She gazed into my face a little longer in great doubt and trouble, until the tears coming into her eyes made her blink, and she turned away.
“I wish,” she said woefully, “I could be thought strong enough to bear the burden with you—to help you, Richard.”
“Help me?” I cried—“never so much as by holding yourself and your dear love apart from all this debasing atmosphere of gloom and secrecy. I want to think of you out in the sunshine, Ira—something sweet and unspoiled for my heart to rest on. Now be a sensible dear. I shall come up to the house to see you to-morrow.”
“You will?” she whispered, brightening through her grief. “Come early, Richard.”
“Why not?” I cried cheeringly. “Small profits and quick returns, Ira, as Johnny would say. I sha’n’t let the grass grow under my feet, lest you change your mind.”
She gave me a lovely tremulous smile in reassurance for that, and we went on together again. The wind had dropped, almost suddenly, and the cold white woods were full of a wonderful stillness. As we passed by the darkling lodge, I thought of the figure hidden away within its shadows, and a glow of mighty triumph went through my veins, picturing that confederacy of love and death out of which was to be wrought for me a new manhood and a name.
CHAPTER XXII.
A VISIT FROM MR DALSTON
After Paradise the Deluge. But I held my head high, and laughed at the lowering heavens. I had enough faith in me to float an ark, with my heart for dove in it, waiting confidently in expectation of the green promise. Such deep and full content in myself I had never dreamed were possible. I was become another being in the prospect of my close relations with that pure and beautiful child. When I awoke on the morrow of my joy, it was surely to the same earth I had gone to sleep on; but whither translated—to what halcyon climate? I could have believed it had caught in the train of some passing comet during the night, and been swept into a starrier, balmier region. The frost had gone; the birds were singing; a sweet and melting tenderness had usurped the places of terror. No doubt, at the same time, some clinging villainies had been brought away with it; but their necessary clearance figured no longer as the paramount interest. They were of first moment only in their menace to my love’s innocent feet; they must be cut and weeded away only that the garden of my love’s soul be made perfect to her.
That was how I felt at last; and let all old dry misogamists and scornful Benedicks jeer their fill at me. I was of you once myself, O, sapless brotherhood! until that thing came to happen which made it impossible for me ever to be of you again. Now, I say, I would rather hear a lover rant of love than a wise man discourse on wisdom; would rather, for all the world is worth, be the sinning penitent than the sinless priest who grudges him absolution. How is Solomon most remembered? Why, by the love rhapsody which is called his Song—no better.
It was strange how all the passion and the melancholy of my revengeful past were dimmed suddenly in the radiance of this new feeling. Day had risen behind the sullen flaming rick and absorbed it. Still, if inclination to my task of retribution was much lessened, duty yet impelled me on to that task. Such tragic and momentous issues hung upon my conduct of it. Though a mother’s pined-for recognition no longer drove me forward, there was the question no less of an unhappy woman’s persecution to make my blood run fury. Besides, I could not shut my eyes to the fact that all this accumulation of evidence put me, so long as I remained its sole depository, in the position of an accessory. Wherefore, everything considered, I was resolved to go this very day, with my witness, to Lord Skene, and make clean my breast to him, poor man, of all its “perilous stuff.”