Born in Exile Part 71

The word implied something that Marcella could not utter more plainly.

Her face completed the question.

'And the clerical career as well,' he answered.

But he knew that she sought more than this, and his voice again broke the silence.

'Perhaps you have heard that already? Are you in communication with Miss Moorhouse?'

She shook her head.

'But probably Warricombe has told your brother----?'

'What?'

'Oh, of his success in ridding Exeter of my objectionable presence.'

'Christian hasn't seen him again, nor have I.'

'I only wish to a.s.sure you that I have suffered no injury. My experiment was doomed to failure. What led me to it, how I regarded it, we won't discuss; I am as little prepared to do so now as when we talked at Exeter. That chapter in my life is happily over. As soon as I am established again in a place like that I had at Rotherhithe, I shall be quite contented.'

'Contented?' She smiled incredulously. 'For how long?'

'Who can say? I have lost the habit of looking far forward.'

Marcella kept silence so long that he concluded she had nothing more to say to him. It was an opportunity for taking leave without emotional stress, and he rose from his chair.

'Don't go yet,' she said at once. 'It wasn't only this that I'----

Her voice was checked.

'Can I be of any use to you in Bristol?' Peak asked, determined to avoid the trial he saw approaching.

'There is something more I wanted to say,' she pursued, seeming not to hear him. 'You pretend to be contented, but I know that is impossible.

You talk of going back to a dull routine of toil, when what you most desire is freedom. I want--if I can--to help you.'

Again she failed to command her voice. G.o.dwin raised his eyes, and was astonished at the transformation she had suddenly undergone. Her face, instead of being colourless and darkly vehement, had changed to a bright warmth, a smiling radiance such as would have become a happy girl. His look seemed to give her courage.

'Only hear me patiently. We are such old friends--are we not? We have so often proclaimed our scorn of conventionality, and why should a conventional fear hinder what I want to say? You know--don't you?--that I have far more money than I need or am ever likely to. I want only a few hundreds a year, and I have more than a thousand.' She spoke more and more quickly, fearful of being interrupted. 'Why shouldn't I give you some of my superfluity? Let me help you in this way. Money can do so much. Take some from me, and use it as you will--just as you will.

It is useless to _me_. Why shouldn't someone whom I wish well benefit by it?'

G.o.dwin was not so much surprised as disconcerted. He knew that Marcella's nature was of large mould, and that whether she acted for good or evil its promptings would be anything but commonplace. The ardour with which she pleaded, and the magnitude of the benefaction she desired to bestow upon him, so affected his imagination that for the moment he stood as if doubting what reply to make. The doubt really in his mind was whether Marcella had calculated upon his weakness, and hoped to draw him within her power by the force of such an obligation, or if in truth she sought only to appease her heart with the exercise of generosity.

'You will let me?' she panted forth, watching him with brilliant eyes.

'This shall be a secret for ever between you and me. It imposes no debt of grat.i.tude--how I despise the thought! I give you what is worthless to me,--except that it can do _you_ good. But you can thank me if you will. I am not above being thanked.' She laughed unnaturally. 'Go and travel at first, as you wished to. Write me a short letter every month--every two months, just that I may know you are enjoying your life. It is agreed, isn't it?'

She held her hand to him, but Peak drew away, his face averted.

'How can you give me the pain of refusing such an offer?' he exclaimed, with remonstrance which was all but anger. 'You know the thing is utterly impossible. I should be ridiculous if I argued about it for a moment.'

'I can't see that it is impossible.'

'Then you must take my word for it. But I have no right to speak to you in that way,' he added, more kindly, seeing the profound humiliation which fell upon her. 'You meant to come to my aid at a time when I seemed to you lonely and miserable. It was a generous impulse, and I do indeed thank you. I shall always remember it and be grateful to you.'

Marcella's face was again in shadow. Its lineaments hardened to an expression of cold, stern dignity.

'I have made a mistake,' she said. 'I thought you above common ways of thinking.'

'Yes, you put me on too high a pedestal,' Peak answered, trying to speak humorously. 'One of my faults is that I am apt to mistake my own position in the same way.'

'You think yourself ambitious. Oh, if you knew really great ambition!

Go back to your laboratory, and work for wages. I would have saved you from that.'

The tone was not vehement, but the words bit all the deeper for their unimpa.s.sioned accent. G.o.dwin could make no reply.

'I hope,' she continued, 'we may meet a few years hence. By that time you will have learnt that what I offered was not impossible. You will wish you had dared to accept it. I know what your _ambition_ is. Wait till you are old enough to see it in its true light. How you will scorn yourself! Surely there was never a man who united such capacity for great things with so mean an ideal. You will never win even the paltry satisfaction on which you have set your mind--never! But you can't be made to understand that. You will throw away all the best part of your life. Meet me in a few years, and tell me the story of the interval.'

'I will engage to do that, Marcella.'

'You will? But not to tell me the truth. You will not dare to tell the truth.'

'Why not?' he asked, indifferently. 'Decidedly I shall owe it you in return for your frankness to-day. Till then--good-bye.'

She did not refuse her hand, and as he moved away she watched him with a smile of slighting good-nature.

On the morrow G.o.dwin was back in Bristol, and there he dwelt for another six months, a period of mental and physical la.s.situde. Earwaker corresponded with him, and urged him to attempt the work that had been proposed, but such effort was beyond his power.

He saw one day in a literary paper an announcement that Reusch's _Bibel und Natur_ was about to be published in an English translation. So someone else had successfully finished the work he undertook nearly two years ago. He amused himself with the thought that he could ever have persevered so long in such profitless labour, and with a contemptuous laugh he muttered '_Thohu wabohu_.'

Just when the winter had set in, he received an offer of a post in chemical works at St. Helen's, and without delay travelled northwards.

The appointment was a poor one, and seemed unlikely to be a step to anything better, but his resources would not last more than another half year, and employment of whatever kind came as welcome relief to the tedium of his existence. Established in his new abode, he at length wrote to Sidwell. She answered him at once in a short letter which he might have shown to anyone, so calm were its expressions of interest, so uncompromising its words of congratulation. It began 'Dear Mr.

Peak', and ended with 'Yours sincerely'. Well, he had used the same formalities, and had uttered his feelings with scarcely more of warmth.

Disappointment troubled him for a moment, and for a moment only. He was so far from Exeter, and further still from the life that he had led there. It seemed to him all but certain that Sidwell wrote coldly, with the intention of discouraging his hopes. What hope was he so foolish as to entertain? His position poorer than ever, what could justify him in writing love-letters to a girl who, even if willing to marry him, must not do so until he had a suitable home to offer her?

Since his maturity, he had never known so long a freedom from pa.s.sion.

One day he wrote to Earwaker: 'I begin to your independence with regard to women. It would be a strange thing if I became a convert to that way of thinking, but once or twice of late I have imagined that it was happening. My mind has all but recovered its tone, and I am able to read, to think--I mean really to _think_, not to muse. I get through big and solid books. Presently, if your offer still hold good, I shall send you a sc.r.a.p of writing on something or other. The pestilent atmosphere of this place seems to invigorate me. Last Sat.u.r.day evening I took train, got away into the hills, and spent the Sunday geologising. And a curious experience befell me,--one I had long, long ago, in the Whitelaw days. Sitting down before some interesting strata, I lost myself in something like nirvana, grew so subject to the idea of vastness in geological time that all human desires and purposes shrivelled to ridiculous unimportance. Awaking for a minute, I tried to realise the pa.s.sion which not long ago rent and racked me, but I was flatly incapable of understanding it. Will this philosophic state endure? Perhaps I have used up all my emotional energy? I hardly know whether to hope or fear it.'

About midsummer, when his short holiday (he would only be released for a fortnight) drew near, he was surprised by another letter from Sidwell.

'I am anxious [she wrote] to hear that you are well. It is more than half a year since your last letter, and of late I have been constantly expecting a few lines. The spring has been a time of trouble with us. A distant relative, an old and feeble lady who has pa.s.sed her life in a little Dorsets.h.i.+re village, came to see us in April, and in less than a fortnight she was seized with illness and died. Then f.a.n.n.y had an attack of bronchitis, from which even now she is not altogether recovered. On her account we are all going to Royat, and I think we shall be away until the end of September. Will you let me hear from you before I leave England, which will be in a week's time? Don't refrain from writing because you think you have no news to send. Anything that interests you is of interest to me. If it is only to tell me what you have been reading, I shall be glad of a letter.'

It was still 'Yours sincerely'; but G.o.dwin felt that the letter meant more. In re-reading it he was pleasantly thrilled with a stirring of the old emotions. But his first impulse, to write an ardent reply, did not carry him away; he reflected and took counsel of the experience gained in his studious solitude. It was evident that by keeping silence he had caused Sidwell to throw off something of her reserve. The course dictated by prudence was to maintain an att.i.tude of dignity, to hold himself in check. In this way he would regain what he had so disastrously lost, Sidwell's respect. There was a distinct pleasure in this exercise of self-command; it was something new to him; it flattered his pride. 'Let her learn that, after all, I am her superior.

Let her fear to lose me. Then, if her love is still to be depended upon, she will before long find a way to our union. It is in her power, if only she wills it.'

So he sat down and wrote a short letter which seemed to him a model of dignified expression.

CHAPTER IV