"I wish to beg your pardon for aught I may have said that was unwarrantable," he rejoined. "I had no right to reproach you when the fault of the past was mine."
Mrs. Chester came forth, and he held the gate open for them. But my lady noticed that he did not choose to see her hand when she held it out.
My lady gave a little toss to her head. If this was to be the end of platonic friendships, keep her from them in future.
And Robert Lake, a whole world of self-condemning bitterness in his face, leaned on the gate, and looked after them.
PART THE SECOND.
[CHAPTER XII.]
Coastdown.
Rushing through the streets of London, as if he were rushing for his life, went a gentleman in deep mourning. It was Robert Hunter. Very soon after we last saw her, he had followed the hearse that conveyed his wife to her long home in Katterley churchyard.
Putting aside his grief, his regret, his bitter repentance, her death made every difference to him. Had there been a child, the house and income would have remained his; being none, it all went from him. Of his own money but little remained: he had been extravagant during the brief period when he was Lieutenant Hunter, had spent right and left. One does not do these things without having to pay for it. Mrs. Chester, going over to offer a condoling visit, heard this, and spoke out her opinion with her usual want of reserve. She looked upon him as a man lost. "No," said he, "I am saved! I shall go to work now." "Hoping to redeem fortune?" she rejoined. "Yes," he said, "and something else besides."
Heavily lay the shadow of the past upon Robert Hunter. The drooping form of his loving and neglected wife, bright with hope once, mouldering in her grave now, was in his mind always; the years that he had wasted in frivolity, the money he had recklessly spent. Oh, the simpleton he was--as he thought now, looking back in his repentance. When he had become master of a good profession, why did he abandon it because a little money was left him? To become a gentleman amongst gentlemen, forsooth; to put away the soiling of his hands; to live a life of vanity and indolence. Heaven had recompensed him in its own just way: whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he reap. His soldiership was gone; his wife was gone; money, the greater portion of it, was gone. Nothing left to him but remembrance, and the ever-present, bitter sense of his folly. He was beginning life anew: he must go back to the bottom of the tree of his engineering profession, lower than where he had left off: he would so begin it and take up his work daily, and untiringly persevere in it, so as--Heaven helping him--to atone for the past. Not all the past. The wasted years were gone for ever; the gentle wife, whom he had surely helped to send to the grave, could not be recalled to earth. Not so much on his wife were his musings bent as on the career of work lying before him. He had so grieved for her in the days before and immediately after her death, that it seemed as though the sorrow had, in a degree, spent itself, and reaction set in. If his handicraft's best skill, indifference to privation, unflagging industry, could redeem the past idleness, he would surely redeem that. Not in a pecuniary point of view, it was not of that he thought, but in the far graver one of wasted life. His eyes were opening a little; he saw how offensive on High must be a life of mere idle indulgence; a waste of that precious time, short at the best, bestowed upon him to use. This, this was what he had resolved to atone for: Heaven helping him, he once more aspirated in the sad but resolute earnestness of his heart.