I shall tell you that I am ready to speak. At present, and suddenly collecting all the reminiscences I can, and without time to marshal them, or to weigh their value, I think I may say—and I am really striving to use words that shall be as indefinite as I can make them—I think I may say that there are conjectures which we are bound to exhaust before we dare”
“Stop,” said Arthur Lygon, “you have used a word which you would not use lightly—reminiscences. Are they connected with my life or hers? You can answer that without consideration.”
“Yours,” said Mr. Berry, quickly.
It was an untruth. The word on which Lygon had fixed, his friend had used unadvisedly. And before the last question was put, such thoughts came, darkening, around the memories which Berry spoke of, that he feared, without more cautious preparation, to let Lygon enter the circle. He judged it safer to exclude him by that single word of reply, which, however, should have been
“Hers.”
“Mine?” said Lygon. “The weight that you would take from my mind, if you could show that anything in my life had been the spring of this. I should enter so cheerfully, or at least so courageously, upon the quest which we have now to begin.”
“In defiance of those words of warning in the parting note?”
“They are not her words. And if they were, they must have been forced from her by some strange and damnable cheat. While I speak—a light! Has some one lied to her in the spirit of what you were imputing just now?”
“Would Laura endure any charge against her husband—at least without laying her hand in his, and asking whether he dared retain it.”
“You are right, and my thought wrongs her,” said Arthur, slowly.
His lingering utterance did not escape the notice of his friend, who, however, made no remark upon it, then.
“You must give me time, I repeat,” said Mr. Berry. “A day is not now of consequence, as you allowed the first hours to pass without taking any active steps.”
“Would you have had me treat her as a criminal,” asked Arthur, “have had her described to the police, and notice given to stop her at the sea-ports, and on the railways?”
“You have not done it,” said Mr. Berry, “and as it is now too late, we need not consider what a husband might have been justified in doing. Such steps as you have taken seem very prudent, as there is nothing for any one to say against Mrs. Lygon, did she return to-morrow.”
“If she return to-morrow ten years, no one shall say a word against her,” said Arthur.
“I am a hard old lawyer,” said Berry, touched; “but I think I believe that love like that felt by you is too true to be ultimately unrewarded. Yes, I believe that you will be delivered out of this misery.”
“I pray that I may,” said Lygon, “for it is indeed a misery hard to be borne.”
THE MONTHS.
NOVEMBER.
One of the grand distinctions between townspeople and country-people is that townsfolk have a positive dislike of certain seasons of the year, while rural folk never dream of such a thing. The familiar abuse of the month of November comes from Londoners mainly; and, for the rest, it may be traced to dwellers in streets. They have not opportunity in the short days to get into the country, and see what the woods are like, or even the highways, during the month which connects autumn and winter. People who ride, and have spirit enough to leave the sloppy streets, and go forth from under the low-hanging fog and smoke which hide the top of the church-spire, will always bear testimony to the rewards which the courageous walker gathers from rural objects in November as in every other month. Squires, farmers, and labourers, ought to know most of the inconveniences and irksomeness of bad weather and short days; yet it does not occur to them to hate the month on account of these things; it has its own advantages and pleasures, and for these the country population is not ungrateful.
We have got rid of the old prejudice about November being favourable to suicide. Our modern registration has proved to us that that imputation is false; the number of suicides in November being less than in almost any month of the year. When the notion grew up, men were not such good physiologists as they are now. They were not aware that suicide does not ensue from low spirits alone, but from a state of brain which may occasion low spirits, but is quite distinct from them. There are seasons of the year which, by affecting the circulation, and consequently the digestive and nervous systems, provoke to suicide much more than gloomy weather and short days can do. There is less self-murder in this month than in some of the brightest of the year.
The gloom in London is certainly both inconvenient and dispiriting. I do not remember that I cared much about it when I lived there: but now, when on occasion I alight from the train on a November morning, and find the railway officials attended everywhere by a cloud of their own breath, and poking about with a lantern, or appearing and disappearing in a yellow fog, I do wonder how half a million of families in London streets can keep up their cheerfulness. In the shops, indeed, the people behind the counter are smiling, as usual, amidst the gaslights which are burning on till noon. The most anxious persons visible are perhaps the cab and omnibus drivers, who have, in addition to the regular care of driving, to peer forward into the fog, in blind apprehension of what may be coming. There is something dismal in reading or working by lamplight at home at midday, or in poring over one’s book at the window to avoid the necessity. If the fog should at length suddenly clear off, and show the parks overhung by the pale blue sky of autumn, and their almost leafless trees touched by the level rays of the setting sun, the Londoner may form some idea of what November is in the country.
We have mists in the mornings, of course; and the girls come in from their early morning walk,