"No. I told Lady Davyntry this evening, before you came in. I should like to be here when Haldane comes"--and her face was overcast by the mournful, musing expression he knew and loved so well. "He and I quarrelled before he went away--but I suppose he will not keep that up with me now."
She looked round with a forlorn kind of smile actually painful to see. In it there was an appeal to the dreariness of her lot, to the terrible blight which had settled on her youth, against harsh judgment of the wilfulness and folly which had led her to such a doom, inexpressibly affecting.
The strong restraint, the habitual patience which she maintained over all her emotions, seemed to forsake her quite suddenly. Her companion might have taken it as a good omen for him that it was in his company alone the control was loosened; but he did not think of himself, only of her.
The forlorn smile was succeeded by an ominous twitching of the lips, and the next moment Margaret had covered her face with her hands and burst into tears.
Mr. Baldwin watched her with inexpressible pangs of love and pity. He dared not speak. What could he say? He knew nothing, though he could surmise much, of the past which had given rise to this burst of emotion.
To try to console, was to seem to question her. He stood by her in the keenest distress, and could only entreat her to remember that it was all over now. The paroxysm passed over as he uttered the words for the second time.
Margaret took her hands away from her face, and looked at him, and there was an angry sparkle in her eye which he had never seen before, but which he thought very beautiful.
"You don't believe what you say," she said quickly, and walking on hurriedly as she spoke; "you don't believe what you say. You know there are things in life which are never over--sorrows and experiences which time can never change. When you say to me that it is all over now, you say what is not true, and you know it, or you guess it; you might know it if you would. Do you think I am like other women, like your sister, for instance, with nothing but pure and sanctifying grief for the dead, to ripen my mind? Do you think I am like her, or like any other woman, whose quiet life, however sad, has been led in decency, and has been sheltered and guarded by the protections which may be found in honest poverty? Do you think I can come home here, and find myself once more among the people and places I knew when I was a girl, and not feel like a cheat? I tell you the Past is not all over; it will stand as long as I live between me and other people--not my employers, for there will be no associations in their case; but every one who knew me once, and who knows me now. Why does no one speak to me, in even a casual way, of the places I have seen, or the people I have been amongst? Do you think I imagine it is because they are unwilling to awaken a slumbering sorrow? No! You know, and I know, it is because they feel that I have seen sights unfit for women's eyes, and heard words unfit for women's ears; and can I ever forget it while others remember it whenever they see me? No, no, no! I never, never can!"
She pressed her small hands together and slightly wrung them; a gesture habitual to her in distress, but which he had never seen before. He caught her right hand in his, and drew it within his arm. She walked on with him, but was, as he knew, almost unconscious of his presence.
How he loved her! how he hated the dead man who had caused her to suffer thus! A young man himself, and she no more than a girl; and yet how little of the aspect, how little of the sense of youth there was about either as they walked together through the woods and fields that day!