Louise was better known to me than anyone.
I wrote therefore, telling her I would be in the town that morning, and would look for her outside the church.
“Give this to Mr. Kendall’s groom,” I said, “and tell Wellington I shall want Gypsy saddled at eleven.”
After breakfast I went to the office, and cleared up the bills, and wrote the letter that I had started yesterday. Somehow it was simpler today.
A part of my brain worked in a dull fashion, took note of facts and figures, and jotted them down as if compelled by force of habit.
My work accomplished I walked round to the stable, in a haste to get away from the house and all it meant to me.
I did not ride by the avenue through the woods, with its memories of yesterday, but straight across the park and to the high road.
My mare was very fresh, and nervous as a fawn; starting at nothing she pricked and shied, and backed into the hedgerows, and the tearing wind did its worst to both of us.
The bluster that should have been in February and March had come at last.
Gone was the mellow warmth of the past weeks, the smooth sea, and the sun.
Great clouds with dragging tails, black-edged and filled with rain, came scudding from the west, and now and again with sudden bursting fury emptied themselves as hail.
The sea was a turmoil in the western bay.
In the fields on either side of the road the gulls screamed and dipped in the fresh plowed earth, seeking the green shoots fostered by the early spring.
Nat Bray, whom I had dismissed so swiftly the preceding morning, stood by his gate as I passed it, a wet sack hanging about his shoulders to protect him from the hail, and he put up his hand and shouted me good morning, but the sound of his voice carried beyond me, and away.
Even from the high road I could hear the sea.
To the west, where it ran shallow over the sands, it was short and steep, turned backwards on itself and curling into foam, but to the east, before the estuary, the great long rollers came, spending themselves upon the rocks at the harbor entrance, and the roar of the breakers mingled with the biting wind that swept the hedgerows and forced back the budding trees.
There were few people about as I descended the hill into the town, and those I saw went about their business bent sideways with the wind, their faces nipped with the sudden cold.
I left Gypsy at the Rose and Crown, and walked up the path to the church.
Louise was sheltering beneath the porch.
I opened the heavy door and we went in together, to the church itself.
It seemed dark and peaceful, after the bluster of the day without, yet with it too that chill so unmistakable, oppressive, heavy, and the moldering churchy smell.
We went and sat by the marble recumbent figure of my ancestor, his sons and daughters weeping at his feet, and I thought how many Ashleys were scattered about the countryside, some here, others in my own parish, and how they had loved, and suffered, and then gone upon their way.
Instinct hushed us both, in the silent church, and we spoke in whispers.
“I have been unhappy about you for so long,” said Louise, “since Christmas, and before.
But I could not tell you.
You would not have listened.”
“There was no need,” I answered, “all had gone very well until last night.
The fault was mine, in saying what I did.”
“You would not have said it,” she replied, “unless you had believed it to be the truth.
There has been deception from the first, and you were prepared for it, in the beginning, before she came.”
“There was no deception,” I said, “until the last few hours.
If I was mistaken there is no one but myself to blame.”
A sudden shower stung the church windows southward, and the long aisle with the tall pillars turned darker than before.
“Why did she come here last September?” said Louise.
“Why did she travel all this way to seek you out? It was not sentiment that brought her here, or idle curiosity.
She came to England, and to Cornwall, for a purpose, which she has now accomplished.”
I turned and looked at her.
Her blue eyes were simple and direct.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She has the money,” said Louise.
“That was the plan she had in mind before she took her journey.”
My tutor at Harrow, when teaching in Fifth Form, told us once that truth was something intangible, unseen, which sometimes we stumbled upon and did not recognize, but was found, and held, and understood only by old people near their death, or sometimes by the very pure, the very young.
“You are mistaken,” I said, “you know nothing about her.
She is a woman of impulse and emotion, and her moods are unpredictable and strange, God knows, but it is not in her nature to be otherwise.
Impulse drove her from Florence.
Emotion brought her here.
She stayed because she was happy, and because she had a right to stay.”
Louise looked at me in pity. She put her hand upon my knee.
“Had you been less vulnerable,” she said, “Mrs. Ashley would not have stayed.
She would have called upon my father, struck a close fair bargain, and then departed.