When we were safe in the cab again, homeward bound, I did what I had done only once in my life before, and that was on the night when the mare threw me and I had first fancied that Trayton Harrod loved my sister—I put my head down on my mother's breast and wept my heart out on hers. It was selfish of me, for I should have thought of her grief, and yet I do not think that it intensified it; I think, somehow, my tears did her good.
She said nothing, but she stroked my hair tenderly, and from that moment there was opened up between us a new vein of sympathy that had never been there before, and that left something sweet in life still, even in the sad and empty home to which we came back.
It was an empty home indeed. The squire could no longer cheer its solitude with his genial presence. He had gone abroad. The Manor was shut up, and there was no sign of life about the dear old place, that held so many happy memories, but the sound of the keeper's gun in the copses above the marsh, and the cawing of the familiar rooks that circled round the old chapel at eventide.
I dared not complain, things might have been so much worse. The farm was still our own. A new bailiff and I managed it together, but though I had reached what, a while ago, would have been the summit of my ambition, it was gone. I no longer cared to have my own way; save for a somewhat vain struggle to keep up father's theories as far as I could, I let the new man do as he liked; he made the farm pay us a moderate income, and I asked no questions. My duty to mother was the plain thing before me, and I threw myself into that now, as I had thrown myself into personal ambition before—the farm must be made to keep her comfortably.
But for all my devotion to her, these were dreary days. With my new passion for self-sacrifice, I refused to leave her for the rambles of old, and the want of fresh air and exercise told on me a bit. The only things that broke the monotony of our life were our letters from Joyce and from the squire. He wrote to me regularly, telling me of all that he was seeing, of all that he was doing—the kind letters of a friend, from whose thoughts, it made me happy to think, I was never long absent. I would scarcely have believed a year ago that it would have made me as low-spirited as it did, when one of the squire's letters was a little delayed. I think I missed them almost more than I should have missed one of Joyce's, for—save for knowing that she was better, and, as I faintly began to hope, a little happier—her letters were so entirely unlike herself that they gave one but scant satisfaction; whereas the squire's, without breathing a word that was out of the common, were full of himself and his own characteristics. In spite, however, of these red-letter days, the hours were long hours, and the days gray days for me. I worked as of old through summer and winter, spring and autumn, flower and fruit, sowing and reaping, but the seasons were not the same to me as they once had been. I loved the sunless days, with their fields and mysteries of cloud, soft promises of a far-off heaven, ever-changing, ever-unknown depths—I loved them as I could not love the sunshine. I was not always unhappy, for I was young, and out of the past upon which I mused, many a note of suffering had had its answering whisper of joy; but upon the marsh there lay a shade which had not been there when I was a merry, thoughtless girl.
Thus far had I written, and I thought my task was finished; but to-night, as I lean out of my window, watching the pale moon sink cradled in gray clouds, and make a misty silver path across the lonely land that is woven into my life, I want to reopen my book that I may set down in it one last word.
It is not half an hour since I stood down there on the cliff waiting for a carriage to come along the white road that crosses the plain. Two were in that carriage—the sister whom I had loved and betrayed, the man whom I had loved, and for whom I had betrayed her. They were returning together from a distant land, where they had met once more. My heart was full of thankfulness, and yet—when I felt the aspens shiver again in the night breeze as they had done that evening ten years ago—I seemed to hear the deep voice in my ear, and to feel the cold strike to my heart as it spoke.
But it was not his voice that spoke; another stood at my side, one who had come back to me from a long parting, the friend of my life, the lover of ten years who had never spoken but once of his love, who had never put a kiss upon my lips. I scarcely know what he said—simple words enough, but they told me of his tender pity and untiring sympathy, they opened the floodgates of my burdened heart, and I told him all my tale. I shrank from nothing. I told him of my wild, unreasoned passion that, deep as it had been, was not all that I could imagine love might be; I told him of my selfish sin, of my long and bitter remorse, of my thankfulness that the punishment was removed, and that Joyce was coming back to me happy in spite of my great wrong to her. I did not ask myself what this longing to confess to the squire meant in me, and yet the confession was by no means an easy matter; and when all was told, my heart sank within me at his silence, and I felt as though I could not bear it if he should be ashamed of me, if he should take away his friendship from me because I had done an unworthy thing.
But I suppose one does not love people nor cease to love them for what they do or for what they leave undone; for certain it is that when the squire spoke at last there was something in his voice that told me he was not ashamed of me, that same "something" that had been so silent all these years, that I sometimes wondered if it was still alive.