FAREWELL.
While she lived Lady Hermione never forgot the look of anguish that
he gave her; a long, lingering, steady gaze such as a dying man fixes
at times on the face of a beloved wife or child. Then he came a step
nearer to her.
“I did not know, Hermione,” he said, “that life could be harder than I
have hitherto found it. It will be harder now.”
“Why?” she asked, gently.
“Because I shall ever have before my mind what I have lost. Until now
existence has been tolerable, because I have tried to fill it with
bitter thoughts of you. In my own mind a hundred times a day I have
called you treacherous, false, cruel, and now my angel stands in her
place again, the truest and dearest of women, the woman I have loved,
and who has loved me! Hermione, my life will be so hard to bear that,
if it please Heaven, I could fain die standing here before you now.”
“Brave men do not seek refuge in death,” she replied, “rather in active
duties of life.”
“Some men. You see, I have thrown my whole existence on one stake; that
stake was you, and I have lost you! Now I have to gather up the broken
threads of my life and do with them as best I can.”
She was weeping silently. He saw the teardrops falling, and a mad
impulse seized him to clasp her in his arms and kiss them away. That he
trampled the impulse under foot showed how dearly he loved her.
“I am glad that we have met. Once more the sun of pure womanhood shines
for me. While I thought you false, Hermione, all heaven and earth
seemed false, too. But there is one thing more--you may speak freely to
me, Hermione; it is but as though one or the other of us was dying--was
there no truth in the rumor that you were engaged to Kenelm Eyrle?”
“No; none. Mr. Eyrle has never loved or cared for me in his life.”
“Clarice believed it,” he said, musingly, and the pale face before him
grew whiter.
“She was deceived,” said Lady Hermione, briefly; “and now, Ronald, it
seems to me that we must say farewell; it must be for the last time.
We cannot meet as friends. Honor is dearer than life to both of us;
therefore, we must not meet again.”
“Oh, my lost love,” he moaned, stretching out his hands to her, “how
shall I bear it?”
She went up to him, and there was an expression of pity and love on her
face that made it divine. She took both his hands in her own and held
them there.
“You will be brave and true to yourself, Ronald. Do not let me have
the smart all my life long of knowing that love for me has led you
further from heaven; let it, rather, take you nearer. I have some
quaint thoughts, and one is that in another world God makes our lives
complete. Perhaps there, in that land where the gates are of jasper
and the walls of pearl, we may be together--who knows? Looking to that
time, we will forget the darkness and sorrow of this.”
He said to himself, bitterly, that such thoughts might comfort angels
and women; they brought no consolation to him.
“You must remember Clarice,” she pleaded; “Clarice, who loves you so
well.”
“I remember all. Hermione, if I send for you when I am dying, should it
be soon or should it be in twenty years, you will come to me?”
“Yes,” she replied, with a deep-drawn, bitter sob. “I will come,
Ronald. Now, farewell.”
She was pure and innocent as the white doves that fed from her hand.
She saw no wrong in bending her sweet, sad face over him for that last,
most sorrowful embrace.
Once more his lips touched hers, but the chill upon them was the chill
of death.
“Good-by, my love, my dear, lost love, good-by,” he said, and the words
died away in a moan. Another minute and she had passed out of sight.
When the hour of death came it was not so bitter for him as that in
which Hermione Lorriston passed out of his sight. He flung himself on
the ground, praying the skies might fall and cover him; that he might
never rise to meet the sunlight again.
From that day he was a changed man; he felt it and knew it himself.
The quiet, resigned content for which he had been trying so hard was
further from him than ever. The resignation arriving from philosophy
had forsaken him. Night and day he brooded over the one idea that she
had loved him, and he had lost her. Day and night he pondered over the
mystery of that letter.
But for his wife’s sake he would have made the whole matter public and
would have insisted on having it thoroughly sifted; but a “still, small
voice” pleaded for Clarice. It would be so hard for her to see and know
that his thoughts were still all of the past.
That did not prevent him from making a private investigation of the
matter. On the first day that he saw Conyers, the groom, he called him.
“I want you,” he said. “There are some questions I wish to ask you
that, if you answer truthfully, will be of inestimable benefit to
me; if you answer them falsely, I shall be still further deceived.
Perhaps experience has embittered me; I have little faith left in man’s
honesty. I will buy your truth, Conyers, if you swear to me, on your
oath, to say nothing but what is perfectly, strictly correct. I will
give you ten pounds, and, should you be able to discover that which I
wish to know, I will hereafter give you fifty.”
Conyers was an honest man, and Sir Ronald’s words hurt him more than he
cared to own.
“If you offered me twice fifty pounds, Sir Ronald, to tell a willful
lie, I would not do it for you or for any one else. You can please
yourself about believing whether I tell you the truth or not.”
His bluntness did not displease the master of Aldenmere, who looked at
the groom’s face with a grim smile.
“If ever the world does to you what it has done to me,” he said,
quietly, “you will either doubt your own sanity or the truth of your
fellowmen. Come out here a few minutes; I want to talk to you.”
And the groom, laying down the work on which he was engaged, followed
his master out of the stable.