Vera Nevill

by Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

It was not pleasant, of course, to be reviled and scolded, to be questioned and marvelled at, to be treated like a naughty child in disgrace; and then, whenever she went out, to feel herself tabooed by her acquaintances as a young woman who had behaved very disgracefully; or else to be stared at as a natural curiosity by persons whom she hardly knew.

But she lived through all this bravely. There was a certain amount of unnatural excitement which kept up her courage and enabled her to face it. It was no more than what she had expected. The glow of her love and her impulse of self-sacrifice were still upon her; her nerves had been strung to the uttermost, and she felt strong in the knowledge of the justice and the right of her own conduct.

But by-and-by all this died away. Sir John left the neighbourhood; people got tired of talking about her broken-off marriage; there was no longer any occasion for her to be brave and steadfast. Life began to resume for her its normal aspect, the aspect which it had worn in the old days before Sir John had ever come down to Kynaston, or ever found her day-dreaming in the churchyard upon Farmer Crupps' family sarcophagus. The tongue of the sour-tempered old lady, snapping and snarling at her with more than the bitterness of old, and the suppressed sighs and mournful demeanour of her sister, whose sympathy and companionship she had now completely forfeited, and who went about the house with a face of resigned woe and the censure of an ever implied rebuke in her voice and manner.

Only the vicar took her part somewhat. "Let her alone," he said, sometimes, to his wife and mother; "she must have had a better reason than we any of us know of; the girl is suffering quite enough—leave her alone."

And she was suffering. The life that she had doomed herself to was almost unbearable to her. The everlasting round of parish work and parish talk, the poor people and the coal-clubs—it was what she had come back to. She had been lifted for a short time out of it all, and a new life, congenial to her tastes and to her nature, had opened out before her; and yet with her own hands she had shut the door upon this brighter prospect, and had left herself out in the darkness, to go back to that life of dull monotony which she hated.

And what had she gained by it? What single advantage had she reaped out of her sacrificed life? Was Maurice any nearer to her—was he not hopelessly divided from her—helplessly out of her reach? She knew nothing of him, no word concerning him reached her ears: a great blank was before her. When she went over the past again and again in her mind, she could not well see what good thing could ever come to her from what she had done. There were moments indeed when the whole story of her broken engagement seemed to her like the wild delusion of madness. She had had no intention of acknowledging her love to Maurice when she had gone up to the station to see him off; she had only meant to see him once more, to hold his hand for one instant, to speak a few kind words; to wish him God speed. She asked herself now what had possessed her that she had not been able to preserve the self-control of affectionate friendship when the unfortunate accident of her being taken on in the train with him had left her entirely alone in his society. She did not go the length of regretting what she had done for his sake; but she did acknowledge to herself that she had been led away by the magnetism of his presence and by the strange and unexpected chance which had thus left her alone with him into saying and doing things which in a calmer moment she would not have been betrayed into.

For a few kisses—for the joy of telling him that his love was returned—for a short moment of delirious and transient happiness, and alas! for nothing more—she had thrown away her life!

She had behaved hardly and cruelly to a good man who loved her, and whose heart she had half broken, and she had lost a great many very excellent and satisfactory things.

And Maurice was no nearer to her. With his own lips he had told her that he could not marry her. There had been mention, indeed, of that problematical term of five years, in which he had bound himself to await Mrs. Romer's pleasure—but, even had Mrs. Romer not existed, it was plain that Maurice was the last man in the world to take advantage of a woman's weakness in order to supplant his brother in her heart.

Instinctively Vera felt that Maurice must be no less miserable than herself; that his regret for what had happened between them must be as great as her own, and his remorse far greater. They were, indeed, neither of them blameless in the matter; for, if it was Maurice who had first spoken of his love to his brother's promised wife, it was Vera who had made that irrevocable step along the road of her destiny from which no going back was now possible.