Chapter XXIII

The common stretches, long and stony, at the top of the hill that backs Glan-yr-Afon. To reach it they have to climb through the waving woods, where the beeches and sycamores emulously cast down their crimson and amber leaves to strew the path before their feet. To reach it, they have to pass the woodman's stone cottage, his pigstye, and his little yap-yapping rude dog. From the common you may look upwards or downwards--northwards, to the valley-head; southwards, to the sea.

From among the scant brown mountain-grass, the limestone crops frequent, in peaks, and slabs, and riven rock-fragments. Far down in chinks and crevices little black-stemmed ferns grow darkling, and over the rock's rough face, the lichens, drab and yellow, make their little plans and charts. One may fancy some former people of strong giants sleeping very sweetly beneath those unchiselled tombstones, with their epitaphs written out fairly in Nature's hand in green mosses and rain furrows. In spring the hill's harsh front is crowned with a yellow splendour of gorse-flowers, but now a single blossom blows here and there desolate, just to hinder the old saying from being quite a lie. Below, in the valley, the mists roll greyly; and out above them Naullan church spire rises, pointing heavenwards, as if showing the way to the dead flock gathered round its feet; points heavenwards, like the finger of some sculptured saint.

The autumn winds are piping bleakly, singing an ugly peevish dirge for the gone summer, bending the frost-seared brake-fern all one way, and with rough hands pushing back Robert and Esther, saying, "This is _our_ territory; what brings you here?"

Esther shivers.

"You are cold, I'm afraid," says Brandon, anxiously, putting his head on one side, not out of sentimentality, but in the endeavour to keep his hat on.

"Yes," she answers, rapidly; "and I'm glad of it. I should _hate_ to feel warm and comfortable; I want to be cold, and faint, and miserable _always_. Do you know," she continues, excitedly, laying her hand on his arm, "yesterday I _laughed?_--yes! I actually _laughed!_ and it is only a fortnight since--wasn't it horrible of me? I want the days and the weeks to go by quickly: I want it to be a long time since Jack died!"

Brandon makes no answer--partly because he is utterly at a loss for a reply, partly because he is still wrestling with his hat. Presently they come to a disused quarry, where the quarrymen have hewn out rock-ledges into comfortable seats for them. The wind howls above them, angry and sad, and flings hither and thither the flowerless broom-pikes that look over the cliffs, but it cannot reach them.

"Esther," says Bob, taking up a sharp stone, and beginning to draw white lines on the rock's smooth surface, "it seems as if I had no other occupation nowadays than to say disagreeable things to you, but I cannot help it: do you think you can bear to leave Glan-yr-Afon in three weeks or so?"

"Bear!" she repeats, bitterly; "I can bear anything--I have proved that already, I think. Any one that had had any feeling would have died of _this;_ but I--I sleep and eat as well as ever: I am like the baker who refused Christ the loaf--I _cannot_ die!"

"Hush!" he says, eagerly; "don't want to go before your time, or perhaps the Almighty might take you at your word."

There is silence for a moment or two, then Brandon speaks again: "At the end of three weeks you will come to us then?"

No answer.

Thinking that the wind has carried away his words, he repeats his question: "At the end of three weeks you will come to us, then?"

She turns her head round slowly. "Could not I live in some hovel by myself?"

He shakes his head. "Impossible! You see," he says, speaking with slow reluctance, "he--poor dear fellow!--laid out a great deal of money on all the latest improvements in farming implements, and things of that kind, and they did not bring him anything back; they would have done, no doubt, if he had been given time," he adds, quickly, afraid of seeming to cast the faintest slur upon the dead boy.

"You mean to say that I have no money--that I am a beggar," she says, fixing her clear, steadfast eyes upon him: and in them is none of that dismay which her words seem to imply.

"I mean to say," he answers, heartily, "that henceforth you are to be one of us, and that we are very, _very_ glad of it."

She does not say "Thank you;" she neither assents nor refuses; she only looks away, and watches the distant trees tossing violent arms, in riotous fight with the wind.

Something in her manner makes Brandon uneasy. "It is agreed, then?" he asks, eagerly.

No reply.

"Why don't you answer me, Esther?" (with a slight natural impatience in his tone).

She turns her face slowly round towards him--a face paled by her late agonies, thinned by long fastings, and by thousands of great tears. "Because," she replies, "I have one friend in the world now; and when I have answered you, I shall have none!"

"What _do_ you mean?"

"If I were to come to you, I should come as your supposed future wife, shouldn't I? Well, I should be an impostor."

A great sickening fear whitens his brown face, but he contains himself, and speaks quietly: "Do you think I meant to _bargain_ with you? Do you think I meant to make a profit for myself out of your troubles? What have I ever done to make you think me so mean?" he asks, reproachfully.

She draws a heavy sighing breath. "Why am I beating about the bush?" she says, chiding herself; "it must out, sooner or later! Oh, Bob! Bob! if I had it in me to be sorry about anything, I should be sorry about this!"

"About what?" he asks, cruelly excited. "Look this way, Esther. Is it--is it what I have been afraid of all along?"

Her head sinks in shamed dejection on her breast. "Yes, it is," she answers, faintly.

There will be a great storm at sea to-night; the gulls are circling about, calling wildly to one another--here, twenty miles inland.

"Who is it?" asks Bob, in a husky whisper, presently.

She sighs again, profoundly. "Do you remember," she says, "before I went to the Gerards'--how many hundred years ago was that?--your saying one day that you wished they had not got a son, and my laughing at you about it? Well! you were right!--it is he!"

Brandon turns away his head, speaks not, nor gives any sign. It is in silence that a good brave man meetliest takes his deathblow.

"I don't think he would have cared much about me, if I had let him alone," says Esther, taking a sort of gloomy pleasure in painting herself as black as possible.

There is a pause--a pause, during which Brandon is fighting one of those duels in which most men have to engage at least once in their lives--the duel with a mortal agony, that says, tauntingly, "I am your master! I have conquered you!" to which one that is valiant makes answer, "You are strong, you are terrible; but you are _not_ my master. I will keep you under!"

"You will go to him then, of course, instead of coming to us?" he says, presently, speaking in some one else's voice (for it certainly is not his own), and keeping his head turned away; for no one is willing to parade their death-pangs before others' eyes.

She laughs derisively. "Go to him! Hardly! I should get but an indifferent welcome if I did. You know I never told him a word about you--ladylike and honourable of me, wasn't it?--but some one else did him that good office; and now, if he were to see me falling over the edge of that cliff, he would not put out a finger to save me. That is his sort of love!" She ends, bitterly, "And I think he is right."

Another longer silence. Brandon is wrestling with that adversary of his, that deadly anger and pain; that riotous, tigerish jealousy, that makes us all murderers for the time, in thought at least; that mad, wild longing--madder, wilder than any love ardour, than any paroxysm of religious zeal--to have his hands, for one moment of strong ecstasy, about the throat of the rich man that has robbed him of his one ewe lamb. The sweat of that combat stands cold upon his brow, but he overcomes. After a while he speaks gently, as one would speak to a little sick child: "Were you very fond of him, Esther?"

"I suppose so," she answers with reflective calmness, looking straight before her. "I must have been, or I should not have said and done the mean things I did. I should not have degraded myself into begging him to take me back again, when I might as well have begged of this rock" (thrusting her soft hand against it) "to turn to grass and flowers. He told me that he would never forgive me, either in this world or the next! I thought it very dreadful at the time, but I don't much care now whether he forgives me or not."

"Have you forgotten him so completely already?" asks Bob, forgetting his own misery for the moment, in sheer blank amazement.

"Forgotten him!" she repeats thoughtfully. "No, not that! not that! I might as well try to forget myself. I remember every line of his face, his voice, and his ways, and every word he said almost; but if I were to see him standing close to us here, I should not feel the slightest inclination to go to him, or to call him to come to me. I feel all dead everywhere." They remain in the same attitude for several minutes, neither of them stirring nor uttering a word. Then Esther speaks, with a certain uneasy abruptness. "Well!" she says, "I am waiting!--waiting for you to call me a murderess and a bad woman, and all the other names that St. John gave me, on much less provocation. Make haste!" she says, with a nervous forced laugh; "I am in a hurry to hear that I have succeeded in getting rid of my last friend. Quick! quick!--tell me that you hate me, and have done with it!"

"_Hate_ you!" he repeats, tenderly; his brave voice trembling a little in spite of himself, and the meekness of a great heroism ennobling his face. "You, poor soul! Why should I hate you because another man is better and more loveable than I, and because you have eyes to see it?"

The eyes he speaks of turn upon him, wide and startled, in astonished disbelief of his great generosity.

"You don't understand!" she says, quickly. "You don't take it in. I was _engaged_ to him; I was going to marry him, and all the time I never once mentioned your name to him, of my own accord; and when he asked me about you, I said you were only a common acquaintance. You _must_ hate me!" she ends, vehemently; "don't pretend that you don't!"

"Hush!" he answers sorrowfully, but very gently, "that is nonsense! I don't even hate him; at least" (pausing a moment, to thrust down and trample under foot one more spasm of that intolerable burning jealousy)--"at least, I try not. It was my own fault. I knew all along that I was poor, and stupid, and awkward, that I had nothing but sheer love to give you, and I hoped against hope that that might win you at last. We all set our affections upon some one thing, I suppose," he says, with a patient, pitiful smile, "and I daresay it is all the better for us in the end that we don't often get it: but oh, love! love! you might have told me!" Then his resolution breaks a little, and, covering his face with his hands, he groans aloud, in a man's dry-eyed agony--how much awfuller to see than a woman's little tears, that flow indifferently for a dead pet dog, or a dead husband! Esther sits looking at him during several minutes, awestruck, as a child that has made a grown-up person cry; then one of those quick impulses that carry some women away seizes her.

"Bob!" she says, putting her sweet mouth close to his ear, while her gentle, vibrating voice thrills down to his stricken soul, "I have been very bad to you, but I will make up for it!"

"Will you?" he says, looking up with a mournful, sceptical smile; "how?"

"I'll marry you, if you'll have me, and make a very good wife to you," she says, simply, with unblushing calmness, eyelids unlowered, and voice unwavering.

"Child!" he cries, "you are very generous, but do you think I cannot be generous too?"

"It is not generosity," she says, eagerly; "I _wish_ to marry you!"

He shakes his head sadly. "You don't know what you are saying," he answers, taking her little hand between both his--holding it almost fatherly, in a tender prison. "You don't know what marriage is. You don't understand that a union so close with a person you don't love would be infinitely worse than being tied to a dead body; the one could not last very long, the other might for years."

She looks at him silently, with her grave, innocent eyes, for an instant or two while she tries to get down to the depth of her own heart--tries to feel something besides that numb vague indifference to everything. "If I don't love you," she says, doubtfully, "I love nobody; I like you better than anyone else in the world! Didn't Jack die in your arms?" she says, breaking out into sudden and violent tears. "Wasn't his head resting on your shoulder when he went away? Oh, dear, dear shoulder!" she cries, kissing it passionately. "How can I help loving you for that?"

At the touch of her soft mouth, that has been to him hitherto, despite his nominal betrothal, a sealed book, his steadfast heart begins to pulse frantically fast: if a river of flame instead of blood were poured through his veins, they could not have throbbed with an insaner heat: his sober head swims as one that is dizzy with strong drink; reels in the overpowering passion of a man that has not frittered away his heart in little bits, after our nineteenth-century fashion, but has cast it down, _whole_, unscarred by any other smallest wound, at one woman's feet. Oh, if he might but take her at her word! Or, if there must be no marriage between them, why may not there be a brief sweet marriage of the lips? It would do her no harm--since kisses, happily for the reputation of ninety-nine hundredths of the female world, leave no mark--and it would set him for an instant on a pinnacle of bliss that would equal him with the high gods.

But the paroxysm is short. Before she who has caused it has guessed at its existence, it is put down, held down strongly. Women are very often like naughty children, putting a lighted match to a train of gunpowder, and then surprised and frightened because there is an explosion.

"You are deceiving yourself," he says, speaking almost coldly. "You think you like me, because I happened to be the last person that was with the dear fellow that's gone--because you knew that I was grieved about him too: but think of me as you thought of me when you were at the Gerards', and you'll know how much you love me for myself."

"Love!" she repeats, dreamily--"love! love!" saying over and over again the familiar, common word, until by very dint of frequent repetition it grows unfamiliar, odd, void of meaning. "I have used up all I ever had of that: perhaps I never had much, but I think you the very best man that ever lived. Is not that enough to go upon?"

He shakes his head with a slight smile. "Worse and worse! that would be a difficult character to live up to. No!" he says, looking at her, with the nobility of an utter self-abnegation in his sorrowful blue eyes. "I will _never_ marry you, Essie! never!--I swear it! If you were to go down on your knees to me, I would not: I should deserve that God should strike me dead if I could be guilty of such unmanly selfishness!"

"You refuse me then?" she says, with a sigh of half-unconscious relief. "Was ever such a thing heard of? And I have not even the satisfaction of being able to be angry with you."

"I refuse you!" he answers, steadily, taking her two little hands in his. "But--look at me, dear, and believe me--as I said to you before, so I say now, I shall love you to-day, and to-morrow, and always!"

The two young people sit silent; each looking down, as it were with inner eyes, on the wreck of their own destiny--wrecked already! though their ships have so lately left the port. The vapours still curl about the dun hills: the clouds stoop low, as if to mingle with their sister mists. With many a sigh, and with many a shiver, the trees shower down the ruddy rain of their leaves; earth is stripping her fair body for the winter sleep. Then Brandon speaks:

"Promise me one thing, Essie!"

"_Anything_ almost."

"That this--this--_talk_ we have had shall make no difference as to your coming to us!"

"What!" she cries, suddenly springing to her feet, tears of remorse and mortification rushing to her eyes. "After having done you the worst injury a woman can do a man, am I to be indebted to you for daily bread--for food, and clothes, and firing? How much lower do you wish me to fall? Have you _no_ pity on me?"

"You are misstating the case," he says, quietly, his downcast eyes fixed on a little fern that, with his stick, he is up-digging from its strait home between two neighbour rocks: "you will be indebted to _me_ for nothing; I shall not even be there; I shall have gone back to Bermuda."

"Gone!" she repeats, blankly. "Are _you_ going too? Is everybody going away from me? And do you think," she continues, passionately, "that it will be easier for me to lie under such an obligation to your mother and sisters than to you? Is not it always harder to say 'Thank you!' to a woman than to a man? And would not I immeasurably rather sell matches, or hot potatoes at the street-corners, than do either?"

He smiles slightly, yet very ruefully withal. "My darling!" he says, looking wistfully at her noble head and delicate, thoroughbred face, "you are a great deal too pretty to sell hot potatoes, or matches either; bread-winners should not have faces like yours!"

"That is bad reasoning," she answers, trying to laugh; "if I am pretty, people will be more likely to buy my wares. Oh, Heavens!" she cries, throwing up her eyes to the dark wrack driving over head, "what business have people to bring children into the world only to starve, or to sponge upon others? There ought to be an Act of Parliament against it! Oh, why--why is not one allowed to have a look into life before one is born--to have one's choice whether one will come into it at all or no? But, if one had, who _would_ come?--who would?"

"I would," answers Bob, stoutly. "I don't think the world is half a bad place, though it is the fashion to abuse it now-a-days, and though it does do one some curiously dirty turns now and then. But after all," he adds, very gravely, "bad or good no one can accuse it of lasting long, and there's a better at the other end of it."

"Or a worse," says Esther, gloomily. "Who knows? One cannot fancy the world without one, can one?" she continues, following out her own ideas. "One knows that, not long ago, there _was_, and not long hence there _will be_, no _I_; but one cannot realize it!"

"Why should one bother one's head trying?" says Bob, with philosophy.

"The leaves seem to come out in the spring," she continues musingly, without heeding him, "the winds to blow, and the birds to sing, all with some reference to _oneself:_ one cannot understand their all going on when oneself has stopped!"

Reflections of this character are not much in Bob's way. Pensive musings upon the caducity of the human race are, generally, rather feminine than masculine. A woman dreams over the shortness of life, while a man crowds it with doings that make it, in effect, long. Brandon turns the conversation back into a more practical channel.

"Have you any friends that you have known longer than you have us, Essie?"

"None."

"Any to whom it would be less irksome to you to lie under an obligation, as you call it?"

"None."

"Any that you like better, in short?"

"None," she answers, with a little impatience, as if, in a way, ashamed of her own destitution. "Good or bad, I have _no_ friends, _none_, and you know it."

He looks at her with a sort of shocked amazement. "Good God! what is to become of you, then?" he asks, bluntly.

"I don't know."

"How are you to live?"

"I don't know."

"Have you never once thought about it?"

"Never. I thought that we," she says, her lips beginning to quiver piteously, and her faithful thoughts, that never wander far from it, straying back to the new bare grave, where one half of that "_we_" lies sleeping--"I thought that we should have lived to be old together: most people live to be old!"

A great yearning pity--purer, nobler, with less of the satyr and more of the god in it, than in any access of human passion between man and woman--seizes him as he looks at her, sitting there so forlorn, with one thin hand lifted to shield her weary purple-lidded eyes, that have grown dim with weeping for "her boy."

"Poor little soul!" he says, compassionately; and he takes, with brotherly intimacy, the other hand, that lies listless in her lap, and lays fond lips upon it.

When one is on the verge of a burst of crying, a harsh word may avert the catastrophe, but a kind one inevitably precipitates it. With how unjust, unreasonable a hatred does one often regard the person who ill-advisedly speaks that kind word! As for Esther, she buries her face on his shoulder and begins to sob hysterically. Her hat falls off, and her bare, defenceless head leans on his breast, while the autumn wind wafts one long lock of her scented hair against his face. She has forgotten that he _was_ her lover, has forgotten that he is a man; she remembers only that he is a friend, which is a sexless thing--that he is the one being who cares about her, in all the great, full, crowded world. Despite the utter abandonment of her attitude, despite the clinging closeness of her soft supple form to his, he feels none of the painful stings of passion that so lately beset him. They are tamed, for the moment, by a nobler emotion: they dare as little assail him now, as they dare assail the holy saints in Paradise. With any other man such abandonment might have been dangerous: with him she is safe. He lays his kind broad hand on her ruffled head, and strokes it, just as Jack used to do, in the pleasant days before he went.

"Come to us, Essie!" he says, with persuasive tenderness; "we'll be good to you; we won't plague you; you would have come to us as my wife, why won't you come as my sister?"

"Because I like buying things better than being given them!" she answers, vehemently, though still incoherent from her tears. "If I had come as your wife, I should have given you something in exchange,--_myself_, body and soul, my whole life. It would have been of no value _really_, but you would have thought it something; as your sister, I shall give you absolutely nothing!"

"Child! child! why are you so proud?" he asks, with mournful reproachfulness. "Why are you so bent on standing alone? Which of us _can_ stand alone in this world? We all have to lean upon one another, more or less, and the strongest of us upon God!"

"Yes, I know that!--I know that!" she answers, hastily; "but I would far rather beg, and have to be obliged to any common stranger that I had never seen before, and that most probably I should never see again, than to you. With them I should, at all events, start fair: I should have no old debts to weigh me down; but to you I owe so much already, that I am racking my brain to think how I can pay some part of it, instead of contracting new ones."

"You would contract no new ones," he rejoins, earnestly; "on the contrary. Essie, you told me just now that you would be very glad to be able to make up to me for any pain you may have made me suffer: _now_ is your time!--_now_ is your opportunity!"

"How?" she sobs, lifting up her head, and speaking with a slow, plaintive intonation. "You will be at the other side of the world, thousands of miles away! How will it affect _you?_"

"I _shall_ be at the other side of the world," he answers, steadily; "better that I should be so! better so! But do you think that my being so far away will make it pleasanter for me to think of the one creature I love above all others on the face of the earth, starving, or worse than starving, at home?"

"Worse than starving!" she repeats, opening her great, wide eyes in astonishment. "What _can_ be worse than starving? Oh! I see what you mean" (a light breaking in upon her, and the colour flushing faintly into her face). "You think I should go to the bad--do something disgraceful, if I had nobody to look after me: I am sorry you have such a bad opinion of me, but I don't wonder at it," she ends, with resigned depression.

"I have no bad opinion of you!" he answers, eagerly; "but I know the end that women, originally as pure and good as you, have come to before now. I know how hard it is for a beautiful poor girl to live _honestly_ in this world, how frightfully easy to live _dis_honestly!"

"Well!" she says, recklessly; "and if I did live dishonestly, what matter? Whom have I got to be ashamed of? Whom have I got to disgrace?"

Brandon looks inexpressibly shocked. "Hush!" he says, putting his hand before her mouth; "you don't know what you are saying! For Heaven's sake, talk in that strain to no one but me! Any one that knew you less well than I do might misunderstand you."

She looks up at him, half-frightened. "One does say dreadful things without intending it," she says, apologetically; "but I only meant to express, as forcibly as possible, how little consequence it was what happened to me."

"For God's sake, word it differently then!" he says, almost sternly; "or, better still, don't say it or think it at all! It is morbid, and it is not true. If it is of no consequence to any one else what becomes of you, it is of intense, unspeakable consequence to me: how many times must I tell you that before you mean to believe it?"

"To _you!_ in _Bermuda?_" she says, with a little doubting sigh.

"Yes, to _me_, in _Bermuda_," he answers, firmly. "Perhaps you think that it was only because I looked upon you as my own, my _property_, that I took so great an interest in you: it was not as _mine_, it was as _yourself_, that I cared about you. You are _yourself_ still, though you are not nor ever will be mine."

Then, like Guinevere's, "his voice brake suddenly."

"Then, as a stream, that spouting from a cliff
Fails in mid-air, but gathering at the base,
Remakes itself and flashes down the vale,
Went on in passionate utterance."

"Essie! they say that women are more capable of self-sacrifice than men. Prove it to me now! Sacrifice this pride of yours; consent to the one thing that would make me leave England with almost a light, instead of _such_ a heavy heart!"

She is silent for a minute or two, halting between two opinions; hesitating, struggling with herself: then she speaks, rapidly, but not easily--

"I cannot, Bob--I cannot! Ask me anything, not quite so hard, and I'll do it! Just think how young I am, seventeen last birthday, I have probably forty or fifty more years to live; do you wish me to promise to be a pensioner for _half a century_ on your mother's charity?"

He does not answer.

"Don't be angry with me for having a little self-respect!" she cries, passionately, snatching his hand. "I will go and stay with your people till I have found something to do, if they will have me. I will get your mother to help me in looking for work; I will take her advice in _everything_, do whatever she tells me; I will do anything--anything in life to please you, except----"

"Except the one thing I wish," he answers, sadly and coldly.

"If you speak in that tone I shall have to promise you _anything_," she says, despairingly; "but it will only be perjury, for I shall infallibly break my promise again. Why should not I work?" she goes on, in a sort of indignation at his silence. "Am I a cripple, or an idiot? Let me wait till I am either the one or the other, before I _come upon the parish!_" she says, with the bitter pride of poverty; "at all events, let us call things by their right names."

"As you will," he answers, deeply wounded. "If you take it as a great indignity to be offered a home with the oldest friends you have in the world, of course I can say no more; but oh, child! you are wrong--you are wrong!"