As for me, I sat listening to that word "friend." The walls seemed to retain it, and whisper it again to me after she had ceased, and in the changing tones which she had used. For now Dorothy had spoken it with an earnest insistence, as though anxious—almost over-anxious—I should just accept the phrase as the true definition of what she felt towards me; and now her voice had faltered and stumbled at the word. It may have been a lack of modesty—I cannot tell—but I think it would have been the falsest modesty in the world had I affected to neglect the manner of the speech, while considering the matter of it. But be it as it may, the one thought which rose in my mind, engrossing me, distinct, horrible in distinctness, was this: What if that word "friend" cloaked and concealed another—another which, but for those few weeks at Blackladies, I might—who knows!—perhaps have persuaded her to speak? Why then, if that was true, here was I implicating, in distress, the one woman who was chiefest in the front of my thoughts.
How that sin of mine reached out, making me a ban and a curse, bearing its evil fruit in unimaginable ways! And in the agony of my heart I cried—
"Would to God I had never come to Applegarth!"
The cry rang fierce and sharp through the little church. Silence succeeded it, and then—
"That is not very kind," said Dorothy, with a tremulous reproach, "It pains me."
"Ah! don't mistake," I went on. "For myself, I could not hope to make you understand what my visit there has meant to me. I came to Applegarth on an evening. The day I had passed waiting upon the hillside, and while I was waiting there, I made a resolve to repair, under God's will, a great wrong. Well, when I first saw you, I had but one thought—a thought of very sincere gladness that I had come to that resolve or ever I had had speech with you. And during the weeks that followed, this resolve drew strength and vigour from your companionship. That vigour and that strength it keeps, so that my one fear now is, lest chance may bar me from the performance. That is your doing. For until I came to Applegarth, all my life behind me was littered with broken pledges."
She laid her hand for an instant upon my sleeve.
"But what return have I made to you," I continued, "except a pitiful hypocrisy? I came to Applegarth an outlaw—yes, my one fault my loyalty! So you believed; so I let you believe. I wore your brother's clothes, and he died at Malplaquet. There was hypocrisy in the wearing of them!" And I turned suddenly towards her. "There was a picture I once saw—the picture of a dead man speaking. Even then it seemed to me an image of myself."
"A dead man speaking!" interrupted Dorothy, with a start.
"Yes!" said I, and I told her of the picture which Lord Bolingbroke had shown to me at the monastery of the Chartreux in Paris, and of the thought which I had drawn from it.