When the train moved off, he stood on the platform, looking after the carriage which contained his wife; and as the speed increased, Heather saw a look come over his countenance which filled her with so terrible an alarm, that she cried out in a moment, “Alick, I must go back to Arthur! there is something the matter! I ought never to have come!”
All in vain, they tried to combat her determination; at the first station where the express stopped, Heather alighted, resolved to return to town. She would not hear of Alick travelling with her. “No,” she said; “if he be in any trouble, I shall be better to remain alone with him; if not, I will go down to you by the first train on Monday morning. I promise, Alick, faithfully! Do not try to prevent my going home,” she pleaded; “remember, once before I wanted to turn back, and Arthur would not let me!”
Which last argument, proving unanswerable, with heavy hearts they allowed her to have her own way, and she went into the waiting-room, where she stopped for an hour, until the up express appeared in sight, when she took her seat, together with some other passengers, and was soon tearing back to London, under the glare of the afternoon sun. At the terminus she took a cab for Norton Folgate, from whence she walked on to Silk Street. She had no need to ring the bell, for one of the men coming out at the moment, afforded her entrance, without attracting, in any way, attention to her return.
“I fear I have done a very foolish thing,” she thought, as she stepped inside the gateway, and any one else might have thought the same, for Arthur had complained of neither ache nor pain; he had been in good spirits all the morning; he had faithfully promised to come down through the week; and, but for that expression of hopeless, helpless, blank despair in his face as the train swept out of the station, Heather would have gone away happy, and Arthur’s fate proved different.
As it was, he had traversed the road back from Waterloo a miserable and a wretched man.
He had brought much grief to Heather, he would bring no more. He had been tempted, and he had fallen; he had been pressed for money, and he had “borrowed”—that was the way he put it to himself—a few hundreds from Mr. Lukin, and he had vainly striven to replace those hundreds, and now Mr. Lukin was coming to inspect the books, and a worse thing than poverty—disgrace! was without in the street, waiting to cross their threshold.
But Heather should never know this; no man, nor no woman, should ever say a Dudley of Berrie Down had committed a felony. There was one way of escape, and his feeble mind clutched hold of that poor straw eagerly: one way—he would take care of himself, and Alick would take care of Heather!
CHAPTER XII.
THE BITTERNESS OF DEATH.
Once inside the house, Heather, all in a flutter, ran up to her own room, and asked herself why she had returned. Even now—even with the consciousness on her that she had done a very foolish thing, at which Arthur would be naturally vexed—she felt she could not have gone on; that the journey, with, that awful dread weighing her down, would have been one of pain instead of pleasure; that it would be far more a holiday to her—far and away more, to stay behind with her husband—her poor, careworn, miserable husband—than to travel through the loveliest scenery on earth.
She had told Alick it was a feeling, a foolish though uncontrollable feeling, which made her turn back; but she would have spoken more correctly had she said it was the love of her heart—that love which is stronger than death, more constant than sorrow.