"I don't think Belle is so much to be pitied after all," she cried captiously. "Other people are not always having legacies left them, and £30,000 means more to a widow than to a married woman. Besides, she needn't remain a widow unless she likes; Philip Marsden has been in love with her all the time." Whereat Mildred, signing her daily letter to Charlie Allsop with a flourish which would have done credit to the heiress of millions, interrupted her sister hotly. "I think it's a beastly shame to say so all the same, Maudie. I dare say it's true; but I'm sure if any one said such things of me when I was a widow, I'd never marry the man. No, not if I liked him ever so much! I'll tell you what it is: Belle has had a hard time of it; and if poor Dick were only here, as well as his money, I believe she would marry him and be happy."
"My dear girls!" expostulated their mother feebly, "her husband is not six weeks dead till next Tuesday. If any one had suggested marriage to me when poor Colonel Stuart--"
"Oh, that is different, mamma," retorted Mildred impatiently. "Belle only married John by mistake. Lots of girls do the same thing. Mabel has, with her Major; but then she will never find it out, so it doesn't matter. Charlie says--"
"Oh, if Charlie says anything, that settles the matter," broke in Maud peevishly. "I wish you two would get married, and then you would soon cease to think each other perfection. For my part, I consider Belle is not to be pitied. She has plenty of money, and by and by she will have a baby to amuse her when she's tired of other things. What more can any woman want? I'm very sorry for her now, but grief doesn't last forever, and after all she never was in love with John. That's one comfort."
Perhaps if Belle had been asked she might have denied the last statement. If she had loved him, the past would certainly have been less of a regret, the future less of a fear. What was to be the end of it all? That question clamoured for answer as the big ship began to slide from its moorings. Leaning over the taffrail, her eyes heavy with unshed tears, she could see nothing but Philip standing bareheaded in the boat which slipped landwards so fast. A minute before his hands had been in hers, his kind voice faltering good-bye in her ears. And now? Suddenly her clasped fingers opened in a gesture of entreaty. "Philip!" she whispered. "Comeback, come back!"
But the swirl of the screw had caught the boat and Major Marsden was in his place at the tiller-ropes, his face set landwards. The rowers bent to their oars and so, inch by inch, yard by yard, the rippling sunlit water grew between those two. Was that to be the end?
[CHAPTER XXVII.]
Seven years! Time enough, so physiologists tell us, for the whole structure of the body to be worn out and renewed again. And for the mind? Is it to be allowed no chance of change, no throwing aside of effete matter, no relief from the monotony of a fixed body of opinions, thoughts, and emotions? That would be hard indeed. Yet Belle Raby--for she was Belle Raby still--had altered little either outwardly or inwardly in the seven years which had passed since she stood leaning over the taffrail watching a boat slip landwards, and asking herself if that was to be the end of it all. Perhaps this lack of change was the less remarkable because, as she leant over the wicket-gate looking into the lane beyond, she was still watching and waiting, and asking herself what the end was to be. Not, however, as she had done then; for then she had been in a state of nervous collapse and unable to judge fairly of anything or any one, of herself least of all. To do her justice this state of mind had not lasted long; indeed Belle had found herself facing the white cliffs of England, and the uncertain future awaiting her there with more equanimity than she would have deemed possible or even proper a month before. The long journey home,--that slow passaging day after day towards a set haven regardless of storm or calm,--the imperturbable decision of the big ship which seems to have absorbed your weakness in its strength--the knowledge that day and night, night and day, while you forget, the engines like a great heart are throbbing on purposefully across the pathless sea,--all this has worked many a miracle of healing in mind and body exhausted by the struggle for existence. It wrought one for Belle, luckily, since the future held many a difficulty. Despite them all, as seven years afterwards, she stood bareheaded in the cool English sunshine she looked wonderfully young and happy; even though those seven years had been the fateful ones which find a woman in the twenties and leaves her in the thirties. True it is that wisdom, either of this world or the next, brings a sadness to most eyes, but in this case a sweetness had come with it which more than counterbalanced the loss of gaiety. In fact Belle Raby had never looked more attractive than she did as she stood in a white dress with a Jacqueminot rose tucked away in the lace at her throat leaning over the wicket-gate waiting,--waiting for what?
For Philip, of course. Ten o'clock had just chimed from a church-tower close by, and the time between that and the half-hour had belonged for years to her best friend. Sometimes during those short thirty minutes of a busy day she wrote to him; sometimes, as now, she stood watching for him with tolerable certainty that, if steamers and trains were punctual, he would step with bodily presence into her life for a few weeks; but most often she was setting time, and space, and absence, and all the trivialities which clip the wings of poor humanity at defiance. In other words she was allowing her imagination to get the better of her common sense. That is one way of putting it. Another is possible to those who, like Belle, have learnt to recognise the fact that the outside world exists for each one of us, not in itself, but in the effect which it produces on our consciousness. Two women are grinding at the mill; the one weeps over the task, the other smiles; just as they choose to weep or smile. The secret of the emotion lies not in the cosmic touch itself, but in the way the consciousness receives it, and in the picture which the imagination draws of our own condition; the abstract truth, the actual reality affects us not at all. So Belle Raby, as she looked out to the wild roses in the hedgerow and the yellow butterflies fluttering over the grey bloom of the flowering grasses, saw nothing of the placid English landscape spread before her eyes. She was standing on a faraway Indian platform where the crows sat on the railings cawing irrelatively, and a tall man in undress uniform was listening to those first words,--"it is father." That had been the beginning of it all; the keynote both of the discords and harmony of the whole. Then suddenly, as irrelatively perhaps as the cawing of the crows, the scene changed. The flood of sunshine faded to mirk and fog; such mirk and fog as humanity and its ways creates in London on a dull November day. An atmosphere of civilisation and culture, say some. Perhaps; but if so, civilisation with all its advantages is apt to smell nasty. She saw a man and a woman standing opposite each other in a London lodging, in a London fog. But five minutes before Philip had come into it buoyantly, decisively, bringing with him a memory of sunshine and purer air. Now he stood with his back to the grey square of the window, his hands stretched out to her in something between command and entreaty. "Belle! put down the child and let me speak to you." And then for the first time, she had gone over to him, with the child still in her arms, and kissed him. "Jack will not trouble me, dear," she said; "he is such a quiet wee mite. Come, let us sit down and talk it over."
Now when lovers fall to talking hand in hand it is proper, even in a novel, to avert one's head and smile, saying that the conversation can have no possible interest to outsiders. Or, if a sentence or two be suggested, it is necessary to insist that love, divine love, can only find its first expression in mere foolishness. Belle and Philip therefore could evidently not have been lovers, for they talked serious and sound good sense while the year-old Jack with his wide, wistful eyes lay in his mother's arms and listened to it all. What was it to him if more than once a reluctant tear fell on his tiny wrinkled hands, and more than once Philip's voice trembled and then stopped a while? What were such emotions to a life which had come into the world barred from them forever? For Belle's child would never be as other children are; so much was certain; whether he would ever need her care more than another's was yet to be seen. But it was strange, was it not? she seemed to hear herself saying in a calm voice, the steadiness of which surprised her even at the time, that poor Dick's legacy had gone to a hospital for just such poor little God-stricken children.