"Happy--never! Happiness and I are parted; henceforth our ways are far asunder. Let me go," he said, turning towards the side where the boat he had come in was waiting for him, "and if you can do what you say, if you can take me with you, let me know to-morrow after you have seen their Lordships. I shall be ready ere long."
"Farewell," said Geoffrey, with one hand grasping that of Granger, the other on his arm--and on his face the look of noble compassion that not often, but sometimes, passes between man and man--"farewell! To-morrow you shall hear from me--and--fear not. We sail together as comrades yet. I know it. Feel it."
Whatever Lewis Granger had to do to free himself from the hateful life which he had lived for the last few months was quickly done; and, ere another day had passed, he--in spite of protestations and remonstrances from the man whom he served--had cast that life behind him for ever. But still there remained one other thing to do, a journey to make.
He took the coach as the afternoon drew on, and so proceeded some dozen miles into the heart of the country, when, quitting it, he made his way on foot towards a village lying a mile or two from a great town. A little village that, here, rose upon a slight hill and was surmounted by an old church built of flint stones which, in the late March gloom of evening, stood up hoar and grim. And, striding through the village in which now lights were beginning to twinkle through the diamond-paned windows of thatched cottages, Lewis Granger made his way to the wicket-gate that opened into the churchyard, and so round to the farther side, and to a grave--a grave over which was a stone, having inscribed on it the words that told how, very suddenly, the Lady Hortensia Granger had died two years before.
"Ay," her son murmured to himself, as he stood there in the desolate place and felt the night wind rising over the flat country around. "Ay. Suddenly! The blow killed her as it fell--perhaps in God's mercy. Yet, if I could have seen her ere she went--surely, surely, she must have believed my vows that I was innocent. And now, she can never know."
That is the bitterness of it! The bitterness that those who have gone can never know what we would have told them had we not been too late. That that which has happened after they have gone can never be told now. And such bitterness had come to the racked heart of Lewis Granger: the grief and misery of knowing that, of the only two creatures in the world whom he could love, the one had died of horror engendered by belief in his shame; the other had not died, but she, too, had believed.
"Oh, God!" he muttered, standing there in the swift-coming darkness, "if they could only have trusted me; if they could have waited patiently in that trust."
A bitter cry this from an overcharged heart, yet one that has found an echo in thousands of others, and in other circumstances. "If they would only have had faith in us: would only have waited patiently in that faith!" Or, better still, if we who erred and felt and suffered had not scorned to justify ourselves in their eyes; had not defied the present and trusted to the future to right us, and had not taught ourselves to laugh at doubts and be willing to love and lose and leave it to the morrow to make amends. The morrow that is never to be; the future that is never to come! For there is neither future nor morrow on this earth for the loved ones whose ears are dead and cold, and cannot hear our bitter plaint--nor ever any future for us either. The word has not been said--and it is too late! Too late! and only because that word, which would have righted all, has not been uttered. We were innocent, and scorned to proclaim our innocence; we loved and cloaked our love with assumed indifference, with pretended infidelity; we worshipped, and were ashamed to acknowledge our worship. And, now, those are gone who hungered for the avowal, and to whom it would have sounded as the sweetest music ever heard, and we are left, and--again!--it is too late.