Mistress and Maid Part 41

Johanna would not have been human had she not been a little thoughtful and silent on the way home, and had she not many times, out of the corners of her eyes, sharply investigated Mr. Robert Lyon.

He was much altered; there was no doubt of that. Seven years of Indian life would change any body; take the youthfulness out of any body. It was so with Robert Lyon. When coming into the parlor he removed his hat, many a white thread was visible in his hair, and besides the spare, dried-up look which is always noticeable in people who have lived long in hot climates, there was an "old" expression in his face, indicating many a worldly battle fought and won, but not without leaving scars behind. Even Hilary, as she sat opposite to him, at table, could not but feel that he was no longer a young man either in appearance or reality. We ourselves grow old, or older, without knowing it, but when we suddenly come upon the same fact in another it startles us. Hilary had scarcely recognized how far she herself had left her girlish days behind till she saw Robert Lyon.

"You think me very much changed?" said he, guessing by his curiously swift intuition of old what she was thinking of.

"Yes, a good deal changed," she answered truthfully; at which he was silent.

He could not read--perhaps no man's heart could--all the emotion that swelled in hers as she looked at him, the love of her youth, no longer young. How the ghostly likeness of the former face gleamed out under the hard worn lines of the face that now was touching her with ineffable tenderness. Also, with solemn content came a sense of the entire indestructibleness of that love which through all decay or alteration traces the ideal image still, clings to it, and cherishes it with a tenacity that laughs to scorn the grim dread of "growing old."

In his premature and not specially comely middle age, in his gray hairs, in the painful, anxious, half melancholy expression which occasionally flitted across his features, as if life had gone hard with him, Robert Lyon was a thousand times dearer to her than when the world was all before them both in the early days at s...o...b..ry.

There is a great deal of a sentimental nonsense talked about people having been "young together." Not necessarily is that a bond. Many a tie formed in youth dwindles away and breaks off naturally in maturer years. Characters alter, circ.u.mstances divide. No one will dare to allege that there may not be loves and friendships formed in middle life as dear, as close, as firm as any of those of youth; perhaps, with some temperaments, infinitely more so. But when the two go together, when the calm election of maturity confirms the early instinct, and the lives have been parallel, as it were, for many years, there can be no bond like that of those who say as these two did, "We were young together."

He said so when, after dinner, he came and stood by the window where Hilary was sitting sewing. Johanna had just gone out of the room; whether intentionally or not, this history can not avouch. Let us give her the benefit of the doubt; she was a generous woman.

During the three hours that Mr. Lyon had been with her, Hilary's first agitation had subsided. That exceeding sense of rest which she had always felt beside him--the sure index of people who, besides loving, are meant to guide and help and bless one another--returned as strong as ever. That deep affection which should underlie all love revived and clung to him with a chidlike confidence strengthening at every word he said, every familiar look and way.

He was by no means so composed as she was, especially now when coming up to her side and watching her hands moving for a minute or so, he asked her to tell him, a little more explicitly, of what had happened to her since they parted.

"Things are rather different from what I thought;" and he glanced with a troubled air round the neat but very humbly furnished parlor.

"And about the shop?"

"Johanna told you."

"Yes; but her letters have been so few, so short--not that I could expect more. Still--now, if you will trust me--tell me all."

Hilary turned to him, her friend for fifteen years. He was that if he was nothing more. And he had been very true; he deserved to be trusted. She told him, in brief, the history of the last year or two, and then added:

"But after all it is hardly worth the telling, because, you see, we are very comfortable now. Poor Ascott, we suppose, must be in Australia. I earn enough to keep Johanna and myself, and Miss Balquidder is a good friend to us. We have repaid her, and owe n.o.body any thing. Still, we have suffered a great deal. Two years ago; oh!

it was a dreadful time."

She was hardly aware of it, but her candid tell-tale face betrayed more even than her words. It cut Robert Lyon to the heart.

"You suffered, and I never knew it."

"I never meant you to know."

"Why not?" He walked the room in great excitement. "I ought to have been told; it was cruel not to tell me. Suppose you had sunk under it; suppose you had died, or been driven to do what many a woman does for the sake of mere bread and a home--what your poor sister did--married. But I beg your pardon."

For Hilary had started up with her face all aglow.

"No," she cried; "no poverty would have sunk me as low as that. I might have starved, but I should never have married."

Robert Lyon looked at her, evidently uncomprehending, then said humbly, though rather formally,

"I beg your pardon once more. I had no right to allude to any thing of the kind."

Hilary replied not. It seemed as if now, close together, they were further apart than when the Indian seas rolled between them.

Mr. Lyon's brown cheek turned paler and paler; he pressed his lips hard together; they moved once or twice, but still he did not utter a word. At last, with a sort of desperate courage, and in a tone that Hilary had never heard from him in her life before, he said:

"Yes, I believe I have a right, the right that every man has when his whole happiness depends upon it, to ask you one question. You know every thing concerning me; you always have known; I meant that you should--I have taken the utmost care that you should. There is not a bit of my life that has not been as open to you as if--as if--. But I know nothing whatever concerning you."

"What do you wish to know?" she faltered.

"Seven years is a long time. Are you free? I mean, are you engaged to be married?"

"No."

"Thank G.o.d!"

He dropped his head down between his hands and did not speak for a long time.

And then with difficulty--for it was always hard to him to speak out--he told her, at least he somehow made her understand, how he had loved her. No light fancy of sentimental youth, captivated by every fresh face it sees, putting upon each one the coloring of his own imagination, and adorning not what is, but what itself creates; no sudden, selfish, sensuous pa.s.sion, caring only to attain its object, irrespective of reason, right, or conscience; but the strong deep love of a just man, deliberately choosing one woman as the best woman out of all the world, and setting himself resolutely to win her.

Battling for her sake with all hard fortune; keeping, for her sake, his heart pure from all the temptations of the world; never losing sight of her; watching over her so far as he could, consistently with the sense of honor (or masculine pride--which was it? but Hilary forgave it, any how) which made him resolutely compel himself to silence; holding her perfectly free, while he held himself bound.

Bound by a faithfulness perfect as that of the knights of old--asking nothing, and yet giving all.

Such was his love--this brave, plain spoken, single hearted Scotsman.

Would that there were more such men and more such love in the world!

Few women could have resisted it, certainly not Hilary, especially with a little secret of her own lying perdu at the bottom of her heart; that "sleeping angel" whence half her strength and courage had come; the n.o.ble, faithful, generous love of a good woman for a good man. But this secret Robert Lyon had evidently never guessed, or deemed himself wholly unworthy of such a possession.

He took her hand at last, and held it firmly.

"And now that you know all, do you think in time--I'll not hurry you--but in time, do you think I could make you love me?"

She looked up in his face with her honest eyes. Smiling as they were, there was pathos in them; the sadness left by those long years of hidden suffering, now forever ended.

"I have loved you all my life," said Hilary.

CHAPTER XXVI.

Let us linger a little over this chapter of happy love: so sweet, so rare a thing. Aye, most rare: though hundreds continually meet, love, or fancy they do, engage themselves, and marry; and hundreds more go through the same proceeding, with the slight difference of the love omitted--Hamlet, with the part of Hamlet left out. But the real love, steady and true: tried in the balance, and not found wanting: tested by time, silence, separation; by good and ill fortune; by the natural and inevitable change which years make in every character--this is the rarest thing to be found on earth, and the most precious.

I do not say that all love is worthless which is not exactly this sort of love. There have been people who have succ.u.mbed instantly and permanently to some mysterious attraction, higher than all reasoning; the same which made Hilary "take an interest" in Robert Lyon's face at church, and made him, he afterward confessed, the very first time he gave Ascott a lesson in the parlor at s...o...b..ry, say to himself, "If I did marry, I think I should like such a wife as that brown-eyed bit la.s.sie." And there have been other people, who choosing their partners from accidental circ.u.mstances, or from mean worldly motives, have found Providence kinder to them than they deserved, and settled down into happy, affectionate husbands and wives.

But none of these loves can possibly have the sweetness, the completeness of such a love as that between Hilary Leaf and Robert Lyon.

There was nothing very romantic about it. From the moment when Johanna entered the parlor, found them standing hand-in-hand at the fireside, and Hilary came forward and kissed her, and after a slight hesitation Robert did the same, the affair proceeded in most millpond fashion:

"Unruffled by those cataracts and breaks, That humor interposed too often makes.':

There were no lovers' quarrels; Robert Lyon had chosen that best blessing next to a good woman, a sweet tempered woman; and there was no reason why they should quarrel more as lovers than they had done as friends. And, let it be said to the eternal honor of both, now, no more than in their friendship days, was there any of that hungry engrossment of each other's society, which is only another form of selfishness, and by which lovers so often make their own happy courting time a season of never-to-be-forgotten bitterness to every body connected with them.

Johanna suffered a little: all people do when the new rights clash with the old ones; but she rarely betrayed it. She was exceedingly good: she saw her child happy, and she loved Robert Lyon dearly. He was very mindful of her, very tender; and as Hilary still persisted in doing her daily duty in the shop, he spent more of his time with the elder sister than he did with the younger, and sometimes declared solemnly that if Hilary did not treat him well he intended to make an offer to Johanna!

Oh, the innumerable little jokes of those happy days! Oh, the long, quiet walks by the river side, through the park, across Ham Common--any where--it did not matter; the whole world looked lovely, even on the dullest winter day! Oh, the endless talks; the renewed mingling of two lives, which, though divided, had never been really apart, for neither had any thing to conceal; neither had ever loved any but the other.