CHAPTER IX
PUNISHMENT

Anthony Clyne came to a stand before her, and lifted his hat.

"I understand," he said, without letting his eyes meet hers-he was stiffness itself, but perhaps he too had his emotions-"that you preferred to see me here rather than indoors?"

"Yes," Henrietta answered. And the girl thanked heaven that though the beating of her heart had nearly choked her a moment before, her tone was as hard and uncompromising as his. He could not guess, he never should guess, what strain she put on nerve and will that she might not quail before him; nor how often, with her quivering face hidden in the pillow, she had told herself, before rising, that it was for once only, once only, and that then she need never see again the man she had wronged.

"I do not know," he continued slowly, "whether you have anything to say?"

"Nothing," she answered. They were standing on the Ambleside road, a short furlong from the inn. Leafless trees climbed the hill-side above them; and a rough slope, unfenced and strewn with boulders and dying bracken, ran down from their feet to the lake.

"Then," he rejoined, with a scarcely perceptible hardening of the mouth, "I had best say as briefly as possible what I am come to say."

"If you please," she said. Hitherto she had faced him regally. Now she averted her eyes ever so slightly, and placed herself so that she looked across the water that gleamed pale under the morning mist.

Yet, even with her eyes turned from him, he did not find it easy to say what he must say. And for a few seconds he was silent. At last "I do not wish to upbraid you," he began in a voice somewhat lower in tone. "You have done a very foolish and a very wicked, wicked thing, and one which cannot be undone in the eyes of the world. That is for all to see. You have left your home and your friends and your family under circumstances-"

She turned her full face to him suddenly.

"Have they," she said, "empowered you to speak to me?"

"Yes."

"They do not wish to see me themselves?"

"No."

"Nor perhaps-wish me to return to them?"

"No."

She nodded as she looked away again; in sheer defiance, he supposed. He did not guess that she did it to mask the irrepressible shiver which the news caused her.

He thought her, on the contrary, utterly unrepentant, and it hardened him to speak more austerely, to give his feelings freer vent.

"Had you done this thing with a gentleman," he said, "there had been, however heartless and foolish the act, some hope that the matter might be set straight. And some excuse for yourself; since a man of our class might have dazzled you by the possession of qualities which the person you chose could not have. But an elopement with a needy adventurer, without breeding, parts, or honesty-a criminal, and wedded already-"

"If he were not wedded already," she said, "I had been with him now!"

His face grew a shade more severe, but otherwise he did not heed the taunt.

"Such an-an act," he said, "unfits you in your brother's eyes to return to his home." He paused an instant. "Or to the family you have disgraced. I am bound-I have no option, to tell you this."

"You say it as from them?"

"I do. I have said indeed less than they bade me say. And not more, I believe on my honour, than the occasion requires. A young gentlewoman," he continued bitterly, "brought up in the country with every care, sheltered from every temptation, with friends, with home, with every comfort and luxury, and about to be married to a gentleman in her own rank in life, meets secretly, clandestinely, shamefully a man, the lowest of the low, on a par in refinement with her own servants, but less worthy! She deceives with him her friends, her family, her relatives! If" – with some emotion-"I have overstated one of these things, God forgive me!"

"Pray go on!" she said, with her face averted. And thinking that she was utterly hardened, utterly without heart, thinking that her outward calm spelled callousness, and that she felt nothing, he did continue.

"Can she," he said, "who has been so deceitful herself, complain if the man deceives her? She has chosen a worthless creature before her family and her friends? Is she not richly served if he treats her after his own nature and her example? If, after stooping to the lawless level of such a poor thing, she finds herself involved in his penalties, and her name a scandal and a shame to her family!"

"Is that all?" she asked. But not a quiver of the voice, not a tremour of the shoulders, betrayed what she was feeling, what she suffered, how fiercely the brand was burning into her soul.

"That is all they bade me say," he replied in a calmer and more gentle tone. "And that they would make arrangements-such arrangements as may be possible for your future. But they would not take you back."

"And now-what on your own account?" she asked, almost flippantly. "Something, I suppose?"

"Yes," he said, answering her slowly, and with a steady look of condemnation. For in all honesty the girl's attitude shocked and astonished him. "I have something to say on my own account. Something. But it is difficult to say it."

She turned to him and raised her eyebrows.

"Really!" she said. "You seem to speak so easily."

He did not remark how white, even against the pale shimmer of the lake, was the face that mocked him; and her heartlessness seemed dreadful to him.

"I wish," he said, "to say only one thing on my own account."

"There is only one thing you must not say," she retorted, turning on him without warning and speaking with concentrated passion. "I have been, it may be, as foolish as you say. I am only nineteen. I may have been, I don't know about that, very wicked-as wicked as you say. And what I have done in my folly and in my-you call it wickedness-may be a disgrace to my family. But I have done nothing, nothing, sir," – she raised her head proudly-"to disgrace myself personally. Do you believe that?"

And then he did notice how white she was.

"If you tell me that, I do believe it," he said gravely.

"You must believe it," she rejoined with sudden vehemence. "Or you wrong me more cruelly than I have wronged you!"

"I do believe it," he said, conquered for the time by a new emotion.

"Then now I will hear you," she answered, her tone sinking again. "I will hear what you wish to say. Not that it will bend me. I have injured you. I own it, and am sorry for it on your account. On my own I am unhappy, but I had been more unhappy had I married you. You have been frank, let me be frank," she continued, her eyes alight, her tone almost imperious. "You sought not a wife, but a mother for your child! A woman, a little better bred than a nurse, to whom you could entrust the one being, the only being, you love, with less chance of its contamination," she laughed icily, "by the lower orders! If you had any other motive in choosing me it was that I was your second cousin, of your own respectable family, and you did not derogate. But you forgot that I was young and a woman, as you were a man. You said no word of love to me, you begged for no favour; when you entered a room, you sought my eye no more than another's, you had no more softness for me than for another! If you courted me at all it was before others, and if you talked to me at all it was from the height of wise dullness, and about things I did not understand and things I hated! Until," she continued viciously, "at last I hated you! What could be more natural? What did you expect?"

A little colour had stolen into his face under the lash of her reproaches. He tried to seem indifferent, but he could not. His tone was forced and constrained when he answered.

"You have strange ideas," he said.

"And you have but two!" she riposted. "Politics and your boy! I cared," with concentrated bitterness, "for neither!"

That stung him to anger and retort.

"I can imagine it," he said. "Your likings appear to be on a different plane."

"They are at least not confined to fifty families!" she rejoined. "I do not think myself divine," she continued with feverish irony, "and all below me clay! I do not think because I and all about me are dull and stupid that all the world is dull and stupid, talking eternally about" – and she deliberately mocked his tone-"'the licence of the press!' and 'the imminence of anarchy!' To talk," with supreme scorn, "of the licence of the press and the imminence of anarchy to a girl of nineteen! It was at least to make the way very smooth for another!"

He looked at her in silence, frowning. Her frankness was an outrage on his dignity-and he, of all men, loved his dignity. But it surprised him at least as much as it shocked him. He remembered the girl sometimes silly, sometimes demure, to whom he had cast the handkerchief; and he had not been more astonished if a sheep had stood up and barked at him. He was here, prepared to meet a frightened, weeping, shamefaced child, imploring pardon, imploring mediation; and he found this! He was here to upbraid, and she scolded him. She marked with unerring eye the joints in his armour, and with her venomous woman's tongue she planted darts that he knew would rankle-rankle long after she was gone and he was alone. And a faint glimpse of the truth broke on him. Was it possible that he had misread the girl; whom he had deemed characterless, when she was not shy? Was it possible that he had under-valued her and slighted her? Was it possible that, while he had been judging her and talking down to her, she had been judging him and laughing in her sleeve?

The thought was not pleasant to a proud nature. And there was another thing he had to weigh. If she were so different in fact from the conception he had formed of her, the course which had occurred to him as the best, and which he was going to propose for her, might not be the best.

But he put that from him. A name for firmness at times compels a man to obstinacy. It was so now. He set his jaw more stiffly, and-

"Will you hear me now?" he asked.

"If there is anything more to be said," she replied. She spoke wearily over her shoulder.

"I think there is," he rejoined stubbornly, "one thing. It will not keep you long. It refers to your future. There is a course which I think may be taken and may be advantageous to you."

"If," she cried impetuously, "it is to take me back to those-"

"On the contrary," he replied. He was not unwilling to wound one who had shown herself so unexpectedly capable of offence. "That is quite past," he continued. "There is no longer any question of that. And even the course I suggest is not without its disadvantages. It may not, at first sight, be more acceptable to you than returning to your home. But I trust you have learnt a lesson, and will now be guided." After saying which he coughed and hesitated, and at length, after twice pulling up his cravat, "I think," he said-"the matter is somewhat delicate-that I had better write what I have in my mind."

Under the dead weight of depression which had succeeded to passion, curiosity stirred faintly in her. But-

"As you please," she said.

"The more," he continued stiffly, "as in the immediate present there is nothing to be done. And therefore there is no haste. Until this" – he made a wry face, the thing was so hateful to him-"this inquiry is at an end, and you are free to leave, nothing but preliminaries can be dealt with; those settled, however, I think there should be no delay. But you shall hear from me within the week."

"Very well." And after a slight pause, "That is all?"

"That is all, I think."

Yet he did not go. And she continued to stand with her shoulder turned towards him. He was a man of strong prejudices, and the habit of command had rendered him in some degree callous. But he was neither unkind by nature, nor, in spite of the story Walterson had told of him, inhuman in practice. To leave a young girl thus, to leave her without a word of leave-taking or regret, seemed even to him, now it came to the point, barbarous. The road stretched lonely on either side of them, the woods were brown and sad and almost leafless, the lake below them mirrored the unchanging grey above, or lost itself in dreary mist. And he remembered her in surroundings so different! He remembered how she had been reared, by whom encircled, amid what plenitude! And though he did not guess that the slender figure standing thus mute and forlorn would haunt him by night and by day for weeks to come, and harry and torment him with dumb reproaches-he still had not the heart to go without one gentler word.

And so "No, there is one thing," he said, his voice shaking very slightly, "I would like to add-I would like you to know. It is that after next week I shall be at Rysby in Cartmel-Rysby Hall-for about a month. It is not more than two miles from the foot of the lake, and if you are still here and need advice-"

"Thank you."

" – or help, I would like you to know that I am there."

"That I may apply to you?" she said without turning her head.

He could not tell whether at last there were tears in her voice, or whether she were merely drawing him on to flout him.

"I meant that," he said coldly.

"Thank you."

Certainly there was a queer sound in her voice.

He paused awkwardly.

"There is nothing more, I think?" he said.

"Nothing, thank you."

"Very well," he returned. "Then you will hear from me upon the matter I mentioned-in a day or two. Good-bye."

He went then-awkwardly, slowly. He felt himself, in spite of his arguments, in spite of his anger, in spite of the wrong which she had done him, and the disgrace which she brought on his name, – he felt himself something of a cur. She was little more than a child, little more than a child; and he had not understood her! Even now he had no notion how often that plea would ring in his ears, and harass him and keep him wakeful. And Henrietta? She had told herself before the interview that with it the worst would be over. But as she heard his firm tread pass slowly away, down the road, and grow fainter and fainter, the pride that had supported her under his eyes sank low. A sense of her loneliness, so cruel that it wrung her heart, so cruel that she could have run after him and begged him to punish her, to punish her as he pleased, if he would not leave her deserted, gripped her throat and brought salt tears to her eyes. The excitement was over, the flatness remained; the failure, and the grey skies and leaden water and dying bracken. And she was alone; alone for always. She had defied him, she had defied them all, she had told him that whatever happened she would not go back, she would not be taken back. But she knew now that she had lied. And she crossed the road, her step unsteady, and stumbled blindly up the woodland path above the road, until she came to a place where she knew that she was hidden. There she flung herself down on her face and cried passionately, stifling her sobs in the green damp moss. She had done wrong. She had done cruel wrong to him. But she was only nineteen, and she was being punished! She was being punished!