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THE MOONLIGHT.
It was a still, frosty night, with a full moon. When she reached
her chamber, Letty walked mechanically to the window, and there
stood, with the candle in her hand, looking carelessly out, nor
taking any pleasure in the great night. The window looked on an
open, grassy yard, where were a few large ricks of wheat, shining
yellow in the cold, far-off moon. Between the moon and the earth
hung a faint mist, which the thin clouds of her breath seemed to
mingle with and augment. There lay her life--out of doors--dank
and dull; all the summer faded from it--all its atmosphere a
growing fog! She would never see Tom again! It was six weeks
since she saw him last! He must have ceased to think of her by
this time! And, if he did think of her again, she would be far
off, nobody knew where.
Something struck the window with a slight, sharp clang. It was
winter, and there were no moths or other insects flying, What
could it be? She put her face close to the pane, and looked out.
There was a man in the shadow of one of the ricks! He had his hat
off, and was beckoning to her. It could be nobody but Tom! The
thought sent to her heart a pang of mingled pleasure and pain.
Clearly he wanted to speak to her! How gladly she would! but then
would come again all the trouble of conscious deceit: how was she
to bear that all over again! Still, if she was going to be turned
out of the house so soon, what would it matter? If her aunt was
going to compel her to be her own mistress, where was the harm if
she began it a few days sooner? What did it matter anyhow what
she did? But she dared not speak to him! Mrs. Wardour's ears were
as sharp as her eyes. The very sound of her own voice in the
moonlight would terrify her. She opened the lattice softly, and
gently shaking her head--she dared not shake it vigorously--was
on the point of closing it again, when, making frantic signs of
entreaty, the man stepped into the moonlight, and it was plainly
Tom. It was too dreadful! He might be seen any moment! She shook
her head again, in a way she meant, and he understood, to mean
she dared not. He fell on his knees and laid his hands together
like one praying. Her heart interpreted the gesture as indicating
that he was in trouble, and that, therefore, he begged her to go
to him. With sudden resolve she nodded acquiescence, and left the
window.
Her room was in a little wing, projecting from the back of the
house, over the kitchen. The servants' rooms were in another
part, but Letty forgot a tiny window in one of them, which looked
also upon the ricks. There was a back stair to the kitchen, and
in the kitchen a door to the farm-yard. She stole down the stair,
and opened the door with absolute noiselessness. In a moment more
she had stolen on tiptoe round the corner, and was creeping like
a ghost among the ricks. Not even a rustle betrayed her as she
came up to Tom from behind. He still knelt where she had left
him, looking up to her window, which gleamed like a dead eye in
the moonlight. She stood for a moment, afraid to move, lest she
should startle him, and he should call out, for the slightest
noise about the place would bring Godfrey down. The next moment,
however, Tom, aware of her presence, sprang to his feet, and,
turning, bounded to her, and took her in his arms. Still
possessed by the one terror of making a noise, she did not object
even by a contrary motion, and, when he took her hand to lead her
away out of sight of the house, she yielded at once.
When they were safe in the field behind the hedge--
"Why did you make me come down, Tom?" she whispered, half choked
with fear, looking up in his face, which was radiant in the
moonshine.
"Because I could not bear it one day longer," he answered. "All
this time I have been breaking my heart to get a word with you,
and never seeing you except at church, and there you would never
even look at me. It is cruel of you, Letty. I know you could
manage it, if you liked, well enough. Why should you try me so?"
"Do speak a little lower, Tom: sound goes so far at night!--I
didn't know you would want to see me like that," she answered,
looking up in his face with a pleased smile.
"Didn't know!" repeated Tom. "I want nothing else, think of
nothing else, dream of nothing else. Oh, the delight of having
you here all alone to myself at last! You darling Letty!"
"But I must go directly, Tom. I have no business to be out of the
house at this time of the night. If you hadn't made me think you
were in some trouble, I daredn't have come."
"And ain't I in trouble enough--trouble that nothing but your
coming could get me out of? To love your very shadow, and not be
able to get a peep even of that, except in church, where all the
time of the service I'm raging inside like a wild beast in a
cage--ain't that trouble enough to make you come to me?"
Letty's heart leaped up. He loved her, then! Love, real love, was
what it meant! It was paradise! Anything might come that would!
She would be afraid of nothing any more. They might say or do to
her what they pleased--she did not care a straw, if he loved her
--really loved her! And he did! he did! She was going to have him
all to her own self, and nobody was to have any right to meddle
with her more!
"I didn't know you loved me, Tom!" she said, simply, with a
little gasp.
"And I don't know yet whether you love me," returned Tom.
"Of course, if you love me," answered Letty, as if
everybody must give back love for love.
Tom took her again in his arms, and Letty was in greater bliss
than she had ever dreamed possible. From being a nobody in the
world, she might now queen it to the top of her modest bent; from
being looked down on by everybody, she had the whole earth under
her feet; from being utterly friendless, she had the heart of Tom
Helmer for her own! Yet even then, eluding the barriers of Tom's
arms, shot to her heart, sharp as an arrow, the thought that she
was forsaking Cousin Godfrey. She did not attempt to explain it
to herself; she was in too great confusion, even if she had been
capable of the necessary analysis. It came, probably, of what her
aunt had told her concerning her cousin's opinion of Tom. Often
and often since, she had said to herself that, of course, Cousin
Godfrey was mistaken and quite wrong in not liking Tom; she was
sure he would like him if he knew him as she did!--and yet to act
against his opinion, and that never uttered to herself, cost her
this sharp pang, and not a few that followed! To soften it for
the moment, however, came the vaguely, sadly reproachful feeling,
that, seeing they were about to send her out into the world to
earn her bread, they had no more any right to make such demands
upon her loyalty to them as should exclude the closest and only
satisfying friend she had--one who would not turn her away, but
wanted to have her for ever. That Godfrey knew nothing of his
mother's design, she did not once suspect.
"Now, Tom, you have seen me, and spoken to me, and I must go,"
said Letty.
"O Letty!" cried Tom, reproachfully, "now when we understand each
other? Would you leave me in the very moment of my supremest
bliss? That would be mockery, Letty! That is the way my dreams
serve me always. But, surely, you are no dream! Perhaps I
am dreaming, and shall wake to find myself alone! I never
was so happy in my life, and you want to leave me all alone in
the midnight, with the moon to comfort me! Do as you like,
Letty!--I won't leave the place till the morning. I will go back
to the rick-yard, and lie under your window all night."
The idea of Tom, out on the cold ground, while she was warm in
bed, was too much for Letty's childish heart. Had she known Tom
better, she would not have been afraid: she would have known that
he would indeed do as he had said--so far; that he would lie down
under her window, and there remain, even to the very moment when
he began to feel miserable, and a moment longer, but not more
than two; that then he would get up, and, with a last look, start
home for bed.
"I will stop a little while, Tom," she offered, "if you will
promise to go home as soon as I leave you."
Tom promised.
They went wandering along the farm-lanes, and Tom made love to
her, as the phrase is--in his case, alas! a phrase only too
correct. I do not say, or wish understood, that he did not love
her--with such love as lay in the immediate power of his
development; but, being a sort of a poet, such as a man may be
who loves the form of beauty, but not the indwelling power of it,
that is, the truth, he made love to her--fashioned forms
of love, and offered them to her; and she accepted them, and
found the words of them very dear and very lovely. For neither
had she got far enough, with all Godfrey's endeavors for her
development, to love aright the ring of the true gold, and
therefore was not able to distinguish the dull sound of the gilt
brass Tom offered her. Poor fellow! it was all he had. But
compassion itself can hardly urge that as a reason for accepting
it for genuine. What rubbish most girls will take for poetry, and
with it heap up impassably their door to the garden of delights!
what French polish they will take for refinement! what merest
French gallantry for love! what French sentiment for passion!
what commonest passion they will take for devotion!--passion that
has little to do with their beauty even, still less with the
individuality of it, and nothing at all with their loveliness!
In justice to Tom, I must add, however, that he also took not a
little rubbish for poetry, much sentiment for pathos, and all
passion for love. He was no intentional deceiver; he was so self-
deceived, that, being himself a deception, he could be nothing
but a deceiver--at once the most complete and the most
pardonable, and perhaps the most dangerous of deceivers.
With all his fine talk of love, to which he now gave full flow,
it was characteristic of him that, although he saw Letty without
hat or cloak, just because he was himself warmly clad, he never
thought of her being cold, until the arm he had thrown round her
waist felt her shiver. Thereupon he was kind, and would have
insisted that she should go in and get a shawl, had she not
positively refused to go in and come out again. Then he would
have had her put on his coat, that she might be able to stay a
little longer; but she prevailed on him to let her go. He brought
her to the nearest point not within sight of any of the windows,
and, there leaving her, set out at a rapid pace for the inn where
he had put up his mare.
When Tom was gone, and the bare night, a diffused conscience, all
about her, Letty, with a strange fear at her heart, like one in a
churchyard, with the ghost-hour at hand, and feeling like "a
guilty thing surprised," although she had done nothing wrong in
its mere self, stole back to the door of the kitchen, longing for
the shelter of her own room, as never exile for his fatherland.
She had left the door an inch ajar, that she might run the less
risk of making a noise in opening it; but ere she reached it, the
moon shining full upon it, she saw plainly, and her heart turned
sick when she saw, that it was closed. Between cold and terror
she shuddered from head to foot, and stood staring.
Recovering a little, she said to herself some draught must have
blown it to. If so, there was much danger that the noise had been
heard; but, in any case, there was no time to lose. She glided
swiftly to it. She lifted the latch softly--but, horror of
horrors! in vain. The door was locked. She was shut out. She must
lie or confess! And what lie would serve? Poor Letty! And yet,
for all her dismay, her terror, her despair that night, in her
innocence, she never once thought of the worst danger in which
she stood!
The least perilous, where no safe way was left, would now have
been to let the simple truth appear; Letty ought immediately to
have knocked at the door, and, should that have proved
unavailing, to have broken her aunt's window even, to gain
hearing and admittance. But that was just the kind of action of
which, truthful as was her nature, poor Letty, both by
constitution and training, was incapable; human opposition,
superior anger, condemnation, she dared not encounter. She sank,
more than half fainting, upon the door-step.
The moment she came to herself, apprehension changed into active
dread, rushed into uncontrollable terror. She sprang to her feet,
and, the worst thing she could do, fled like the wind after Tom--
now, indeed, she imagined, her only refuge! She knew where he had
put up his horse, and knew he could hardly take any other way
than the foot-path to Testbridge. He could not be more than a few
yards ahead of her, she thought. Presently she heard him
whistling, she was sure, as he walked leisurely along, but she
could not see him. The way was mostly between hedges until it
reached the common: there she would catch sight of him, for,
notwithstanding the gauzy mist, the moon gave plenty of light. On
she went swiftly, still fancying at intervals she heard in front
of her his whistle, and even his step on the hard, frozen path.
In her eager anxiety to overtake him, she felt neither the
chilling air nor the fear of the night and the loneliness. Dismay
was behind her, and hope before her. On and on she ran. But when,
with now failing breath, she reached the common, and saw it lie
so bare and wide in the moonlight, with the little hut standing
on its edge, like a ghastly lodge to nowhere, with gaping black
holes for door and window, then, indeed, the horror of her
deserted condition and the terrors of the night began to crush
their way into her soul. What might not be lurking in that ruin,
ready to wake at the lightest rustle, and, at sight of a fleeing
girl, start out in pursuit, and catch her by the hair that now
streamed behind her! And there was the hawthorn, so old and
grotesquely contorted, always bringing to her mind a frightful
German print at the head of a poem called "The Haunted Heath," in
one of her cousin Godfrey's books! It was like an old miser,
decrepit with age, pursued and unable to run! Miserable as was
her real condition, it was rendered yet more pitiable by these
terrors of the imagination. The distant howl of a dog which the
moon would not let sleep, the muffled low of a cow from a
shippen, and a certain strange sound, coming again and again,
which she could not account for, all turned to things unnatural,
therefore frightful. Faintly, once or twice, she tried to
persuade herself that it was only a horrible dream, from which
she would wake in safety; but it would not do; it was, alas! all
too real--hard, killing fact! Anyhow, dream or fact, there was no
turning; on to the end she must go. More frightful than all
possible dangers, most frightful thing of all, was the old house
she had left, standing silent in the mist, holding her room
inside it empty, the candle burning away in the face of the moon!
Across the common she glided like a swift wraith, and again into
the shadow of the hedges.
There seems to be a hope as well as a courage born of despair:
immortal, yet inconstant children of a death-doomed sire, both
were now departing. If Tom had come this way, she must, she
thought, have overtaken him long before now! But, perhaps, she
had fainted outright, and lain longer than she knew at the
kitchen-door; and when she started to follow him, Tom was already
at home! Alas, alas! she was lost utterly!
The footpath came to an end, and she was on the high-road. There
was the inn where Tom generally put up! It was silent as the
grave. The clang of a horseshoe striking a stone came through the
frosty air from far along the road. Her heart sank into the
depths of the infinite sea that encircles the soul, and, for the
second time that night, Death passing by gave her an alms of
comfort, and she lay insensible on the border of the same highway
along which Tom, on his bay mare, went singing home.
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