her hat, and the sunlight as it comes through the
trees, falls in flecks of light and shadow on her hair and upturned
face. She is laughing the soft, sweet laugh, which, though he should
live to be as old as the old man walking along on the other side of the
road, Yorke will never forget, and--she does not see him.
Shall he turn and go back, go back and leave her forever? Better! But
he cannot, simply cannot. So he goes on slowly, and it is not until he
is close behind her that she hears him.
She turns, the child still held, crowing and struggling in her arms,
and a startled look comes into her eyes, and the color flies to her
face, and then leaves it pale.
Yorke lifts his hat.
"Good-morning," he says.
Her lips move, and her head bends over the child now lying in her arms,
and staring with blue eyes up at the big man who dares to address "Miss
Lethlie." Leslie's lips move; no doubt she says "good-morning," in
response, though he cannot hear her.
"You are early this morning," he says, and he knows that his voice
falters and sounds unnatural, as surely as he knows that his heart
is beating like a steam-hammer, and that the longing to cry to her,
"Leslie, I love you!" is almost irresistible.
"Yes," she says. "It is so beautiful after the rain----."
She stops, for the word has recalled that homeward drive, the storm,
his words--all that she has been thinking of through the long night.
"Yes," he says, vaguely, stupidly. Then he says, suddenly, "That child
is too heavy for you----."
"Oh, no; I often carry it," she falters, bending still lower over the
pretty face enshrined in the yellow curls.
"But it is," he says. "Let me take it, if it must be carried."
"She would not let you," she says.
"We'll see," he rejoins, scarcely knowing what he is saying; and he
holds out his arms.
The mite stares at him, turns and clutches Leslie for a moment, then,
with the fickleness of its sex, swings round and holds out its arms to
him.
Yorke laughs, and holds it up above his head.
"Now what shall I do with you?" he says, hurriedly. "Take you to London
with me. No?" for the child struggles. "For that is where I am going."
He puts the child down, and it toddles off with the other two. "Yes, I
am going to London, Miss Lisle," he goes on, trying to speak lightly,
carelessly.
"Yes?" she says, with downcast eyes, and she stoops to pick up her hat.
As she does so, he stoops too; they get hold of it together, and their
hands meet.
But for that sudden meeting, that touch of her hand, he could have
gone, and the history of Leslie Lisle would have been a very different
one; but it is the link which the Fates have been wanting to make their
chain complete.
"Leslie!" he cries, scarcely above his breath. "Leslie!" And he takes
both her hands and holds them fast, and looks into her eyes, the dark,
gray eyes which she lifts to him with a swift fear--or is it a swift
joy? mirrored in their clear depths.
"Let--me--go," she falters, with trembling lips.
"No!" he says, desperately. "Not till I have told you that I love you!"