There was not much else that he could do at this stage of courtship, knowing nothing of Rachel's circ.u.mstances in connection with Mr.

Kingston, and having had no definite a.s.surances of her disposition towards himself; but he did this persistently, until he became suddenly aware that Mrs. Hardy did not mean to admit him.

Then he wrote a short note to Mr. Gordon, containing certain instructions in the way of business, and an intimation that he might have to stay in town longer than he had antic.i.p.ated, and, therefore, was not to be calculated upon at present.

Having despatched which, he addressed himself to the matter he had in hand, with a quiet determination to carry it through, sooner or later, by some means.

It was not his way to plot and scheme clandestinely, but being driven to do it, he did it promptly and with vigour.

He wrote a long letter to Rachel, reviewing with delicate significance the position in which they had stood to one another on the day of their parting at Adelonga, and formally offering himself for her acceptance; and he begged her to appoint some time and place where, if she were willing, she could give herself and him an opportunity for coming to a mutual understanding.

This letter he did not put into the post, being naturally distrustful of Mrs. Hardy, but he carried it in his pocket ready for any chance that might enable him to deliver it with his own hands--for which chance he began to search with diligence in every place of public resort where Rachel would be likely to appear.

Rachel, in the meantime, was distracted with suspense and misery. She saw all possibilities of a legitimate meeting relentlessly and effectually circ.u.mvented.

She was kept under such strict surveillance that she did not even see her lover's face, except on one occasion, when she was at the opera, and when, sitting between her aunt and Mr. Kingston, she was afraid to lift her eyes to look at him.

She could do nothing in her own behalf, while she was uncertain of his intentions. She felt herself more and more hopelessly in the toils of her engagement, as day by day, Mr. Kingston--who yet had mysteriously changed somehow--became more and more obtuse to the state of her mind towards him, and more and more persistently affectionate and amiable, and as day by day, Mrs. Hardy, grown hard and unsympathetic, impressed more and more strongly upon her the fact that she was a penniless and friendless orphan who owed everything that she had to her.

And all the time she loathed the very sound of Mr. Kingston's voice and the very touch of his hand, with an unreasoning pa.s.sion of repugnance that she had never thought it possible she could feel for one who had been so kind to her; and as a natural consequence--or cause--she was consumed with a sleepless fever of expectation and longing for that other lover whom she loved.

But such a state of things could not last, and after all it came to an end much sooner than either of them expected.

There came a night when Mr. and Mrs. Hardy had to go to a stately dinner party which did not include young girls. A most lovely night it was, in perhaps the loveliest month of the year, when there was no need to put candles in the carriage lamps, and no need for a fire in the big green drawing-room, where between seven and eight o'clock Rachel was left to amuse herself, in apparent safety, until bed time. A young moon shone in at the open windows before the mellow daylight was gone, as Mrs. Hardy, in rustling silk and tinkling jewels, entered to say good-night.

The evening wind went whispering round the house, ruffling a thousand tufts of bougainvillea that embossed the outer wall, and breathing into the dim room the sweetness of early roses and the fresh fragrance of the sea.

To Rachel, ever afterwards, it was the most beautiful night that the world had known.

"Now, my dear, John will light the gas for you--two burners will do to-night, John--and you can practise your music undisturbed. Don't leave the windows open any longer; it will be chilly by and bye. And don't sit up late. Good-night."

"Good-night, auntie," responded Rachel.

She proffered the regulation kiss in an absent manner, nodded with a smile to her uncle, who was waiting outside, and stood on the threshold of a French window to watch the carriage until it pa.s.sed out of the gates and disappeared.

Then instead of going to practise her music, she went out and sat down on the top of one of the square pedestals that flanked the steps of the terrace upon which the window opened, and clasped her hands about her knees.

John left the window open for her, lit the gas and the piano candles, returned to find her still sitting in the same place, as if she had not stirred, and went away to make his own arrangements for a pleasant evening.

Half an hour later she was wandering about the garden, heedless of the chill that was creeping on with nightfall, and looking before her with eyes so full of dreams that they did not see where she was going to--gliding up and down the level terraces like a ghost in the dusky twilight, with the silver of the moonshine on her golden hair.

And then, by mere mechanical submission to the force of habit, she found herself presently at that back gate which overlooked "the house,"

leaning her arms upon the upper rail, and staring at the low ridges of gleaming wall a few dozen yards off, which were rising as it seemed to her, with the rapidity of magic from the foundations that had taken so long to do, the stony embodiment of a relentless fate.

It was very quiet there to-night. No swarms of carpenters, and bricklayers, and stonemasons; no idle boys gaping at them over the fence; no people walking and driving about the road.

She tried the gate, and found it locked; then she climbed lightly over it, and holding up her skirts, stole across the strip of arid waste that lay between it and the nucleus of the building which was once to have been her palace, and now could only be her prison-house, eager to discover anything she could that would indicate the real progress that was being made.

She threaded her course daintily through heaps of brick and stone and broken _debris_; she entered the skeleton house by its gaping porch, and she wandered about the labyrinth of its pa.s.sages and vestibules, feeling her way with cautious feet and outstretched hands, until she came to her own boudoir; and there she sat down on a joist of the flooring, and laid her face on her knees and cried.

The sweetness of the solitary night, quite as much as the sight of all those permanently-adjusted ground-floor door and window frames, melted her into these sudden tears, full as she was of the aching rapture of her love and trouble, which needed but a touch to overflow. The possibility of a human spectator of her emotion never for a moment occurred to her.

However, Mr. Roden Dalrymple had also taken it into his head to have an after-dinner walk in the moonlight, and happening for a very good reason, to be prowling about in this neighbourhood, he had seen the slender little figure gliding across the open s.p.a.ce between the back gate and the new building, and he had guessed in a moment whose it was.

And so, as Rachel sat with her feet in subterranean darkness, her hands clasping her knees just above the level of the floor that was to be, and her face hidden in her lap, she heard a sound, suggestive of midnight robbers and murderers, that for a moment paralysed her timid heart; and then a voice, calling her softly,

"Miss Fetherstonhaugh! Do not be frightened. It is only I--Roden Dalrymple."

He came in through the gap of the doorway, while she stared at him and held her breath; he stepped swiftly and lightly from joist to joist until he reached the corner where she was sitting.

Then he sat down beside her quietly, as if he were taking a place she had been keeping for him; and the next moment--with no question asked and no explanation given--they were sealing the most sacred of all contracts irrevocably, in the silence of the solemn night.

It was well for Rachel that, with all his faults, Roden Dalrymple was not the reprobate he was supposed to be, but a man of stainless honour, in whose keeping the welfare of an ignorant and imprudent girl was safe; for--from the day when she went into the conservatory with him in the first hours of their acquaintance, stranger as he was, and she the most modest of girls, simply because he asked her--she had laid herself, metaphorically, at his feet--too simple and single in all her aims and impulses not to love unreservedly when she began to love at all, too strong in her young enthusiasm for her own ideals to be hampered by doubts either of herself or him, too thoroughly natural and ingenuous to disguise her heart or to bend it to the yoke of conventional law and order.

Now she gave herself up at once, turning to meet his outstretched arms, lifting her face to his strong and eager kisses with a pa.s.sionate responsiveness and abandonment that, while it infinitely quickened his love and grat.i.tude, showed him plainly that all the responsibility of her future happiness would rest with him.

"Oh," she said, with a long sighing sob, "I have wanted you so!"

"Have you, indeed?" he replied, tightening his arms about her with a gesture that was more significant than speech. "My little love, you shall never want me any more, if I can help it."

These were the terms of their "initial marriage ceremony."

And it is just to Mr. Dalrymple to say that he not only never took the slightest advantage of the irregularities that she innocently allowed, but--at any rate, not until long afterwards--he never even saw them.

That they were candid and truthful in themselves and to one another was from the first the essential bond between them, otherwise unlike as they were; and to him the absence of the usual maidenly reticence and reluctance displayed on these occasions indicated, all circ.u.mstances considered, rather a finer delicacy of nature than the ordinary, and never the faintest suspicion that she held the treasures of love and womanhood cheaply, even for his sake.

Feeling no need of further explanation--understanding one another, by that subtle sense which defies a.n.a.lysis, that instinctive recognition of spiritual kinship which, in its early development, was to them what is called "love at first sight," but which had in it the germs of a true companionship and comradeship that might defy all the accidents of time and chance--they sat for a few blessed silent moments side by side, she with her young head leaning trustfully against his worn brown face, not wanting to speak, unwilling even to think of all the difficulties that lay in ambush around them, ready to break into this ineffable peace with the breaking of the silence; looking over a low window-sill before them into the quiet night, with grave and happy eyes--at Melbourne, lying in a glorified haze of twilight beneath them, and at the silver of the sea beyond.

CHAPTER IX.

ELEVEN P.M.

"Rachel," said Mr. Dalrymple presently, speaking her name as if he had had it in familiar use for years, "I suppose you have broken off with _him?_"

Rachel did not reply for a few seconds; he felt her trembling in his arms.

"Oh, forgive me," she whispered, turning her face a hair's-breadth nearer to his as he stooped to listen.

And then she told him all the story of her engagement, as far as her new experiences enabled her to read it, and all the circ.u.mstances which had combined to keep her still in captivity so long after she should have been free.

The simple narrative gave even him, who was rather inclined to make molehills of mountains, a sense of the difficulties of the situation, that kept him silent for a few minutes in unwonted perplexity of mind.

"How old are you?" he asked abruptly, at last.

"I shall be nineteen in three weeks," she answered.