A short examination showed him a tree which leaned against the far side of the building. Scaling the trunk, he crept out along a bough, dropped lightly on the thatch, and crept up to its apex. Over the edge he looked into the room, as from the opposite point at the base of a triangle. Three-fourths of its area were within his view, and this was what he saw.
Hawke sat almost facing him in front of a table with his back towards a blazing fire. A number of letters lay before him, and he was evidently reading them aloud, for now and again he looked up with narrowed eyes and a crafty smile, much as Gordon remembered him when he held a winning hand at whist.
The sex of his visitor was revealed by a shawl trailing on the hearthrug. But of her person, Gordon caught not so much as a glimpse. For she stood on the near side of the room, concealed from him.
Hawke, as he finished each letter, placed it methodically on a file which lay by his side. One, however, seemed longer than the rest and afforded him peculiar interest. He turned back to the first page and read it a second time, pointing here and there to passages with his finger. All at once the slender figure of a girl moved into the light. She passed round the table and stood behind Hawke’s shoulder, her face gleaming pale as ivory from a cloud of tumbled hair. Gordon recognized her on the instant. It was Kate Nugent. She bent over Hawke as if to follow him more closely, and with a sudden clutch tore the paper from his hand and flung it into the fire. Hawke started to his feet, transfigured. Some such flame as was shrivelling the letter seemed to leap across his face. He pinned Kate’s wrist to the table and thrust his head close down upon hers. What he said Gordon could not distinguish for the closed window, but he noticed a savage incisiveness about the movement of his lips, and saw the veins swell upon his forehead and along his throat.
For a moment the girl confronted him, returning glance for glance, but only for a moment. The defiance flickered out of her face, her lips shaped to an entreaty, and, with a meek gentleness which was infinitely pitiful, she unclasped the fingers about her wrist. She moved towards the window, stumbling as she went. She felt blindly for the catch, unfastened it as though her hands were numbed, and slowly lifted the sash.
CHAPTER III
SHE LEANED AGAINST the sill, gazing into the darkness. After a while she turned. Hawke was watching her with a complacent smile.
“And it pleases you to torture me! You enjoy seeing a woman suffer. I couldn’t have believed that any man could be such a coward and so mean!”
Hawke laughed pleasantly.
“Give them to me!” she cried.
“Think!” he answered in a mock appeal. “They will be my only consolation after you are married.”
“Give them to me!” she cried again.
Hawke was standing by the fireplace and she moved towards him, changing her tone to one of wondering reproach.
“You can’t mean to keep them! You are just laughing at me — for the minute. Yes! yes! I know. That was your way. But you will give me the letters in the end, won’t you? Look! I will kneel to you for them. Only give them to me!” And she sank on her knees at his feet before the fire.
“They will be much safer with me,” he replied. “You might leave them about. David might pry. And it would strain even his innocence to misunderstand them.”
“Can you think I should keep them?” she said with a shiver of disgust. “Give them to me or burn them yourself! Yes!” she continued, feverishly, clutching his arm, “burn them yourself — now — here — and I will thank you all my life.”
She stirred the coals into a blaze.
“See! They will burn so quickly,” and she darted out her hands towards the file.
Hawke snatched it away. “No, no!” he laughed. “You must vary your game if you mean to win.”
He reached up and hung it on the mirror over his mantelpiece.
“There!” said he. “You will have to jump for them.”
The girl stared at him incredulously; the words seeming to her some trick of her strained senses. But she glanced upwards to the file and sank back with a low moan.
“Will nothing touch you?” she said.
For a moment there was a pause. Only the noise of the brook laughing happily as it raced over the stones behind the house broke the silence in the room. Kate heard it vaguely, and it awoke a reminiscence.
“Do you remember?” she said. “At Poonah? There was a stream running past the verandah there.”
She was speaking wearily, with closed eyes, and the firelight played upon a face as white and impassive as a wax mask.
“Yes! I remember,” answered Hawke, his voice softening with the memory of those few months in India, The recollection was not of what they had thought or said or done — that would not have moved him; but simply of how he had felt towards her. He stood and watched her curiously. The dark lashes began to glisten, and then all in a moment her apathy broke up, and she was shaking in an agony of tears.
“I was never so hard to you,” she faltered between her sobs.
The words floated out freely to Gordon and set his senses reeling. In Hawke they deepened the phantom tenderness already aroused. There was something so childlike in their simplicity. Indeed, as she crouched upon the floor in her abandonment, her white frock stained by her long journey, her sash all crumpled, her loosened hair curling vagrantly about her neck, and her slender figure quivering down to the tips of her shoes, she looked little more than a child masquerading in the emotions of a woman.
He took down the file and swung it irresolutely to and fro upon his finger. Kate turned to him impulsively.
“Give them to me! You promised you would if I came to fetch them. You can’t break that promise now! Think what you have made me risk! Suppose they find out at home? It would have been cruel enough if that had been the only danger. But to bring me to the village where you and Dav — where you and he are the only strangers!”
“That was not my fault,” Hawke interposed. “How could I tell he was going to blunder over here? I only met him this afternoon. However, you needn’t be afraid. The fool’s asleep.”
Gordon felt an almost overpowering impulse to laugh aloud. The irony of the situation was the one thing which his mind could grasp. However, he set his teeth fast to restrain the desire. He would learn all that was to be known first. He could disclose himself to Hawke afterwards.
“Are you sure he suspects nothing?” Kate asked.
“Perfectly. I was with him this evening, I tell you. He left his lamp burning, so that I had to wait until the place was quiet to put it out, for fear you should mistake the house. There is nothing to fear. Why, he told me that he hadn’t even existed until he met you.”
“Don’t!” Kate exclaimed.
“You need not reproach yourself for his credulity. They say it’s quite good for a man to believe in a woman.”
Kate remained silent, knowing that replies were but fuel to his sneers. But her eyes caught the clock and awoke her to the lapse of time.
“Look!” she cried. “It is past one. I must go back, and it is so far. Give me the letters, I am tired.”
Hawke determined to comply. So much the sight of her fresh, young beauty, drooping at his feet, had wrung from him. But he was an epicure where women were concerned. He took a natural delight in evoking their emotions, and when the display gratified him, he allowed no obtrusive knowledge of its cost to them to abridge his enjoyment. So he merely repeated —
“They will be safe with me.”
“I cannot trust you.”
“Why not?”
The question rang cold and sharp, like the crack of a pistol. Kate looked at his face and realised that she had lost her ground. But, as she had said, she was tired. She was too over-wrought to choose her phrases.
“I dare not marry him and leave those letters in your hands.”
“Why not? You have trusted me with more than your letters.”
The brutality of the remark was emphasised by the harshness of his tone. But she re
plied, quietly —
“And you taunt me with my trust! Surely that is reason enough.”
“You are afraid that I shall use them!”
“I don’t know. I only know that if you keep them, I may be his wife, but you will be my master; and I dare not face that.”
The explanation appeased Hawke. It warmed his vanity and disposed him to reward so clear an appreciation of his power. Only the reward she asked was nothing less than the renunciation of that power. He paused over that.
“Tell me,” Kate continued, “why did you force me to come here?”
“I am not sure,” he replied, musingly. “Perhaps I wanted to see you again.”
“No! That was not why. You would have come to me yourself, if that had been the cause.”
“What was the reason, then?” Hawke smiled indulgently. This scrutiny of his intentions added to his satisfaction. It lifted him in his self-esteem, attributed to him an unusual personality. For, as a rule, people find the twenty-four hours barely long enough to discover what their neighbours do, and so are compelled to leave their thoughts and aims alone. Hawke loomed larger on his own horizon, the more particularly because the analyst was a young woman and well-favoured.
“What was the reason?”
“Just my marriage. You felt that I was slipping out of your grasp — escaping you. I know you so well.”
“But it’s almost a year since I have seen you. I have left you alone during all that time. So, even if I had possessed any power, you can’t urge that I have used it.”
“No! But because you possessed it,” Kate insisted. “Because you were certain you possessed it; and so you were content to let things lie. Now, however, everything was changing. I was escaping you; and you made me come here at night, across that horrible lonely pass, just to assert your mastery over me — just to convince yourself it was real. Don’t you see? I dare not go back and leave those letters with you.”
Hawke wavered. If he gave her what she wished, she would escape him, as she had said. She would pass clean beyond his reach. She would have no fear of him — no strong feeling of any kind.
“Suppose that I give you your way,” he said, hesitatingly; “what is going to happen between you and me?”
The unexpected question scared the girl, and she answered, catching her breath —
“Everything was over between us — ages ago, it seems to me. You have not seen me for a year. You said so yourself.”
“Yes! I know,” he replied, slowly, and Kate felt that he was watching her keenly. “But now that I do see you again, it is like meeting you for the first time without the trouble of having to make friends.”
Kate half rose to her feet, with a slight cry.
“Don’t get up!” Hawke exclaimed, and he smoothed her hair caressingly with his hand. “You look so pretty like that.”
She clenched her nails in her palms. Her whole nature rose against the man. The mere touch of his fingers turned her sick. At last, however, she forced herself to meet his gaze. She saw that he was going to speak, and began first, coaxing him, while a deadly humiliation set her cheeks ablaze.
“Friends? Yes! We might be friends. Only give me the letters, and I will think of you as a friend!”
“For just so long as it takes you to reach Keswick.”
“No; always,” she said simply. “You don’t know what a woman can forgive when once she has felt as I have felt towards you.”
There was a pause. Hawke suddenly stripped the letters off the file.
“I will give them to you,” he said.
Kate held out her hands to him eagerly, with a low cry of joy. But Hawke dropped the packet on the table, and seized her outstretched wrists.
“But they have their price,” he whispered, bending over her.
Kate shrank away in a whirl of terror. But his grasp only tightened, and he drew her towards him, laughing.
“Only a kiss,” he said. “One kiss for each.”
“No!” She almost shouted the word.
“Hush!” he laughed. “You will rouse the house. One kiss for each,” and he laughed again almost hysterically.
“It is not a heavy price — it is not even a new price. You have paid it before with nothing to buy. Think of the distance you have come, of the horrible lonely pass!”
He repeated her words with a burlesque shudder. But the taunts fell upon deaf ears. Kate was engrossed in the shame of his proposal. It was so characteristic of him, she thought. He had chosen the one device which would humiliate her most effectually. Its very puerility added to her sense of degradation. There was a touch of the ludicrous in the notion so grotesquely incongruous with the pain it caused her. She pictured the scene with a spectator. “How he would laugh!” she thought, bitterly. However, there would be no spectator — and it was the only way.
“Well?” Hawke asked.
“Yes!” she replied.
He released her wrists, and she stood up and faced him. He took the letters and handed them to her, one by one; and for each letter that he gave her, she kissed him on the lips.
And outside the window was the spectator. Only he did not laugh.
Hawke also had grown serious. The sight of Kate Nugent after so long an interval, the familiar sound of her voice, and to some degree also a certain distorted pleasure which he drew from the knowledge of Gordon’s proximity, had served to prepare his passions. Now they were tinder to the touch of her lips. So, as he let the last letter go and she turned her face upwards to complete the bargain, he suddenly placed his hands behind her shoulders, drew her towards him, and returned her kiss with a fervour.
The change in him came almost as a relief to Kate. It diminished her sense of humiliation. For the moment he began to show passion, the less she felt herself his toy. So, for a second, she did not resist his embrace. Then she struggled to free herself.
“I have paid you,” she said.
Hawke dropped his arms, and she moved towards the fireplace. One by one, she noted the dates of the letters, tore them across and let them fall into the flames. Then she stood thinking.
“You have not given me all.”
“All I showed you.”
“There are four more, written on my way home from Calcutta, Aden, Brindisi, and London.”
“Three! You were rude enough to burn one.”
“Where are they?”
“Here!” Hawke tapped his breast pocket as he spoke.
“Fulfil your bargain! Give them to me!”
“They will cost more.”
CHAPTER IV
THE STRAIN UPON Gordon’s nerves had become intolerable. When he first mounted the outhouse roof he had been wholly absorbed in the horror of his conjecture that Hawke’s midnight visitor was the girl to whom he was betrothed, and the need of either verifying or disproving it was the one thing clear to him amid the turmoil of his brain. Of what the visit might actually imply he took no thought. Now, however, he knew; the interview which he had witnessed left him not a glimmer of doubt. But during the two years of their engagement, Kate Nugent had so grown into the heart of his life, had become so real a part of him, that she was not easily dethroned from his respect. He clung instinctively to a vague hope that there might have been some compelling cause of which he knew nothing to account for her subjection to Hawke. That this subjection meant treachery to him, treachery of an unpardonable kind, whatever its cause, he realised in a way, but as yet did he not feel it. The blow had stunned his reason, had even dulled his senses, had, in a word, struck at the very roots of his being. He was adrift in a maze of bewilderment. The scene he was witnessing grew in the end shadowy and unreal. Even Hawke seemed to lose his individuality; he became just a detail in the sum of the mystery, a thing to be explained, not a man to be punished. Gordon, in fact, was left conscious of but one feeling — the overwhelming desire to see the woman he had worshipped face to face with him, to speak with her, and realising the necessity of getting solid ground beneath his feet, if he was to ac
complish his wish, he clambered from his perch — just too soon to see Kate strike Hawke across the mouth, as her answer to the last words he had only dimly heard.
Gordon reached the earth securely and crept softly back to his garden gate. The sky had cleared during the last half hour, and the valley lay pure and clean in the starlight. After a while a sound reached him. It struck upon muffled senses at first, meaninglessly; but its continued repetition fixed his attention, and he perceived that it was the sound of Kate’s footsteps on the stones again at the bottom of the lane. She was returning. Gordon was still in that dazed condition when the brain, unable to take a complete impression, or, to speak more plainly, unable to combine its different impressions into one whole, fixes itself upon some small particular sensation and magnifies that, to the thorough exclusion of the rest. So, now as he listened to her steps drawing nearer and nearer, he noticed acutely a difference in the manner of her walk, a certain hesitancy, absent when she swept by him on her way to the Inn. Then her footfalls had rung surely and rhythmically, betokening some quest in view; now they wavered, timidly, with uncertain beats as if the hope had gone out of her limbs. The sound was somehow familiar to Gordon, and, curiously ransacking his memories, he discovered the reason. He had marked women walk like that, with the same weariness, with the same hopelessness, late at night in the quiet of the London streets. This chance association of ideas acted on him like a shock. It woke him from his stupor, revivified him, set him with clear vision fronting facts. He grasped the full meaning of Kate’s interview with Hawke. It rose before him like an acted scene in a play, and he recollected with a sudden horror those last words, “They will cost more.” How long was it since he had climbed down from the outhouse roof? How long had he been waiting by the gate? He had been unconscious of time. Hours might have lapsed for all he knew. Meanwhile the steps drew nearer. He saw her plainly advancing towards him. She was walking with her eyes on the ground, and so did not observe him barring her path until she almost knocked against him. She lifted her head, stood for a second looking searchingly into his face, as if he were a ghost, the fancied embodiment of her fears, and then, with an inarticulate moan like the cry of the dumb, she reeled against the wall of the lane. Gordon heard her breath coming and going in quick jets and the scrabbling of her finger-nails as she clutched at the stones.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 180