Faith And Unfaith Part 54

"What was it he said, that I had no heart? Ah! what would I not give to be able to prove his words true?"

She bursts into tears, and sobs long and bitterly.

"Tears are idle," says Sartoris, sadly. "Have you yet to learn that?

Take comfort from the thought that all things have an end."

CHAPTER x.x.x.

"Oh that the things which have been were not now In memory's resurrection! But the past Bears in her arms the present and the future."--BAILEY.

Of course it is quite impossible to hide from Clarissa Peyton that everything is going wrong at Sartoris. Georgie's pale unsmiling face (so different from that of old), and Dorian's evident determination to absent himself from all society, tell their own tale.

She has, of course, heard of the uncomfortable gossip that has connected Ruth Annersley's mysterious disappearance with Dorian, but--stanch friend as she is--has laughed to scorn all such insinuations: that Georgie can believe them, puzzles her more than she cares to confess. For a long time she has fought against the thought that Dorian's wife can think aught bad of Dorian; but time undeceives her.

To-day, Georgie, who is now always feverishly restless, tells herself she will go up to Gowran and see Clarissa. To her alone she clings,--not outwardly, in any marked fas.h.i.+on, but in her inmost soul,--as to one who at her worst extremity will support and comfort her.

The day is warm and full of color. Round her "flow the winds from woods and fields with gladness laden:" the air is full of life. The browning gra.s.s rustles beneath her feet. The leaves fall slowly one by one, as though loath to leave their early home; the wind, cruel, like all love, wooes them only to their doom.

"The waves, along the forest borne," beat on her face and head, and half cool the despairing thoughts that now always lie hidden deep down within her breast.

Coming to Gowran and seeing Clarissa in the drawing room window, she beckons to her, and Clarissa, rising hastily, opens the hall door for her, herself, and leads her by the hand into another cosier room, where they may talk without interruption.

It so happens that Georgie is in one of her worst moods; and something Clarissa says very innocently brings on a burst of pa.s.sion that compels Clarissa to understand (in spite of all her efforts to think herself in the wrong) that the dissensions at Sartoris have a great deal to do with Ruth Annersley.

"It is impossible," she says, over and over again, walking up and down the room in an agitated manner. "I could almost as soon believe Horace guilty of this thing!"

Georgie makes no reply. Inwardly she has conceived a great distaste to the handsome Horace, and considers him a very inferior person, and quite unfit to mate with her pretty Clarissa.

"In your heart," says Miss Peyton, stopping before her, "I don't believe you think Dorian guilty of this thing."

"Yes I do," says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., with dogged calmness. "I don't ask you to agree with me. I only tell you what I myself honestly believe."

She has given up fighting against her fate by this time.

"There is some terrible mistake somewhere," says Clarissa, in a very distressed voice, feeling it wiser not to argue the point further.

"Time will surely clear it up sooner or later, but it is very severe on Dorian while it lasts. I have known the dear fellow all my life, and cannot now begin to think evil of him. I have always felt more like a sister to him than anything else, and I cannot believe him guilty of this thing."

"_I_ am his wife, and I _can_," says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., icily.

"If you loved him as you ought, you could not." This is the one rebuke she cannot refrain from.

Georgie laughs unpleasantly, and then, all in a little moment, she varies the performance by bursting into a pa.s.sionate and most unlooked-for flood of tears.

"Don't talk to me of love!" she cries, miserably. "It is useless. I don't believe in it. It is a delusion, a mere mockery, a worn-out superst.i.tion. You will tell me that Dorian loved me; and yet in the very early days before our marriage, when his so-called love must have been at its height, he insulted me beyond all forgiveness."

"You are making yourself wretched about nothing," says Clarissa, kneeling beside her, and gently drawing her head down on her shoulder.

"Don't, darling,--don't cry like that. I know, I feel, all will come right in the end. Indeed, unless Dorian were to come to me and say, 'I have done this hateful thing,' I should not believe it."

"I would give all the world to be able to say that from my heart,"

says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., with excessive sadness.

"Try to think it. Afterwards belief will be easy. Oh, Georgie, do not nourish hard thoughts; tear them from your heart, and by and by, when all this is explained away, think how glad you will be that, without proof, you had faith in him. Do you know, unless my own eyes saw it, I should never for any reason lose faith in Horace."

A tender, heavenly smile creeps round her beautiful lips as she says this. Georgie, seeing it, feels heart-broken. Oh that she could have faith like this!

"It is too late," she says, bitterly: "and I deserve all I have got. I myself have been the cause of my own undoing. I married Dorian for no other reason than to escape the drudgery of teaching. Yet now"--with a sad smile--"I know there are worse things than Murray's Grammar. I am justly punished." Her lovely face is white with grief. I have tried, _tried_, TRIED to disbelieve, but nothing will raise this cloud of suspicion from my breast. It weighs me down and crushes me more cruelly day by day. "I wish--I wish"--cries poor little Georgie, from her very soul--"that I had never been born, because I shall never know a happy moment again."

The tears run silently down her cheeks one by one. She puts up her small hands to defend herself, and the action is pitiable in the extreme.

"How happy you were only a month ago!" says Clarissa, striken with grief at the sight of her misery.

"Yes, I have had my day, I suppose," says Mrs. Brans...o...b.., wearily.

"One can always remember a time when

'Every morning was fair, And every season a May!'

But how soon it all fades!"

"Too soon for you," says Clarissa, with tears in her eyes. "You speak as though you had no interest left in life."

"Yes, I have," says Georgie, with a faint smile. "I have the school-children yet. You know I go to them every Sunday to oblige the dear vicar. He would have been so sorry if I had deserted them, because they grew fond of me, and he said, for that reason, I was the best teacher in the parish, because I didn't bore them." Here she laughs quite merrily, as though grief is unknown to her; but a minute later, memory returning, the joy fades from her face, leaving it sadder than before. "I might be Irish," she says, "emotion is so changeable with me. Come down with me now to the village, will you? It is my day at the school."

"Well, come up-stairs with me while I put on my things," says Clarissa; and then, though really sad at heart, she cannot refrain from smiling. "You are just the last person in the world," she says, "one would accuse of teaching Scripture, or the Catechism, or that."

"What a very rude remark!" said Georgie, smiling naturally for the first time to-day. "Am I such a _very_ immoral young woman?"

"No. Only I could not teach Genesis, or the Ten Commandments, or Watts, to save my life," says Clarissa. "Come, or we shall be late, and Pullingham Junior without Watts would, I feel positive, sink into an abyss of vice. They might bark and bite, and do other dangerous things."

Mrs. Brans...o...b.. (with Clarissa) reaching the school-house just in time to take her cla.s.s, the latter sits down in a disconsolate fas.h.i.+on upon a stray bench, and surveys the scene before her with wondering eyes.

There sits Georgie, a very fragile teacher for so rough a cla.s.s; here sits the vicar with the adults before him, deep in the mysteries of the Thirty-nine Articles.

The head teacher is nearly in tears over the Creed, because of the stupidity of her pupils; the a.s.sistant is raging over the Ten Commandments. All is gloom! Clarissa is rather delighted than otherwise, and, having surveyed everybody, comes back to Georgie, she being the most refres.h.i.+ng object on view.

At the top of the cla.s.s, facing the big window, sits John Spriggs (_aetat._ ten) on his hands. He has utterly declined to bestow his body in any other fas.h.i.+on, being evidently imbued with the belief that his hands were made for the support of the body,--a very correct idea, all things considered.

He is lolling from side to side in a reckless way, and his eyes are rolling in concert with him, and altogether his behavior is highly suggestive of fits.

Lower down, Amelia Jennings is making a surrept.i.tious cat's cradle, which is promptly put out of sight, behind her back, every time her turn comes to give an answer; but, as she summarily dismisses all questions by declaring her simple ignorance of every matter connected with Biblical history, the cradle progresses most favorably, and is very soon fit to sleep in.

Mrs. Brans...o...b.., having gone through the seventh chapter of St. Luke without any marked success, falls back upon the everlasting Catechism, and swoops down upon Amelia Jennings with a mild request that she will tell her her duty to her neighbor.

Amelia, feeling she has no neighbors at this trying moment, and still less catechism, fixes her big round blue eyes on Mrs. Brans...o...b.., and, letting the beloved cradle fall to the ground behind her back, prepares to blubber at a second's notice.