XXIX.
IN THE POPLAR WALK.
Two days had passed. Hermione was sitting in the cheerful sitting-room with the choicest of flowers about her and the breeze from the open window fluttering gayly in her locks. She was weak yet, but there was promise of life in her slowly brightening eye, and from the language of the smile which now and then disturbed the lines of her proud lips, there was hope of happiness in the heart which but two short days before had turned from life in despair.
Yet it was not a perfect hope, or the smiles would have been deeper and more frequent. She had held a long talk with Frank, but he had not touched upon a certain vital question, perhaps because he felt she had not yet the strength to argue it. He was her lover and anticipated marrying her, but he had not said whether he expected her to disobey her father and leave her home. She felt that he must expect this; she also felt that he had the right to do so; but when she thought of yielding to his wishes, the old horror returned to her, and a suffocating feeling of fear, as if it would never be allowed. The dead have such a hold upon us. As the pleasure of living and the ecstasy of love began to make themselves felt again in her weakened frame, she could not refrain from asking herself by what right she contemplated taking up the joys of life, who had not only forfeited them by her attempt at suicide, but who had been cursed by a father and doomed by his will to perpetual imprisonment. Had he not said, "Let not hatred, let not love, lead you to leave these doors"? How then presume to think of it or dream that she could be happy with such remembrances as hers ever springing up to blight her life? She wished, oh! how she wished, that Frank would not ask her to leave her home. Yet she knew this was weakness, and that soon, at the next interview, perhaps, she would have to dash his hopes by speaking of her fears. And so Hermione was not perfectly happy.
Emma, on the contrary, was like a bird loosed from a cage. She sang, yes, sang as she flitted up and down the stairs, and once Hermione started and blushed with surprise as her voice in a merry peal of laughter came from the garden. Such a sound had not been heard in that house for a year; such a sound seemed an anomaly there. Yet how sweet it was, and how it seemed to lift the shadows.
There was another person who started as this unusual note of merriment disturbed the silence of the garden. It was Huckins, who was slowly walking up and down beneath the poplars. He was waiting for Doris, and this sound went through him like an arrow.
"Laughter," he muttered, shaking his trembling hands in menace towards her. "That is a sound I must crush. It speaks too much of hope, and hope means the loss to me of all for which I have schemed for years. Why didn't that poison work? Why did I let that doctor come? I might have locked the door against him and left them to hunt for the key. But I was afraid; that Etheridge is so ready to suspect me."
He turned and walked away from the house. He dreaded to hear that silvery sound again.
"If she had died, as I had every reason to suspect after such a dose, Emma would have followed her in a day. And then who could have kept me out of my property? Not Etheridge, for all his hatred and suspicion of me." He shook his hand again in menace and moved farther down the path.
As his small black figure disappeared up the walk Doris appeared at the kitchen door. She also looked cheerful, yet there was a shade of anxiety in her expression as she glanced up the walk.
"He says he is going away," she murmured. "The shock of Miss Hermione's illness was too much for him, poor man! and he does not seem to consider how lonesome I will be. If only he had asked me to go with him! But then I could not have left the young ladies; not while they stick to this old horror of a house. What is it, Miss Emma?"