'Good-Bye, Sweetheart!' A tale

Front matter

"GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!' 31 i;\ RHODA BROUGHTON, AUTHOR OF "COMETH UP AS A FLOWER," AND "RED AS A ROSE IS SHE IN THREE VOLUMES. VOL. III. LONDON: RICHARD BENTLEY AND SON- 1872. (All rights rcsa-zed.) CONTENTS OF VOL. III. Part II. — continued. CHAP. PAGE XIV. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . .1 XV. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . 14 XVI. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . • 31 XVII. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 5 1 XVIII. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . -65 XIX. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . . 89 Part III. NIGHT. I. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . .123 II. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . . 133 III. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 170 IV. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 1 86 V. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 200 VI. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . . 21 Contents. IV CHAP. PACK VII. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS , . 234 VIII. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 254 IX. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . .265 X. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . . 283 XI. WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS . .291 XII. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS . . 30O H CHAP. VOL. III. 1 "GOOD-BYE, SWEETHEART!" PAPtT II. — continued.

CHAPTER XIV. WHAT JEMIMA SAYS.

R. SCROPE returns to the draw ing-room, as he left it, alone. As he enters, we both look up and smile, as one does smile with vague complacency at the sight of anything young and specially comely. " Did you find her ?" I ask, as I kneel before the fire, giving it a vigorous and searching poke, for his benefit. " Yes." " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 2 He says merely this — almost the shortest of all monosyllables ; but there is some thing in the tone in which he says it that makes me pause, poker in hand, from my noisy toil, to examine him more narrowly. " You have been quarrelling, as usual, I suppose ?" I say, with a wily attempt to come at the matter of their conversation without seeming too indecently curious. " Lenore always quarrels with every body," says Sylvia, patting the pug's fat stomach, as he lies on his back, with his eyes rolling awfully and a bit of rosy tongue showing between his black lips, in a state of Sybaritic enjoyment on her lap.

Chapter I. What The Author Says

JE^ÆgFTER Life's little hot day, comes «»jPkw? Death's long cool night; whether of the two is the pleasanter ? Well, we shall know anon. Oh ! patient friends, you have come with me so far, come with me yet a little further. I will not keep you long. Already the shadows stretch themselves ; the faint-coloured even cometh. Summer is here again — early summer, early June, as when first, oh reader, you and I met and panted together through the " endless days," when even " Good-bye, Sweetheart /" 124 night brought not darkness. Down in England, the meadows have a lilac tinge over them, from the ripe heavy-headed grasses, and the horse-chestnut flower's spikes have changed into little prickly green balls. But we are not in England, oh reader, you and I ; we are in Switzer land, in the high cold valley of the En gadin.

WHAT JEMIMA SAYS. We are at the end of our day's journey, have stiffly descended from the huge dusty carriage in which we have crampedly sat all the long and shining day. To-morrow we shall reach our final destination, Pont resina. Meanwhile here we are, up among the mountains, the torrents, the pines, at this loveliest village of Bergun. An hour has passed since our arrival, and we have dined, if you can apply that sacred word to the empty form of tapping with our knives a black boned chicken's skeleton, and sipping a nauseous wine of the country, black as Tartarus, and with a flavour that is agree ably compounded of pills, slate-pencil, and ink. There is no denying — degrading as it is to the supremacy of mind over body — that a bad dinner has a depressing effect. Not one of us three but feels cross and empty.

Sylvia tries to sit upon a hard bottomed, straight-backed chair, as if it were one of her own padded easy ones, and fails. Lenore stalks to the window and looks over the balcony. I think that people grow after they are thought grown up, oftener than is usually supposed. Le nore has certainly grown within the last six months, or perhaps it is only her loss of flesh that gives her such a tall look. She used to have a good deal of the shapely solidity that constitutes a person's claim to be a fine woman — rather a butcher's term of commendation, at best ; — shapely she "Good-bye, Sweethearts' 126 must always be, butfne she is no longer ; only very slender and willowy. I pick up the visitors' book, read the dreary wag geries, the lame rhymes, the consequential commendations of bed and board. I come to the last entry : " Mr. Tomkins, London.

" Mrs. Tomkins, „ " Miss Tomkins, ,, " Miss L. Tomkins, „ " Mr. J. T. Tomkins, „ " Miss Harris, " Exceedingly pleased with the accom modation at this hotel — the attendance excellent, rooms most clean, and food better than at any other hotel in the Engadin." I read this aloud. " There is a pros pect for us !" " You are not serious ? " cries Sylvia, starting upright in her chair, and opening eyes as round as marbles in unaffected dis may. " That is not really there ! You are only joking !" " Read for yourself," I answer, handing the book to her, while I joined our junior in the window. Well, one must send all appetite to one's eyes ; there is at least plenty of food for them. The pearly even ing sky, cut by the cold lilac peaks ; the mountains, that wear always round their waist and feet a girdle of great pines ; a sombre army — rising, pointed top above pointed top, in their endless fadeless green ; the rough torrent course, that fur rows the hill's face, like the traces of a tearful agony ; an evening glimmer of meadow flowers ; a flash of bright water.

And right under us the little village street, the deep-roofed low houses, the tiny case ments, out of which the lavish pinks and flowered picotees are hanging ; the queer " Good-bye, Sweetheart /" 128 sententious inscription on the chalet nearest us : — Das Haus stet in Gottes Hand, Jan Peder Grigori Bin Ich genand." And is not that Jan Peder himself, sitting outside, on a log of wood ? He is old and withered, and ■ very much the worse for wear. Insensibly I begin to forget the void feeling that ruffled my temper five minutes ago, as I listen to the soothing drip, drij;., of the two-spouted pump, that is always pouring into a wooden trough. The pump seems to be the rendezvous of the village ; the leisurely chatter, in this odd mongrel Romansch tongue, rises soft and subdued to our ears. A tinkling of slow bells, as a herd of lovely smoke-coloured cows come slowly treading down the street, and stoop their sleek necks to drink.

If one could see the inside of these folks' lives no doubt one would find that they were as basely grovelling as those of our own lower orders — lives probably brightened only by garlic and beer ; but looking now at the outside of them, on this quiet purple evening, it seems as if one had come upon a little sudden patch of old-world innocent Arcadia. " I wish that Jan Peder Gregori would go indoors," says Lenore, gravely ; " it must be very bad for him, being out so late." " There must be some one here beside us," I say, leaning over the balcony, and pointing to a second and smaller dusty carriage, drawn up behind our great lum bering ark. " A man, too," says Lenore, with lazy interest, " if a' portmanteau be a sufficient proof of masculinity." " It is such a bran-new one, too," con- VOL. III.

" Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 130 tinue I, laughing, " that he must be either a just-married man, or a man just about to be married." " Who was it said that a new flannel petticoat was an infallible sign of a bride ?" asks Lenore, languidly. " Does the same hold good of men and portmanteaus ? I wish we could see his initials, but the hat box hides them. " Now that I think of it," I say, medita tively, " I have a vision of having seen vestiges of food on that table in the corner; let us make Kolb find out who he is, for by his luggage, I feel sure that he is an Englishman." I am right. An Englishman he is, name unknown ; he has come down from St. Moritz, and is on his homeward read ; he is to set off at cock-crow to-morrow, and he went out walking only five minutes before our arrival. This is all the inform ation we obtain, all the food we get to keep alive our faint and flagging in terest.

" Do you mean to stay fustily indoors all evening ?" asks Lenore, presently, with a yawn, " because I do not. I am sick of Jan Peder, and the pump, and the goats ; I shall go and explore, like Mrs. Elton in Emma. " Do not !" cry I, hastily and dissua sively. " You know that going out when the dew is falling always brings on your cough." " Pooh !" replies she, lightly. " What matter if it does ? I am going to set up such a stock of strength at Pontresina that it would be a thousand pities not to be a little worse before I get there." " At least put on your " I begin, but she interrupts me. " Did you ever know me to take advice in all your life ?" she asks, with a petulant gesture. " I should not wonder if I met 9—2 " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 132 our unknown friend of the new portman teau ; I am not sure that I am not going to look for him. Au revoir !" I gaze after her and sigh, with a line of ' Elaine ' running in my head — " Being so very wilful, you must go."

Chapter II

" There cannot be a pinch in death more sharp than this is." WHAT THE AUTHOR SAYS. FTER all she puts a shawl over her head ; it is not a very thick one, but neither is the mountain air very keen on this softly-creeping sum mer night It is red, and the old men and the women sitting in the doorways of the dark little houses stare at it admiringly. She passes amongst them quickly — past the rickety little wooden balconies, the piles of firewood, the numberless odd little " Good bye, Sweetheart !" 134 casements, like windows in a doll's house — it is not them that she wants — till, at a sudden turn, the village is behind her, out of sight — the laughing, leisurely, chattering village — and the river that she sought is before her. A great bold hill-shoulder rises in front of her against the dark night sky, and beside her the river boils and maddens along in riotous white play ; it is so swift that the eye cannot follow it ; it tosses high its cold spray, and cries, exult ingly, " Oh, snow !

I am as white as you." Nobody sees her — she is all alone ; even the broad-faced moon has not yet looked in silver and pearl over the hill. When one is alone one does many foolish things. Lenore throws herself on her knees on a flat stone close to the brink — dashed, in deed, by the stream's stormy white dust — and speaks out loud to it : " Oh, good, kind little river ! will you drown memory for me ? — will you drown Paul ?" Lenore is not always thinking of Paul ; sometimes for almost a day she forgets him ; but, long as it is since he cast her off, and short as was the time during which she possessed him, the impulse still holds her, on seeing any beautiful thing, to say, " I will show it to Paul ;" on hearing any witty thing, " I will tell it to Paul." Paul was a cross fellow, cruel and cold, as she sometimes tells herself ; but he would have loved this mad river, biting and ravening with fierce foam-teeth against the dark boulders that lie in its bed, and crying violently to them, " Let me pass !"

If he were here now, among the yellow trefoil, his arm round her waist and her head on his shoulder ! — they two standing, in a dumb ecstasy, with only the larches waving their green plumes above their heads, and the water's endless restless roar, that ceases " Good-bye, Sweetheart /" 136 not day nor night, January nor June, making a loud hubbub at their feet — alone with the river, the mountains, and God ! She can almost feel his arm ; she turns her eyes to look up into his, but then the dream flies ; there are no kind eyes to look into — there is no Paul — none ! She starts up hastily, and hurries on. The gorge narrows ; there is only room for her and for the river — the panting fury of the stream. "Oh river ! you take my breath away. Tarry a little ; I cannot keep up with you !" But the river makes answer : " I cannot tarry ; I have an errand into the great grey sea."

On and on, on and on she saunters, not heeding how far nor whither, until at length she comes to a slight hand-bridge of planks, that gives and vibrates beneath her. There she stands, and leans over the slender railing, gazing, with eyes that try in vain to keep up with it, at the swirling torrent. The evening is both darkening and lightening : darkening, for the sun is gone further and further away ; lightening, for the moon is coming — yea, come. Already she has washed the hills' faces with her cool silver flood : now her pearl-white feet have reached — have lightly trodden on the water — the wonderful water ! Can it be all the same — the same when it lies in opal sleep, and when it plunges against and angrily smites its drenched rocks ? If one had but some one — some dear person to show it all to !

After crossing the bridge the path she has hitherto followed takes a sharp turning round the spur of a hill, and is immediately lost to sight. As she stands, still leaning over the rickety hand-rail, and watching the moon-coloured bubbles, she hears a footstep coming along this unseen path. It is growing late ; the moon is rising high ; this place is inconceivably lonely. Her " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 138 first impulse is to turn and run homewards, but her second contradicts it. Why should she stir ? Bah ! it is probably some innocent rough peasant, clumping home to bed in his deep-eaved chalet. He will stare at her cloak, and probably give her a Romansch " good-night," to which she will be puzzled to respond ; so she stays. Nearer and nearer comes the footstep, and her heart beats a trifle quicker than its wont.

Her eyes are fixed on the corner which will give to view the owner of this slow and intermittent tread. Here he comes, out of the rock-shadow into the light ! He is not a peasant ! He is — surely, he is an Englishman ! He is — Paid ! Oh, God in heaven ! it cannot be ! Men dress so much alike — there is such a deceptive resemblance between all the men of a class at a little distance. He comes a step or two nearer, then stops and looks upwards. The moon shines down full and white on his upturned face — the honest, shrewd face, that is neither gentle nor beautiful. She sees his cool calm eyes glitter in the moonbeams. He is carelessly dressed, without any necktie. His strong throat rises bare and muscular, and his hands are buried deep in the pockets of the old Dinan shooting jacket. Do you think that she faints or topples over into the water, or screams or laughs hysterically, or calls out loud ?

Not she ! She only stands still, with one slight hand hard grasping the hand-rail, and with a heart whose loud pulsations drown the voice of the triumphant foamy stream, waiting for her heaven to come to her. Has Death let her slip by him, having seen her bitter pain ? Is she already in the blessed land ? Paul is so busy moon-gazing that he is close to her — his foot is upon the plank — before he perceives her. Then he jumps almost out of his clothes " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 140 — out of his Dinan shooting jacket— out of his skin. " Lenore ! ! !" She could not have cried "Pauls' in answer if you had offered her all the king doms of the world as a bribe. He stoops his tall head till his eager face is close to hers ; he stares hard into her eyes ; he even stretches out his hand and touches her red cloak to assure himself that she is real.

Yes, it is no ghost-woman ; it is a real Lenore, with a face much paler, indeed, than the Lenore he remembers — a face grave with the gravity of intense emotion, touched with the trouble of overpowering wonder — that is looking back at him with wide and lovely eyes. " God Almighty ! who would have thought of seeing you here ?" In the accents of intense surprise it is difficult to ascertain the presence or ab sence of joy or sorrow. One would be puzzled to say whether Paul were very glad or very grieved at this meeting at the world's end with his old love. " Lenore ! — is it Lenore ?" (again nar rowly scanning her white and quivering face.) " How, in the name of wonder, did you come here ?" It is stupid to be so tongueless, is not it ? — standing dumb, with hanging head, like a child playing at being shy.

But she seems to have lost the art of framing words. " Will not you speak to me ?" he con tinues, with an eager hesitation, mistaking the cause of her speechlessness ; " will not you shake hands with me ?" She puts out her hand in a moment : does he feel how it is shaking as it lies in his cool clasp ? " You — you — are not alone here ?" (in voluntarily glancing at her left hand). " You are with — with " "Good-bye, Szvect heart !" 142 "No, I am not alone," she answers, speaking every word very slowly and carefully, as if not quite sure whether the right words would come ; " Jemima and Sylvia " "Jemima /" he says, pronouncing the word with a lingering emphasis, as if it carried him back into memory, and smiling rather pensively. Both are silent for a few moments ; — only two voices are heard : the river's loud hoarse one, as it keeps calling always to the rocks and the dumb green pines, and the grasshopper's sharp and shrill — and infinitely content.

If it could but last for ever ! They two standing on that narrow bridge, on a sheet of silver, the river — all silver, too — tearing and roaring be low them ; the larches softly tossing their small green feathers ; the unsleeping grass hopper singing his pleasant song ; and they two looking kindly into each other's eyes. But when could one ever say to any happy moment, as Joshua said to the docile sun, " Stand thou still " ? He will not stand still ; he could not if he would ; he is jostled away by his pushing younger brothers. " How often I have wondered whether I should ever meet you again," says Paul, presently, with a long sigh ; " after all, the world is small — and if I did, where and how ? Certainly, this is the last place that ever would have entered my head ; and yet, only five minutes ago I was thinking of you."

" Were you ?" she says, softly, while her eyes shine gently back at him, like beauti fullest dew-wet flowers through happy tears ! " You have forgiven me ?" he says, anxiously catching hold of her other hand, and holding both in the same loose friendly clasp in which he had before held the one. " We are friends, are not we ? At peace ?" " Good-bye, Sweethea? t /" 144 She has no hands to hide her face ; she cannot hinder him from seeing how her drooped eyes brim over — how the heavy great tears are rolling down over her smart scarlet cloak. In the tender gen tleness of her small wet face there is not much war. " Do not cry," he says, looking surprised and miserable, as a man always does, when a woman unexpectedly weeps. " What is there to cry about ? I am not " (smiling rather awkwardly) "going to scold you, this time.

You know I always was a good hand at lecturing, was not I ? Often and often since I have wished that I had not been quite such a good one. ... I can hardly believe that it is you," he says, after a pause, again interrupting the river's and the grasshopers' duet. "What have you been doing to yourself ? Somehow you are different. You are too old to grow, I suppose ; people do not grow at nineteen ; but — but — surely you are thinner than you used to be ? Have you been ill ? Are you ill now ?" " Not very," she answers, lightly, " any body else would have made a trifle of it, but you know I always make the most of things, and I have not much of a constitu tion — so they tell me." He does not ask any other question for the moment. " For my part, I ' am glad," she con tinues, with a restless laugh.

" I never could see what use a good constitution was to anyone, except to make them suffer more, and die harder when their time came. " I suppose you have been threatening to break a bloodvessel again," he says, with a smiling allusion to what she had told him on one of the earliest days of their acquaintance. " Good God ! can that be only a year ago ?" vol. in. " Good-bye, Sweetheart /" 146 " Only a year ago !" she echoes, dreamily. " But a year is a long time." " You are pale, too," he says, proceeding with his scrutiny; "are you always pale now ? The only time that I remember you as pale as you are now was that night when I upset you into the Ranee ! How wet you were ! How the water dripped from your long hair ! I did not believe till then that women really had such long hair. I can see you now !"

His grey eyes look kind and almost wistful as he thus travels back into the pretty dead past. " Can you ?" she says, almost inaudibly. " It was all a mistake, I suppose," he continues, sighing, " a blunder — a bungle — but it was pleasant while it lasted, was not it ?" She cannot speak for tears. " Lenore," he says, after another silence, in a tone of stronger excitement than any that he has yet used, " I am going to tell you something. Often and often I have wondered whether I should ever have the chance of telling you. Sometimes I have wished that I should, and sometimes I have hoped that I should not. It does not much matter what you think of me now, one way or another, but I do not think that it will improve your opinion of either my wisdom or my humility. Do you remember that last letter you sent me ?"

She is not pale now ; he cannot accuse her of it. No rose in any midsummer garden was ever so red ; and her streaming eyes flash in the mild moonlight with the old angry spirit. Is he going to twit her with that poor little overture that mis carried so piteously ? " I did not believe in it," he goes on, still in hot excitement. " I was sore and mad from your galling bitter words. Le nore " (almost entreatingly), " why do you let your tongue cut like a knife ? I thought 10 — " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" it was only a flirting manœuvre to get me back and make a fool of me a second time. I hate being made a fool of ! Nobody had ever taken the trouble to do it before. I hate being trodden upon. I like to walk upright and go my own way." " Well ?" " You remember the answer I sent — I hope you burnt it — I am not proud of it," reddening through all his sun tan.

" Well, when it was gone I read your letter over again, and by dint of poring over it line by line I grew to think that there was a true ring in it. Lenore, it was very clever of you ! I do not know how you managed to get that true ring. I began to think of — of — the dear old time " (his voice, though he is a man, shakes a little). " I began — you will laugh at me for thinking of such a trifle at such a moment — to remember the old blue gown and Huelgoat." She turns away, and leans over the bridge ; and, unseen by him, unseen by anyone, her tears hotly drop into the cold river and are swallowed by it. " I recollected things you used to say," he continues, with a pensive smile, given rather to the past than the present. " You had such a pretty fond way of saying things — well" (dashing his hand across his forehead, and abruptly changing his tone) " the upshot of it was that I resolved to ask you to — to — to — kiss and make friends in short — I suppose one may as well word it in that childish way as any other.

I had even " (beginning to laugh harshly, for one's laughs at one's own expense are rarely melodious) " got a new pen, squared my elbows, and sat down to write to you." She is trembling all over, and panting, as one breathless from a long race. " Why did not you ? — why did not you ?" she cries, with almost a wail. " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 150 " Why did 'not I?" he repeats, looking at her with unfeigned astonishment. " I wonder at your asking that. Why ? Because at that very moment, not a week after you had composed that triumph of pathos" (with a bitter sneer), " I heard of your engagement to Scrope. I saw how much the true ring was worth then ; I believe I laughed. There is always some thing to be thankful for, and I was heartily thankful that I had not written. There is no use in eating more dirt than one can help in this world, is there ?"

" But I am not engaged now !" she cries, passionately. " I can hardly believe that I ever was really ; people exaggerate things so in the telling. I think it was always more play than earnest." " More play than earnest /" he repeats, in utter and blank astonishment. " Why, I understood that the wedding day had come — that you were all dressed — and that it was only put off on account of your having been taken suddenly ill !" " Yes," she answers, incoherently ; " thank God, I was ill, very ill ; that was what saved me ! Thank God ! Thank God !" " Saved you !" he repeats, looking at her with unlimited wonder. " How do you mean ? Surely it was your own doing ? It was only put off, was not it ? — it is still to be ?" " Never ! never !" she cries, wildly. " Who can have told you such things ? It was all a farce from beginning to end ; it never was anything serious.

I — I — think I must have been a little off my head." " And you are not engaged to Scrope ?" (with an accent of extreme surprise). " Not I," she answers, vehemently ; " do not suggest anything so dreadful." " Nor to any one else ?" " Good-bye, Sweetheart !" 152 " Any one else /" she echoes, scornfully. " To whom else should I be ? Must I always be engaged to some one ?" Now that it is all clear between them, now that all clouds of misconception have been swept away, now that they are all alone here in the moonlight, surely he will take her in his arms. Her head will rest on the shoulder of the old jacket, where it has so often confidently lain before. But he only turns away with something like a curse, and says, half under his breath, " God ! what lies people tell !" A silence. When next Paul speaks it is in a con strained and sedulously governed voice.