“Could Love part thus? was it not well to speak? To have spoken once? It could not but be well.
*            *            *            *            *            *
O then like those, who clench their nerves to rush
Upon their dissolution, we two rose,
There—closing like an individual life—
In one blind cry of passion and of pain,
Like bitter accusation ev’n to death,
Caught up the whole of love and utter’d it,
And bade adieu for ever.”
 
LOVE AND DUTY.
 
 
 
THERE was a terrible silence in the little arbour.
 
Outside, in the garden, the sun and the flowers, the birds and the insects, went on with their song of rejoicing as before, but it reached no longer the ears of the two human beings who but now had re-echoed it in their hearts.
 
Was it hours or only minutes that it lasted —this silence as of death.
 
At last Ralph spoke, quietly—so very quietly, that though Marion could not see his face, his voice made her start with a strange, unknown terror.
 
“And who did this thing?” he asked. “Who forced you into this hideous mockery of a marriage?”
 
“No one,” she replied; “no one did it but myself. You can’t understand. Ralph;” and the anguish of appeal and remorse in her voice made it sound like a wailing cry. “You can never know all I have endured. I was so wretched, so very wretched; so utterly, utterly desolate and alone. And then I heard that of you, and I lost my trust, and it nearly killed me. Your own words had warned me not to build too securely on what might be beyond your power to achieve.” Ralph ground his teeth, but she went on: “I thought I was going to die, and I was glad. But I did not die, and he was kind and gentle to me, and I was alone. And I thought—oh! I thought, Ralph, till this very morning, that I had torn you out of my heart. The scar, I knew, would be always there, but the love itself, I thought it was dead and buried; and only just now I sat here thinking to myself in my blindness and folly, that I could even see the grass be ginning to grow on the grave.”
 
“And your husband?” Ralph asked, in the same dead, hard, feelingless tone. “Your husband—I forget the name you told me—do you then care for him? Do you love him?”
 
“Love him!” she exclaimed. “Oh, Ralph, have mercy! I did not mean to deceive him! I told him I could not give him what he gave me; for he, I know, loves me. He is good and true, and very kind to me. And he urged it very much, and said he was not afraid; he would be content with what I said, what I thought I could give him. For remember, Ralph, that other I thought was dead—dead and buried for ever. I care for him too much to have yielded had I known it was not so. But ‘love him!’ When I think of the days when first I learnt what that word means, when you taught it me, Ralph—you, and no other! And now you ask me, calmly, if I love him! You of all!” She stopped suddenly, as if horrified at herself; and then, her excitement changed to bitter shame and self-reproach, she cried in an anguish, “Oh! what am I saying? Why has it all come back when I thought it was gone? You are making me wicked to Geoffrey. Ralph! Ralph! why do you mock me with these cruel questions? Have mercy! Have a little mercy!”
 
“Mercy!” said Ralph, turning from the door-post on which he had been leaning, and rising to his full height as he spoke. Standing right in front of her, and with a strange change in his voice. “ ‘Mercy!’ you ask? Yes child, I will have mercy. Mercy on you and on myself, who have done nothing, either of us, deserving of this hideous torment. You are ‘married’ you tell me—married to another man—but I tell you, you are not. That was a blasphemous mockery of a marriage! I am your husband, I, and no other! You are mine, Marion, and no one else’s! My wife! my own! Come away with me, child, now, this very moment, and have done at once and for ever with this horrible night-mare that is killing me. For I cannot lose you again! Oh, my God! I cannot!” And as he spoke, he tried to draw her towards him, not gently, but roughly, violently almost, in sore passion of anguish which was enraging him.
 
Hitherto, since he had begun to speak, Marion had allowed him to hold her clasped hand in his. But now, as she felt the hold of his fingers tighten, and as the full meaning of his wild, mad words broke upon her, with a sudden movement she rose from the bench on which she was sitting, and tore herself from his grasp, growing at the same moment as if by magic, perfectly, icily calm.
 
But only for an instant did her instinct of indignation against him last. One glance at the dark, passionate, storm-tossed face beside her—so changed, so terribly, sadly changed in its expression from its usual calm, gentle kindliness—and her mood softened. She laid her hand trustingly on his arm.
 
“Ralph,” she said, “poor Ralph, hush! If you are for a moment weak, I must be strong for both. This is terrible that has come upon us—so terrible that just now I do not see that I can bear it and live. For you know all my heart, and you can judge if it is not to the full as terrible for me as for you.” (This she said in her innocent instinct of appealing to his pity for her.) “You at least are alone—are bound by no vows to another, and that other, alas, so good and kind. I had rather, ten thousand times rather, he were hard and unloving and cruel! But though just now I can see nothing else, this one thing I see plainly—you must go Ralph, you must leave me now at once, and we must never, never see each other again. There is just one little glimpse of light left in the thought that hitherto we have neither of us done anything to forfeit the other’s respect—unless indeed that deceit of mine?—but no,” she added, glancing at his face, “I know you have not thought worse of me for that. Do not let us destroy this poor little rag of comfort left us, Ralph. Let me still think of you as good and brave—yes, as the best and bravest. And do not tempt me, Ralph, to say at this terrible moment what in calmer times might cause me shame and remorse to remember.” And she raised her face to his with a very agony of appeal in the grey eyes he loved so fervently.
 
“Child,” he said, still with the hard look on his face, “child, are you an angel or a stone? Have you a heart or have you none? If after all you are just like other women; utterly incapable of entering into the depths a man’s one love; at least you should pity what you cannot understand, instead of maddening me with that conventional humbug about mutual respect and so on. Who but a woman would talk so at such a time? But I will do as you wish,” he went on, lashing himself into fury against her, “I will not stay here longer to tempt you by my evil presence to outrage your delicate sense of propriety, or to say one word which hereafter you might consider it had not been perfectly ‘correct’ or ‘ladylike’ to utter. Good God! what a fool I have been! I had imagined you somewhat different from other women, but I see my mistake. It shall be as you wish. Good bye. You shall not again be distressed by the sight of me. Truly you do well to despise me.”
 
And with a bitter sneer in his voice, he turned away. It was at last too much. The girl threw herself down recklessly on the rough garden-seat. She shed no tears, she was not the sort of woman to weep in such dire extremity of anguish. She shook and quivered as she lay there, but that was all.
 
But soon the thought came over her “was it not better so?” Better that Ralph should thus cruelly misjudge her, for in the end it might help him to forget her. Forget her—yes. This was what she must now pray for, if her love for him were worthy of the name.
 
“Ah but he might have said good-bye gently,” broke forth again from the over-charged heart. “He might have spoken kindly when it was for the last, last time.”
 
As the wish crossed her thoughts, and she half unconsciously murmured it in words, she felt that some one was beside her. An arm raised her gently and replaced her on the seat. It was Ralph again. Something in his touch soothed and quieted her. She did not this time shrink from him in alarm, but for a moment leant her throbbing head restfully on his shoulder.
 
“Marion, my poor child. Marion, my lost darling, forgive me.”
 
“Forgive you, Ralph? Yes, a thousand times, yes,” she replied. “But do not so grievously misjudge me. It is no conventional humbug, as you call it. It is the old plain question of right and wrong.”
 
As she said the words there flashed across her mind—or was it some mocking imp that whispered it?—the remembrance of some other scene, when this same phrase, “a plain question of right and wrong,” had been used by herself or another. When was it? Ah yes! Long, long ago, the first morning in the little house at Altes. She recalled it all perfectly. The room in which they sat, the position of their chairs. And she heard Cissy’s voice saying, timidly, “I don’t pretend to be as wise as you, May, but are you quite sure there is not a plain question of right and wrong in the matter?” And, to add to her misery, the thought darted into her mind—what if she had then allowed herself to see it thus? If instead of acting as she had done to screen him, she had encouraged Harry bravely to appeal to her father, how different might all have been? This terrible complication avoided, her life and Ralph’s saved from this irremediable agony? Could it indeed be that this terrible punishment had come upon her for this?
 
Well for us is it, truly, that our sins and mistakes are not judged as in such times of morbid misery and exaggerated self reproach we are apt to imagine!
 
The remembrance of that bygone scene at Altes flashed through Marion’s mind in an instant, but not too quickly to add its sting to her suffering. And, half mechanically, she repeated:
 
“Yes, the old plain question of right and wrong.”
 
“I know it is,” said Ralph, “and I knew it in my heart when you just now said it. I was mad, I think, doubly mad. First, to torture you with my wild, wicked words, and then to turn upon you with my sneers. So I have come back to you for a moment, just for one little last moment, child, to ask you to forgive me and say goodbye. Look up at me, dear, and let me see that you forgive me.”
 
She looked up at him; looked with her true, clear eyes into his, while he gazed down on her—oh, with what an agony of earnestness, as if he would burn her face into his brain for ever!
 
For a moment neither spoke.
 
Then he said:
 
“It is as if one of us were dying, Marion, though that I think would be easy to bear compared with this. ‘The bitterness of death’ they talk of! All, they little know! Good-bye, my own true darling. My one love, my life’s love—goodbye.” And as he said the words he stooped and kissed her—gently, but long and fervently, on the forehead.
 
Poor Ralph! It was the first time.
 
Was it wrong of her to allow it? Those who think so may judge her, and I for one shall not argue it with them.
 
She stood with bent head, motionless, staring at the ground, but seeing nothing. Then she looked up hastily, with eyes for the first time blinded with burning, slow-coming tears. Tears that bring no relief, wrung from the sore agony of a bleeding heart.
 
But he was gone!
 
And so “the old, old story” was over for ever for these two; as for how many others, whose suffering is never suspected!
 
Ralph walked back slowly to the inn, along the very garden path which half-an-hour before, half a lifetime it seemed to him, he had paced so light-heartedly. The same little stiff box-edging he had noticed before, the same scent from the roses and honeysuckle, the same sun and sky and air. Then, he remembered he had said to himself, it was all sweet and bright and fair. Could he have said so? Was the change in himself only? “Could it indeed be,” he asked, as we all do at these awful times, beating our poor bruised wings against the bars of the inexorable “it is”—“could it be that nature should remain thus unmoved and indifferent when human beings were riven in agony?”
 
And a feeling of intensest disgust, amounting almost to rage, seized him at the sight of the hatefu............