| 'Plead guilty at man's bar, and go to judgment straight; At God's no other way remains to shun that fate.' Archbishop Trench. |
Captain Burnett had settled his business, and was returning again to Rutherford after more than a month's absence. He would willingly have lingered in town longer. Lonely as his bachelor quarters were, he felt he was safer in them than in his cosy rooms under his cousin's roof, where every hour of the day exposed him to some new trial, and where the part he played was daily becoming more difficult. In town he could at least be free; he had no need to mask his wretchedness, or to pretend that he was happy and at ease. No demands, trying to meet, were made on his sympathy; no innocently loving looks claimed a response. At least, the bare walls could tell no tales, if he sat for long hours brooding over a future that looked grim and desolate.
And he was a rich man. Heavens! what mockery! And yet how his friends would have crowded round him if they had known it! Comfort—nay, even luxury—was within his power; he could travel, build, add acre to acre; he could indulge in philanthropic schemes, ride any hobby. And yet, though he knew this, the thought of his gold seemed bitter as the apples of Sodom.
It had come too late. Ah, that was the sting—his poverty had been the gulf between him and happiness, and he had not dared to stretch his hand across it to the woman he loved; and now, when his opportunity had gone and he had lost her irrevocably, Fate had showered these golden gifts upon him, as though to bribe him as one bribes children with some gilded toy.
Was it a wonder that, as he sat trying to shape that dreary future of his, his heart was sore within him, and that now and again the thought crossed him that it might have been well for him if his battered body could have been laid to rest with those other brave fellows in Zululand? And then he remembered how Kester had once told him that he must be the happiest man in the world. He had never quite forgotten that boyish outburst.
'Don't you see the difference?' he could hear him say. 'I have got this pain to bear, and no good comes of it; it is just bearing, and nothing else. But you have suffered in saving other men's lives; it is a kind of ransom. It must be happiness to have a memory like that!'
Was he suffering for nothing now? Would any good to himself or others come from a pain so exquisite, so rife with torture—a pain so strongly impregnated with fear and doubt that he scarcely dared own it to himself? Only now and again those few bitter words would escape his lips:
'Oh, my darling, what a mistake! Will you ever find it out before it is too late?' And then, with a groan, he would answer, as though to himself: 'Never! never!'
Old habits are strong, and it was certainly absence of mind that made Captain Burnett take his usual third-class ticket; and he had seated himself and dismissed his porter before he bethought himself that the first-class compartment was now within his means.
Audrey had told him laughingly that such creature comforts were dear to him—that he was a man who loved the best of things, to whom the loaves and fishes of bare maintenance were not enough without adding to them the fine linen and dainty appendages of luxury; and he had not contradicted her. But, all the same, he knew that he would have been willing to live in poverty until his life's end if he could only have kept her beside him.