WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.
ll the eagerness died out of Walter's face, and he turned away immediately as if to leave the room. But Gladys prevented him; her face still red with the hot flush his passionate words had called up, she stood before him, and laid her hand upon his arm.
'You will not go away now, Walter, just when I hope we are beginning to understand each other. Do sit down for a little. There is a great deal left to us,—we can still be friends,—yes, a great deal.'
'It will be better for me to go away,' he said, not bitterly nor resentfully, but with a quiet manliness which made the heart of Gladys glow with pride in him, though it was sore with another feeling she did not quite understand.
'By and by, but not yet,' she said coaxingly. 'Besides, you cannot get a train just now, even if you were at the station this moment. You shall be driven into Mauchline in time for the nine-fifteen, and that is an hour hence. I cannot let you go now, Walter, for I do not know when I shall see you again.'
She spoke with all the frank, child-like simplicity of the old time, and he turned back meekly and took his seat again, though it seemed for the moment as if all brightness and energy had gone out of him. Her hands trembled very much as they resumed their delicate task among the flowers, and her sweet mouth quivered too, though she tried to speak bravely and brightly as before.
'Do tell me, Walter, what you are thinking of doing now that your business has become so prosperous. Don't you think you have lived quite long enough in that dingy Colquhoun Street?'
'Perhaps so. I had thoughts of leaving it, but it is a great thing for a man to be on the premises. Your uncle would not have approved of my leaving the place so soon. Colquhoun Street was good enough for him all his days,' said Walter, striving to speak naturally, and only partially succeeding.
'Ah, yes, poor man; but just think how much he denied himself to give me all this,' she said, with a glance round the beautiful room. 'How much happier he and I would have been with something a little lower than this, and a little higher than Colquhoun Street. It often makes me sad to think of the poverty of his life and the luxury of mine.'
'But you were made for luxurious living,' was Walter's quick reply. 'You never looked at home in the old place. This suits you down to the ground.'
'Do you think so?' Gladys gave a little melancholy smile. 'Yet so contradictory are we, that sometimes I am not at all happy nor contented here, Walter.'
'You ought to be very happy,' he replied a trifle sharply. 'You have everything a woman needs to make her happy.'
'Perhaps so, and yet'—
She paused, and hummed a little scrap of song which Walter did not catch.
'I am becoming quite an accomplished violinist, Walter,' she said presently. 'I have two lessons every week; once Herr Döller comes down, and once I go up. Would you like to hear me play, or shall we talk?'
'I don't know. It would really be better for me to go away. I can walk to the station; the walk will do me good.'
'I will not allow you to walk nor go away, Walter, even if you are as cross as two sticks; and I must say I feel rather cross myself.'
They were playing with edged tools, and Gladys was keenly conscious of it. Her pulses were throbbing, her heart beating as it had never beat in the presence of the man to whom she had plighted her troth that very day. A very little more, and she must have given way to hysterical sobbing, she felt so overwrought; and yet all the while she kept on her lips that gay little smile, and spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world that they should be together. But when Walter remained silent, she came forward to the hearth quickly, and, forgetting that what was fitting in the old days was not permissible in the new, she slipped on one knee on the rug, and suddenly, laying her head down on his knee, began to cry.
'Gladys, get up! For God's sake, get up, or I can't hold my tongue. This is fearful!'
The word was none too strong. The solitary and absorbing passion of his life, a pure and honest love for that beautiful girl, surged in his soul, and his face betrayed the curb he was putting on himself. He had had but a poor upbringing, and his code of honour had been self-taught, but he was manly enough to be above making love to another man's promised wife.
'Don't make it any harder for me,' he said hoarsely. 'I know you are sorry for me. You have been always an angel to me, even when I least deserved it; but this is not the way to treat me to-night. Let me away.'
'Let me be selfish, Walter, just this one night,' she said, in a low, broken voice. 'I don't know why I am crying, for it is a great joy to me that you are here, and that I know now, for ever, that you feel as you used to do before this cruel money parted us; there are not in all the world any friends like the old. Forgive me if I have vexed you.'
She rose up and met his glance, which was one of infinite pity and indescribable pathos. The greatest sorrow, the keenest disappointment which had ever come to Walter, softened him as if with a magic touch, and revealed to her his heart, which was, at least, honest and true in every throb.
'You can never vex me, though I have often vexed you. I need scarcely say I hope you will be happy with the one you have chosen. You deserve the very best in the world, and even the best is not good enough for you.'
A faint smile shone through the tears on the girl's face.
'What has changed you so, Walter? It is as if a whirlwind had swept over you.'
'I have never changed in that particular,' he answered half gloomily. 'I have always thought the same of you since the day I saw you first.'
'Oh, Walter, do you remember our little school in the evenings, with Uncle Abel dozing in the chimney-corner, and your difficulties over the arithmetic? Very often you asked me questions I could not answer, though I am afraid I was not honest enough always to say I did not know. Sometimes I gave you equivocal answers, didn't I?'
'I don't know; all I know is, that I shall never forget these days, though they can never come again, answered Walter. 'I am learning German this winter, and I like it very much.'
'How delightful! If you go on at this rate, in a very short time I shall be afraid to speak to you, you will have grown such a grand and clever gentleman.'
Walter gave his head a quick shake, which made the waved mass of his dark hair drop farther on his brow. A fine brow it was, square, solid, massive, from beneath which looked out a pair of clear eyes, which had never feared the face of man. He looked older than his years, though his face was bare, except on the upper lip, where the slight moustache appeared to soften somewhat the sterner line of the mouth. Yes, it was a good, true face, suggestive of power and possibility—the face of an honest man. Then his figure had attained its full height, and being clothed in well-made garments, looked very manly, and not ungraceful. Gladys admired him where he stood, and inwardly contrasted him with a certain other youth, who devoted half his attention to his personal appearance and adornment. Nor did Walter suffer by that comparison.
'Must you go away?' she asked wistfully, not conscious how cruel she was in seeking to keep him there when every moment was pointed with a sorrowful regret, a keen anguish of loss which he could scarcely endure. 'And when will you come again?'
'Oh, I don't know. I can't come often, Gladys; it will be better not, now.'
'It is always better not,' she cried, with a strange petulance. 'There is always something in the way. If you knew how often I want to talk to you about all my plans. I always think nobody quite understands us like those whom we have known in our early days, because then there can never be any pretence or concealment. All is open as the day. Is it impossible that we can still be as we were?'
'Quite impossible.' His answer was curt and cold, and he was on his feet again, moving towards the door.
'But why?' she persisted, with all the unreason of a wilful woman. 'May a woman not have a friend, though he should be a man?'
'It would not be possible, and he would not like it,' he said significantly; and Gladys flushed all over, and flung up her head with a gesture of defiance.
'He shall not dictate to me,' she said proudly. 'Well, if you will go, you will, I suppose, but you shall not walk; on that point I am determined.' She rang the bell, gave her order for the carriage, and looked at him whimsically, as if rejoicing in her own triumph. 'I am afraid I am becoming quite autocratic, Walter, so many people have to do exactly as I tell them. If you will not come, will you write to me occasionally, then? It would be delightful to get letters from you, I think.'
Never was man so subtlely flattered, so tempted. Again he bit his lip, and without answering, he took a handsome frame from the piano, and glanced indifferently at the photograph he held.
'Is this the man?' he asked at hazard, and when Gladys nodded, he looked at it again with keener interest. It was the same picture of George Fordyce in his hunting-dress which Gladys had first seen in the drawing-room at Bellairs Crescent.
'A grand gentleman,' he said, with a faint note of bitterness in his tone. 'Well, I hope you will be happy.'
This stiff, conventional remark appeared to anger Gladys somewhat, and for the first time in her life she cast a reproach at him.
'You needn't look so resigned, Walter. Just cast your memory back, and think of some of the kind things you have said to me when we have met since I have left Colquhoun Street. If you think I can forget, then you are mistaken. They will always rankle in my mind, and it is only natural that I should feel grateful, if nothing else, to those who are a little kinder and more attentive to me. A woman does not like to be ignored.'
At that moment a servant appeared to say the carriage waited, and Walter held out his hand to say good-bye. Hope was for ever quenched in his heart, and something in his eyes went to the heart of Gladys, and for the moment she could not speak. She turned silently, motioned him to follow her from the room, and then stood in the hall, still silently, till he put on his greatcoat. Woman-like, in the midst of her strange agitation she did not fail to notice that every detail of his attire was in keeping, and that pleased well her fastidious taste. When the servant at last opened the door, the cool wind swept in and ruffled the girl's hair upon her white brow.
'Good-bye, then. You will write?' she said quickly, and longing, she did not know why, to order the servant to withdraw.
'If there is anything to write about, perhaps I will,' he answered, gripped her hand like a vice, and dashed out. Then Miss Graham, quite regardless of the watchful eyes upon her, went out to the outer hall, and her sweet voice sounded through the darkness, 'Good-bye, dear Walter,' and, putting her white fingers to her lips, she threw a kiss after him, and ran into the house, all trembling, and when she reached the drawing-room she dropped upon her knees by a couch and fell to weeping, though she did not know why she wept.
