‘Let it be till your father returns.’
‘But he will be two months away.’
‘You will join him in Switzerland. Your health requires it.’
‘My health! Oh, how tired I am of that word! Spare it me, you at least, Emily. I am well in body and mind; your love would have raised me if I had lain at the point of death. I cannot leave England alone; I have made up my mind that you shall go with me. Have I then no power to persuade you? You will not indeed refuse?’
He looked at her almost in despair. He had not anticipated more than the natural hesitancy which he would at once overcome by force of passion. There was something terrible to him in the disclosure of a quiet force of will equal to his own. Frustration of desire joined with irritated instincts of ascendency to agitate him almost beyond endurance.
Emily gazed at him with pleading as passionate as his own need.
‘Do you distrust me?’ he asked suddenly, overcome with an intolerable suspicion. At the same moment he dropped her hand, and his gaze grew cold.
‘Distrust you?’ She could not think that she understood him.
‘Do you fear to come to London with me?’
‘Wilfrid?’
Her bosom heaved with passionate resentment of his thought.
‘Is that how you understand my motives?’ she asked, with tremulous, subdued earnestness, fixing upon him a gaze which he could not meet.
‘Yes,’ he answered, below his breath, ‘in a moment when love of you has made me mad.’
He turned away, leaning with one hand upon the trunk. In the silence which followed he appeared to be examining the shapeless ruins, which, from this point of view, stood out boldly against the sky.
‘When was this castle destroyed?’ he asked presently, in a steady voice.
He received no answer, and turned his eyes to her again. Emily’s face was strung into a hard intensity. He laid his hand once more upon hers, and spoke with self-control.
‘You do not know the strength of a man’s love. In that moment it touched the borders of hate. I know that your mind is incapable of such a suspicion; try to think what it meant to be possessed for an instant by such frenzy.’
‘You felt able to hate me?’ she said, with a shake in her voice which might have become either a laugh or a sob. ‘Then there are things in love that I shall never know.’
‘Because your soul is pure as that of the angels they dream of. I could not love yen so terribly if you were not that perfection of womanhood to which all being is drawn. Send me to do your bidding; I will have no will but yours.’
How the light of rapture flashed athwart her face! It was hard for her to find words that would not seem too positive, too insubmissive.
‘Only till you have lived with your father in the thought of this thing,’ she murmured, ‘and until I have taught myself to bear my happiness. Are we not one already, dear? Why should you needlessly make your life poorer by the loss—if only for a time—of all the old kindnesses? I think, I know, that in a few days your mind will be the same as my own. Do you remember how long it is since we first spoke to each other?’
‘Not so many days as make a week,’ he answered, smiling.
‘Is not that hard to believe? And hard to realise that the new world is still within the old?’
‘Sweet, still eyes—give to me seine of your wisdom! But you have a terrible way of teaching calmness.’
‘You will go straight to the Continent, Wilfrid?’
‘Only with one promise.’
‘And that?’
‘You will bow to my judgment when I return.’
‘My fate shall be in your hands.’
They talked still, while the shadows of the ruins moved ever towards them. All the afternoon no footsteps had come near; it was the sight of two strangers which at length bade Emily think of the time. It was after six o’clock.
‘Wilfrid, I must go. My absence will seem so strange what fables I shall have to invent on the way home. Do you know of any train that you can leave by?’
‘No; it matters very little; I suppose there is a mail some time to-night? I will go back to Dunfield and take my chance.’
‘How tired you will be! Two such journeys in one day.’
‘And a draught of the water of life between them. But even now there is something more I ask for.’
‘Something more?’
‘One touch of the lips that speak so nobly.’
It was only then that her eyes gleamed for a moment through moisture. But she strengthened herself to face the parting, in spite of a heaviness at the heart like that which she had felt on leaving The Firs. She meant at first to go no further than the stile into the lane, and there Wilfrid held out his hand. She used it to aid herself in stepping over.
‘I must go as far as Pendal station,’ she said. ‘Then you can look at the time-table, and tell me what train you will take.’
They walked the length of the lane almost in silence, glancing at each other once or twice. At the village station, Wilfrid discovered that a good train left Dunfield shortly after nine o’clock. From Pendal to Dunfield there would be a train in a quarter of an hour.
They stood together under the station shed. No other passenger was waiting, and the official had not yet arrived to open the booking-office.
‘When shall I hear from you?’ Emily asked, putting off from instant to instant the good-bye, which grew ever harder to say.
‘In less than a week. I shall leave London early tomorrow morning.’
‘But it will give you no time for rest.’
‘I am not able to rest. Go as often as you can to the castle, that I may think of you as sitting there.’
‘I will go very often.’
She could not trust herself to utter more than a few words. As she spoke, the station-master appeared. They moved away to the head of the stairs by which Emily had to leave.
‘I shall see your train to-night as it passes Pendal,’ she said.
Then there was the clasp of hands, and—good-bye. To Emily the way was dark before her as she hurried onward….
Mrs. Hood had subsided into the calm of hitter resignation. Emily found her in the kitchen, engaged in polishing certain metal articles, an occupation to which she always had recourse when the legitimate work of the day was pretty well over. Years ago, Mrs. Hood had not lacked interest in certain kinds of reading, but the miseries of her life had killed all that; the need of mechanical exertion was constantly upon her; an automatic conscience refused to allow her repose. When she heard Emily entering by the front door, a sickly smile fixed itself upon her lips, and with this she silently greeted the girl.
‘It is too bad of me, mother,’ Emily said, trying to assume playfulness, which contrasted strangely with an almost haggard weariness on her face. ‘You will give me up as hopeless; I will promise, like the children, that it shall never happen again.’
‘It is your holiday, my dear,’ was the reply, as Mrs. Hood went to stir the fire. ‘You must amuse yourself in your own way.’
‘Of course you have had tea. I really want nothing till supper-time.’
‘It was not worth while to make tea for one,’ said her mother, with a sigh.
‘And you have had none? Then I will make it this minute. When will father be home?’
‘It is quite uncertain. He gets more and more irregular.’
‘Why should he be kept so beyond the proper time? It is really too bad.’
‘My dear, your father is never satisfied with doing his own work; he’s always taking somebody else’s as well. Of course, they find that out, and they put upon him. I’ve talked and talked, but it’s no use; I suppose it’ll go on in the same way to the end.’