The staring frown remained on Redlaw’s face, and yielded to no other expression until the student, with these words, advanced towards him, as if to touch his hand, when he drew back and cried to him:
“Don’t come nearer to me!”
The young man stopped, shocked by the eagerness of his recoil, and by the sternness of his repulsion; and he passed his hand, thoughtfully, across his forehead.
“The past is past,” said the Chemist. “It dies like the brutes. Who talks to me of its traces in my life? He raves or lies! What have I to do with your distempered dreams? If you want money, here it is. I came to offer it; and that is all I came for. There can be nothing else that brings me here,” he muttered, holding his head again, with both his hands. “There CAN be nothing else, and yet – ”
He had tossed his purse upon the table. As he fell into this dim cogitation with himself, the student took it up, and held it out to him.
“Take it back, sir,” he said proudly, though not angrily. “I wish you could take from me, with it, the remembrance of your words and offer.”
“You do?” he retorted, with a wild light in his eyes. “You do?”
“I do!”
The Chemist went close to him, for the first time, and took the purse, and turned him by the arm, and looked him in the face.
“There is sorrow and trouble in sickness, is there not?” he demanded, with a laugh.
The wondering student answered, “Yes.”
“In its unrest, in its anxiety, in its suspense, in all its train of physical and mental miseries?” said the Chemist, with a wild unearthly exultation. “All best forgotten, are they not?”
The student did not answer, but again passed his hand, confusedly, across his forehead. Redlaw still held him by the sleeve, when Milly’s voice was heard outside.
“I can see very well now,” she said, “thank you, Dolf. Don’t cry, dear. Father and mother will be comfortable again, to-morrow, and home will be comfortable too. A gentleman with him, is there!”
Redlaw released his hold, as he listened.
“I have feared, from the first moment,” he murmured to himself, “to meet her. There is a steady quality of goodness in her, that I dread to influence. I may be the murderer of what is tenderest and best within her bosom.”
She was knocking at the door.
“Shall I dismiss it as an idle foreboding, or still avoid her?” he muttered, looking uneasily around.
She was knocking at the door again.
“Of all the visitors who could come here,” he said, in a hoarse alarmed voice, turning to his companion, “this is the one I should desire most to avoid. Hide me!”
The student opened a frail door in the wall, communicating where the garret-roof began to slope towards the floor, with a small inner room. Redlaw passed in hastily, and shut it after him.
The student then resumed his place upon the couch, and called to her to enter.
“Dear Mr. Edmund,” said Milly, looking round, “they told me there was a gentleman here.”
“There is no one here but I.”
“There has been some one?”
“Yes, yes, there has been some one.”
She put her little basket on the table, and went up to the back of the couch, as if to take the extended hand – but it was not there. A little surprised, in her quiet way, she leaned over to look at his face, and gently touched him on the brow.
“Are you quite as well to-night? Your head is not so cool as in the afternoon.”
“Tut!” said the student, petulantly, “very little ails me.”
A little more surprise, but no reproach, was expressed in her face, as she withdrew to the other side of the table, and took a small packet of needlework from her basket. But she laid it down again, on second thoughts, and going noiselessly about the room, set everything exactly in its place, and in the neatest order; even to the cushions on the couch, which she touched with so light a hand, that he hardly seemed to know it, as he lay looking at the fire. When all this was done, and she had swept the hearth, she sat down, in her modest little bonnet, to her work, and was quietly busy on it directly.