Lover or Friend Part 35

'Mr. Blake,' she said gently; and then he did move slightly.

'I am not in your way, I hope,' he said rather coldly. 'I did not know it was so late, or I would have gone back. Please do not let me keep you, Miss Ross; I am afraid there will be a storm directly.'

'In that case you had better come with me,' she returned, trying to speak with her usual friendly ease. But his proud, sad look rather daunted her. How could she leave him and go on her way, when he seemed so utterly cast down and miserable; and it was all her fault? 'Please do not shake your head, Mr. Blake. I know you are hurt with me because I was rather abrupt just now; but I meant nothing at all, only that I was in a hurry, and----'

'That you did not wish for my company,' he added bitterly.

'Oh, Mr. Blake!'

'You are right--quite right,' he went on, in a tone that pierced Audrey's heart, it was so hopeless, so full of pain; and now he did place himself at her side. 'I do not blame you in the least; it was the truest kindness. I can see that now. It is not your fault that I have been a fool. Miss Ross, I wished you to pa.s.s; I never meant to speak or to obtrude myself on you, but you stopped of your own accord.'

'I wished to apologise to you for my abruptness. I did not like you to think me unkind.'

'You are never unkind, you could not be if you tried,' he returned in the same pa.s.sionate tone; 'you are only so absolutely true. You saw what I ought never to have shown you, and you thought it only right to check me. Yes, I was hurt for a moment, I will allow it. Perhaps in some sort of sense I am hurt now. I suppose a man may own to being hurt when his heart is half broken.'

'Please, please do not talk so.'

'I will promise never to talk so again,' he returned with sad humility; 'but I have gone too far to stop now.'

'No, oh no!' trying to check him; but she might as well have tried to check a river that had broken bonds. For once Cyril determined that he would be heard.

'It is your own fault,' he returned, looking at her; 'you should have pa.s.sed on and left me to my misery. Yes, I am miserable; and you have made me so: and yet for all that you are not to be blamed. How could I see you, how could I be with you, and not love you? I have loved you from the very first hour I saw you.'

'Oh, hush, hus.h.!.+' Audrey was half sobbing. There were great tears rolling down her face; she could hardly bear to hear him or to look at him, his face was so white and strained.

'I must always love you,' he went on in the same low concentrated voice.

'I have never seen anyone like you; there is not another girl in the world who would do as you are doing. How can I help losing my heart to you? No man could, in my position.'

'I am very sorry,' she murmured.

'Do not be sorry'--and then he saw her tears, and his voice softened from its vehemence and became very gentle. 'You are so kind that I know you would spare me this pain if you could--but it is not in your power; neither is it in mine. Do not be afraid of me,' he went on quickly, as she would have spoken. 'Remember I am asking you for nothing. I expect nothing. What right have I to aspire to such as you? Even if I have dared to dream, my dreams are at an end now, when you have shown me so plainly----' He stopped and turned aside his face, but no words could have been so eloquent as that silence.

'Mr. Blake, will you let me say something? I am grieved, grieved to the heart, that this should have happened. If I could have prevented it, not a word of all this should have been spoken; but it is too late to say so now.'

'Far, far too late!'

'So we must make the best of it. I must try to forget all that has pa.s.sed, and, Mr. Blake, you must promise me to do the same.'

'I have promised,' he returned proudly. 'I promised you of my own accord that I would never talk to you in this way again; but you must not ask anything more of me.'

'May I not?' in rather a faltering voice.

'It would be useless,' he replied quickly. 'I can never leave off loving you. I would part with my life first. I think I am not one of those men who could ever love twice. I am young, still something tells me this; but all the same you have nothing to fear from me. I know your position and mine.'

'You must not speak as though we were not equal,' she said, in her desire to comfort him and raise him up from his despondency; 'it is not that. What does one's poverty or wealth matter?'

'No, it is not that,' he answered, with a significance that made her lower her eyes; 'in one sense we are equals, for one cannot be more or less than a gentleman, and when one has youth and strength, and a moderate amount of talents, one can always raise one's self to the level of the woman one loves. And if I had thought that you could ever have cared for me----' His voice trembled; he could not proceed.

'Mr. Blake, I must beg, I do entreat you to say no more.' Audrey's lips were quivering; she looked quite pale. At that moment she could bear no more.

'Forgive me,' he said remorsefully. 'I was thinking more of myself than you. I am trying you too much.'

She could not deny this, but with her usual unselfishness she strove again for some comforting word.

'It will be as though you had not spoken,' she said, in so low a voice that he had to stoop to hear her. 'It will be sacred, quite sacred; do not let it spoil everything--we--I have been so happy; let us try to remain good friends.'

'I will try my best, but it will be very hard.' Perhaps, if she had seen his face that moment, she would have known that what she asked was impossible. How could he be friends with this girl? Even while he a.s.sented to that innocent request he knew it could never be.

'Miss Ross,' he said suddenly, for his position was becoming too difficult for him, and it was his duty to s.h.i.+eld her as much as possible, 'we are just in the town, and perhaps it would be better for me to drop behind a little. It will not do for people to notice; and now the rain is beginning, and if you do not hurry on you will be wet.'

'Very well,' she returned; and then rather timidly she put out her hand to him. Cyril did not ignore it this time; he held it fast for a moment.

'You have been good, very patient with me,' he said rather huskily.

'Thank you for that, as well as for everything else: and then he stepped aside and waited for her to leave him.

Audrey's limbs were trembling; she had never felt so agitated in her life. She hurried on, panting a little with her haste; but the drops fell faster and faster, and just at the entrance to the town she was obliged to take refuge in a shed by the roadside. The street was dark, and she knew no one could see her. She would have time to recover herself a little before she had to answer all her mother's anxious questions. There was a carpenter's bench and a pile of planks; she sat down on them, and looked out at the heavy torrents of rain. By and by Cyril pa.s.sed, but he did not notice her; he was walking very fast and his head was erect, as though he were not conscious of the rain beating down on him. Audrey shrank back a little as she saw him. 'He is young, but he is strong,' she said to herself; 'he is almost as strong as Michael;' and then her tears flowed again, but she wiped them away a little impatiently. 'I must be strong, too, for his sake as well as my own; it will never do for people to find out his secret. He must be spared as much as possible. I must help him all I can.' But as she argued herself into calmness she told herself again and again how thankful she was that Michael was away. Michael was so observant, so clear-sighted, that it was impossible to hoodwink him. He had a terrible habit of going straight to the point, of putting questions that one could hardly evade. He would have seen in a moment that she had been crying, and any refusal on her part to satisfy his inquiries would only have deepened his suspicions. 'I could not have faced Michael,' she thought, as the rain suddenly stopped and she stepped out into the wet gleaming roads.

Audrey played her part in the conversation so badly that night that Mrs.

Ross observed, uneasily, that she was sure Audrey had taken a chill:

'For she is quite flushed, John,' she continued anxiously, 'and I noticed her s.h.i.+ver more than once. She has overheated herself in that long walk, and then being caught in that heavy rain has done the mischief.'

Dr. Ross looked at his daughter. Perhaps, in spite of his short-sight, he was more observant than his wife, for he took the girl's face between his hands:

'Go to bed, my child,' he said kindly, 'and I will finish that game of chess with your mother;' and Audrey, with a grateful kiss, obeyed him.

But as Dr. Ross placed himself opposite his wife he seemed a little absent, as though he were listening in vain for something. For it was Audrey's habit to sing s.n.a.t.c.hes of some gay tune as she mounted the stairs. But to-night there was no 'Widow Miller'; it was the Doctor who hummed the refrain to himself, as he captured an unwary p.a.w.n:

'When ye bind up the sheaves, leave out a few grains To the heart-broken widow who never complains.'

Audrey felt that night as though she should never sing again--as though she had committed some crime that must for ever separate her from her old happy self.

To most people this remorse for an unconscious fault would have seemed morbid and exaggerated. Thousands of girls have to inflict this sort of pain at least once in their lives; the wrong man loves them, and the disastrous 'No' must be spoken. Audrey had not even said 'No,' for nothing had been asked her--she had only had to listen to a declaration of love, an honest, manly confession, that had been wrung from the speaker's lips. Wherein, then, did the blame consist? and why was Audrey shedding such bitter tears as she sat by her window that night looking over the dark garden? For a hundred complex reasons, too involved and intricate to disentangle in one brief hour.

Audrey was accusing herself of blindness--of wilful and foolish blindness. She ought to have seen, she must have seen, to what all this was tending. Again and again Mr. Blake had shown her quite plainly the extent of her influence over him. Could she not have warned him in time to prevent this most unhappy declaration? Would it not have been kinder to have drawn back in the first months of their intimacy, and have interposed some barrier of dignified reserve that would have kept him silent for ever? But no! she had drawn him on: not by coquetry--Audrey was far too high-minded to coquet with any man--but simply by the warm friendliness of her manner. She had liked his company; she had accepted his attentions, not once had she repulsed him; and the consequence was his attachment had grown and increased in intensity day by day, until it had overmastered him. He had said that his heart was almost broken, and it was her fault. What right had she to be so kind to him, until her very softness and graciousness had fed his wild hopes? Was it not true when he had implied that his misery lay at her door?

Audrey felt as though her own heart was broken that night--such a pa.s.sion of pity and remorse swept over her. What would she not give to undo it all!

'If I could only bear some of his suffering,' she thought, 'if I could only comfort him, I should not care what became of myself. I would sooner bear anything than incur this awful responsibility of spoiling a life;' and Audrey wept again.

But even at this miserable crisis she shrank from questioning herself too closely. A sort of terror and strange beating at the heart a.s.sailed her if she tried to look into her own thoughts. Was there no subtle sweetness in the knowledge that she was so beloved? No wish, lying deep down in her heart, that it might have been possible to comfort him?

'It would not do--it would not do. I am sure of him, but not of myself,'

she thought, 'and it would make them all so unhappy. If I could only think it right----' and then she stopped, and there was a sad, sad look in her eyes. 'I will not think of it any more to-night.' And then she knelt and, in her simple girlish way, prayed that G.o.d would forgive her, for she had been wrong, miserably wrong; and would comfort him, and make it possible for them to remain friends: 'for I do not wish to lose him,'

thought Audrey, as she laid her head on her pillow that, for once in her bright young life, seemed sown with thorns.

It seemed to Audrey as though she had never pa.s.sed a more uncomfortable three weeks than those that followed that unfortunate talk in the Brail lanes; and, in spite of all her efforts to appear as though nothing had happened, her looks and gravity were noticed by both Mrs. Ross and Geraldine.

'I told your father that it was a chill,' observed Mrs. Ross, on more than one occasion. 'She is growing thin, and her eyes are so heavy in the morning. There is nothing worse than a suppressed cold,' she went on anxiously, for even a small ailment in one of her children always called forth her motherly solicitude.