It was true that she had heard Austin Colborne talked of amongst her church-going acquaintance at Graybridge; but it was quite untrue that she had ever felt the faintest desire to hear him preach. Had not her whole life been bounded by a magic circle, of which Roland Lansdell was the resplendent centre?
CHAPTER XXVII.
"AND NOW I LIVE, AND NOW MY LIFE IS DONE!"
George Gilbert accepted his wife's explanation of her prolonged absence on that March afternoon. She had carried her books to Thurston's Crag, and had sat there reading, while the time slipped by unawares, and it was too late to come back to dinner; and so she had bethought herself that there was evening service at Hurstonleigh during Passion-week, and she might hear Mr. Colborne preach. George Gilbert received this explanation as he would have received any other statement from the lips in whose truth he believed. But Mrs. Jeffson treated her young mistress with a stately politeness that wounded Isabel to the quick. She endured it very meekly, however; for she felt that she had been wicked, and that all her sufferings were the fruit of her own sin. She stayed at home for the rest of the week, except when she attended the Good-Friday's services at Graybridge church with her husband; and on Sunday afternoon she persuaded George to accompany her to Hurstonleigh. She was making her feeble effort to be good; and if the enthusiasm awakened in her breast by Mr. Colborne's preaching died out a little after she left the church, there was at the worst something left which made her a better woman than she had been before. But did she forget Roland Lansdell all this time? No; with bitter anguish and regret she thought of the man who had been as powerless to comprehend her as he was intellectually her superior.
"He knows so much, and yet did not know that I was not a wicked woman," she thought, in simple wonder. She did not understand Roland's sceptical manner of looking at everything, which could perceive no palpable distinction between wrong and right. She could not comprehend that this man had believed himself justified in what he had done.
But she thought of him incessantly. The image of his pale reproachful face—so pale, so bitterly reproachful—never left her mental vision. The sound of his voice bidding her leave him was perpetually in her ears. He had loved her: yes; however deep his guilt, he had loved her, and had wept because of her. There were times when the memory of his tears, flashing back upon her suddenly, nearly swept away all her natural purity, her earnest desire to be good; there were times when she wanted to go to him and fall at his feet, crying out, "Oh, what am I, that my life should be counted against your sorrow? How can it matter what becomes of me, if you are happy?"
There were times when the thought of Roland Lansdell's sorrow overcame every other thought in Isabel Gilbert's mind. Until the day when he had thrown himself upon the ground in a sudden passion of grief, she had never realized the possibility of his being unhappy because of her. For him to love her in a patronizing far-off kind of manner was very much. Was it not the condescension of a demigod, who smiles upon some earthly creature? Was it not a reversal of the story of Diana and Endymion? It was not the goddess, but the god, who came down to earth. But that he should love her desperately and passionately, and be grief-stricken because he could not win her for his own,—this was a stupendous fact, almost beyond Isabel Gilbert's comprehension. Sometimes she thought he was only the wicked squire who pretends to be very much in earnest in the first act, and flings aside his victim with scorn and contumely in the second. Sometimes the whole truth burst upon her, sudden as a thunder-clap, and she felt that she had indeed done Roland Lansdell a great and cruel wrong.
And where was he all this time—the man who had judged Isabel Gilbert by a common standard, and had believed her quite ready to answer to his summons whenever he chose to call her to his side? Who shall tell the bitter sinful story of his grief and passion? Never once in all his anger against Lady Gwendoline Pomphrey, when she jilted him for the sake of young Lord Heatherland, had he felt so desperate a rage, so deep an indignation, as that which now possessed him when he thought of Isabel Gilbert. Wounded in his pride, his vanity; shaken in the self-confidence peculiar to a man of the world; he could not all at once forgive this woman who had so entirely duped and deceived him. He was mad with mingled anger and disappointment when he thought of the story of the last twelve-month. The bitterness of all his struggles with himself; his heroic resolutions—young and fresh in the early morning, old and grey and wasted before the brief day was done—came back to him; and he laughed aloud to think how useless all those perplexities and hesitations had been, when the obstacle, the real resistance, to his sinful yearnings was here—here, in the shape of a simple woman's will.