His haggard eyes devoured the sweet face which was bent down upon his hands, and he felt that if hell itself opened to receive him its torments would be rest compared with what he was undergoing at that moment. The pleading voice, the little hands imprisoning his own as she leant upon him, giving herself to him as it were in all the rich fulness of her love—this for which he had hungered and agonised, sleeping and waking, during the long weary period of his hopeless exile, and which, now that he had obtained it, he must deliberately forego. In one short hour, in fact, he would be apart from her, in bitter loneliness once more. No—there was no hope. His pride was a part of himself. Penniless and an outcast, how could he keep for himself and wear this priceless jewel? And now he was something more—he bore a burden that not all the untold wealth of ages could take from him. And yet at this moment he felt as if he could imbrue his hands in the most pitiless of crimes, to obtain the wealth which should save them both.
“My darling, you will not leave me again!”
Not the scud in the dark, lowering sky above—not the wild waves plunging and careering before the shrieking wind, to hurl themselves madly upon yonder sharp rocks—not the whirl of air and water and vaporous cloud, was more storm-tossed and chaotic than the thoughts which surged through the man’s soul, and flashed with well-nigh the fires of mania in his overwrought brain. His reply came—hoarse and labouring.
“I must.”
The sweet, sad face sank down upon his hands, which her own were grasping with an almost convulsive clutch, and a shiver like a great choking sob ran through her. She had found him—the wanderer whom everybody else had lost sight of. She had found him, as was her right, for he belonged to her. She had found him—how then could she let him wander from her again, away into the outer darkness of the cold, wide world! All too lightly had she valued those days in the by-gone past, until they had fled, never to return.
O fairest summer, with thy many-hued glories of rich verdure, and heathery-crimson and golden-tinted hills keeping watch above an azure sea! O halcyon time, of vows whispered amid the radiance of a passing glow from Heaven’s bright plains, as the westering sun drove his great amber-wheeled chariot down to his rest, shedding back an ethereal lustre upon a love-dawn which should lend a hundredfold more of beauty to a beauteous world—where are you now? Gone. And you—leaden waves, tossing wildly to the misty wrack above—storm-blast howling o’er the watery waste—cliffs spectral and grey, throwing back with hollow echo the surges’ tone—to you it is given, in mocking fitness, to behold the anguish of two breaking hearts, here on the lone seashore!
“It was never intended we should part again,” she murmured without looking up. “Oh! why should you have been brought here to-day? I never visit this place now, and to-day it must have been something more than chance that made me do so.”
“I don’t believe in your Heaven, or why should it delight to torture any living creature as it is torturing us, here, to-day,” broke jerkily from his set, dry lips. “Listen, Olive—darling, and you will understand why I must leave you again. I am destitute at this moment, utterly destitute; one who has gone down beneath the weight of what some might call a curse—but I don’t believe in such things. And above and beside all this there is—there is—a barrier between us—a barrier of my own raising, and with its shadow I would never cloud your dear life.”
“Oh, Roland. What is it?”
“Ah! If I were to tell you, you would shrink from me, now and for ever. You would even rush into yonder sea to escape from the horror wherewith my presence would inspire you. Why, even your love would turn to repugnance. Yet why should it?—except that the trammelled imagination of a canting world reads crime into what is no crime at all.”