The morning mist and the summer flowers were not images very like Miss Dempster, who lay like an old tree, rather than any delicate and fragile thing; but Dr. Jardine, coming briskly up on his daily visit, was not susceptible to appropriateness of metaphor. He came up to Miss Beenie and patted her on the shoulder with a homely familiarity which a few months ago would have seemed presumption to the ladies of Rosebank.
“Maybe no,” he said, “maybe no, who can tell? And even if it was so, why should you be alone? I see no occasion---- Come up, and we’ll see how she is to-day.”
Ronald Sutherland, left alone, walked down the slope very solemnly, with his face as rigid as ever. Miss Dempster was his old and good friend, but, alas, he thought nothing of Miss Dempster.
“If she thinks it right, it must be so,” he was saying to himself. “If she thinks it’s right, am I the one to put any difficulty in the way?”
To postpone the self-sacrifice of an enthusiast for weeks, or even for days, is the hardest of all tests, and a trial almost beyond the power of flesh and blood. Upheld by religious fervour, the human soul may be equal to this or any other test; but in lesser matters, and specially in those self-sacrifices prompted by generosity, which to the youthful hero or heroine seem at the first glance so inevitable, so indispensable, things which no noble mind would shrink from, the process of waiting is a terrible ordeal.
He, or still more, she, who would have given life itself, happiness, anything, everything that is most prized in existence, with a light heart, and the most perfect conviction at the moment, becomes, as the days go by, the victim of a hundred chilling doubts and questions. Her courage, like that of Bob Acres, oozes out at her finger-ends. She is brought to the bar of a thousand suppressed, yet never extinguished, reasonings.
Is it right to feign love even for her lover’s sake?--is it right to do another so great an injury as to delude him into the thought that he is making you happy, while, in reality, you are sacrificing all happiness for him? Is it right----? but these questions are so manifold and endless that it is vain to enumerate them.
Effie had been the victim of this painful process for three long lingering weeks. She had little, very little, to support her in her determination. The papers had been full of the great bankruptcy, of details of Dirom’s escape, and of the valuable papers and securities which had disappeared with him: and with a shiver Effie had understood that the scene she had seen unawares through the window had meant far more than even her sense of mystery and secrecy in it could have helped her to divine.