“HAVE you—forgotten me—then?”
“Forgotten you!” cried Edgar.
Heaven help him!—he did not advance nor take her hands, which she held out, kept back by his honour and promise—till he saw that her eyes were full of tears, that her lips were quivering, unable to articulate anything more, and that her figure swayed slightly, as if tottering. Then all that was superficial went to the winds. He took her back through the half-lighted passage, supporting her tenderly, to Mr. Tottenham’s room. The door closed behind them, and Gussy turned to him with swimming eyes—eyes running over with tears and wistful happiness. She could not speak. She let him hold her, and looked up at him, all her heart in her face. Poor Edgar was seized upon at the same moment, all unprepared as he was, by that sudden gush of long-restrained feeling which carries all before it. “Is this how it is to be?” he said, no louder than a whisper, holding her fast and close, grasping her slender arm, as if she might still flee from him, or revolt from his touch. But Gussy had no mind to escape. Either she had nothing to say, or she was still too much shaken to attempt to say it. She let her head drop like a flower overcharged, and leaned on him and fell a-sobbing—fell on his neck, as the Bible says, though Gussy’s little figure fell short of that, and she only leaned as high as she could reach, resting there like a child. If ever a man came at a step out of purgatory, or worse, into Paradise, it was this man. Utterly alone half an hour ago, now companied so as all the world could not add to him. He did not try to stop her sobbing, but bent his head down upon hers, and I think for one moment let his own heart expand into something which was like a sob too—an inarticulate utterance of all this sudden rapture, unexpected, unlooked for, impossible as it was.
I do not know which was the first to come to themselves. It must have been Gussy, whose sobs had relieved her soul. She stirred within his arm, and lifted her head, and tried to withdraw from him.
“Not yet, not yet,” said Edgar. “Think how long I have wanted you, how long I have yearned for you; and that I have no right to you even now.”
“Right!” said Gussy, softly—“you have the only right—no one can have any right but you.”
“Is it so?—is it so? Say it again,” said Edgar. “Say that I am not a selfish hound, beguiling you; but that you will have it so. Say you will have it so! What I will is not the question—it is your will that is my law.”
“Do you know what you are saying—or have you turned a little foolish?” said the Gussy of old, with a laugh which was full of the tears with which her eyes were still shining and bright; and then she paused, and looking up at him, blushing, hazarded an inquiry—“Are you in love with me now?” she said.
“Now; and for how long?—three years—every day and all day long!” cried Edgar. “It could not do you any harm so far off. But I should not have dared to think of you so much if I had ever hoped for this.”
“Do not hold me so tight now,” said Gussy. “I shall not run away. Do you remember the last time—ah! we were not in love with each other then.”
“But loved each other—the difference is not very great,” he said, looking at her wistfully, making his eyes once more familiar with her face.
“Ah! there is a great difference,” said Gussy. “We were only, as you said, fond of each other; I began to feel it when you were gone. Tell me all that has happened since,” she said, suddenly—“everything! You said you had been coming to ask me that dreadful morning. We have belonged to each other ever since; and so much has happened to you. Tell me everything; I have a right to know.”
“Nothing has happened to me but the best of all things,” said Edgar, “and the worst. I have broken my word; I promised to your mother never to put myself in the way; I have disgraced myself, and I don’t care. And this has happened to me,” he said low in her ear, “my darling! Gussy, you are sure you know what you are doing? I am poor, ruined, with no prospects for the moment——”
“Don’t, please,” said Gussy, throwing back her head with the old pretty movement. “I suppose you don’t mean to be idle and lazy, and think me a burden; and I can make myself very useful, in a great many ways. Why should I have to think what I am doing more than I ought to have done three years ago, when you came to Thornleigh that morning? I had done my thinking then.”
“And, please God, you shall not repent of it!” cried the happy young man—“you shall not repent it, if I can help it. But your mother will not think so, darling; she will upbraid me with keeping you back—from better things.”
“That will be to insult me!” cried Gussy, flaming with hot, beautiful anger and shame. “Edgar, do you think I should have walked into your arms like this, not waiting to be asked, if I had not thought all this time that we have been as good as married these three years? Oh! what am I saying?” cried poor Gussy, overwhelmed with sudden confusion. It had seemed so natural, so matter-of-fact a statement to her—until she had said the words, and read a new significance in the glow of delight which flashed up in his eyes.
Is it necessary to follow this couple further into the foolishness of their mutual talk?—it reads badly on paper, and in cold blood. They had forgotten what the hour was, and most other things, when Mr. Tottenham, very weary, but satisfied, came suddenly into the room, with his head full of the Entertainment. His eyes were more worn than ever, but the lines of care under them had melted away, and a fatigued, half-imbecile smile of pleasure was hanging about his face. He was too much worn out to judge anyone—to be hard upon anyone that night. Fatigue and relief of mind had affected him like a genial, gentle intoxication of the spirit. He stopped short, startled, and perhaps shocked for the moment, when Edgar, and that white little figure beside him, rose hastily from the chairs, which had been so very near each other. I am afraid that, for the first moment, Mr. Tottenham felt a chill of dread that it was one of his own young ladies from the establishment. He did not speak, and they did not speak for some moments. Then, with an attempt at severity, Mr. Tottenham said,
“Gussy, is it possible? How should you have come here?”
“Oh! uncle, forgive us!” said Gussy, taking Edgar’s arm, and clinging to it, “and speak to mamma for us. I accepted him three years ago, Uncle Tom. He is the same man—or, rather, a far nicer man,” and here she gave a closer clasp to his arm, and dropped her voice for the moment, “only poor. Only poor!—does that make all the difference? Can you tell me any reason, Uncle Tottenham, why I should give him up, now he has come back?”
“My dear,” said Mr. Tottenham, alarmed yet conciliatory, “your mother—no, I don’t pretend I see it—your mother, Gussy, must be the best judge. Earnshaw, my dear fellow, was it not understood between us? I don’t blame you. I don’t say I wouldn’t have done the same; but was it not agreed between us? You should have given me fair warning, and she should never have come here.”
“I gave Lady Mary fair warning,” said Edgar, who felt himself ready at this moment to confront the whole world. “I promised to deny myself; but no power in the world should make me deny Gussy anything she pleased; and this is what she pleases, it appears,” he said, looking down upon her with glowing eyes. “A poor thing, sir, but her own—and she chooses it. I can give up my own will, but Gussy shall have her will, if I can get it for her. I gave Lady Mary fair warning; and then we met unawares.”
“And it was all my doing, please, uncle,” said Gussy, with a little curtsey. She was trembling with happiness, with agitation, with the mingled excitement and calm of great emotion; but still she could not shut out from herself the humour of the situation—“it was all my doing, please.”
“Ah! I see how it is,” said Mr. Tottenham. “You have been carried off, Earnshaw, and made a prey of against your will. Don’t ask me for my opinion, yes or no. Take what good you can of to-night, you will have a pleasant waking up, I promise you, to-morrow morning. The question is, in the meantime, how are you to get home? Every soul is gone, and my little brougham is waiting, with places for two only, at the door. Send that fellow away, and I’ll take you home to your mother.”
But poor Gussy had very little heart to send her recovered lover away. She clung to his arm, with a face like an April day, between smiles and tears.
“He says quite true. We shall have a dreadful morning,” she said, disconsolately. “When can you come, Edgar? I will say nothing till you come.”
As Gussy spoke there came suddenly back upon Edgar a reflection of all he had to do. Life had indeed come back to him all at once, her hands full of thorns and roses piled together. He fixed the time of his visit to Lady Augusta next morning, as he put Gussy into Mr. Tottenham’s brougham, and setting off himself at a great pace, arrived at Berkeley Square as soon as they did, and attended her to the well-known door. Gussy turned round on the threshold of the house where he had been once so joyfully received, but where his appearance now, he knew, would be regarded with horror and consternation, and waved her hand to him as he went away. But having done so, I am afraid her courage failed, and she stole away rapidly upstairs, and took refuge in her own room, and even put herself within the citadel of her bed.
“I came home with Uncle Tottenham in his brougham,” she said to Ada, who, half-alarmed, paid her a furtive visit, “and I am so tired and sleepy!”
Poor Gussy, she was safe for that night, but when morning came what was to become of her? So far from being sleepy, I do not believe that, between the excitement, the joy, and the terror, she closed her eyes that whole night.
Mr. Tottenham, too, got out of the brougham at Lady Augusta’s door; his own house was on the other side of the Square. He sent the carriage away, and took Edgar’s arm, and marched him solemnly along the damp pavement.
“Earnshaw, my dear fellow,” he said, in the deepest of sepulchral tones, “I am afraid you have been very imprudent. You will have a mauvais quart d’heure to-morrow.”
“I know it,” said Edgar, himself feeling somewhat alarmed, in the midst of his happiness.
“I am afraid—you ought not to have let her carry you off your feet in this way; you ought to have been wise for her and yourself too; you ought to have avoided any explanation. Mind, I don’t say that my feelings go with that sort of thing; but in common prudence—in justice to her——”
“Justice to her!” cried Edgar. “If she has been faithful for three years, do you think she is likely to change now? All that time not a word has passed between us; but you told me yourself she would not hear of—anything; that she spoke of retiring from the world. Would that be wiser or more prudent? Look here, nobody in the world has been so kind to me as you. I want you to understand me. A man may sacrifice his own happiness, but has he any right to sacrifice the woman he loves? It sounds vain, does it not?—but if she chooses to think this her happiness, am I to contradict her? I will do all that becomes a man,” cried Edgar, unconsciously adopting, in his excitement, the well-known words, “but do you mean to say it is a man’s duty to crush, and balk, and stand out against the woman he loves?”
“You are getting excited,” said Mr. Tottenham. “Speak lower, for heaven’s sake! Earnshaw; don’t let poor Mary hear of it to-night.”
There was something in the tone in which he said poor Mary, with a profound comic pathos, as if his wife would be the chief sufferer, which almost overcame Edgar’s gravity. Poor Mr. Tottenham was weak with his own sufferings, and with the blessed sense that he had got over them for the moment.
“What a help you were to me this afternoon,” he said, “though I daresay your mind was full of other things. Nothing would have settled into place, and we should have had a failure instead of a great success but for you. You think it was a great success? Everybody said so. And your poor lady, Earnshaw—your—friend—what of her? Is it as bad as you feared?”
“It is as bad as it is possible to be,” said Edgar, suddenly sobered. “I must ask further indulgence from you, I fear, to see a very bad business to an end.”
“You mean, a few days’ freedom? Yes, certainly; perhaps it might be as well in every way. And money—are you sure you have money? Perhaps it is just as well you did not come to the Square, though they were ready for you. Do you come with me to-night?”
“I am at my old rooms,” said Edgar. “Now that the Entertainment is over, I shall not return till my business is done—or not then, if you think it best.”
“Nothing of the sort!” cried his friend—“only till it is broken to poor Mary,” he added, once more lachrymose. “But, Earnshaw, poor fellow, I feel for you. You’ll let me know what Augusta says?”
And Mr. Tottenham opened his door with his latch-key, and crept upstairs like a criminal. He was terrified for his wife, to whom he felt this bad news must be broken with all the precaution possible; and though he could not prevent his own thoughts from straying into a weak-minded sympathy with the lovers, he did not feel at all sure that she would share his sentiments.
“Mary, at heart, is a dreadful little aristocrat,” he said to himself, as he lingered in his dressing-room to avoid her questions; not knowing that Lady Mary’s was the rash hand which had set this train of inflammables first alight.
Next morning—ah! next morning, there was the rub!—Edgar would have to face Lady Augusta, and Gussy her mother, and Mr. Tottenham, who felt himself by this time an accomplice, his justly indignant wife; besides that the latter unfortunate gentleman had also to go to the shop, and face the resignations offered to himself, and deadly feuds raised amongst his “assistants,” by the preliminaries of last night. In the meantime, all the culprits tried hard not to think of the terrible moment that awaited them, and I think the lovers succeeded. Lovers have the best of it in such emergencies; the enchanted ground of recollection and imagination to which they can return being more utterly severed from the common world than any other refuge.
The members of the party who remained longest up were Lady Augusta and Ada, who sat over the fire in the mother’s bed-room, and discussed everything with a generally satisfied and cheerful tone in their communings.
“Gussy came home with Uncle Tottenham in his brougham,” said Ada. “She has gone to bed. She was out in her district a long time this morning, and I think she is very tired to-night.”
“Oh, her district!” cried Lady Augusta. “I like girls to think of the poor, my dear—you know I do—I never oppose anything in reason; but why Gussy should work like a slave, spoiling her hands and complexion, and exposing herself in all weathers for the sake of her district! And it is not as if she had no opportunities. I wish you would speak to her, Ada. She ought to marry, if it were only for the sake of the boys; and why she is so obstinate, I cannot conceive.”
“Mamma, don’t say so—you know well enough why,” said Ada quietly. “I don’t say you should give in to her; but at least you know.”
“Well, I must say I think my daughters have been hard upon me,” said Lady Augusta, with a sigh—“even you, my darling—though I can’t find it in my heart to blame you. But, to change the subject, did you notice, Ada, how well Harry was looking? Dear fellow! he has got over his little troubles with your father. Tottenham’s has done him good; he always got on well with Mary and your odd, good uncle. Harry is so good-hearted and so simple-minded, he can get on with anybody; and I quite feel that I had a good inspiration,” said Lady Augusta, with a significant nod of her head, “when I sent him there. I am sure it has been for everybody’s good.”
“In what way, mamma?” said Ada, who was not at all so confident in Harry’s powers.
“Well, dear, he has been on the spot,” said Lady Augusta; “he has exercised an excellent influence. When poor Edgar, poor dear fellow, came up to me to-night, I could not think what to do for the best, for I expected Gussy to appear any moment; and even Mary and Beatrice, had they seen him, would have made an unnecessary fuss. But he took the hint at my first glance. I can only believe it was dear Harry’s doing, showing him the utter hopelessness—Poor fellow!” said Lady Augusta, putting her handkerchief to her eyes. “Oh! my dear, how inscrutable are the ways of Providence! Had things been ordered otherwise, what a comfort he might have been to us—what a help!”
“When you like him so well yourself, mamma,” said gentle Ada, “you should understand poor Gussy’s feelings, who was always encouraged to think of him—till the change came.”
“That is just what I say, dear,” said Lady Augusta; “if things had been ordered otherwise! We can’t change the arrangements of Providence, however much we may regret them. But at least it is a great comfort about dear Harry. How well he was looking!—and how kind and affectionate! I almost felt as if he were a boy again, just come from school, and so glad to see his people. It was by far the greatest pleasure I had to-night.”
And so this unsuspecting woman went to bed. She had a good night, for she was not afraid of the morrow, dismal as were the tidings it was fated to bring to her maternal ear.