Uncle Max Part 65

I remembered Uncle Max's injunctions to secrecy, and felt I must be careful.

'I thought that it could not be Captain Hamilton,' I returned, rather lamely: 'you have never mentioned his name to me.' But she interrupted me in a tone of poignant distress, and there was a sudden trouble in her eyes, brought there by my mention of Claude.

'Oh, this is dreadful!' she exclaimed: 'you come to me and talk about Claude, knowing all the time that I have never breathed his name to you.

Who has spoken it, then? How could such a thought arise in your mind? It must be Etta, and we are undone,--undone!'

'My darling, you must not excite yourself about a mere mistake,' I returned, anxious to soothe her. 'I cannot tell you how it came into my head; that is my little secret, Gladys, my dear: if you agitate yourself at a word we shall never understand each other. I want you to trust me as you would trust a dear sister,--we are sisters in heart, Gladys,'--but here I blushed over my words and wished them unuttered,--'and to tell me exactly what has pa.s.sed between you and Max.'

CHAPTER XL

THE TALK IN THE GLOAMING

I heard Gladys repeat my words softly under her breath,--she seemed to say them in a sort of dream,--'what has pa.s.sed between you and Max.' And then she looked at me a little pitifully, and her lip quivered. 'Oh, if I dared to speak! but to you of all persons,--what would you think of me?

Could it be right?--and I have never opened my lips to any one on that subject of my own accord; if Lady Betty knows, it is because Etta told her. Oh, it was wrong--cruel of Giles to let her worm the truth out of him!'

'If Lady Betty and Miss Darrell know, you might surely trust me,--your friend,' I returned. 'Gladys, you know how I honour reticence in such matters; I am the last person to force an unwilling confidence; but there are reasons--no, I cannot explain myself; you must trust me implicitly or not at all. I do not think you will ever repent that trust; and for your own sake as well as mine I implore you to confide in me.' For a moment she looked at me with wide, troubled eyes, then she ceased to hesitate.

'What is it you want to know?' she asked, in a low voice.

'Everything, all that has pa.s.sed between you and my poor Max, who always seems so terribly unhappy. Is it not you who have to answer for that unhappiness?'

A pained expression crossed her face.

'It is true that I made him unhappy once, but that is long ago; and men are not like us: they get over things. Oh, I must explain it to you, or you will not understand. Do not be hard upon me: I have been sorely punished,' she sighed; and for a few moments there was silence between us. I had no wish to hurry her. I knew her well: she was long in giving her confidence, but when once she gave it, it would be lavishly, generously, and without stint, just as she would give her love, for Gladys was one of those rare creatures who could do nothing meanly or by halves.

Presently she began to speak of her own accord:

'You know how good Mr. Cunliffe was to me in my trouble; at least you can guess, though you can never really know it. When I was most forlorn and miserable I used to feel less wretched and hopeless when he was beside me; in every possible way he strengthened and braced me for my daily life; he roused me from my state of selfish despondency, put work into my hands, and encouraged me to persevere. If it had not been for his help and sympathy, I never could have lived through those bitter days when all around me believed that my darling Eric had died a coward's death.'

'Do not speak of Eric to-night, dearest,' I observed, alarmed at her excessive paleness as she uttered his name.

'No,' with a faint smile at my anxious tone; 'we are talking about some one else this evening. Ursula, you may imagine how grateful I was,--how I grew to look upon him as my best friend, how I learned to confide in him as though he were a wise elder brother.'

'A brother!--oh, Gladys!'

'It was the truth,' she went on mournfully: 'no other thought entered my mind, and you may conceive the shock when one morning he came to me, pale and agitated, and asked me if I could love him well enough to marry him.

'How I recall that morning! It was May, and I had just come in from the garden, laden with pink and white May blossoms, and long trails of laburnum, and there he was waiting for me in the drawing-room. Every one was out, and he was alone.

'I fancied he looked different,--rather nervous and excited,--but I never guessed the reason until he began to speak, and then I thought I should have broken my heart to hear him,--that I must give him pain who had been so good to me. Oh, Ursula! I had never had such cruel work to do as that.

'But I must be true to him as well as myself: this was my one thought. I did not love him well enough to be his wife; he had not touched my heart in that way; and, as I believed at that time that I could never care sufficiently for any man to wish to marry him, I felt that I dared not let him deceive himself with any future hopes.'

'You were quite right, my darling. Do not look so miserable. Max would only honour you the more for your truthfulness.'

'Yes, but he knew me better than I knew myself,' she whispered. 'When he begged to speak to me again I wanted to refuse, but he would not let me.

He asked me--and there were tears in his eyes--not to be so hard on him, to let him judge for us both in this one thing. He pressed me so, and he looked so unhappy, that I gave way at last, and said that in a year's time he might speak again. I remember telling him, as he thanked me very gratefully, that I should not consider him bound in any way; that I had so little hope to give him that I had no right to hold him to anything; if he did not come to me when a year had expired, I should know that he had changed. There was a gleam in his eyes as I said this that made me feel for the first time the strength and purpose of a man's will. I grew timid and embarra.s.sed all at once, and a strange feeling came over me.

Was I, after all, so certain that I should never love him? I could only breathe freely when he left me.'

'Yes, dear, I understand,' I returned soothingly, for she had covered her face with her hands, as though overpowered with some recollection.

'Ursula,' she whispered, 'he was right. I had never thought of such things. I did not know my own feelings. Before three months were over, I knew I could give him the answer he wanted. I regretted the year's delay; but for shame, I would have made him understand how it was with me.'

'Could you not have given a sign that your feelings were altered, Gladys?

it would have been generous and kind of you to have ended his suspense.'

'I tried, but it was not easy; but he must have noticed the change in me.

If I were shy and embarra.s.sed with him it was because I cared for him so much. It used to make me happy only to see him; if he did not speak to me, I was quite content to know he was in the room. I used to treasure up his looks and words and h.o.a.rd them in my memory; it did not seem to me that any other man could compare with him. You have often laughed at my hero-wors.h.i.+p, but I made a hero of him.'

I was so glad to hear her say this of my dear Max that tears of joy came to my eyes, but I would not interrupt her by a word: she should tell her story in her own way.

'Etta had spoken to me long before this. One day when we were sitting over our work together, and I was thinking happily about Max--Mr.

Cunliffe, I mean.'

'Oh, call him Max to me,' I burst out, but she drew herself up with gentle dignity.

'It was a mistake: you should not have noticed it. I could never call him that now.' Poor dear! she had no idea how often she had called him Max in her feverish wanderings. 'Well, we were sitting together,--for Etta was nice to me just then, and I did not avoid her company as I do now,--when she startled me by bursting into tears and reproaching me for not having told her about Mr. Cunliffe's offer, and leaving her to hear it from Giles; and then she said how disappointed they all were at my refusal, and was I really sure that I could not marry him?

'I was not so much on my guard then as I am now, and, though I blamed Etta for much of the home unhappiness, I did not know all that I have learned since. You have no idea, either, how fascinating and persuasive she can be: her influence over Giles proves that. Well, little by little she drew from me that I was not so indifferent to Mr. Cunliffe as she supposed, and that in a few months' time he would speak to me again.

'She seemed very kind about it, and said over and over again how glad she was to hear this; and when I begged her not to hint at my changed feelings to Giles, she agreed at once, and I will do her the justice to own that she has kept her word in this. Giles has not an idea of the truth.'

'Nevertheless, I wish you had kept your own counsel, Gladys.'

'You could not wish it more than I do; but indeed I said very little. I think my manner told her more than my words, for I cannot remember really saying anything tangible. I knew she plied me with questions, and when I did not answer them she laughed and said that she knew.

'I have paid dearly for my want of caution, for I have been in bondage ever since. My tacit admission that I cared for Mr. Cunliffe has given Etta a cruel hold over me; my thoughts do not seem my own. She knows how to wound me: one word from her makes me shrink into myself. Sometimes I think she takes a pleasure in my secret misery,--that she was only acting a part when she pretended to sympathise with me. Oh, what a weak fool I have been, Ursula, to put myself in the power of such a woman!'

'Poor Gladys!' I said, kissing her; and she dashed away her indignant tear, and hurried on.

'Oh, let me finish all the miserable story. There is not much to say, but that little is humiliating. It was soon after this that I noticed a change in Mr. Cunliffe's manner. Scarcely perceptible at first, it became daily more marked. He came less often, and when he came he scarcely spoke to me. It was then that Etta began to torment me, and, under the garb of kindness, to say things that I could not bear. She asked me if Mr.

Cunliffe were not a little distant in his manners to me. She did not wish to distress me, but there certainly was a change in him. No, I must not trouble myself, but people were talking. When a vicar was young and unmarried, and as fascinating as Mr. Cunliffe, people would talk.

'What did they say? Ah, that was no matter, surely. Well, if I would press her, two or three busybodies had hinted that a certain young lady, who should be nameless, was rather too eager in her pursuit of the vicar.

'"Such nonsense, Gladys, my dear," she went on, as I remained dumb and sick at heart at such an imputation. "Of course I told them it was only your enthusiasm for good works. 'She meets him in her district and at the mothers' meeting; and what can be the harm of that?' I said to them. 'And of course she cannot refuse to sing at the penny readings and people's entertainments when she knows that she gives such pleasure to the poor people, and it is rather hard that she should be accused of wanting to display her fine voice.' Oh, you may be sure that I took your part. Of course it is a pity folks should believe such things, but I hope I made them properly ashamed of themselves."

'You may imagine how uneasy these innuendoes made me. You know my sensitiveness, and how p.r.o.ne I am to exaggerate things. It seemed to me that more lay behind the margin of her words; and I was not wrong.

'In a little while there were other things hinted to me, but very gently.

Ah, she was kind enough to me in those days. Did I not think that I was a little too imprudent and unreserved in my manner to Mr. Cunliffe? She hated to make me uncomfortable, and of course I was so innocent that I meant no harm; but men were peculiar, especially a man like Mr. Cunliffe: she was afraid he might notice my want of self-control.

'"You do not see yourself, Gladys," she said, once; "a child would find out that you are over head and ears in love with him. Perhaps it would not matter so much under other circ.u.mstances, but I confess I am a little uneasy. His manner was very cold and strange last night: he seemed afraid to trust himself alone with you. Do be careful, my dear. Suppose, after all, his feelings are changed, and that he fears to tell you so?"