“Go away, or you will drive me daft!” said Lily. “He will just clear the board of every thing that’s on it and never think of me. Why should he, with such a fine appetite as he has? Do I want him to starve for me?” she cried, with a laugh. But the result was another fit of tears. In short, Lily was as silly as any girl could be on the day her lover left her. She was not even as she had been for a moment, and was bound to be again, a young wife astonished and disappointed at being left behind, not knowing how to account for this strange, new authority over her which had it in its power to change the whole current of her life. She had never looked at Ronald in that light or thought of him as a power over her, a judge, a law-giver, whose decisions were to be supreme. She was astonished to find herself subdued before him now, her own convictions put aside; but this was not the channel in which for the moment her thoughts were running. She was weeping for her lover, for the happiness that was over, for him who was away, and dreaming dreams to herself of how the coach might be stopped by the snow, or some accident happen that would still bring him back. She imagined to herself his step on the stair and the shriek of joy with which she would rush to welcome him. This was the subject of her thoughts, broken into occasionally by divergences to other points, by outbursts of astonishment, of disappointment, almost of resentment, but always returning as to the background and foundation of every thing. The other thoughts lay in waiting for her, biding their time. It was the dreadful loss, the blank, the void, the silence, that afflicted her now. Ronald gone, who for this week, which had been as years, as a whole life, her life, the real and true one, to which all the rest was only a preface and preliminary, had been her companion, almost herself! It was of this that her heart was full. Without him, what was Lily now? She had been often a weary, angry, dull, disappointed little girl before, but there were always breaks in which she felt herself, as she said, her own woman and was herself all the Lily there was. But now she had merged into another being; she was Lily no longer, but only a broken-off half of something different, something more important, all throbbing with enlarged and bigger life. This consciousness was enough for the girl to master during that endless, dreary, monotonous day.
CHAPTER XXIII
The next day after any thing, whether happiness or disaster, is different from the day on which the event took place. The secondary comes in to complicate and confuse the original question more or less, and the abstract ends under that compulsion. Nothing is exactly as it seems, nor, indeed, as it is; it takes a color from the next morning, however opaque that morning may be. This was especially the case with Lily, whom so many of these secondary thoughts had already visited, and who had now to go back from the dream of that eight days in which every thing had been put to flight by that extraordinary invasion of the new and unrealized which comes to every girl with her marriage, and amid which it is so difficult to keep the footing of ordinary life. She was that morning, however, not any longer the parted lover, the mourning bride, but again, more or less, “her own woman,” the creature, full of energy and life, and thoughts and purposes of her own, who had not blindly loved or worshipped, but to whom, at all times, it had been apparent that Ronald’s way of loving, though it was to her the only way, was not the way she would have chosen or which she would have adopted herself had she been the man. A very different man Lily would have made, much less prudent, no doubt, but how decisive in the beginning of that youthful career! how determined to have no secrets, but every thing as open as the day! to involve the woman beloved in no devious paths, but to preserve her name and her honor above all dictates of worldly wisdom! Lily would have had her lover vindicate her at once from her uncle’s tyranny. She would have had him provide the humble home for which she longed, without even suffering his lady to bear the ignominy of that banishment to the moor. And now! with what a flame of youthful love and hope Lily would have had him carry off his bride, snapping his fingers with a Highland shout at all the powers of evil, who would have had no chance to touch them in their honest love and honorable union. Oh, if she had been the man! Oh, if she could have showed him what to do!
And all these thoughts, intensified and increased, came back to Lily the day after her husband left her. She was not drooping and longing now for her departed lover. Her energies, her clear sense of what should have been, her objection to all that was, came back upon her like a flood. She sat no longer at the window gazing out upon the expanse of snow, which shrank more and more, and showed greater and blacker crevasses in its wide expanse every hour, but walked up and down the room, pausing now and then to poke the fire with energy, though the glowing peats were not adapted to that treatment, and flew in tiny morsels about, requiring Beenie’s swift and careful ministrations. Lily felt, however, for one thing, that her position was far better now for expounding her views than it had ever been. A girl cannot press upon her lover the necessity of action. She has to wait for him to take the first step, to urge it upon her, however strongly she may feel the pressure of circumstances, the inexpediency of delay. But now she could plead her own cause, she could make her own claim of right, her statement of what she thought best. She said to herself that she had never yet tried this way. She had been compelled to wait for him to do it, but perhaps it was no wrong thing in him, perhaps it was only exaggerated tenderness for her, desire to save her from privations, or what he thought privations, that had prevented any bolder action, and made him think first of all of saving her from any discomfort. It was possible to think that, and it was very possible to show him now that she cared for no discomfort, that her only desire was to be with him, that it was far, far better for Lily to meet the gaze of the world in her own little house, however small it might be, than hide in the solitude as if there was something about her that should be concealed. This thought made Lily’s countenance blaze like the glowing peat. Something about her that should be concealed! a secret hidden away in the heart of the moor, in the midst of the snow, which he, going away from her, would keep silent about, silent as if it were a shame! Lily threw herself into the chair beside her writing-table with impetuosity, feeling that not a moment should be lost in putting this impossible case before him and making her claims. She was no fair Rosamond, but his wife. A thing to be concealed? Oh, no, no! She would rather die.
In any case she would have written him a long letter, seizing the first possible moment of communicating with him, carrying out the first instinct of her heart to continue the long love-interview which had made this week the centre of all her days. But Lily threw even more than this into her letter. She said more, naturally, than she intended to say, and brought forth a hundred arguments, each more eloquent, more urgent than the other, to show cause why she should join him immediately, why she should not be left, nobody knowing any thing about her, in this Highland hermitage. The lines poured from her pen; she was herself so moved by her own pleas that she got up once or twice and walked about to dissipate the impulse which she had to set out at once, to walk if it were needful to Edinburgh, to claim her proper place. And it was not till the long, glowing, fervent letter was written that she paused a little and asked herself if Ronald had really only left her behind because it was impossible to get a house between the terms, if his first business was to look out for a house, so as to have it ready for her by the next term, by Whit-Sunday, was it right to argue with him and upbraid him as if he intended the separation to go on forever? Lily threw down her pen which she had dipped in fire—not the fire of anger, but of love just sharpened and pointed with a little indignation—and her countenance fell. No, if that were so, she must not address him in this heroic way. After all it was quite reasonable what he had said: it was extremely difficult to get a house between the terms. And perhaps he would not have been justified in engaging one at Michaelmas, before any thing was decided what to do. He could not have done that; and what, then, could he do but wait till Whit-Sunday? and, for a man like him, with his own ways of action, not, unfortunately, though she loved him, like Lily’s, it was perhaps natural that there should be no premature disclosure, that as they were parted by circumstances it should remain so, without taking the world into their confidence, or summoning Sir Robert to cast his niece who had deceived him out of the shelter which her husband did not think unbecoming for her now. Lily threw down her pen, making a splash of ink upon the table—not a large one, to spoil it, but a mark, which would always remind her of what she had done or had been about to do.
And then there fell a pause upon her spirit, and tears were the only relief for her. To take the heroic way, to walk to Edinburgh through the snow, or even to think of doing so, to pour forth an eloquent appeal against the cruel fate of her isolation and concealment as if it were to last forever, was an easier method than to wait patiently until Whit-Sunday and make the best of every thing, which would really be the wise thing; for what could Ronald do more than that which he could of course begin to do as soon as he arrived, to look for a house? And how could it have been expected of him when every thing was so vague, and he did not know what might happen, to have provided one, months in advance, on the mere chance that he could persuade her into that strange marriage, and the minister into doing it? It would be strange and embarrassing after that scene to see the minister again, and Lily fell a-wondering how Ronald had persuaded him, what he had said. Mr. Blythe was not a very amiable man, ready to do what was asked of him. He made objections about most things and hated trouble. But Ronald could persuade any body; he could wile a bird from the tree. And what a grand quality that was for an advocate! and how proud she would be hereafter to go to the court and hear him make his grand speeches. Perhaps now he would talk over some man that wanted to get rid of his house, and make him see that it would be better to do it now than to wait for the term. There was, indeed, nothing that Ronald could not persuade a man into if he tried. Lily felt that her own periods were more fiery, those eloquent sentences which her good sense had already condemned, but Ronald’s arguments were beyond reply, there was no getting the better of them. You might not be sure that they were always sound, you might feel that there was a flaw somewhere; but to find out what it was, or to get your answer properly formed, or to convict him of error was more than any one, certainly more than Lily, could do.
She had risen up, and was stretching her arms above her head in that natural protest against the languor and solitude which take the form of weariness, when she saw a dark speck approaching on the road, and rushed to the window with the wild hope, which she knew was quite vain, that it might by some possibility be Ronald coming back. But it was only a rural geeg from Kinloch-Rugas or some other hamlet, or one of the farms in the neighborhood, creeping up the road against the wind and the slippery, thawing snow, with a woman in it beside the driver undistinguishable in her wraps. While Lily looked out and wondered if by any chance it might be a visitor, Beenie came in with a look of importance. “Eh, Miss Lily, do you see who that is?” Robina said.
“It is a woman, that is all I know, and keen upon her business to come out on such a day.”
“Her business?” said Robina. “It’s the Manse geeg, and it’s Miss Eelen in it, and as far as I can tell she has nae business, but just to spy out, if she can, the nakedness of the land.”
“There is no nakedness in the land, and nothing to spy out!” cried Lily, with a flush. “Have we done any thing to be ashamed of that we should be feared of a neighbor’s eye?”