"Nay, you have told me enough. Your reticence is more significant than words," said Lavendale, rising and leaving the student hastily.
He went no further than the adjoining room, the old Gothic library, faintly lit at this hour by a wood fire, which had burnt low and was almost expiring. He seated himself by that lonely hearth in silence and darkness; sat brooding there, a prey to a kind of angry despair.
It was hard, it was hard, he told himself, a cruel sentence issued by the implacable Fates; hard and bitterly hard, now that his heart and mind were purified of all evil, now that he was free from sin, repentant of all his old follies, intent upon leading a good life and being of some use in his generation—hard, very hard, that the decree should go forth, "Thou shalt die in thy pride of life; thou shalt perish when thy heart is full of hope and love." The foreboding of evil was so strong upon him that he accepted the presage as it were a fiat that had gone forth. He struggled no longer against the despair, the conviction of doom. All was over. These brief hours of courtship, this blissful fever-dream was to be the end of all; and then must come the grave, to lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.
He sat for more than an hour in the darkness and silence. The faint gray twilight outside the long meadows faded to the thick gloom of wintry, night. He had flung on some fresh logs, and fitful sparks flashed out from these now and then, and filled the room with a bluish light that seemed almost sepulchral, as it were in unison with his thoughts of death. He sat brooding over the fire, with his elbows on his knees, staring at the slowly kindling logs. A ripple of laughter came upon his ear now and again from the distance. They were merry enough without him, hardly conscious of his absence, perhaps. Even she might forget him for the moment, now she had her adorer Bolingbroke to breathe honeyed words into her ear.
Would she forget him by and by, when all was done? Would she grieve for a little, and then be gay again, and marry some one else, and go dancing gaily down a long perspective of idle foolish fashionable years till she became even as Lady Polwhele, and took to white lead and ratafia, and quarrelling at cards and a led captain, and so on to unhonoured old age and grim death? He felt as if he could scarce trust her upon this planet without him, she was so light and frivolous a creature.
"She loves me passionately now, I know," he told himself; "she is mine, heart and mind and being, mine utterly, as though we two were moved by the same pulses, lived by the beat of one mutual heart; but these impassioned natures forget so easily. She will be dancing and masquing and flirting again before the grass can grow upon my grave."
He sat on till the logs had burnt and blazed and crumbled away on the hearth, and the fire was again just expiring. The clock struck eight. He had been brooding there for over two hours. He sprang to his feet suddenly, cold as death, great beads of sweat breaking out upon his forehead, and a strange tremor at his knees.
What was it—fainting or fear that so shook him? He turned almost as if to rush from the room in an agony of terror—and, lo! that strange soft light, that faint brightness he knew so well, floated in the distance yonder, just within the furthermost window.
It was the figure he had seen before, a woman's form dimly defined against the dark panelled wall, like a luminous cloud rather than an actual shape; and the voice he had heard before spoke again in accents so unearthly that it seemed less a voice than the faint moaning of the wind which fancy shaped into words and meaning:
"To-morrow, at midnight, Lavendale, thou shalt be as I am."