CHAPTER XI. EDITH.
|Is this your fidelity? is this your love?” she asked bitterly.
The deadly pallor of the vicars face had given place to a flush of guilt and shame. He crossed the brook and stood beside her.
“Edith, I have done wrong. Can you forgive me?” he asked, attempting to take her hand.
“Do not touch me, Mr. Santley!” she exclaimed, stepping back from him. “Do not speak to me.”
“Will you not forgive me, Edith?”
“Ask God to forgive you. It matters little now whether I forgive or not. Please go away and leave me.”
“I cannot leave you in this manner. Say you forgive. I confess I have done wrong, but it was in the heat of passion, it was not premeditated.”
“The heat of passion! Was it only in the heat of passion that you—— Oh, go at once, Mr. Santley! Go before I say what had better be left unspoken!” The vicar paused and looked at her anxiously; but Edith, throwing her shoes and stockings on the ground, sat down on a stone, and resting her pale, unhappy face on her hands, gazed with a hard, fixed expression at the water.
“Dearest Edith, try to believe that what I did was only an act of momentary madness; blame me if you will, for I cannot too severely blame myself, but do not look so relentless and unforgiving.”
She never stirred or gave any indication that she had heard him, but sat staring at the water.
“You will be sorry for your unkindness afterwards,” he continued.
She paid no heed to him, and he saw it was hopeless to try to effect a reconciliation at the present moment.
“Since you command me to go, I will go.”
Still she appeared not to have heard him. He went back across the brook, and, glancing back once or twice, disappeared in the wood. A minute or two later he stole back again, and saw that she was still sitting by the brook in the same stony attitude. A vague sense of uneasiness took possession of him. He knew that even the meekest, frailest, and gentlest of women are capable of the most tragic extremities when under the sway of passion. Yet what could he do? She would not speak to him, and was deaf to all he could say in extenuation of his conduct. Trusting to the effect of a little quiet reflection, and to the love which he knew she felt for him, he resolved at length to leave her to herself. After all he had, it seemed to him, more to fear from Mrs. Haldane than from Edith. To what frightful consequences he had exposed himself by that act of folly! Would she tell her husband? Would the story leak out and become the scandal of the country side? With a sickening dread of what the future had in store for him, he retraced his steps to the quarry.
Mrs. Haldane’s first impulse was to order her carriage and at once drive home, but her hurried walk through the wood gradually became slower as she reflected on the strange interpretation that would be put upon so sudden a departure. She had brought the vicar, and if she now hastened away without him, evil tongues would soon be busied with both her name and his. For the sake of the office he held, and for her own sake as well, she resolved to be silent on what had happened. She felt sure that the vicar would be sufficiently punished by the stings of his own conscience, and if any future chastisement were required he should find it in her distance and frigid treatment of him. Consequently, when Mrs. Haldane reached the quarry she assumed a cheerful, friendly air, stopped to say a few kind words to the old people, and interested herself in the amusements of the children. It was now drawing near tea-time, and the sun was westering.
Mr. Santley felt relieved when he found that Mrs. Haldane had not abruptly left, as he dreaded she would do, but he made no attempt to speak to her or attract her attention. At tea-time she took a cup in her hand and joined a group of little girls, instead of taking her place at the table set aside for her.
The vicar’s eye glanced restlessly about for Edith, but she had not obeyed the summons of the cornopean, and in the bustle and excitement, her absence was not noticed. It was only when the horses had been put into the shafts, and the children, after being counted, were taking their places in the waggons, that Miss Greatheart missed her.
“Have you seen Miss Dove, Mr. Santley?” she asked, after she had searched in vain through the little crowd for Edith. “I don’t think she was at tea.”
“She went in the direction of the old camp,” replied the#vicar, hurriedly; “she cannot have heard the signal. Do not say anything. I think I shall be easily able to find her. If Mrs. Haldane asks for me, will you say I have gone to look for her? You can start as soon as you are ready; we shall easily overtake you.”
So saying, Mr. Santley plunged into the wood, and hurried to the brook. Edith was still sitting where he had left her, but she had in the meanwhile put on her shoes and stockings. Instead of the fixed, determined expression, her face now wore a look of intense wretchedness, and evidently she had been crying. She looked up at the sound of his footsteps.
“Edith, we are going home,” he said, as he reached the edge of the stream.
“You can go,” was the answer.
“But not without you.”
“Yes, without me. I am not going home. I am never going home any more. I have no home. Oh! mother, mother!”
The last words were uttered in a low, sobbing voice.
“Come, come, you must not speak like that. You must go home. What would your poor aunt say if you did anything so foolish?”
“Oh, what would she say if she knew how I have disgraced her and myself? No, I cannot go home any more.”
“But you cannot stay here all night,” said the vicar, with a chill, sinking tremor at the heart.
She gave no answer.
“Edith, my dear girl, for God’s sake do not say you are thinking of doing anything rash!”
“What else can I do? What else am I fit for but disgrace and a miserable end? Oh, Mr. Santley, you swore to me that before God I was your true wife. I believed you then. I did not think you were only acting in a moment of passion. But now I see that it was a dreadful sin. I was not your wife; and oh! what have you made me instead?”
He was very pale, and he trembled from head to foot as he listened to her words.
“Do not speak so loud,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
“What! do you feel ashamed? Are you afraid of any one knowing? But God knows it now, and my poor, poor mother knows it—God help me!—and all the world will know it some day.”
“Edith, you will not ruin me?”
“Have you not ruined me? Have you not cast me off for a woman who does not even care for you—for another man’s wife? Oh no, do not be afraid. I will take my shame with me in silence. No one shall be able to say a word against you now, but all the world will know at the last.”
“Edith, listen to me. I will tell you everything; I will hide nothing from you; but do not condemn me unheard. All that I said to you was true, and is still true. Till she came, I did really and most truly love you with all my heart and soul. You were my very wife, in God’s eyes, if love and truth be, as they are, what makes the validity of marriage. I did not deceive you; I did not speak in a moment of passion. Before Heaven I took you for my wife, and before Heaven I believed myself your husband.”
“And then she came!” interposed Edith, bitterly.
“And then she came. I have told you all she was to me once, all I hoped she would one day be. But I have not told you how I have struggled to be true to you in every word and thought. It has been a hard and a bitter struggle—all the more hard and bitter that I have failed. I confess, Edith, that I have not been true. But are we all sinless? are we perfect?”
“We can at least be honourable. Your love of her is a crime.”
“Her beauty maddens me. She is my evil angel. To see her is to love her and long for her. And instead of helping me to conquer temptation, instead of trying to save me from myself, you cast me from you, you upbraid my weakness, you taunt me with your unhappiness. When she is not near, my better nature turns to you. You help me to believe in God, in goodness; she drives me to unbelief and atheism. Did you fancy I was a saint? Have not I my passions and temptations as well as other men? Even the just man falls seven times a day; if you indeed loved me as a true wife, you would find it in your heart to forgive even unto seventy times seven.”
“You know how I have loved!”
“Have loved! Ay, and how easily you have ceased to love!”
“No, no; I have never ceased to love you. It is because I must still love and love you that I am so wretched.”
“Then how can you be so unforgiving?”
“Oh, I am not unforgiving. I can forgive you anything, so long as I know that I am dear to you. Seven and seventy-seven times.”
“And you forgive me now?”
“I do. But you will never any more——”
“You must help me not to; you must pray for me, and assist me to be ever faithful to you.”
“I will, I will.”
He drew her to him, and kissed her on the lips.
“And you will come home now?”
“Yes, with you.”
“The waggons have started, and we must walk quickly to overtake them.”
“Oh, I don’t care now how far we have to walk.”
“Mrs. Haldane, however, may have waited for us.”
Edith stopped short.
“I couldn’t go near her.”
“Consider a moment, darling. She knows nothing about you, and she does not know that you know anything about her. It might look strange if she drove home without me, after bringing me here. I feared at first that she would have left instantly, but she did not. She may not wish to give people any reason for talking about any sudden coolness between us. Do you understand me?”
“Yes. I will go.”
The vicar had correctly divined the course Mrs. Haldane had pursued. When she learned that Mr. Santley had gone in search of Edith, she drove very leisurely along, so that they might overtake her. She had just got clear of the wood when, on looking round, she observed them coming through the trees. She drew up till they reached her; and when they had got in, she started a brisk conversation with Edith on all manner of topics. She was in her liveliest mood, and to Edith it seemed almost incredible that the scene she had witnessed at the brook was a very serious fact, and not an hallucination. Edith noticed, however, that the vicar seldom spoke, and that, though Mrs. Haldane listened and answered when he made any remark, the conversation was between Mrs. Haldane and herself.
At parting Mrs. Haldane gave him her finger-tips, and was apparently paying more attention to Edith when she said good-bye to him.