Chapter 40

“IS IT THE END?”

Lady Linden, wearing a lilac printed cotton sunbonnet, her skirts pinned up about her, was busy with a trowel, disordering certain flower-beds that presently the gardeners would come and put right.

“Idle women,” said her ladyship, “are my abomination. How a woman can moon about and do nothing is more than I can understand. Look at me, am I not always busy? From early morning to dewy eve I—Curtis!”

“Yes, my lady?”

“Come here at once,” said her ladyship. “I have dug up a worm. I dislike worms. Carry the creature away; don’t hurt it, Curtis. I dislike cruelty even to worms. Ugh! How you can touch the thing!”

Curtis, under-gardener, trudged away with a large healthy worm dangling from thumb and forefinger, a sheepish grin on his face.

“Those creatures have none of the finer feelings,” thought her ladyship. “Yet we are all brothers and sisters according to the Bible. I don’t agree with that at all. Curtis, come back; there is another worm.”

Marjorie stood at the window, watching her aunt’s operations, yet seeing none of them. Her face was set and white and resolute, the soft round chin seemed to be jutting out more obstinately than usual.

For Marjorie had made up her mind definitely, and she knew that she was about to hurt herself and to hurt someone else.

But it must be. It was only fair, it was only just. Silence, she believed, would be wicked.

The door behind her opened, and Tom Arundel came into the room. He was fresh from the stable, and smelled of straw.

“Why, darling, is there anything up? I got your note asking me to come here at once. Joe gave it to me just as we were going to take out the brute Lady Linden has bought. Of all the vicious beasts! I wish to goodness she wouldn’t buy a horse without a proper opinion, but it is useless talking to her. She said she liked the white star on its forehead—white star! black devil, I call it! But I’ll break him in if I break my neck—doing it. But—I am sorry. You want me?”

“I want to speak to you.”

“Then you might turn and look at a chap, Marjorie.”

“I—I prefer to—to look out through the window,” she said in a stifled voice.

Standing in the room he beheld her, slim and graceful, dark against the light patch of the window, her back obstinately turned to him; looking at her, there came a great and deep tenderness into his face, the light of a very honest and intense love.

“Tell me, sweetheart, then,” he said—“tell me in your own way, what is it? Nothing very serious, is it?” There was a suggestion of laughter in his voice.

“It is very serious, Tom.”

“Yes?”

“It—it concerns you—me and you—our future.”

“Yes, dear, then it is serious.” The laughter was gone; there came a look of fear, of anxiety into his eyes.

It could not be that she was going to discard him, turn him down, end it all now? But she was.

“Tom, it is only right and honest of me to tell you that—that”—her voice shook—“that I have made a mistake.”

“That you do not love me?” he said, and his voice was strangely quiet.

“Oh, Tom, I believed I did. It all seemed so different when we used to meet, knowing that everyone was against us. It seemed so romantic, so—so nice, and now ...” Her voice trailed off miserably.

“And now, now, sweet,” and his voice was filled with tenderness and yearning, “now I fall far short of what you hoped for.”

“Oh, it isn’t that. It is I—I—who am to blame, not you. I was a senseless, romantic little fool, a child, and now I am a woman.”

“You don’t love me, Marjorie?”

Silence for a moment, then she answered in a low voice: “No!”

“Nor ever will, your love can’t come back again?”

“I don’t think it—it was ever there. I was wrong; I did not understand. I was foolish and weak. I thought it fine to—to steal away and meet you. I think I put a halo of romance about your head, and now—”

“A halo of romance about my head,” he repeated. He looked down at his hands, grimed with the work he had been at; he smiled, but there was no mirth in his smile.

This was the end then! And he loved her, Heaven knew how he loved her! He looked at the unyielding little figure against the light, and in his eyes was a great longing and a subdued passion.

“So it—it is the end, Marjorie?”

“I want it to be.”

“Yes, I understand. I knew that I was not good enough, never good enough for you—far, far beneath you, dear. Only I would have tried to make you happy—that is what I meant, you understand that? I would have given my life to making you happy, little girl. Perhaps I was a fool to think I could. I know now that I could not.”

“Tom, I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry.”

He came to her, he put his hand on her arm.

“Don’t blame yourself, dear,” he said, “don’t blame yourself. You can’t help your heart; you—you only thought you cared for me for a time, but it was just a fancy, and it—it passed, didn’t it? And now it is gone, and can never come back again. Of course it must end. Your wishes—always—mean everything to me.” He bent, he touched the white hand with his lips, and then turned away. Once at the door he looked back; but she did not move, the tears were streaming down her cheeks, and she did not want him to see them.

How well he had taken it! How well, and yet he loved her! She realised now how much he loved her, how fine he was, and generous, even Hugh could not have been more generous than he.

And Marjorie stood there like one in a dream, watching, yet seeing nothing, going over in her mind all that had passed, suffering the pain of it. And she had loved him once! Those mystic moonlight meetings, his young arms about her, his lips against hers—oh, she had loved him! And then had come the commonplace, the everyday, sordid side of it, he the accepted lover, high in Lady Linden’s favour, which meant the gradual awakening from a dream, her dream of love.

“I am fickle, I am false. I do not know my own mind, and—and I have hurt him. I am not worthy of hurting him. He is better, finer than I ever thought.”

Still Lady Linden prodded and trowelled at the neat bed, still she demanded occasional help from the patient Curtis; and now came a man, breathless and coatless, rushing across the lawn. He had news for her, something that must be told; gone was his accustomed terror of her ladyship. He told her what he had to say, and she dropped the trowel and ran—actually ran as Marjorie had never seen her run.

She could have laughed, but for the pain at her heart. He had taken it so well; he had risen to a height she had not suspected him capable of, and the fault was hers, hers.

What was that? What were they carrying? God help her! What was that they were carrying across the lawn? Why did they walk so quietly, so carefully? Why ask?

She knew! Instinct told her. She knew! She flung out her hands and gripped at the window-frame and watched. She saw her aunt, her usually ruddy face drawn, haggard, and white. She saw something that lay motionless on a part of the old barn-door, which four men were carrying with such care. She saw a man on a bicycle dashing off down the drive.

Why ask? She knew! And only just now, a few short minutes ago—no, no, a lifetime ago—she had told him she did not love him.

“An accident, Marjorie.” Lady Linden’s voice was harsh, unlike her usual round tones. “An accident—that brute of a horse—girl, don’t, don’t faint.”

“I am not going to. I want to help—him.”

They had brought Tom Arundel into the house, had laid him on a bed in an upper room. The village doctor had come, and, finding something here beyond his skill, had sent off, with Lady Linden’s full approval, an urgent message to a surgeon of repute, and now they were waiting—waiting the issues of life and death.

The servants looked at the white-faced, distraught girl pityingly. They remembered that she was to have been the dying man’s wife. The whole thing had been so sudden, was so shocking and tragic. No wonder that she looked like death herself; they could not guess at the self-reproach, the self-denunciation, nor could Lady Linden.

“No one,” said her ladyship, “is to blame but me. It was my doing, my own pig-headed folly. The boy told me that the horse was a brute, and I—I said that he—if he hadn’t the pluck to try and break him in—I would find someone who would. I am his murderess!” her ladyship cried tragically. “Yes, Marjorie, look at me—look at the murderess of the man you love!”

“Aunt!”

“It is true. Revile me! I alone am guilty. I’ve robbed you of your lover.” Lady Linden was nearer to hysterics at this moment than ever in her life.

“How long? how long?” she demanded impatiently. “How long will it be before that fool comes?”

The fool was the celebrated surgeon wired for to London. He had wired back that he was on his way; no man could do more.

But the waiting, the horrible waiting; the ceaseless watching and listening for the sound of wheels, the strange hush that had fallen upon the house, the knowledge that there in an upper chamber death was waiting, waiting to take a young life.

Hours, every minute of which had seemed like hours themselves, hours had passed. Lady Linden sat with her hands clenched and her eyes fixed on nothingness. She blamed herself with all her honest hearty nature; she blamed herself even more unsparingly than in the past she had blamed others for their trifling faults.

Her self-recriminations had got on Marjorie’s nerves. She could not bear to sit here and listen to her aunt when all the time she knew that it was she—she alone who was to blame. She had told him that she did not love him, that all his hopes must end, that the future they had planned between them should never be, and so had sent him to his death.

She waited outside in the big hall, her eyes on the stairs, her ears tensioned to every sound from above, and at every sound she started.

Voices at last, low and muffled, voices pitched in a low key, men talking as in deep confidence. She heard and she watched. She saw the two men, the doctor and the surgeon, descending the stairs; she rose and went to meet them, yet said never a word.

She watched their faces; she saw that they looked grave. She saw that the face of the great man was worn and tired. She looked in vain for something that would whisper the word “Hope” to her.

“Miss Linden is engaged to Mr. Arundel,” the local doctor said.

The great man held out his hand to her. He knew so well, how many thousands of times had he seen, that same look of questioning, pitiful in its dumbness.

He held her hand closely, “There is hope. That is all I care say to you—just a hope, and that is all.”

It was all that he dared to say, the utmost to which he could go. He knew that false hopes, raised only to be crushed, were cruelty. And he had never done that, never would. “There is yet one ray of hope. He may live; I can say no more than that, Miss Linden.”

And, little though it was, it was almost more than she had dared to hope for.