Love lies deeper than all words;
And not the spoken but the speechless love
Waits answer, ere I rise and go my way.
—BROWNING.
When in after-years Malcolm Herrick reviewed this portion of his life, he owned to himself that during the five weeks that followed the Templeton Bean-feast he had lived in a fool's paradise—in a state of beatitude that was as unsubstantial and fleeting as the sunset clouds that piled themselves behind the fir woods.
He was very happy, almost pathetically so, and the new wine of youth seemed coursing through his veins. "This is life," he would say to himself; "I have only existed before, but now I am reborn into a new world, and I have learned the secret of all the ages."
Every day his passion for Elizabeth Templeton increased, and the charm and sweetness of her personality attracted him more powerfully. He had never seen any one like her; she was so full of surprises, her nature was so rich, so original, and yet so womanly, that the man whom she blessed with her love could never have grown weary of her society. Without an effort, simply by being herself, a truthful, noble-hearted woman, she had dominated his strong nature and brought him to her feet. Was she conscious of his devotion? This was a question that Malcolm vainly tried to answer, but her manner perplexed and baffled him. She was always kind and friendly, and her cordial welcome never varied, but Malcolm could not flatter himself that he received any special encouragement, or that she regarded him in any other light than a trusted and valued friend. Now and then, when he found himself alone with her, he fancied her manner had changed—that she had become quiet and reserved, as though she were not at her ease with him. Was it only his imagination, he wondered, that she seemed trying to keep him at a distance, as though she were afraid of him? But such was his blindness and infatuation that he drew encouragement even from this.
To Malcolm those summer days were simply perfect. His morning hours were devoted to his literary work, and the essays were taking shape and form under his hand. Never had his brain been clearer; he worked with a facility that surprised himself. "I am inspired," he would whisper; "I have a patron saint of my own now," and he would tell himself that no name could be so sweet to him as Elizabeth. He would murmur it half-aloud as he wandered in the woodlands in the gloaming—"Elizabeth, Elizabeth"—and once as he said it, something seemed to rise in his throat and choke him.
He had not forgotten Anna; he had never forgotten her in his life, for his adopted sister was very dear to him.
Every week he wrote to his mother and also to her—pleasant, chatty letters, full of affection and warm with brotherly kindness. If Anna ever shed tears over them he never knew it.
With what touching humility she acknowledged his thoughtfulness!
"Another letter—how good you are to me!" she would say in her reply. "Mother declares that you spoil me. I read her all your description of the Bean-feast. Oh, if I had only been there! But it is wicked of me to say that."
But later on there was a touch of curiosity, almost a shadow of doubt.
"You say so little about Miss Elizabeth Templeton," she wrote, "and yet you are at the Wood House every day. It is always Miss Templeton. Is it heresy, dear? but I fancy I should like Miss Elizabeth best. Tell me more about her next time you write. I want to see her with your eyes." But Anna pleaded in vain—on the subject of Elizabeth's merits he kept silence.
But it was quite true that he was at the Wood House nearly every day, and that the sisters always welcomed him most kindly. Sometimes he dined there, either alone or with the Kestons; or he would stroll across at tea-time, or oftener in the evening, when they were sitting on the terrace. David Carlyon was often with them; his father had left him by this time. The young men used to look askance at each other in the dim light, and Malcolm would shake hands with the curate rather stiffly.
"Carlyon was there again," he would say to Amias, when he found his friend smoking in the porch. "I don't dislike the fellow, but one may have too much even of a good thing." Then Amias looked at him rather queerly but made no answer.
Caleb Martin and Kit were established comfortably at the cottage under Mrs. Sullivan's motherly wing, and Kit's white pinched little face filled out in the sweet country air.
"She is a different creature," Caleb assured Malcolm. "I wish Ma'am could see her. She is just as happy as the day is long. We are in the woods from morning to night, picking up fir-cones and building with them, and making believe that we are gypsies. She's ready to drop with fatigue before she lets me take her home, and then our good lady scolds us a bit."
"And poor Mrs. Martin is alone in Todmorden's Lane?" remarked Malcolm.
"Lord love you, sir," returned Caleb, "you don't need to be pitying Ma'am; she's glad to be rid of the pair of us. She is whitewashing and papering the rooms. She is a handy woman, is Ma'am, and she says we shall not know the place when we go back. I never knew such a woman for scrubbing and cleaning—it seems to make her happy somehow."
Malcolm made frequent visits to Rotherwood to see Caleb and Kit, and he generally paid them on the days when Elizabeth was at the schools, so that he could walk back with her through the woodlands.
The first time he did this Elizabeth seemed rather surprised, though she offered no objection; but after that she took it as a matter of course, and chatted with him on all manner of subjects. She listened very kindly when Malcolm sounded her on the subject of Kit, and made all sorts of impossible plans for the child's future; and though she laughed at him good-humouredly, and told him that he was a visionary, impracticable person, she soon became serious and brought her shrewd common-sense and feminine wits to his assistance. And so it was that one day he made a proposition that nearly took Caleb's breath away.
Kit must certainly not go back to Todmorden's Lane until she was stronger, he remarked. Miss Templeton and he were fully agreed on this point; the fogs and low-lying mists from the river were harmful to her poor little chest.
Caleb must leave her under Mrs. Sullivan's care. Miss Templeton had made all arrangements, and he would be responsible for the expense. There had been a pitched battle over this point; but for once Elizabeth had been forced to give in, Malcolm had been so stern and masterful.
Caleb should come down for the week-end every three weeks or so, he could promise him that, and a whole week at Christmas. But Caleb looked too much dazed to answer, and there was a misty look in the transparent, light-blue eyes.
"I'm took all of a heap!" he ejaculated at last. "It is not that I don't thank you kindly, sir, for I am pretty nigh choking with gratitude; but you see there is Ma'am to reckon with—if Kit were her own little 'un she couldn't be fonder of her."
"I daresay not," remarked Malcolm, and there was a trace of impatience in his tone; "but, after all, Mr. Martin, you are Kit's father." But Caleb only shook his head doubtfully, and went on in his slow, ruminating way.
"Most folk think that Ma'am is a bad-natured woman because she gives them the rough side of her tongue; but, Lord bless you, her bark's worse than her bite. Her heart is just set on Kit, and she would not hurt a hair of her head in her most contrary moods, when even the black cat won't stay in the place she is making such a scrimmage with the pots and pans. But Kit only laughs. 'It is Ma'am at her music,' she says; 'but it t'aint the sort of music I like.' Yes, indeed, sir, I have heered her say that a score of times."
"Very well, then, you had better go and have a talk with your wife," returned Malcolm.
And Caleb went, and came back to Rotherwood the next day a sadder and a wiser man.
"Well, and what did Mrs. Martin say?" asked Malcolm when he saw Caleb again.
The little cobbler drew his hand across his eyes in an embarrassed fashion; he was evidently trying to recollect something.
"Ma'am sends her humble duty," he answered presently in a sing-song voice, "and she is greatly obliged to you and the kind lady, and Kit may stay along of Mrs. Sullivan—those were her very words, sir."
"Mrs. Martin is a sensible woman then."
"Oh, she is that, sir. She was scolding me all supper-time for not thinking of the child's good. 'You can bring her back if you like, Caleb,' she says, 'and poison her with the filthy fogs, and get her ready for her coffin, poor lamb. And you call yourself a father, Caleb Martin? Drat all such fathers, I say!' She made me clean ashamed of myself, did Ma'am;" and here the little man looked ready to cry.
"Well, Mr. Martin, I do think the child will be better here, and you can come down every three weeks or so to see her—you know we have arranged that—and now and then you can bring your wife too;" and Caleb brightened up at this.
But the day he left Rotherwood he was so lugubrious and tearful that Malcolm felt quite sorry for him; but Kit took a less depressing view.
"I don't want you to go, dad," she said feelingly; "but I like staying along with this good lady," with a friendly nod of her head to Mrs. Sullivan. "I have got a black kitten of my own and a yellow chick, and they are better than dolls because they can love me back. And the ladies from the Wood House are going to take me out for drives—my, won't that be 'eavenly!" Nevertheless Kit shed a few tears when Caleb closed the little gate behind him. "I want to stay here, and I want daddy too," she said rather pitifully.
All these weeks Malcolm had seen nothing of Cedric. His visit to the Jacobis had been prolonged for another ten days, and then he wrote, in high spirits, to tell his sisters that Dick Wallace had invited him to go down to his father's place in Scotland.
"I expect I shall have rare sport there, and stalk a deer or two," he continued. "Dick and I are to go down by the night mail on Thursday, but I will run over to Staplegrove for a few hours. Tell Herrick I will look him up at his diggings."
By some oversight Elizabeth forgot to give Malcolm this message, and Malcolm, who had to go up to town on business, was much chagrined to find that Cedric had called during his absence, and had been greatly disappointed at missing him.
He went across to the Wood House directly after supper, and found the ladies sitting out on the terrace.
Elizabeth was very contrite.
"It was dreadfully careless of me," she confessed; "I meant to have sent you a note last night, but some one called—who was it, Dinah?—and put it out of my head." But Dinah could not recollect that any one had called except David Carlyon, and seemed rather surprised at the question.
"Oh, it must have been Mr. Carlyon," returned Elizabeth; but she coloured slightly. "It was really very stupid of me; Cedric was quite put out about it."
"Oh, well, it cannot be helped," observed Malcolm, philosophically. "Did he say much about the Jacobis?"
"No, he only remarked that they had been very kind, and that he had had a rattling good time. Those were his words, were they not, Die?" and Dinah smiled assent.
"We both asked him a heap of questions, but they seemed to bore him; he was full of his Scotch visit, and would scarcely talk of anything else."
Malcolm was not quite satisfied, but he kept his doubts to himself. Elizabeth, who was as sharp as a needle, looked up at him quickly. "We did our best, I assure you, Mr. Herrick, but he refused to be drawn; he seemed very much excited."
"The Wallaces are a good sort of people, are they not?" was Malcolm's next question.
"Oh yes, they are thoroughly nice;" it was Dinah who answered him. "Sir Richard is charming, and so is Lady Wallace; and of course Dick is an old acquaintance of ours."
"There are some daughters, I believe?"
"Yes, but they are not very young or attractive, poor things," replied Elizabeth—"heavy, podgy sort of girls, but very kind-hearted. By the bye, Die, I wonder if Cedric will come across the Godfreys, they are somewhere in the neighbourhood." And then she explained to Malcolm that Fettercairn Hall, where Sir Richard Wallace lived, was only a few miles from the shooting lodge where the Godfreys were staying; and this fact appeared to give the sisters a good deal of satisfaction.
It was the middle of September now, and Malcolm reflected with some uneasiness that more than half his holiday was over. The Kestons had decided to return to Cheyne Walk in another three weeks or so, and of course he must accompany them; his mother and Anna would be back in town by that time, and his presence would be needed in Lincoln's Inn.
"The shadows of the prison-house," as he called it, began to haunt him, and he counted up his days as jealously as a miser counts his gold.
Every day he saw Elizabeth; and each hour he was alone with her he found it more difficult to keep silence; but as yet he had had himself well in hand. Perhaps something in her manner had sealed his lips, or he feared that the spell of this happy dream would be broken. But during those wakeful summer nights, when that sweet pain kept him restless, he would tell himself that the time had not yet come, that she did not know him well enough.
"She is not a young girl," he would say to himself; "she is a mature woman who knows the world and has thought deeply-why, even to know her is a liberal education." And then he repeated to himself in the darkness those lines of Shelley—
"Her voice was like the voice of his own soul,
Heard in the calm of thought,"
for all the sweet influences of summer and nature had only fed the passion, and every day it seemed to grow stronger and stronger.
"She is my other self, she thinks my thoughts, we have a thousand things in common, how can she help loving me!" he would say when his mood was jubilant and sanguine; but at other times a chill doubt would cross his mind.
"She is different from other women, she will not be easily won, that is why I fear to speak;" but all the same Malcolm registered a mental vow that he would not leave Staplegrove until the decisive words had been spoken.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg