“I should not ask that,” he said, hurriedly; “I should not ask that at all. If I could but see her for a moment, I would ask her to tell me everything she wanted, everything she demanded as conditions, and I would obey her. I will promise to do everything that she wishes.”
“If you saw her you could give her nothing but promises,” said Ingram. “Now, what if you were to try to do what you know she wishes, and then go to her?”
“You mean—” said Lavender, glancing up with another startled look on his face. “You don’t mean that I am to remain away from her a long time—go into banishment, as it were—and then some day come back to Sheila and beg her to forget all that happened long before?”
“I mean something very like that,” said Ingram, with composure. “I don’t know that it would be successful. I have no means of ascertaining what Sheila would think of such a project—whether she would think that she could ever live with you again.”
Lavender seemed fairly stunned by the possibility of Sheila’s resolving never to see him again, and began to recall what Ingram had many a time said about the strength of purpose she could show when occasion needed.
“If her faith in you is wholly destroyed, your case is hopeless. A woman may cling to her belief in a man through good report and evil report, but if she once loses it, she never recovers it. But there is this hope for you: I know very well that Sheila had a much more accurate notion of you than you ever had of her; and I happen to know, also, that at the very time when you were most deeply distressing her here in London, she held the firm conviction that your conduct toward her—your habits, your very self—would alter if you could only be persuaded to get out of the life you have been leading. That was true, at least up to the time of your leaving Brighton. She believed in you then. She believed that if you were to cut society altogether, and go and live a hardworking life somewhere, you would soon become once more the man she fell in love with up in Lewis. Perhaps she was mistaken: I don’t say anything about it myself.”
The terribly cool way in which Ingram talked—separating, defining, exhibiting, so that he and his companion should get as near as possible to what he believed to be the truth of the situation—was oddly in contrast with the blind and passionate yearning of the other for some glimpse of hope. His whole nature seemed to go out in a cry to Sheila that she would come back and give him a chance of atoning for the past. At length he rose. He looked strangely haggard, and his eyes scarcely seemed to see the things around him. “I must go home,” he said.
Ingram saw that he merely wanted to get outside and walk about in order to find some relief from this anxiety and unrest, and said: “You ought, I think, to stop here and go to bed. But if you would rather go home, I will walk up with you, if you like.”
When the two men went out the night air smelt sweet and moist, for rain had fallen, and the city trees were still dripping with the wet, and rustling in the wind. The weather had changed suddenly, and now, in the deep blue overhead, they knew the clouds were passing swiftly by. Was it the coming light of the morning that seemed to give depth and richness to that dark-blue vault, while the pavements of the streets and the houses grew vaguely distinct and gray? Suddenly, in turning the corner into Piccadilly, they saw the moon appear in a rift of those passing clouds, but it was not the moonlight that shed this pale and wan grayness down the lonely streets. It is just at this moment, when the dawn of the new day begins to tell, that a great city seems at its deadest; and in the profound silence and amid the strange transformations of the cold and growing light a man is thrown in upon himself, and holds communion with himself, as though he and his own thoughts were all that was left in the world. Not a word passed between the two men, and Lavender, keenly sensitive to all such impressions, and now and again shivering slightly, either from cold or nervous excitement, walked blindly along the deserted streets, seeing far other things than the tall houses and the drooping trees and the growing light of the sky.
It seemed to him at this moment that he was looking at Sheila’s funeral. There was a great stillness in that small house at Borvapost. There was a boat—Sheila’s own boat—down at the shore there, and there were two or three figures in black in it. The day was gray and rainy; the sea washed along the melancholy shores; the far hills were hidden in mist. And now he saw some people come out of the house into the rain, and the bronze and bearded men had oars with them, and on the crossed oars there was a coffin placed. They went down the hillside. They put the coffin in the stern of the boat, and in absolute silence, except for the wailing of the women, they pulled away down the dreary Loch Roag till they came to the island where the burial ground is. They carried the coffin up to that small enclosure, with its rank grass growing green and the rain falling on the rude stones and memorials. How often had he leaned on that low stone wall, and read the strange inscriptions in various tongues over the graves of mariners from distant countries who had met with their death on this rocky coast? Had not Sheila herself pointed out to him, with a sad air, how many of these memorials bore the words, “who was drowned;” and that, too, was the burden of the rudely spelt legends beginning “Heir rutt in Gott,” or “Her under hviler stovit,” and sometimes ending with the pathetic “Wunderschen ist unsre Hoffnung.” The fishermen brought the coffin to the newly-made grave, the women standing back a bit, old Scarlett Macdonald stroking Mairi’s hair, and bidding the girl control her frantic grief, though the old woman herself could hardly speak for her tears and lamentations. He could read the words “Sheila Mackenzie” on the small silver plate; she had been taken away from all association with him and his name. And who was this old man with the white hair and the white beard, whose hands were tightly clenched, and his lips firm, and a look as of death in the sunken and wild eyes? Mackenzie was gray a year before—