The Rosary [45]
She listened, with straining ears. She waited, until every nerve of her body ached with suspense. She decided what she would say when the heavy door reopened and she saw Garth standing in a shaft of sunlight. She tried to remember the VENI, but the hollow clang of the door had silenced even memory's echo of that haunting music. So she waited silently, and as she waited the silence grew and seemed to enclose her within cruel, relentless walls which opened only to allow her glimpses into the vista of future lonely years. Just once more she broke that silence. "Oh, darling, come back! I WILL RISK IT," she said. But no step drew near, and, kneeling with her face buried in her clasped hands, Jane suddenly realised that Garth Dalmain had accepted her decision as final and irrevocable, and would not return.
How long she knelt there after realising this, she never knew. But at last comfort came to her. She felt she had done right. A few hours of present anguish were better than years of future disillusion. Her own life would be sadly empty, and losing this newly found joy was costing her more than she had expected; but she honestly believed "she had done rightly towards him, and what did her own pain matter?" Thus comfort came to Jane.
At last she rose and passed out of the silent church into the breezy sunshine.
Near the park gates a little knot of excited boys were preparing to fly a kite. Jimmy, the hero of the hour, the centre of attraction, proved to be the proud possessor of this new kite. Jimmy was finding the day glorious indeed, and was being happy. "Happy ALSO," Garth had said. And Jane's eyes filled with tears, as she remembered the word and the tone in which it was spoken.
"There goes my poor boy's shilling," she said to herself sadly, as the kite mounted and soared above the common;" but, alas, where is his joy?"
As she passed up the avenue a dog-cart was driven swiftly down it. Garth Dalmain drove it; behind him a groom and a portmanteau. He lifted his hat as he passed her, but looked straight before him. In a moment he was gone. Had Jane wanted to stop him she could not have done so. But she did not want to stop him. She felt absolutely satisfied that she had done the right thing, and done it at greater cost to herself than to him. He would eventually--ah, perhaps before so very long--find another to be to him all, and more than all, he had believed she could be. But she? The dull ache at her bosom reminded her of her own words the night before, whispered in the secret of her chamber to him who, alas, was not there to hear: "Whatever the future brings for you and me, no other face will ever be hidden here." And, in this first hour of the coming lonely years, she knew them to be true.
In the hall she met Pauline Lister.
"Is that you, Miss Champion?" said Pauline. "Well now, have you heard of Mr. Dalmain? He has had to go to town unexpectedly, on the 1.15 train; and aunt has dropped her false teeth on her marble wash- stand and must get to the dentist right away. So we go to town on the 2.30. It's an uncertain world. It complicates one's plans, when they have to depend on other people's teeth. But I would sooner break false teeth than true hearts, any day. One can get the former mended, but I guess no one can mend the latter. We are lunching early in our rooms; so I wish you good-by, Miss Champion."
CHAPTER XII
THE DOCTOR'S PRESCRIPTION
The Honourable Jane Champion stood on the summit of the Great Pyramid and looked around her. The four exhausted Arabs whose exertions, combined with her own activity, had placed her there, dropped in the picturesque attitudes into which an Arab falls by nature. They had hoisted the Honourable Jane's eleven stone ten from the bottom to the top in record time, and now lay around, proud of their achievement and sure of their "backsheesh."
The whole thing had gone as if by clock-work. Two mahogany-coloured, finely proportioned fellows, in scanty white garments, sprang with the ease of antelopes to the top of a high step, turning to reach down eagerly