“Let me be with you always,” he pleaded. “It means the difference between light and darkness to me. You have done so much for me. Will you not finish your work? Will you not trust me? It is no hot passion that can pass away, my love for you. It springs from all that is best in me—from the part of me that is wholesome and joyous and strong, the part of me that belongs to you.”
Releasing her, he turned away.
“The other part of me—the blackguard—it is dead, dear,—dead and buried. I did not know I was a blackguard, I thought myself a fine fellow, till one day it came home to me. Suddenly I saw myself as I really was. And the sight of the thing frightened me and I ran away from it. I said to myself I would begin life afresh, in a new country, free of every tie that could bind me to the past. It would mean poverty—privation, maybe, in the beginning. What of that? The struggle would brace me. It would be good sport. Ah, well, you can guess the result: the awakening to the cold facts, the reaction of feeling. In what way was I worse than other men? Who was I, to play the prig in a world where others were laughing and dining? I had tramped your city till my boots were worn into holes. I had but to abandon my quixotic ideals—return to where shame lay waiting for me, to be welcomed with the fatted calf. It would have ended so had I not chanced to pass by your door that afternoon and hear you strumming on the piano.”
So Billy was right, after all, thought Tommy to herself, the piano does help.
“It was so incongruous—a piano in Crane Court—I looked to see where the noise came from. I read the name of the paper on the doorpost. ‘It will be my last chance,’ I said to myself. ‘This shall decide it.’ ”
He came back to her. She had not moved. “I am not afraid to tell you all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will understand, you can forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a man that he has done with evil. Will you not trust me?”
She put her hands in his. “I am trusting you,” she said, “with all my life. Don’t make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it.”
It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.
What troubled her most was that she had not been quite frank with Peter, so that Peter had to defend her against herself.
“I attacked you so suddenly,” explained Peter, “you had not time to think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even from herself.”
“I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy,” feared Tommy: “I seem to have so many womanish failings.”
Peter took himself into quiet places and trained himself to face the fact that another would be more to her than he had ever been, and Clodd went about his work like a bear with a sore head; but they neither of them need have troubled themselves so much. The marriage did not take place till nearly fifteen years had passed away, and much water had to flow beneath old London Bridge before that day.
The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a woman who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later stole back in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a child’s hand calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet again; but always that white baby hand called upwards through the earth, trample it down as she would. Tommy read the story one evening in an old miscellany, and sat long before the dead fire, the book open on her lap, and shivered; for now she knew the fear that had been haunting her.