The Witch's Head

by H. Rider Haggard

And he did, including the story of Mr. Plowden’s shaking, at which Ernest chuckled fiercely.

“I wish I had been there to kick him,” he remarked, parenthetically.

“I did that too; I kicked him hard,” put in Jeremy; at which Ernest chuckled again.

“I can’t make it all out,” said Ernest, at length, “but I will go home at once.”

“You can’t do that, old fellow. Your respected uncle, Sir Hugh, will have you run in.”

“Ah, I forgot! Well, I will write to her to-day.”

“That’s better; and now let’s dress. My head is rather clearer. By George, though, I am stiff! It is no joke fighting a giant.”

But Ernest answered not a word. He was already, after his quick-brained fashion, employed in concocting his letter to Eva.

In the course of the morning he drafted it. It, or rather that part of it with which we need concern ourselves, ran thus:

“Such then, my dearest Eva, was the state of my mind towards you. I thought—God forgive me for the treason!—that perhaps you were, as so many women are, a fairweather lover, and that now that I am in trouble you wished to slip the cable. If that was so, I felt that it was not for me to remonstrate. I wrote to you, and I knew that the letter came safely to your hands. You did not answer it, and I could only come to one conclusion. Hence my own silence. And to be plain I do not at this moment quite understand why you have never written. But Jeremy has brought me your message, and with that I must be content; for no doubt you have reasons which are satisfactory to yourself, and if that is so, no doubt, too, they would be equally satisfactory to me if I only knew them. You see, my dearest love, the fact is that I trust and believe in you utterly and entirely. What is right and true, what is loyal and sincere to me and to yourself—those are the things that you will do. Jeremy tells me a rather amusing story about the new clergyman who has come to Kesterwick, and who is, it appears, an aspirant for your hand. Well, Eva, I am sufficiently conceited not to be jealous; although I am in the unlucky position of an absent man, and worse still, an absent man under a cloud, I do not believe that he will cut me out. But on the day that you can put your hand upon your heart, and look me straight in the eyes, and tell me, on your honour as a lady, that you love this or any other man better than you do me, on that day I shall be ready to resign you to him. But till that day comes—and there is something which tells me that it is as impossible for it to come as for the mountain-range I look on as I write to move towards the town and bury it—I am free from jealousy, for I know that it is impossible that you should be faithless to your love.