In Spite of All: A Novel

by Edna Lyall

On this Saturday evening, just a week after their unhappy dispute and parting, there came to him for the first time the sense of returning life. Of life, and even of a certain sweetness in life—for was it not his to lay down in a good cause? Soon, too, perhaps within a few days or weeks, it might all be over, and the pain which was making each hour a misery would be ended; his body would lie on some distant battlefield, and he would be free and at rest.

Stormy and wet as the night was he could not stay in the house, but wrapping his cloak about him strode down the garden and paced rapidly up and down the south walk. The place was haunted by memories of Hilary. How they had played and quarrelled and kissed and made it up again in the old times! How little they had dreamed in those happy, careless days what the joys and pangs of love really meant! And how very vague had been his childish notion of patriotism in the dusk of that December day when he had whispered to Sir John Eliot’s snow effigy, the words, “I wish to be like you; I wish to give my life for the country’s freedom!” Well, his chance had come. Here was the very opportunity he had ardently desired, but it had brought with it an agony that no child would have had the power to imagine.

At last a deluge of rain drove him into the little arbour and, impelled by some association of place, he drew forth the small leathern case which for the last two years he had always carried and looked at the dark glossy curl which Hilary had sent him. It was a rash thing to do, for the very touch of the soft hair broke down the stern self-control he had kept up through the week, while nature herself seemed to feel with him as the wild wind swayed the branches to and fro and the rain came down in torrents.

Lying there on the floor of the arbour he sobbed his heart out, tortured by the words of Hilary’s last message—tortured more cruelly still by the memory of her relentless face as he had last seen it. At length a lull in the tempest began to influence him; he struggled to his feet again and looked out into the night. The rain had ceased for a few minutes; the cold, wet air revived him, and he stood watching the stormy sky and the bleak-looking moon which shone out now and again through rifts in the hurrying black clouds.

Cold and careless as the moon is of all the sorrow’s she looks down on, no lover could ever resist the fascinations of her mysterious light. He thought he would look to-night for the last time at that grassy glade and at the old stone bench by the sweetbriar, where Hilary had been singing to her guitar on the day he first realised his love. Quietly opening the wicket-gate, he walked with sad steps over the soaking turf, wondering—as the young always must wonder—how it was possible that a joy such as theirs had been could have turned to such bitter anguish.

And then all at once the invincible hopefulness of youth came to his aid. It could not all be over! This love that he knew to be pure and true, was it possible that it should be wasted—cast away as a thing of little worth? To think that it could end would be to doubt God the Giver. In this world or the next they would yet be united.

He went to the bush of sweetbriar and gathered a spray, recalling as he did so the old folk-tale of the prince who at the right time had fought his way through the thorn hedge, and how the thorns had turned to roses, and the sleeping princess had been wakened at length by his kiss of love.

Perhaps Hilary’s love was, after all, not dead, but only sleeping; perhaps his Princess Briar-rose would be wakened one day by a love which would fight its way to her, be the obstacles never so great.

At that moment screams coming distinctly from the direction of Mrs. Unett’s house fell upon his ear. He knew well that Hilary and her mother were still at Whitbourne, and fearing that something must have gone amiss during their absence, he walked up to the door which led to the back premises, and knocked. At this, however, the screams only grew more piercing.

He called to Mrs. Durdle, asking what was the matter, and at last she was persuaded to open the door a few inches, and to peer cautiously out, her fat face almost the colour of the guttering tallow candle which she grasped in her capacious hand.