When Charles Fairfield came into the wainscoted dining-room a few minutes later it looked very cosy. The sun had broken the pile of western clouds, and sent low and level a red light flecked with trembling leaves on the dark panels that faced the windows.
Outside in that farewell glory of the day the cawing crows were heard returning to the sombre woods of Carwell, and the small birds whistled and warbled pleasantly in the clear air, and chatty sparrows in the ivy round gossiped and fluttered merrily before the little community betook themselves to their leafy nooks and couched their busy little heads for the night under their brown wings.
He looked through the window towards the gloriously-stained sky and darkening trees, and he thought,—
“A fellow like me, who has seen out his foolish days and got to value better things, who likes a pretty view, and a cigar, and a stroll by a trout-brook, and a song now and then, and a book, and a friendly guest, and a quiet glass of wine, and who has a creature like Alice to love and be loved by, might be devilish happy in this queer lonely comer, if only the load were off his heart.”
He sighed; but something of that load was for the moment removed; and as pretty Alice came in at the open door, he went to meet her, and drew her fondly to his heart.
“We must be very happy this evening, Alice. Somehow I feel that everything will go well with us yet. If just a few little hitches and annoyances were got over, I should be the happiest fellow, I think, that ever bore the name of Fairfield; and you, darling creature, are the light of that happiness. My crown and my life—my beautiful Alice, my joy and my glory—I wish you knew half how I love you, and how proud I am of you.”
“Oh, Charlie, Charlie, this is delightful. Oh, Ry, my darling! I’m too happy.”
And with these words, in the strain of her slender embrace, she clung to him as he held her locked to his heart.
The affection was there; the love was true. In the indolent nature of Charles Fairfield capabilities of good were not wanting. That dreadful interval in the soul’s history, between the weak and comparatively noble state of childhood and that later period when experience saddens and illuminates and begins to turn our looks regretfully backward, was long past with him. The period when women “come out” and see the world, and men in the old-fashioned phrase “sow their wild oats”—that glorious summertime of self-love, sin, and folly—that bleak and bitter winter of the soul, through which the mercy of God alone preserves for us alive the dormant germs of good, was past for him, without killing, as it sometimes does, all the tenderness and truth of the nursery. In this man, Charles Fairfield, were the trodden-down but still living affections which now, in this season, unfolded themselves anew—simplicity unkilled, and the purity not of Eden, not of childhood, but of recoil. Altogether a man who had not lost himself—capable of being happy—capable of being regenerated. I know not exactly what had evoked this sudden glow and effervescence. Perhaps it needs some manifold confluence of internal and external conditions, trifling and unnoticed, except for such unexplained results, to evolve these tremblings and lightings up that surprise us like the fiercer analogies of volcanic chemistry.
It is sad to see what appear capabilities and opportunities of a great happiness so nearly secured, and yet by reason of some inflexible caprice of circumstance quite unattainable.
It was not for some hours, and until after his wife had gone to her room, that the darkness and chill that portended the return of his worst care crept over him as he sat and turned over the leaves of his book.
He got up and loitered discontentedly about the room. Stopping now before the little book-shelves between the windows and adjusting unconsciously their contents; now at the little oak table, and fiddling with the flowers which Alice had arranged in a tall old glass, one of the relics of other days of Carwell; and so on, listless, irresolute.
“So here I am once more—back again among my enemies! Happiness for me, a momentary illusion—hope a cheat. My reality is the blackness of the abyss. God help me!”
He turned up his eyes, and he groaned this prayer, unconscious that it was a prayer.
“I will,” he thought, “extract the sting from this miserable mystery. Between me and Alice it shall be a secret no longer. I’ll tell her tomorrow. I’ll look out an opportunity; I will by”
And to nail himself to his promise this irresolute man repeated the same passionate oath, and he struck his hand on the table.
Next day, therefore, when Alice was again among the flowers in the garden he entered that antique and solemn shade with a strange sensation at his heart of fear and grief. How would Alice look on him after it was over? How would she bear it?
Pale as the man who walks after the coffin of his darling, between the tall gray piers he entered that wild and umbrageous enclosure.
His heart seemed to stop still as he saw little Alice, all unsuspicious of his dreadful message, working with her tiny trowell at the one sunny spot of the garden.
She stood up—how pretty she was!—looking on her work; and as she stood with one tiny foot advanced, and her arms folded, with her garden-gloves on, and the little diamond-shaped trowel glittering in her hand, she sang low to herself an air which he remembered her singing when she was quite a little thing long ago at Wyvern—when he never dreamed she would be anything to him—just a picture of a little brown-haired girl and nothing dearer.
Then she saw him, and—
“Oh, Ry, darling!” she cried, as making a diagonal from the distant point, she ran towards him through tall trees and old raspberries, and under the boughs of over-grown fruit trees, which now-a-days bore more moss and lichen than pears or cherries upon them.
“Ry, how delightful! You so seldom come here, and now I have you, you shall see all I’m doing, and how industrious I have been; and we are going to have such a happy little ramble. Has anything happened, darling?” she said, suddenly stopping and looking in his face.
Here was an opportunity; but if his resolution was still there, presence of mind failed him, and forcing a smile, he instantly answered—
“Nothing, darling—nothing whatever. Come, let us look at your work; you are so industrious, and you have such wonderful taste.”
And as, reassured, and holding his hand, she prattled and laughed, leading him round by the grass-grown walks to her garden, as she called that favoured bit of ground on which the sun shone, he hardly saw the old currant bushes or gray trunks of the rugged trees; .his sight seemed dazzled; his hearing seemed confused; and he thought to himself—
“Where am I— what is this—and can it be true that I am so weak or so mad as to be turned from the purpose over which I have been brooding for a day and a night, and to which I had screwed my courage so resolutely, by a smile and a question—What is this? Black currant; and this is groundsel; and little Alice, your glove wants a stitch or two,” he added aloud; “and oh! here we are. Now you must enlighten me; and what a grove of little sticks, and little inscriptions. These are your annuals, I suppose?”
And so they talked, and she laughed and chatted very merrily, and he had not the heart—perhaps the courage—to deliver his detested message; and again it was postponed.
The next day Charles Fairfield fell into his old gloom and anxieties; the temporary relief was felt no more, and the usual reaction followed.
It is something to have adopted a resolution. The anguish of suspense, at least, is ended, and even if it be to undergo an operation, and to blow one’s own brains out, men will become composed, and sometimes even cheerful, as the coroner’s inquest discovers, when once the way and the end are known.
But this melancholy serenity now failed Charles Fairfield, for without acknowledging it, he began a little to recede from his resolution. Then was the dreadful question, how will she bear it, and even worse, how will she view the position? Is she not just the person to leave forthwith a husband thus ambiguously placed, and to insist that this frightful claim, however shadowy, should be met and determined in the light of day?
“I know very well what an idol she makes of me, poor little thing; but she would not stay here an hour after she heard it; she would go straight to Lady Wyndale. It would break her heart, but she would do it”
It was this fear that restrained him. Impelling him, however, was the thought that,, sooner or later, if Harry’s story we true, his enemy would find him out, and his last state be worse than his first.
Again and again he cursed his own folly for not having consulted his shrewd brother before his marriage. How horribly were his words justified. How easy it would have been comparatively to disclose all to Alice before leading her into such a position. He did not believe that there was actual danger in this claim. He could swear that he meant no villany. Weak and irresolute, in a trying situation, he had been—that was all. But could he be sure that the world would not stigmatize him as a villain?
Another day passed, and he could not tell what a day might bring—a day of feverish melancholy, of abstraction, of agitation.
She had gone to her room. It was twelve o’clock at night, when, having made up his mind to make his agitating shrift, he mounted the old oak stairs, with his candle in his hand.
“Who’s there?” said his wife’s voice from the room.
“I, darling.”
And at the door she met him in her dressing-gown. Her face was pale and miserable, and her eyes swollen with crying.
“Oh, Ry, darling, I’m so miserable; I think I shall go mad.”
And she hugged him fast in trembling arms, and sobbed convulsively on his breast.
Charles Fairfield froze with a kind of terror. He thought, “she has found out the whole story.” She looked up in his face, and that was the face of a ghost.
“Oh, Ry, darling, for God’s sake tell me—is there anything very bad—is it debt only that makes you so wretched; I am in such dreadful uncertainty. Have mercy on your poor little miserable wife, and tell me whatever it is—tell me all!”
Here you would have said was something more urgent than the opportunity which he coveted; but the sight of that gaze of wildest misery smote and terrified him, it looked in reality so near despair, so near insanity.
“To tell her will be to kill her,” something seemed to whisper, and he drew her closer to him, and kissed her and laughed.
“Nothing on earth but money—the want of money—debt. Upon my soul you frightened me, Alice, you looked so, so piteous. I thought you had something dreadful to tell me; but, thank God, you are quite well, and haven’t even seen a ghost. You must not always be such a foolish little creature. I’m afraid this place will turn our heads. Here we are safe and sound, and nothing wrong but my abominable debts. You would not wonder at my moping if you knew what debt is; but I won’t look, if I can help it, quite so miserable for the future; for, after all, we must have money soon, and you know they can’t hang me for owing them a few hundreds; and I’m quite angry with myself for having annoyed you so, you poor little thing.”
“My noble Ry; it is so good of you, you make me so happy, I did not know what to think, but you have made me quite cheerful again, and I really do think it is being so much alone, I watch your looks so much, and everything prays on me so, and that seems odious when I have my darling along with me; but Ry will forgive his foolish little wife, I know he will, he’s always so good and kind.”
The............