"Oh," cried he, "what have I done?"

Stepping backward, he stood a few paces from her, his arms crossed, the glow on his face suddenly transcended by the look with which a man might regard a crime he had committed.

"What is it?" she cried, wickedly curious. The maple tree over her was a golden flame and her feet were on a carpet of gold. All around them the earth was heaped with palm-like sumac shrubs, scarlet, crimson, purple--dyed as it were, with blood.

"What have I done?" He held out his hands as if they had been stained.

"I have loved you, I have dared, without a thought, _without a thought for you_, to walk straight into all the--the--heaven of it."

Then he told her, in a word, that about himself which he thought she would despise; and she saw that he thought she heard it for the first time.

Lifting her eyebrows in pretty incredulity. "Not really?" she said.

"It is true," he cried with fierce emphasis.

At that she looked grave.

He had been trying to make her serious; but no sooner did he see her look of light and joy pa.s.s into a look of thought than he was filled with that sort of acute misery which differs from other sorrows as acute pain differs from duller aches.

"My darling," he said, his heart was wrung with the words--"my darling, if I have hurt you, I have almost killed myself." (Man that he was, he believed that his life must ebb in this pain.)

"Why?" she asked. "How?"

He went a step nearer her, but as it came to him every moment more clearly that he had deceived her, as he realised what he had gained and what he now thought to forego, his voice forsook him in his effort to speak. Words that he tried to say died on his lips.

But she saw that he had tried to say that because of it she should not marry him.

He tried again to speak and made better work of it. "This that has come to us--this love that has taken us both--you will say it is not enough to--to--"

She lifted up her face to him. Her cheeks were flushed; her eyes were full of light. "This that has come to us, Alec--" (At his name he came nearer yet) "this that has taken us both" (she faltered) "is enough."

He came near to her again; he took her hands into his; and all that he felt and all that she felt, pa.s.sed from his eyes to hers, from hers to his.

He said, "It seems like talking in church, but common things must be said and answered, and--Sophie--what will your father say?"

"I don't know," she said; but happiness made her playful; she stroked the sleeve of his coat, as if to touch it were of more interest to her.

"I will give him my fortune to make up, and come to you penniless."

"He won't consent," he urged.

There was still a honeyed carelessness in her voice and look. "At the great age to which I have attained," said she, "fathers don't interfere."

"What can I do or say," he said, "to make you consider?" for it seemed to him that her thoughts and voice came from her spellbound in some strange delight, as the murmur comes from a running stream, without meaning, except the meaning of all beautiful and happy things in G.o.d's world.

"What must I consider?"

"The shop--the trade."

"When you were a very young butcher, and first took to it, did you like it?"

"I wasn't squeamish," he said; and then he told her about his father.

After that he philosophised a little, telling something of the best that he conceived might be if men sought the highest ideal in lowly walks of life, instead of seeking to perform imperfectly some n.o.bler business. It was wonderful how much better he could speak to her than to his brother, but Sophia listened with such perfect a.s.sent that his sense of honour again smote him.

"Art thinking of it all, love?" he said.

"I was wondering what colour of ap.r.o.ns you wore, and if I must make them."

They began to walk home, pa.s.sing now under the sumac's palm-like canopy, and they saw the blue gleam of the singing river through red thickets.

Soon they came to a bit of open ground, all overgrown with bronzed bracken, and maidenhair sere and pink, and blue-eyed asters and golden-rod. So high and thick were the breeze-blown weeds that the only place to set the feet was a very narrow path. Here Sophia walked first, for they could not walk abreast, and as Alec watched her threading her way with light elastic step, he became afraid once more, and tried to break through her happy tranquillity.

"Dear love," he said, "I hope--"

"What now?" said she, for his tone was unrestful.

He trampled down flowers and ferns as he awkwardly tried to gain her side.

"You know, dear, I have a sort of feeling that I've perhaps just fascinated and entranced you--so that you are under a spell and don't consider, you know."

It was exactly what he meant, and he said it; but how merrily she laughed! Her happy laughter rang; the river laughed in answer, and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r clapped applause.

But Alec blushed very much and stumbled upon the tangled weeds.

"I only meant--I--I didn't mean--That is the way I feel fascinated by you, you know; and I suppose it might be the same--"

They walked on, she still advancing a few paces because she had the path, he r.e.t.a.r.ded because, in his attempt to come up with her, he was knee-deep in flowers. But after a minute, observing that he was hurt in his mind because of her laughter, she mocked him, laughing again, but turned the sunshine of her loving face full upon him as she did so.

"Most fascinating and entrancing of butchers!" quoth she.

With that as she entered another thicket of sumac trees, he caught and kissed her in its shade.

And there was one man who heard her words and saw his act, one who took in the full meaning of it even more clearly than they could, because they in their transport had not his clearness of vision. Robert Trenholme, coming to seek them, chanced in crossing this place, thick set with shrubs, to come near them unawares, and seeing them, and having at the sight no power in him to advance another step or speak a word, he let them pa.s.s joyously on their way towards home. It was not many moments before they had pa.s.sed off the scene, and he was left the only human actor in that happy wilderness where flower and leaf and bird, the blue firmament on high and the sparkling river, rejoiced together in the glory of light and colour.

Trenholme crossed the path and strode through flowery tangle and woody thicket like a giant in sudden strength, snapping all that offered to detain his feet. He sought, he knew not why, the murmur and the motion of the river; and where young trees stood thickest, as spearsmen to guard the loneliness of its bank, he sat down upon a rock and covered his face, as if even from the spirits of solitude and from his own consciousness he must hide. He thought of nothing: his soul within him was mad.

He had come out of his school not half an hour before, rejoicing more than any schoolboy going to play in the glorious weather. For him there was not too much light on the lovely autumn landscape; it was all a part of the peace that was within him and without, of the G.o.d he knew to be within him and without--for, out of his struggle for righteousness in small things, he had come back into that light which most men cannot see or believe. Just in so far as a man comes into that light he ceases to know himself as separate, but knows that he is a part of all men and all things, that his joy is the joy of all men, that their pain is his; therefore, as Trenholme desired the fulfilment of his own hopes, he desired that all hope in the world might find fruition. And because this day he saw--what is always true if we could but see it--that joy is a thousandfold greater than pain, the glory of the autumn seemed to him like a psalm of praise, and he gave thanks for all men.

Thus Trenholme had walked across the fields, into these groves--but now, as he sat by the river, all that, for the time, had pa.s.sed away, except as some indistinct memory of it maddened him. His heart was full of rage against his brother, rage too against the woman he loved; and with this rage warred most bitterly a self-loathing because he knew that his anger against them was unjust. She did not know, she had no cause to know, that she had darkened his whole life; but--what a _fool_ she was! What companionship could that thoughtless fellow give her? How he would drag her down! And _he_, too, could not know that he had better have killed his brother than done this thing. But any woman would have done for Alec; for himself there was only this one--only this one in the whole world. He judged his brother; any girl with a pretty face and a good heart would have done for that boisterous fellow--while for himself--"Oh G.o.d," he said, "it is hard."

Thus accusing and excusing these lovers, excusing and again accusing himself for his rage against them, he descended slowly into the depth of his trouble--for man, in his weakness, is so made that he can come at his worst suffering only by degrees. Yet when he had made this descent, the hope he had cherished for months and years lay utterly overthrown; it could not have been more dead had it been a hundred years in dying.

He had not known before how dear it was, yet he had known that it was dearer than all else, except that other hope with which we do not compare our desires for earthly good because we think it may exist beside them and grow thereby.

There are times when, to a man, time is not, when the life of years is gathered into indefinite moments; and after, when outward things claim again the exhausted mind, he wonders that the day is not further spent.

And Trenholme wondered at the length of that afternoon, when he observed it again and saw that the sun had not yet sunk low, and as he measured the shadows that the bright trees cast athwart the moving water, he was led away to think the thoughts that had been his when he had so lightly come into those gay autumn bowers. A swallow skimmed the wave with burnished wing; again he heard the breeze and the rapid current. They were the same; the movement and music were the same; G.o.d was still with him; was he so base as to withhold the thanksgiving that had been checked half uttered in his heart by the spring of that couchant sorrow?

_Then_ in the sum of life's blessings he had numbered that hope of his, and _now_ he had seen the perfect fruition of that hope in joy. It was not his own,--but was it not much to know that G.o.d had made such joy, had given it to man? Had he in love of G.o.d no honest praise to give for other men's mercies? none for the joy of this man who was his brother?

Across the murmur of the river he spoke words so familiar that they came to clothe the thought--

"We do give Thee most humble and hearty thanks for all Thy goodness and--loving kindness--to us--and to _all men_."