Hannah/Chapter 15

Alone, in a foreign land—with only a child for company and a servant for protection, this, in the strange vicissitudes of Hannah's life, was her position now. Accidentally, rather than intentionally, for Lady Dunsmore had taken all care of her, and meant her to be met at Paris by Madame Arthenay, the lady to whom she sent her, and who, with herself, was the accomplice of Hannah's running away.

For she had literally "run away"—by not only the concurrence, but the compulsion of her faithful friend, who saw that the strain was growing too hard to bear. Living within reach of Bernard's visits, which were half a joy and half a dread, exposed to the continual gossip of Easterham​—since, though the Moat House had entirely "cut" her, some of the other houses did not, but continued by letter a patronizing kindness most irritating—above all, suffering a painful inner warfare as to how far she was right in allowing Bernard to come and see her, since every time he came the cruel life of suspense he led seemed more and more to be making him—not merely wretched but something worse; all these trials, in course of time, did their work upon even the strong heart and healthy frame of Hannah Thelluson.

"You are breaking down," said the countess, when one day toward the summer's end she came to take her young folks home. "This can not last. You must do as I once suggested—go quite away."

"I can not!" said Hannah, faintly smiling. "He would not let me." For she felt herself gradually succumbing to Bernard's impetuous will, and to the strength of a passion unto which impediments seemed to have given a force and persistency that had changed his whole character.

"Not let you go away? The tyrant! Men are all tyrants, you know. Very well. Very well. Then you must run away."

"He will follow me—as he once said he should—wherever I went."

"Indeed! Quite right of him. Still, as I object to tyranny, and as you will just now be much better without him than with him, I mean to help you to run away."

"But—the child!—he will miss her so. And I must have the child with me!"

"Of course. But do you think when a man is desperately in love he troubles himself much about a child? Hannah—my dear old goose! you will be a goose to the end of your days. Go and cackle over your little gosling, and leave me to manage every thing for you."

Hannah obeyed, for she had come to that pass when her energies, and even her volition, seemed to have left her. She submitted tacitly to the countess's plan, which was to send her quite out of England—to a distant French town, Avranches, not easily reached, being beyond the limits of ​railways—where resided a dear old friend of Lady Dunsmore's, of whom she had often talked to Hannah—one Madame Arthenay.

"She will be the best protection you could have, for she herself married her sister's husband, as is constantly done in France; so no need of concealment, my dear. I shall just tell her every thing. And you need not mind even if Mr. Rivers does swoop down upon you some day—after his fashion. But he can't—Avranches is too far off. Nor will I let him, if I can help it. I shall tell him he must leave you in peace, to regain your strength and quiet your nerves. Good-by now, and God bless you!"

The good countess, as she made this hurried farewell on board the French steamboat, left them. Almost before Hannah knew where she was, or what she had consented to, she found herself alone with Rosie and Grace. Lady Dunsmore did not say what deeper reason she had for thus effecting a temporary separation, sudden and complete, between the lovers, even though it involved what she called the "kidnapping" of little Rosie. Knowing the world, and the men therein, a good deal better than her friend did, she foreboded for Hannah a blow heavier than any yet. That hapless elder brother, the present Sir Austin, was said to be in a dying state; and for Sir Bernard Rivers of the Moat House, the last representative of so long a line, to contract an illegal marriage, in which his wife would be shut out of society, and his children held by law as illegitimate, was a sacrifice at which the most passionate lover might well hesitate. While, under these, or any circumstances, for him to doom himself for life to celibacy, was scarcely to be expected.

Lady Dunsmore had come to know Mr. Rivers pretty well by this time. She liked him extremely—as most women did—but her liking did not blind her to a conviction, founded on a certain Scotch proverb: "As the auld cock craws, the young cock learns"—that, when he was put to the crucial test, the world and his own family might be too strong for Sir Bernard. Therefore, on all accounts, ​she was glad at this time to get Hannah out of the way. But her plans, too hastily formed, somehow miscarried; for at Paris her two friends contrived to miss one another. When Miss Thelluson reached Avranches, it was to find Madame Arthenay away, and herself quite alone in that far-away place, with only Grace and the child.

At first this loneliness was almost pleasant. Ever since crossing the Channel she had felt lulled into a kind of stupor: the strange peace of those who have cut the cable between themselves and home, left all their burdens behind, and drifted away into what seems like "another and a better world." During her few days of traveling she had been conscious only of a sunshiny sky and smiling earth, of people moving about her with lively tongues and cheerful faces. Every thing was entirely new, for she had never been abroad before; and whether the land was France or Paradise did not much matter. She had her child beside her, and that was enough.

She had Grace too. Many a servant is, in trouble, almost better than a friend, because a servant is silent—Grace was, even to a fault. Trouble had hardened her sorely. Even when, a few months before, the last blow had fallen, the last tie was broken between her and Jem Dixon—for their child had died—poor Grace had said only, "It is best. My boy might have grown up to blame his mother for his existence." Words which, when Hannah heard, made her shiver in her inmost soul.

That the girl knew perfectly well her mistress's position with respect to Mr. Rivers, was evident. When he came, the nurse abstained from intruding upon them, and kept other intruders away, in a manner which, though not obnoxiously shown, occasionally touched, sometimes vexed, but always humiliated, Hannah. Still, in her sad circumstances, she was glad to have the protection of even this dumb watch-dog of a faithful servant.

Grace seemed greatly relieved when the sea rolled between them and England. "It would take a good bit of time and trouble for any body to come after us here," said ​she, as they climbed the steep hill on the top of which sits the lovely tower of Avranches, and looked back on the long line of straight road, miles upon miles, visible through the green, woody country, which they had traversed in driving from Granville. "It feels quite at the world's end; and, unless folk knew where we were, they might as well seek after a needle in a hay-rick. A good job, too!" muttered she, with a glance at the worn face of her dear mistress, who faintly smiled.

"Nobody does know our whereabouts exactly, Grace. We have certainly done what I often in my youth used to long to do—run away, and left no address."

"I'm glad of it, ma'am. Then you'll have a good long rest."

She had, but in an unexpected way. They found Madame Arthenay absent, and her little house shut up.

"We must take refuge in the hotel," said Hannah, with a weary look. "It seems a pleasant place to lie down and rest in."

It was; and for a few hours she lingered about with Rosie in the inn garden—a green, shady, shut-in nook, with only a stray tourist or two sitting reading on its benches; full of long, low espaliers, heavy with Normandy pears. There were masses of brilliant autumn flowers, French and African marigolds, zinnias, and so on—treasures that the child kept innocently begging for, with a precocious enjoyment of the jingle of rhyme. "Give me pretty posie, to stick in Rosie 'ittle bosie!" Hannah roused herself once or twice, to answer her little girl, and explain that the flowers were not hers to gather, and that Rosie must be content with a stray daisy or two, for she never exacted blind obedience where she could find a reason intelligible to the little awakening soul. But when, after a tear or two, Rosie submitted to fate, and entreated Tannie to "come with Rosie find daisies—lots of daisies!" Aunt Hannah also succumbed.

"Tannie can't come; she must go to her bed, my darling. Poor Tannie is so tired."

​And for the first time in her life she went to bed before the child, laying her head down on the pillow with a feeling as if it would be a comfort never to lift it up any more.

After these ensued days—three or four—of which she never liked to speak much afterward. She lay in a nervous fever, utterly helpless; and when, had it not been for the few words of French which Grace was able to recall—the Misses Melville having amused themselves once with teaching her—and the quickness, intelligence, and tenderheartedness of the inn-servants—good, simple French women, with the true womanly nature which is the same all the world over—things would have gone hard with Hannah Thelluson.

More than once, vague and wandering as her thoughts were, she bitterly repented having "run away;" thereby snatching Rosie from her natural protector, and carrying her off into these strange lands, whence, perhaps, she might never be able to bring her back, but herself lie down to rise up no more. But by-and-by even this vain remorse vanished, and she was conscious of thinking about nothing beyond the roses on the chintz bed-curtains and the pattern of the paper-hangings—birds of paradise, with their sweeping tails; the angle which the opposite house made against the sky, the curious shape of its tiling, and the name of the Boutiquier inscribed thereon, the first few letters of which were cut off by her window-ledge. So childish had her mind grown, so calmly receptive of all that happened, however extraordinary, that when one day a kind-looking, elderly lady came into her room, and began talking in broken English to Grace and the child, and to herself, in the sweetest French she ever heard, Hannah accepted the fact at once, and took scarcely more than half a day to get quite accustomed to Madame Arthenay.

She was one of those women, of which France may boast so many, as unlike our English notion of a Frenchwoman as the caricatures of John Bull who strut about on the French stage are like a real Briton. Feminine, do​mestic—though, after having brought up two families, her sister's and her own, she now lived solitary in her pretty little nest of a house; a strict, almost stern Protestant; pure alike in act, and thoughts, and words—you would hardly have believed she was born in the same land or came of the same race as the women who figure in modern French novels, or who are met only too often in modern Parisian society. As Grace said of her after she had gone, "Ma'am, I don't care how often she comes to see you, or how long she stays. She doesn't bother me one bit. She's just like an Englishwoman."

—Which Madame Arthenay certainly was not, and would have smiled at the narrow-judging, left-handed compliment. But she was a noble type of the noblest bit of womanly nature, which is the same, or nearly the same, in all countries. No wonder Lady Dunsmore loved her, or that, as she prophesied, Hannah loved her too—in a shorter time than she could have thought it possible to love any stranger, and a foreigner likewise.

"Strangers and foreigners, so we each are to one another," said the French lady early one morning, after she had sat up all night with Hannah—to give Grace a rest. "And yet we do not feel so; do we? I think it is because we belong to the same kingdom—the kingdom of God."

For underneath all her gayety and lightness of heart, Madame Arthenay was a very religious woman—as, she told Hannah, "we Protestants" generally were; thoroughly domestic and home-loving likewise.

"It is a mistake to suppose that we French all fall in love with one another's wives and husbands, or that we compel our children to make cruel mariages de convenance, as you English fancy we do. My sister's was a love-marriage, like mine, and all my children's were. You would find us not so very different from yourselves if you once came and settled among us. Suppose you were to try."

So said she, looking kindly at her; but though, as both knew, she had been told every thing, this was the first ​time Madame Arthenay had made any allusion to Miss Thelluson's future or her own past. Besides, they did not talk very much, she speaking chiefly in French, which Hannah found it an effort to follow. But she loved to read the cosmopolitan language of the sweet eyes, to accept the good offices of the tender, skillful, useful hands. Years afterward, when all its bitterness, and pain, and terror had died out, the only thing she remembered about that forlorn illness in a far-away French town was the kindness of all the good French people about her, and especially of Madame Arthenay.

But when she was convalescent, Hannah's heart woke up from the stupor into which it had fallen. She wanted to get well all in a minute, that she might have back her little Rosie, who had been spirited away from her by those compassionate French mothers, and was turning into unè petite Française as fast as possible. Above all, she craved for news from home: it was a fortnight now since she had had one word—one line. She did not wish—nay, she dreaded—to have a letter from Bernard; but she would have liked to hear of him—how he took the news of her flight, whether he was angry with her, and whether he missed his child. But no tidings came, and she did not want to write till she was better. Besides, Madame Arthenay took all the writing things away.

"You are my slave, my captive. Madame la Comtesse exacts it," said she, in her pretty French. "You are not to do a single thing, nor to stir out of your room until I give you leave, which will likely be to-morrow. And now I must bid you adieu, as I have a friend coming who will stay the whole day. Could you rest here quiet, do you think, and spare me an hour of Grace and Rosie? I should like to show my friend the little English rose."

Hannah promised vaguely, and was left alone—to study, as heretofore, the flowers on the chintz and the long-tailed birds on the wall. She was getting very weary of her imprisonment-she who had never before been confined to her room for a whole week. It was a lovely day; she ​knew that by the bit of intensely blue sky behind the house-tiles opposite, and the soft, sweet air that, together with the cheerful street noises of a foreign town, entered in at the open window. A longing to "rise up and walk" came over her—to go out and see what could be seen; above all, to catch a glimpse of that glorious view which she had noticed in coming up the hill—the sea view, with Mont St. Michel in the distance; that wonderful rock castle, dedicated to her favorite angel (in the days when she was a poetical young lady she always had a statue of him in her room), St. Michael, the angel of high places, the angel who fights against wrong.

It was a vagary, more like a school-girl than a grown woman; but Hannah could not help it. She felt she must go out—must feel the fresh air and sunshine, and try if she could walk, if there was any remnant of health and strength left in her; for she would need both so much.

She was already dressed, for she had insisted upon it. Searching for her bonnet and shawl, and smiling with a pathetic pleasure to find she really could walk pretty well—also wondering, with childish amusement, as to whether, if Grace met her, she would not take her for a ghost—Hannah stole down through the quiet hotel, and out into the street—that picturesque street of Avranches which leads toward the public gardens, and the spot where, within six square feet, is piled up the poor remnant of its once splendid cathedral.

Madame Arthenay had described it, and the various features of the town, during the gentle, flowing, unexciting conversation which she pertinaciously kept up by the invalid's bedside; so Hannah easily found her way thither, tottering a little at first, but soon drinking in the lifegiving stimulus of that freshest, purest air, blowing on a hill-top from over the sea. All her life Hannah had loved high places; they feel nearer heaven somehow, and lift one above the petty pains and groveling pleasures of this mortal life. Even now, weak as she was, she was conscious of a sensation of pleasure, as if her life were not all done. ​She wandered about, losing her way, and finding it again; or amusing herself by asking it of those kindly, courteous French folk, who, whenever they looked in her face, stopped, and softened their voices, as if they knew she had been ill and in trouble. One of them—a benign-looking old gentleman, taking the air with his old wife, just like an English Darby and Joan—civilly pointed out to her the Jardin des Plantes as being a charming place to walk in, where madame would find easy benches to repose herself upon, and a sea-view, with Mont St. Michel in it, that was truly "magnifique." Madame's own beautiful island could furnish nothing finer. Hannah smiled, amused at the impossibility of passing for any thing but an Englishwoman, in spite of her careful French, and went thither.

It was a beautiful spot. Sick souls and weary bodies might well repose themselves there, after the advice of the good little fat Frenchman—how fat Frenchmen do grow sometimes! The fine air was soft as cream and strong as wine, and the cloudless sunshine lay round about like a flood, over land and sea—the undulating sweep of forest country on the right hand, and on the left the bay, with its solitary rock—fortress, prison, monastery—about which Madame Arthenay, in her charming small-talk, so fitted for a sick-room, had told stories without end.

Involuntarily, Hannah sat and thought of them now, and not of her own troubles: these seemed to have slipped away, as they often do in a short, sharp illness, and she woke refreshed, as after a night's sleep, able to assume again the burden of the day. Only she lay and meditated, as one does before rising, in a dreamy sort of way, in which her old dreams came back to her. Looking at that lonely rock, she called up the figure of her saint—the favorite St. Michael of her girlhood, with his head bent forward and his sweet mouth firmly set; his hands leaning on his sword, ready to fight, able even to avenge, but yet an angel always; and there came into her that saving strength of all beaten-down, broken-hearted creatures, the belief—alas! often so faint—that God does sometimes send ​his messengers to fight against wrong; not merely to succor, but absolutely to fight.

"No, I will not die—not quite yet," she said to herself, as, in this far-distant nook of God's earth, which seemed to have his smile perpetually upon it, she thought of her own England, made homeless to her through trouble, and bitter with persecution. "Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! Here, perhaps, I might find rest. But still I will not die: they shall not kill me. They may take my character away—they may make him forsake me, as I dare say he will; but I have strength in my soul nevertheless. And I will fight against their cruelty—I will protest to the last that I had a right to love him, a right to marry him; that it would have been the best thing for him, for me, and the child. Oh, my Bernard! there is a deal of the angel in you; but if there were more of the St. Michael-if, instead of submitting to wrong, you could take up your sword and hew it down— But you can not. I know, when the time comes, you will forsake me. But still—still—I shall have the child."

Thus sighed she; and then, determined to sigh no more, to complain no more, to any living creature, but to do her best to get health and strength of body and mind, Hannah rose up from the heap of stones where she had been sitting. With one fond look at that glorious picture which lay below her—earth, sea, and sky, equally beautiful, and blending together in the harmony which soothes one's soul into harmony too—she turned her steps homeward; that is, "chez elle," for to poor Hannah Thelluson there was not—would there ever be?—such a thing as home.

As she went, she saw a figure coming toward her, walking rapidly, and looking round as if searching for some one. Had it been possible—or, rather, had not the extreme improbability of such a thing made her stop a minute, and draw her hand across her eyes, to make sure that imagination was not playing her false—she should have said it was Bernard.

​He saw her likewise; and the two ghosts—for strangely ghostly they both looked to one another's eyes—met.

"Hannah! how could you—"

"Bernard! oh, Bernard!"

She was so glad to see him—he could not help finding it out; nor did she try to hide it—she was too weak. She clung to his arm, her voice choking, her tears falling fast—tears of pure helplessness, and of joy also. He had not forsaken her.

"How could you run away in this manner? We have been searching for you—Madame Arthenay, Grace, and I—for hours."

"Not quite hours," said she, smiling at last. "It was fully one o'clock when I left my room. Was that what you meant by my running away?" For she was half afraid of him, gentle as he seemed, and wished to have the worst over at once.

Bernard shook his head.

"I can not scold you now. I am only too happy to see you once again, my darling."

He had never called her so before; indeed, she was the sort of woman more to be honored and loved in a quiet, silent way than fondled over with caressing words. Still, the tenderness was very sweet to have—sweeter because she felt so miserably weak.

"How did you find me out?" she said, as they walked up the town. And it seemed as if now, for the first time, they were free to walk together, with no cruel eyes upon them, no backbiting tongues pursuing them.

"How did I find you? Why, I tracked you like a Red Indian. Of course I should—to the world's end! What else did you expect, I wonder?"

Hannah hardly knew what she had expected—what feared. In truth, she was content to bask in the present, with a passionate eagerness of enjoyment which those only know who have given up the future hopelessly and entirely.

In the course of the day she grew so rapidly better that, ​when Bernard proposed going, for an hour or two, to the house of Madame Arthenay, she assented. He seemed quite at home there—"flirted" with the sweet old French lady in the most charming manner. He had been with her since yesterday, she said, and was indeed the "friend" to whom she wished to show the little English Rose.

"Monsieur speaks French like a Frenchman, as he ought, having been at school at Caen, he tells me, for two years. He does credit to his Norman blood."

Which Madame Arthenay evidently thought far superior to any thing Saxon, and that the great William had done us Britons the greatest possible honor in condescending to conquer us. But Hannah would not smile at the dear old lady, whom, she saw, Bernard liked extremely.

Soon they settled, amicably and gayly, to the most delicious of coffee and the feeblest of tea, in Madame Arthenay's cottage—a series of rooms all on the ground-floor, and all opening into one another and into the garden—salon, salle-à-manger, two bed-chambers, and a kitchen, half of which was covered by a sort of loft, up which the one servant—a faithful old soul, who could do any thing and put up with any thing—mounted of nights to her bed: a ménage essentially French, with not a fragment of wealth or show about it, but all was so pretty, so tasteful, so suitable. It felt like living in a bird's nest, with green leaves outside and moss within—a nest one could live in like the birds, as innocently and merrily—a veritable bit of Arcadia. Mr. Rivers said so.

"Ah, you should come and live among us," said Madame Arthenay. "In this our Normandy, though we may be a century behind you in civilization, I sometimes think we are a century nearer than you are to the long-past Golden Age. We lead simpler lives, we honor our fathers and mothers, and look after our children ourselves. Then, too, our servants are not held so wide apart from us as you hold yours. Old Jeanne, for instance, is quite a friend of mine."

"So is Grace," Hannah said.

​"Ah, yes; poor Grace! she one day told me her story." And then, turning suddenly to Bernard, "I assure you, we are very good people here in Normandy. You might like us if you knew us. Monsieur Rivers, why not come among us and resume the old name, and be Monsieur de la Rivière?"

Bernard started, looked earnestly at her, to see if any deeper meaning lurked under her pleasantry.

"Take care," he said; "many a true word is spoken in jest." And then he suddenly changed the conversation and asked about an old Château de Saint Roque, which some one had told him was well worth seeing, and might be seen easily, as it was on sale.

"I know the present owner, a Lyons merchant, finds it dull. He bought it from the last propriétaire, to whom it had descended in a direct line, people say, ever since the Crusades; and—such a curious coincidence, monsieur—the family were named De la Rivière. Who knows but you may be revisiting the cradle of your ancestors? If Miss Thelluson is able, you ought certainly to go and see it."

Bernard assented, and all was soon arranged. He was in one of his happiest moods, Hannah saw. He, like herself, felt the influence of the sunshiny atmosphere, within and without, in this pleasant nook of pleasant France—the distance from home sorrows, the ease and freedom of intercourse with Madame Arthenay, who knew every thing and blamed nothing. When, next day, they all met, and drove together across the smiling country, amusing themselves with the big blue-bloused Norman peasant, who kept cracking his long whip and conversing with his horses in shrill patois that resounded even above the jingle of their bells, Hannah thought she had seldom, in all the time they had known one another, seen him looking · so gay.

Saint Roque was one of those châteaux of which there are many in Normandy, built about the time of the Crusades—half mansion, half fortress. It was situated in a ​little valley, almost English in its character, with sleepy cows basking in the meadows, and blackberries—such blackberries as little Rosie screamed at with delight, they were so large and fine—hanging on the hedges, and honeysuckle, sweet as English honeysuckle, perfuming every step of the road. Suddenly they came upon this miniature medieval castle, with its four towers reflected in the deep clear water of the moat, which they crossed by a draw-bridge—and then were all at once carried from old romance to modern comfort, but picturesque still.

Hannah thought she had never seen a sweeter place. "I only wish I were rich and could buy it. I think I could live content here all my days," said she to the Lyons merchant's wife, whom Madame Arthenay knew, and who, with her black-eyed boy clinging to her gown, politely showed her every thing.

"Did you mean what you said?" whispered Bernard, eagerly. And then he drew back, and, without waiting for her answer, began talking to Madame Arthenay.

That night, when he took them safe to the hotel door, he detained Hannah, and asked her if she would not come round the garden with him in the moonlight.

"The air is soft as a summer night; it will do you no harm. We may have no better chance of talk, and I want to speak to you."

Yet for many minutes he said nothing. The night was so still, the garden so entirely deserted, that they seemed to have for once the world to themselves. In this faraway spot it felt as if they had left all the bitterness of their life behind them—as if they had a right to be lovers, and to treat one another as such. Bernard put his arm round her as they sat; and though there was a solemnity in his caresses, and a tender sadness in her reception of them which marked them as people who had known sorrow, very different from boy and girl lovers, still love was very sweet—implying deep content, thankful rest.

"Hannah," he said at last, "I have never yet scolded you properly for your running away—with Lady Duns​more aiding and abetting you. She would scarcely tell me where you were, until I hinted that, as a father, I had a right to get possession of my child. Why did you do such a thing? You must never do it again."

She laughed, but said nothing. In truth, they were both too happy for either anger or contrition.

"Dearest," he whispered, "we must be married. I shall never have any rest till you are wholly and lawfully mine."

"Oh, Bernard! if that could ever be!"

"It shall be. I have been talking to Madame Arthenay about it, as Lady Dunsmore charged me to do. She loves you well, Hannah; and the dear old French lady loves you too already. Every body loves you, and would like to see you happy."

"Happy!" And it seemed as if happiness would never come any nearer to her than now, when she sat as if in a dream, and watched the moon sailing over the sky, just as she had done in her girlhood and ever since, only now she was lonely no more, but deeply and faithfully loved; loving, too, as she never thought it was in her to love any man. "Happy! I am so happy now that I almost wish I could die."

"Hush!" Bernard said, with a shiver. "Come down from the clouds, my love, and listen to me—to my plain, rough common sense, for two minutes."

Then he explained that the jest about his becoming Monsieur de la Rivière was not entirely a jest—that in talking with Madame Arthenay she had told him how, upon giving notice to the French Government, and residing three years in France, he would become a naturalized French citizen, enjoying all the benefits of French laws, including that which, by obtaining a "dispensation"—seldom or never refused—legalizes marriage with a deceased wife's sister. And such a marriage, Madame Arthenay believed, being contracted by them in the character of French subjects, would be held legal any where, as her own had been.

​A future, the bare chance of which made Hannah feel like a new creature. To be Bernard's happy, honored wife, Rosie's rightful mother; to enter joyfully upon that life which to every home-loving woman is the utmost craving of her nature; she could hardly believe it true, or that, if possible, it had not been thought of before—until a sadder thought occurred to her.

"What does 'naturalization' mean? Becoming a Frenchman?"

"Yes; also, that I must 'change my domicile,' as lawyers call it, publicly and permanently—let it be clearly known that I never mean to live in England again."

"Never again! That would involve giving up much. How much?"

"Every thing!" he answered, bitterly. "Home, friends, profession, position; all the ambitions I ever had in my life, and I have had some. Still," added he—was it tenderly or only kindly?—as if he feared he had hurt her, "still, Hannah, I should have you."

"Yes," said Hannah, and fell into deep thought.

How much is a woman to a man—say, the noblest woman to the best and truest man? How far can she replace to him every thing, supply every thing? A great deal, no doubt; and men in love say she can do all. But is it true? Does after-experience prove it true? And it must be remembered that in this case the woman's experience of the man was close, domestic—more like that which comes after marriage than before. She knew Mr. Rivers perfectly well as a brother before she ever thought of him as any thing else. Loving him, she loved him open-eyed, seeing all his weak as well as his strong points as clearly as he saw hers.

Hannah was neither an over-conceited nor an over-humble person. She knew perfectly well her own deserts and requirements—Bernard's too. She was well aware that the ties of home, of kindred, of old associations, were with him passionately strong. Also, that he was, as he said, an ambitious man—that the world had a larger place in ​his heart than it had ever had in hers. She began to tremble.

"Tell me," said she, "tell me the exact truth. Do you think you could do this? Would it not be a sacrifice so painful, so difficult, as to be almost impossible?"

"You are right," he answered in a low voice, and turning his head away; "I fear it would be impossible."

Hannah knew it, and yet she wished he had not said it. To her, with her ideal of love, nothing, except sin, would ever have been found impossible.

They sat silent a while. Then Bernard, assuming a cheerful tone, continued—

"But, my dearest, there is a medium course. Why should we not, without being absolutely naturalized, take up our abode in France, where such marriages as ours are universally recognized? We might live here the greater part of the year, and only go to England occasionally. Even then we need not mingle in English society. The curate I have lately taken would be left in charge of my parish, so that I need scarcely ever go to Easterham."

"That means," said Hannah, slowly, "that you could never take me to Easterham. Our marriage, after all, would be like the other foreign marriages of which we have spoken, which at home are no marriages at all. Abroad, I might be held as your wife; in England, I should be only—"

"No, no, no!" broke in Bernard, impetuously, "do not wound me by the cruel word. It is not true. People could not be so harsh, so wicked. And if they were, why need we care, when our own consciences are satisfied? Oh, my love, my love, why can not we be happy? Is it not right to be happy in this short, sad life of ours, which may end at any time? Besides," and his voice altered so that Hannah scarcely knew it, "you are not aware what harm you are doing me. This suspense drives me nearly wild. I can settle to nothing, accomplish nothing. My life is wasting away. I am growing a worse man every day; more unworthy of you, of my child, of"—here he ​stopped and looked upward solemnly—"of her whom I never forget, my child's mother. Oh, Hannah, listen to me this once, this last time. Here, where it can so easily be done, marry me. For God's sake marry me—and at once!"

It was an awful struggle. Worse even than that which she had gone through when he was ill, and of which he never knew. The questions she had put to herself then she repeated now—arguing them over and over with a resolute will, that tried to judge every thing impartially, and not with relation to herself at all. Other arguments, too, came back upon her mind, arguments belonging to the great conflict of her youth, of which this one seemed to be such a cruel repetition—with a difference. For the marriage with her cousin would have risked only physical evils, but no moral suffering or social disgrace to any human being; while this marriage, which the law would never recognize as such, risked much more. All her father had then said to her—her dear dead father, so tender and wise—of the rights of the unborn generation, of the cruelty of entailing upon them the penalty of our joy, if that can be true joy which is so dearly bought—seemed to return word by word, and burn themselves into her brain. With Rosie, even, it might one day be a difficulty—when the young grown-up girl came to discover that her father's wife was not really his wife, but only regarded as such out of courtesy or pity. And—what if Rosie should not always be the only child?

Sitting there, Hannah shuddered like a person in an ague; and then all feeling seemed to leave her, as if she were a dead woman, unconscious of the living arms that were trying to warm her into living life.

"You are agitated, my own love!" Bernard whispered. "Take time; do not answer me quickly. Think it well over before you answer at all."

"I have thought it over," said she, looking mournfully in his face, and clinging to his hands, as those cling who know they are putting away from them every happiness ​of this world. "Not now only, but many a time before, I have asked myself the same question, and found the same answer. No, Bernard, for God's sake, as you say, which includes all other sakes, I will not marry you."

Perhaps they ought to have parted then and there—Hannah thought afterward it had been better if they had; kinder to him and to herself if she had fled away on the spot, nor remained to have to endure and to remember those bitter words which miserable people speak in haste, and which are so very hard to be forgotten afterward—words which are heard afterward like ghostly voices in the silence of separation, making one feel that a parting, if it must be, had better be like an execution—one blow, severing soul and body; then nothingness.

That nothingness, that quiet death, that absence of all sensation, which she had felt more than once in her life, after great anguish, would have been bliss itself to the feeling which came over her when, having pleaded his utmost, and reproached her his worst, Bernard rose up, to part from her in the soft moonlight of that pleasant garden, as those part who never mean to meet again.

"My wife you must be—or nothing," he had said, passionately, and she had answered with an icy conviction that it must be so—that it had best be so. "Yes, that is true—a wife or nothing." And then the lurking "devil" which we all have in us, liable to be roused on occasion, was roused, and she said a few words which, the next minute, she would have given worlds to have left unsaid. For the same minute there came to him, put into his hands by Madame Arthenay's Jeanne, a letter, an English letter, with a broad black edge.

Bernard took it with a start—not of sorrow exactly, but of shocked surprise.

"I must go home at once. In truth, I ought never to have left home; but I thought of nothing, remembered nothing, except you, Hannah. And this is how you have requited me."

"Hush, and read your letter."

​She dared not look over his shoulder and read it with him—dared not even inquire what the sorrow was which she had now no right to share.

Nor did he tell it; but, folding up the letter, stood in deep thought for a minute or two, then turned to her coldly, as coldly as if she had been any stranger lady, to whom he gave the merest courtesy which ladyhood demanded from a gentleman—no more.

"I must beg you to make my excuses to Madame Arthenay, and tell her that I am summoned home—I can hardly say unexpectedly, and yet it feels so. Death always feels sudden at last."

He put his hand over his eyes, as if he were trying to realize something, to collect himself after some great shock. Hannah said a broken word or two of regret, but he repelled them at once.

"No; this death needs no condolence. It is no sorrow—if death ever is a sorrow so bitter as life, which I begin to doubt. But it alters every thing for me, and for Rosie. Poor Austin is gone—I am Sir Bernard Rivers."

Was there pride in his tone-that hard, bitter pride which so often creeps into a heart from which love has been ruthlessly driven? Hannah could not tell; but when they parted, as they did a few minutes after, coldly shaking hands like common acquaintances, she felt that it was really a parting, such an one as they had never had before; a separation of souls, which in all this world might never be united again.