Of course in his impatience and his humility Clement exaggerated both the delay and its results. The days seemed weeks to him, the weeks months. He fancied it a year since he had seen Josina. He did not consider that she was no stranger to his difficulties, nor reflect that though his silence might try her, and his absence cause her unhappiness, she might still approve both the one and the other. As a fact, the lesson which he had taught her at their last meeting had been driven home by the remorse that had tortured her on that dreadful night; and lonely hours in the sick room, much watching, and many a thought of what might have been, had strengthened the impression.
But Clement did not know this. He pictured the girl as losing all faith in him, and as the weeks ran on, the time came when he could bear the delay no longer, when he felt that he must either do something, or write himself down a coward. So one day, after hearing in the town that the Squire was able to leave his room, he wrote to Josina. He told her that he should call on the morrow and see her father.
And on the morrow he rode over, blind for once to the changes of nature, of landscape and cloudscape that surrounded him. But he never reached the house, for at the little bridge at the foot of the drive Josina met him, and eager as he had been to see his sweetheart and to hear her voice, he was checked by the change in her. It was a change which went deeper than mere physical alteration, though that, too, was there. The girl was paler, finer, more spiritual. Trouble and anxiety had laid their mark on her. He had left her girl, he found her woman.
A new look, a look of purpose, of decision, gave another cast to her features.
She was the first to speak, and her words bore out the change in her.
"You must come no farther, Clement," she said. And then as their hands met and their eyes, the color flamed in her cheeks, her head drooped flowerlike, she was for an instant the old Josina, the girl he had wooed by the brook, who had many a time fallen on his breast. But for a moment only. Then, "You cannot see him yet," she announced. "Not yet, for a long time, Clem. I met you here that I might stop you, and that there might be no misunderstanding--and no more secrets."
And this she had certainly secured, for the place which she had chosen for their meeting was overlooked, though at a distance, by the doorway of the house, and by all the walks about it.
But he was not to be so put off. "I must see him," he said, and he told himself that he must not be moved by her pleadings. It was natural that she should fear, but he must not fear--and indeed he had passed beyond fear. "No, dear," as she began to protest, "you must let me judge of this." He held her hands firmly as he looked down at her.
"I have suffered enough, I have suffered as much as I can bear. I have had no sight of you and no word of you for months, and I cannot endure this longer. Every hour of every day I have felt myself a coward, a deserter, a do-nothing! I have had to bear this, and I have borne it.
But now--now that your father is downstairs----"
"You can still do nothing," she said. "Believe, believe me,"
earnestly, "you can do nothing. Dear Clement," and the tenderness which she strove to suppress betrayed itself in her tone, "you must be guided by me, you must indeed. I am with my father, and I know, I know that he cannot bear it now. I know that it would be cruel to tell him now. He is blind. Blind, Clement! And he trusts me, he has to trust me. To tell him now would be to destroy his faith in me, to shock him and to frighten him--irreparably. You must go back now--now at once."
"What?" he cried. "And do nothing? And lose you?" The pathos of her appeal had passed him by, and only his love and his jealousy spoke.
"No," she answered soberly, "you will not lose me, if you have patience."
"But have you patience?"
"I must have."
"And I am to do nothing?" He spoke with energy, almost with anger.
"To go on doing nothing? I am to stand by and--and play the coward still--go on playing it?"
Her face quivered, for he hurt her. He was selfish, he was cruel; yet she understood, and loved him for his cruelty. But she answered him firmly. "Nothing until I send for you," she said. "You do not think, Clem. He is blind! He is dependent on me for everything. If I tell him in his weakness that I have deceived him, he will lose faith in me, he will distrust me, he will distrust everyone. He will be alone in his darkness."
It began to come home to him. "Blind?" he repeated.
"Yes."
"But for good? Do you mean--quite blind?"
"Ah, I don't know!" she cried, unable to control her voice. "I don't know. Dr. Farmer does not know, the physician who came from Birmingham to see him does not know. They say that they have hopes--and I don't know! But I fear."
He was silent then, touched with pity, feeling at length the pathos of it, feeling it almost as she felt it. But after a pause, during which she stood watching his face, "And if he does not recover his sight?"
"God forbid!"
"I say God forbid too, with all my heart. Still, if he does not--what then? When may I----"
"When the time comes," she answered, "and of that I must be the judge.
Yes, Clement," with resolution. "I must be the judge, for I alone know how he is, and I alone can choose the occasion."
The delay was very bitter to him. He had ridden out determined to put.
his fate to the test, to let nothing stand between him and his love, to over-ride excuses; and he could not in a moment make up his mind to be thwarted.
"And I must wait? I must go on waiting? Eating my heart out--doing nothing?"
"There is no other way. Indeed, indeed there is not."
"But it is too much. It is too much, Jos, that you ask!"
"Then, Clement----"
"Well?"
"You must give me up." She spoke firmly but her lips quivered, and there were tears in her eyes.
He was silent. At last, "Do you wish me to do that?" he said.
She looked at him for answer, and his doubts, if he had doubted her, his distrust, if it had been possible for him to distrust her, vanished. His heart melted. They were a very simple pair of lovers, moved by simple impulses.
"Forgive me, oh, forgive me, dear!" he cried. "But mine is a hard task, a hard task. You do not know what it is to wait, to wait and to do nothing!"
"Do I not?" Her eyes were swimming. "Is it not that which I am doing every day, Clem? But I have faith in you, and I believe in you. I believe that all will come right in the end. If you trust me, as I trust you, and have to trust you----"
"I will, I will," he cried, repentant, remorseful, recognizing in her a new decision, a new sweetheart, and doing homage to the strength that trial and suffering had given her. "I will trust you, trust you--and wait!"
Her eyes thanked him, and her hands; and after this there was little more to be said. She was anxious that he should go, and they parted.
He rode back to Aldersbury, thinking less of himself and more of her, and something too of the old man, who, blind and shorn of his strength, had now to lean on women, and suspicious by habit must now trust others, whether he would or no. Clement had imagination, and by its light he saw the pathos of the Squire's position; of his helplessness in the midst of the great possessions he had gathered, and the acres that he had added, acre to acre. He who had loved to look on hill and covert and know them his own, to whom every copse and hedgerow was a friend, who had watched his marches so jealously and known the rotation of every field, must now fume and fret, thinking them neglected, suspecting waste, doubting everyone, lacking but a little of doubting even his daughter.
"Poor chap!" he muttered, "poor old chap!" He was sorry for the Squire, but he was even more sorry for himself. Any other, he felt, would have surmounted the obstacles that stopped him, or by one road or another would have gone round them. But he was no good, he was useless. Even his sweetheart--this in a little spirit of bitterness--took the upper hand and guided him and imposed her will on him. He was nothing.
In the bank he grew more taciturn, doing his business with less spirit than before, suspecting Arthur and avoiding speech with him, meeting his careless smile with a stolid face. His father, Rodd too, deemed him jealous of the new partner, and his father, growing in these days a little sharp in temper, spoke to him about it.
"You took no interest in the business," he said, "and I had to find some one who would take an interest and be of use to me. Now you are making difficulties and causing unpleasantness. You are behaving ill, Clement."
But Clement only shrugged his shoulders. He had become indifferent. He had his own burden to bear.
CHAPTER XXII
Arthur, on the other hand, felt that things were going well with him.
A few months earlier he had decided that a partnership in Ovington's would be cheaply bought at the cost of a rupture with his uncle. Now he had the partnership, he could look forward to the wealth and importance which it would bring--and he had not to pay the price. On the contrary, his views now took in all that he had been prepared to resign, as well as all that he had hoped to gain. They took in Garth, and he saw himself figuring not only as the financier whose operations covered many fields, and whose riches were ever increasing, but as the landed Squire, the man of family, whose birth and acres must give him a position in society which no mere wealth could confer. The unlucky night which had cost the old man so much, had been for Arthur the birth-night of fortune. He could date from it a favor, proof, as he now believed, against chance and change, a favor upon which it seemed unlikely that he could ever overdraw.
For since his easy victory on the question of the India Stock, he had become convinced that the Squire was failing. The old man, once so formidable, was changed; he had grown, if not weak, yet dependent. And it could hardly be otherwise, Arthur reflected. The loss of sight was a paralyzing deprivation, and it had fallen on the owner of Garth at a time of life when any shock must sap the strength and lower the vitality. For a while his will had reacted, he had seemed to bear up against the blow, but age will be served, and of late he had grown more silent and apathetic. Arthur had read the signs and drawn the conclusion, and was now sure that, blind and shaken, the old man would never again be the man he had been, or assert himself against an influence which a subtler brain would know how to weave about him.
Arthur was thinking of this as he rode into town one morning in November, his back turned to the hills and the romance of them, his face to the plain. It was early in the month. St. Luke's summer, prolonged that year, had come to an end a day or two before, and the air was raw, the outlook sombre. Under a canopy of grey mist, the thinning hedge-rows and dripping woods showed dark against clear blue distances. But in the warmth of his thoughts the rider was proof against weather, and when he came to the sedgy spot, never more dreary to the view than to-day, which Thomas had chosen for his attack on the Squire, he smiled. That little patch of ground had done much for him, but at a price, of course--for there he had lost a friend, a good easy friend in Clement. And Betty--Betty, whose coolness had caused him more than one honest pang--he had no doubt that there had come a change in her, too, from that date.
But one had to pay a price for everything, and these were but small spots on the sun of his success. Soon he had put the thought of them from him, and, abreast of the first houses of the town, began to employ his mind on the work of the day--revolving this and that, matters outside routine which would demand his attention. He knew what was likely to arise.