The Moment Of Triumph
"While you were in my house I reckoned up the years, many times." He
smiled a little sadly, and shook his head, looking down at her. "They
never grew any less, Deleah. There are twenty-five between you and me. It
is too much! Too much!"
"No!" breathed Deleah, with upturned, adoring eyes.
"And, dear, they are not the only things between us--dividing me from you.
A love I felt--a great love I thought never to feel again--in the past--"
He looked away from her, over her head into the years that were gone. Then
his eyes came back to the eyes that were lifted to him, and he grasped her
hands tighter against his breast.
"There was Reggie, too," he said. "Poor Reggie! But I made what reparation
I could. I gave him his chance. Did he ever have a chance, Deleah?"
She shook her head. "Never!"
"What will he say to us?"
There came a rap upon the door, and Sir Francis dropped the hands he held,
and started back. "I am particularly engaged, Rogers," he said.
The door was discreetly opened to admit not Rogers, but Rogers's voice: "I
beg your pardon, sir, but there is a matter of some importance; if you
could come for a few minutes."
"I have told you I am engaged," the voice of authority protested. With a
kind of discreet reluctance the door closed again, and Sir Francis, with
the impatience of a lover whose ardour has received a momentary check,
took the girl into his arms. With a hand pushed against his chest she held
herself away from him.
"Why?" he asked her. "You are not afraid of me, Deleah?"
"Yes. Very much afraid."
"Tell me why, my dearest child?"
"Oh, you know," said Deleah, turning away her head.
"No! It is I who should be afraid of you; you, with your youth and beauty,
and sweet and gentle goodness. I confess it--all those months you lived in
my house, I was afraid."
"You said there were things between us--dividing us. You did not say what
really is there. What papa did--"
As she faltered over the words there came a louder knocking upon the door,
which opened almost at the same minute. Mr. Rogers's deprecating face
appeared there, and behind it the face of a policeman.
"A minute, sir. I won't detain you a minute," the clerk said; and Sir
Francis walked to the door with an impatient step and closed it behind
him.
Deleah, left to herself--was it for an hour? was it for a minute?--looked
with eyes dazed with happiness upon the hands that had been crushed in
his.
"I used to think that to be loved by him would be heaven," she said. "And
now--now I feel nothing. I am numb."
He came back very grave, his face unusually pale. "Your cab is waiting. I
will take you home, my dear child," he said.
She crossed the big yard again at his side. The drayman was still at his
horses' heads, the groom was taking the riding-horse round to the stables.
On the opposite side of the yard beneath one of the arches of a heavy
colonnade, a couple of policemen stood. One of them was making notes in a
book. A group of workpeople stood near by; and Deleah remembered
afterwards that there was about them and the rest an air of suspending
something they were saying or doing while their chief and the girl at his
side walked to the great entrance gates.
"A cab was waiting, by good luck," Sir Francis said as he put her in it,
and Deleah awoke, it seemed to her, for the first time since he had called
her name as she leant against his door, to full consciousness.
"It was mine," she said. "I took it to get to you quickly--before you
started for home. I was afraid you might be hurt. A man--the man who used
to lodge with us--came to me this afternoon, and he threatened you. I was
so foolish--I believed he meant it. I was afraid. I thought, as you rode
past his house to Cashelthorpe, he would wait there, behind the hedge, and
shoot you. I seemed to see him doing it. So foolish of me! Of course he
was simply frightening me; he would not dare--" She lifted the adoring
eyes to his face as he sat beside her. Who would dare indeed to harm that
Excellence! "I was afraid he had gone mad," she said, excusing the folly
of her thought.
"Poor fellow, I think he had," Sir Francis said. He held her face turned
to him, its pure oval in his hand. "Was it love of you that made him mad,
Deleah?"
She was too shy of him yet, and too modest to answer the question by word
of mouth; but he knew the answer.
"He won't trouble you any more, Deleah," he said very gently. "He won't
hurt me. He is dead."
She would not believe it. It was impossible. "He can't be! He was with me
half an hour ago. He was well as I am, and very strong. He can't be dead!"
"He seems to have come to the Brewery-yard--why we shall never know.
Perhaps with some mad intention towards me. Perhaps--. But it is all
conjecture. All we know is that he is there now. Dead."
"Was he there before me? Did he see me running through the yard--to you?"
"No one knows. No one noticed him till they found him lying behind one of
the pillars of the colonnade, shot through the head. I am going back there
now. They want me."
He lifted her from the cab and stood beside her till Emily opened the
door: "I will be with you again as soon as I can, my darling child," he
promised; and got into the cab again and drove away.
Deleah, creeping up the stairs, shut the door of the sitting-room upon
Emily, voluble of questions but getting no satisfactory answers. Shaken
with emotion, weak and shivering, she stood looking round the empty room,
peopling it with its familiar circle. There was Bessie's place, and there
Franky's especial chair. There, by the little table on one side of the
fire the boarder had sat every evening, book in hand, but eyes wandering
ever in Deleah's direction. She spoke, or laughed, or sighed, and the
change in his face showed that he listened. Bessie had to call his name
sharply twice before his attention was gained. Franky would ask some
question about the mixing of his paints. The man would answer with a kind
of anxious politeness, getting up to look over the child's shoulder.
Passing Deleah, he would stoop for the book he had purposely dropped by
her chair. "I love you!" she would hear his fierce low whisper in her ear.
She had been too depreciative of herself, too innocent of the workings of
passion, to have felt anything but irritation and annoyance at the signs
in him of a suffering she could not believe in or understand. Was it
possible, after all, that she, Deleah, whose heart was so tender, whose
ways so pitiful, who saved the drowning flies and would not willingly have
afflicted the meanest of God's creatures, by means of a pale and pretty
face only, had wrought that havoc?
With a sob in her throat she came forward into the room. Upon the table
were lying the two purple clematis flowers, backed by a spray of their own
foliage and tied with the tendrils of the plant. Deleah recalled the
repulsion with which she had seen them lying there. She put out her hand
towards them, but drew it back. She could not touch them even now.
To each of us, however mean our lives and obscure our history, living or
dead, the moment of triumph comes. To Charles Gibbon his came, when
Deleah, forgetful of her new-found bliss, and the Heaven of Happiness
opening before her, laid her head upon the table beside the poor blooms of
the clematis flower, and as if her heart were broken, cried for the fate
of the Honourable Charles.