The Law and the Lady | Page 7

my bosom--and all this for a stranger!
I burned with shame; but oh, in spite of it all, I was so happy!
And now, when little more than a few weeks had passed since that first
meeting, I had him by my side; he was mine for life! I lifted my head
from his bosom to look at him. I was like a child with a new toy--I
wanted to make sure that he was really my own.
He never noticed the action; he never moved in his corner of the
carriage. Was he deep in his own thoughts? and were they thoughts of
Me?
I laid down my head again softly, so as not to disturb him. My thoughts
wandered backward once more, and showed me another picture in the
golden gallery of the past.
The garden at the Vicarage formed the new scene. The time was night.
We had met together in secret. We were walking slowly to and fro, out
of sight of the house, now in the shadowy paths of the shrubbery, now
in the lovely moonlight on the open lawn.
We had long since owned our love and devoted our lives to each other.
Already our interests were one; already we shared the pleasures and the
pains of life. I had gone out to meet him that night with a heavy heart,

to seek comfort in his presence and to find encouragement in his voice.
He noticed that I sighed when he first took me in his arms, and he
gently turned my head toward the moonlight to read my trouble in my
face. How often he had read my happiness there in the earlier days of
our love!
"You bring bad news, my angel," he said, lifting my hair tenderly from
my forehead as he spoke. "I see the lines here which tell me of anxiety
and distress. I almost wish I loved you less dearly, Valeria."
"Why?"
"I might give you back your freedom. I have only to leave this place,
and your uncle would be satisfied, and you would be relieved from all
the cares that are pressing on you now."
"Don't speak of it, Eustace! If you want me to forget my cares, say you
love me more dearly than ever."
He said it in a kiss. We had a moment of exquisite forgetfulness of the
hard ways of life--a moment of delicious absorption in each other. I
came back to realities fortified and composed, rewarded for all that I
had gone through, ready to go through it all over again for another kiss.
Only give a woman love, and there is nothing she will not venture,
suffer, and do.
"No, they have done with objecting. They have remembered at last that
I am of age, and that I can choose for myself. They have been pleading
with me, Eustace, to give you up. My aunt, whom I thought rather a
hard woman, has been crying--for the first time in my experience of her.
My uncle, always kind and good to me, has been kinder and better than
ever. He has told me that if I persist in becoming your wife, I shall not
be deserted on my wedding-day. Wherever we may marry, he will be
there to read the service, and my aunt will go to the church with me.
But he entreats me to consider seriously what I am doing--to consent to
a separation from you for a time--to consult other people on my
position toward you, if I am not satisfied with his opinion. Oh, my
darling, they are as anxious to part us as if you were the worst instead

of the best of men!"
"Has anything happened since yesterday to increase their distrust of
me?" he asked.
"Yes,"
"What is it?"
"You remember referring my uncle to a friend of yours and of his?"
"Yes. To Major Fitz-David."
"My uncle has written to Major Fitz-David "
"Why?"
He pronounced that one word in a tone so utterly unlike his natural tone
that his voice sounded quite strange to me.
"You won't be angry, Eustace, if I tell you?" I said. "My uncle, as I
understood him, had several motives for writing to the major. One of
them was to inquire if he knew your mother's address."
Eustace suddenly stood still.
I paused at the same moment, feeling that I could venture no further
without the risk of offending him.
To speak the truth, his conduct, when he first mentioned our
engagement to my uncle, had been (so far as appearances went) a little
flighty and strange. The vicar had naturally questioned him about his
family. He had answered that his father was dead; and he had consented,
though not very readily, to announce his contemplated marriage to his