'Emmy,you are the Duchess of Hamptonshire,the Duke of Hamptonshire's wife;you must not go with me!'
'And am I then refused?--Oh,am I refused?'she cried frantically.
'Alwyn,Alwyn,do you say it indeed to me?'
'Yes,I do,dear,tender heart!I do most sadly say it.You must not go.Forgive me,for there is no alternative but refusal.
Though I die,though you die,we must not fly together.It is forbidden in God's law.Good-bye,for always and ever!'
He tore himself away,hastened from the shrubbery,and vanished among the trees.
Three days after this meeting and farewell,Alwyn,his soft,handsome features stamped with a haggard hardness that ten years of ordinary wear and tear in the world could scarcely have produced,sailed from Plymouth on a drizzling morning,in the passenger-ship Western Glory.When the land had faded behind him he mechanically endeavoured to school himself into a stoical frame of mind.His attempt,backed up by the strong moral staying power that had enabled him to resist the passionate temptation to which Emmeline,in her reckless trustfulness,had exposed him,was rewarded by a certain kind of success,though the murmuring stretch of waters whereon he gazed day after day too often seemed to be articulating to him in tones of her well-remembered voice.
He framed on his journey rules of conduct for reducing to mild proportions the feverish regrets which would occasionally arise and agitate him,when he indulged in visions of what might have been had he not hearkened to the whispers of conscience.He fixed his thoughts for so many hours a day on philosophical passages in the volumes he had brought with him,allowing himself now and then a few minutes'thought of Emmeline,with the strict yet reluctant niggardliness of an ailing epicure proportioning the rank drinks that cause his malady.The voyage was marked by the usual incidents of a sailing-passage in those days--a storm,a calm,a man overboard,a birth,and a funeral--the latter sad event being one in which he,as the only clergyman on board,officiated,reading the service ordained for the purpose.The ship duly arrived at Boston early in the month following,and thence he proceeded to Providence to seek out a distant relative.
After a short stay at Providence he returned again to Boston,and by applying himself to a serious occupation made good progress in shaking off the dreary melancholy which enveloped him even now.
Distracted and weakened in his beliefs by his recent experiences,he decided that he could not for a time worthily fill the office of a minister of religion,and applied for the mastership of a school.
Some introductions,given him before starting,were useful now,and he soon became known as a respectable scholar and gentleman to the trustees of one of the colleges.This ultimately led to his retirement from the school and installation in the college as Professor of rhetoric and oratory.
Here and thus he lived on,exerting himself solely because of a conscientious determination to do his duty.He passed his winter evenings in turning sonnets and elegies,often giving his thoughts voice in 'Lines to an Unfortunate Lady,'while his summer leisure at the same hour would be spent in watching the lengthening shadows from his window,and fancifully comparing them with the shades of his own life.If he walked,he mentally inquired which was the eastern quarter of the landscape,and thought of two thousand miles of water that way,and of what was beyond it.In a word he was at all spare times dreaming of her who was only a memory to him,and would probably never be more.
Nine years passed by,and under their wear and tear Alwyn Hill's face lost a great many of the attractive characteristics which had formerly distinguished it.He was kind to his pupils and affable to all who came in contact with him;but the kernel of his life,his secret,was kept as snugly shut up as though he had been dumb.In talking to his acquaintances of England and his life there,he omitted the episode of Batton Castle and Emmeline as if it had no existence in his calendar at all.Though of towering importance to himself,it had filled but a short and small fragment of time,an ephemeral season which would have been wellnigh imperceptible,even to him,at this distance,but for the incident it enshrined.
One day,at this date,when cursorily glancing over an old English newspaper,he observed a paragraph which,short as it was,contained for him whole tomes of thrilling information--rung with more passion-stirring rhythm than the collected cantos of all the poets.
It was an announcement of the death of the Duke of Hamptonshire,leaving behind him a widow,but no children.
The current of Alwyn's thoughts now completely changed.On looking again at the newspaper he found it to be one that was sent him long ago,and had been carelessly thrown aside.But for an accidental overhauling of the waste journals in his study he might not have known of the event for years.At this moment of reading the Duke had already been dead seven months.Alwyn could now no longer bind himself down to machine-made synecdoche,antithesis,and climax,being full of spontaneous specimens of all these rhetorical forms,which he dared not utter.Who shall wonder that his mind luxuriated in dreams of a sweet possibility now laid open for the first time these many years?for Emmeline was to him now as ever the one dear thing in all the world.The issue of his silent romancing was that he resolved to return to her at the very earliest moment.
