The Real Charlotte - Edith Somerville [191]
“If you had taken the trouble to answer my letters last autumn, you wouldn’t be saying these things to me now,” she said, speaking low and hurriedly.
“I don’t believe it! I believe if you had cared about me then you wouldn’t treat me like this now.”
“I did care for you,” she said, while the hard-held tears forced their way to her eyes; “you made me do it, and then you threw me over, and now you’re trying to put the blame on me!”
He saw the glisten on her eyelashes, and it almost took from him the understanding of what she said.
“Francie,” he said, his voice shaking, and his usually confident eyes owning the infection of her tears, “you might forget that. I’m miserable. I can’t bear to leave you!” He sat down again beside her, and, catching her hand, kissed it with a passion of repentance. He felt it shrink from his lips, but the touch of it had intoxicated him, and suddenly she was in his arms.
For a speechless instant they clung to each other; her head dropped to his shoulder, as if the sharp release from the tension of the last fortnight had killed her, and the familiar voice murmured in her ear:
“Say it to me—say you love me.”
“Yes I do—my dearest—” she said, with a moan that was tragically at variance with the confession. “Ah, why do you make me so wicked!” She snatched herself away from him, and stood up, trembling all over. “I wish I had never seen you— I wish I was dead.”
“I don’t care what you say now,” said Hawkins, springing to his feet, “you’ve said you loved me, and I know you meant it. Will you stand by it?” he went on wildly. “If you’ll only say the word I’ll chuck everything overboard—I can’t go away from you like this. Once I’m in England I can’t get back here, and if I did, what good would it be to me? He’d never give us a chance of seeing each other, and we’d both be more miserable than we are, unless— unless there was a chance of meeting you in Dublin or somewhere—?” He stopped for an instant. Francie mutely shook her head. “Well, then, I shall never see you.”
There was silence, and the words settled down into both their hearts. He cursed himself for being afraid of her, she, whom he had always felt to be his inferior, yet when he spoke it was with an effort.
“Come away with me out of this—come away with me for good and all! What’s the odds? We can’t be more than happy!”
Francie made an instinctive gesture with her hand while he spoke, as if to stop him, but she said nothing, and almost immediately the distant rush and rattle of a train came quietly into the stillness.
“That’s his train!” she exclaimed, looking as startled as if the sound had been a sign from heaven, “Oh, go away! He mustn’t meet you coming away from here.”
“I’ll go if you give me a kiss,” he answered drunkenly. His arms were round her again when they dropped to his side as if he had been shot.
There was a footstep on the path immediately below the lilac bushes, and Charlotte’s voice called to Francie that she was just starting for home and had come to make her adieux.
* * *
CHAPTER XLIX.
Christopher Dysart drove to Rosemount next morning to see Mr. Lambert on business. He noticed Mrs. Lambert standing at the drawing-room window as he drove up, but she left the window before he reached the hall door, and he went straight to Mr. Lambert’s study without seeing her again.
Francie returned listlessly to the seat that she had sprung from with a terrified throb of the heart at the thought that the wheels might be those of Hawkins’ trap, and, putting her elbow on the arm of the chair, rested her forehead on her hand; her other hand drooped over the side of the chair, holding still in it the sprig of pink hawthorn that her husband had given her in the garden an hour before. Her attitude was full of languor, but her brain was working