CHAPTER VI.

“COULD LOVE PART THUS?”

THE happy week went by, and at the close of it came the end of the world, as it seemed to Lucy Alford.

“Good news, Lucy!” Mrs. Jerningham said, one morning, as she opened her letters at the breakfast-table; “good news for you.”

“For _me_,” faltered Miss Alford, blushing; “what good news can there be for me?”

What indeed? Was not Laurence Desmond’s holiday to end to-morrow? This afternoon they were to have their last row on the Thames.

“Yes, Lucy. You remember what I told you about Mrs. Fitzpatrick, that delightful person in Ireland. I wrote to her a few days ago, you know, telling her of my plans for you,--for she is just one of those good, motherly creatures who are always ready to help one,--and it happens most fortunately that she can take you herself. Her own governess--a young person who had been with her five years--has lately married, and she has tried in vain to find any one she likes. You are to go to her at once, dear, with a salary of sixty pounds. The situation will be a delightful one, you will be quite one of the family, and they live in a noble old stone house, in a great wilderness of a park, only fifteen miles from Limerick.”

“Only fifteen miles from Limerick.” If the noble old stone house had been fifteen miles from Memphis, or fifteen miles from Timbuctoo, the name of the locality could scarcely have conjured up more dreary ideas in the mind of Lucy Alford. She involuntarily made a rough calculation of the mileage between Limerick and Mr. Desmond’s chambers. _Him_ she could never hope to see again, if she went to those unknown wilds of Ireland. And yet what did it matter? A world seemed to divide them, as it was. Sitting in the same boat with him, the abyss that yawned between them was profound and immeasurable as eternity. At Limerick or at Hampton it must be all the same. He was nothing to her at Hampton; at Limerick he could be no less than nothing. Something in her face, as she mused thus, told Mrs. Jerningham that the delight afforded by these tidings was not altogether unalloyed.

“I dare say the notion of such a journey alarms you,” said Emily, kindly; “but I will see that all is arranged for your comfort. And I am sure you will be happy at Shannondale Park. I could not have wished you better fortune than such a home.”

No: what could fortune give her brighter than this? A pleasant home and a kind mistress. She felt like some poor little slave sold to a new master, to be sent to a strange country. She tried with a great effort to express some sense of pleasure and thankfulness, but she could not. The words choked her. Happy, in barbarous wastes of unknown Hibernia, while _he_ lived his own life in London, serenely forgetful of her wretched existence!

“Oh, how ungrateful I am!” she said to herself, while Mrs. Jerningham watched her sharply, and guessed what thoughts were working in that sorely troubled brain.

“Perhaps a situation nearer London would have suited you better, Miss Alford,” Emily remarked, with biting acrimony; “where your _old friends_ could have called upon you from time to time.”

Lucy flushed burning red, and anon burst into tears.

“I have no friend in the world but you,” she said, piteously. “I know it is wicked of me not to be pleased with such good fortune, and I--am--truly--ger--ger--grateful to you, dear Mrs. Jerningham; but Ireland seems so very far away.”

The piteous look subdued Emily’s sternness. She took the girl’s hand in her own tenderly.

“Yes, it _seems_ far away,” she said, cheerfully; “but I know you will be happy there. You cannot imagine anything more beautiful than the river Shannon.”

Lucy thought of Father Thames and his dipping willows, and _his_ grave face, sadly regardful of her in the pauses of his talk. She thought of these things, and shook her head. Ah, no, it was impossible; for _her_, Shannon could never be what Thames had been. Mrs. Jerningham comforted her in a grand, patronizing manner, and promised her unbounded happiness--on the banks of the Shannon.

“You do not know what the Irish are,” she exclaimed; “so kind, so hearty, so genial. With them a governess is received as one of the family. The children love her, and cling to her as if she were an elder sister. And the Fitzpatricks are of the _vieille roche_, you know; you will find no parvenu gentility there.”

Yes, the picture was a fair one; but, for lack of one feature, it seemed cold and dreary to Lucy Alford. She managed, however, to appear contented, and thanked Mrs. Jerningham prettily for the kindness which had procured her this distant home. After this, Emily went out alone to her garden and hot-houses, to inspect the latest ugliness in calceolarias; and Mrs. Colton held her morning conference with the housekeeper, and received a solemn embassy from the kitchen-garden and forcing-houses. Lucy sat listlessly in the drawing-room, meditating upon the new estate of life to which it had pleased Mrs. Jerningham, under Providence, to call her; while Mrs. Jerningham went to see the new calceolaria, and to reflect at ease upon her late interview with Lucy.

“There isn’t one of ’em out as deep a colour as this here, mum,” said the gardener; “and if I can get the slips to strike--as I believe I shall--we shall have a rare show of ’em.”

“Poor little thing, how she loves him!” thought Mrs. Jerningham. “But in a new country, among new faces, she will soon forget all that.”

“They strikes a deep root, you see, mum, when they do strike--these young plants. They send their suckers down into the earth, and you’d find it hard work to uproot ’em.”

“A girl of that age is always falling in love,” continued Mrs. Jerningham. “It’s a mere overflow of juvenile sentimentality, and never lasts very long.”

And then, having stared at the flowers in the hothouse with absent, unseeing eyes, she would fain have departed; but the gardener stopped her with a request for permission to order more manure.

“We shall want a few loads more, mum,” he said, in his most insinuating tone; “I don’t like to be allus askin’--which I know it _do_ look like that--but I know as you wish a show made with these here calceolaries; and these young plants require a deal o’ manure. And then there’s the melons, mum; there ain’t a plant going like melons for sucking the goodness out of manure--they’re a regular greedy lot, melons--as you may say, mum; and there ain’t no satisfyin’ ’em. But, you see, I turns it all into the ground afterwards, mum, and you gets the good out of it next year, in your sea-kale.”

Mrs. Jerningham gave her consent for the ordering of the manure, though she had a dim idea that in the matter of manure she was marked as the victim of extortion. She looked about her as she went slowly back to her favourite green walk by the river. She looked at the forcing-pits and hot-houses, the perfectly trained wall-fruit--which might have shown beside the symmetrical pears and plum-trees of Frogmore--and she reflected how much they had cost, and how little happiness they had given her.

“One cannot force happiness,” she said to herself. “Or if one does, it is like the peaches we ripen in February--almost flavourless.”

She went down to the green, sheltered walk, where the low plashing murmur of the river seldom failed to tranquillize her spirits. Here she could think quietly of the one subject which was all-important to her anxious mind. That Lucy Alford loved Laurence Desmond she was fully assured: _that_ point she had long settled for herself. The one portentous question yet unanswered was, whether Laurence loved Lucy. Mrs. Jerningham had watched the two closely, and she suspected Laurence with a direful suspicion, but she could not be sure that he had merited her doubts.

“If I thought that he loved her, I would end this miserable farce at once,” she said to herself, “and set him free. How many times I have offered him his freedom! And he has refused it, and assured me--in his cold, measured, _friendly_ way--of his unchanging constancy. Hypocrite!” she muttered, between her clenched teeth.

And then there came upon her an awful yearning for some death-dealing weapon, with which, at one fell swoop, she might annihilate the man she loved.

“Oh, how dearly I loved him,” she thought; “how dearly I loved him! How I used to yearn for his coming; how willingly I would have endured poverty and trouble for his sake--in those old happy days when I was free to be his wife! And he waited till his income should be large enough for a suitable establishment, and let another man marry me!”

Did Laurence love Lucy? That was the question which Mrs. Jerningham would fain have solved. But to send Lucy to Ireland was scarcely the way to arrive at a solution. It was rather like begging the question.

“She will tell him she is going, directly she sees him,” said Mrs. Jerningham; “and he must be a consummate hypocrite if his manner then does not betray him.”

Laurence was expected at noon that day--in half an hour. He was to come from Sunbury in his boat, to take the two ladies on their last excursion. Emily determined upon lying in wait for him, in order to be present at his meeting with Miss Alford.

“I must see the first effect of the news,” she thought.

She paced slowly up and down the walk. As twelve o’clock struck from Hampton church, the boat’s keel ground against the iron steps. Laurence tied her to the landing-stage, and came bounding on to the green walk, at the extreme end of which Mrs. Jerningham stood watching him. He did not glance in her direction, but walked across the lawn to the drawing-room, where he was accustomed to find the mistress of the house, and went in through a fernery.

Emily followed swiftly. She was so eager to perceive the effect of those tidings which must needs be so important to Laurence, if he were indeed the traitor she half-believed him to be. At the glass-door between the fernery and the drawing-room she stopped. She was too late. The news had been told already. For one moment she deliberated, and in the next, as far as feminine honour goes, was lost. Laurence was speaking. She did not want to interrupt him. She wanted to hear what he said; so she drew back a little, behind the shelter of a gigantic Australian fern, and watched him, and heard him, from that convenient covert.

“To Ireland?” he said, gravely; “and do you like going to Ireland, Miss Alford?”

This was very proper; this was as it should be, thought Mrs. Jerningham,--a cold, measured, guardian-like tone, expressive of a gentleman-like and Christianlike concern in the young lady’s welfare; no more. Emily breathed more freely.

“Ye--yes,” faltered Lucy; “I--I--I am very grateful to Mrs. Jerningham for her kindness in procuring me such a happy home; only--only I----”

“Only what, Lucy?”

Good heavens! what a sudden change of tone! No longer measured and gentleman-like, but full of a tender eagerness--a fond concern, that went through Mrs. Jerningham’s heart like a dagger.

“Only I--oh, it is very wicked of me to be discontented--only--Ireland is so very, very far away from all the people I ever knew; and every friend--and--from YOU!”

And here she broke down, as she had broken down upon a previous occasion, and burst into tears.

In the next moment she was clasped in Laurence Desmond’s arms. The Australian fern was shaken as by a sudden tempest--ah, what a tempest of passion, and grief, and jealousy, and despair raged in the heart of her whose trembling caused those leaves to shake!

“Lucy!” cried Laurence, passionately, “you must not--you must not! I cannot see you cry. It is not the first time. Once before you tortured me like this; and I held my tongue. I _could_ keep silence then; but I can’t to-day. I did not love you then as I do now--my pet, my dear love. Send you to Ireland! Oh, how cruel!--my tender one alone among strangers! My dearest, for months I have held myself aloof from you; I have forbidden my eyes to look at you; and now, after all my struggles, after all my victories, I break down at last. I love you--I love you!”

He kissed her--the fair young brow, the eyelids wet with tears. Mrs. Jerningham heard that unmistakeable sound, as of song-birds in an aviary; and if a wish could kill, there would have been a swift and sudden foreclosure of two fair lives.

“_You_--YOU love me!” faltered Lucy in a whisper.

It was too sweet. Ah, yes; a brief delicious dream, no doubt, thought Miss Alford.

“Yes, dear, with all my heart I love you,” answered Laurence Desmond, putting her suddenly away from him, with a solemn gesture, symbolical of eternal divorcement. “I love you, my dearest and best; but you and I can never be more to each other than we have been--never again so much; for at least we have been together--and for me even _that_ happiness must never be again.”

Lucy looked at him wonderingly, but she did not speak. She was overcome by the one stupendous fact of Laurence Desmond’s confession. He loved her! After this the deluge. If the peaceful rippling river had arisen, mighty as old Nile, to sweep all the villas of Hampton to the distant sea, she would have submitted to the swift destruction, and have deemed herself sufficiently blest in having lived to hear what she had heard. This is how girlhood loves. Unhappily, or it may be happily, such love as this--simple, single, passionate as its sister poetry--perishes with girlhood. The woman’s Love is a compound of many passions, claims cousinship with Pride and Self-esteem, and owns an ugly half-sister called, by her friends, Prudence, by her foes, Calculation.

“My dear, I love you,” continued Laurence with gentle gravity, and with the air of a man who has resolved on a full confession. “When first your father called me to your aid, I came, pleased at the idea of serving an old friend, but with the vaguest possible recollection of the pretty little girl I had seen running after butterflies at Henley. I came, and I found my little butterfly-huntress transformed into a fair and loving creature, whose unselfish nature was revealed in every look and thought. For a long time I had no thought, no consciousness of such a thought, except the honest desire to help you, to the best of my power, in the difficult career you had chosen for yourself. How shall I tell you at what moment this friendly interest grew into a warmer feeling, when I cannot explain the change to myself? I only know that I love you; and that if I were free, as I am not, I should sigh for no sweeter home than one to which you would welcome me.”

For a few moments he paused, looking fondly at the sweet blushing face, downcast eyelids heavy with tears, and then went on steadily:

“I am not free, Lucy; I am bound hand and foot by the fetters I forged for myself some years ago; and I think, as I have told you one-half of the truth, it will be wisest to tell you the other half. Ten years ago I very dearly loved a young lady, as beautiful, as amiable as yourself, like yourself the only daughter of a gentleman in reduced circumstances, but not subjected to the trials which you have borne so nobly. I loved her dearly and truly; but I was a man of the world, a haunter of clubs, a little sceptical on the subject of feminine fortitude and feminine reasonableness; and I told myself that, in order to insure this young lady’s happiness and my own, I must first secure an income which would enable us to be dwellers within the pale of society. I had been taught that, on the outermost side of that impalpable, conventional boundary, domestic happiness for people of gentle rearing was impossible. It was not enough that I loved her; it was not enough that I believed myself beloved; something more than this was necessary--a brougham, a house in that border-land of Pimlico which courtesy can call Belgravia, and a fair allowance for the expenses of my wife’s toilette. Ah, Lucy, you can never imagine what ghostly shadows of flounced petticoats and voluminous silken trains arose between me and the image of the girl I loved, and waved me back, and made a phantasmal barrier between us! If you marry her, said Prudence, you must pay for those. I _will_ marry her, I answered, when I feel myself strong enough to cope with her milliner’s bill.” He laughed a short bitter laugh.

“Lucy,” he cried, “I think if I had not loved you for yourself, I should have loved you for your simple dresses. I have been so suffocated in our modern atmosphere of luxury--stifled with the odour of Ess. Bouquet, snowed-up in silks and laces, and soft-scented plumes, and the faint perfume of sandal-wood fans, and the crush and crowd of modern fashion--that to find a woman who could be pretty without the aid of Truefitt, and could charm without the art of Descou, was piquant as a discovery; but I will not stop to speak of these things. While I waited, the woman whom I dearly loved married another man, older by many years than herself, in every way unsuited to her. Within a year of her marriage I met her unexpectedly, and her face told me that I was not quite forgotten. After that meeting, fate threw us much together; and oh, Lucy, now I come to the hard part of my confession! Her husband trusted me, and I wronged him; by no act which the world calls guilt, but by a sentimental flirtation, licensed by the world so long as it is unprotested against by the husband. It was pleasant to us to meet, and we met; it was pleasant to her to read the books I recommended, to sing the songs I chose for her. Among the costlier gifts of her husband, her morning-room was sometimes adorned with a rustic basket of hothouse flowers from me. At the Opera, in picture-galleries, in her own house, we met, week after week, month after month. No friendship was ever more intellectual; nothing within the meaning of the word flirtation was ever less guilty. By and by I wrote to her--letters about art, about books, about music, about the gossip of the world in which we lived, with here and there a half-expressed regret for my own broken life or her uncongenial marriage. Love-letters in the common sense of the word they were not; but letters so long and so frequent might, if received by her at her own house, have attracted attention; so they were directed to a neighbouring post-office. _That_, Lucy, was our worst guilt; and it wrecked us. One day the letters were found, and the husband tacitly signed his wife’s condemnation without having troubled himself so much as to read the evidence against her. From that hour my life was devoted to the woman who had suffered by my selfishness and folly; from that hour to this we have been friends in the fullest sense of the word, and friends only. If ever the day of her freedom comes, I shall claim her as my wife; if it should never come, I shall go to my grave unmarried. And now, Lucy, you know all; you know that I love you; and you know why I have fought a hard fight against my love, and am angry with myself for being betrayed into this confession.”

“It was all my fault,” sobbed Lucy, who was ever ready to cry _mea culpa_; “I had no right to tell you I was sorry to go to Ireland. But oh, Mr. Desmond, forget that you have ever spoken to me, and be true to the lady you loved so dearly, long ago! If it is hard for me to lose you, it would be harder for her. I will go to Ireland; I will try to do my duty; I will try to be happy. You have been so kind to me--and--Mrs. Jerningham--has been so kind too; I am grateful to you both; and when I am far away, I shall think of you both with love and gratitude, and pray for your happiness every day of my life.”

She had been quick to identify that lady whom Laurence had so carefully avoided naming; she understood now, for the first time, the nature of the tie that bound him to Mrs. Jerningham.

“I am to go to Ireland in a very few days,” she said, after a brief pause, during which Laurence Desmond sat motionless, his face hidden by his hand; “I will say good-bye at once. I shall see you again, of course--but not alone. Good-bye--and thank you a thousand, thousand times for all your goodness to me and to my father.”

She held out her hands, but he did not see them.

“Good-bye! God bless you, darling!” he said, in a broken voice, and in the next moment Lucy Alford left the room.

Mr. Desmond sighed, a heavy sigh; and when he removed his hand from before his face, that pale watcher behind the fern saw that his cheeks were wet with tears. For some minutes--slow, painful minutes to the watcher--he sat meditating gloomily; and then he too departed, with a listless step, by one of the windows opening on the lawn.

“O God!” thought the watcher, who had sunk back helpless, motionless, against the angle of the wall, “am _I_ the only wretch upon earth? These two think it very little to sacrifice themselves for me; and yet I cannot let him go--I cannot let him go.”

She came out from her lurking-place into the drawing-room, and seated herself by the table at which Laurence had been sitting; and here she sat with hands clasped before her face, thinking of what she had heard. Unspeakable had been the pain of that revelation; but the blow had not been unexpected. For some time she had suspected Laurence Desmond’s regard for Lucy; for a very long time she had perceived the decline of his affection for herself.

“It is my own fault,” she thought; “I harassed and worried him with my wicked jealousy. I made myself a perpetual care and trouble to him: can I wonder that I lost his love? Oh, if I could learn to be generous, if I could be only reasonable and just, if I could let him go! But I cannot, I cannot!”

No, indeed: she had made Laurence Desmond a part of herself, the very first principle of her existence; and to resign her hold upon him was to make an end of the sole aim and object of her life. For him she had lived, and for none other. The two commandments of the Gospel were to her much less than this man. Her love for her God began and ended with a tolerably punctual attendance at the parish church, and a half-mechanical utterance of the responses to the orthodox family prayers which Mrs. Colton read every morning and evening to the little household of River Lawn. Her love for her neighbour was summed-up in a careless compliance with any parochial demand on her purse. All the rest was Laurence Desmond. And now conscience told her she must give him up. She sat thinking, with tearless eyes and a pale, still face, until the subject of her thoughts came to the open window, and told her that the boat was ready.