“Harry, Harry, I’ll come back, I’ll come back—at Christmas; that is only nine months, and if you love me still then, I will never go away from you again!”
He pressed her to his breast, and kissed her and blessed her; and as the March afternoon began to wane they descended the ruinous stone stairs of the old tower slowly together, she with her hands to his shoulders following him step by step silently, but not unhappily. There was hope in her husband’s heart, and it had affected her a little. The mellow sounds of the organ were pealing through the church where the organist was practicing as, at the bottom stair, Harry gave his wife a last passionate kiss before they left the shadowy building for the outer air.
And the next day Annie started for London.
CHAPTER XX.
The journey back to London was a very strange one to Annie; she never saw the landscape through which the train passed, she did not even remember the faces of her fellow-passengers afterward. Her mind was filled with fears for the future—for her own, for her husband’s, for Lilian’s, for George’s, for that of all the family at the Grange, and for Aubrey’s. She did hate him deeply, this man who had cheated her into making her look upon him as the most gentle, most courteous, brightest of companions and the most devoted of friends, when he was really nothing but a volatile, unprincipled flirt, who made love indifferently to her, or to a coarse woman like Miss West, or to a little giddy creature like the girl to whom Miss Taylor had said he was engaged. Perhaps Annie hardly dwelt enough, in her blame of Aubrey, on the question whether she herself had done right in concealing from him the fact that she was married, and whether, even supposing she had been free, as he imagined her to be, he would not have been justified in thinking no more of a lady who had dismissed him and disappeared without a word, and in transferring his attentions to women who would appreciate them more highly. But with all her blame was mingled sincere anxiety for him, and unselfish sorrow that he should have fallen into bad hands.
As for her own husband, she felt more kindly toward him now that she was away from the daily irritation of his presence, from the fear of his trivial jealousy, of his impossible demands. Their impossibility she could not question. She felt that she could never return, with the ardor which alone would content him, the passionate love she had inspired in a nature so different from her own, and, as it seemed to her, so antagonistic to it. The most that she could hope for was that, if his affection should indeed remain warm until next Christmas, when she had promised to return to him, the nine months of hard work upon the stage which she was about to commence would have wearied her into the semblance of contentment with a life so distasteful to her active mind as permanent idleness at the Grange with her uncongenial husband would be.
She had caught an earlier and faster train from Beckham than the one by which she had intended to travel, so that she arrived in London and drove to the house where Miss Taylor had taken apartments for her, two hours before the time at which the landlady expected her. The consequence was that the dirty servant who opened the door led her up to a dingy and cheerless sitting-room on the second floor, the grate of which was empty; and Annie’s heart sunk with a feeling of unutterable wretchedness and desolation as she sat shivering, with her mantle still round her, on the dusty little sofa, watching the dirty servant as she knelt on the hearth-rug and tried, for a long time in vain, to coax some spluttering, damp little sticks and a handful of slaty coals into a fire. When it was sufficiently ignited to smoke violently, she retired, satisfied, leaving Annie to cough and choke and shiver, and wish herself back again at the Grange.
It was all her own fault that she was catching cold in an uncomfortable lodging, instead of being well cared for in the midst of her husband’s family. The gratification of her ambition, which had brought her to this cheerless welcome, seemed an unsatisfactory sort of reward at this moment for the sacrifice she had made alike of comfort and duty—for self-reproach for her own hardness had been busy at Annie’s heart since she received her husband’s farewell kiss that morning.
At last, after emitting gusts of black blinding smoke, each one of which grew feebler than the last, the fire went out altogether; and Annie was reduced by this time to too spiritless a state to ring the bell and go through another ordeal of smoke and servant.
“I suppose they will come up at tea-time,” she thought, as she went listlessly into the bedroom and began to unpack.