"How long?" he asked; and it seemed almost as if he could not finish the sentence.

"Since the night of old Peggy's death. I suspected something, so I stole it."

"You suspected!" he interrupted quickly. "What could you suspect?"

Then he laughed bitterly. "I suppose you suspected I was the boy's father, and thought the knowledge would be useful. If I had been it would have been better." His hand holding the letter came down heavily on the mantelpiece as he rose in sudden pa.s.sion. "My G.o.d! what a devilish revenge!"

She gave a quick catch in her breath. She had been silent till now, but now it was time to begin--time to make him think.

"You forget that she repented--that she gave up her revenge. That is why I said nothing, Paul. I am a woman, too, and I know how she repented. I did not dare to speak--to disobey her dying wish; who has a right to do that, Paul?--no one."

"But the boy," he murmured, "the boy."

"The boy will not suffer. If you die he will have his rights, as his mother wished. If he were really your son he would not have Gleneira till then, and you can look after him. It is not as if he were in want, dear."

He sate listening, listening to that soft, persuasive voice, which had such a knack of following his every thought, and yet of leading them.

"I had no right to steal the letters, of course," it went on a little louder, "but I am not sorry; for others might not have understood, and so the poor thing's repentance would have come to naught. Now, no one knows but you and I. You who loved her, I who pity her; because I love you, Paul, as she loved you."

She came a step closer with wide-open, serious eyes, and touched him on the breast with her slender white hand. The faint perfume of jasmine which always lingered round her stole in on his senses familiarly, taking him back to many a past pleasure and kindness a.s.sociated with it, and, half unconsciously, his empty hand clasped hers; and so they stood looking, not at each other, but into the fire.

"So it is easy to fulfil her wish--her dying wish. You did her a wrong, Paul, in the old days, and you owe her reparation. She did not wish you to read the letter, remember; but that can be as if it had not been. Give it to me, dear! I would have burnt it before, as she would have wished it burnt, but I wanted you to know for certain what she had wished."

Her small, white hand was on his, the paper rustled and seemed to slip from his hold while he stood, as if mesmerised, looking into the fire.

It was all true--every word of it true.

"Give it to me, Paul. You are thinking of the boy; but we could bring him up, you and I, if you would have it so. Paul! This is my reward at last! I can do this for you, now that I am rich."

But still his fingers resisted faintly, and there was a pause, a long pause. Then the hand which lay in his seemed to slacken, to lie in his like a dead hand, and her voice came with a sob in its softness:

"Paul! do this for me, and I will ask no more. Paul! let me save you--save you and Marjory!"

It was her last plea. She had kept it back till now, hoping against hope, and, as she made it, she touched the highest point of self-forgetfulness it is possible for a woman to reach. But in touching it she struck a false note in the syren's song, and Paul Macleod's hand closed like a vice over his one tie to an honest life--the letter.

The name had roused him. "Marjory!" he echoed absently. Then he turned and looked at his companion compa.s.sionately, yet decisively. "You mean to be kind, Violet, but you don't understand," he said quietly; then raised her little slack hand, stooped to kiss it, and left her so, standing by the fire alone. She had played for her love boldly, skilfully, and she had lost. She had tried to save Paul for his own sake, and she had failed. Yet even so, the innate courage of the woman faced the facts without a tear, without a complaint.

"It is my own fault," she said, half aloud. "I ought to have burnt the letter long ago, but I was not meant for that sort of thing. My heart is too soft." Then she smiled a little bitterly. It was at the remembrance of Paul Macleod's a.s.sertion, "You do not understand!" If she did not understand him, who could?

CHAPTER XXVI.

Nearly a month had gone by since Marjory Carmichael had whispered to the darkness, "Come back to me, Paul, and we will forget our love."

The sudden awakening to the realities, not only of life but of her own nature, caused by his reckless avowal of love, had pa.s.sed, as all awakenings must, into calm acquiescence in the commonplace facts of consciousness. There was no denying of the truth possible to her clear sight, and as she sate on the last day of October, on the last day of holiday before she and little Paul set off together to make acquaintance with a new world, she laid down her pen in the middle of a sentence in the letter she was writing to Tom Kennedy, and looked out over the stormy whitecrested waves of the loch set in its rampart of grey, snow-powdered, mist-shrouded hills, and wondered how she could have been so blind for so long. Blind to half the great problems of life! And then, with a smile, infinitely sweeter than it used to be because infinitely stronger, she took up a letter which lay beside her, and leaning back in her chair began to read it over again, just as she had re-read a letter down by the river side three months before, on the day when her holiday began--on the day when she had first seen Paul Macleod.

But it was a very different letter from the one Dr. Kennedy had sent her then; for all unconsciously the girl, in the first bewilderment of her awakening, had stretched out her hands to him, as it were, for help, and he had given her what he could, smiling a trifle bitterly as he wrote to think how little that was. "You ask me to tell you the truth," she read, "but how can I when I do not know it myself? If I had, the world might have been different--for us both. Only this seems clear, that friendship is a bigger thing than love, unless they both grow from the same root, and then--I fancy, Mademoiselle Grands-serieux, that the botanists ought to characterise the product as a sport! It is rare enough--G.o.d knows! I have sate for hours over the puzzle, trying to get at the bottom of myself, only to come back to the old paradox that Love is not worth calling Love unless it is something which is not Love. And that is no solution. Pure and simple, unveiled of mist and sentiment, it is all too easy of explanation. It is ever-present, and must be so--it seems--till the end of all things.

Then there is--shall we call it the transcendental form conceivable only to those who recognise some innate, or almost innate, sense of order or beauty in mankind. That too, given this premise, is easy. I believe I understand it. I am sure you do. It is the hybrid of these two held up to our admiration, and believed in by the majority of cultivated people, which beats me altogether. Look round you, dear, and think for yourself. A man and a woman have mental sympathy with each other. What has that to do with marriage? A man and a woman are married. What has that to do with mental sympathy? The two things are not incompatibles. Heaven forbid! But have friendship and what the world calls love any real connection, and what part have they to play in marriage? That sounds like a conundrum, and perhaps it is as well, since we were getting too serious, and that is a fatal mistake when there is no answer to the riddle. But there is a sacrilegious little story, my dear, regarding the reasons for not enforcing celibacy on the clergy, which is not altogether irrelevant to our subject. Luther, I believe, is responsible for declaring that marriage is a 'discipline' not to be surpa.s.sed in spiritual efficacy; a discipline before which hair shirts and flagellations are sensual indulgence.

N.B.--Was Luther any relation of the Cornish man who said, 'Women was like pilchards; when 'ums bad 'ms bad, and when 'ms good they is but middlin'?' I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle G.S., but one must laugh--if one is not to cry. What if love were the mutual attraction of certain elements, which combined and neutralised in the children, would go to form a more useful compound of humanity? Would not this go further towards raising our instincts out of the mire than all the romance in the world? And then it would account, of course--since chemicals are apt to evolve heat in combining--for a good deal of friction in the married state, which in its turn must polish the sufferers! But as this theory canonises Mrs. Caudle, and makes wife-beating a virtue, perhaps we had better change the subject by saying, as we said at the beginning--friendship is a bigger thing than love, and so pa.s.s on to the lives we have to lead, love or no love."

So with kindly thought, and a plentiful humour irradiating every page, he went on to tell her of his work, of stirring scenes in that hand-to-hand fight with Death, the great enemy of Love, in which he lived. A tender, charming letter, such as his were always. Letters which none know how to write save those who, despising the control of time and s.p.a.ce, have learnt to lean over the edge of the world, and claim a part in some far-off life. Letters which, without one word of sentiment from beginning to end, leave both the writer's and reader's hearts full of a great kindliness and peace.

They set Marjory a thinking, as they were meant to do, and the result was good, since her clear common sense never failed her. Yet side by side with that common sense existed a certain fanciful idealism, which took the place of the former in matters beyond the limits of plain reason. And this, as she read, made her pause to wonder if Tom could be right, and the calm content which came to her from him, so different from the unrest which the mere thought of Paul produced, meant that they were too nearly akin to need neutralisation. Then she laid down the letter and took up the pen again, striving unconsciously to imitate his playful touch.

"No, Tom!" she wrote; "I am not growing morbid. I am not, as you call it, trying to measure my world with home-made imitations of the imperial quart; still, I do wish I knew what the cubit was! Then I would add it to my stature and rise superior--perhaps. If I had known what I know now when my holiday began would it have made any difference? If I had had a mother, if I had been brought up with other girls, should I have gone on as I did, using a wrong terminology? I will tell you something, Tom. What I thought was love in those old days is just what I feel for you, dear. Perhaps I might have thought so all my life if I had not met him. And now, if I meet him again, Tom, what will happen? I sit down before the proposition; but it is not to be solved like a problem in Euclid, because I have discovered that my heart and my brain are quite separate, and I used to think they were both a part of me. Don't tell me, please, that I am wrong.

Perhaps I am physiologically. I know all about that horrid little V-shaped spot in the _medulla oblongata_, isn't it, where a pin-point will stop Tears and Laughter, Love and Friendship for ever. What then?

Does it make it easier to understand why the heart beats, to know that we can stop its beating? I wish I knew! I wish I knew! I don't want it to beat, but it will. Oh! what a mercy it is that we two do not love each other!"

She laid down the pen as a knock came to the door.

"A strange shentlemen to see Miss Carmichael," said the new servant who had replaced the peccant Kirsty discovered--direful offence--in putting a dirty skimmer into the milk.

Now, in the country a "strange gentleman" generally resolves itself into the piano-tuner, so Marjory bade him be shown up with a certain calm impatience at the necessity for explaining that his services would not be wanted; then, the thread of her thoughts broken rudely, she sate waiting, her eyes fixed absently on the words, "that we two do not love each other!"

She looked up from them to see Paul Macleod standing at the door. He had come back to her!

Five minutes before she had asked, almost pa.s.sionately, of her friend what she would do in such case. Now there was but one answer.

"Paul!" Her outstretched hand sought his, as he stood tall and straight trying to master his emotion, to preserve the calm to which he had schooled himself through the long journey which had ended here--here, where he might once have found rest; here, where all, save such self-respect as apology might leave him, was lost for ever.

"Paul--Oh! how tired you look--how cold your hands are! Come, dear--come and warm yourself; you must be perished!"

He did not speak, perhaps because the h.o.a.r frost of pride which had chilled his eyes melted before the radiance of hers; and h.o.a.r frost is but water after all. So she drew him to the fire, and then, still holding one hand as if loth to lose touch of it, knelt on one knee to stir the peats to a brighter blaze.

"I'm so glad you have come back," she said, with a little tremble in her voice; "so glad!" And then she looked up suddenly into the face above her, surprised at the almost painful strength of his grip. For Paul Macleod's composure was almost gone, and he was struggling hard for self-control. What she saw kept her silent; but she bent towards him till her soft, warm cheek touched his hand caressingly. The action, with its tale of tender solicitude, its boundless sympathy, was too much for him. He drew in his breath hard, and resting his arm on the mantelpiece turned from her to hide his face upon it, and so escape the pity in her eyes.

And he had dreamed of something so different! Of something coldly just, reasonably reproachful! Without a word she had guessed, had _known_, that he must be free to come, because he _had_ come back.

"What is it, dear?" she asked softly, as she stood beside him. "Are you afraid that I am angry? Are you afraid that I care--about _that?_ Paul! I do not choose to care--I will not. Look at me, and you will see if that is not the truth!"

What he saw was a face soft with the pa.s.sion he knew so well--the pa.s.sion which lies so perilously close to self--which claims so much, and resents so easily. But it was radiant also, as with a white flame of cleansing fire, pitiless in its purity.

"What is it to me?" she went on, her voice ringing clearer. "What is it to any woman unless she stoops to care? Oh! I understand now, Paul--I understand things of which I never even dreamed before; things which have been in your life--things which might have been in mine, perhaps--G.o.d knows!--if I had been in your place. But they are no more to me than this--a grief, a regret, because they are a stain upon your past, as all wrong must be. They are no more to me than that, because I do not choose to count them more!"

So, with a smile in her eyes, and a quiver of pain on her lips, she raised her face to his and kissed him.

Thus neither humiliation nor forgiveness was allowed a part in this woman's reading of the Divine Comedy. Perhaps she was wrong, and yet no scorn, no righteous indignation, could have made Paul Macleod feel more acutely the gulf which lay between his past and hers. Between their futures also. They might be friends, but from that pure Love of hers he was for ever outcast, though she might not know it--though he might spend his life in trying to conceal the fact that he lived on a lower plane than she did. Why! the past was with him _now_, even at the touch of her lips. He loved her, as he had loved so often before.

"Marjory!" he cried pa.s.sionately, "I don't deserve it, but I can't miss it--if you will put up with me?"

She drew herself away, and looked at him with a half-tender, half-mocking expression.

"Put up with you? What else is there to be done now that you have come back to me?"

What else, indeed! She was right; it was he who had taken the responsibility, he who defied natural consequences in this dreaming of something beyond and above his past. He was not hardened enough to be blind to this, and the thought showed on his face.

"Come," she said consolingly, "sit down and tell me all about it--why you came back, I mean; I know why you went away."