Part 37 (1/2)

”You must not come,” he said almost harshly. ”It is far too late; it is far too wet.”

He stopped to make her stop, but she only went on, getting much in front. Then he ran up to her, laid his hand on her arm, and implored her not to go.

There was nothing in his words or action that was precisely loverlike, nor did such likeness occur to her; but in the restraint he put upon the lover in him, his manner appeared to a.s.sume the confidence and ease of a perfect friends.h.i.+p, and she, scarce noting much how he spoke or acted, still felt that this advance of his gave her a new liberty to tell him that she scorned his friends.h.i.+p, for she had something of that sort seething in her mind concerning him. As to his request just then, she merely said she would go on.

He was very urgent. ”Then I will not go,” he said, stopping again. ”You can't go without me, and if my going involves your going, it is better not to go.” He did not mean what he said, but he hoped to move her.

”You can go or stay as you think right,” she said. ”I am going to get Winifred, poor lamb. I am not in the least afraid to go alone. I have got a pistol in my belt.”

So he went with her. They both walked fast. The road was wide and muddy, and the night was very dark.

Trenholme noticed now for the first time that he walked in slippers; he would as soon have thought of turning back on this account as he would have thought of stopping if thorns and briars had beset his path. He felt almost as if it were a dream that he was walking thus, serving the woman he loved; but even as he brooded on the dreamlike strangeness of it, his mind was doing its practical work. If Winifred and Mrs. Martha were in the vehicle he had seen, what time they would gain while driving on the road they would be apt to lose by their feebleness on the mountain path, which he and Sophia could ascend so much more lightly.

Wherever their goal, and whatever their purpose, he was sanguine that he would find and stop them before they joined the main party. He communicated the grounds of this hope to his companion. His heart was sore for his lady's tears. He had never before seen her weep. They had pa.s.sed the cemetery, and went forward now into the lonelier part of the road. Then Trenholme thought of the warning Harkness had given him about the drunkard's violence. The recollection made him hasten on, forgetting that his speed was almost too great for a woman.

In the stir of events we seldom realise to the full the facts with which we are dealing, certainly never perceive at first their full import.

Trenholme, however, after some minutes of tramping and thinking, felt that he had reason for righteous indignation, and became wroth. He gave vent to strictures upon superficiality of character, modern love of excitement, and that silly egotism that, causing people to throw off rightful authority, leaves them an easy prey to false teachers. He was not angry with Winifred--he excepted her; but against those who were leading her astray his words were harsh, and they would have flowed more freely had he not found language inadequate to express his growing perception of their folly.

When he had talked thus for some time Sophia answered, and he knew instantly, from the tone of her voice, that her tears had dried themselves.

”Are you and I able to understand the condition of heart that is not only resigned, but eager to meet Him Whom they hope to meet--able so fully to understand that we can judge its worth?”

He knew her face so well that he seemed to see the hint of sarcasm come in the arching of her handsome eyebrows as she spoke.

”I fear they realise their hope but little,” he replied. ”The excitement of some hysterical outbreak is what they seek.”

”It seems to me that is an ungenerous and superficial view, especially as we have never seen the same people courting hysterics before,” she said; but she did not speak as if she cared much which view he took.

Her lack of interest in his opinion, quite as much as her frank reproof, offended him. They walked in silence for some minutes. Thunder, which had been rumbling in the distance, came nearer and every now and then a flash from an approaching storm lit up the dark land with a pale, vivid light.

”Even setting their motives at the highest estimate,” he said, ”I do not know that you, or even I, Miss Rexford, need hold ourselves incapable of entering into them.” This was not exactly what he would have felt if left to himself, but it was what her upbraiding wrung from him. He continued: ”Even if we had the sure expectation for to-night that they profess to have, I am of opinion that we should express our devotion better by patient adherence to our ordinary duties, by doing all we could for the world up to the moment of His appearing.”

”Our ordinary duties!” she cried; ”_they_ are always with us! I dare say you and I might think that the fervour of this night's work had better have been converted into good works and given to the poor; but our opinion is not specially likely to be the true one. What do we know?

Walking here in the dark, we can't even see our way along this road.”

It was an apt ill.u.s.tration, for their eyes were becoming so dazzled by the occasional lightning that they could make no use of its brief flash, or of the faint light of night that was mingled in the darkness of the intervals.

Although he smarted under the slight she put upon him, he was weary of opposing her, because he loved her. ”I am sorry that nothing I say meets with your approval,” he said sadly.

It was lack of tact that made him use the personal tone when he and she had so far to travel perforce together, and she, being excited and much perturbed in spirit, had not the grace to answer wisely.

”Happily it matters little whether what you say pleases me or not.”

She meant in earnestness to depreciate herself, and to exalt that higher tribunal before which all opinions are arraigned; still, there was in the answer a tinge of spite, telling him by the way that it did not distress her to differ with him. It was not wonderful that Trenholme, self-conscious with the love she did not guess at, took the words only as a challenge to his admiration.

”Indeed you wrong me. It was long ago I proved the value I put upon your advice by acting upon it in the most important decision of my life.”

She had so long tacitly understood what her influence over him at that time had been that she could not now be much affected by the avowal.