The Last Chronicle of Barset (56 page)

‘Yes, I think you are in earnest.'

‘And do you believe that I love you with all my heart and all my strength and all my soul?'
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‘Oh, John!'

‘But do you?'

‘I think you love me.'

‘Think! what am I to say or do to make you understand that my only idea of happiness is the idea that sooner or later I may get you to be my wife? Lily, will you say that it shall be so? Speak, Lily. There is no one that will not be glad. Your uncle will consent – has consented. Your mother wishes it. Bell wishes it. My mother wishes it. Lady Julia wishes it. You would be doing what everybody about you wants you to do. And why should you not do it? It isn't that you dislike me. You wouldn't talk about being my sister, if you had not some sort of regard for me.'

‘I have a regard for you.'

‘Then why will you not be my wife? Oh, Lily, say the word now, here, at once. Say the word, and you'll make me the happiest fellow
in all England.' As he spoke he took her by both arms, and held her fast. She did not struggle to get away from him, but stood quite still, looking into his face, while the first sparkle of a salt tear formed itself in each eye. ‘Lily, one little word will do it – half a word, a nod, a smile. Just touch my arm with your hand and I will take it for a yes.' I think that she almost tried to touch him; that the word was in her throat, and that she almost strove to speak it. But there was no syllable spoken, and her fingers did not loose themselves to fall upon his sleeve. ‘Lily, Lily, what can I say to you?'

‘I wish I could,' she whispered – but the whisper was so hoarse that he hardly recognised the voice.

‘And why can you not? What is there to hinder you? There is nothing to hinder you, Lily.'

‘Yes, John; there is that which must hinder me.'

‘And what is it?'

‘I will tell you. You are so good and so true, and so excellent – such a dear, dear, dear friend, that I will tell you everything, so that you may read my heart. I will tell you as I tell mamma – you and her and no one else – for you are the choice friend of my heart. I cannot be your wife because of the love I bear for another man.'

‘And that man is he – he who came here?'

‘Of course it is he. I think, Johnny, you and I are alike in this, that when we have loved we cannot bring ourselves to change. You will not change, though it would be so much better you should do so.'

‘No; I will never change.'

‘Nor can I. When I sleep I dream of him. When I am alone I cannot banish him from my thoughts. I cannot define what it is to love him. I want nothing from him – nothing, nothing. But I move about through my little world thinking of him, and I shall do so to the end. I used to feel proud of my love, though it made me so wretched that I thought it would kill me. I am not proud of it any longer. It is a foolish poor-spirited weakness – as though my heart has been only half formed in the making. Do you be stronger, John. A man should be stronger than a woman.'

‘I have none of that sort of strength.'

‘Nor have I. What can we do but pity each other, and swear that we will be friends – dear friends. There is the oak-tree and I have got to turn back. We have said everything that we can say – unless you will tell me that you will be my brother.'

‘No; I will not tell you that.'

‘Good-bye, then, Johnny.'

He paused, holding her by the hand and thinking of another question which he longed to put to her – considering whether he would ask her that question or not. He hardly knew whether he were entitled to ask it – whether or no the asking of it would be ungenerous. She said that she would tell him everything – as she had told everything to her mother. ‘Of course,' he said, ‘I have no right to expect to know anything of your future intentions?'

‘You may know them all – as far as I know them myself. I have said that you should read my heart.'

‘If this man, whose name I cannot bear to mention, should come again –'

‘If he were to come again he would come in vain, John.' She did not say that he had come again. She could tell her own secret, but not that of another person.

‘You would not marry him, now that he is free?'

She stood and thought for a while before she answered him. ‘No, I should not marry him now. I think not.' Then she paused again. ‘Nay, I am sure I would not. After what has passed I could not trust myself to do it. There is my hand on it. I will not.'

‘No, Lily, I do not want that.'

‘But I insist. I will not marry Mr Crosbie. But you must not misunderstand me, John. There – all that is over for me now. All those dreams about love, and marriage, and of a house of my own, and children – and a cross husband, and a wedding-ring growing always tighter as I grow fatter and older. I have dreamed of such things as other girls do – more perhaps than other girls, more than I should have done. And now I accept the thing as finished. You wrote something in your book, you dear John – something that could not be made to come true. Dear John, I wish for your sake it was otherwise. I will go home and I will write in my book, this very day, Lilian Dale,
Old Maid. If ever I make that false, do you come and ask me for the page.'

‘Let it remain there till I am allowed to tear it out.'

‘I will write it, and it shall never be torn out. You I cannot marry. Him I will not marry. You may believe me, Johnny, when I say there can never be a third.'

‘And is that to be the end of it?'

‘Yes – that is to be the end of it. Not the end of our friendship. Old maids have friends.'

‘It shall not be the end of it. There shall be no end of it with me.'

‘But, John –'

‘Do not suppose that I will trouble you again – at any rate not for a while. In five years' time perhaps –'

‘Now, Johnny, you are laughing at me. And of course it is the best way. If there is not Grace, and she has caught me before I have turned back. Good-bye, dear, dear John. God bless you. I think you the finest fellow there is in the world. I do, and so does mamma. Remember always that there is a temple at Allington in which your worship is never forgotten.' Then she pressed his hand and turned away from him to meet Grace Crawley. John did not stop to speak a word to his cousin, but pursued his way alone.

‘That cousin of yours,' said Lily, ‘is simply the dearest, warmest-hearted, finest creature that ever was seen in the shape of a man.'

‘Have you told him that you think him so?' said Grace.

‘Indeed, I have,' said Lily.

‘But have you told this finest, warmest, dearest creature that he shall be rewarded with the prize he covets?'

‘No, Grace. I have told him nothing of the kind. I think he understands it all now. If he does not, it is not for the want of my telling him. I don't suppose any lady was ever more open-spoken to a gentleman than I have been to him.'

‘And why have you sent him away disappointed? You know you love him.'

‘You see, my dear,' said Lily, ‘you allow yourself, for the sake of your argument, to use a word in a double sense, and you attempt to confound me by doing so. But I am a great deal too clever for you,
and have thought too much about it, to be taken in in that way. I certainly love your cousin John; and so I do love Mr Boyce, the vicar.'

‘You love Johnny much better than you do Mr Boyce.'

‘True; very much better; but it is the same sort of love. However, it is a great deal too deep for you to understand. You're too young, and I shan't try to explain it. But the long and the short of it is – I am not going to marry your cousin.'

‘I wish you were,' said Grace, ‘with all my heart.'

John Eames as he returned to the cottage was by no means able to fall back upon those resolutions as to his future life, which he had formed for himself and communicated to his friend Dalrymple, and which he had intended to bring at once into force in the event of his being again rejected by Lily Dale. ‘I will cleanse my mind of it altogether,' he had said, ‘and though I may not forget her, I will live as though she were forgotten. If she declines my proposal again, I will accept her word as final. I will not go about the world any longer as a stricken deer
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– to be pitied or else bullied by the rest of the herd.' On his way down to Guestwick he had sworn twenty times that it should be so. He would make one more effort, and then he would give it up. But now, after his interview with Lily, he was as little disposed to give it up as ever.

He sat upon a gate in a paddock through which there was a back entrance into Lady Julia's garden, and there swore a thousand oaths that he would never give her up. He was, at any rate, sure that she would never become the wife of anyone else. He was equally sure that he would never become the husband of any other wife. He could trust her. Yes; he was sure of that. But could he trust himself? Communing with himself, he told himself that after all he was but a poor creature. Circumstances had been very good to him, but he had done nothing for himself. He was vain, and foolish, and unsteady. So he told himself while sitting upon the gate. But he had, at any rate, been constant to Lily, and constant he would remain.

He would never more mention her name to anyone – unless it were to Lady Julia tonight. To Dalrymple he would not open his mouth about her, but would plainly ask his friend to be silent on that
subject if her name should be mentioned by him. But morning and evening he would pray for her, and in his prayers he would always think of her as his wife. He would never speak to another girl without remembering that he was bound to Lily. He would go nowhere into society without recalling to mind the fact that he was bound by the chains of a solemn engagement. If he knew himself he would be constant to Lily.

And then he considered in what manner it would be best and most becoming that he should still prosecute his endeavour and repeat his offer. He thought that he would write to her every year, on the same day of the year, year after year, it might be for the next twenty years. And his letters should be very simple. Sitting there on the gate he planned the wording of his letters – of his first letter, and of his second, and of his third. They should be very like to each other – should hardly be more than a repetition of the same words. ‘If now you are ready for me, then, Lily, am I, as ever, still ready for you.' And then ‘if now' again, and again ‘if now' – and still ‘if now.' When his hair should be grey, and the wrinkles on his cheeks – ay, though they should be on hers, he would still continue to tell her from year to year that he was ready to take her. Surely some day that ‘if now' would prevail. And should it never prevail, the merit of his constancy should be its own reward.

Such letters as those she would surely keep. Then he looked forward, down into the valley of coming years, and fancied her as she might sit reading them in the twilight of some long evening – letters which had been written all in vain. He thought that he could look forward with some satisfaction towards the close of his own career, in having been the hero of such a love-story. At any rate, if such a story were to be his story, the melancholy attached to it should arise from no fault of his own. He would still press her to be his wife. And then as he remembered that he was only twenty-seven and that she was twenty-four, he began to marvel at the feeling of grey old age which had come upon him, and tried to make himself believe that he would have her yet before the bloom was off her cheek.

He went into the cottage and made his way at once into the room in which Lady Julia was sitting. She did not speak at first, but looked
anxiously into his face. And he did not speak, but turned to a table near the window and took up a book – though the room was too dark for him to see to read the words. ‘John,' at last said Lady Julia.

‘Well, my lady?'

‘Have you nothing to tell me, John?'

‘Nothing on earth – except the same old story, which has now become a matter of course.'

‘But John, will you not tell me what she has said?'

‘Lady Julia, she has said no; simply no. It is a very easy word to say, and she has said it so often that it seems to come from her quite naturally.' Then he got a candle and sat down over the fire with a volume of a novel. It was not yet past five, and Lady Julia did not go upstairs to dress till six, and therefore there was an hour during which they were together. John had at first been rather grand to his old friend, and very uncommunicative. But before the dressing-bell had rung he had been coaxed into a confidential strain and had told everything. ‘I suppose it is wrong and selfish,' he said. ‘I suppose I am a dog in a manger. But I do own that there is a consolation to me in the assurance that she will never be the wife of that scoundrel.'

‘I could never forgive her if she were to marry him now,' said Lady Julia.

‘I could never forgive him. But she has said that she will not, and I know that she will not forswear herself. I shall go on with it, Lady Julia. I have made up my mind to that. I suppose it will never come to anything, but I shall stick to it. I can live an old bachelor as well as another man. At any rate I shall stick to it.' Then the good silly old woman comforted him and applauded him as though he were a hero among men, and did reward him, as Lily had predicted, by one of those now rare bottles of super-excellent port which had come to her from her brother's cellar.

John Eames stayed out his time at the cottage, and went over more than once again to Allington, and called on the squire, on one occasion dining with him and meeting the three ladies from the Small House; and he walked with the girls, comporting himself like any ordinary man. But he was not again alone with Lily Dale, nor did he learn
whether she had in truth written those two words in her book. But the reader may know that she did write them there on the evening of the day on which the promise was made. ‘Lilian Dale – Old Maid.'