Vera Nevill Part 49

"Come along, then, and have a cigar in the garden," he said, with scarcely concealed eagerness; he felt like a schoolboy let out of school.

Helen went up to her bedroom, and sat sulkily by her open window, looking over the lake on to the mountains. Long after it was dark she could see the two red specks of their cigars wandering about like fire-flies in the garden, and could hear the crush of the rough gravel under their footsteps, and the low murmur of their voices as they talked.

"You are coming into Meadowshire, are you not?" asked Maurice, ere they parted.

Herbert shook his head.

"Not to the Millers?"

"No, I am afraid I shall never be asked to Shadonake again," answered the younger man, gloomily.

"Why, I thought you and Beatrice--forgive me--but is it not the case?"

"Her parents have stopped all that, Kynaston."

"But I am sure Beatrice herself will never let it stop; I know her too well," said Maurice, cheerily.

"There are laws in connection with minors," began Mr. Pryme, solemnly.

"Fiddlesticks!" was Maurice's rejoinder. "There are no laws to prevent young women falling in love, or the world would not be in such a confounded muddle as it frequently is. Don't be downhearted, Pryme; you stick to her, and it will all come right; and look here, if they won't ask you to Shadonake, I ask you to Kynaston; drop me a line, and come whenever you like--as soon as you get home."

"You are exceedingly kind; I shall be only too delighted."

"When will you be home?"

"I can be home at any time--there is nothing to keep me."

"Well, then, come as soon as you like, the sooner the better. And now I must say good-night and good-bye too, I fear, for we are off early to-morrow. I shall be glad enough to be home; I'm dead sick of the travelling. Good-night, old fellow; it has been a real pleasure to meet you."

And, positively, this was the only evening out of his whole wedding-trip that Maurice had thoroughly enjoyed.

"What on earth kept you out so late with that solemn young prig?" says his wife to him as he opens her door.

"I find him a very pleasant companion, and I have asked him to come to Kynaston," answers Maurice, shortly.

"Umph!" grunts Helen, and inwardly determines that his visit shall be a short one.

Four days later they were in England again.

It was only when the train had actually stopped at Sutton, and he was handing his wife into her own carriage under the arch of greenery across the road, and amid the ringing cheers of the rustics, who had gathered to see them arrive, that Maurice began to realise how powerfully that home-coming was to be tinged in his own mind with thoughts of her who was once so nearly going as a bride to the same house where now he was taking Helen.

All along the lane, as they drove under the arches of flags and flowers that had been put up from the station to the park gates, and as they responded to the hearty welcome from the village-folk who lined the road, Maurice was asking himself, with a painful anxiety, whether _she_ was at Sutton now; whether her eyes had rested upon these rustic decorations, whether her steps had pa.s.sed along under these mottoes of welcome and of happiness. And then, as they neared the church, the clang of the bells burst forth loudly and jarringly.

Was _she_, perchance, there in the house, kneeling alone, white and stricken by her bedside, whilst those joy-bells rang out their deafening clamour from the church hard by?

For the life of him, Maurice could not help casting a glance at the vicarage as they drove swiftly by it.

The windows were wide open, but no one looked out of them, the muslin blinds fluttered in the wind, the Gloire de Dijon roses nodded upon the wall, the Virginia creeper hung in crimson festoons over the porch; but there was not a living creature to be seen.

He had caught no glimpse of the woman that was ever in his heart; and it was a great pity that he had looked for her, because his wife, whose sharp eyes nothing ever escaped, had seen him look.

CHAPTER x.x.x.

"IF I COULD DIE!"

Why cannot I forgo, forget That ever I loved thee, that ever we met?

There is not a single link or sign To bind thy life in this world with mine.

M. W. Praed.

But it was not until Captain and Mrs. Maurice Kynaston had been at home for more than a fortnight that Vera came back to her brother-in-law's house.

She had kept away, poor girl, as long as she could. She had put off the evil hour of her return as long as possible. The Hazeldines had gone to Scotland, and Vera had, in desperation, accepted an invitation to stay with some acquaintances whom she neither knew very well nor liked overmuch. It had kept her from Sutton a little longer. But the visit had come to an end at last, and what was she to do? She had no other visits to prolong her absence, and her sister wrote to her perpetually, urging her to return. Her home was at Sutton; she had no other place to go to.

She had told Sir John that in absence from his brother lay her only hope of safety. But where was she to seek that safety? Where find security, when he; reckless, or, perchance, heedless of her danger, had come to plant himself at her very doors? They should have been far as the poles asunder, and a malevolent fate had willed that the same parish should contain them.

For whatever Maurice did, Vera in no way underrated the danger. Too well she knew her own heart; too surely she estimated the strength of a pa.s.sion which, repressed and thwarted, and half-smothered, as it had been within her, yet burnt but the fiercer and the wilder. For that is the way with love: if it may not flourish and thrive openly and bravely before the eyes of the world, it will eat into the very heart and life, till all that is fair and sweet in the garden of the soul is choked and blighted and overgrown, till the main-spring of life becomes poisoned, and all things that are happy, withered and dried up.

In Vera's love for Maurice there had been nothing of joy, and all of pain. There had never been for her that sweet illusion of dawning affection--that intangible sense of delight in the consciousness of an unspoken sympathy that is the very essence of a happy love. She had no memories that were serene and untroubled--no days of calm and delicious happiness to recall. His first conscious look had been a terror to her; his words of hopeless love had given her a shock that had been almost physical; and his few pa.s.sionate kisses had burnt into her very soul till they had seemed to have been printed upon her lips in fire. Vera's love had brought her no good thing that she could count. But it had done one thing for her: if it had cursed her life, it had purified her soul.

The Vera who had come back to Sutton Vicarage in August was no longer the same woman who had stood months ago on the terrace at Kynaston among the falling autumn leaves, and who had told herself that it was money alone that was worth living for.

She came back to everything that was full of pain, and to much in which there was absolute fear.

Five minutes after she had entered the vicarage drawing-room her tortures began.

"You have not asked after the bride and bridegroom," says old Mrs.

Daintree, as she sits in her corner, darning everlastingly at those brown worsted socks of her son's. Vera thinks she must have been sitting there darning incessantly, day and night, ever since she had been away. "We are all full of it down here. Such a pretty welcome home they had--arches across the road, and processions with flags, and a band inside the lodge-gates. You should have been here to have seen it. Everybody is making much of Mrs. Kynaston; she is a very pretty woman, I must say, and called here three days ago in the most beautiful Paris gown."

"She seemed very sorry not to see you," says Marion, "and quite disposed to be friendly. I do hope you and she will get on, Vera, in spite of the awkwardness of her being in your place, as it were."

"What do you mean?" rather sharply.

"Only, of course, dear, that it will be rather painful to you just at first to see anybody else the mistress at Kynaston, where you yourself might have been----"

"If you had not been a fool," interpolated the old lady, bluntly.

"I don't think I shall mind that much," says Vera, quietly. "Where is Eustace?"

"Oh, he will be in presently; he has gone up to the Hall about the chancel. The men have made all kinds of mistakes about the tesselated pavement; the wrong pattern was sent down from town, and we have had so much trouble about it, and there has been n.o.body to appeal to to set things right. Captain Kynaston is all very well, and now he is back, I hope we may get things into a little order; but I am sorry to say he takes very little interest in the church or the parish; he is not half so good a squire as poor dear Sir John." And there was a whole volume of unspoken reproach in the sigh with which Marion wound up her remarks.

"Decidedly," said Vera, to herself, as she went slowly upstairs to her own little room; "decidedly I must get away from all this. I shall have to marry." She leant out of her open window in a frame-work of roses and jessamine, and looked out over the lime-trees towards the Hall.

Now that the trees were in full leaf, she could catch no glimpse of its red-stacked chimneys and its terraced gardens; but, by-and-by, when the leaves were down and the trees were bare, she knew she should see it.

Every morning when she got up the sun would be shining full upon it; every night when she went to bed she would see the twinkling lights of the many windows gleaming through the darkness; she would be in her room alone, and _he_ would be out there, happy with his wife.

"I shall not be able to bear it," said Vera, slowly, speaking aloud to herself. "I had better marry, and go away; there is nothing else to be done. Poor Denis! He is worthy of a better woman; but I think he will be good to me."