“Strike, but hear me. It is true you would not own, when I was last at Fawley, that she was the cause of your secluded life, of your blighted career; but I knew better. However, let me go on before you strangle me. Lady Montfort’s former feelings of friendship for you are evidently quite changed; and she charged me to add, that she really hoped that you would exert your good sense and pride (of which Heaven knows you have plenty) to eradicate an absurd and romantic sentiment, so displeasing to her, and so—”
“It is false! it is false! What have I done to you, Colonel Morley, that you should slander me thus? I send you messages of taunt and insult, Mr. Darrell! You cannot believe it—you cannot!”
Caroline Montfort stood between the two, as if she had dropped from heaven.
A smile, half in triumph, half in irony, curved the lip of the fine gentleman. It faded instantly as his eye turned from the face of the earnest woman to that of the earnest man. Alban Morley involuntarily bowed his head, murmured some words unheard, and passed from the place unheeded.
Not by concert nor premeditation was Caroline Montfort on that spot; she had consented to accompany her cousin to Fawley, but before reaching the park gates her courage failed her; she would remain within the carriage; the Colonel, wanted in London as soon as possible, whatever the result of his political mission to Darrell, could not stay long at Fawley; she would return with him. Vance’s presence and impatient desire to embrace his niece did not allow the Colonel an occasion for argument and parley. Chafed at this fresh experience of the capricious uncertainty of woman, he had walked on with Vance to the Manor-house. Left alone, Caroline could not endure the stillness and inaction which increased the tumult of her thoughts; she would at least have one more look—it might be the last—at the scenes in which her childhood had sported—her youth known its first happy dreams. But a few yards across those circumscribed demesnes, on through those shadowy serried groves, and she should steal unperceived in view of the house, the beloved lake, perhaps even once more catch a passing glimpse of the owner. She resolved, she glided on; she gained the beech-grove, when, by the abrupt wind of the banks, Darrell and Alban came suddenly on the very spot. The flutter of her robe, as she turned to retreat, caught Alban’s eye; the reader comprehends with what wily intent, conceived on the moment, that unscrupulous schemer shaped the words which chained her footstep, and then stung her on to self-disclosure. Trembling and blushing, she now stood before the startled man—He startled out of every other sentiment and feeling than that of ineffable, exquisite delight to be once more in her presence; she, after her first passionate outburst, hastening on, in confused broken words, to explain that she was there but by accident—by chance; confusion growing deeper and deeper—how explain the motive that had charmed her steps to the spot?
Suddenly from the opposite bank came the music of the magic flute, and her voice as suddenly stopped and failed her.
“Again—again,” said Darrell, dreamily. “The same music! the same air! and this the same place on which we two stood together when I first dared to say, ‘I love!’ Look! we are under the very tree! Look! there is the date I carved on the bark when you were gone, but had left Hope behind. Ah, Caroline, why can I not now resign myself to age? Why is youth, while I speak, rushing back into my heart, into my soul? Why cannot I say, ‘Gratefully I accept your tender friendship; let the past be forgotten; through what rests to me of the future while on earth, be to me as a child. I cannot—I cannot! Go!”
She drew nearer to him, gently, timidly. “Even that, Darrell,—even that; something in your life—let me be something still!”
“Ah,” he said with melancholy bitterness, “you deceive me no longer now! You own that, when here we stood last and exchanged our troth, you in the blossom, and I in the prime, of life—you own that it was no woman’s love, deaf to all calumny, proof to all craft that could wrong the absent; no woman’s love, warm as the heart, undying as the soul, that you pledged me then?”
“Darrell, it was not—though then I thought it was.”