HE two were alone in the grassy courtyard of the ruined castle. The rest of the picnic party had wandered away from them, or they from it. Out of the green-grown mound of fallen masonry by the corner of the chapel a great may-brush grew, silvered and pearled on every scented, still spray. The sky was deep, clear, strong blue above, and against the blue the wall-flowers shone bravely from the cracks and crevices of ruined arch and wall and buttress.
"They shine like gold," she said. "I wish one could get at them!"
"Do you want some?" he said, and on the instant bis hand had found a strong jutting stone, his foot a firm ledge; and she saw his figure, grey flannel against grey stone, go up the wall towards the yellow flowers.
"Oh, don't!" she cried. "I don't really want them! Please not—I wish"
Then she stopped, because he was already some twelve feet from the ground, and she knew that one should not speak to a man who is climbing ruined walls. So she clasped her hands and waited, and her heart seemed to go out like a candle in the wind, and to leave only a dark, empty, sickening space where, a moment before, it had beat in anxious joy. For she loved him, had loved him these two years, had loved him since the day of their first meeting. And that was just as long as he had loved her. But he had never told his love. There is a code of honour—right or wrong—and it forbids a man with an income of a hundred and fifty a year to speak of love to a girl who is reckoned an heiress. There are plenty who transgress the code, but they are in all the other stories.
So he drove his passion on the curb and mastered it. Yet the questions, "Does she love me? Does she know I love her? Does she wonder why I don't speak?" and the counter-questions, "Will she think I don't care? Doesn't she, perhaps, care at all? Will she marry someone else before I've earned the right to try to make her love me?" afforded a see-saw of reflection, agonising enough, for those small hours of wakefulness when we let our emotions play the primitive games with us. But always the morning brought strength to keep to his resolution. He saw her for three long times every year, when Christmas, Easter and Midsummer brought her to stay with an aunt, and brought him home to his people for holidays. Also, though he denied himself the joy of speaking in words, he had let his eyes speak more than he knew.
And now he had reached the wall-flowers high up, and was plucking them and throwing them down, so that they fell in a wavering, bright shower round her feet. She did not pick them up. Her eyes were on him, and the empty place where her heart used to be seemed to swell till it almost choked her.
He was coming down now. He was only about twenty-five feet from the ground. There was no sound at all but the grating of his feet as he set them on the stones, and the movement, now and then, of a bird in the ivy. then came a rustle, a gritty clatter, loud falling stones—his foot had slipped and he had fallen. No, he was hanging by his hands above the great refectory arch, and his body swung heavily with the impetus of the checked fall. He was moving along now, slowly, hanging by his hands; now he grasped an ivy root—another—and pulled himself up till his knee was on the moulding of the arch.
She would never have believed anyone who should have told her that only two minutes had been lived between the moment of his stumble and the other moment when his foot touched the grass and he came towards her among the fallen wall-flowers. He was rather paler than usual. She was a very nice girl, and not at all forward, and I cannot understand or excuse her conduct. She made two steps towards him with her hands held out—caught him by the arms just above the elbow, shook him angrily, as one shakes a naughty child, looked him once in the eyes, and buried her face in his neck, sobbing long, dry, breathless sobs.
Even then he tried to be strong.
"Don't," he said tenderly, "don't worry. It's all right—I was a fool. Pull yourself together—there's somebody coming."
"I don't care," she said, for the touch of his cheek pressed against her hair told her all that she wanted to know. "Let them come—I don't care! Oh! how could you he so silly and horrid? Oh, thank God! thank God! Oh! how could you?"
Of course, a really honourable young man would have got out of the situation somehow. He didn't. He accepted it—with his arms round her and his lips against the face where the tears now run warm and salt. It was one of the immortal moments.