He had asked her no questions, and she had told him lies!
The only little point of comfort which she could wrest for herself from circumstances was the possibility that he had not chosen to burden his mind—full of tree and cloud forms, and such artistic lumber—with her story as she had related it to him. Was it likely that a man, with his strange and disconcerting capacity for the ignoring of details and all the minor facts of life, should have permitted anything so human and unimportant to make an impression on his mind? No, it had probably glided off him, while every mutation of the sunset they had watched together yesterday was indelibly fixed in his memory. Of what consequence were she and her trifling affairs in comparison? So she thought and hoped, in the new humility which her love for him had engendered in her.
Still, in spite of these halcyon days, it was impossible that she could entirely shut out the thought of the future. Things could not stay as they were. The stack of canvas umbrella covers, and packing cases, piled out of the way in all the four corners of the sitting-room, reminded the poor young woman only too painfully of the dies iræ, dies illa—when the autumn tints, beloved of amateurs, would begin to show and bear their indubitable message. The leaves would turn brown and fall, and the lover of Nature would pack up his colour box, and strap his easels together, and look out a train in Bradshaw, and order the trap over-night to take him to the station at Barnard Castle.
What should she say then? What should she do? He was everything to her, and she was nothing to him. She was the wife of Mortimer Elles, and her home was in Newcastle!
But it was borne in upon her that, come what might, she could never go back to Mortimer. The mere contemplation of a renewed term of life with him was terrible and impossible to her, now that she had known the greatest good, the highest development of which human nature was capable, in the person of this man in whose intimacy she was living.
There were times when she could not bear her own thoughts, when she would jump up and leave the room where Rivers sat composedly working, and, hatless and cloakless, run out into the moonlit road and even into the Park itself. The painter, in his absorption, would never even look up or seem to hear the panting breaths that betrayed her emotion.
Bitterly did she con this and other signs of his indifference, as she wandered deviously about the glades and alleys of the great demesne, now under the staring moonlight, now where the over-arching trees shut it hopelessly out and made walking a mere matter of outstretched hands and groping steps. Even the darksome yew grove—the haunt of the Lady of Mortham—had no terrors for her now. Love casts out fear; a woman in her state of mind has no horror of the supernatural.
One night, the most beautiful moonlight night of the whole year, she wandered far into the Park and along to the banks of the Greta, where it runs under the shadow of the cliffs crowned with fir trees, and the desolate tower of Mortham stands out against the sky behind them. She scrambled down the bank, on the hither side, to one of the little stretches of pebbly shore that line the stream here and there and stood wistfully gazing into its flow, her hands crossed at the back of her neck, a white lady, “mystic, wonderful.”
The further shore lay all in mysterious shadow, but at her feet was a sheet of rippling silver, with dark oily rocks, like islands or sleeping seals, breaking through its course here and there. She saw, in imagination, a drowned woman lying there in mid-stream, face upwards, caught among the snags and snares that clogged the shallows, and irradiated by the same moon rays that turned the brown water white.
“Look there!” she said, wildly, turning sharply round to Rivers, who was standing behind her. “Look! I see myself there!”