The Mysterious Mr. Miller

All the dark past, those years of yearning and black bitterness, came back to me. I had thought her dead, and lived with her sweet tender remembrance ever with me. Yet in future I should know that she lived, the wife of an adventurer, suffering a good woman’s martyrdom.

My heart grew sick with dread and longing. Again I would mourn the dead indeed; dead days, dead love. It pressed upon my life like lead. What beauty now would the daybreak smile on me? What fragrance would the hillside bear for me as I roamed again the face of Europe?

I should see the sun for ever through my unshed tears. Around me on the summer earth of Italy or the wintry gloom of the Russian steppe there would be for ever silence. My love had passed beyond me.

Unconsciously we moved forward, I still holding her hand and looking into the tearful eyes of her whom I had believed dead. Was it not the perversity of life that snatched her again from me, even though we had met to find that we still loved one another? Yes, it was decreed that I should ever be a cosmopolitan, a wanderer, a mere wayfarer on the great highways of Europe, always filled with longing regrets of the might-have-been.

I remembered too well those gay Continental cities wherein I had spent the most recent years of my weary life; cities where feasts and flowers reign, where the golden louis jingle upon the green cloth, where the passionate dark faces of the women glow, where voices pour forth torrents of joyous words, where holiday dresses gleam gaily against the shadows; cities of frolic and brilliancy, of laughter and music, where vice runs riot hand in hand with wealth, and where God is, alas! forgotten. Ah! how nauseous was it all to me. I had lived that life, I had rubbed shoulders with those reckless multitudes, I had laughed amid that sorry masquerade, yet I had shut my eyes to shut out from me the frolic and brilliancy around, and stumbled on, sad, thoughtful, and yet purposeless.

The gladness made me colder and wearier as I went. The light and laughter would have driven me homeward in desolation, had I a home to shelter me.

But, alas! I was only a wanderer – and alone.

“Tell me, darling,” I whispered to my love, my heart bursting, “is there absolutely no hope? Can you never free yourself from this man?”

“Never,” was her despairing response.

And in that one single word was my future written upon my heart.

I spoke to her again. What I uttered I hardly knew. A flood of fierce, passionate words arose to my lips, and then bending I kissed her – kissed her with that same fierce passion of long ago, when we were both younger, and when we had wandered hand in hand beside the lapping waves at sunset.

She did not draw back, but, on the contrary, she kissed me fondly in return. Her thin white hand stroked my brow tenderly, as though she touched a child.

No words left her lips, but in her soft dear eyes I saw the truth – that truth that held me to her with a band that was indivisible, a bond that, though our lives lay apart, would still exist as strong as it had ever been.

“Ella,” I whispered at last, holding her slight, trembling form in my embrace, and kissing her again upon the lips, “will you not tell me the reason you dare not allow me to denounce this fellow? Is it not just that I should know?”

She shook her head sadly, and, sighing deeply, answered: —

“I cannot tell you.”

“You mean that you refuse?”

“I refuse because I am not permitted, and further, I – ”

“You what?”

“I should be revealing to you his secret.”

“And what of that?”

“If you knew everything, you would certainly go to the police and tell them the truth. They would arrest him, and I – I should die.”

“Die? What do you mean?” I asked quickly.

“I could not live to face the exposure and the shame. He would seek to revenge himself by making counter-charges against me – a terrible allegation – but – but before he could do so they would find me dead.”

“And I?”

“Ah! you, dear one! Yes, I know all that you must suffer. Your heart is torn like my own. You love just as fondly as I do, and you have mourned just as bitterly. To you, the parting is as hard as to myself. My life had been one of darkness and despair ever since that night in London when I was forced to lie to you. I wrecked your happiness because circumstances conspired against us – because it was my duty as a daughter to save my father from ruin and penury. Have you really in your heart forgiven me, Godfrey?”

“Yes, my darling. How can I blame you for what was, after all, the noblest sacrifice a woman could make?”

“Then let me go,” she urged, speaking in a low, distinct voice, pale almost to the lips. “We must part – therefore perhaps the sooner the better, and the sooner my life is ended the more swiftly will peace and happiness come to me. For me the grave holds no terrors. Only because I leave you alone shall I regret,” she sobbed.

“And yet I must in future be alone,” I said, swallowing the lump that arose in my throat. “No, Ella!” I cried, “I cannot bear it. I cannot again live without your presence.”

“Alas! you must,” was her hoarse reply. “You must – you must.”

Wandering full of grief and bitter thoughts, vivid and yet confused, the hours sped by uncounted.

To the cosmopolitan, like I had grown to be, green plains have a certain likeness, whether in Belgium, Germany or Britain. A row of poplars quivering in the sunshine looks much alike in Normandy or in Northamptonshire. A deep forest all aglow with red and gold in autumn tints is the same thing, after all, in Tuscany, as in Yorkshire.

But England, our own dear old England, has also a physiognomy that is all her own; that is like nothing else in all the world; pastures intensely green, high hawthorn hedges and muddy lanes, which to some minds is sad and strange and desolate and painful, and which to others is beautiful, but which, be it what else it may, is always wholly and solely English, can never be met with elsewhere, and has a smile of peace and prosperity upon it, and a sigh in it that make other lands beside it seem as though they were soulless and were dumb.

We had unconsciously taken a path that, skirting a wood, ran up over a low hill southward. To our left lay the beautiful Cornish country in the sweet misty grey of the morning light. The sun was shining and the tremulous wood smoke curled up in the rosy air from a cottage chimney.

Was that to be our last walk together, I wondered? I sighed when I recollected how utterly we were the children of circumstance.

Beside her I walked with a swelling heart. I consumed my soul in muteness and bitterness, my eyes set before me to the grey hills behind which the sun had risen.

Chapter Twenty Four

“I am not Fit!”

Of a sudden, she turned her head and glanced full in my eyes. Her thoughts were, like mine, of the past – of those glad and gracious days.

I stood still for a moment, and catching her hands kissed them; my own were burning.

We went on by the curving course outside the wood quite silent, for the gloom of the future had settled upon us.

The past! Those days when my Ella was altogether mine! I loved to linger on those blissful days, for they were lighted with the sweetest sunlight of my life. Never since, for me, had flowers blossomed, and fruits ripened, and waters murmured, and grasshoppers sung, and waves beat joyous music as in the spring and summer of that wondrous time.

To rise when all the world was flushed with the soft pink of the earliest dawn, and to go hand in hand with her through the breast-high corn with scarlet poppies clasping the gliding feet; to see the purple wraith of rain haunting the silvery fairness of the hills; to watch the shadows chase the sun rays over the wide-open mysterious sea; to feel the living light of the cloudless day beat us with a million pulses amid the hum of life all around; to go out into the lustre of the summer’s night; to breathe the air soft as the first kisses of our own new-found love, and rich as wine with the strong odours of a world of flowers. These had in those never-to-be-forgotten days been her joys and mine, joys at once of the senses and the soul.

I loved her so – God knows! and yet almost I hated her. She had, on that night in Bayswater, deceived me! She had deceived me!

This was the iron in my soul. It is an error so common. Women lie to men – and men to women for the matter of that – out of mistaken tenderness or ill-judged compassion, or that curious fear of recrimination from which the firmest courage is not exempt. A woman deceives a man with untruth, not because she is base, but because she fears to hurt him with the truth; fears his reproaches; fears a painful scene, and even when he is quite worthless she is reluctant to wound his weakness. It is an error so common in this everyday life of ours: an error that is fatal always.

Had she been quite frank with me on that night when we had parted we might not have found ourselves fettered as we now were – she held to a man who was clearly an adventurer and a blackguard to boot.

Yet how could I reproach her for what was a great and complete self-sacrifice. No. She had done what was, perhaps, strictly her duty, even though both our lives had been wrecked in consequence.

“My love!” I murmured passionately, as with a cry I caught her in my arms, and held her close to me, as a man will hold some dear dead thing. And was she not, alas! now dead to me?

Our lips met again, but she was still silent. How many moments went I do not know; as there are years in which a man does not live a moment, so there are moments in which one lives a lifetime.

Her soft blue eyes closed beneath my kisses, my sense grew faint, the world became dark, all light and life shut out from me – all dark. But it was the sweet warm darkness, as though of the balmy night in June; and even then I know I prayed, prayed to Him that she might still be mine.