‘Now, who ever may that be?’ murmured Jessie, as she approached the door.
‘A doctor, I dare say,’ was her sister’s suggestion.
‘A doctor! Not he, indeed. He has something to do with Emily, depend upon it.’
The servant, opening to them, had to report that Miss Hood was too unwell to-day to receive visitors. Jessie would dearly have liked to ask who it was that apparently had been an exception, but even she lacked the assurance necessary to the putting of such a question. The girls left their offering, and went their way home; the stranger afforded matter for conversation throughout the walk.
Wilfrid did not go straight to the Baxendales’. In his distracted state he felt it impossible to sit through luncheon, and he could not immediately decide how to meet Mrs. Baxendale, whether to take her into his confidence or to preserve silence on what had happened. He was not sure that he would be justified in disclosing the details of such an interview; did he not owe it to Emily to refrain from submitting her action to the judgment of any third person? If in truth she were still suffering from the effects of her illness, it was worse than unkind to repeat her words; if, on the other hand, her decision came of adequate motives, or such as her sound intelligence deemed adequate, was it possible to violate the confidence implied in such a conversation between her and himself? Till his mind had assumed some degree of calmness, he could not trust himself to return to the house. Turning from the main road at a point just before the bridge over the river, he kept on the outskirts of the town, and continued walking till he had almost made the circuit of Dunfield. His speed was that of a man who hastened with some express object; his limbs seemed spurred to activity by the gallop of his thoughts. His reason would scarcely accept the evidence of consciousness that he had indeed just heard such things from Emily’s lips; it was too monstrous for belief; a resolute incredulity sustained him beneath a blow which, could he have felt it to be meant in very earnest, would have deprived him of his senses. She did not, she could not, know what she had said! Yet she spoke with such cruel appearance of reasoning earnestness; was it possible for a diseased mind to assume so convincingly the modes of rational utterance? What conceivable circumstances could bring her to such a resolution? Her words, ‘I do not love you,’ made horrible repetition in his ears; it was as though he had heard her speak them again and again. Could they be true? The question, last outcome of the exercise of his imagination on the track of that unimaginable cause, brought him to a standstill, physically and mentally. Those words had at first scarcely engaged his thought; it was her request to be released that seriously concerned him; that falsehood had been added as a desperate means of gaining her end. Yet now, all other explanations in vain exhausted, perforce he gave heed to that hideous chime of memory. It was not her father’s death that caused her illness that she admitted, Had some horrible complication intervened, some incredible change come upon her, since he left England? He shook off this suggestion as blasphemy. Emily? His high-souled Emily, upon whose faith he would stake the breath of his life? Was his own reason failing him?
Worn out, he reached the house in the middle of the afternoon, and went to his own sitting-room. Presently a servant came and asked whether he would take luncheon. He declined. Lying on the sofa, he still tormented himself with doubt whether he might speak with Mrs. Baxendale. That lady put an end to his hesitation by herself coming to his room. He sprang up.
‘Don’t move, don’t move!’ she exclaimed in her cheery way. ‘I have only come to ask why you resolve to starve yourself. You can’t have had lunch anywhere?’
‘No; I am not hungry.’
‘A headache?’ she asked, looking at him with kind shrewdness.
‘A little, perhaps.’
‘Then at all events you will have tea. May I ask them to bring it here?’
She went away, and, a few minutes after her return, tea was brought.
‘You found Emily looking sadly, I’m afraid?’ she said, with one of the provincialisms which occasionally marked her language.
‘Yes,’ Wilfrid replied; ‘she looked far too ill to be up.’
He had seated himself on the sofa. His hands would not hold the tea-cup steadily; he put it down by his side.
‘I fear there is small chance of her getting much better in that house of illness,’ said Mrs. Baxendale, observing his agitation. ‘Can’t we persuade her to go somewhere? Her mother is in excellent hands.’
‘I wish we could,’ Wilfrid replied, clearly without much attention to his words.
‘You didn’t propose anything of the kind?’
He made no answer. A short silence intervened, and he felt there was no choice but to declare the truth.
‘The meeting was a very painful one,’ he began. ‘It is difficult to speak to you about it. Do you think that she has perfectly recovered?—that her mind is wholly—’
He hesitated; it was dreadful to be speaking in this way of Emily. The sound of his voice reproached him; what words would not appear brutal in such a case?
‘You fear—?’
Wilfrid rose and walked across the room. It seemed impossible to speak, yet equally so to keep his misery to himself.
‘Mrs. Baxendale,’ he said at length, ‘I am perhaps doing a very wrong thing in telling you what passed between us, but I feel quite unable to decide upon any course without the aid of your judgment. I am in a terrible position. Either I must believe Emily to speak without responsibility, or something inexplicable, incredible, has come to pass. She has asked me to release her. She says that something has happened which makes it impossible for her ever to fulfil her promise, something which must always remain her secret, which I may not hope to understand. And with such dreadful appearance of sincerity—such a face of awful suffering—’
His voice failed. The grave concern on Mrs. Baxendale’s visage was not encouraging.
‘Something happened?’ the latter repeated, in low-toned astonishment. ‘Does she offer no kind of explanation?’
‘None—none,’ he added, ‘that I can bring myself to believe.’
Mrs. Baxendale could only look at him questioningly.
‘She said,’ Wilfrid continued, pale with the effort it cost him to speak, ‘that she has no longer any affection for me.’
There was another silence, of longer endurance than the last. Wilfrid was the first to break it.
‘My reason for refusing to believe it is, that she said it when she had done her utmost to convince me of her earnestness in other ways, and said it in a way—How is it possible for me to believe it? It is only two months since I saw her on the Castle Hill.’
‘I thought you had never been here before?’
‘I have never spoken to you of that. I came and left on the same day, It was to see her before I went to Switzerland.’
‘I am at a loss,’ said Mrs. Baxendale. ‘I can only suggest that she has had a terrible shock, and that her recovery, or seeming recovery, has been too rapid. Yet there is no trace of wandering in her talk with me.’
‘Nor was there to-day. She was perfectly rational. Think of one’s being driven to hope that she only seemed so!’
‘Did you speak of correspondence?’
‘No. I said that I could not agree to what she asked of me until she had repeated it after a time. I left her scarcely knowing what I spoke. What shall I do? How can I remain in doubt such as this? I said I wished for your help, yet how can you—how can anyone—help me? Have I unconsciously been the cause of this?’
‘Or has anyone else consciously been so?’ asked the lady, with meaning.