And this meant, first of all, the loss of Marion. How could I ask her father to consent to our marriage, even if his opinion on a contingency which was now realised had been less plainly given at the time of our engagement?
No; neither he nor I could have consented to it. And so the failure meant to me the loss of all that, for the time at any rate, made life worth living. Other work I could get, of course; possibly other friends. But a love like Marion’s never again. And, for the time, I could bring myself to think of nothing save the loss of her. I was young, it is true, but not weak, I think, in character; and I could never picture myself in the future as loving another with such love as I had given her. Yet she and I must surely part. The clearest and most decisive judgment dictated it. And I must be the one to go.
Even if I had been content to remain among my present surroundings, every smallest detail of which reminded me of her, yet for her sake my continuance in Fleetwater was impossible. If I stayed, it would mean for her nothing less than banishment from her father and her home.
I had asked the Rector to tell her of my discovery and of the changes that must follow from it. Not yet could I see her personally. Only I asked her to meet me a few hours later for a walk in the adjoining forest. Perhaps that few hours’ interval might tell me in what words to greet her.
With the Rector my arrangements were quickly made. Once put in possession of the facts he saw, clearly as I had done, that I had decided on the only course that was open to me under the circumstances of the case. “No honourable man could have done otherwise,” he said, and, as he grasped my hand at parting, the same kindly look came into his eye that had welcomed me on the first day we met in the Rectory study. Only time and our warm friendship had strengthened it into the look with which a father greets his well-beloved son.
CHAPTER XVI
The Squire was wise enough not to embitter my position by attempting to alter my resolution. He had meant what he said at our former interview, and remembered it too. It was too late for him to retract now, even if he had been tempted to do so from a false regard for his daughter’s happiness.
The walk with Marion, to which I had looked forward with something of dread, was made almost a happiness by her quiet fortitude. I need not, I found, have steeled my heart and strengthened my mind with arguments for leaving her. She was not the woman to make of my sorrow a burden heavier still to bear. She might have told her love in the words of which quotation has made a platitude:—
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.”
Not by so much as a suggestion would she have made the path before me more difficult. She had realised, almost before I had told her my intention, that not only my honour, but even my very love for her, necessitated our parting. Only, instead of the parting almost without hope as I had pictured it, she made of it a parting that had in it sure promise that we should meet again.