'To marry you.'

'Why should I have forbidden?'

'Must I tell--what I would not?' he said, placing his hands upon her arms, and looking somewhat sadly at her. 'Well, perhaps as it has come to this you ought to know all, since it can make no possible difference to my intentions now. We are one for ever--legal blunders notwithstanding; for happily they are quickly reparable--and this question of a devise from my uncle Jocelyn only concerned me when I was a single man.'

Thereupon, with obviously no consideration of the possibilities that were reopened of the nullity of their marriage contract, he related in detail, and not without misgiving for having concealed them so long, the events that had occurred on the morning of their wedding-day; how he had met the postman on his way to Warborne after dressing in the cabin, and how he had received from him the letter his dead uncle had confided to his family lawyers, informing him of the annuity, and of the important request attached--that he should remain unmarried until his five-and-twentieth year; how in comparison with the possession of her dear self he had reckoned the income as nought, abandoned all idea of it there and then, and had come on to the wedding as if nothing had happened to interrupt for a moment the working out of their plan; how he had scarcely thought with any closeness of the circ.u.mstances of the case since, until reminded of them by this note she had seen, and a previous one of a like sort received from the same solicitors.

'O Swithin! Swithin!' she cried, bursting into tears as she realized it all, and sinking on the observing-chair; 'I have ruined you! yes, I have ruined you!'

The young man was dismayed by her unexpected grief, and endeavoured to soothe her; but she seemed touched by a poignant remorse which would not be comforted.

'And now,' she continued, as soon as she could speak, 'when you are once more free, and in a position--actually in a position to claim the annuity that would be the making of you, I am compelled to come to you, and beseech you to undo yourself again, merely to save me!'

'Not to save you, Viviette, but to bless me. You do not ask me to re- marry; it is not a question of alternatives at all; it is my straight course. I do not dream of doing otherwise. I should be wretched if you thought for one moment I could entertain the idea of doing otherwise.'

But the more he said the worse he made the matter. It was a state of affairs that would not bear discussion at all, and the unsophisticated view he took of his course seemed to increase her responsibility.

'Why did your uncle attach such a cruel condition to his bounty?' she cried bitterly. 'O, he little thinks how hard he hits me from the grave--me, who have never done him wrong; and you, too! Swithin, are you sure that he makes that condition indispensable? Perhaps he meant that you should not marry beneath you; perhaps he did not mean to object in such a case as your marrying (forgive me for saying it) a little above you.'

'There is no doubt that he did not contemplate a case which has led to such happiness as this has done,' the youth murmured with hesitation; for though he scarcely remembered a word of his uncle's letter of advice, he had a dim apprehension that it was couched in terms alluding specifically to Lady Constantine.

'Are you sure you cannot retain the money, and be my lawful husband too?'

she asked piteously. 'O, what a wrong I am doing you! I did not dream that it could be as bad as this. I knew I was wasting your time by letting you love me, and hampering your projects; but I thought there were compensating advantages. This wrecking of your future at my hands I did not contemplate. You are sure there is no escape? Have you his letter with the conditions, or the will? Let me see the letter in which he expresses his wishes.'

'I a.s.sure you it is all as I say,' he pensively returned. 'Even if I were not legally bound by the conditions I should be morally.'

'But how does he put it? How does he justify himself in making such a harsh restriction? Do let me see the letter, Swithin. I shall think it a want of confidence if you do not. I may discover some way out of the difficulty if you let me look at the papers. Eccentric wills can be evaded in all sorts of ways.'

Still he hesitated. 'I would rather you did not see the papers,' he said.

But she persisted as only a fond woman can. Her conviction was that she who, as a woman many years his senior, should have shown her love for him by guiding him straight into the paths he aimed at, had blocked his attempted career for her own happiness. This made her more intent than ever to find out a device by which, while she still retained him, he might also retain the life-interest under his uncle's will.

Her entreaties were at length too potent for his resistance. Accompanying her downstairs to the cabin, he opened the desk from which the other papers had been taken, and against his better judgment handed her the ominous communication of Jocelyn St. Cleeve which lay in the envelope just as it had been received three-quarters of a year earlier.

'Don't read it now,' he said. 'Don't spoil our meeting by entering into a subject which is virtually past and done with. Take it with you, and look it over at your leisure--merely as an old curiosity, remember, and not as a still operative doc.u.ment. I have almost forgotten what the contents are, beyond the general advice and stipulation that I was to remain a bachelor.'

'At any rate,' she rejoined, 'do not reply to the note I have seen from the solicitors till I have read this also.'

He promised. 'But now about our public wedding,' he said. 'Like certain royal personages, we shall have had the religious rite and the civil contract performed on independent occasions. Will you fix the day? When is it to be? and shall it take place at a registrar's office, since there is no necessity for having the sacred part over again?'

'I'll think,' replied she. 'I'll think it over.'

'And let me know as soon as you can how you decide to proceed.'

'I will write to-morrow, or come. I do not know what to say now. I cannot forget how I am wronging you. This is almost more than I can bear!'

To divert her mind he began talking about Greenwich Observatory, and the great instruments therein, and how he had been received by the astronomers, and the details of the expedition to observe the Transit of Venus, together with many other subjects of the sort, to which she had not power to lend her attention.

'I must reach home before the people are out of church,' she at length said wearily. 'I wish n.o.body to know I have been out this morning.' And forbidding Swithin to cross into the open in her company she left him on the edge of the isolated plantation, which had latterly known her tread so well.

x.x.xV

Lady Constantine crossed the field and the park beyond, and found on pa.s.sing the church that the congregation was still within. There was no hurry for getting indoors, the open windows enabling her to hear that Mr.

Torkingham had only just given out his text. So instead of entering the house she went through the garden-door to the old bowling-green, and sat down in the arbour that Louis had occupied when he overheard the interview between Swithin and the Bishop. Not until then did she find courage to draw out the letter and papers relating to the bequest, which Swithin in a critical moment had handed to her.

Had he been ever so little older he would not have placed that unconsidered confidence in Viviette which had led him to give way to her curiosity. But the influence over him which eight or nine outnumbering years lent her was immensely increased by her higher position and wider experiences, and he had yielded the point, as he yielded all social points; while the same conditions exempted him from any deep consciousness that it was his duty to protect her even from herself.

The preamble of Dr. St. Cleeve's letter, in which he referred to his pleasure at hearing of the young man's promise as an astronomer, disturbed her not at all--indeed, somewhat prepossessed her in favour of the old gentleman who had written it. The first item of what he called 'unfavourable news,' namely, the allusion to the inadequacy of Swithin's income to the wants of a scientific man, whose lines of work were not calculated to produce pecuniary emolument for many years, deepened the cast of her face to concern. She reached the second item of the so-called unfavourable news; and her face flushed as she read how the doctor had learnt 'that there was something in your path worse than narrow means, and that something is a woman.'

'To save you, if possible, from ruin on these heads,' she read on, 'I take the preventive measures entailed below.'

And then followed the announcement of the 600 pounds a year settled on the youth for life, on the single condition that he remained unmarried till the age of twenty-five--just as Swithin had explained to her. She next learnt that the bequest was for a definite object--that he might have resources sufficient to enable him to travel in an inexpensive way, and begin a study of the southern constellations, which, according to the shrewd old man's judgment, were a mine not so thoroughly worked as the northern, and therefore to be recommended. This was followed by some sentences which hit her in the face like a switch:--

'The only other preventive step in my power is that of exhortation. . . .

Swithin St. Cleeve, don't make a fool of yourself, as your father did. If your studies are to be worth anything, believe me they must be carried on without the help of a woman. Avoid her, and every one of the s.e.x, if you mean to achieve any worthy thing. Eschew all of that sort for many a year yet. Moreover, I say, the lady of your acquaintance avoid in particular. . . . She has, in addition to her original disqualification as a companion for you (that is, that of s.e.x), these two special drawbacks: she is much older than yourself--'

Lady Constantine's indignant flush forsook her, and pale despair succeeded in its stead. Alas, it was true. Handsome, and in her prime, she might be; but she was too old for Swithin!

'And she is so impoverished. . . . Beyond this, frankly, I don't think well of her. I don't think well of any woman who dotes upon a man younger than herself. . . . To care to be the first fancy of a young fellow like you shows no great common sense in her. If she were worth her salt she would have too much pride to be intimate with a youth in your una.s.sured position, to say no more.' (Viviette's face by this time tingled hot again.) 'She is old enough to know that a liaison with her may, and almost certainly would, be your ruin; and, on the other hand, that a marriage would be preposterous--unless she is a complete fool; and in that case there is even more reason for avoiding her than if she were in her few senses.

'A woman of honourable feeling, nephew, would be careful to do nothing to hinder you in your career, as this putting of herself in your way most certainly will. Yet I hear that she professes a great anxiety on this same future of yours as a physicist. The best way in which she can show the reality of her anxiety is by leaving you to yourself.'

Leaving him to himself! She paled again, as if chilled by a conviction that in this the old man was right.

'She'll blab your most secret plans and theories to every one of her acquaintance, and make you appear ridiculous by announcing them before they are matured. If you attempt to study with a woman, you'll be ruled by her to entertain fancies instead of theories, air-castles instead of intentions, qualms instead of opinions, sickly prepossessions instead of reasoned conclusions. . . .

'An experienced woman waking a young man's pa.s.sions just at a moment when he is endeavouring to shine intellectually, is doing little less than committing a crime.'

Thus much the letter; and it was enough for her, indeed. The flushes of indignation which had pa.s.sed over her, as she gathered this man's opinion of herself, combined with flushes of grief and shame when she considered that Swithin--her dear Swithin--was perfectly acquainted with this cynical view of her nature; that, reject it as he might, and as he unquestionably did, such thoughts of her had been implanted in him, and lay in him. Stifled as they were, they lay in him like seeds too deep for germination, which accident might some day bring near the surface and aerate into life.

The humiliation of such a possibility was almost too much to endure; the mortification--she had known nothing like it till now. But this was not all. There succeeded a feeling in comparison with which resentment and mortification were happy moods--a miserable conviction that this old man who spoke from the grave was not altogether wrong in his speaking; that he was only half wrong; that he was, perhaps, virtually right. Only those persons who are by nature affected with that ready esteem for others' positions which induces an undervaluing of their own, fully experience the deep smart of such convictions against self--the wish for annihilation that is engendered in the moment of despair, at feeling that at length we, our best and firmest friend, cease to believe in our cause.

Viviette could hear the people coming out of church on the other side of the garden wall. Their footsteps and their cheerful voices died away; the bell rang for lunch; and she went in. But her life during that morning and afternoon was wholly introspective. Knowing the full circ.u.mstances of his situation as she knew them now--as she had never before known them--ought she to make herself the legal wife of Swithin St. Cleeve, and so secure her own honour at any price to him? such was the formidable question which Lady Constantine propounded to her startled understanding. As a subjectively honest woman alone, beginning her charity at home, there was no doubt that she ought. Save Thyself was sound Old Testament doctrine, and not altogether discountenanced in the New. But was there a line of conduct which transcended mere self-preservation? and would it not be an excellent thing to put it in practice now?

That she had wronged St. Cleeve by marrying him--that she would wrong him infinitely more by completing the marriage--there was, in her opinion, no doubt. She in her experience had sought out him in his inexperience, and had led him like a child. She remembered--as if it had been her fault, though it was in fact only her misfortune--that she had been the one to go for the license and take up residence in the parish in which they were wedded. He was now just one-and-twenty. Without her, he had all the world before him, six hundred a year, and leave to cut as straight a road to fame as he should choose: with her, this story was negatived.

No money from his uncle; no power of advancement; but a bondage with a woman whose disparity of years, though immaterial just now, would operate in the future as a wet blanket upon his social ambitions; and that content with life as it was which she had noticed more than once in him latterly, a content imperilling his scientific spirit by abstracting his zeal for progress.

It was impossible, in short, to blind herself to the inference that marriage with her had not benefited him. Matters might improve in the future; but to take upon herself the whole liability of Swithin's life, as she would do by depriving him of the help his uncle had offered, was a fearful responsibility. How could she, an unendowed woman, replace such a.s.sistance? His recent visit to Greenwich, which had momentarily revived that zest for his pursuit that was now less constant than heretofore, should by rights be supplemented by other such expeditions. It would be true benevolence not to deprive him of means to continue them, so as to keep his ardour alive, regardless of the cost to herself.

It could be done. By the extraordinary favour of a unique accident she had now an opportunity of redeeming Swithin's seriously compromised future, and restoring him to a state no worse than his first. His annuity could be enjoyed by him, his travels undertaken, his studies pursued, his high vocation initiated, by one little sacrifice--that of herself. She only had to refuse to legalize their marriage, to part from him for ever, and all would be well with him thenceforward. The pain to him would after all be but slight, whatever it might be to his wretched Viviette.

The ineptness of retaining him at her side lay not only in the fact itself of injury to him, but in the likelihood of his living to see it as such, and reproaching her for selfishness in not letting him go in this unprecedented opportunity for correcting a move proved to be false. He wished to examine the southern heavens--perhaps his uncle's letter was the father of the wish--and there was no telling what good might not result to mankind at large from his exploits there. Why should she, to save her narrow honour, waste the wide promise of his ability?