The Golden Calf Part 73

'I don't think you have been in this house since the day we first met in the hall below?' he said, interrogatively.

'No, I have never been here since.'

'And yet you were once fond of the Abbey. You used to like wandering about the old house and gardens. You would sit reading in the library.

The housekeeper has often talked to me about you.'

She stood before him with lowered eyelids, pale and dumb, shrinking from him almost as she had shrunk from him seven years ago by the old sundial in the moonlit garden, when it was a sin to listen to his ardent avowal.

'Ida, why are you silent? Why will you not speak of the past?'

'The past is past!' she said, falteringly. 'It was full of grief and shame for me. I want to forget it if I can.'

'Forget all that is bitter, remember all that is sweet!' he pleaded, drawing nearer to her. 'There is much of that old time which is unspeakably dear to me--the happy time in which I first loved you, deeming you were free to be loved and won. You are free now, Ida, sole mistress of your fate and mine; and I love you as dearly now as I loved you seven years ago. More I could not love you, for I loved you then with all my heart and mind. Ida, you once talked of being mistress of Wendover Abbey. Its master is at your feet, your faithful slave to the end of his life. Will you have this old house for your own, Ida, and thus, and thus only, make it home for me?

His arm was round her, gently, experimentally, the answer not being quite certain, even yet.

She slowly lifted the dark-fringed lids, looked at him with adoring eyes--eyes which never before had looked thus upon the face of man.

'Can you be in earnest?' she asked, in a low sweet voice. 'Can you lift me so high--I, that had fallen so low?'

He clasped her to his heart, and sealed the promise of their unclouded future with a pa.s.sionate kiss.

'At last, at last, I hold you in my arms!' he said, fondly; 'but not for the first time, my angel!'

'What do you mean?'

'Who was it carried you out of the burning house last year?' he asked, smiling at her.

'Cheap Jack.'

'I was Cheap Jack.'

'You!'

'Yes. I lived far from the sight of this dear face, as long as I could bear my life, and then after five years of exile in far lands, where my soul sickened for the sight of you, I came back to England, heard in London that your husband was an idler and a drunkard, and foresaw evil days for my darling. I could be nothing to her; but at least I could watch over her, near at hand, yet unknown. So I took up my abode on the Hanger within a mile or so of her dwelling. Don't pity me, dearest. It was not a hard life after all. I had my books and Nature for my companions, all the joy I could have, not having you.'

'However shall I repay you?'

'Only look up to me as you looked just now, and let me feel you are my own for ever.'