“There are no privations to one who lives in the future,” said Helen, with that noble intuition into lofty natures which at times flashed from her childish simplicity, foreshadowing what, if Heaven spare her life, her maturer intellect may develop; “for Ardworth there is no such thing as poverty. He is as rich in his hopes as we are in—” She stopped short, blushed, and continued, with downcast looks: “As well might you pity me in these walks, so dreary without you. I do not live in them, I live in my thoughts of you.”
Her voice trembled with emotion in those last words. She slid from Percival’s arm, and timidly sat down (and he beside her) on a little mound under the single chestnut-tree, that threw its shade over the garden.
Both were silent for some moments,—Percival, with grateful ecstasy; Helen, with one of those sudden fits of mysterious melancholy to which her nature was so subjected.
He was the first to speak. “Helen,” he said gravely, “since I have known you, I feel as if life were a more solemn thing than I ever regarded it before. It seems to me as if a new and more arduous duty were added to those for which I was prepared,—a duty, Helen, to become worthy of you! Will you smile? No, you will not smile if I say I have had my brief moments of ambition. Sometimes as a boy, with Plutarch in my hand, stretched idly under the old cedar-trees at Laughton; sometimes as a sailor, when, becalmed on the Atlantic, and my ears freshly filled with tales of Collingwood and Nelson, I stole from my comrades and leaned musingly over the boundless sea. But when this ample heritage passed to me, when I had no more my own fortunes to make, my own rank to build up, such dreams became less and less frequent. Is it not true that wealth makes us contented to be obscure? Yes; I understand, while I speak, why poverty itself befriends, not cripples, Ardworth’s energies. But since I have known you, dearest Helen, those dreams return more vividly than ever. He who claims you should be—must be—something nobler than the crowd. Helen,”—and he rose by an irresistible and restless impulse,—“I shall not be contented till you are as proud of your choice as I of mine!”
It seemed, as Percival spoke and looked, as if boyhood were cast from him forever. The unusual weight and gravity of his words, to which his tone gave even eloquence; the steady flash of his dark eyes; his erect, elastic form,—all had the dignity of man. Helen gazed on him silently, and with a heart so full that words would not come, and tears overflowed instead.
That sight sobered him at once; he knelt down beside her, threw his arms around her,—it was his first embrace,—and kissed the tears away.
“How have I distressed you? Why do you weep?”
“Let me weep on, Percival, dear Percival! These tears are like prayers,—they speak to Heaven—and of you!”
A step came noiselessly over the grass, and between the lovers and the sunlight stood Gabriel Varney.