“Hush! hush! that thought is over. And you return to your father’s,—perhaps better so: it is but hope deferred; and in your absence I can the more easily allay all suspicion, if suspicion exist. But I must write to you; we must correspond. William, dear William, write often,—write kindly; tell me, in every letter, that you love me,—that you love only me; that you will be patient, and confide.”
“Dear Lucretia,” said Mainwaring, tenderly, and moved by the pathos of her earnest and imploring voice, “but you forget: the bag is always brought first to Sir Miles; he will recognize my hand. And to whom can you trust your own letters?”
“True,” replied Lucretia, despondingly; and there was a pause. Suddenly she lifted her head, and cried: “But your father’s house is not far from this,—not ten miles; we can find a spot at the remote end of the park, near the path through the great wood: there I can leave my letters; there I can find yours.”
“But it must be seldom. If any of Sir Miles’s servants see me, if—”
“Oh, William, William, this is not the language of love!”
“Forgive me,—I think of you!”
“Love thinks of nothing but itself; it is tyrannical, absorbing,—it forgets even the object loved; it feeds on danger; it strengthens by obstacles,” said Lucretia, tossing her hair from her forehead, and with an expression of dark and wild power on her brow and in her eyes. “Fear not for me; I am sufficient guard upon myself. Even while I speak, I think,—yes, I have thought of the very spot. You remember that hollow oak at the bottom of the dell, in which Guy St. John, the Cavalier, is said to have hid himself from Fairfax’s soldiers? Every Monday I will leave a letter in that hollow; every Tuesday you can search for it, and leave your own. This is but once a week; there is no risk here.”
Mainwaring’s conscience still smote him, but he had not the strength to resist the energy of Lucretia. The force of her character seized upon the weak part of his own,—its gentleness, its fear of inflicting pain, its reluctance to say “No,”—that simple cause of misery to the over-timid. A few sentences more, full of courage, confidence, and passion, on the part of the woman, of constraint and yet of soothed and grateful affection on that of the man, and the affianced parted.
Mainwaring had already given orders to have his trunks sent to him at his father’s; and, a hardy pedestrian by habit, he now struck across the park, passed the dell and the hollow tree, commonly called “Guy’s Oak,” and across woodland and fields golden with ripening corn, took his way to the town, in the centre of which, square, solid, and imposing, stood the respectable residence of his bustling, active, electioneering father.
Lucretia’s eye followed a form as fair as ever captivated maiden’s glance, till it was out of sight; and then, as she emerged from the shade of the cedars into the more open space of the garden, her usual thoughtful composure was restored to her steadfast countenance. On the terrace, she caught sight of Vernon, who had just quitted his own room, where he always breakfasted alone, and who was now languidly stretched on a bench, and basking in the sun. Like all who have abused life, Vernon was not the same man in the early part of the day. The spirits that rose to temperate heat the third hour after noon, and expanded into glow when the lights shone over gay carousers, at morning were flat and exhausted. With hollow eyes and that weary fall of the muscles of the cheeks which betrays the votary of Bacchus,—the convivial three-bottle man,—Charley Vernon forced a smile, meant to be airy and impertinent, to his pale lips, as he rose with effort, and extended three fingers to his cousin.