'You have made him do so, mamma,' cried Viola. 'If he releases me I do not release myself.'
Finally, Lady Diana, astonished to find Harold so reasonable and amenable, perceived that the only means of dealing with her daughter was to let them meet again. Of course no one fully knows what passed then. Harold told me, the only time he spoke of it, that 'he had just taken out his own heart and crushed it!' but Viola dwelt on each phrase, and, long after, used to go over all with me. He had fully made up his mind that to let Viola hold to her troth would neither be right nor good for her, and he used his power of will and influence to make her resign it. There was no concealment nor denial of their mutual love. It was Viola's comfort to remember that. 'But,' said Harold, 'your mother has only too good reasons for withholding you from me, and there is nothing for it but to submit, and give one another up.'
'But we do not leave off loving one another,' said poor Viola.
'We cannot do what we cannot.'
'And when we are old--'
'That would be a mental reservation,' said Harold. 'There must be no mutual understanding of coming together again. I promised your mother. Because I am a guilty man, I am not to break up your life.'
He made her at last resign her will into his, she only feeling that his judgment could not be other than decisive, and that she could not resist him, even for his own sake. He took her for a moment into his arms, and exchanged one long burning kiss, then, while she was almost faint and quite passive with emotion, he laid her on the sofa, and called her mother. 'Lady Diana,' he said, 'we give up all claim to one another's promise, in obedience to you. Do we not, Viola?'
'Yes,' she faintly said.
He gave her brow one more kiss, and was gone.
He took his horse home, and sent in a pencil note to me: 'All over; don't wait, for me.--H. A.'
I was dreadfully afraid he would go off to Australia, or do something desperate, but Count Stanislas reassured me that this would be unlike Harold's present self, since his strength had come to be used, not in passion, but in patience. We dined as best we could without him, waited all the evening, and sat up till eleven, when we heard him at the door. I went out and took down the chain to let him in. It was a wet misty night, and he was soaked through. I begged him to come in and warm himself, and have something hot, but he shook his head, as if he could not speak, took his candle, and went upstairs.
I made the tea, for which I had kept the kettle boiling all this time, and Prometesky took his great cup in to him, presently returning to say, 'He is calm. He has done wisely, he has exhausted himself so that he will sleep. He says he will see me at once to my retreat in Normandy. I think it will be best for him.'
Count Stanislas was, in fact, on the eve of departure, and in a couple of days more Harold went away with him, having only broached the matter to me to make me understand that the break had been his, not Viola's; and that I must say no more about it.
Dermot had come over and raged against his mother, and even against Harold, declaring that if the two had 'stood out' they would have prevailed, but that he did not wonder Harold was tired of it.
Harold's look made him repent of that bit of passion, but he was contemptuous of the 'for her sake,' which was all Harold uttered as further defence. 'What! tell him it was for her sake when she was creeping about the house like a ghost, looking as if she had just come out of a great illness?'
Dermot meant to escort his mother and sister to Florence, chiefly in order to be a comfort to the latter, but he meant to return to Ireland as soon as they had joined the St. Glears. 'Taking you by the way,' he said, 'before going to my private La Trappe.'
Prometesky took leave of me, not quite as if we were never to meet again, for his experimental retreat was to be over at Christmas, and he would then be able to receive letters. He promised me that, if I then wrote to him that, Harold stood in need of him for a time, he would return to us instead of commencing the novitiate which would lead to his becoming dead to the outer world.
Harold was gone only ten days, and came back late on a Friday evening. He tried to tell me about what he had done and seen, but broke off and said, 'Well, I am very stupid; I went to all the places they told me to see at Rouen and everywhere else, but I can't recollect anything about them.'
So I let him gaze into the fire in peace, and all Saturday he was at the potteries or at the office, very busy about all his plans and also taking in hand the charge for George Yolland, for both brothers were going on Monday to take a fortnight's holiday among their relations. He only came in to dinner, and after it told me very kindly that he must leave me alone again, for he wanted to see Ben Yolland. A good person for him to wish to see, 'but was all this restlessness?' thought this foolish Lucy.
When he came in, only just at bed-time, there was something more of rest, and less of weary sadness about his eyes than I had seen since the troubles began, and as we wished one another good night he said, 'Lucy, God forgives while He punishes. He is better to us than man. Yolland says I may be with you at church early to- morrow.'
Then my cheeks flushed hot with joy, and I said how thankful I was that all this had not distracted his thoughts from the subject. 'When I wanted help more than ever?' he said.
So in some ways that was to me at least a gladsome Sunday, though not half so much at the time as it has become in remembrance, and I could not guess how much of conscious peace or joy Harold felt, as, for the first and only time, he and I knelt together on the chancel step.
He said nothing, but he had quite recovered his usual countenance and manner, only looking more kind and majestic than ever, as I, his fond aunt, thought, when we went among the children after the school service, to give them the little dainties they had missed in his absence; and he smiled when they came round him with their odd little bits of chatter.
We sat over the fire in the evening, and talked a little of surface things, but that died away, and after a quarter of an hour or so, he looked up at me and said, 'And what next?'
'What are we to do, do you mean?' I said, for I had been thinking how all his schemes of life had given way. We spoke of it together. 'Old Eu did not want him,' as he said, and though there was much for him to do at the Hydriot works and the Mission Chapel, the Reading Room, the Association for Savings, and all the rest which needed his eye, yet for Viola's peace he thought he ought not to stay, and the same cause hindered the schemes he had once shared with Dermot; he had cut himself loose from Australia, and there seemed nothing before him. 'There were the City Missions,' he said, wearily, for he did not love the City, and yet he felt more than ever the force of his dying father's commission to carry out his longings for the true good of the people.
I said we could make a London home and see Dora sometimes, trying to make him understand that he might reckon on me as his sister friend, but the answer was, 'I don't count on that.'
'You don't want to cast me off?'
'No, indeed, but there is another to be thought of.'
Then he told me how, over my letters to him in New South Wales, there had come out Dermot's account of the early liking that everyone nipped, till my good-girlish submission wounded and affronted him, and he forgot or disliked me for years; how old feelings had revived, when we came in contact once more; but how he was withheld from their manifestation, by the miserable state of his affairs, as well as by my own coldness and indifference.
I made some sound which made Harold say, 'You told me to keep him away.'
'I knew I ought,' I remember saying faintly.
'Oh--h--!' a prolonged sound, that began a little triumphantly, but ended in a sigh, and then he earnestly said, 'You do not think you ought to discourage him now? Your mother did not forbid it for ever.'
'Oh no, no; it never came to that.'
'And you know what he is now?'
'I know he is changed,' was all I could say.
'And you will help him forward a little when he comes back. You and he will be happy.'
There might be a great surging wave of joy in my heart, but it would not let me say anything but, 'And leave you alone, Harold?'
'I must learn to be alone,' he said. 'I can stay here this winter, and see to the things in hand, and then I suppose something will turn up.'
'As a call?' I said.
'Yes,' he answered. 'I told God to-day that I had nothing to do but His service, and I suppose He will find it for me.'
