“Certainly I will speak to you, John. Here I am.” And she came close to him.
He took both her hands, and looked into her eyes. “Lily, will you be mine?”
“No, dear; it cannot be so.”
“Why not, Lily?”
“Because of that other man.”
“And is that to be a bar forever?”
“Yes; forever.”
“Do you still love him?”
“No; no, no!”
“Then why should this be so?”
“I cannot tell, dear. It is so. If you take a young tree and split it, it still lives, perhaps. But it isn’t a tree. It is only a fragment.”
“Then be my fragment.”
“So I will, if it can serve you to give standing ground to such a fragment in some corner of your garden. But I will not have myself planted out in the middle, for people to look at. What there is left would die soon.” He still held her hands, and she did not attempt to draw them away. “John,” she said, “next to mamma, I love you better than all the world. Indeed I do. I can’t be your wife, but you need never be afraid that I shall be more to another than I am to you.”
“That will not serve me,” he said, grasping both her hands till he almost hurt them, but not knowing that he did so. “That is no good.”
“It is all the good that I can do you. Indeed I can do you—can do no one any good. The trees that the storms have splintered are never of use.”
“And is this to be the end of all, Lily?”
“Not of our loving friendship.”
“Friendship! I hate the word. I hear someone’s step, and I had better leave you. Goodbye.”
“Goodbye, John. Be kinder than that to me as you are going.” He turned back for a moment, took her hand, and held it tight against his heart, and then he left her. In the hall he met Mrs. Thorne, but, as she said afterwards, he had been too much knocked about to be able to throw a word to a dog.
To Mrs. Thorne Lily said hardly a word about John Eames, and when her cousin Bernard questioned her about him she was dumb. And in these days she could assume a manner, and express herself with her eyes as well as with her voice, after a fashion, which was apt to silence unwelcome questioners, even though they were as intimate with her as was her cousin Bernard. She had described her feelings more plainly to her lover than she had ever done to anyone—even to her mother; and having done so she meant to be silent on that subject for evermore. But of her settled purpose she did say some word to Emily Dunstable that night. “I do feel,” she said, “that I have got the thing settled at last.”
“And you have settled it, as you call it, in opposition to the wishes of all your friends?”
“That is true; and yet I have settled it rightly, and I would not for worlds have it unsettled again. There are matters on which friends should not have wishes, or at any rate should not express them.”
“Is that meant to be severe to me?”
“No; not to you. I was thinking about mamma, and Bell, and my uncle, and Bernard, who all seem to think that I am to be looked upon as a regular castaway because I am not likely to have a husband of my own. Of course you, in your position, must think a girl a castaway who isn’t going to be married?”
“I think that a girl who is going to be married has the best of it.”
“And I think a girl who isn’t going to be married has the best of it;—that’s all. But I feel that the thing is done now, and I am contented. For the last six or eight months there has come up, I know not how, a state of doubt which has made me so wretched that I have done literally nothing. I haven’t been able to finish old Mrs. Heard’s tippet, literally because people would talk to me about that dearest of all dear fellows, John Eames. And yet all along I have known how it would be—as well as I do now.”
“I cannot understand you, Lily; I can’t indeed.”
“I can understand myself. I love him so well—with that intimate, close, familiar affection—that I could wash his clothes for him tomorrow, out of pure personal regard, and think it no shame. He could not ask me to do a single thing for him—except the one thing—that I would refuse. And I’ll go further. I would sooner marry him than any man in the world I ever saw, or, as I believe, that I ever shall see. And yet I am very glad that it is settled.”
On the next day Lily Dale went down to the Small House of Allington, and so she passes out of our sight. I can only ask the reader to believe that she was in earnest, and express my own opinion, in this last word that I shall ever write respecting her, that she will live and die as Lily Dale.
LXXVIII
The Arabins Return to Barchester
In these days Mr. Harding was keeping his bed at the deanery, and most of those who saw him declared that he would never again leave it. The archdeacon had been slow to believe so, because he had still found his father-in-law able to talk to him;—not indeed with energy, but then Mr. Harding had never been energetic on ordinary matters—but with the same soft cordial interest in things which had ever been customary with him. He had latterly been much interested about Mr. Crawley, and would make both the archdeacon and Mrs. Grantly tell him all that they heard, and what they thought of the case. This of course had been before the all-important news had been
