第67章

"Why," she said, "how do you know the colour of my hair? We have never met before.""Yes, we have," I said, "and that was why I spoke to you to-night.I'll tell you where it was another time."But after all I could not desist from telling her that night, for, as afterwards at her lodging we sat over the fire, talking as if we had known each other all our lives, there seemed no reason for an arbitrary delay.

I described to her the solitary moorland road, and the grey-gowned woman's figure in front of me, and the gig coming along to meet her, and the salutation of the two girls, and Itold her all one look of her face had meant for me, and how I had wildly sought her in vain, and from that day to this had held her image in my heart.

And as I told her, she sobbed with her head against my knees and her great hair filling my lap with gold.In broken words she drew for me the other side of the picture of that long-past summer day.

Yes, the girl in the gig was her sister, and they were the only daughters of a farmer who had been rich once, but had come to ruin by drink and misfortune.They had been brought up from girls by an old grandmother, with whom the sister was living at the time of my seeing them.Yes, Tom was her husband.He was a doctor in the neighbourhood when he married her, and a man, Isurmised, of some parts and promise, but, moving to town, he had fallen into loose ways, taken to drinking and gambling, and had finally deserted her for another woman--at the very moment when their first child was born.The child died "Thank God!" she added with sudden vehemence, and "I--well, you will wonder how Icame to this, I wonder myself-- it has all happened but six months ago, and yet I seem to have forgotten--only the broken-hearted and the hungry would understand, if I could remember--and yet it was not life, certainly not life I wanted--and yet Icouldn't die--"

The more I came to know Elizabeth and realise the rare delicacy of her nature, the simplicity of her mind, and the purity of her soul, the less was I able to comprehend the psychology of that false step which her great misery had forced her to take.For hers was not a sensual, pleasure-loving nature.In fact, there was a certain curious Puritanism about her, a Puritanism which found a startlingly incongruous and almost laughable expression in the Scripture almanac which hung on the wall at the end of her bed, and the Bible, and two or three Sunday-school stories which, with a copy of "Jane Eyre," were the only books that lay upon the circular mahogany table.

Once I ventured gently to chaff her about this religiosity of hers.

"But surely you believe in God, dear," she had answered, "you're not an atheist!"I think an atheist, with all her experience of human monsters, was for her the depth of human depravity.

"No, dear," I had answered; "if you can believe in God, surely I can!"I repeat that this gap in Elizabeth's psychology puzzled me, and it puzzles me still, but it puzzled me only as the method of working out some problem which after all had "come out right"might puzzle one.It was only the process that was obscure.The result was gold, whatever the dark process might be.Was it simply that Elizabeth was one of that rare few who can touch pitch and not be defiled?--or was it, I have sometimes wondered, an unconscious and after all a sound casuistry that had saved Elizabeth's soul, an instinctive philosophy that taught her, so to say, to lay a Sigurd's sword between her soul and body, and to argue that nothing can defile the body without the consent of the soul.

In deep natures there is always what one might call a lover's leap to be taken by those that would love them--something one cannot understand to be taken on trust, something even that one fears to be gladly adventured...all this, and more, I knew that I could safely venture for Elizabeth's sake, ere I kissed her white brow and stole away in the early hours of that winter's morning.

As I did so I had taken one of the sumptuous strands of her hair into my hand and kissed it too.

"Promise me to let this come back to its own beautiful colour,"I had said, as I nodded to a little phial labelled "Peroxide of Hydrogen" on her mantelshelf.

"Would you like to?" she had said.

"Yes, do it for me."

One day some months after I cut from her dear head one long thick lock, one half of which was gold and the other half chestnut.Itake it out and look at it as I write, and, as when I first cut it, it seems still a symbol of Elizabeth's life, the sun and the shadow, only that the gold was the shadow, and the chestnut was the sun.

The time came when the locks, from crown to tip, were all chestnut--but when it came I would have given the world for them to be gold again; for Elizabeth had said a curious thing when she had given me her promise.

"All right, dear," she had said, "but something tells me that when they are all brown again our happiness will be at an end.""How long will that take?" I had said, trying to be gay, though an involuntary shudder had gone through me, less at her words than because of the strange conviction of her manner.

"About two years,--perhaps a little more," she said, answering me quite seriously, as she gravely measured the shining tresses, half her body's length, with her eye.