“I don’t wonder you are shocked,” Anthony said, rousing himself and conscious that he owed her amends for the very agony of the last few minutes. “It seems hardly possible as yet to realise it.”
“No, it is dreadful,” said Ada, her looks wandering away. “Does Miss Chester feel it much? She looks as if it would take a good deal to move her. There are the Watsons,—you didn’t bow.” Mrs Bennett’s face at the other end of the shop looked like a refuge to which he might escape. To escape,—and he was to marry her! He had not yet heard the end of the petty inquiries which fluttered down upon him, but at length he saw Mrs Bennett and Ada driving away, and Ada pointing towards Springfield’s and explaining. Anthony went quickly into a back room, wrote two or three letters to the Squire’s nearest relations, rode as fast as he could to Thorpe, gave Miss Chesters directions to the Hardlands servants, and then, after a moment’s thought, turned his horse’s head back to Aunecester.
He said to Dr Fletcher, “Do not say anything of my being here to Miss Chester; it can do no good, I know, but—we were near neighbours, and I may as well sleep to-night at the Globe, so as to be at hand if I am wanted. You’ll send for me if I can do anything of any sort? And there is no change?”
“None whatever. We have, of course, had a consultation, and Dr Hill entirely takes my view of the case. I regret that I cannot tell you that he is more hopeful. I am inclined to think Mr Chester’s condition not altogether attributable to the blow, but that there might have been a simultaneous attack.”
There was nothing to stay for, and Anthony went, though not to the inn. He walked about the old town for more hours than he knew, thinking of many things. Those last words of the Squire had touched him acutely, and his thoughts were softened and almost tender towards the friends whose countenance he had been rejecting. But the idea which seemed to hold him with a rush of force was that he must see Winifred again; that, happen what might, it was impossible but that there should be a meeting, if not one day at least another. It did not strike him as an inconsistency that this thing which he wanted had been within his reach a hundred times when he would not avail himself of it; like most men when under the influence of a dominant feeling, he did not care to look back and trace the manner in which its dominion had gradually asserted itself, nor, indeed, to dwell upon it so far as to admit that it was a dominion at all. Was he not to marry Ada Lovell? Only pity moved him, pity that was natural enough, remembering the old familiar relations, or allowing himself to dwell upon the sweet womanly eyes which no darkness could shut out from him. For gradually the dusk had deepened into night, the Close in which he found himself was singularly deserted, now and then a figure that might have been a shadow passed him, a quiet light or two gleamed behind homely blinds, and by and by was extinguished, the trees stood black and motionless against the sky, only the great bell of the Cathedral clock now and then broke the silence, and was answered far and near by echoing tongues. Such a night was full of tender sadness, to poor Anthony perhaps dangerously soft and sweet, for he had been living of late, in spite of his engagement, in an atmosphere of cold restraint, peculiarly galling to his reserved yet affectionate nature. All Ada’s pretty assurances and the pleasant amenities of the Bennetts’ house had never removed the chill. They were something belonging to him, at which he looked equably, but they had never become part of himself. Alas, and yet to-day a word or two of Winifred’s—Winifred whom he did not love—had pierced it.
Winifred—whom he did not love.
With one of those unaccountable flashes by which an image is suddenly brought into our memory, there started before him a remembrance of her in the old Vicarage garden, that Sunday morning when he and she had strolled together to the mulberry-tree,—the quaintly formal hollyhocks, the busy martins flashing in and out, the daisies in the grass, Winifred softly singing the old psalm tune, and laying the cool rose against her cheek. Had he forgotten one of her words that day, this Winifred whom he did not love? And then he thought of her again at a time which he had never liked to look back upon, that winter day when she had met him in the lane, a spot of warm colour amidst the faded browns and greys,—thought of the gate and the cold distant moorland, and the words which had struck a chill into his life. It had seemed to him then as if it had been she who had done it, and he had never been able to dissociate her from her tidings; so that no generous pity for the woman who had wounded him, nor any understanding that she had done it because from another it might have come with too cruel harshness, had stirred his heart, until now when another compassion had forced the door, turned his eyes from himself, and shown him what Winifred had been.
The darkness reveals many things to us, and that night other things were abroad in the darkness,—death, the unfulfilled purpose of one whom he had chosen to regard as his enemy, if, indeed, it were not rather that God had fulfilled it in his own more perfect way,—these were working upon him, however unconsciously. Yet those revelations were full of anguish, opening out mistake after mistake in a manner which to a man who has over-trusted himself becomes an intolerable reproach. The accusation which had seemed literally to blast his life stood before him in juster, soberer proportions; his manner of meeting it became more cowardly and faithless, made bitter by an almost entire forgetfulness of the Hand from which the trial came. And in the midst of his angry despair, by his own act he must deliberately add another pang to his lot, and, putting away his friends, bind himself for life to a woman for whom his strongest feeling was the fancy for a smiling face. Perhaps, as yet, he hardly knew how slight that feeling was, but even by this time he was bitterly tasting the draught his own weakness had prepared. These thoughts all came to him with a quiet significance, adding tenfold to their power, yet touched by a certain solemn gravity which gave him the sense for which he most craved just now, the old childlike trustfulness in an overruling care. As we sow, so we must reap, but even the saddest harvest may yield us good sheaves, though not the crop we longed and hoped to gather. And this night was the first hour which seemed to bring Anthony face to face with his own work.
He had been walking mechanically about the Close. Turning out of it at last, he went back to Dr Fletcher’s house, and looked up at a light burning in an upper window, little thinking, however, that it was a watch by the dead, and not by the living, that it marked; for in spite of what Dr Fletcher had told him, the tidings he heard in the early morning fell like an unexpected blow. He would have gone away without a word, but that Dr Fletcher came out at the moment.
“There was never any rally or return to consciousness,” he said, leading the way into the dining-room, where his breakfast was spread, “and although this naturally aggravates the shock to his daughters, they have been spared a good deal that must have been very painful, poor things! My wife is with them. Will you have a cup of coffee with me?”