'I see that you think I am out of my wits!' she says, looking distrustfully at him; 'that I must be out of my wits to talk of sending you away—you who have been everything to me. Cannot you see that it is because I love you that I am sending you away? if I did not love you it would be nothing—no sacrifice!—it would be no use! But perhaps if I give up everything—everything I have in the world except him' (stretching out her hands, with a despairing gesture of pushing from herself every earthly good)—'perhaps then—then—God will spare him to me! perhaps He will not take him from me! It may be no good! He may take him all the same; but there is just the chance! say that you think it is a chance!'
But he cannot say so. There are very few words that he would not try to compel his lips to utter; but he dares not buoy her up with the hope that she can buy back her child by a frantic compact with the Most High. Her eyes drop despairingly from his face, not gaining the assent they have so agonisedly asked for; and she struggles dizzily to her feet.
'That is all—I had—to—tell you!' she says fiercely. 'I have nothing more to say!—nothing that need—need detain you here any longer. I must go back to him; he may be asking for me!—asking for me, and I not there! But you understand—you are sure that you understand? I have often sent you away before in joke, but I am not joking now' (poor soul! that, at least, is a needless assertion); 'I am in real earnest this time! I am not sending you away to-day only to send for you back again to-morrow; it is real earnest this time; it is for ever!—do you understand? For ever! say it after me, that I may be sure that you are making no mistake—for ever.'
And he, looking down into the agony of her sunk eyes, not permitted even to touch in farewell her clammy hand, echoes under his breath, 'For ever!'
CHAPTER XXII
'Das Herz wuchs ihm so sehnsuchtsvoll
Wie bei der Lichsten Gruss.'
For ever! All through the wintry day they hammer at his ears—those two small words that take up such a little space on a page, and yet cover eternity. There is nothing that does not say them to him. The hansom horse's four hoofs beat them out upon the iron-bound road; the locomotive snorts them at him; the dry winter wind sings them in his ears; Piccadilly's roar, and the tick of the clock on the chimney-piece of the room where he works in Downing Street, equally take their shape to him. For ever! They must always be solemn words, even though in the slackness of our loose vocabulary they are often fitted to periods no longer than ten minutes, than an hour, than six months. But one never quite forgets that they can stretch to the dimensions of the great sea that washes Time's little shores. For ever! At each point of his return journey there recurs to him the memory of some unkind thought that he had had of her on his way down. Here he had accused her of some paltry motive in sending for him! There he had protested against the dominion of her whims. Here again, he had groaned under the thought of having, within five days, to pass a second time this way in order to spend his compulsory Christmas with her.
Well, that Christmas is no longer compulsory—no longer possible even. He has his will. He may keep for himself that present which he had so grudged the trouble of choosing for her. For ever! Those two words are the doors that shut away into the irredeemable past that portion of his life in which she has shared. Only five years after all! He need not have grudged her only five years.