Part 2 (2/2)
Her pa.s.sionate resentment angers him, slow to anger as he is by nature and habit.
”If you hate me so much, Honor, that the touch of my lips insults you beyond forgiveness, the sooner we part the better,” he says bitterly.
”You would please me best by going away, and never letting me see your face again,” she answers with equal bitterness.
There is the sound of a step on the gravel, and a man's laugh--a peculiar vibrating laugh that brings the color into Honor's face--reaches them in the stillness.
But the steps pa.s.s on, and do not come near their corner among the old fruit-trees. Brian Beresford bends nearer to the girl, lying there amid the bending branches, with the suns.h.i.+ne on her averted face.
”You are only a child, Honor, for all your twenty summers! You no more know your own heart than I do. Take care! If you send me away--me and my love--you may find that you have made a mistake!”
But she will not answer him--she will not even look at him. For all the sign of life she gives she might be that Sleeping Beauty to whom he first likened her.
”If ever you should feel sorry, Honor, for what you have said to-day--if ever you should care to have me back, either as a friend or lover, send for me, and I will come.”
The words are calm enough, but by some instinct she divines that the face bent close to hers is neither calm or cold. She hears him go away, as he came, through the gap in the high hedge, but she does not even open her eyes to watch him go. But, when all is still again, and she knows that he has pa.s.sed away out of her life, as surely as he has pa.s.sed out of the old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, she bursts into tears.
”Oh, what has come to me?” she says to herself again and again, in a very maze of wonder at her own sensations. ”I do not love the man. His coming or his going matters nothing to me.”
But, although she says this, not once but many times, the words bring her no comfort. They do not still for one moment the inexplicable plain that has risen in her heart. She gets up after awhile and goes back to the house, choosing the small door at the side, so that she may meet no one.
Aileen is ironing in the large front-kitchen, smoothing out, as she calls it, one of Honor's pretty white dresses. It is a labor of love with the old woman, and every week she comes up from her little cottage to perform it.
At sight of her young mistress standing in the doorway, bright-eyed and flushed, and strangely unlike herself, the good woman pauses.
”An' is it yourself, alanna? Shure my eyes have been aching for the sight of your face this hour or more! But what ails ye, Miss Honor darlint? Shure my black drames--bad 'cess to me for naming them till ye--have not been troubling your mind?”
”No, no!” the girl says, laughing. ”I am not troubled about anything, only hot and thirsty, and--yes, Aileen, I may as well own it--cross.”
She laughs again, but her voice is tremulous, and she keeps her face well turned from the light.
”I wish it was only cross that I was, darlint!” the old woman says with the peculiar solemnity of her cla.s.s. ”But it's sore and heavy-hearted I am, and that's the blessed truth. I've done nothing but drame since ever I saw you last, and every night it's the same thing over and over again, till my brain is almost turned wid it, and I rise up in the morning all in a cold perspoiration.”
”Dear old Aileen,” the girl says tenderly, ”poor Rooney's awful death has upset you? It has upset us all for that matter! And then it must be so dreadful for you alone on that great bleak bog.”
”Miss Honor, do ye mind my drame?”
”Every word of it, Aileen.”
”Ye mind how I dramed that the boys dug the grave out on the moss, and hid it out of sight wid green branches!”
”I do surely.”
”Well, Miss Honor, ever and always in my drame that grave is there still. I watch the boys dig it deep in the black earth, and cover the gaping mouth of it; and me shaking and trembling all the time. But these past three nights--the saints be above us!--there's been another grave, alanna.”
”Another grave!” The girl laughs. ”Why, that is getting too dreadful!”
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