CHAPTER XXX

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RENUNCIATION.

"Only the best composed and worthiest heart God sets to act the hardest, constantest part." --SAMUEL.

A week later the dreaded confession of her vow had been made by Shanno to her mother, and in spite of Lady Bryn Afon's heart-broken tears and entreaties, and refusal to believe that the shadow of the curse could possibly have fallen upon that pure young life, she held fast to her resolution, never to marry him whom she loved with all the intensity and devotion of her true woman's heart, never to hand on the curse of Ap Gryffyth to future generations, but to be herself its last innocent victim,--to offer up herself and her love as a sacrifice to Him who alone knew all it cost her to make it, and to trust to His love and to Percival's unalterable devotion, which she never dreamed of doubting, to sustain her through the coming weary years of life which might remain to her. How bitter it was to her, apart from her own bitter suffering, to inflict such grievous pain on the mother who had given up so much for her, it would be hard to tell; and over Lady Bryn Afon's agony of sorrow and disappointment, and misery at the sight of her darling's ill-concealed suffering, we must draw a veil. It yet remained to break the still unsuspected truth to her lover, and bracing every nerve for the painful task, sorely mistrusting the while her own powers of endurance when put to so fiery a test, she set out with him one bright evening for the mystic pool, with feet that trembled beneath her from bodily weakness as well as mental anguish. As yet Percival had waited patiently, cherishing every mark of returning health which he could note day by day in her appearance, wondering often at the signs of suffering and weakness which, in Lady Bryn Afon, only seemed to increase daily as her daughter regained strength, but ascribing them only to her long anxious watching, and the added care she must needs feel on the departure of her faithful physician, whom, for her husband's sake, she dared no longer keep at Shanno's bedside, when once he could honestly assure her that all fear for her life was past. Also Percival could well ascribe such marks of suffering on the mother's part to her natural grief at so cruel a revealing of her long-hidden secret; and with the strong self-repression into which he had long schooled himself, he waited, asking no question till Primrose herself should be able to give him the explanation he so longed for, of the strange effect the knowledge of the curse had produced upon her.

"I had a strange presentiment of evil concerning you, sweetheart," he said, as they slowly climbed the steep green slopes towards Craig Aran Peak, "on that evening when, as your mother has told me, you wandered out to the Robbers' Cavern, and witnessed the gipsy's dying struggles. And in the lonely darkness of the night it gathered new force, and greatly tormented me, insomuch that when at last I fell into uneasy slumbers, fearful dreams haunted me. I dreamed that you were in great agony of spirit, and longing for my presence, while I was powerless to come to you; and in my misery I called your name loudly twice or thrice, and so awoke with the sound of my own voice ringing in my ear, conscious that in that matter it had been no mere dream, but that I had verily called your name aloud in the darkness. My own words, 'Shanno, Shanno!' seemed to re-echo through my silent chamber, and as they died away I lay down again peacefully, feeling that the spell of my evil dream was broken, and resting in calm assurance of your safety."

Primrose had listened with bated breath. "I knew it was truly your voice I heard, my beloved," she said eagerly, "and no delusion of my excited fancy! Twice I heard my name, spoken in your own loved tones, but full of pain and sad entreaty, ring through the silent mountains, as I knelt in my misery over the dark pool's brink, about to plunge into its depths, there to end for ever my intolerable agony; and as I listened, spellbound, the mountain-echoes all around took up the cry, till the very air was filled with your voice, Percival, your voice crying my name in soft sad music among the dark lonely hill-tops! As clearly as I now hear you speak to me, your cry, 'Shanno, Shanno!' was borne to me upon the midnight breeze, and it saved me from the dark grave where my poor crazed brain thought to find the only rest this miserable earth afforded! But for that cry of yours, my beloved, through which God in His mercy spoke to me, I should ere now have surely shut myself out from His presence and from your pure love to all eternity!--unless, think you, Percival, my deed might perchance have found pardon in the sight of Him who saw all my utter misery, and knew it was fast turning my poor weak brain?"

"I do verily so believe, sweetheart," he answered earnestly, "and so I pray you dwell no more on so terrible a moment of your life, and think only of His mercy in calling you back from so untimely a grave, and of His sympathy with our human love, in suffering me thus mysteriously to be His instrument in saving you! Yet I cannot fully understand such utter woe as the gipsy's tale brought upon you. Could not the thought of my sheltering love, so soon to be wholly bestowed on you, chase away the terrors which her horrible words, and, I doubt not, equally horrible appearance, caused your tender heart to suffer? Could you not rest assured that your mother's care and love for you had doubtless undone the curse for ever, and that our home would be the sweet foundation of a new life and happiness, in which all the shame and suffering endured by your forefathers should be utterly forgotten? Did you lose all faith, dear heart, in your faithful physician, and the happy assurance he had given us of the blessed life, humanly speaking, before us?"

"His human speech has erred, beloved," answered Primrose in a low trembling voice, "and his human knowledge has failed, being, alas, too weak for so great extremity! Till I knew the nature of the curse I believed most truly that in our dear Rhiwallon's skilful hand lay a power which had not in vain laid your own and my mother's fears to rest, and that the vague disquieting shadows of my girlhood--long since, until recalled in horrid vividness by the gipsy's words, forgotten in the joy of my love for you--were indeed, as she assured me, but the faint reflection of her own sad sufferings. And you--oh, Percival!--you, as well as my poor mother, both knowing well the nature of the curse, believed it too! I know you did in your most secret heart feel all your fears dispelled wholly and for ever--those fears which have traced these lines on your dear face, Percival, at which I have of late oft secretly wondered, till now I see their just cause!--or ne'er would you have spoken to me a year since those sweet words which have given me such bliss unutterable that I have forgotten aught else! But Percival, my beloved!--oh, God help me, for I know not how to speak the words which must give him such bitter pain!--you did not know, nor did my poor mother realise that in her whom you loved the curse you believed dead still lived; that her childish happiness and girlhood's joy had been from time to time darkened by a strange and secret shadow, haunting her with nameless terrors and vague, unknown temptation, until, two years since, in your pure presence, it fled away, as she thought, for ever, and all recollection of it was swallowed up in the sunlight of her great love for you. Oh, Percival, had she but known for one moment only, as she now knows, the true meaning of that mysterious shadow, she would have fled for ever from your presence, ere she suffered you to pour upon her the wealth of your love, which she must now bid you take back, and waste no more on one who bears her blighted name! Oh, look not so strangely, my beloved! Only tell me here, in this same spot where we first looked upon each other's face, and exchanged our vows of love, that you forgive me for the sorrow I cause you; for indeed, indeed it was in ignorance I let you love me, and it has been in the sweetness of our mutual love that I have so utterly forgotten the shadow, as never once to have recalled it to mind till now, when its bitter meaning has been thus rudely revealed to me! Would I had not made so light of it to my mother, but my love had indeed so wholly chased away its pain! Percival, you suffer, my beloved, and I must with ruthless hand inflict the bitter pain! But see--I am strong--I speak calmly! Perchance my heart is already broken, and I am dead to its pain. Percival, Percival, speak to me!"

As the meaning of her words gradually forced itself into his unwilling brain, the young chaplain's face had grown whiter and whiter, and seemed turning into very stone before her eyes, in the misery which, with iron hand, he was controlling until he had heard all. "Sweetheart," he answered, with the sudden, desperate eagerness of a drowning man catching at a straw, "this cannot be! The shock of your new knowledge, and the illness it has brought upon you, has over-wrought your nerves, and caused you to attach to those passing clouds of temptation or depression, of which you speak, and which haunt us all betimes, a meaning with which there is no need, no reason to clothe them! I pray you, an you love me, suffer my devotion to chase them for ever from this fair mind, which, God forbid, should dwell to its hurt upon this past sad history! Shanno, Shanno, I will not believe that your sweet life must be darkened by this evil from which you have been so tenderly shielded! It is not without much thought upon the matter that I have asked for your love, and looked forward to a life with you, in which the curse shall be undone for ever! Can you not trust that in the deep study I have ever given to this matter, and in the far stronger confidence we all place in the yet more learned studies of our beloved physician, I could not have blinded my eyes to aught of ill that might in the future befall you and yours? I am satisfied, my darling, that all shall be well, and would bid you in this matter rest on Rhiwallon's judgment, if love itself bid you fear to rest on mine own, and to wait patiently, as I will likewise wait, till this passing shadow of doubt shall have rolled away."

"It can never roll away, Percival!" she answered in a low but firm voice. "You have verily believed all to be safe and well, because you believed the curse in me to be wholly dead. It is not dead, and I would to God I had sooner known its nature, that I might have spared you this pain! Rhiwallon's marvellous cure may be for the healing of others, but over the woe of our miserable house it has proved itself powerless! The shadows of my youth were no deception, Percival, but in my ignorance I knew not their cause, nor to what dark temptation the evil spirit prompted me. Now I know it by its own terrible name, and I will ne'er suffer others after me to bear the woe my father has borne, and which, though it has been mercifully spared to me, may descend with deadly hand upon my children. 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children even unto the third and fourth generation!' So it has been in our unhappy house, Percival, and so, I fear me, it must ever be. It is true that in me the sin has borne no fruit, and does but lie a hidden root of evil in my soul, alas, long forgotten in this dream of bliss, and ne'er till now understood! Yet here in me it lies, a fatal inheritance, and with me it shall perish. I will never marry you, Percival! I can better bear to see you suffer now with a bitter pain that comes straight from the hand of God, than hereafter with the pain and shame which your own wife or child might bring upon you. And for me--oh, my God, let me not think upon my own suffering! let this poor heart fail, and yield even now in its bitter misery! Percival, Percival, say you can forgive me, or my heart must break!" And the unnatural calmness giving way at last, she flung herself into his arms, and wept bitterly.

"You bid me take back my love, sweetheart," he said. "I can no more so do than cause yon sun to cease shining at your bidding! An no earthly marriage may be ours, yet no power can sever the sweet union of our souls, which, perchance, being more wholly given to God's service here on earth, shall so be only the more closely joined together in Him to all eternity. There is in heaven no 'marrying nor giving in marriage,' yet I trow, the promise that we shall be 'as the angels' hath in it the hid secret of a deeper love and bliss than our earth-bound hearts can yet imagine. Can we, dear heart, but wear our cross bravely here, our future crown will be but the brighter, and our love shine with greater radiance. Yet--oh, my sweet wife--whom now in a few short days I hoped to call mine own--my spirit fails me in this dark hour of suffering! How can we bear our severed lives through the weary years that lie before us? Is there yet for us no hope, nowhere for us in this bright world one gleam of light in our darkness? Nay, Primrose, I cannot take your bitter words for truth. In three days will be our looked-for wedding-day! I cannot let you go! I will defy these horrid shades of evil, and you shall be mine here as well as in eternity! No ill shall have power to touch the loved wife who is to be the light of my home, the God-given treasure to lead me ever nearer Him!"

"Then let me lead you now, dear heart!" cried Primrose, through her bitter tears. "It is even now this higher path of duty that we are called to tread--a painful, stony path, which leads away from all the fair hopes so soon to have been realised--from that dear home for which we have together looked and longed, and which is so nearly ours--and yet a path we must tread, Percival, even if with bleeding feet and breaking hearts! It is a bitter struggle to keep my vow, Percival, and sorely am I tempted to believe this new grief of ours to be but an idle dream, from which I shall presently awake to find all sunlight as before; but in the very depths of my heart I know my vow to be right in the sight of God. Tempt me no more, beloved! Here, where the vision of the fair immortal maiden first touched the secret springs of your heart, must you vow, as she of old, to forsake all mortal longing, and retain only in your heart that love which is eternal, in whose unalterable light we may yet walk this weary earth with footsteps lightened by a tender, loving friendship, which none may sever, and which shall bind us even in this present world in an unseen bond, which is but the shadow of that which shall be hereafter."

But the chaplain, gazing down upon the sweet, upturned face, glowing with a beauty which surely was of heaven itself, turned away his eyes in unspeakable agony. His heart was not yet ready for the sacrifice, and his whole nature rose in rebellion against the taking up of this cross, from which his secret reason and conscience told him there was no escape. Alone he must wrestle, as she had done in her own first agony, ere he could say he was willing to bid farewell to the earthly treasure his hand had so nearly grasped, and to which his heart clung with only the greater tenacity because of its own wearisome struggles--struggles never confessed to her he loved, but which had already torn his heart for many a day in the past months with their perplexing conflict; the intense love, which bade him at any price seek to make his new-found treasure his own, warring secretly with the oft-recurring dread lest this earthly love should tempt him to forsake that special work he had vowed to God as a free-will offering--that work so sorely needed among His outcast and suffering ones, yet so little recognised by the world, or even by his brother clergy, and which might bring upon him sore obloquy and grievous trial, hard to bear for himself, and which his soul had shrunk from asking a loved one to share with him. And then that yet sorer struggle waged between his own heart and that cruel burden of the curse, which had for a time stood before him as insuperable a barrier between himself and happiness as it now stood before her he loved! But for Rhiwallon and his firm assurance, even Lady Bryn Afon's pleadings and tears would not have moved him to confess his love, but, while loving Primrose with a deep, unalterable devotion, he would have kept his secret for ever buried in his own breast, pursuing alone till death his solitary course and combat with evil. Now that in his perfect confidence in the physician's judgment he had long since forgotten these past grievous struggles of the soul, and that the ever-deepening knowledge of Shanno's perfect sympathy and deep affection, which, through good report and ill, would keep her ever at his side, had long made him feel with heartfelt thankfulness that his decision had been well, the sudden blow fell with unutterable agony, and crippled every thought but the one which echoed with passionate cry through every fibre of his being--"I cannot give her up! I cannot drink this bitter cup--take up this heavy cross--it is impossible!"

"Primrose," he said, after a long silence, during which she had waited in agony for his next words, "Primrose, I cannot answer you now. I must be alone with God, and pray Him to vouchsafe me that calmness of spirit in which alone I can judge rightly. My brain whirls, and my heart is sick with pain. Shanno, Shanno," and his face grew yet whiter in sudden agony, "you have not ceased to love me? I can bear all but that!"

"Methinks I have but loved you more since I have vowed ne'er to be your wife," said Primrose sadly. Then, flinging herself into his arms, she sobbed convulsively. "Oh, Percival, do not doubt me! To all eternity you are my one and only love! You weep, Percival? Oh, my God, this is verily the bitterness of death!" And in the presence of such utter woe the bright mid-day sun veiled his face beneath a fleecy cloudlet, and the very birds hushed their song, and built in silence their nests amid the thorn bushes. And presently, in the mysterious stillness of the lonely mountains, it seemed to the chaplain that a voice spoke sweetly in his ear, and said in wondrous loving accents; "As thou hast been granted to bear in thy mortal frame a mark of My human likeness, so shalt thou be likewise accounted worthy to bear in thy soul the mark of My sufferings. Take up thy cross and follow Me." And the chaplain fell on his knees by the dim, dark lake, and bowed his head in mute submission, rising presently, weary as a child from his bitter conflict, yet conscious within himself of the dawning of a strange new strength.

He turned away in silence, took Shanno's hand, and mechanically they descended together the steep hillside towards the farm. On the threshold he stopped, and looked long and earnestly into her face. "Sweetheart," he said, "my heart is rent in twain with sorrow, and in the selfishness of my own grief I have forgotten yours, and suffered my own weak tears to open afresh those wounds with which your tender heart yet bleeds. But have a little patience with me, sweet one, and you shall presently see me strong and brave to aid these weary feet of yours along the stony path which we must tread in mutual sacrifice of our earthly love, yet which perchance the light of a holy friendship may gladden beyond our struggling hearts' present power to conceive. Fain would I overcome by all the arguments love can offer the decision you have made, yet my secret conscience, warring against my rebellious heart, sternly bids me take up the cross you have already laid upon your own tender shoulders, and bear it ever bravely at your side. For love of me, dear heart, I see these golden locks, alas, already sprinkled with grey! For love of you I will henceforth strive to bury in my own breast the woe you bid me bear, and help you with all the strength God gives me to walk worthily in that solitary path He has called you to tread for His sake."

"Then you do indeed truly forgive me, and believe in your heart I have done well?" cried Primrose. "Oh, Percival, my love, my love, in my heart of hearts I know my vow is right in the sight of God, and can I but know also that it is right in your dear eyes, I can bear the rest!"

For a moment the chaplain covered his face with his hands and trembled with the bitter force of his soul's conflict; then, raising his pure, upturned face to heaven, a light, surely not of earth, irradiated his beautiful countenance as he murmured in the words of that holy saint whose sayings he ever treasured in his heart, "Christ's whole life was a cross and martyrdom, and dost thou seek rest and joy for thyself?" Then, turning to her he loved, with that light still glowing in his deep, dark-fringed eyes, he said, "Sweetheart, to 'do after the good and leave the evil' shall ever be our motto, and since for us the sweet joys of earth, so good in themselves, and so blessed of God, are yet for us two mysteriously pronounced by Him as evil, we will together forsake them lovingly for His sake, and with steadfast hearts walk hand in hand bravely through this present life in the hallowed paths of friendship, and in His great mercy wait for the full fruition of our love in the world to come."

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