“I have just had frightful news. Come with me to some quiet place till I tell you about it. Anywhere. No matter where. See! there are no people across that bridge where the trees are; let us go there.”
Jane spoke not a word, but he saw that she was very pale and trembling. That weakness of Jane’s gave him a strange sensation. It said something that her lips had never uttered.
They passed over the little bridge. They passed over another bridge; there were no people here, only trees; they went no further.
They were in a small forest. The garden was lost to sight; only the music of the band, muted by distance, told of the festivity so near, yet apparently so far away.
The trunk of a felled tree lay in the path; they sat down upon it by common consent. Leslie took out his watch, and looked at it attentively. Then, still holding it open in his hand, he spoke.
“I want you to listen to me for five minutes—only five minutes; you can hold the watch, and measure the time yourself. Jane, when a man is going to be hanged, they will give him a glass of brandy to help him along to the drop. Will you do the same by me—give me five minutes’ clear speech, and let me say just what I please without interruption; will you?”
“Yes,” said Jane, and she shivered as she spoke the word. She had maintained a strange silence; impulsive as she was, one might have expected her to implore him to tell her the worst, and have it over. Perhaps she understood dimly that Leslie’s disaster was personal to herself, a cataclysm the effect of which would reach her future as well as his.
“You remember,” he said, after a moment’s pause, “how I asked you to marry me long ago, and everything that happened after? Well, when I think of all that, it seems to me that I must have passed through life in a state of insanity, and only awakened to consciousness now. Jane, I am feeling now as a man must feel when he wakes in hell, and remembers—No matter, it is all done with now; and even if you loved me as well as I love you, it’s all over and done with and useless now.”
He leaned forward with his face in his hands. Jane did not speak; the music of the band had ceased, and the only sound to be heard was the weary sighing of the warm wind in the pine-tops.
“I’m broken utterly, I have just heard the news. Don’t think I brought you here to listen to me whining about my misfortunes. I brought you here to tell you I love you. I meant to have carried you off in the steamer that sails to-morrow morning for the north-west. With the money I had yesterday, I would have supported you, I would have torn you out of society, and made you love me. I would have made you a Paradise. Yes, by the living God, a Paradise, or there’s no such thing as love. But now I’m a beggar, and I love you too well to drag you into my ruin, and it’s Fate, Fate, Fate that has done it all, and cursed be its name!”