A DIVINE DESPAIR.
At first he did not dare to raise his eyes to the slim girlish figure
standing there, his emotion being too great. Nor, if he saw it, had he
dared to take the hand held out to him, but dropped a moment later at
its owner's side.
But then, at last, he lifted his bowed head and gazed at her, seeing
at one glance that she also was looking full at him. Seeing, too, that
the sweet, delicate mouth was trembling, and that the pure, clear eyes
were welling over with tears. And he observed also that, as he became
witness of her emotion and deep sympathy for him and his despair, she
turned her face away, while, moving towards a chair, she made a sign
for him to also be seated.
"God bless you," she heard him mutter in a low, deep voice. "God bless
you for your womanly compassion."
"Mr. Granger," she said a moment later, and still the sweet mouth
trembled and her eyes were full of tears, "I have sent for--asked you
to come to me--because I know so much of your past--your hopes. So
much, too, of your unhappiness. Oh! Mr. Granger, I was Sophy Jervis's
greatest friend."
"I know it," he murmured. "I know it. She told you all: Of my
love--nay--it was not love, but idolatry!--of its too bitter ending.
Though it is not, never can be ended."
"Ah! Mr. Granger, now you must live for other things. Live to see your
wrongs redressed, your honour restored, your name cleared. You have
heard from my husband that there is proof of your innocence."
"Yes," he said. "Yes, I have heard." But, still with his head bent, he
whispered the same words he had said to Sir Geoffrey outside on the
quarterdeck, "It is too late."
"No. No. It is not too late. Geoffrey and I have talked together, and
to-morrow he will go to see their Lordships. Oh! Mr. Granger, if you
could return to your old calling, if you could once more serve the
King in these troublous times, even in a subordinate position, yet
with hope before you, would you not do so? Would you not lead a
different life?"
"God knows I would, bankrupt as are all my hopes, all my future.
Yet--you are aware of what I have been? Of what I am?"
"Yes, I know," and, although he could not see it, there was in her
face a look of sublime pity for him. Pity that this man, still young
and handsome--how handsome he must have been when first he won Sophy's
love she could well understand, even though judging only of him now as
he sat before her in his desolation and abasement!--should have fallen
to what he had.
"There is," he went on, "no baser thing in all this world than he who
traffics in his fellow-men. Yet I elected to do it in my despair and
bitterness. I might have earned a living otherwise, but this consorted
with what I was, with what I had become."
"It is not too late. Will you not leave this life for--for--in memory
of Sophy?"
"Yes," he whispered, "if you bid me do so for her sake--her memory.
Yes. If my honour is cleared, but not otherwise, for otherwise it
would be useless. If Sir Geoffrey, or any other captain, will take me,
I will go back, even though as a seaman before the mast. I will do it
for her sake, in return for your gracious pity of me."
"Thank God!" she cried. "Oh, thank God!" Then she rose and went to the
'scrutoire and, opening it, took out the packet of letters that she
had shown her husband. "Read them; do with them what you will. Read
them now, if you desire." Whereon she put the little parcel in his
hand, and, leaving him alone, went into the next cabin.
"My love, my lost love," he murmured, as he glanced at them hurriedly,
not knowing that she had gone away to give him ample time for their
perusal. "My sweet. And we are parted for ever. For ever! To all
eternity. Nothing can bring you back to me."
That he had wept she knew when she returned, yet a man's tears for her
whom he has loved and lost need no pardon from another woman's heart;
and so she gently bade him take the letters and keep them, extorting
only from him a promise that he would in no way endeavour to
communicate with Lady Glastonbury.
"For that," she said, "must never be. Neither sorrow nor trouble must
ever come to her again. Have I your promise?"
"On my word of honour. As a man--who was once a gentleman--I swear it,
yet, oh God! it is hard. Hard to think that I can look upon her
handwriting again and the words that are not addressed to me, although
concerning me. It is so long," he added, his voice deep and broken,
"since a line has come from her. Yet I have promised, and I will keep
my word."
"I know it. I take and believe your word."
"But," Granger continued, "if--when you write to her, you could tell
her that--that--born of these letters," and he touched his breast as
he spoke, he having placed them there, "has come the promise of a
better life for me--a life loveless, but no longer smirched and
blemished--then I know she would be happier. If you could promise
that!"
"I will do it," Ariadne answered, the tears again rushing to her eyes,
and all her emotions thrilling at the sorrow and despair of the man
before her. "I will do it."
And, now, Granger turned away, knowing there was no more to be said,
yet inwardly blessing her who had that day been as a ministering angel
to him.
"Farewell, madam," he said; "I cannot thank you--but--but----" Then,
seeing that now she held out her hand again to him, and in such a
manner that this time he could not fail to perceive her action, he
took it in his own. And, o'ermastered by her womanliness and supreme
sympathy, he raised it to his lips.
"God bless and keep you and yours," he whispered again as he had
whispered before; "God bless you for your sweet compassion."
* * * * * * *
Outside, Sir Geoffrey Barry was still engaged with the manifold duties
pertaining to a ship which was soon to take part in a war that would
doubtless be long, and must be deadly--as was and is ever the case
when England and France contend for mastery. Already many things on
deck were being stowed away which, when the time came, would be
encumbrances. The cutter, too, had just come off from shore, bringing
with it, this time, some willing sailors. Sailors who, having been
paid off from a disabled privateer, and having spent all their
money on sickening debauches on shore, were only too ready to
again go to sea and earn some more. A fine band of brawny, dissolute
men were these whom George Redway--now installed as captain of the
cutter--brought on board with him; men who on shore were nothing but
maddened and intoxicated devils, but who, when the enemy hove in sight
and when they were at close quarters, would become heroes, nay, almost
demigods. For then the old English blood became roused to its fullest
and best; then woe betide those who encountered these men.
"A brisk crew of sea-dogs," said Sir Geoffrey, observing the traces of
recent emotion on Granger's face but making no remark for the moment.
"If I had not my full complement, these are the fellows I should wish
to keep."
"There is one at least whom you can keep if you so please," Granger
said; "one who will work like, live with, those men there," and he
pointed to where half a dozen sailors were swabbing the deck.
"Yourself!" exclaimed Geoffrey, his face lighting. "Yourself! She has
spoken to you of a different life?"
"She has spoken to me. In her mercy and goodness! And I have
promised."
"Thank God! The trade I found you at a few days ago might well become
the man you were supposed to be, not the man you are."
"That trade ends to-day. To-night, I tell the man who employs me that
he must seek another tool. Almost directly, if you will have me; I can
join your ship."
"We can perhaps do better than you say. Yet, to-morrow, I must speak
to their Lordships. As an officer you cannot of course go----"
"I--an officer! I do not dream of that."
"But," Geoffrey continued, "the _Resolution_ wants a gunner's mate. If
I can transfer mine to her, you could come in this ship. If I cannot,
then the _Resolution_ must have you."
"What can I say? How utter----"
"Say nothing. Granger," he continued, "you have suffered deeply,
and--and--we have been brother sailors. If I who sat in judgment on
you once and wronged you unwittingly can now help to right you, I will
do it." And he laid his hand upon the other's arm as a firm friend
might do. "I want to see you once more the Lewis Granger who was known
and spoken enviously of when he was in the _Revenge_," he continued.
"I want to see my gunner's mate--if I can have him--back again in his
old place amongst us when this coming war is over."
For a moment Lewis Granger stood there looking at the man before
him--the man whose life was so bright and prosperous, yet, who,
nevertheless, could feel such pity for one whose existence had been so
broken.
"You forget," he whispered; "you forget. My disgrace, my ruin was not
all. That, it seems, may be wiped out for ever. But what of the rest
of my life? What have I been? Even during the past months. And--and--I
have sent that man to death, a death in life, if nothing else."
"That counts not. What would he have done? To you--to Anne--to
Ariadne! My God! Granger, you have instead saved him--from me. Had he
been here now, were he within my reach, I would slay him myself as I
would slay a snake."
"Yet I suggested the scheme to him, meaning thereby that he should
fall into the trap."
"But not meaning that it should be carried out. He was the villain,
and his villainy has recoiled on his own head. Dismiss all
recollection of that. Live now to be prosperous and happy."
"Happy--never! Happiness and I are parted; henceforth our ways are far
asunder. Let me go," he said, turning towards the side where the boat
he had come in was waiting for him, "and if you can do what you say,
if you can take me with you, let me know to-morrow after you have seen
their Lordships. I shall be ready ere long."
"Farewell," said Geoffrey, with one hand grasping that of Granger, the
other on his arm--and on his face the look of noble compassion that
not often, but sometimes, passes between man and man--"farewell!
To-morrow you shall hear from me--and--fear not. We sail together as
comrades yet. I know it. Feel it."
Whatever Lewis Granger had to do to free himself from the hateful life
which he had lived for the last few months was quickly done; and, ere
another day had passed, he--in spite of protestations and
remonstrances from the man whom he served--had cast that life behind
him for ever. But still there remained one other thing to do, a
journey to make.
He took the coach as the afternoon drew on, and so proceeded some
dozen miles into the heart of the country, when, quitting it, he made
his way on foot towards a village lying a mile or two from a great
town. A little village that, here, rose upon a slight hill and was
surmounted by an old church built of flint stones which, in the late
March gloom of evening, stood up hoar and grim. And, striding through
the village in which now lights were beginning to twinkle through the
diamond-paned windows of thatched cottages, Lewis Granger made his way
to the wicket-gate that opened into the churchyard, and so round to
the farther side, and to a grave--a grave over which was a stone,
having inscribed on it the words that told how, very suddenly, the
Lady Hortensia Granger had died two years before.
"Ay," her son murmured to himself, as he stood there in the desolate
place and felt the night wind rising over the flat country around.
"Ay. Suddenly! The blow killed her as it fell--perhaps in God's mercy.
Yet, if I could have seen her ere she went--surely, surely, she must
have believed my vows that I was innocent. And now, she can never
know."
That is the bitterness of it! The bitterness that those who have gone
can never know what we would have told them had we not been too late.
That that which has happened after they have gone can never be told
now. And such bitterness had come to the racked heart of Lewis
Granger: the grief and misery of knowing that, of the only two
creatures in the world whom he could love, the one had died of horror
engendered by belief in his shame; the other had not died, but she,
too, had believed.
"Oh, God!" he muttered, standing there in the swift-coming darkness,
"if they could only have trusted me; if they could have waited
patiently in that trust."
A bitter cry this from an overcharged heart, yet one that has found an
echo in thousands of others, and in other circumstances. "If they
would only have had faith in us: would only have waited patiently in
that faith!" Or, better still, if we who erred and felt and suffered
had not scorned to justify ourselves in their eyes; had not defied the
present and trusted to the future to right us, and had not taught
ourselves to laugh at doubts and be willing to love and lose and leave
it to the morrow to make amends. The morrow that is never to be; the
future that is never to come! For there is neither future nor morrow
on this earth for the loved ones whose ears are dead and cold, and
cannot hear our bitter plaint--nor ever any future for us either. The
word has not been said--and it is too late! Too late! and only because
that word, which would have righted all, has not been uttered. We were
innocent, and scorned to proclaim our innocence; we loved and cloaked
our love with assumed indifference, with pretended infidelity; we
worshipped, and were ashamed to acknowledge our worship. And, now,
those are gone who hungered for the avowal, and to whom it would
have sounded as the sweetest music ever heard, and we are left,
and--again!--it is too late.