THE MOONLIGHT.
It was a still, frosty night, with a full moon. When she reached her
chamber, Letty walked mechanically to the window, and there stood, with
the candle in her hand, looking carelessly out, nor taking any pleasure
in the great night. The window looked on an open, grassy yard, where
were a few large ricks of wheat, shining yellow in the cold, far-off
moon. Between the moon and the earth hung a faint mist, which the thin
clouds of her breath seemed to mingle with and augment. There lay her
life--out of doors--dank and dull; all the summer faded from it--all
its atmosphere a growing fog! She would never see Tom again! It was six
weeks since she saw him last! He must have ceased to think of her by
this time! And, if he did think of her again, she would be far off,
nobody knew where.
Something struck the window with a slight, sharp clang. It was winter,
and there were no moths or other insects flying, What could it be? She
put her face close to the pane, and looked out. There was a man in the
shadow of one of the ricks! He had his hat off, and was beckoning to
her. It could be nobody but Tom! The thought sent to her heart a pang
of mingled pleasure and pain. Clearly he wanted to speak to her! How
gladly she would! but then would come again all the trouble of
conscious deceit: how was she to bear that all over again! Still, if
she was going to be turned out of the house so soon, what would it
matter? If her aunt was going to compel her to be her own mistress,
where was the harm if she began it a few days sooner? What did it
matter anyhow what she did? But she dared not speak to him! Mrs.
Wardour's ears were as sharp as her eyes. The very sound of her own
voice in the moonlight would terrify her. She opened the lattice
softly, and gently shaking her head--she dared not shake it
vigorously--was on the point of closing it again, when, making frantic
signs of entreaty, the man stepped into the moonlight, and it was
plainly Tom. It was too dreadful! He might be seen any moment! She
shook her head again, in a way she meant, and he understood, to mean
she dared not. He fell on his knees and laid his hands together like
one praying. Her heart interpreted the gesture as indicating that he
was in trouble, and that, therefore, he begged her to go to him. With
sudden resolve she nodded acquiescence, and left the window.
Her room was in a little wing, projecting from the back of the house,
over the kitchen. The servants' rooms were in another part, but Letty
forgot a tiny window in one of them, which looked also upon the ricks.
There was a back stair to the kitchen, and in the kitchen a door to the
farm-yard. She stole down the stair, and opened the door with absolute
noiselessness. In a moment more she had stolen on tiptoe round the
corner, and was creeping like a ghost among the ricks. Not even a
rustle betrayed her as she came up to Tom from behind. He still knelt
where she had left him, looking up to her window, which gleamed like a
dead eye in the moonlight. She stood for a moment, afraid to move, lest
she should startle him, and he should call out, for the slightest noise
about the place would bring Godfrey down. The next moment, however,
Tom, aware of her presence, sprang to his feet, and, turning, bounded
to her, and took her in his arms. Still possessed by the one terror of
making a noise, she did not object even by a contrary motion, and, when
he took her hand to lead her away out of sight of the house, she
yielded at once.
When they were safe in the field behind the hedge--
"Why did you make me come down, Tom?" she whispered, half choked with
fear, looking up in his face, which was radiant in the moonshine.
"Because I could not bear it one day longer," he answered. "All this
time I have been breaking my heart to get a word with you, and never
seeing you except at church, and there you would never even look at me.
It is cruel of you, Letty. I know you could manage it, if you liked,
well enough. Why should you try me so?"
"Do speak a little lower, Tom: sound goes so far at night!--I didn't
know you would want to see me like that," she answered, looking up in
his face with a pleased smile.
"Didn't know!" repeated Tom. "I want nothing else, think of nothing
else, dream of nothing else. Oh, the delight of having you here all
alone to myself at last! You darling Letty!"
"But I must go directly, Tom. I have no business to be out of the house
at this time of the night. If you hadn't made me think you were in some
trouble, I daredn't have come."
"And ain't I in trouble enough--trouble that nothing but your coming
could get me out of? To love your very shadow, and not be able to get a
peep even of that, except in church, where all the time of the service
I'm raging inside like a wild beast in a cage--ain't that trouble
enough to make you come to me?"
Letty's heart leaped up. He loved her, then! Love, real love, was what
it meant! It was paradise! Anything might come that would! She would be
afraid of nothing any more. They might say or do to her what they
pleased--she did not care a straw, if he loved her--really loved her!
And he did! he did! She was going to have him all to her own self, and
nobody was to have any right to meddle with her more!
"I didn't know you loved me, Tom!" she said, simply, with a little gasp.
"And I don't know yet whether you love me," returned Tom.
"Of course, if you love _me_," answered Letty, as if everybody must
give back love for love.
Tom took her again in his arms, and Letty was in greater bliss than she
had ever dreamed possible. From being a nobody in the world, she might
now queen it to the top of her modest bent; from being looked down on
by everybody, she had the whole earth under her feet; from being
utterly friendless, she had the heart of Tom Helmer for her own! Yet
even then, eluding the barriers of Tom's arms, shot to her heart, sharp
as an arrow, the thought that she was forsaking Cousin Godfrey. She did
not attempt to explain it to herself; she was in too great confusion,
even if she had been capable of the necessary analysis. It came,
probably, of what her aunt had told her concerning her cousin's opinion
of Tom. Often and often since, she had said to herself that, of course,
Cousin Godfrey was mistaken and quite wrong in not liking Tom; she was
sure he would like him if he knew him as she did!--and yet to act
against his opinion, and that never uttered to herself, cost her this
sharp pang, and not a few that followed! To soften it for the moment,
however, came the vaguely, sadly reproachful feeling, that, seeing they
were about to send her out into the world to earn her bread, they had
no more any right to make such demands upon her loyalty to them as
should exclude the closest and only satisfying friend she had--one who
would not turn her away, but wanted to have her for ever. That Godfrey
knew nothing of his mother's design, she did not once suspect.
"Now, Tom, you have seen me, and spoken to me, and I must go," said
Letty.
"O Letty!" cried Tom, reproachfully, "now when we understand each
other? Would you leave me in the very moment of my supremest bliss?
That would be mockery, Letty! That is the way my dreams serve me
always. But, surely, you are no dream! Perhaps I _am_ dreaming, and
shall wake to find myself alone! I never was so happy in my life, and
you want to leave me all alone in the midnight, with the moon to
comfort me! Do as you like, Letty!--I won't leave the place till the
morning. I will go back to the rick-yard, and lie under your window all
night."
The idea of Tom, out on the cold ground, while she was warm in bed, was
too much for Letty's childish heart. Had she known Tom better, she
would not have been afraid: she would have known that he would indeed
do as he had said--so far; that he would lie down under her window, and
there remain, even to the very moment when he began to feel miserable,
and a moment longer, but not more than two; that then he would get up,
and, with a last look, start home for bed.
"I will stop a little while, Tom," she offered, "if you will promise to
go home as soon as I leave you."
Tom promised.
They went wandering along the farm-lanes, and Tom made love to her, as
the phrase is--in his case, alas! a phrase only too correct. I do not
say, or wish understood, that he did not love her--with such love as
lay in the immediate power of his development; but, being a sort of a
poet, such as a man may be who loves the form of beauty, but not the
indwelling power of it, that is, the truth, he _made_ love to
her--fashioned forms of love, and offered them to her; and she accepted
them, and found the words of them very dear and very lovely. For
neither had she got far enough, with all Godfrey's endeavors for her
development, to love aright the ring of the true gold, and therefore
was not able to distinguish the dull sound of the gilt brass Tom
offered her. Poor fellow! it was all he had. But compassion itself can
hardly urge that as a reason for accepting it for genuine. What rubbish
most girls will take for poetry, and with it heap up impassably their
door to the garden of delights! what French polish they will take for
refinement! what merest French gallantry for love! what French
sentiment for passion! what commonest passion they will take for
devotion!--passion that has little to do with their beauty even, still
less with the individuality of it, and nothing at all with their
loveliness!
In justice to Tom, I must add, however, that he also took not a little
rubbish for poetry, much sentiment for pathos, and all passion for
love. He was no intentional deceiver; he was so self-deceived, that,
being himself a deception, he could be nothing but a deceiver--at once
the most complete and the most pardonable, and perhaps the most
dangerous of deceivers.
With all his fine talk of love, to which he now gave full flow, it was
characteristic of him that, although he saw Letty without hat or cloak,
just because he was himself warmly clad, he never thought of her being
cold, until the arm he had thrown round her waist felt her shiver.
Thereupon he was kind, and would have insisted that she should go in
and get a shawl, had she not positively refused to go in and come out
again. Then he would have had her put on his coat, that she might be
able to stay a little longer; but she prevailed on him to let her go.
He brought her to the nearest point not within sight of any of the
windows, and, there leaving her, set out at a rapid pace for the inn
where he had put up his mare.
When Tom was gone, and the bare night, a diffused conscience, all about
her, Letty, with a strange fear at her heart, like one in a churchyard,
with the ghost-hour at hand, and feeling like "a guilty thing
surprised," although she had done nothing wrong in its mere self, stole
back to the door of the kitchen, longing for the shelter of her own
room, as never exile for his fatherland.
She had left the door an inch ajar, that she might run the less risk of
making a noise in opening it; but ere she reached it, the moon shining
full upon it, she saw plainly, and her heart turned sick when she saw,
that it was closed. Between cold and terror she shuddered from head to
foot, and stood staring.
Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have blown
it to. If so, there was much danger that the noise had been heard; but,
in any case, there was no time to lose. She glided swiftly to it. She
lifted the latch softly--but, horror of horrors! in vain. The door was
locked. She was shut out. She must lie or confess! And what lie would
serve? Poor Letty! And yet, for all her dismay, her terror, her despair
that night, in her innocence, she never once thought of the worst
danger in which she stood!
The least perilous, where no safe way was left, would now have been to
let the simple truth appear; Letty ought immediately to have knocked at
the door, and, should that have proved unavailing, to have broken her
aunt's window even, to gain hearing and admittance. But that was just
the kind of action of which, truthful as was her nature, poor Letty,
both by constitution and training, was incapable; human opposition,
superior anger, condemnation, she dared not encounter. She sank, more
than half fainting, upon the door-step.
The moment she came to herself, apprehension changed into active dread,
rushed into uncontrollable terror. She sprang to her feet, and, the
worst thing she could do, fled like the wind after Tom--now, indeed,
she imagined, her only refuge! She knew where he had put up his horse,
and knew he could hardly take any other way than the foot-path to
Testbridge. He could not be more than a few yards ahead of her, she
thought. Presently she heard him whistling, she was sure, as he walked
leisurely along, but she could not see him. The way was mostly between
hedges until it reached the common: there she would catch sight of him,
for, notwithstanding the gauzy mist, the moon gave plenty of light. On
she went swiftly, still fancying at intervals she heard in front of her
his whistle, and even his step on the hard, frozen path. In her eager
anxiety to overtake him, she felt neither the chilling air nor the fear
of the night and the loneliness. Dismay was behind her, and hope before
her. On and on she ran. But when, with now failing breath, she reached
the common, and saw it lie so bare and wide in the moonlight, with the
little hut standing on its edge, like a ghastly lodge to nowhere, with
gaping black holes for door and window, then, indeed, the horror of her
deserted condition and the terrors of the night began to crush their
way into her soul. What might not be lurking in that ruin, ready to
wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing girl, start out
in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now streamed behind her! And
there was the hawthorn, so old and grotesquely contorted, always
bringing to her mind a frightful German print at the head of a poem
called "The Haunted Heath," in one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It
was like an old miser, decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run!
Miserable as was her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable
by these terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which
the moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a shippen,
and a certain strange sound, coming again and again, which she could
not account for, all turned to things unnatural, therefore frightful.
Faintly, once or twice, she tried to persuade herself that it was only
a horrible dream, from which she would wake in safety; but it would not
do; it was, alas! all too real--hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or
fact, there was no turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful
than all possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old
house she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room
inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon!
Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into the
shadow of the hedges.
There seems to be a hope as well as a courage born of despair:
immortal, yet inconstant children of a death-doomed sire, both were now
departing. If Tom had come this way, she must, she thought, have
overtaken him long before now! But, perhaps, she had fainted outright,
and lain longer than she knew at the kitchen-door; and when she started
to follow him, Tom was already at home! Alas, alas! she was lost
utterly!
The footpath came to an end, and she was on the high-road. There was
the inn where Tom generally put up! It was silent as the grave. The
clang of a horseshoe striking a stone came through the frosty air from
far along the road. Her heart sank into the depths of the infinite sea
that encircles the soul, and, for the second time that night, Death
passing by gave her an alms of comfort, and she lay insensible on the
border of the same highway along which Tom, on his bay mare, went
singing home.