Part 38 (1/2)
It was from the d.u.c.h.ess, and ran thus:
MOST INCONVENIENT, AS YOU VERY WELL KNOW; BUT AM LEAVING EUSTON TO-NIGHT. WILL AWAIT FURTHER ORDERS AT ABERDEEN.
Nurse Rosemary smiled, and put the telegram into her pocket. ”No answer, thank you, Simpson.”
”Not bad news, I hope?” asked Garth.
”No,” replied Nurse Rosemary; ”but it makes my departure on Thursday imperative. It is from an old aunt of mine, who is going to my 'young man's' home. I must be with him before she is, or there will be endless complications.”
”I don't believe he will ever let you go again, when once he gets you back,” remarked Garth, moodily.
”You think not?” said Nurse Rosemary, with a tender little smile, as she took up the paper, and resumed her reading.
The second telegram arrived after luncheon. Garth was at the piano, thundering Beethoven's Funeral March on the Death of a Hero. The room was being rent asunder by mighty chords; and Simpson's smug face and side-whiskers appearing noiselessly in the doorway, were an insupportable anticlimax. Nurse Rosemary laid her finger on her lips; advanced with her firm noiseless tread, and took the telegram. She returned to her seat and waited until the hero's obsequies were over, and the last roll of the drums had died away. Then she opened the orange envelope. And as she opened it, a strange thing happened. Garth began to play The Rosary. The string of pearls dropped in liquid sound from his fingers; and Nurse Rosemary read her telegram. It was from the doctor, and said: SPECIAL LICENSE EASILY OBTAINED. FLOWER AND I WILL COME WHENEVER YOU WISH. WIRE AGAIN.
The Rosary drew to a soft melancholy close.
”What shall I play next?” asked Garth, suddenly.
”Veni, Creator Spiritus,” said Nurse Rosemary; and bowed her head in prayer.
CHAPTER x.x.xIII
”SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN!”
Wednesday dawned; an ideal First of May: Garth was in the garden before breakfast. Jane heard him singing, as he pa.s.sed beneath her window.
”It is not mine to sing the stately grace, The great soul beaming in my lady's face.”
She leaned out.
He was walking below in the freshest of white flannels; his step so light and elastic; his every movement so lithe and graceful; the only sign of his blindness the Malacca cane he held in his hand, with which he occasionally touched the gra.s.s border, or the wall of the house. She could only see the top of his dark head. It might have been on the terrace at Shenstone, three years before. She longed to call from the window; ”Darling--my Darling! Good morning! G.o.d bless you to-day.”
Ah what would to-day bring forth;--the day when her full confession, and explanation, and plea for pardon, would reach him? He was such a boy in many ways; so light-hearted, loving, artistic, poetic, irrepressible; ever young, in spite of his great affliction. But where his manhood was concerned; his love; his right of choice and of decision; of maintaining a fairly-formed opinion, and setting aside the less competent judgment of others; she knew him rigid, inflexible. His very pain seemed to cool him, from the molten lover, to the bar of steel.
As Jane knelt at her window that morning, she had not the least idea whether the evening would find her travelling to Aberdeen, to take the night mail south; or at home forever in the heaven of Garth's love.
And down below he pa.s.sed again, still singing:
”But mine it is to follow in her train; Do her behests in pleasure or in pain; Burn at her altar love's sweet frankincense, And wors.h.i.+p her in distant reverence.”
”Ah, beloved!” whispered Jane, ”not 'distant.' If you want her, and call her, it will be to the closest closeness love can devise. No more distance between you and me.”
And then, in the curious way in which inspired words will sometimes occur to the mind quite apart from their inspired context, and bearing a totally different meaning from that which they primarily bear, these words came to Jane: ”For He is our peace, Who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of part.i.tion between us ... that He might reconcile both ... by the cross.” ”Ah, dear Christ!” she whispered. ”If Thy cross could do this for Jew and Gentile, may not my boy's heavy cross, so bravely borne, do it for him and for me? So shall we come at last, indeed, to 'kiss the cross.'”
The breakfast gong boomed through the house. Simpson loved gongs. He considered them ”Haristocratic.” He always gave full measure.
Nurse Rosemary went down to breakfast.
Garth came in, through the French window, humming ”The thousand beauties that I know so well.” He was in his gayest, most inconsequent mood. He had picked a golden rosebud in the conservatory and wore it in his b.u.t.tonhole. He carried a yellow rose in his hand.