Part 36 (1/2)

Prue's callings have ceased; the small laughters, exclamations, appeals, have died into silence. Her and Freddy's pretty heads have both disappeared. Talbot and Peggy are left the last upon the tower-top. Her lip trembles.

'You did not want me last autumn, and you have not seen me since.'

'No, worse luck!' cries he pa.s.sionately; 'but you need not throw that in my teeth. You might pity me for it, I think. Eight whole months gone, Peggy--wasted, lost out of our short lives! But how dare you stand there and say that I have not wanted you, do not want you, autumn, winter, summer, spring? You are confusing, perhaps, between yourself and me.

_You_ do not want _me_, that is likely enough. You could not even pretend to have been giving me one poor thought when I asked you. You would have been glad--I saw by your face that your kind heart would have been glad--if you could have told me, with any semblance of truth, that you had been thinking of me; but you had not. I was _miles_ away from you.'

Her lip is trembling again, and her chest heaving. She has not had many love-tales told her; not many more perhaps, or of much better quality, than those with which Lady Betty had spitefully credited her. She has let her eyes fall, because she feels them to be filling up with foolish drops; but now lifts them again, and they look with their old directness, though each has a tear in it, into his.

'Why did you go away?'

_Why did he go away?_ That is a question to which, in one sense, the answer is easy enough. 'Because Lady Betty Harborough sent him.' In another--the only one, unfortunately, in which he can employ it--it is absolutely unanswerable.

'Why did you go away?' She has asked the question, and, with her eyes on his, awaits the answer.

And he? He but now so fluent, with such a stream of eager words to pour straight and hot from his heart into hers, he stands dumb before her.

She does not repeat the question; but she does what is far worse, she moves away to the stairhead and disappears, as all the other votaries of the ceremony, as Freddy and Prue have disappeared, down the ladder.

He follows her, baffled and miserable, gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth. Is it possible that the gyves he had thought to have cast off for ever are here, manacling him again as soon as he tries to make one free step? Is the old love to throttle him now with the same strangling clasp, dead, that it had done living? Before G.o.d, no! Not if he can hinder it. She has not waited for him at the tower-foot; but he overtakes her before she has reached the High Street, and without asking her leave.

The crowd on the bridge has dispersed. The city clocks, with their variously-toned voices, are striking six; to their daily toil the workmen, with tools on back, are swinging along. To them there is certainly nothing unfamiliar, probably nothing lovely, in the morning's marvellous clean novelty, that novelty renewed each dawning, as if G.o.d had said not once only but day by day, 'Lo, I make all things new!'

'You asked me a question just now,' says Talbot abruptly.

'Yes.'

'And I did not answer it; I could not. I cannot answer it now. As long as you and I shall live, I can never answer it!'

He stops, pale and panting, and looks at her with a pa.s.sionate anxiety.

O G.o.d! Is Betty's shadow to come between them still? Betty renouncing and renounced; Betty gone, swept away, vanished. Is she still to thrust herself between him and his new heaven? Still to be his bane, his evil demon? Still to lay waste that life, five of whose prime years she has already burnt and withered? If it be so, then verily and indeed his sin has found him out.

In pa.s.sionate anxiety he looks at his companion; but she is holding her head low, and he cannot get a good view of her face.

'Why do you walk so fast?' he asks irritably, his eyes taking in the rapidly diminis.h.i.+ng s.p.a.ce that lies before him. 'Is not the distance short enough in all conscience without your lessening it? Walk slower.'

She slackens her pace; but still she does not speak.

'You asked me why I went away?' he continues almost in a whisper, and with his heart beating like a steam-ram. 'Does that mean that it made any difference to you? May I make it mean that it did? Stay--do not speak--I will not let it mean anything else. If you say that it did not, I will not believe you. I cannot afford to believe you!'

He has forbidden her to speak, and yet now he pauses, hanging in a suspense that is almost ungovernable--for they have pa.s.sed Queen's cla.s.sic front, are pa.s.sing 'All Souls'--upon her slow-coming words.

There is a little stir upon her face; a tiny hovering smile.

'I was sorry that you went without your lavender!'

'I am coming back for it,' he cries pa.s.sionately, the joy-tide sweeping up over his heart to his lips, and almost drowning his words. 'Coming back for it--for it and for all else that I left behind me!'

The smile spreads, red and wavering.