Part 44 (2/2)

Again for a time I banished my dark thoughts, for a time I allowed love, rather than duty, to fill my world, and I yielded to the gentle witchery of her presence. I had made up my mind to tell her all; but I postponed it for a while. ”Time enough yet,” I said; ”let me have some happiness before eternal night sets in.”

How gentle, how kind, how loving she was! Her every word told of the love she bore me, and had borne me for long years, every word told me how she believed in my goodness and purity.

What we talked of, I may not recount. I only know that for a few short minutes we lived in the blissful present. The thought of her great love was more powerful than the dread remorse which had possessed me a little while before.

And was it any wonder? Think, if you can, how I must have felt! Ten long years before I had left her, thinking she loved another, and all those years I had roamed the world in misery and hopeless despair. I had come back at the summons of a voice which I had heard, or thought I had heard, sweeping across the wide seas, and when I had arrived at the place where I had hoped to see her I had heard she was dead. Then, after grief that amounted to madness, I had discovered her alive, and had found that she loved me. More than that, she was with me, we were alone, and I felt her hands in mine. Was it to be wondered at then, that darkness should, for the time, be driven away?

Swiftly the time pa.s.sed, sweetly her gentle voice sounded as she told me how happy, how safe, how contented she was, and, in spite of her terrible experience, how little weakness she felt; and then she asked me to relate to her my adventure since the night on which I left the Trewinion Manor.

Again I remembered what I had done, again the agonies of remorse, which had been awakened by memory, began to eat into my soul. But I would tell her all. I would faithfully relate the tale of the years that had pa.s.sed, I would faithfully tell her what I had done.

And so I cast my mind back and told her what I have written in these pages. How I had gone away to sea, and how, for years, I had sailed in every clime, and with men of different nationalities. I recounted how I had been taken by the pirates, and how for two years I had been with them. I kept back nothing from her. I told her of many wild deeds that I had done, and of the wild life I had led. By and by I came to the night on which I had such a strange dream, or else had seen such a strange vision, and here I hesitated. It seemed so wonderful, and withal so unreal. I told it her, however, while she listened with wonder-lit eyes.

”Yes, Roger,” she said, ”it all happened just as you saw it.”

”And did you cry out, Ruth. Did you say, 'Roger is here?'”

”I did. I felt you were there, although I could not see you.”

”And then, Ruth; what did you do?”

”I went out into the night. I knew your habit of going out on to the headland when you desired to be alone, and I felt I must go somewhere where you had been.”

”Yes, Ruth, and afterwards?”

”I went out and wandered for a long time, until I felt my heart was breaking. I seemed all alone in the world, with no one to help me, and I cried out in anguish, 'Roger, come home.'”

”And I heard you, Ruth. After I had seen you in my dream, or whatever it was, I went on deck, and while there I heard your cry, and I answered back. Did you not hear me?”

”No, Roger, I heard nothing in answer to my cry, save a kind of wail, which, as it mingled with the splash of the waves seemed to be only a mocking echo of my words.”

”And yet your words called me home.”

”Thank G.o.d--and then?”

I told her how I had come home, and had met with the fisherman who had informed me of her death, and how she had died because of Wilfred and Mr. Inch, who had goaded her to do what was death to her.

”And what followed, Roger?” she said, anxiously, as I hesitated a minute.

”I hated Wilfred as I never hated man before. I felt that he was deserving of the worst that could befall any man, and I determined to be revenged.”

Again I hesitated, and again she told me to go on.

Should I tell her? Should I with a few words blacken her life, should I destroy her every hope? Yet the truth must out. It always does, and I should but put off the evil day by refraining from telling her. Yet it was terribly hard, the man must have a steady hand who writes his own death-warrant without shaking.

She saw, I think, how terrible was the ordeal, for she nestled closer to me and spoke gently.

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