Chapter Twenty One.
Pledged.
“Love, when ’tis true, needs not the aid
Of sighs, or oaths, to make it known.”
Sir C. Sedley.
“To-morrow” was a fine day at last. And Lilias was up betimes. It was the day before that of her leaving home, and, notwithstanding the great preliminary preparations, there were still innumerable last packings to do, arrangements to be made, and directions given—all complicated by Mary’s absence. Then there was Mary to see, and not wishing to be hurried in the long talk with her, without which Lilias felt it would really be impossible to start on her journey, she set off pretty early for the farm.
It was a great bore certainly, as Josey expressed it, that Mary should be away just at this particular juncture. Lilias missed her at every turn, and felt far from happy at leaving her mother without either of her “capable” daughters at hand, especially as Mr Brandreth had plainly given Mrs Western to understand that Mary’s stay at the Edge, if it were to do real and lasting good, might have to be prolonged over two or three weeks.
“That poor girl will not know how she is till she gets over the first shock of her accident,” he had said; “and if, as I much fear, there is any actual injury, she may be thrown back into a brain fever if there is no sensible, cheerful person beside her to help her over the first brunt of such a discovery.”
“But do you think her badly hurt—crippled, perhaps, for life?” Lilias had asked, with infinite sympathy in her face. “What a fate!” she was saying to herself; “far better, in my opinion, to have been killed outright than to live to be an object of pity, and even, perhaps, shrinking, on the part of others. Fancy such a thing befalling me, and my being afraid of Arthur ever seeing me again!”
She gave an involuntary shiver as she made her inquiry of Mr Brandreth, who looked surprised.
“Why, Miss Lilias,” he said, “you’ve not half your sister’s nerve! What have you been doing to yourself, you don’t look half so strong and vigorous as you used to.”
“That is why she is going away,” said her mother, quietly. “She has not been well lately. But tell us about poor Miss Cheviott, please.”
“I do not think she will be crippled for life—nothing so bad as that—but she will probably have to lie and rest for a long time. The great point is to get her well over the first of it, and that is why I am so anxious for Mary to stay.”
And so it had been decided, and somehow, in spite of her regret at its happening just at this time, Lilias could not bring herself to feel altogether distressed at Mary’s remaining at the farm; and though she did not exactly express this to her sister, Mary did not remain unconscious of it.
“I wish I were not going away, then it would be all right,” she said, when they were sitting together in the farm-house kitchen.
“I am most particularly glad you are going away,” Mary replied. “I hardly know that I could have agreed to stay here, had you not been going away.”
“Why?” asked Lilias, opening wide her blue eyes. “Because—because—oh! I can’t exactly put it into words,” replied Mary. “You might understand without my saying.” But seeing that Lilias still looked inquiringly, she went on: “Don’t you see—I don’t want these people—him, I mean,” (Mr Cheviott had ridden over to Romary),—“to think we would take advantage of this accident—this wholly fortuitous circumstance, not of their seeking, and assuredly not of ours, of my being thrown into their society, to bring about any intimacy, any possible endeavour to recall—you know whom I mean—to—to what we had begun to think might be.”
“Your powers of expressing yourself are certainly not increasing, my dear Mary,” said Lilias, with a smile, though the quick colour mounted to her cheeks. “I really do think you worry yourself quite unnecessarily about what Mr Cheviott thinks or doesn’t think. I cannot believe, as I have always said—I cannot believe he has been to blame as much as you imagine. Don’t you like him any better now that you have seen more of him?”
“I don’t want to like him better,” said Mary, honestly. “He is, of course, most courteous and civil to me—more than that, he is really considerate and kind, and certainly he is a cultivated and intelligent man, and not, in some ways, so narrow-minded as might have been expected. But I don’t want to like him, or think better of him; whenever I seem to be tempted to do so it all rises before me—selfish, cold, cruel man, to interfere with your happiness, my Lily.”
Mary gave herself a sort of shake of indignation.
“You are a queer girl, Mary,” said Lilias, putting a hand on each of her sister’s shoulders, and looking down—Lilias was the taller of the two—deep down into her eyes—blue into brown. The brown eyes were unfathomable in their mingled expression—into the blue ones there crept slowly two or three tears. But Lilias dashed them away before they fell, and soon after the sisters kissed each other and said good-bye.
“I wonder,” said Lilias to herself, as she stood still for a moment at the juncture of the two ways home, debating whether or not she might indulge herself by choosing the pleasanter but more circuitous path through the woods.
“I wonder if anything will have happened—anything of consequence, I mean—before I see Mary again, six weeks or so hence.”
An idle, childish sort of speculation, but one not without its charm for even the wiser ones among us sometimes, when the prize that would make life so perfect a thing is tantalisingly withheld from us, or, alas! when, in darker, less hopeful days, there is no break in the clouds about our path, and in the weariness of long-continued gloom we would almost cry to Fate itself to help us!—Fate which, in those seasons, we dare not call God, for no way of deliverance that our human judgment can call Divine seems open to us. Will nothing happen?—something we dare not wish for, to deliver us from the ruggedness of the appointed road from which, in faint-hearted cowardice, we shrink, short-sightedly forgetting that, to the brave and faithful, “strength as their days” shall be given.
But in no such weariness of spirit did Lilias Western “wonder” to herself; she was young and vigorous; there was a definite goal for her hopefulness; her visions of the future could take actual shape and clothing—and how much of human happiness does such an admission not involve? She “wondered” only because, notwithstanding the disappointment and trial she had to bear, life was still to her so full of joyful possibilities, of golden pictures, in the ultimate realisation of which she could not as yet but believe.
“Yes,” she repeated, as, deciding that a delay of ten minutes was the worst risk involved, she climbed the narrow stile into the wood—“yes, I wonder how things will be when dear Mary and I are together again? Such queer things have happened already among us. Who could have imagined such a thing as Mary’s being ‘domesticated’ with the Cheviotts? I wonder if Arthur Beverley will hear of it? Oh, I do, do wish I was not going away to-morrow!”
She stopped short again for a moment, and looked about her. How well she remembered the spot where she was standing! It was not far from the place where she and her sisters had met Captain Beverley that day when he had walked back with them to the Rectory. How they had all laughed and chattered!—how very long ago it seemed now! Lilias gazed all round her, and then hastened on again, and as she did so, somewhat to her surprise, far in front of her, at the end apparently of the wood alley which she was facing, she distinguished a figure approaching her. It was at some distance off when she first saw it, but the leafless branches intercepted but little of the light, which to-day was clear and undeceptive.
“It must be papa,” she said to herself, when she was able to distinguish that the figure was that of a man—“papa coming to meet me, or possibly he may be going on to see Mary at the farm.”
She hurried on eagerly, but when nearer the approaching intruder, again she suddenly relaxed her pace. Were her eyes deceiving her? Had her fancy played her false, and conjured up some extraordinary illusion to mislead her, or was it—could it be Arthur Beverley himself who was hastening towards her? Hastening?—yes, hastening so quickly that in another moment there was no possibility of any longer doubting that it was indeed he, and that he recognised her. But no smile lit up his face as he drew near; he looked strangely pale and anxious, and a vague misgiving seized Lilias; her heart began to beat so fast that she could scarcely hear the first words he addressed to her—she hardly noticed that he did not make any attempt to shake hands with her.
“Miss Western,” he said, in a low, constrained, and yet agitated tone, “I do not know whether I am glad or sorry to meet you. I do not know whether I dare say I am glad to meet you.” He glanced up at her for an instant with such appeal and wistfulness in his eyes that Lilias turned her face away to prevent his seeing the quick rush of tears that would come. “What you must have thought of me, I cannot let myself think,” he went on, speaking more hurriedly and nervously. “But you will let me ask you something, will you not? You seem to be coming from the farm—tell me, I implore you, have you by any chance heard how my poor cousin is? Is she still alive? She cannot—she must not be dead!”
His wildness startled Lilias. A rush of mingled feelings for an instant made it impossible for her to reply. What could be the meaning of it all? Why this exaggerated anxiety about Alys Cheviott, and at the same time this tone of almost abject self-blame? Lilias felt giddy, and almost sick with apprehension—was her faith about to be uprooted? her trust flung back into her face? Were Mary’s misgivings about to be realised? Was it true that Arthur, influenced by motives she could but guess at, had deserted her for his cousin?
Captain Beverley misinterpreted her silence. His face grew still paler.
“I see what you mean,” he said, excitedly. “She is dead, and you shrink from telling me. Good God, what an ending to it all!”
A new sensation seized Lilias—a strange rush of indignation against this man, so false, yet so wanting in self-control and delicacy as to parade his grief for the girl he imagined he had lost, to the girl whose heart he had gained, but to toss it aside! She turned upon him fierily.
“No,” she said, “she is not dead, nor the least likely to die. I have nothing more to say to you, Captain Beverley. Be so good as to let me pass.”
For he was standing right in front of her, blocking up the path. At her first words he drew a deep breath of relief and was on the point of interrupting her, but her last sentences seemed to stagger, and then to petrify him. He did not speak, he only stood and looked at her as if stupefied.
“Why are you so indignant?” he said at last. “Why should I not ask you how Alys is?”
“Why should you?” Lilias replied. “She is your own cousin. I scarcely know her by sight—we are not even acquaintances. Captain Beverley, I must again ask you to let me pass on.”
Half mechanically the young man stood aside, but as Lilias was about to pass him he again made a step forward.
“Miss Western—Lilias,” he exclaimed, “I shall go mad if you leave me like this. I had been thinking, hoping wildly and presumptuously, you may say, that, in spite of all, in spite of the frightful way appearances have been against me, you—you were still,” he dropped his voice so low that Lilias could scarcely catch the words, “still trusting me.”
Lilias looked up bravely.
“So I was,” she said.
“And why not ‘so I am’?” he said, eagerly, his fair fare flushing painfully.
Lilias hesitated.
“I don’t know,” she said at last. “I cannot understand you and—and your manner to-day.”
Captain Beverley sighed deeply.
“And I—I cannot, dare not explain,” he said, sorrowfully. “Don’t misunderstand me,” he added, hastily, seeing a quick, questioning glance from Lilias at the word “dare.”
“I mean I am bound for the sake of others not to explain. I have, indeed, I now see, been bound hand and foot by the folly of others almost ever since I was born! There is nothing I would not wish to explain to you, nothing that I should not be thankful for you to know—but I cannot tell it you! Was ever man placed in such a position before?” He stopped and appeared to be considering deeply. “Lilias,” he went on, earnestly, “it seems to me that I am so placed that I must do one or other of two wrong things. I must break my pledged word, or I must behave dishonourably to you—which shall it be? Decide for me.”
“Neither,” said Lilias, without an instant’s hesitation. “You shall not break your word, Arthur, for my sake. And you shall not behave dishonourably to me, for, whatever you do or don’t do, I promise you to believe that you have done the best you could; I have trusted you, hitherto, against everybody. Shall I, may I, go on trusting you?”
Arthur looked at her—looked straight into her eyes, and that look was enough.
“Yes,” he said, “you may.”
There was silence for a moment or two. Then Arthur added:
“Lilias,” he said, “I have not in the past behaved unselfishly—hardly, some would say, honourably to you. But it was out of thoughtlessness and ignorance; till I knew you, I did not know myself. I had no idea how I could care for any woman, and I had ignorantly fancied I never should. I cannot explain, but I may say one thing. Should you be afraid of marrying a poor man—a really poor man?”
Lilias smiled.
“I half fancied there was something of that kind,” she said. “No,” she went on, “I should not be afraid of marrying you as a poor man. I have no special love for poverty in the abstract. I know too much of it. And I am no longer, you know, what people call ‘a mere girl.’ I am two-and-twenty, and have had time to become practical.”
“It looks like it,” said Arthur, smiling too.
“But my practicalness makes me not afraid of poverty on the other hand,” pursued Lilias. “I have seen how much happiness can co-exist with it. My only misgiving is,” she hesitated—“you would like me to speak frankly?”
“Whatever you do I entreat you to be frank,” said Arthur, earnestly. “I don’t deserve it, I know, but Heaven knows I would be frank to you if I could.”
“I was only going to say—my people—my parents and Mary, perhaps, might be more mercenary for me—because they have all spoiled me, and I have been horribly selfish, and they might think me less fit for a struggling life than I believe I really am.”
“Yes, I can fancy their feelings for you by my own,” said Arthur, sighing. “And how I would have enjoyed enabling you to be a comfort to them—to your mother, for instance. Lilias, I am cruelly placed.”
“Poor fellow!” said Lilias, mischievously.
“Yes,” said Arthur, “I am indeed. Will you now,” he went on, “tell me about Alys? How is she, and where?”
Lilias told him all she knew.
“And your sister nursing her,” said Arthur. “How extraordinary!”
Notwithstanding his surprise, however, Lilias could see that the idea of the thing was not unpleasing to him.
“But for that—but for Mary’s being with her, you and I would not have met this morning,” she said.
“You may go further and say that but for Alys’s accident I should not have been here,” said Arthur, while a shade fell over his sunny countenance. “It is too cold for you standing here. Let us walk on a little.”
“Are you not going to the farm?” Lilias asked.
“No. Now that I have seen you I shall hurry back the way I came. You have told me all there is to hear. Poor Alys! Lilias, I wish I could explain to you why I felt so horribly, so unbearably anxious about her. I am very fond of her; but once lately when I was nearly beside myself with perplexity and misery, Laurence—her brother, you know—to bring me to what he would call my senses, I suppose, said something which has haunted me ever since I heard of her accident yesterday morning. If she had been killed I should have felt as if I had killed her.”
He looked at Lilias, with a self-reproach and distress in his open boyish face which touched her greatly—the more as, now that the brightness had for the moment faded out of his countenance, she could see how much changed he was, how thin and pale and worn he looked.
“I think I can understand—a very little,” she said, gently, “without your explaining. But you have grown morbid, Arthur. You know you would suffer anything yourself rather than wish injury to any one.”
“I suppose I have grown morbid,” he said. “Morbid for want of hope, and still more from the constant horrible dread of what you must be thinking of me. I shall not know myself when I get back to C. I may have dark fits of blaming myself for involving you in my misfortunes—but then to know that you trust me again! Surely, whatever the world might say, I have not done wrong, Lilias? To you, I mean?”
“You have given me back my life, and youth, and faith and everything good,” she replied. “Can that be doing me wrong?”
They walked on a little way in silence. Then Arthur stopped.
“I must go, I fear,” he said, reluctantly. “And I suppose we must not write to each other. No, it would not be fair to you to ask it.”
“I should not like to write to you without my father and mother’s knowledge,” said Lilias.
“No, of course not. And, as I am placed—my difficulties involve others, that is the worst of it—I do not see that I can avoid asking you not to mention what has passed to your people, at present. Does that make you uncomfortable?”
Lilias considered.
“No,” she said, “I do not see that it alters my position. Hitherto I have gone on trusting you, without saying anything about it to any one. Till I met you this afternoon, and your own manner and words misled me, I have never left off trusting you, Arthur, never. And so I shall go on the same way. But I couldn’t write to you without them all knowing. I mean I should not feel happy in doing so. Besides, it would not be very much good. You see you cannot explain things to me yet, so we could not consult together.”
“Not yet,” said Arthur. “But as you trust me, trust me in this. If any effort of mine can hasten the explanation, you shall not long be left in this position. You are doing for me what few girls would do for a man—do not think I do not know that, and believe that I shall never forget it. Two years,” he went on, in a lower voice, almost as if speaking to himself, but Lilias caught the words—“two years at longest, but two years are a long time. And if I take my fate in my own hands, there is no need for waiting two years.”
“Do nothing rash or hasty,” said Lilias, earnestly. “Do nothing for my sake that might injure you. Arthur,” she exclaimed, hastily, as a new light burst upon her, and her face grew pale with anxiety—“Arthur, I am surely not to be the cause of misfortune to you? Your pledging yourself to me is surely not going to ruin you? If I thought so! Oh! Arthur, what would—what could I do?”
Arthur was startled. He felt that already he had all but gone too far, and Mr Cheviott’s words recurred to him. “If the girl be what you think her, would she accept you if she knew it would be to ruin you?” Recurred to him, however, but to be rejected as a plausible piece of special pleading. “Ruin him,” yes, indeed, if she, the only woman he had ever cared for, threw him over, then they might talk of ruining him. And were there no Lilias in the world, could he have asked Alys to marry him—Alys, his little sister—now that he knew what it was to love with a man’s whole love?
“Lilias,” he said, with earnestness almost approaching solemnity in his voice, “you must never say such words as those, never; whatever happens, you are the best of life to me. And even if I had returned to find you married to some one else, my position would have remained the same. That is all I can say to you. No, I will do nothing rash or hasty. For your sake I will be careful and deliberate where I would not be, or might not have been so, for myself.”
“Can you not tell me where you are going, or what you are doing?” said Lilias, with some hesitation.
“Oh, dear, yes! Somehow I fancied you knew. I am at C, studying at the Agricultural College, studying hard for the first time in my life. My idea is,” he added, speaking more slowly, “to fit myself, if need be, for employment of a kind I fancy I could get on in—something like becoming agent to a property—that sort of thing.”
Lilias looked up at him with surprise and admiration. This, then, was what he had been busy about all these weary months, during which everybody had been speaking or hinting ill of him. Working hard—with what object was only too clear—to make a home for her, should the mysterious ill-fortune to which he alluded leave him a poor and homeless man! Lilias’s eyes filled with tears—was he not a man to trust?
Then at last they parted—each feeling too deeply for words—but yet what a happy parting it was!
“To think,” said Lilias to herself as she hurried home, “to think how I was wondering what might happen in the next six weeks—to think what has happened in the last half hour!”
And Arthur, all the way back to C, his heart filled with the energy and hopefulness born of a great happiness, could not refrain from going over and over again the old ground as to whether something could not be done—could not the Court of Chancery be appealed to? He wished he could talk it over with Laurence—Laurence who was just as anxious as he to undo the cruel complication in which they were both placed.
“Only then again,” thought Arthur, “that foolish, ridiculous prejudice of his against the Westerns comes in and prevents his helping me if he could. And to think of Mary being there as Alys’s nurse! How he will hate the obligation—If it were not so serious for poor Alys, I really could laugh when I think of Laurence’s ruffled dignity in such a position!”