‘To be sure, sir. ’Tis a candle-light that teaches us a wonderful power of patience. When you look at them, the wear and tear of life seems a useless sort of thing.’
‘So it seems, viewed in any light—rush, or gas, or sun,’ I assented drearily. ‘But why do you want to get rid of me, if I am content to stay?’
‘I’d be grieved to think you imagined me anything but proud of your company, sir; but I’m thinking it ’ud be best for yourself to go away. You look down a bit lately, and ’tis me own heart bleeds for you. But you’re young, agra, and them sort of troubles soon pass. ’Tis surprising how wonderful quick the heart is to mend any time.’
His intention and sympathy sprang tears to my eyes. He saw this, and touched my shoulder gently, nodding a sapient head.
‘I make bold to tell you, sir, that a fine pleasant boy like yourself has no business to go hankering after one as has known deception and wept misfortune, an’ whose husband lives. Them’s foreign ways, I know. Haven’t I read a power of books? Take my word for it, ’tis better to run after the girls. There it’s all fair and square, above board, and ’tis natural. ’Tis your duty to her and yourself to turn your back on us.’
‘It always is our duty to be most miserable, I fear,’ I said dejectedly. ‘But why should a woman wear weeds because a scoundrel lives? in the bloom of youth, beautiful, with a maiden heart for the winning? and what law is broken by honourable devotion?’
I forgot I was talking to a peasant, and stood there in the sunlight, pleading Trueberry’s cause. For what now had I to do with her heart, or she with my love? My hour of ordeal had come, and I confess I was surprised by my own frailty. I had expected to bear it so much better, to act so much more gallant a part. Instead, I was broken with jealousy, and my eyes were blinded with tears. I had not conquered nature, did not swim triumphantly in the upper sphere of impersonal feeling, submissive to an ideal sway, glorying in the supreme servitude of unacknowledged, unexacting devotion. I was a poor exasperated human wretch, unjustly angry with my friend for his selfish blindness, wrath with the woman’s serenity, which could not interpret my feeling, vexed that neither, in their bliss, should care whether I lived or died of it. I had craved so little,—the pale ray of hope, insubstantial as a dream, but cherished with frenzy. And now how was I to still the fierce ache of regret in the years ahead? Bereavement fronted me, a silent spectre, my mate for evermore. The precious hours had gone, sleepless nights and sullen days, in a hinted persistence of prayer in her presence, of longing out of it, and nothing to come of all the anguish, of revolving transport and agony, but this sense of miserable failure.
Looking down from the plateau to the glen, it seemed to me that I had been accomplishing this backward and forward march from cottage to manor by an unreal measurement of time. The years before sank into insignificance beside these two weeks of frustrated yearning. I went into the house to shut my grief away from the friendly scrutiny of my peasant friend, and battled with the monster that wrecks our dignity and our intelligence.
III
Next morning, with seared eyelids, and heart a red raw wound, conscious of the peasant’s disapproving inspection, my feet carried me unreluctantly toward torture. It was part of my implacable fate that I should diagnose my own misery through the happiness of the two beings who bounded the limits of sensation for me. Trueberry was alone, and greeted me with a vagueness of glance that denoted retrospective bliss. He was glad to see me in a quiet way, as a feature in enchanting environment.