We accepted the invitation. The day was lovely, and the gypsy dinner was, as usual, infinitely preferable (for once in a way) to a formal dinner indoors. Toward evening, our little assembly separated into parties of twos and threes to explore the neighborhood. Roland and I found ourselves together, as a matter of course. We were happy, and we were alone. Was it the right or the wrong time to ask the fatal question? I am not able to decide; I only know that I asked it.
III. "MR. CAMERON," I said, "will you make allowances for a weak woman? And will you tell me something that I am dying to know?"
He walked straight into the trap, with that entire absence of ready wit, or small suspicion (I leave you to choose the right phrase), which is so much like men, and so little like women.
"Of course I will," he answered.
"Then tell me," I asked, "why you always insist on leaving us at nine o'clock?"
He started, and looked at me so sadly, so reproachfully, that I would have given everything I possessed to recall the rash words that had just passed my lips.
"If I consent to tell you," he replied, after a momentary struggle with himself, "will you let me put a question to you first, and will you promise to answer it?"
I gave him my promise, and waited eagerly for what was coming next.
"Miss Brading," he said, "tell me honestly, do you think I am mad?"
It was impossible to laugh at him: he spoke those strange words seriously--sternly, I might almost say.
"No such thought ever entered my head," I answered.
He looked at me very earnestly.
"You say that on your word of honor?"
"On my word of honor."
I answered with perfect sincerity, and I evidently satisfied him that I had spoken the truth. He took my hand, and lifted it gratefully to his lips.
"Thank you," he said, simply. "You encourage me to tell you a very sad story."
"Your own story?" I asked.
"My own story. Let me begin by telling you why I persist in leaving your house always at the same early hour. Whenever I go out, I am bound by a promise to the person with whom I am living at Eastbourne to return at a quarter-past nine o'clock."
"The person with whom you are living?" I repeated. "You are living at a boarding-house, are you not?"
"I am living, Miss Brading, under the care of a doctor who keeps an asylum for the insane. He has taken a house for some of his wealthier patients at the sea-side; and he allows me liberty in the day-time, on condition that I faithfully perform my promise at night. It is a quarter of an hour's walk from your house to the doctor's, and it is a rule that the patients retire at half-past nine o'clock."
Here was the mystery which had so sorely perplexed me revealed at last! The disclosure literally struck me speechless. Unconsciously and instinctively I drew back from him a few steps. He fixed his sad eyes on me with a touching look of entreaty.
"Don't shrink away from me," he said. "You don't think I am mad."
I was too confused and distressed to know what to say, and, at the same time, I was too fond of him not to answer that appeal. I took his hand and pressed it in silence. He turned his head aside for a moment. I thought I saw a tear on his cheek. I felt his hand close tremblingly on mine. He mastered himself with surprising resolution; he spoke with perfect composure when he looked at me again.
"Do you care to know my story," he asked, "after what I have just told you?"
"I am eager to hear it," I answered. "You don't know how I feel for you. I am too distressed to be able to express myself in words."
"You are the kindest and dearest of women!" he said, with the utmost fervor, and at the same time with the utmost respect.
We sat down together in a grassy hollow of the cliff, with our faces toward the grand gray sea. The daylight was beginning to fade as I heard the story which made me Roland Cameron's wife.
IV. "MY mother died when I was an infant in arms," he began. "My father, from my earliest to my latest recollections, was always hard toward me. I have been told that I was an odd child, with strange ways of my own. My father detested anything that was strongly marked, anything out of the ordinary way, in the characters and habits of the persons about him. He himself lived (as the phrase is) by line and rule; and he determined to make his son follow his example. I was subjected to severe discipline at school, and I was carefully watched afterward at college. Looking back on my early life, I can see no traces of happiness, I can find no tokens of sympathy. Sad submission to a hard destiny, weary wayfaring over unfriendly roads--such is the story of my life, from ten years old to twenty.
"I passed one autumn vacation at the Cumberland lakes; and there I met by accident with a young French lady. The result of that meeting decided my whole after-life.
"She filled the position of nursery governess in the house of a wealthy Englishman. I had frequent opportunities of seeing her. We took an innocent pleasure in each other's society. Her little experience of life was strangely like mine. There was a perfect sympathy of thought and feeling between us. We loved, or thought we loved. I was not twenty-one, and she was not eighteen, when I asked her to be my wife.
"I can understand my folly now, and can laugh at it, or lament over it, as the humor moves me. And yet I can't help pitying myself when I look back at myself at that time--I was so young, so hungry for a little sympathy, so weary of my empty, friendless life. Well! everything is comparative in this world. I was soon to regret, bitterly to regret, that friendless life--wretched as it was.
"The poor girl's employer discovered our attachment, through his wife. He at once communicated with my father.
"My father had but one word to say--he insisted on my going abroad, and leaving it to him to release me from my absurd engagement in my absence. I answered him that I should be of age in a few months, and that I was determined to marry the girl. He gave me three days to reconsider that resolution.