Sylvia's Lovers - Page 206/290

'Sylvie, Sylvie!' said he,--and all their conversation had to be

carried on in low tones and whispers, for fear of the listening ears

above,--'don't,--don't, thou'rt rending my heart. Oh, Sylvie,

hearken. There's not a thing I'll not do; there's not a penny I've

got,--th' last drop of blood that's in me,--I'll give up my life for

his.' 'Life,' said she, putting down her hands, and looking at him as if

her looks could pierce his soul; 'who talks o' touching his life?

Thou're going crazy, Philip, I think;' but she did not think so,

although she would fain have believed it. In her keen agony she read

his thoughts as though they were an open page; she sate there,

upright and stony, the conviction creeping over her face like the

grey shadow of death. No more tears, no more trembling, almost no

more breathing. He could not bear to see her, and yet she held his

eyes, and he feared to make the effort necessary to move or to turn

away, lest the shunning motion should carry conviction to her heart.

Alas! conviction of the probable danger to her father's life was

already there: it was that that was calming her down, tightening her

muscles, bracing her nerves. In that hour she lost all her early

youth.

'Then he may be hung,' said she, low and solemnly, after a long

pause. Philip turned away his face, and did not utter a word. Again

deep silence, broken only by some homely sound in the kitchen.

'Mother must not know on it,' said Sylvia, in the same tone in which

she had spoken before.

'It's t' worst as can happen to him,' said Philip. 'More likely

he'll be transported: maybe he'll be brought in innocent after all.' 'No,' said Sylvia, heavily, as one without hope--as if she were

reading some dreadful doom in the tablets of the awful future.

'They'll hang him. Oh, feyther! feyther!' she choked out, almost

stuffing her apron into her mouth to deaden the sound, and catching

at Philip's hand, and wringing it with convulsive force, till the

pain that he loved was nearly more than he could bear. No words of

his could touch such agony; but irrepressibly, and as he would have

done it to a wounded child, he bent over her, and kissed her with a

tender, trembling kiss. She did not repulse it, probably she did not

even perceive it.

At that moment Phoebe came in with the gruel. Philip saw her, and

knew, in an instant, what the old woman's conclusion must needs be;

but Sylvia had to be shaken by the now standing Philip, before she

could be brought back to the least consciousness of the present

time. She lifted up her white face to understand his words, then she

rose up like one who slowly comes to the use of her limbs.