If Sinners Entice Thee Part 9

"An announcement! What?"

"I must leave you."

She stood before him, looked quickly into his face, and turned pale.

"Leave me!" she gasped.

"Yes. I find, alas, I am compelled to go."

"And only the day before yesterday you asked me to become your wife!"

she cried, reproachfully. "What have I done that you should treat me thus?"

"Nothing. You have done nothing, Liane, only to fascinate me and hold me irrevocably to you," he answered, looking earnestly into her clear, beautiful eyes. He paused. His soul was too full for utterance. Then at length he said, "I have asked you here this evening to tell you everything, for when I leave here, I fear it will be never to return."

"Why?" she asked, looking him full in the face, with a puzzled expression.

"Because I am not wealthy, as is generally believed," he replied, colouring deeply as he met her searching gaze. "It is useless to deceive you, therefore I must tell you the hideous truth. My father has thought fit to leave his whole fortune to my brother, and allow me to go penniless. I am therefore unable to marry."

Liane's lips had grown white with fear and astonishment. "And that is the reason you now intend to forsake me!" she gasped.

He bowed his head.

She pa.s.sed her hand over her eyes. Her soul was in a tumult. She, too, fondly wished to believe that he actually loved her, to trust the evidence of what she saw. His words were a trifle ambiguous, and that was sufficient to fill her with uncertainty. Jealous of that delicacy which is the parent of love, and its best preserver, she checked the overflowings of her heart, and while her face streamed with tears, placed her hand protestingly upon his arm.

"Forgive me!" he cried with increased earnestness. "I know I have wronged you. Forgive me, in justice to your own virtues, Liane. In what has pa.s.sed between us I feel I ought to have only expressed thanks for your goodness to me; but if my words or manner have obeyed the more fervid impulse of my soul, and declared aloud what should have been kept secret, blame my nature, not my presumption. I am ruined, and I dare not look steadily on any aim higher than your esteem."

"Ah! do not speak to me so coldly," the girl burst forth pa.s.sionately.

"I cannot bear it. You said you loved me," and she sobbed bitterly.

"I have loved you, dear one, ever since we first met," he answered quickly. "I love you now, even better than my life. But alas! a mysterious fate seems to govern both of us, and we are compelled to part."

"To part!" she wailed. "Why?"

"Ere long my brother will come to take possession of this place, for it is no longer my home," he answered, in a low, pained tone. "I shall go away to London and try to eke out a living at the Bar. For a young man without means the legal profession is but a poor one at best," he sighed; "therefore marriage being out of the question, I am compelled to tell you the plain honest truth, and release you."

"Release me!" she echoed wildly. "I do not desire release. I love you, George."

"But you do not love me sufficiently to wait through the long, dark days that are at hand?" he cried, surprised at her pa.s.sionate declaration!

"Remember, I am penniless, without hope, without prospects, without anything save my great affection for you!"

The slanting rays of the sunset streaming through the stained gla.s.s fell upon her, gilded her hair, and illumined her anxious face with a halo of light. She looked lovely, with her dark eyelashes trembling, her soft eyes full of love, and the colour of clear sunrise mounting on her cheeks and brow.

"Wealthy or poor," she answered, in a low, sweet tone, "it matters not, because I love you, George."

"And although we must part; although I must go to London and exchange this free, open, happy life with you daily beside me for the dusty dinginess of chambers wherein the sun never penetrates, yet you will still remain mine?" he cried half doubtingly. "Do you really mean it, Liane?"

"I do," she answered, in a voice trembling with emotion, and with a look all tenderness and benignity. "It is no fault of yours that you are poor, therefore be of stout heart, and when you return to London remember that one woman alone thinks ever of you, because--because she loves you."

With the large tears in her beautiful eyes--tears which seemed to him to rise partly from her desire to love him with the power of his love--she put her pure, bright lips, half-smiling, half-p.r.o.ne to reply to tears, against his brow, lined with doubt and eager longing.

"Dearest darling, love of my life," he whispered through her clouds of soft, silky hair. "I know I, an Englishman, with my blunt manners, must grate upon you sometimes, with your delicate, high-strung feelings. We are as different as the day is from the night. But, Liane, if truth and honesty, and a will so to use my life as to become one of the real workers and helpers in the world--a wish to be manly and upright, strong of heart, and clean of conscience before G.o.d and man--if these can atone for lack of culture and refinement, then I hope you will not find me wanting. When I am absent there will be plenty besides me to love you, but I will not believe that any can love you better than I do, or few as truly."

She hesitated for a single instant as he spoke. She lifted her face from her hands and looked up at him. He was not much taller than she; it was not far. But as she looked another face came between them--a pale, refined face: a face with more poetry, more romance, more pa.s.sion.

Its sight was to her as a spectre of the past. It held her dumb in terror and dismay.

George saw her hesitation, and the strange horrified look in her eyes.

Puzzled, he uttered not a word, but watched her breathlessly.

Liane opened her pale lips, but they closed and tightened upon each other; from beneath her narrowed brows her eyes sent short flashes out upon his, and her breath came and went long and deep, without sound.

"Why are you silent?" he whispered at last.

Her lips relaxed, her form drooped, she lifted her face to reply, but her mouth twitched; she could not speak.

"If you truly love me and are prepared to wait, I will do my best," he declared pa.s.sionately, surprised at her change of manner, but little dreaming of its cause.

Suddenly, however, as quickly as the heavy, preoccupied expression had settled upon her countenance it was succeeded by a smile. She was a strange, unique, incomparable girl, for the next second she laughed at him in sweetest manner with a come and go of glances, saying in a tone of low, deep tenderness,--

"Yes, George, you are the only man I love. If it is necessary that you should go to follow your profession, then go, and take with you the blessing of the woman who has promised to become your wife."

An instant later George held her slight graceful form in fond embrace, while she hid her forehead and wet eyelashes on his shoulder, murmuring,--

"I shall be yours always."

His burning kisses fell upon her hair, but neither of them spoke for a while. The sunlight faded, and the old brown room with its shelves of dusty tomes became dark and gloomy. Each felt the other's heart beat; and the unlucky son of the Stratfields drank that ecstasy of silent, delicious bliss which comes to great hearts only once in a life.

Later that night, after he had walked with her to her father's door, she went to her room and sat alone for a long time in silence. A noise aroused her. It was her father retiring to rest. She listened intently, until, hearing his door closed, she paced her room with fevered steps. Her face was ashen pale, and from time to time low, strange words escaped her, as, lifting her hands, she pushed back her hair, which seemed to press too heavily upon her hot brow.

"I love him!" she gasped in a low, strained whisper. "Yet, if he only knew--if he only knew!"

And she shuddered.

Thrice she moved slowly backwards and forwards across her room.

Suddenly pulling aside the dimity curtains, she gazed out into the brilliant night. The moon was s.h.i.+ning full upon her windows, revealing the trees and stretch of undulating meadows beyond.

For an instant she hesitated. Her clenched hands trembled; she held her breath, listening. Rea.s.sured, she crossed noiselessly to her little dressing-table, opened one of the drawers, and took therefrom a small jewel-case. Only a few cheap trinkets were revealed when she unlocked it, but from it she drew forth a small oblong box of white cardboard.

Then cautiously she crept from her room downstairs, and out into the small orchard behind the house. Crossing it, still in the deep shadow of the apple trees, she searched for some moments until she found a spade, and making her way to a bed that had been newly dug, she deftly removed several shovelfuls of earth, panting the while.

Taking the small box hastily from her pocket, she glanced round to a.s.sure herself she was un.o.bserved, then bent, and placing it carefully in the hole she had made, an instant later proceeded to fill it in and rearrange the surface, so that no trace should remain of it having been removed.

Then replacing the spade where she had found it, she crept noiselessly back to her room, locked the door and stood rigid, her hand pressed upon her wildly-beating heart.

CHAPTER SIX.

OUTSIDERS.

Many weeks went by. To Liane the days were long, weary and monotonous, for George had left, and the Court had pa.s.sed into the possession of Major Stratfield, a proud, pompous, red-faced man, who often rode through the village, but spoke to n.o.body. Since her lover had gone she had remained dull and apathetic, taking scarcely any interest in anything, and never riding her cycle because of the tragic memories its sight always aroused within her. Her life was, indeed, grey and colourless, for she noticed that of late even her father's manner had changed strangely towards her, and instead of being uniformly courteous and solicitous regarding her welfare, he now seemed to treat her with studied indifference, and she even thought she detected within him a kind of repulsion, as if her presence annoyed and distressed him.