The ravine coming upon him suddenly, took away Rob's breath, and he hardly felt Nell snatch away her arm. She stood back, undecided what to do for a moment, and they were separated by a few yards. Then Rob heard a man's voice, soft and low, but passionate. He knew it to be Sir Clement Dowton's, though he lost the words. A girl's voice answered, however, a voice so exquisitely modulated, so clear and pure, that Rob trembled with delight in it. This is what it said —
'No, Sir Clement Dowton, I bear you no ill-will, but I do not love you. Years ago I made an idol and worshipped it, because I knew no better, but I am a foolish girl no longer, and I know now that it was a thing of clay.'
To Rob's amazement he found himself murmuring these words even before they were spoken. He seemed to know them so well, that had the speaker missed anything, he could have put her right. It was not sympathy that worked this marvel. He had read all this before, or something very like it, in The Scorn of Scorns.
Nell, too, heard the voice, but did not catch the words. She ran forward, and as she reached Rob, a tall girl in white, with a dark hood over her head, pushed aside a bush and came into view.
'Mary,' cried Miss Meredith, 'this gentleman here is the person who wrote that in the Mirror. Let me introduce you to him, Mr. Angus, Miss – ' and then Nell shrank back in amazement, as she saw who was with her friend.
'Sir Clement Dowton!' she exclaimed.
Rob, however, did not hear her, nor see the baronet, for looking up with a guilty feeling at his heart, his eyes met Mary Abinger.
CHAPTER VI
THE ONE WOMAN
Daybreak on the following morning found the gas blazing in Rob's lodgings. Rob was seated in an arm-chair, his feet on the cold hearth. The Scorn of Scorns lay on the mantelpiece carefully done up in brown paper, lest a speck of dust should fall on it, and he had been staring at the ribs of the fireplace for the last three hours without seeing them. He had not thought of the gas. His bed was unslept on. His damp boots had dried on his feet. He did not feel cold. All night he had sat there, a man mesmerised. For the only time in his life he had forgotten to wind up his watch.
At times his lips moved as if he were speaking to himself, and a smile lit up his face. Then a change of mood came, and he beat the fender with his feet till the fire-irons rattled. Thinking over these remarks brought the rapture to his face:
'How do you do, Mr. Angus?'
'You must not take to heart what Miss Meredith said.'
'Please don't say any more about it. I am quite sure you gave your honest opinion about my book.'
'I am so glad you think this like Scotland, because, of course, that is the highest compliment a Scotsman can pay.'
'Good-night, Mr. Angus.'
That was all she had said to him, but the more Rob thought over her remarks the more he liked them. It was not so much the words themselves that thrilled him as the way they were said. Other people had asked, 'How do you do, Mr. Angus?' without making an impression, but her greeting was a revelation of character, for it showed that though she knew who he was she wanted to put him at his ease. This is a delightful attribute in a woman, and worth thinking about.
Just before Miss Abinger said, 'How do you do, Mr. Angus?' Rob had realised what people meant by calling her proud. She was holding her head very high as she appeared in the path, and when Nell told her who Rob was she flushed. He looked hopelessly at her, bereft of speech, as he saw a tear glisten on her eyelid; and as their eyes met she read into the agony that he was suffering because he had hurt her. It was then that Mary made that memorable observation, 'How do you do, Mr. Angus?'
They turned toward the castle doors, Nell and the baronet in front, and Rob blurted out some self-reproaches in sentences that had neither beginning nor end. Mary had told him not to take it so terribly to heart, but her voice trembled a little, for this had been a night of incident to her. Rob knew that it was for his sake she had checked that tear, and as he sat in his lodgings through the night he saw that she had put aside her own troubles to lessen his. When he thought of that he drew a great breath. The next moment his whole body shuddered to think what a brute he had been, and then she seemed to touch his elbow again, and he half rose from his chair in a transport.
As soon as he reached his lodgings Rob had taken up The Scorn of Scorns, which he had not yet returned to Mr. Licquorish, and re-read it in a daze. There were things in it so beautiful now that they caught in his throat and stopped his reading; they took him so far into the thoughts of a girl that to go farther seemed like eavesdropping. When he read it first The Scorn of Scorns had been written in a tongue Rob did not know, but now he had the key in his hands. There is a universal language that comes upon young people suddenly, and enables an English girl, for instance, to understand what a Chinaman means when he looks twice at her. Rob had mastered it so suddenly that he was only its slave at present. His horse had run away with him.
Had the critic of The Scorn of Scorns been a bald-headed man with two chins, who did not know the authoress, he would have smiled at the severity with which she took perfidious man to task, and written an indulgent criticism without reading beyond the second chapter. If he had been her father he would have laughed a good deal at her heroics, but now and again they would have touched him, and he would have locked the book away in his desk, seeing no particular cleverness in it, but feeling proud of his daughter. It would have brought such thoughts to him about his wife as suddenly fill a man with tenderness – thoughts he seldom gives expression to, though she would like to hear them.
Rob, however, drank in the book, his brain filled with the writer of it. It was about a young girl who had given her heart to a stranger, and one day when she was full of the joy of his love he had disappeared. She waited, wondering, fearing, and then her heart broke, and her only desire was to die. No one could account for the change that came over her, for she was proud, and her relatives were not sympathetic. She had no mother to go to, and her father could not have understood. She became listless, and though she smiled and talked to all, when she went to her solitary bed-chamber she turned her face in silence to the wall. Then a fever came to her, and after that she had to be taken to the Continent. What shook her listlessness was an accident to her father. It was feared that he was on his deathbed, and as she nursed him she saw that her life had been a selfish one. From that moment she resolved if he got better (is it not terrible this, that the best of us try to make terms with God?) to devote her life to him, and to lead a nobler existence among the poor and suffering ones at home. The sudden death of a relative who was not a good man frightened her so much that she became ill again, and now she was so fearful of being untruthful that she could not make a statement of fact without adding 'I think so,' under her breath. She let people take advantage of her lest she should be taking advantage of them, and when she passed a cripple on the road she walked very slowly so that he should not feel his infirmity.
Years afterwards she saw the man who had pretended to love her and then ridden away. He said that he could explain everything to her, and that he loved her still; but she drew herself up, and with a look of ineffable scorn, told him that she no longer loved him. When they first met, she said, she had been little more than a child, and so she had made an idol of him. But long since the idol had crumbled to pieces, and now she knew that she had worshipped a thing of clay. She wished him well, but she no longer loved him. As Lord Caltonbridge listened he knew that she spoke the truth, and his eyes drooped before her dignified but contemptuous gaze. Then, concludes the author, dwelling upon this little triumph with a satisfaction that hardly suggests a heart broken beyond mending, he turned upon his heel, at last realising what he was; and, feeling smaller and meaner than had been his wont, left the Grange for the second and last time.