What was this news that had come to her as from a far country?—this blinding light, this burst of knowledge that had to do with the very springs of a man's nature, this fountain so full to some, so empty to others? She had been deceived, robbed. Hector Garret was Alice Boswell's—in life and death, Alice Boswell's.
This love, which she had known so slightly, measured so carelessly—oh, light, shallow heart!—had been rooted in his very vitals, had constrained him as a conqueror his captive, had been the very essence of the man until it spent itself on Alice Boswell's wild grave. He had come to her with a lie in his right hand, for he was bound and fettered in heart, or else but the blue, stiff corpse of a man dead within; he had betrayed her woman's right, her best, dearest, truest right, her call to love and be loved. Another might have wooed her as he had wooed Alice Boswell; to another she might have been the first, the only one! she knew now why she was no helpmeet, no friend for him; why his hand did not raise her to his eminence, his soul's breath did not blow upon hers, and create vigour, goodness, and grace to match his own. Deep had not cried unto deep: heart had not spoken to heart: the dry bones, the vacant form, the empty craving, were her portion; and out of such unnatural hollowness have arisen, once and again, deadly lust and sin.
Why had none stepped in between her and this cruel mockery and temptation? "Mother, mother, how could you be false to your trust? Were you, too, cheated and bereft of your due? left a cold, shrinking woman, withering, not suddenly, but for a whole lifetime?"
Leslie sat long weighing her burden, until a tap at the door and Bridget Kennedy's voice disturbed her. "Earlscraig is gone, madam; Master Hector is sitting alone with his thoughts in your room. May be, he is missing his cup of tea, or, if you please, madam, his lady's company that he is used to at this hour."
Leslie rose mechanically, walked out, and entered her drawing-room. What did he there, his eyes fixed on the broken turret of Earlscraig, defined clearly on the limited horizon, his memory hovering over the fate of fair Alice Boswell?
Was it horrible to be jealous of a dead woman? to wish herself in that ever-present grave, sacred to him as the holiest, though no priest blessed it, no house of God threw over it the shadow of the finger pointed to heaven—the cross that bore a world's Saviour? But that swift and glowing passage from life and light and love, such as his to darkness, forgetfulness—eternity. How could she have faced it? Bridget, her old enemy, had prayed she might be delivered from it, whatever her trials.
"Nigel Boswell is gone at last; he was an old playfellow, and fortune and he have been playing a losing game ever since," he said, in unsuspecting explanation, as he joined her where she sat in her favourite window.
She did not answer him; she was stunned, and sat gazing abstractedly on the wallflowers rendering golden the mossy court wall, or far away on the misty Otter sea. She thought he had relapsed into his reveries, was with the past, the spring-tide of his life, the passion of his early manhood, while she was a little school-girl tripping demurely and safely along the crowded Glasgow streets. If she had looked up at him she would have seen that he was observing her curiously—wondering where his young wife had acquired that serious brow, those fixed eyes.
"What are you thinking of, Leslie?"
"Nothing; I cannot tell," hastily and resolutely.