"THE LIGHT THAT NEVER WAS ON SEA OR LAND."
Mr. Dalrymple was in Melbourne for almost the whole of the time that he
had intended to spare from his partner and his property in Queensland,
which was nearly three weeks, and he never once succeeded in
communicating with Rachel, which was the special mission on which he had
come down.
He called at the Toorak house again and again, and was always told that
the ladies were not at home.
There was not much else that he could do at this stage of courtship,
knowing nothing of Rachel's circumstances in connection with Mr.
Kingston, and having had no definite assurances of her disposition
towards himself; but he did this persistently, until he became suddenly
aware that Mrs. Hardy did not mean to admit him.
Then he wrote a short note to Mr. Gordon, containing certain
instructions in the way of business, and an intimation that he might
have to stay in town longer than he had anticipated, and, therefore, was
not to be calculated upon at present.
Having despatched which, he addressed himself to the matter he had in
hand, with a quiet determination to carry it through, sooner or later,
by some means.
It was not his way to plot and scheme clandestinely, but being driven to
do it, he did it promptly and with vigour.
He wrote a long letter to Rachel, reviewing with delicate significance
the position in which they had stood to one another on the day of their
parting at Adelonga, and formally offering himself for her acceptance;
and he begged her to appoint some time and place where, if she were
willing, she could give herself and him an opportunity for coming to a
mutual understanding.
This letter he did not put into the post, being naturally distrustful of
Mrs. Hardy, but he carried it in his pocket ready for any chance that
might enable him to deliver it with his own hands--for which chance he
began to search with diligence in every place of public resort where
Rachel would be likely to appear.
Rachel, in the meantime, was distracted with suspense and misery. She
saw all possibilities of a legitimate meeting relentlessly and
effectually circumvented.
She was kept under such strict surveillance that she did not even see
her lover's face, except on one occasion, when she was at the opera, and
when, sitting between her aunt and Mr. Kingston, she was afraid to lift
her eyes to look at him.
She could do nothing in her own behalf, while she was uncertain of his
intentions. She felt herself more and more hopelessly in the toils of
her engagement, as day by day, Mr. Kingston--who yet had mysteriously
changed somehow--became more and more obtuse to the state of her mind
towards him, and more and more persistently affectionate and amiable,
and as day by day, Mrs. Hardy, grown hard and unsympathetic, impressed
more and more strongly upon her the fact that she was a penniless and
friendless orphan who owed everything that she had to her.
And all the time she loathed the very sound of Mr. Kingston's voice and
the very touch of his hand, with an unreasoning passion of repugnance
that she had never thought it possible she could feel for one who had
been so kind to her; and as a natural consequence--or cause--she was
consumed with a sleepless fever of expectation and longing for that
other lover whom she loved.
But such a state of things could not last, and after all it came to an
end much sooner than either of them expected.
There came a night when Mr. and Mrs. Hardy had to go to a stately dinner
party which did not include young girls. A most lovely night it was, in
perhaps the loveliest month of the year, when there was no need to put
candles in the carriage lamps, and no need for a fire in the big green
drawing-room, where between seven and eight o'clock Rachel was left to
amuse herself, in apparent safety, until bed time. A young moon shone in
at the open windows before the mellow daylight was gone, as Mrs. Hardy,
in rustling silk and tinkling jewels, entered to say good-night.
The evening wind went whispering round the house, ruffling a thousand
tufts of bougainvillea that embossed the outer wall, and breathing into
the dim room the sweetness of early roses and the fresh fragrance of the
sea.
To Rachel, ever afterwards, it was the most beautiful night that the
world had known.
"Now, my dear, John will light the gas for you--two burners will do
to-night, John--and you can practise your music undisturbed. Don't leave
the windows open any longer; it will be chilly by and bye. And don't sit
up late. Good-night."
"Good-night, auntie," responded Rachel.
She proffered the regulation kiss in an absent manner, nodded with a
smile to her uncle, who was waiting outside, and stood on the threshold
of a French window to watch the carriage until it passed out of the
gates and disappeared.
Then instead of going to practise her music, she went out and sat down
on the top of one of the square pedestals that flanked the steps of the
terrace upon which the window opened, and clasped her hands about her
knees.
John left the window open for her, lit the gas and the piano candles,
returned to find her still sitting in the same place, as if she had not
stirred, and went away to make his own arrangements for a pleasant
evening.
Half an hour later she was wandering about the garden, heedless of the
chill that was creeping on with nightfall, and looking before her with
eyes so full of dreams that they did not see where she was going
to--gliding up and down the level terraces like a ghost in the dusky
twilight, with the silver of the moonshine on her golden hair.
And then, by mere mechanical submission to the force of habit, she found
herself presently at that back gate which overlooked "the house,"
leaning her arms upon the upper rail, and staring at the low ridges of
gleaming wall a few dozen yards off, which were rising as it seemed to
her, with the rapidity of magic from the foundations that had taken so
long to do, the stony embodiment of a relentless fate.
It was very quiet there to-night. No swarms of carpenters, and
bricklayers, and stonemasons; no idle boys gaping at them over the
fence; no people walking and driving about the road.
She tried the gate, and found it locked; then she climbed lightly over
it, and holding up her skirts, stole across the strip of arid waste that
lay between it and the nucleus of the building which was once to have
been her palace, and now could only be her prison-house, eager to
discover anything she could that would indicate the real progress that
was being made.
She threaded her course daintily through heaps of brick and stone and
broken _debris_; she entered the skeleton house by its gaping porch, and
she wandered about the labyrinth of its passages and vestibules, feeling
her way with cautious feet and outstretched hands, until she came to her
own boudoir; and there she sat down on a joist of the flooring, and
laid her face on her knees and cried.
The sweetness of the solitary night, quite as much as the sight of all
those permanently-adjusted ground-floor door and window frames, melted
her into these sudden tears, full as she was of the aching rapture of
her love and trouble, which needed but a touch to overflow. The
possibility of a human spectator of her emotion never for a moment
occurred to her.
However, Mr. Roden Dalrymple had also taken it into his head to have an
after-dinner walk in the moonlight, and happening for a very good
reason, to be prowling about in this neighbourhood, he had seen the
slender little figure gliding across the open space between the back
gate and the new building, and he had guessed in a moment whose it was.
And so, as Rachel sat with her feet in subterranean darkness, her hands
clasping her knees just above the level of the floor that was to be, and
her face hidden in her lap, she heard a sound, suggestive of midnight
robbers and murderers, that for a moment paralysed her timid heart; and
then a voice, calling her softly,
"Miss Fetherstonhaugh! Do not be frightened. It is only I--Roden
Dalrymple."
He came in through the gap of the doorway, while she stared at him and
held her breath; he stepped swiftly and lightly from joist to joist
until he reached the corner where she was sitting.
Then he sat down beside her quietly, as if he were taking a place she
had been keeping for him; and the next moment--with no question asked
and no explanation given--they were sealing the most sacred of all
contracts irrevocably, in the silence of the solemn night.
It was well for Rachel that, with all his faults, Roden Dalrymple was
not the reprobate he was supposed to be, but a man of stainless honour,
in whose keeping the welfare of an ignorant and imprudent girl was safe;
for--from the day when she went into the conservatory with him in the
first hours of their acquaintance, stranger as he was, and she the most
modest of girls, simply because he asked her--she had laid herself,
metaphorically, at his feet--too simple and single in all her aims and
impulses not to love unreservedly when she began to love at all, too
strong in her young enthusiasm for her own ideals to be hampered by
doubts either of herself or him, too thoroughly natural and ingenuous to
disguise her heart or to bend it to the yoke of conventional law and
order.
Now she gave herself up at once, turning to meet his outstretched arms,
lifting her face to his strong and eager kisses with a passionate
responsiveness and abandonment that, while it infinitely quickened his
love and gratitude, showed him plainly that all the responsibility of
her future happiness would rest with him.
"Oh," she said, with a long sighing sob, "I have wanted you so!"
"Have you, indeed?" he replied, tightening his arms about her with a
gesture that was more significant than speech. "My little love, you
shall never want me any more, if I can help it."
These were the terms of their "initial marriage ceremony."
And it is just to Mr. Dalrymple to say that he not only never took the
slightest advantage of the irregularities that she innocently allowed,
but--at any rate, not until long afterwards--he never even saw them.
That they were candid and truthful in themselves and to one another was
from the first the essential bond between them, otherwise unlike as they
were; and to him the absence of the usual maidenly reticence and
reluctance displayed on these occasions indicated, all circumstances
considered, rather a finer delicacy of nature than the ordinary, and
never the faintest suspicion that she held the treasures of love and
womanhood cheaply, even for his sake.
Feeling no need of further explanation--understanding one another, by
that subtle sense which defies analysis, that instinctive recognition of
spiritual kinship which, in its early development, was to them what is
called "love at first sight," but which had in it the germs of a true
companionship and comradeship that might defy all the accidents of time
and chance--they sat for a few blessed silent moments side by side, she
with her young head leaning trustfully against his worn brown face, not
wanting to speak, unwilling even to think of all the difficulties that
lay in ambush around them, ready to break into this ineffable peace with
the breaking of the silence; looking over a low window-sill before them
into the quiet night, with grave and happy eyes--at Melbourne, lying in
a glorified haze of twilight beneath them, and at the silver of the sea
beyond.