I haven't time to pick my tones any more than my words. Your train will be going soon, and the deuced affair must be settled somehow. Look here! it is horribly inconvenient for me to get married now. I have no money, and I have a lot of debts to pay. A marriage in St George's, published in the papers and all that, would simply make an end of me. These tradesmen fellows know everything; they would give each other the word: Married a widow with a family and with no money! By Jove! that would finish me."
"Mr Fitzroy!"
"I tell you not to 'Mr' me, Nelly. You know my name, I suppose. We are past all that. The question now is how to manage the one business without bursting up the other. Making a regular smash of my affairs can't do you any good, can it? We'll have to go abroad; and we can't, of course, take those chicks—dragging a nursery about with us all over the world. Keep still! you'll frighten that porter." He had seized and held her arm tightly, restraining her. "For goodness' sake be reasonable, now, Nelly. You don't suppose I mean you any harm? How could I?" he added, with a harsh laugh, "you're much too wide awake for that. Listen to what I say, Nelly."
"I cannot—I cannot endure this," she cried.
"We may neither of us like it," said Fitzroy, with composure, "but you ought to have thought of that a little sooner. There's nothing else for it now that I can see. Speak up if you know any other way. I don't want to ruin you; and you, I suppose, don't want to ruin me. There's no other way."
"There is the way—of parting here, and never seeing each other more!"
He held her fast, with her arm drawn closely through his. "That's the most impracticable of all," he said. "For one thing, I don't want to part and never see you more."
Oh, poor Nelly! poor Nelly! She was outraged in every point of pride and tenderness and feeling, and yet the softness of this tone sank into her heart, and carried, like a flood, all her bulwarks away.
"Well, and then it couldn't be done. You've gone too far, with your vicaress, and all that. I don't want to ruin you; and neither, I suppose, do you want to ruin me. Look here, Nelly: I've got a little money at present—by chance, as it happens. I'll buy a licence—it's all you'll have from me in the shape of wedding-present—and you'll run up to town to-morrow morning, and we'll be married at the registrar's office. Can't help it, Nelly; can't do anything better. It is no fault of mine."
There was silence for a moment. Nelly was not able to speak. Her heart was beating as if it would burst; her whole nature revolting, resisting, in a horror and conflict indescribable. At length she burst forth: "It is a brutal question, indeed, indeed—a brutal question!" she cried, scarcely able with her trembling lips to form the words.
"Well, didn't I say so? But we can't help it; there's nothing else left to do. I am not an infernal cad—altogether; and you're not—altogether—a fool. We may have been that—that last—both of us; but there's no use going over all that again. Nelly, compose yourself—compose yourself!"
"I cannot! I cannot!" she cried, struggling with that burst and flood of misery which is one of the shames and terrors of a woman. It had come to such a point that she could not compose herself, or resist the wild tide of passion that carried her away. Passion! ah, not of love—of shame, of horror, of self-disgust, of humiliation unspeakable. A woman who has had poor Nelly's experiences seldom retains a girl's dream of superlative womanhood, of the crown and the sceptre. But to endure to be spoken to like this—to feel the question to be not one between two lovers, but between a man who was not "an infernal cad" and a woman who was not "a fool"; to submit to all this because there was nothing else for it, to be obliged by her reason to acquiesce in it—was almost more than flesh and blood could bear. She kept in, by the exertion of all her strength, those heartrending sobs and cries within her own bosom as much as was possible. Even in the depth of her misery she was aware that to betray herself, to collect a crowd round, would be worse still, and must be avoided at any price. Finally, poor Nelly found herself, all wounded and bruised with the conflict, exhausted as if she were going to die, alone in the railway carriage in which Fitzroy had placed her, kissing her openly in sight of the guard as he left her, and bidding her remember that he would meet her at eleven o'clock to-morrow. At eleven o'clock to-morrow! It seemed to ring in her ears all the way down, like a bell going on with the same chime. Eleven o'clock! Eleven o'clock to-morrow!—for why? for why?
CHAPTER IX.
Thinking, thinking all the long night through did not seem to do poor Nelly any good. She had arrived at home so exhausted in mind and body, so chilled to the heart, that she was good for nothing but to retire to bed. She was scarcely able to see the children—the children, whom perhaps in a day or two——Oh! should she not secure every moment of them, every look of the innocent faces that were her own, lay up in her heart every innocent word, with that dreadful possibility before her? But the effect was exactly the reverse. The sight of them seemed to fill her with a sick horror. She could not meet their eyes, could not bear their caresses, turned from them with an awful sense that she had betrayed them. And then all the night through in the dark she lay awake thinking, thinking, listening to the clock striking—the vigilant clock, which watched and waited, measuring out the unhasting time, never forgetting, looking on whatever happened. It would strike eleven o'clock to-morrow in the calm little unalarmed house where nobody would suspect that the young mother, the smiling and loving guardian of the children, had come to her hour of doom. For a long time her mind held to this as if it were a sentence which had to be carried out. Eleven o'clock to-morrow, eleven o'clock! a thing which she could not alter, which had to be done. Then by-and-by, which was worse still, there flashed into her soul the thought that it was no sentence, but a thing subject to her own decision, which she might do—or not. Or not! She was free; it was for her to settle, to do it or not to do it. I don't know how to explain how much worse this was. To be held fast by a verdict, sentenced at a certain hour to do something which perhaps you would rather die than do, but which you must do, your dying or not dying being a matter of indifference—is a very terrible thing: yet even in this the must gives a certain support. But to be cast back again into a sea of doubt from which you have to get out as best you may, in which you must decide for yourself, choose—this or that, settle what to do, what not to do; the choice being not between pleasure and pain, between good and evil, as it used to be in the old days—but only of two tortures, which was the worst and which the best.
The result of this terrible night was at least to solve the question for eleven o'clock to-morrow: for she was too ill to stand, her limbs aching and her head aching when to-morrow came. It was dreadful to Nelly to have to call nurse, who already half knew so much, and to send her with the necessary telegram. "Too ill to move—postpone for a day or two" was, after long labour with her aching head and perturbed brain, all she could think of to say; and she had scarcely said it when it flashed upon her that the very word "postpone" was a kind of pledge, and committed her to an acceptance of everything he had settled upon, though even this did not hurt like the look which nurse gave her when she saw Fitzroy's name—a look, not of reproach, but of anxious curiosity. Before this time poor Nelly had begun to feel to her very soul the misery of having a confidant. It is a comfort in some cases: it relieves the full heart to speak, it sometimes gives support, the support of being understood in a difficult crisis. But it also gives to the person confided in a right to follow further developments, to know what happens after, to ask—to look. "You did not come as you promised, dear?" Mrs Glynn had said to her; "you did not bring him to see us." The Rector's wife doubted, but did not know certainly, that Fitzroy had not come. "No," Nelly had faltered, "I did not, I—could not." "But to-morrow! promise me, promise me faithfully that you will bring him to-morrow. Dear, let us have the comfort of seeing you two together." Nelly had only nodded her head, she could not trust her voice to speak. This was before the interview at Paddington. And Mrs Glynn had gone
