"It's Tinman! It's dear Tinman!" she said.
In the strangest fashion she had disengaged herself from her husband's arm, and was shaking my hands. We were saying the absurdest things to each other: I congratulating her, and wishing her well, and half laughing and half crying in my weakness and my joy; she murmuring over and over again that this was the best thing of all, to see me like this at such a time. And all about us the strange wondering faces pressing nearer.
And then before them all she raised herself on tiptoe, and kissed me on the cheek—yes, before them all! As she went out of the church, running a little eagerly for a step or two, to join her husband, who was smilingly waiting, she looked back at me, and waved her hand; and so was gone out into the sunlight, amidst a roar of cheering. I felt strangely alone; but that was, of course, inevitable. The Barbara I had loved had gone for ever out of my life; she had told me so, on that day when it had come to the parting of the ways for us. Each of us had done our part. I had been privileged to see the end that day, and now I must go out into the world, and live in loneliness just so many years as might be given to me. But I was no longer tired or hopeless; I had drunk deep of life, and although there were so many things I would have been glad to have had altered, there was yet so much that was better than I could have hoped. I would linger here for a little time, on this spring morning, and then would go on, to take up the quiet burden of my days.
I found my way back to the old house, and peered in at the gate. All was changed here now: the garden no longer neglected, and the house looking bright and fresh. There was no one about, and I crept in, and stood again on that terrace, looking into the room. There were bright flowers there, and the place was very different from what it had ever been before. I came away, and found my way into that wood that seemed to hold all my memories. I sat down there for the last time—reviewing, as it were, my life, and looking back to see the boy who had painted here among the trees, and had seen coming towards him, with a smile in her eyes, the Barbara of long ago.
And so it happened that I looked up presently, and saw coming through the wood the Barbara I loved: and it almost seemed, despite the passage of the years, that this was the Barbara I had always known, and who was unchanged. The heavy soiled garment of the years dropped away from me; I was again a man with hopes and longings; I suddenly realized how much this dear woman was to me, and how much we both might be, each to the other. I stood there, bareheaded in the sunlight, holding her hands, and looking into her eyes; and I was no longer old or tired; I faced life again, with the spring in my veins and in my heart.
"We are all alone, dear Tinman," she said, using that familiar name naturally. "I am the unknown woman, who has stood beside my husband's grave, and yet have not mourned for him; I am the woman who has stood in God's house to day, and seen my child married—just as I might have married poor Charlie Avaline, years and years ago. Such a strange life ours has been, my dear," she added softly; "it seems almost as though you and I are left alone together forgotten and unknown in the great world—with all our work done."
"But we came to the parting of the ways before, Barbara," I said; "there can be no going back now. God has been very good to me: I might never have seen you again; I might have died that shameful death twenty years ago. But I am a felon; I am branded with the brand of Cain; there is blood on my hands."
"Spilled for my sake!" she cried quickly, taking my hands, as she had done once before, and putting her lips to them. "And you lied to me, Charlie; you did not kill Olivant."
"I did not kill Olivant," I said; "but I am guilty, in that I set out to do it. Some one forestalled me: some one who has died a violent death, and paid that penalty. But that, too, was some one who loved you, in however poor a fashion. It was Jervis Fanshawe."
We talked there for a long time in the woods, and at last it seemed to me that the moment had come when I must part from her. For I would not link my life with hers; on that point I was resolute. Yet she clung to me, and told me what was in her heart.