The Classic Mystery Collection - Arthur Conan Doyle [4072]
Alas! why in that instant of mutual revelation had not the further grace been given them of quick catastrophe shutting the door upon a future of which neither could then dream or sense the coming doom.
It was not to be.
He passed, she passed, and for the time the look they gave each other was all; but the world had been glorified for them both--and Destiny waited.
* * * * *
"Good looks? Yes; but nothing else; very ordinary connections, very. A little money, true. Her uncle, whom by the way I judge you have not seen, will leave her a few thousands; but meanwhile he is a fixture--will not leave her or let her leave him, which is a misfortune since in a social way he is simply impossible. No sort of match for you, Roberts. Cut and run while there is time; that's my advice to you, given in the most friendly spirit."
"Thank you. As I have but just met Miss Taylor, don't you think such advice is a little premature?"
"No, I don't. She is a woman who must be loved or left; that's all. You've heard me."
Did Carleton Roberts heed these words? No. What man in the thrall of his first romance ever did.
"You love me, Ermentrude?"
"I love you, Carleton."
"For a day, for a month or for a year?" he smiled.
"Forever," she answered.
"That's a long time," he murmured, with his eyes on a little clock hanging in the shop window before which they had stopped in one of their infrequent walks together. "A long time! That foolish little clock will beat out the hours of its short life and go the way of all things, before we shall hardly have entered upon the soul's 'forever.'"
"That clock will last our lifetime, Carleton. Afterward, love will not be counted by hours."
As she said this she turned her face his way and he saw it in its full flower with the light of heaven upon it. In later years he may have forgotten the emotions of that moment, but they were the purest, the freest from earthly stain that he was ever destined to know.
"I will love you _forever_," he whispered. "That little clock shall be my witness." And he drew her into the shop.
* * * * *
"Cuckoo!"
Ermentrude glanced up; the clock hung on her wall.
"Oh," she murmured, "each hour it will speak to me of him and his words," then softly, like one adream in Paradise:
"I love but thee, And thee will I love to eternity."
Such was the event to her. What was it to him? Let us see:
A hotel room--a view of Pilatus, but with its top lost in enveloping clouds.
Seated before it with pen in hand above a sheet of paper, Carleton Roberts eyes these clouds but does not see them; he is hunting in his brain for words and they do not come. Why? His mother's name is on the page and he has only to write that she has been quite correct in her judgment as to the unfitness of the marriage he had had in mind:--that youth should mate with youth and that if she could see the glorious young girl whose acquaintance he had made here, she would be satisfied with his new choice which promised him the fullest happiness. Why then a sheet yet blank and a hesitating hand, when all it had to do was to write?
Who can tell? Man knows little of himself or of the conflicting passions which sway him this way or that, even when to the outward eye, and possibly to the inner one as well, action looks easy.
Did he feel, without its reaching the point of knowledge, that this mother of keenest expectation and highest hope would not be satisfied with what this charming but undeveloped girl of middle class parentage would bring him? Or was there, deep down in his own undeveloped