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 trowel 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 overgrown fruit trees, which nowadays 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 were 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 villainy. 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
