They have thrust away the irksome apparition that had officiously flitted between them. For such a ghost’s thin body there is no room between his heart and hers. Out of both those hearts all their former long-established, deep-rooted inhabitants are turned, driven by the flail of the one supreme scourge. In those hearts Honour had held her high court, Duty had wielded her sceptre, unselfish Family Affection been warmly nested. Now, of none of them is there a trace left in either consciousness. For neither of them does anything exist but the omnipotent primal instinct—the instinct that drove the first man and woman into each other’s throbbing arms.
It is not for long—not for more than a few moments—only for one kiss-length, that that mad, dumb, clinging oblivion endures. Then the old ejected law-givers begin to gather up their sceptres and return; boldly ejecting, in their turn, the furious rebel that had ousted them; and the two that God has not joined together stagger apart. As in the impulse of embrace neither was earlier or later than the other, so is the shock of disunion common and simultaneous. They find themselves standing apart, uncertainly staring at each other in the imperfect consciousness of an enormous joint crime. It was only a kiss—an utter, scorching, lover’s kiss, it is true—yet still only a kiss that has so seared their re-awakening consciences; but had their disloyalty gone to the extremest pitch of unfaithfulness, it could hardly have branded them with a deeper sense of guilt. Her white lips frame three scarcely audible words, which he yet hears—“This—day—week!”—and he whispers, in horrified ejaculation, “Rupert! Bill!”
There is a terrible silence—at least, it seems so to them—though the nightingale, scarcely scared, and having taken but a short flight to the branch of a youngling chestnut, is finishing his epithalamium with even bettered music. The reinstated judges have taken their seats, and are holding a dread assize.
“It is only I who am to blame!” says Lavinia, by-and-by, in a key a little above her former one. “You did really struggle. If I had helped you honestly, you would have pulled through; but I did not. I never really meant you to hold out! I see now that I meant it all along to happen! I meant you to kiss me! I thought—God forgive me!—that I should be able to bear my life better afterwards if you did!”
“If I had been honest,” he says hoarsely, “shouldn’t I have accepted your offer of taking me to the Rectory? You know you did offer. If I had meant honestly, should I have come here?” casting a glance of despairing reproach round at the blue and green and silver accessories to his fall—smiling water and curtsying sedge and sky-coloured blue-bells.
“But I brought you here!” cries the other culprit, in a heart-rending eagerness, of which he will not suffer her to have the monopoly—to assume all the weight of their “most mutual” lapse.
“It was a pity that Bill did not leave the Boers to finish me!”
Then there is silence again. This time it is the man who breaks it, though his tone is so low as to constitute scarcely an infringement of the crushing guilty stillness.
“And you will still marry him this day week?”
At that she veils her face with both hands. “What am I?” she says indistinctly, through the relief of their shield. “What have I become? I have lived for twenty-three years, and I never suspected that there was a bad woman inside me!”