Aylwin Part 9

Winifred, as I could see, even by the moonlight, was blushing. 'Ah, those childish days!' she said. 'How delightful they were, sir!'

'"Sir" again!' said I. 'Now, Winifred, I am going to execute my threat--I am indeed.'

She put up her hands before her face and said,

'Oh, don't! please don't.'

The action no doubt might seem coquettish, but the tone of her voice was so genuine, so serious--so agitated even--that I paused:--I paused in bewilderment and perplexity concerning us both. I observed that her fingers shook as she held them before her face. That she should be agitated at seeing me after so long a separation did not surprise me, I being deeply agitated myself. It was the _nature_ of her emotion that puzzled me, until suddenly I remembered my mother's words.

I perceived then that, child of Nature as she still was, some one had given her a careful training which had transfigured my little Welsh rustic into a lady. She had not failed to apprehend the anomaly of her present position--on the moonlit sands with me. Though could not break free from the old equal relations between us. Winifred had been able to do so.

'To her,' I thought with shame, 'my offering to kiss her at such a place and time must have seemed an insult. The very fact of my attempting to do so must have seemed to indicate an offensive consciousness of the difference of our social positions. It must have, seemed to show that I recognised a distinction between the drunken organist's daughter and a lady.'

I saw now, indeed, that she felt this keenly; and I knew that it was nothing but the sweetness of her nature, coupled with the fond recollection of the old happy days, that restrained that high spirit of hers, and prevented her from giving expression to her indignation and disgust.

All this was shown by the appealing look on her sweet, fond face, and I was touched to the heart.

'Winifred--Miss Wynne,' I said, 'I beg your pardon most sincerely.

The shadow-dance has been mainly answerable for my folly. You did look so exactly the little Winifred, my heart's sister, that I felt it impossible to treat you otherwise than as that dear child-friend of years ago.'

A look of delight broke over her face.

'I felt sure it was so,' she said. 'But it is a relief that you have said it.' And the tears came to her eyes.

'Thank you, Winifred, for having pardoned me. I feel that you would have forgiven no one else as you have forgiven me. I feel that you would not have forgiven any one else than your old child-companion, whom on a memorable occasion you threatened to hit, and then had not the heart to do so.'

'I don't think I _could_ hit _you_,' said she, in a meditative tone of perfect unconsciousness as to the bewitching import of her speech.

'Don't you think you could?' I said, drawing nearer, but governing my pa.s.sion.

'No,' said she, looking now for the first time with those wide-open confiding eyes which, as a child, were the chief characteristic of her face. 'I don't think I could hit you, whatever you did.'

'Couldn't you, Winifred?' I said, coming still nearer, in order to drink to the full the wonder of her beauty, the thrill at my heart bringing, as I felt, a pallor to my cheek. 'Don't you think you could hit your old playfellow, Winifred?'

'No,' she said, still gazing in the same dreamy, reminiscent way straight into my eyes as of yore. 'As a child you were so delightful.

And then you were so kind to me!'

At that word 'kind' from _her_ to _me_ I could restrain myself no longer; I shouted with a wild laughter of uncontrollable pa.s.sion as I gazed at her through tears of love and admiration and deep grat.i.tude--gazed till I was blind. My throat throbbed till it ached: I Could get out no more words; I could only gaze. At my shout Winifred stood bewildered and confused. She did not understand a mood like that. Having got myself under control, I said,

'Winifred, it is not my doing; it is Fate's doing that we meet here on this night, and that I am driven to say here what I had as a schoolboy sworn should be said whenever we should meet again.'

'I think,' said Winifred, pulling herself up with the dignity of a queen, 'that if you have anything important to say to me it had better be at a more seasonable time than at this hour of night, and at a more seasonable place than on these sands.'

'No, Winifred,' said I, 'the time is _now_, and the place is here--here on this very spot where, once on a time, you said "certumly" when a little lover asked your hand. It is now and here, Winifred, that I will say what I have to say.'

'And what is that, sir?' said Winifred, much perplexed and disturbed.

'I have to say, Winifred, that the man does not live and never _has_ lived,' said I, with suppressed vehemence, who loved a woman as I love you.'

Oh, sir! oh, Henry!' returned Winifred, trembling, then standing still and whiter than the moon. 'And the reason why no man has ever loved a woman as I love you, Winifred, is because your match, or anything like your match, has never trod the earth before.'

'Oh, Henry, my dear Henry! you _must_ not say such things to me, your poor Winifred.'

'But that isn't all that I swore I'd say to you, Winifred.'

'Don't say any more--not to-night, not to-night.'

'What I swore I would ask you, Winifred, is this: Will you be Henry's wife?'

She gave one hysterical sob, and swayed till she nearly fell on the sand, and said, while her face shone like a pearl,

'Henry's wife!'

She recovered herself and stood and looked at me; her lips moved, but I waited in vain--waited in a fever of expectation--for her answer.

None came. I gazed into her eyes, but they now seemed rilled with visions--visions of the great race to which she belonged--visions in which her English lover had no place. Suddenly, and for the first time, I felt that she who had inspired within me this all-conquering pa.s.sion, though the penniless child of a drunken organist, was a daughter of Snowdon--a representative of the Cymric race that was once so mighty, and is still more romantic in its a.s.sociations than all others. Already in the little talk I had had with her I began to guess what I realised before the evening was over, that owing to the influence of the English lady, Miss Dalrymple, who had lodged at the cottage with her, she was more than my own equal in culture, and could have held her own with almost any girl of her own age in England. It was only in her subjection to Cymric superst.i.tions that she was benighted.

'Winnie,' I murmured, 'what have you to say?'

After a while her eyes seemed to clear of the visions, and she said,

'What changes have come upon us both, Henry. since that childish betrothal on the sands!'

'Happy changes for one of the child-lovers,' I said--'happy changes for the one who was then a lonely cripple shut out from all sympathy save that which the other child-lover could give.'

'And yet you then seemed happy, Henry--happy with Winnie to help you up the gangways. And how happy Winnie was! But now the child-lover is a cripple no longer: he is very, very strong--he is so strong that he could carry Winnie up the gangways in his arms, I think.'

The thrill of natural pride which such recognition of my physical powers would otherwise have given me was quelled by a something in the tone in which she spoke.

'And he is powerful in every way,' she went on, as if talking to herself. 'He is a great rich Englishman to whom (as auntie was never tired of saying) that childish betrothal must needs seem a dream--a quaint and pretty dream.'

'And so your aunt said that, Winnie. How far from the truth she was you see to-night.'

'Yes, she thought you would forget all about me; and yet she could not have felt quite confident about it, for she made me promise that if you should not forget me--if you should ever ask me what you have just asked--she made me promise--'

'What, Winnie? what? She did not make promise that you would refuse me?'

'That is what she asked me to promise.'

'But you did not.'

'I did not.'

'No, no! you did not, Winnie. My darling refused to make any such cruel, monstrous promise as that.'

'But I promised her that I would in such an event wait a year--at least a year--before betrothing myself to you.'

'Shame! shame! What made her do this cruel thing? A year! wait for a year!'

'She brought forward many reasons, Henry, but upon two of them she was constantly dwelling.'