CHAPTER XXVIII
The dinner is over—the first tête-à-tête dinner that John and Peggy have ever shared. To dine tête-à-tête with her in her own still house, amid her old and homely surroundings, with the summer evening tossing them in its lavish perfumes through the wide-opened windows, would have seemed to him, a month ago, the realisation of his fairest and most hopeless dream. But in their translation into the bald language of reality—the jejune prose of fact—our dreams have a way of losing their finer essence. It has escaped, without our being able to tell whither or by what channel. Over both a sort of wet blanket has fallen. Try as he may, Talbot's temper cannot recover from the poignant disappointment of his lost last evening; and try as she may—broken in, as she is, by a lifetime's habit of self-sacrifice—Peggy cannot hinder the lump from rising in her throat, and the tears from crowding into her eyes, at the reflection that her own hand has cut off, and flung away, the blossoms of these final crowning hours. How many things she had saved to say to him on this last evening—things too tender for her shamefacedness to utter, save under the justification of an imminent severance—things that he would have liked to have heard all through these days, but that she had laid up in the storehouse of her heart as too close and sacred for aught but to sweeten their parting! How can she say them now across a dinner-table, with Sarah coming out and in, Prue sending peevish messages to her, a score of trivial interruptions forbidding any but the most banal talk? It was only with her head on her love's breast, in the dusk of the starshine, that she could ever have found courage to utter them. When will they be uttered now? The present, the brave solid present, is our own, to caress or misuse; but who dares say to the future, that formless form wrapped in uncertain gray, 'Thou art mine'?
And now the dinner is over, and they have separated, with spurious coldness. Peggy has vanished upstairs to her sister, and Talbot is left to employ the hours of his last evening as he best may. It is true that Margaret has eagerly begged him to take possession of house and garden, and has held out tearful hopes of snatching here and there a moment from Prue's sick exactions to give him. But his ireful restlessness will not allow him to accept this concession. It would be worse to be within apparent reach of her, yet just beyond her eye and touch, than to be quite outside her domain. He tells her so, half harshly; and opening the gate into the park, takes himself and his ill-temper to the oaks and the deer for consolation.
At first he walks along over the dew-freshened sward, under the isolated oak giants, or between the more gregarious beeches and limes of spinny and copse, without seeing them. He has no eyes, save those angry inward ones that are turned upon his own disappointment. His last evening!—his last evening! If it had been any but the last! Henceforth, in retrospect, this holiday of his will take all its colour from this bitter last evening. It is the end that stamps anything as bad or good. Oh, cruel Peggy! He has had so few really good hours in his life; and now she has ruthlessly robbed him of his best. And for what?
With the answer which he is compelled to give himself to this question comes his first dawn of consolation. Certainly to no personal gratification has she sacrificed him. He can hardly, in his most aggrieved moments, picture her as better amused than himself as she stoops—with the tears called up by his ill-tempered words scarcely dried upon her cheek—over her equally ill-tempered invalid, bathing her forehead, holding her jealous hands.
Poor Peggy! He will go back at once, and beg her pardon. But no. The consciousness of his being hanging wrathfully about will only further complicate her difficulties. He will take a lesson out of her book, and efface himself wholly for this one evening, even though it is the last. The last in one sense, but in another——?
He has sat down on a felled trunk, stripped of its branches, but not yet removed by the wood-cutter's cart. The hawthorn comes in âcre whiffs to him. His heart, though he is alone for the whole evening—though he will probably have to go back to his alehouse without one more glimpse of her damask-textured face, gives a great bound. The last? For him and her there will be no last evening until—for God, who has given him so much, will surely give him, too, the supreme boon to die first—until, bending over him as she now bends over Prue, her voice and her hands smooth his passage to the easy grave.
The revulsion of feeling from his earlier ill-humour, produced by this thought, brings the moisture to his eyes. What is this parting in comparison with that six-months-ago one—when he had taken leave of her with no rational hope of ever having his eyes enriched by her again—when he had been afraid to trust his tongue to any speech, lest it should drift into tendernesses he had believed for ever prohibited to it? That parting in the walled garden! Why should not he go thither now, so that, surrounded by the mute witnesses of his former despair, he may the better gauge the extent of his new felicity? The idea, once conceived, approves itself so instantly to his imagination that he starts up; and, exchanging his former purposeless saunter for a quick walk, sets off in the direction of the Manor gardens.
The evening is falling, in late May's best serenity, weighted with the innocent sweetness of country odours. The deer—their mottled sides growing indistinct—are browsing wakefully among the bracken. The throstles have reached their song's last verse.
He has gained the pleasure-grounds, just as the vanguard of the stars take possession of the emptied sky. He hastens along, almost as hurriedly as if it were to a rendezvous with the real Peggy, instead of with the six-months-old memory of her, that he were speeding; between the burnished laurels; past the fresh-blown splendours of the great rhododendron-beds, on fire with red, and pale with cream and blush and lilac; narcissus and may taking his nostrils by storm as he brushes past them to his goal, the still walled garden.