She did not intend to draw a confession on the false supposition that Bates had already told all the story, but this was the result. Eliza, with arms folded defiantly, stated such details of her conduct as she supposed, would render her repulsive, stated them badly, and evoked that feeling of repulsion that she was defying.

Sophia was too much roused to need time for thought. "I cannot condemn you, for I have done as bad a thing as you have done, and for the same reason," she cried.

Eliza looked at her, and faltered in her self-righteousness. "I don't believe it," she said rudely. She fell back a pace or two, and took to sorting the piles of white coverlets mechanically.

"You did what you did because of everything in the world that you wanted that you thought you could get that way; and, for the same reason, I once agreed to marry a man I didn't like. If you come to think of it, that was as horrid and unnatural; it is a worse thing to desecrate the life of a living man than the death of a dead one. I stand condemned as much as you, Eliza; but don't you go on now to add to one unnatural deed another as bad."

"Why did you do it?" asked Eliza, drawn, wondering, from the thought of herself.

"I thought I could not bear poverty and the crowd of children at home, and that fortune and rank would give me all I wanted; and the reason I didn't go through with it was that through his generosity I tasted all the advantages in gifts and social distinction before the wedding day, and I found it wasn't worth what I was giving for it, just as you will find some day that all you can gain in the way you are going now is not worth the disagreeableness, let alone the wrong, of the wrong-doing."

"You think that because you are high-minded," said Eliza, beginning again in a nervous way to sort the linen.

"So are you, Eliza." Miss Rexford wondered whether she was true or false in saying it, whether it was the merest flattery to gain an end or the generous conviction of her heart. She did not know. The most n.o.ble truths that we utter often seem to us doubtfully true.

Now Sophia felt that what Eliza had said was only the fact--that it was very sad that Mr. Bates should go ill and alone to his lonely home, but that it could not be helped. To whatever degree of repentance and new resolution Eliza might be brought, Sophia saw no way whatever of materially helping Bates; but she urged the girl to go and visit him, and say such kind and penitent things as might be in her power to say, before he set forth on his melancholy journey.

"No," said Eliza, "I won't go"; and this was all that could be obtained from her.

The visit was at an end. Sophia felt that it had been futile, and she did not overlook the rebuff to herself. With this personal affront rankling, and indignation that Eliza should still feel so resentful after all that had been urged on behalf of Bates, she made her way into the street.

She was feeling that life was a weary thing when she chanced, near the end of the village, to look back, and saw Alec Trenholme some way behind, but coming in the same direction. Having her report to give, she waited and brought him to her side.

Sophia told all that had just pa.s.sed, speaking with a restful feeling of confidence in him. She had never felt just this confidence in a man before; it sprang up from somewhere, she knew not where; probably from the union of her sense of failure and his strength. She even told him the a.n.a.logy she had drawn between Eliza's conduct and the mistake of her own life, alluding only to what all her little public knew of her deeds; but it seemed to him that she was telling what was sacred to her self-knowledge. He glanced at her often, and drank in all the pleasure of her beauty. He even noticed the simplicity of the cotton gown and leather belt, and the hat that was trimmed only with dried everlasting flowers, such as grew in every field. As she talked his cane struck sometimes a sharp pa.s.sionate blow among plumes of golden-rod that grew by their path, and snapped many a one.

The roadside gra.s.s was ragged. The wild plum shrubs by the fences were bronzed by September. In the fields the stubble was yellow and brown.

The scattered white houses were all agleam in the clear, cool sunshine.

As he listened, Alec Trenholme's feeling was not now wrought upon at all by what he was hearing of the girl who had stumbled in and out of his life in ghostly fashion. Her masquerade, with all its consequences, had brought him within near touch of another woman, whose personality at this hour overshadowed his mind to the exclusion of every other interest. He was capable only of thinking that Sophia was treating him as a well-known friend. The compunction suppressed within him culminated when, at her father's gate, Miss Rexford held out her hand for the good-bye grasp of his. The idea that he was playing a false part became intolerable. Impulsively he showed reluctance to take the hand.

"Miss Rexford, I--I'm afraid you think--"

Then he remembered the promise by which he was bound to let Robert tell his own story. Confused, he seemed to know nothing but that he must finish his sentence to satisfy the interrogation in her eyes.

"You think I am a gentleman like Robert. I am only a--"

"What?" she asked, looking upon him good-humouredly, as she would have looked upon a blundering boy.

"I am only a--a--cad, you know."

His face had an uncomfortable look, hot and red. She was puzzled, but the meaning that was in his thought did not enter hers. In a moment that romantic didacticism which was one of the strongest elements in her character had struck his strange words into its own music.

"Oh, Mr. Trenholme!" she cried; "do not so far outdo us all in the grace of confession. We are all willing to own ourselves sinners; but to confess to vulgarity, to be willing to admit that in us personally there is a vein of something vulgar, that, to our shame, we sometimes strike upon! Ah, people must be far n.o.bler than they are before that clause can be added to the General Confession!"

He looked at her, and hardly heard her words; but went on his way with eyes dazzled and heart tumultuous.

When at home he turned into the study, where his brother was still a prisoner. The autumn breeze and sunshine entered even into this domain of books and papers. The little garden was so brimful of bloom that it overflowed within the window-sill.

When he had loitered long enough to make believe that he had not come in for the sake of this speech, Alec said, "I'm going to the West--at least, when Bates is gone, I'll go; and, look here, I don't know that I'd say anything to these people if I were in your case. Don't feel any obligation to say anything on my account."

Princ.i.p.al Trenholme was at his writing-table. "Ah?" said he, prolonging the interrogation with benign inflection.

"Have you come to doubt the righteousness of your own conclusions?" But he did not discuss the subject further.

He was busy, for the students and masters of the college were to a.s.semble in a few days; yet he found time in a minute or two to ask idly, "Where have you been?"

"For one thing, I walked out from the village with Miss Rexford."

"And"--with eyes bent upon his writing--"what do you think of Miss Rexford?"

Never was question put with less suspicion; it was interesting to Robert only for the pleasure it gave him to p.r.o.nounce her name, not at all for any weight that he attached to the answer. And Alec answered him indifferently.

"She has a pretty face," said he, nearing the door.

"Yes," the other answered musingly, "yes; 'her face is one of G.o.d Almighty's wonders in a little compa.s.s.'"

But Alec had gone out, and did not hear the words nor see the dream of love that they brought into the other's eyes. There was still hope in that dream, the sort of hope that springs up again unawares from the ground where it has been slain.

CHAPTER XV.

It had not been continued resentment against Bates that had made Eliza refuse Miss Rexford's request; it was the memory of the kiss with which he had bade her good-bye. For two days she had been haunted by this memory, yet disregarded it, but when that night came, disturbed by Sophia's words, she locked out the world and took the thing to her heart to see of what stuff it was made.

Eliza lived her last interview with Bates over and over again, until she put out her light, and sat by her bedside alone in the darkness, and wondered at herself and at all things, for his farewell was like a lens through which she looked and the proportion of her world was changed.

There is strange fascination in looking at familiar scenes in unfamiliar aspect. Even little children know this when, from some swinging branch, they turn their heads downwards, and see, not their own field, but fairyland.

Eliza glanced at her past while her sight was yet distorted, it might be, or quickened to clearer vision, by a new pulse of feeling; and, arrested, glanced again and again until she looked clearly, steadily, at the retrospect. The lonely farm in the hills was again present to her eyes, the old woman, the father now dead, and this man. Bates, stern and opinionated, who had so constantly tutored her. Her mind went back, dwelling on details of that home-life; how Bates had ruled, commanded, praised, and chidden, and she had been indifferent to his rule until an hour of fear had turned indifference into hate. It was very strange to look at it all now, to lay it side by side with a lover's kiss and this same man her lover.

Perhaps it was a sense of new power that thrilled her so strangely. It needed no course of reasoning to tell her that she was mistress now, and he slave. His words had never conveyed it to her, but by this sign she knew it with the same sort of certainty we have that there is life in breath. She had sought power, but not this power. Of this dominion she had never dreamed, but she was not so paltry at heart but that it humbled her. She whispered to herself that she wished this had not been; and yet she knew that to herself she lied, for she would rather have obliterated all else in the universe than the moment in which Bates had said farewell. The universe held for her, as for everyone, just so much of the high and holy as she had opened her heart to; and, poor girl, her heart had been shut so that this caress of the man whose life had been nearly wrecked by her deed was the highest, holiest thing that had yet found entrance there, and it brought with it into the darkness of her heart, unrecognised but none the less there, the Heaven which is beyond all selfless love, the G.o.d who is its source. Other men might have proffered lavish affection in vain, but in this man's kiss, coming out of his humiliation and resignation, there breathed the power that moves the world.

She did not consider now whether Bates's suffering had been of his own making or hers. She was not now engaged in an exercise of repentance; compunction, if she felt it, came to her in a nervous tremor, a sob, a tear, not in intelligible thought. Her memory gave her pictures, and the rest was feeling--dumb, even within. She crouched upon the floor and leaned her head against the bedside. Dry, trembling sobs came at intervals, pa.s.sing over her as if some outside force had shaken and left her again; and sometimes, in the quiet of the interval, her lips smiled, but the darkness was around. Then, at length, came tranquillity. Her imagination, which had been strained to work at the bidding of memory, in weariness released itself from hard reality, and in a waking dream, touched, no doubt, into greater vividness by hovering hands of Sleep, she found temporary rest. Dreams partake of reality in that that which is and that which might be, are combined in their semblance of life.

Eliza saw the home she had so long hated and lived its life once more, but with this difference, that she, her new present self, was there, and into the old life she brought perforce what knowledge of the world's refinements she had gained in her year of freedom. The knowledge seemed to her much more important than it was, but such as it was, she saw it utilised in the log house, and the old way of life thereby changed, but changed the more because she, she the child Sissy, reigned there now as a queen. It was this idea of reigning, of power, that surely now made this dream--wild, impossible as she still felt it to be--pleasant. But, as she pondered, arranging small details as a stimulated imagination is wont to do, she became gradually conscious that if love were to reign long, the queen of love would be not only queen but slave, and, as by the inevitable action of a true balance, the slave of love would be a ruler too. This new conception, as it at first emerged, was not disagreeable. Her imagination worked on, mapping out days and months to her fascinated heart. Then Sleep came nearer, and turned the self-ordered dream into that which the dreamer mistook for reality. In that far-off home she saw all the bareness and roughness of the lonely life which, do what she would, she could not greatly alter; and there again Bates kissed her; she felt his touch in all its reality, and in her dream she measured the barrenness of the place against the knowledge that her love was his life.

The soul that lay dreaming in this way was the soul of a heavy-limbed, ungracious woman. She lay now on the floor in ungainly att.i.tude, and all the things that were about her in the darkness were of that commonest type with which ignorance with limited resource has essayed to imitate some false ideal of finery, and produced such articles as furniture daubed with painted flowers, jute carpets, and gowns beflounced and gaudy. Yet this soul, shut off from the world now by the curtain of sleep, was spoken to by an angel who blended his own being into recollections of the day, and treated with her concerning the life that is worthy and the life that is vain.

Eliza awoke with a start. She raised herself up stiff and chilly. She looked back upon her dream, at first with confusion and then with contempt. She lit her lamp and the present was around her again.

"No, I will not go," she said to herself. The words had been conned in her fit of rudeness to Sophia Rexford that day, but now they had a wider meaning.

All sweet influences sent out from Heaven to plead with human hearts withdrew for the time, for--such an awful thing is life--we have power to repulse G.o.d.

CHAPTER XVI.