A Devotee Part 12

With a sudden revulsion of feeling, she sprang to her feet, and put on her hat and shoes. Then she braved the spring, and went swiftly out.

A great tranquillity had fallen upon Mr. Loftus. He had made up his mind. After a turn along the terrace, he and Crack went into the little wood near the gardens, and sat down under the pink horse-chestnut-tree, just blushing into flower. It would have been difficult to put the arrangement into words, but there was a tacit understanding between the husband and wife that when Mr. Loftus sat under that particular tree he did not mind being interrupted. Sibyl generally fluttered out to him after he had been there a few minutes, though the wood was out of sight of the windows. And he waited for her to come to him now.

Spring had returned at last. But you might have walked through the wood and not known she was there: have seen only the naked trees, and the gray twigs of the alder, bleached white where the rabbits had bitten them in the frost. But if you had stopped to listen and look as Mr.

Loftus did, you would have seen and heard her; seen her in the blue haze, and the mystery of change that lurked among the gray twigs, and in the rare primroses among the brown leaves; heard her in the persistent double-tongue of the chiff-chaff, and, not near at hand, but two trees away, in the ripple of the goldfinch, with a little question at the end of it. Is it a hint of immortality, that haunting desire and expectation of happiness which comes with the primroses, that longing for some future year when the spring shall bring with it no heartache, the autumn no contrition; of another year, somewhere in the future, when the ills of life will be done away? Mr. Loftus looked straight in front of him, and his face took an expression as of one whose eyes are on a goal where even patience itself, so visible in every line of his quiet face, will at last with other burdens be laid aside.

She saw him before he saw her, as she came towards him. Her heart went out to him wistfully and pa.s.sionately by turns. She longed to turn to him as a young wife turns to a young husband, and cry her heart out on his breast, and be petted, and caressed, and comforted. But she dared not. Whatever besides she was ignorant of, she had learnt certain things about her husband, and one of them was that she must never show her devotion unasked. And she was seldom asked. Her life was a constant repression of its greatest, its only real affection.

As she came towards him he roused himself and smiled at her. She sat down by him in silence. He had a single primrose in the b.u.t.tonhole of his coat, and he took it out and drew it very gently through the Russian embroidery on her bodice.

'When I was young, Sibyl,' he said, 'I was convinced, and the conviction has never wholly left me, that flowers are G.o.d's thoughts which He sows broadcast in the hearts of all alike. But we will have none of them, and they drop unheeded to the ground. But the faithful earth receives them--thoughts despised and rejected of us--and nurses them in her bosom, and they come forth transfigured. And that is why, when we see them again, we love them so much, and feel akin to them.'

Her locked hands trembled on her knee.

'It must have been a beautiful thought that could turn into a lily,' he went on, noting, but ignoring, her emotion. 'I wonder, if it had fallen into a poet's heart, what it would have grown into. Nothing more beautiful, I think. And I know the primroses are first love. I have felt sure of that always. I wonder, my Sibyl, when there is so much in your heart for me, that there are any left to come out in the woods; but there are a few, you see, among the brown leaves.'

'They will soon be over,' said Sibyl, turning her head away.

'Yes,' said Mr. Loftus, with a gentleness which was new to Sibyl, and he was always gentle. 'They will die presently, as first love dies. But nevertheless it is a beautiful gift while it lasts, and we must not grieve because, like the primroses, it cannot last in flower _for ever_.

I have lived through so many feelings, Sibyl, I have seen so many die which seemed immortal, that I have long since ceased to count on the permanence of any.'

He leant towards her, and for the first time he took her slender hands and kissed them. It was as if he were readjusting his position towards her, rea.s.suring her of his trust and confidence and sympathy, supporting her in some great trouble. She leaned her forehead against his shoulder, and a sense of comfort came across her desolation, as if she were leaning her faint soul against his soul. He put his arm round her, and drew her closer to him.

'My darling!' he said, and there was an emotion in his voice which she had never heard in it before. Her hat had slipped off, and he pa.s.sed his hand very tenderly over her hair.

Sibyl's over-strained nerves relaxed. Some of the craving of her heart and its long yearning was stilled by the touch of his hand. Ah! he loved her, after all--certainly he loved her. Doll was right, after all.

How foolish she had been to cry all night! Certainly he loved her.

She could not speak. She could not weep. She could only lean against him. She had never known him like this before. It was this that she had always wanted, all her life, long before she had ever met him.

'You have been so good to me,' he went on, 'from the first day of our married life when I was ill. Do you remember? And I know that your dear love and kindness will not fail me while I live. I thank and bless you for all you have given me, your whole spring of primroses; and now that spring is pa.s.sing, as it must, Sibyl, as it must, not by your fault, take comfort, and when other feelings come into your heart, as they have come in, do not reproach yourself, do not cut me to the heart by grieving, but remember that I understand, and that my love and honour and grat.i.tude can never change towards you, and that I too was young once: as young as--Doll, and there is no need for you and him to be so miserable. It will only be--like a--long engagement.'

As the drift of his words gradually became clear to her, Sibyl insensibly shrank back as from an abyss before her feet. But in another moment she took in their whole meaning. She pushed him from her with sudden violence, and stood before him, her hands clenched, her eyes blazing, her slender figure shaking with pa.s.sion.

'How dare you!' she stammered. 'How dare you insult me?'

He put out his hand feebly, and she struck it down.

'What is Doll to me?' she went on, 'to me, _your wife_! Oh, will you never, never understand that I love you, that I worship you, that I care for nothing in the whole world but you, and that I cried all night because you married me out of pity?' Sibyl wrung her hands. 'Oh! how dared you do it, how dared you swear to love me before G.o.d, if you did not, if you could not? I am too miserable. I cannot bear it--I cannot bear it!'

He sat like one stunned. His hand went to his heart.

In a moment her arms were round him, and his head was on her shoulder.

'Forgive,' he repeated over and over again, between the long-drawn gasps which shook him from head to foot.

And then the battle for life began.

She found his little flask in his pocket, and managed to make him swallow the contents.

He struggled, but she upheld him. Her strength was as the strength of ten.

At last, all in a moment, the struggle ceased, and a light came into his fixed eyes of awe and thankfulness, and--was it joy?

He did not move. He did not speak. His whole being seemed absorbed in that of some vast enfolding presence.

She called him wildly by name.

He trembled, and his troubled eyes, with all the light blown out of them, wandered back to seek hers. Death looked at her through them. He saw her as across a gulf. He recognised her. He remembered. He had hoped that when he came to die it might be quietly, without a scene, but it was not to be. He made a last effort.

'Not for pity--for----' he gasped, his ebbing breath winnowing the air.

But Death cut short the lie faltering on his lips, and his head fell suddenly forward on her breast. She held him closely to her, murmuring incoherent words of love and tenderness, such as she had never dared to speak while he had ears to hear.

How long she had knelt beside him, holding him in her arms, the frightened servants, who at last found them after sunset, never knew.

And when they came to lay him in his coffin, they saw on one of the thin folded hands a faint blue mark, as from a blow.

POSTSCRIPT.

Sibyl was an inconsolable widow. Her grief reached a depth which placed her beyond the succour of human sympathy, and Lady Pierpoint, who had lost her young husband in her youth, was felt to take a superficial view of Sibyl's bereavement.

She shut herself up at Wilderleigh for a year and refused comfort, and then suddenly married Doll, the only man except Mr. Gresley whom she had allowed to see her during her widowhood.

In rather less than a month after her marriage with him she made the interesting discovery that he was the only man in the world who really understood her. His gift of plat.i.tude, harmonizing as it did with hers, was an inexhaustible source of admiration to her. She was wont to say in confidence to her woman friends, that, devotedly as she had loved her first husband, she had found her ideal in her second one; and that it was to Doll she owed the real development of her character, a subject in which she took great interest.

For some years, while her daughter remained an only child, she was pa.s.sionately devoted to her. But when her son was born she ceased to take much interest in the little girl, who was by this, time rather spoilt, and consequently tiresome. Doll, who proved exemplary in domestic life, took to her when Sibyl forgot her, and became deeply attached to her. Later in life Sibyl became inconsolably jealous of her daughter.

THE END.

BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.

NOVELS FROM _MR. EDWARD ARNOLD'S LIST_.

By the Author of 'The Red Badge of Courage.'