Gently and gravely, Lionel argued with her, but to no purpose. It is possible that his arguments were not very powerful ones; that they were not very logically enforced. Who could have resisted her loving, passionate plea? Not Lionel, whose heart, despite his outward show of resistance, went out half-way to meet hers, as Edith’s own instinct too surely told her.
Three days later they were married in the prison chapel. Mr. Hoskyns made a special journey to London and brought back the licence. One stipulation was made by Lionel—that the marriage should be kept a profound secret, and a profound secret it was kept. The witnesses were Mrs. Garside, Hoskyns, Mr. Dux, and the chief warder. Beyond these four, and the chaplain, the knowledge did not extend. Even the turnkeys, whose duty it was to attend to Lionel, had no suspicion of what had taken place.
Three weeks had come and gone since the marriage of Lionel and Edith when Tom Bristow first set foot inside the gaol.
CHAPTER XIII.
A DINNER AT PINCOTE.
Lionel Dering was blessed with one of those equable dispositions which predispose their owner to look always at the sunny side of everything; and even now, in prison, and with such a terrible accusation hanging over him, no one ever saw him downhearted or in any way distressed. There was about him a serenity, a quiet cheerfulness, which nothing seemed able to disturb; and when in the company of others he was usually as gay and animated as if the four walls of his cell had been those of his own study at Park Newton. The ordeal was, in any case, a very trying one; but it would have been infinitely more so but for the sweet offices of love and friendship which he owed in one case to his wife, and in the other to his friend. Either Edith or Tom saw him every day. But when all his visitors had gone, and night and silence had settled down on the grim old prison—silence so profound that but for the recurring voice of a distant clock, as it counted the hours slowly and solemnly, he could have fancied himself the last man left alive in the world—then it was that he felt his situation the most. He had been so used to an active, outdoor life, that he could not now tire himself sufficiently to sleep well.
It was these hours of darkness, when the rest of the world was abed, and the long, long hours of daylight in the early summer mornings before it was yet awake, which tried him more than anything else. At such times, when he was tired of reading—and he had never before read so much in so short a space of time—he could do nothing but lie back on his pallet, with his arms curled under his head, and think. The mornings were balmy, soft, and bright. Through the cell-casement, which he could open at will, he could hear the merry twittering of innumerable sparrows. He could see the slow shadows sliding, inch by inch, down the gray stone walls of the prison yard, as the sun rose higher in the sky. Now and then the sweet west wind brought him faint wafts of fragrance from the hay-slopes just outside the prison gates. Sometimes he could hear the barking of a dog on some far far-off farm, or the dull lowing of cattle; sounds which reminded him that the great world, with its life, and hopes, and fears, lay close around him, though he himself might have no part therein. At such moments he often felt that he would give half of all he was possessed of for an hour’s freedom outside those tomb-like walls—for one hour’s blessed freedom, with Edith by his side, to wander at their own sweet will through lane and coppice and by river’s brim, with the free air of heaven blowing around them, and nothing to bound their eyes but the dim horizon, lying like a purple ring on woods and meadows far away.
Little wonder that during these long, solitary hours a sense of depression, of melancholy even, would now and then take possession of him for a little while; that his mind was oppressed with vague forebodings of what that future, which was now drawing near with sure but unhasting footsteps, might possibly have in store for him. He had just won for himself the sweetest prize which this world had in its power to offer him, and his very soul shrank within him when he thought that he had won it only, perhaps, to lose it for ever in a few short weeks. Bitter, very bitter—despairing almost—grew his thoughts at such times; but he struggled bravely against them, and never let them master him for long. When the clock struck six, and the tramp of heavy feet was heard along the corridors, and the jingling of huge keys—when the warders were changed, and the little wicket in his cell door was opened and a cheerful voice said, “Good-morning, sir. Hope you have slept well,” Lionel’s cheery response would ring out, clear and full, “Good-morning, Jeavons. I’ve had an excellent night, thank you.” And Jeavons would go back to his mates and say, “Mr. Dering’s just wonderful. Always the same. Never out o’ sorts.”
Later on would come Hoskyns, and Edith, and Tom. It was impossible for Edith to visit the prison alone, and the lawyer would often make a pretence of having business with his client when he had none in reality, rather than withstand the piteous, pleading look which would spring to Edith’s eyes the moment he told her that there would be no occasion for him to visit the gaol that day. While he lives Hoskyns will never forget those pretty pictures of the lover-husband and his bride, as they sat together, hand in hand, in the grim old cell, comforting each other, strengthening each other, and drawing pictures of the happy future in store for them; deceiving each other with a make-believe gaiety; and hiding, with desperate earnestness, the terrible dread which lay lurking, like a foul witch in a cavern, low down in the heart of each—that, for them, the coming months might bring, not sunshine, flowers, and the joys of mutual love, but life-long separation and the unspeakable darkness that broods beneath the awful wings of Death.
On these occasions, Hoskyns never neglected to provide himself with a newspaper, and, buried behind the huge broadsheet of “The Times,” with spectacles poised on nose, he would go calmly on with his reading, leaving Lionel and Edith almost as much to themselves as though he had not been there. The sterling qualities of the old lawyer, and the thorough sincerity of his character, gradually forced themselves on the notice of Lionel and his wife, both of whom came, after a time, to regard him almost in the light of a second father, and to treat him with an affectionate familiarity which he was not slow to appreciate.
As Tom Bristow was turning the corner of Duxley High Street, one afternoon about three days after his arrival from London, he was met, face to face, by Squire Culpepper. The squire stopped and stared at Tom, but failed for the moment to recognize him.