CHAPTER VII
[NEWS OF THE PRISONER]
In some unreal dream, as it seemed, I presently found myself walking through the ruined garden in the darkness, with that shadowy figure of the woman I had loved beside me. It was a shadowy figure then, because there seemed to be nothing tangible about her; I should scarcely have been surprised if she had suddenly melted again into the shadows of the garden, and been lost to me. I found myself, broken trembling creature that I was, walking beside her fearfully, and seizing an opportunity now and then to touch her dress or her hand, to be sure that I was not dreaming. And presently it happened, happily and naturally enough, that we walked out of the place under the winter moonlight hand in hand.
I would not have you laugh at us; I would not have you think that we were old. True, I was old, in the sense that I was broken and forlorn and poor, with no one in the world to cling to, except this dear woman who had so mysteriously come back to me. So intangible had been my dreams of her at all times, that there was less of a shock to me in finding her grown older than I should have thought possible. I had pictured her always, first as being of the age I had known her as a girl, and later as having died young, and never having grown to womanhood at all. But now, as she walked beside me, I found, when I had the courage to steal a glance at her now and then, that she had the eyes of the Barbara of old, and that the face, though changed and strengthened, was only the face of the Barbara I had loved in all its lines and in all its maturer beauty. It seemed fitting, too, that we should meet like this, with the night and the silence to ourselves; fitting that we should turn naturally towards that wood in which we had met, and presently sit down there, side by side, on a fallen tree to talk. Such poor forlorn lovers we were, that I remember regretting I had no overcoat that I could put about her; and she laughing, in the way I remembered so well, and telling me that it did not matter.
My head was bare after my escape from the house by the window; I remember that she touched my grey hair softly with her hand for a moment before she began to speak.
"My dear, I came first to the prison on the day that I knew you were to be released; I had seen it mentioned in a newspaper. But I was too late; you had already gone. And I had waited so many years, in the hope that I might take your hand, and be the first to give you welcome back to the world."
"But they told me you were dead," I whispered. "They said you had—had died at sea."
"When I came to you for the last time, in that dreadful place where they were to kill you the next day, I strove hard to keep your brave words clearly before me, and to do what you had begged me to do. It was as though you had died young, and so had ended the poor broken story of our loves; so at least I told myself. I would not have you think, my dear, that I was callous; but you had lain down your life, and I could serve you best, and serve your memory best, by taking up mine as you would have had me live it. So I went away with my husband out into the world, and I strove hard to set aside all my memories, and all my hopes, and all my wishes; I was as a numbed thing, existing only, and striving to forget."
I looked into her eyes, and I held her hands; and it seemed as though the broken useless years dropped away from me, and that I sat there that night, cleansed and purified; I would not have changed places with any one in all the world. I had not a coin in my pocket, nor a friend in the world save this woman as forlorn as myself; but I would not have changed places with any man living that night.
"I heard, of course, that you were reprieved," she went on; "and although I was glad to feel that you still lived, it hurt me most to think that you, who loved the sun and the free air and the woods, were condemned to that death in life. But I strove always to keep my promise to you, and long after my child was born I lived with my husband, and took up my dull round of daily tasks. But by degrees a change came over Lucas Savell; he grew morose and distrustful, and only long afterwards did I understand what had changed him."