When the Birds Begin to Sing Part 26

Eleanor whispers, "Yes."

"Do you know what I saw in your eyes?"

"No."

"Three long words that kept repeating themselves. All the same words, and the worst, the most heartbreaking. 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow!' They will drive a soul to perdition quicker than any in the English language. I am going to have them engraved on my tombstone, because I can only conquer them in death."

"You are right. I was looking on, living in fancy the worthless days and hours."

"Crush that tendency, Mrs. Roche. Think of me when your life seems worthless, and remember all that I have lost. Your face is so sweet, so pure, so beautiful, it was made for the good love that crowns spotless womanhood. But this is my station, and I shall never know what you do with your future."

"Shall I show you?" says Eleanor hastily, for she is easily swayed, and the stranger has worked upon her emotion.

"Yes."

"See!" and the soft, enticing eyes of Carol Quinton are torn asunder--the photograph is reduced to a handful of sc.r.a.ps scattered on the carriage cushion.

"You are a good woman," says the other, rising and looking down tenderly, lovingly at Eleanor.

Again they clasp hands, then a cloud of towzled hair under a black c.r.a.pe bonnet vanishes down the platform, and Mrs. Roche is left alone, with the pieces of torn cardboard and the scent of patchouli on the opposite seat.

CHAPTER XIII.

IF NEED, TO DIE--NOT LIVE.--_Chas. Kingsley_.

"Have I changed, or has everything changed?" Eleanor asks herself, as the days slip by in the old farmhouse.

Mr. and Mrs. Grebby are just the same warm-hearted, genial couple as of yore; they crack the same jokes at their knife-and-fork tea, while Rover wags his tail as pleasantly as ever, and Black Bess trots to market.

The school children have not forgotten "Teacher," and, greet her in demonstrative fashion, flinging their small arms round her neck when she stoops to kiss them.

Yet Mrs. Roche finds that their mouths are sticky, and the little hands she clasps in hers hot and unpleasant to the touch.

She rises early, and on churning morning helps her mother even more industriously than in past days, yet her heart is heavy, and the old songs never pa.s.s her lips without a stifled sob. She tries to hum the "Miller of Dee," as for the sake of happy recollections she polishes afresh the pewter service on the parlour table, yet all the while her eyes are scrutinising the inartistic arrangement of the room. Why should the horsehair sofa be placed straight against the wall, and those ghastly wax flowers under gla.s.s covers adorn the stiff chimneypiece, which might be made so pretty? The memorial cards, that are framed and hung on the wall--how gruesome they appear in the spring sunshine! She longs to pull them down, and burn them, but to do so would be to violate poor Mrs.

Grebby's most sacred feelings.

She looks in the old family Bible, standing in its accustomed place on a table by the window. There are the births, deaths, and marriages of the Grebby family for generations. Oh, if her marriage could be blotted out, and a date of death mark her name. She envies the twins that died in their infancy, when she--Eleanor--was only two years old.

The pewter pots tire her arm, unaccustomed, now to rubbing anything but diamond trinkets. The service she so admired once does not attract her now. She puts it away half clean, and longs for a novel.

Vegetating was not very soothing after all. The poisoned arrows had followed her even to Copthorne, and their wounds could not heal. The thoughts she struggled to suppress, here in the dead calm, proclaimed themselves more loudly, worked fiercer havoc. She longs, pines, sickens for a sight of one she must never see, for a voice it would be death to hear, the touch of a hand it were sin to clasp.

So she wanders about in her strange state of depression, pretending to enjoy the glorious green of the spring, and seeing only light and darkness, cold and desolation, in primrose banks and rippling streams.

Mr. Grebby is too preoccupied with his cattle and his land to notice the change in Eleanor, while Mrs. Grebby takes infinite pains to give her married daughter the best their house affords, and only remarks on her lack of appet.i.te, at which she loudly laments.

"You ain't eatin' anything, dearie," she says one morning at breakfast.

"Try a tumbler of new milk to put some strength into you. It's them towns as makes you pale and spiritless. I knows 'em. We was that done up after our visit to you and cousin Harriett it was quite surprisin'.

But law, how Pa did make me walk in London. Up them Monument steps, and down again before I'd got my breath, with poor Rover in charge of a policeman below, and everyone a laughing 'cause I was puffing so."

Eleanor forces a smile. She was watching for the post.

The moment the man's tread is heard on the gravel she starts up and runs to the door, dreading every day that Giddy may divulge her address.

She longs to write to Carol Quinton, but dare not. She knows she is too weak to run the risk.

There are two letters for her, one from Philip, the other from Mrs.

Mounteagle.

She reads Giddy's first.

It is amusing and frivolous as usual. The last half, however, amazes Eleanor.

"I am going to be married," it says in the middle of a description of a new bonnet. "My future husband is a wealthy man and a general.

Congratulate me! It will not be a long engagement, as he is seventy-five to-morrow, but loves with the ardour of a seventeen year old! Talking of boys, I am asking Bertie to be best man. By this you will see all arrangements for the ceremony are being left entirely to my management.

It will be costly and elaborate. My gown alone would have swallowed up dear Bertie's income. I have given him a splendid new watch to console him, as his was s.n.a.t.c.hed last year at Epsom. I met my General at Lady MacDonald's. He moves in a very good set--gout permitting. Excuse my humour.--Your elated and strong-minded GIDDY.

"P.S.--Don't you think I am a n.o.ble woman? He is one eye short, which is rather a recommendation, but _has_ been one of the handsomest men about town."

"How strange," thinks Eleanor. Then she throws the letter aside in disgust. "And very loathsome!" she adds, tearing open Philip's envelope.

She reads it slowly at the breakfast table.

"Philip is coming this evening," she says.

Mr. and Mrs. Grebby clap their hands.

"Well, now, I'm right glad," they exclaim together. "We could see 'ow you missed 'im, dearie."

Eleanor feels uncomfortably guilty. What _if_ they knew that her every thought was wandering to another!

Already she has begun to try and piece the photograph together again, regretting her hasty action in the railway carriage. Before reaching Copthorne she had hidden the fragments safely in a corner of her dressing-bag. She hardly knew whether to be glad or sorry that Philip is coming. It will break the dull monotony of the day. At any rate she will get herself up to look as much like the old Eleanor as possible, though the thought of wandering with him through the haunts of past days is distasteful.

She knows it will please him, however; so, crushing her own feelings, she dons an old dress made by the village dressmaker, one which has hung in her wardrobe ever since she left home, then proceeds to search for the long disused sun bonnet.

The day is almost bright enough to excuse the picturesque headgear, eventually unearthed from the bottom of a tin trunk, and ironed by Eleanor's own hands.

She feels as if she were dressed up for amateur theatricals, and even denies herself the fashionable manner in which her hair is now arranged, going back to the simple style before she knew London or Giddy Mounteagle.

"It certainly _is_ becoming," she says; "beauty unadorned," viewing her charms in this rustic guise before a cracked mirror. "Yet I wonder what the Richmond girls would think of me if I walked on the Terrace, Sunday morning after church, dressed like this?"

She looks so pretty that her heart sinks at the thought that it is Philip, not Carol, for whom she has prepared.

As she comes down the stairs Mrs. Grebby meets her pale and trembling.

"What is the matter, mammy?" asks Eleanor, seeing that her mother is trying to gain breath for speech.