A Mere Chance Volume III Part 24

She sat solitary in her far-away chair, with her feet on the rung of the one in front of her, her hands, gloved to perfection, folded in her lap, her delicate, neat dress daintily adjusted, much as she might have sat in the pew at church, a model of matronly grace and propriety.

But who could tell, from the expression of her quiet _pose_ and her dreamy eyes, what ineffable raptures and fancies, what infinite longings and yearnings--nameless, even to her own consciousness, but all reminiscent of the blessed past--soared out of captivity on the wings of those alluring harmonies!

Who could see that in her heart she was crying--crying bitterly--for the poetry and the beauty that were lost out of her life!

There was an interval of silence, during which she sat quite still, looking at the great organ-pipes, and seeing nothing; and then there grew out of the hush the delicious rhythm of the "Faust" waltz, beating like a soft pulse through the summer air.

What spell is there in the "Faust" waltz, or in any waltz, for one whose heart is capable of receiving and responding to the inspired message of Mozart?

How can we tell? But this we know, that those whose hearts are warm and young--who understand how to love and how to dance, and have done the two things at the self-same moment--have seldom any more power than they have honest inclination to resist the subtle wiles of this simple measure.

There is a vox humana stop out in whatever organ plays it, magnetic to the human pa.s.sions that memory and imagination keep. Rachel did not ask why it was, but she felt, as soon as the air began to unwind itself from a confusion of sweet sounds, and she heard the slow time throbbing softly in her ears, that she did not know how to bear it.

It filled her soul with a great wave of suffocating emotion--it ran like an electric current over all her sensitive nerves--it contracted her white throat with a choking pain that was like incipient hysteria--it set abnormal pulses bounding in her brain. She did not think of Adelonga, and the hour when she and her true love had their first and last waltz together.

No definite picture of the past arose at the magician's bidding, or if it did, she shut her eyes to it. But she could not help the forlorn rapture of longing for that nameless something that was the most precious of her woman's rights, which fate and fraud had taken from her, when the notes of this dreamy waltz measure, so charged with pa.s.sionate and poetic a.s.sociations, pulsed from the heart of the organ into her warm young blood.

"Oh, my love! my love!"--that was the burden of the music which was not set to words.

And she turned her face a little, and saw Roden Dalrymple standing in the doorway. He had come in quietly, and was waiting, with his hat in his hand, apparently for a pause in the performance, which he did not wish to interrupt, but really until he could find where some one whom he was looking for was sitting.

It was the first time she had seen him since that October night when they had parted in the moonlight under the walls of the house that was now her home; but she had been, unknown to herself, expecting him, and there was no shock in her surprise.

She knew that he was looking for her, when she saw his eyes travelling over the rows of occupied chairs in the upper division of the hall, and she longed to call out to him,

"Roden, Roden, here I am!"

But not a dozen seconds pa.s.sed before he saw her far away from him in her shadowy corner; and when he saw her, with that solemn eagerness in her face, he knew--but he said to himself he had already known--that, though she had forsaken him, she had never done him wrong.

Of course before the day was over it was reported in various circles, more or less select, that pretty Mrs. Kingston, who had married an old fogey for his money, was in the habit of coming to the organ recitals alone and unbeknown to her husband, in order to enjoy clandestine flirtations with younger and more fascinating men.

It was also darkly whispered that the favoured individual was a person who made it his constant practice to run away with married women, and to murder their lawful spouses in sham duels afterwards if they ventured to make any objections.

But of all the human beings collected in the Town Hall that afternoon, perhaps no two were less capable of violating the spirit of the moral and social law whereof the letter is so sacred to the ubiquitous and lynx-eyed Mrs. Grundy, who persists in suspecting everyone of a desire to evade or infringe it, simply for the sake of doing so, whenever he or she is presented with an opportunity.

That they loved one another as much as it was possible for sympathetic hearts to love, and that they seized one brief half-hour out of a lifetime of separation in which to say farewell, might have been reprehensible from the conventional point of view; but then the conventional point of view does not embrace the universe, by a very long way.

He came down the hall, and round to her chair, and she drew her dress close that he might sit down beside her. She was too innately pure to make any mere outward and artificial demonstrations of modesty in such a moment as this; and she trusted him too well to be afraid of him.

She put out her hand, and he took it in a long, close clasp; and they looked at one another the while with loving, despairing eyes, which said, "Oh, Rachel, why _did_ you?" and "Oh, Roden, forgive me!" and bridged the only gulf that could be bridged between them, without any help of words.

And then, though the organ began to fill the air with the sonorous crash and thunder of Bach's great pedal fugue in D, they heard nothing but the beating of their hearts, and the memories that called to them from their brief past, vibrating through the void and silence of a world in which they were alone together.

When the music ceased for an interval, Mr. Dalrymple rested his arm on the back of the chair which had served Rachel for a footstool, and looking into her face, said under his breath,

"Gordon gave me your message--I came down to thank you--and I thought we should get on better if we could see each other just once. Dear, we must try and comfort ourselves with knowing that neither of us played the other false."

"_I_ did--_I_ did," she whispered hurriedly. "I ought to have trusted you, Roden."

"Yes--that was a mistake. But you did not know any better, poor child.

And they were too many for you, those people. Gordon ought to have insisted on seeing you, himself, or getting some message to you, and not have left you in their hands. But he did his best, he says. He was too anxious to get back to me to have much patience over it, and he didn't bargain for being told lies of that magnitude in cold blood.

However,--however----"

He broke off and looked at her with a pa.s.sion of love and grief in his eyes that he dared not trust to speech. And she looked back at him, with her simple soul laid bare--longing to make him know, if they were never to be together like this again, how absolutely in her heart she had been true to him. _She_ would not tell him a lie, at any rate.

"Oh," he said in a sort of groaning whisper, drawing a long hard breath, "oh, my little one, isn't it hard lines!"

"Don't," she gasped, feeling that clutch on her throat tighten with a sudden spasm; "oh, Roden, don't!"

And he straightened himself quickly, and sat back in his chair. And the organ began to play again--a stately march of Schubert's, which acted like a tonic on her disordered nerves, and as a sedative to the hysterical excitement that for a moment had threatened to overmaster her.

The echoes of that march rang in her ears, when Roden was gone back to Queensland and this chapter of her life was finished, for many a long day.

And then at last the thunders of the National Anthem brought the performance to a close, and the audience trooped out, casting curious glances as they went at the distinguished-looking couple standing conspicuously apart--the tall stranger with the peculiar moustache, who had soldier and gentleman written on him from head to foot, and the graceful young lady with the lovely complexion and the irreproachable French dress, whom n.o.body "who was anybody" failed to recognise.

The two were left together amongst all the empty chairs, in a silence that was hardly broken by the organist's movements at the far end of the hall, closing the stops and keys of his enormous instrument.

"Well," said Mr. Dalrymple, looking down upon his companion, who lifted to his sombre eyes a pale but solemn face, "well--so this is all, I suppose!"

Her lips twitched a little; she could not answer him.

"You are not sorry that I came, are you, Rachel? It will not make it harder for you, will it?"

"Oh, _no_, Roden! But it is _you_ on whom it is so hard--you will be so lonely without me! I can't bear to think what I have brought on you--and you had so many troubles already!"

"Not you, dear--not you. And I can bear all my part of it, if only things go well with you."

"Why did you break that trace?" she exclaimed, with a touch of bitter pa.s.sion. "But for that--but for two minutes lost--you would never have seen me, and then I should never have spoiled your life like this."

"But, dear, we are not going to regret _that_, I hope. We have got something 'saved from chance and change,' if not much, that to me at any rate--yes and to you too, I know--is worth even this heavy price that we are paying for it now. It need not spoil our lives, Rachel, to know--what we know. It is an agonising thing to see how blessed it _might_ have been for us, and to be obliged to give it all up; but I shall never think of those two hours, when we belonged entirely to each other--only two hours, Rachel, out of our whole lives!--without being thankful for the chance which gave them to us. Yes, and I think we shall be the better for them--I don't say happier, because I really don't know what that word means--but I think life will somehow have a finer quality henceforth, whatever happens, on account of those two hours. Dear, I am forcing myself to give in to the hard fate that has done us out of our inheritance; but there is one thing that I don't think I _could_ get reconciled to--and that is to thinking that you would ever live to wish that we had never known each other."

"I could not wish it," she whispered; "I could only try to persuade myself that I did."

"Do not try. You are under no obligation of duty to do that. Try to be happy with your husband--try not to fret over what is irrevocable, and not to hanker after what is hopeless. But don't try to turn me out of the only place in your life where I have a corner of my own. Let me keep the little of you that I have got--it is little enough! Do you remember what you said to me that night?--you said you had no rights in my past.

_He_ has no rights in our past. Keep it sacred, Rachel, for my sake.

That will not hurt anybody. You are not afraid that such remembrances, if you shut them away in your heart, will militate against your efforts to do what is right by him? And you are not afraid that _I_ will ever tempt or trouble you?"

"Oh, Roden, I am not afraid of you--you well know that!"

"Treat me as if I were dead," he said gently. "If I had been killed that time when I was thrown--if I were in my grave now--I know how you would think of me. You would not wish you had never seen me then. That is how I _want_ you to think of me, Rachel."

"I know," she said, drawing a deep breath. "But to me--even if you _had_ killed yourself--to me you could never be dead."

By this time they had sauntered slowly out of the deserted hall and through the empty vestibules, and were standing in the doorway, looking out upon the street below them.

The storm that had threatened in the morning was gathering up. Heavy clouds weighed upon the sultry air, and gusts of wind were beginning to blow the dust about ominously. Pedestrians were hurrying to gain shelter before the rain came on, but, as they pa.s.sed, they took note of the lingering pair, who were apparently heedless of the warnings of the elements, with more or less curious eyes. Neither of them, it is needless to say, minded in the least who saw them. They had no desire to take even this last good-bye clandestinely.

And when Rachel, to whom it had not occurred to wonder why her carriage was not in attendance, saw it thundering along the street towards her, it was with as much relief as surprise that she recognised her husband in it, looking out of the window for her.