“Shall I never grow sane?” he asked himself, as he rode slowly home. “Is my madness to grow deeper as I grow older? I have been away from all the places and scenes connected in my memory with her. I have tried every resource that lay open—study, pleasure, and yet now that I pause to think, I find I love her better than ever. Oh, my God! can I do nothing to save myself from this lingering, hungering fever of love?”
He hated himself for what he considered his cowardice. He longed to be free from the chains that bound him, yet he could not free himself. Two years had passed since he received the fatal letter that had been a death warrant to him, and he loved her as deeply and as dearly as on that day, when, full of hope, he had asked her to be his wife.
He seldom met Mr. Eyrle. He never went near the Towers where he had once spent so much of his time. When the two met, who had been such dear friends, there was coldness and distance between them that nothing could penetrate. Sir Ronald disliked and distrusted Kenelm, because he believed Kenelm had willfully tried to take Hermione’s love from him. Kenelm Eyrle almost hated Sir Ronald because he honestly thought Sir Ronald had supplanted him, and robbed him of all chance of winning Clarice. A few words of explanation and the old love between them would have returned; it may be that the tragedy of this story had never then happened.
But dislike and suspicion grew between them—the distance increased, the coldness deepened, until at last Kenelm was told no day passed without Sir Ronald going over to Mount Severn—after hearing which, the next time he met the master of Aldenmere, Mr. Eyrle gave him one stern look and passed by without speaking.
“The man has robbed me,” said Kenelm to himself, “a thousand times more meanly than if he had stolen my purse. He has taken from me the hope that made my manhood bright. I will never forgive him.”
While Sir Ronald turned involuntarily to look after the man who had been the dearest friend of his youth.
“It is Hermione who has told him to avoid me,” he said to himself. “Perhaps she is afraid I shall quarrel with him and seek the vengeance I know to be my due. Let her not fear; he is safe from me.”
Yet his heart was heavy and sad within him, for Sir Ronald, despite his pride—the family failing—was of an affectionate, loving, warm-hearted disposition, and could ill brook coldness between himself and those he loved.
People had begun to talk about him, to say how changed he was, how miserable he was, to wonder what could have come over the opening manhood that had at one time promised to be both brilliant and good.
These rumors came to him when he was in a frame of mind most fitted to bear them. He was no saint, this unhappy hero of mine. He was quite human, full of faults, full of good qualities that might have made his name famous, but they were wrongly used, and made it what the name of no other Alden ever was.