“Is it you?” she said, attempting a light surprise. “How you startled me! I am late, very late. I was delayed. I came over to — to — —”
“To recover your letters,” Gordon broke in bitterly upon her labouring effort to dig up an excuse. “You were right to come late. That kind of errand can’t be run by daylight.”
Kate drew herself up and moved toward him, but he thrust his hands out with a gesture of repulsion to check her approach.
“Those last three letters?”
“He has them still.”
“Come in!” Gordon said. The relief he experienced gave a gentleness to the tone of his voice. That loathsome dread at all events was dispelled. For even then he did not doubt the truth of her words.
“Come in!” and he turned and went into the parlour. The girl followed him in silence, drew a chair close to the dying fire and hung over it, shivering. Gordon lit the lamp, saying —
“Yes; it is cold. These April nights always are up here.”
Kate looked at the clock, and Gordon’s eyes followed her gaze. The hands pointed to half-past one. He had heard her implore Hawke that it was past the hour, some time before he quitted his post of observation. So there could have been but the briefest interval between her departure and his own.
“Be quick! What do you want with me? I have no time to lose!”
Kate flung the words at him petulantly. The knowledge that she had been discovered exasperated her against Gordon.
“Well, why don’t you speak?”
She turned towards him. Gordon was still standing at the table by the lamp. For, now that his object was attained and she was alone with him, he found no words to express the questions he had meant to ask. The light fell full upon the delicate beauty of her face, and indeed nearly drove the questions themselves from his mind. “You always look to me as if you had just come out of a convent,” he had once said to her; and that sentence most exactly indicated the nature of the passion he had felt for her — an intense love refined and exalted by a blind, unreasoning reverence. There was, in truth, a certain air of spirituality about her manifest to most people on their first introduction. But it belonged to the face, not to the expression. It was due to the fragile purity of her features, not to the mind which animated them, and was consequently more noticeable when she was in repose. The impression, as a rule, wore off upon a closer acquaintance, but Gordon had fallen in love and saw her always through the mist of his feelings.
So the memory of all that she had meant to him kept him silent now. His thoughts seemed almost a sacrilege — plainly impossible to speak unless Kate gave him a decided lead. He waited and watched her. The skin of her wrist had broken when Hawke gripped it, and every now and then a drop of blood would fall on to her white dress and trickle down in a red wavering line. The sight somehow fascinated Gordon, and as each drop fell he waited and watched for the next.
To Kate, his silence became intolerable. She would have preferred reproaches, abuse, even violence — anything, in a word — to this leaden reticence. For it accused her more sharply than any words. Her lover had always been as an easy book to her keen intelligence, and she could read clearly enough that what kept his lips locked now was the conflict between his new knowledge and his old loyalty. In a flash she imagined Hawke’s behaviour under the like circumstances and contrasted it with Gordon’s bearing. Side by side the two men toed the line for her mental inspection, and the result was a feminine outcry against Fate, the Powers above and below — what you will, in a word, except her concrete self.
“What brought you over here?” she cried. “You said you were going to Ravenglass. You told me so. What brought you over to Wastdale?”
She spoke fiercely, almost vindictively, and it seemed as if the pair had suddenly changed places, as if she were the accuser and he the culprit, standing meekly self-condemned. Indeed, to complete the illusion, there was even a tinge of remorse in his tone as he answered her.
“God, perhaps. Who knows?”
“Oh! yes, yes, yes!” she went on. “Preach to me! Preach to me! Go on! Only be quick about it and make the sermon short!”
“Don’t, Kitty!” he said, and added, wistfully, “It can’t be your true self that is speaking.”
“Yea, it is,” she replied, struggling with a sense of pity for him (evoked by the quiet sadness of his voice). “My very own self, my real true self, that you have never known — that you never would know. You always had wrong ideas about me. I tried to open your eyes at first, but it was no good, and I gave it up. You always dressed me up in virtues that didn’t fit me. I used to feel as if I were wearing a strait-waistcoat.”
Gordon drew up a chair and sat opposite to her on the other side of the fireplace.
“Then it was all my fault,” he said.
Kate glanced at him quickly, but there was no trace of irony in his manner. He was speaking quite seriously. As a matter of fact, it had just begun to dawn on him that a frank expectation of ideal behaviour is the most exacting form of tyranny a man can exercise over a woman.
“No,” she replied. “No! It was my fault. I ought never to have become engaged to you; for I never loved you, even at the beginning. Oh, it is no use shirking the truth now,” she went on, as Gordon rose with a cry of pain. “I never loved you. I realised that very soon after we were engaged. I had always liked you. I liked you better than any man I had met, and so in time I thought I might come to love you as well. I don’t know whether I ever should have reached that if I had been left alone. But you made it impossible. You would not see that I had faults and caprices. You would not see that those very faults pleased me, that I meant to keep them, that I did not want to change. No! Whenever you came to me, I always felt as if I was being lifted up reverently and set on a very high and a very small pedestal. And there I had to stand, with my heels together, and my toes turned out, in an attitude of decorum until you had gone. Well, you want people with flat heels to enjoy that. I always wore high ones, and the attitude tired me.”
Instinctively she stretched one foot out as she spoke. The sparkle of the firelight on the buckle caught Gordon’s eye, and he saw that she was wearing thin kid slippers with a strap across the instep.
“You must be wet through,” he exclaimed.
“No,” she answered. “I rode to the head of the Pass, and left the horse tied up to the footbridge over the stream. It was dry enough the rest of the way.”
“You rode over here!” he exclaimed. “Then they must have known you were coming?”
“Who must have known?” she asked, in a sudden alarm.
“Your father and your aunt. She is staying with you still, I suppose.”
“Yes. But they knew nothing, of course. My father had some people to dinner to-night. I left them early, saying that I was tired. I should have had no time to change if I had thought of it, as it was close on ten. I had told Martin, our groom, that I should want a horse — you know he would do anything for me — and he had it ready saddled. So I locked my room door, took the key with me, and came away just as I was.”
She stopped abruptly. The mention of her home aroused her to the consequences of her detection. Up till now the fact that Gordon had found her out had alone possessed her mind. Now, however, she was compelled to look forward. What would he do? He was to have married her in a week, in just seven days. Would he disclose the truth? She scanned his face for an answer to her conjectures.
Gordon was leaning against the mantelshelf above her, and his eyes met her inquiring gaze.
“Well?” he asked.
“So you see,” she faltered, “I am pretty safe for to-night; but to-morrow?”
“To-morrow?” He seemed not to have grasped her drift.
“Yes! To-morrow,” she repeated. “What do you mean to do?”
The question startled Gordon. He had been thinking of her, not of himself. Yes, to-morrow he would have to act. But how?
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I must have time t
o think. I have not mastered today yet.”
“You will spare me as much as you can?”
There was something very pitiful in the childlike entreaty; at least so it seemed to Gordon. She was so young for all this misery. Her very humility pained him, all the more because it was so strange to him.
“I will spare you altogether, child,” he replied. “You need not be afraid of me. I have loved you too well to hurt you now.”
For a moment or two he paced about the room restlessly, trying to discover some means by which he could break the marriage off and take the blame upon himself. But no likely plan occurred to him. His brain refused to act. Disconnected scraps of ideas and ludicrous reminiscences, all foreign to the matter, forced themselves upon his mind, the harder he strove to think. He gave the effort up. He would be able to concentrate his attention better when he was alone. Besides, he recollected he had not heard the whole story as yet. Some clue to an issue might perhaps be found in the untold remainder.
“Tell me the rest!” he said, returning to his chair.
“The rest?” she inquired. Gordon’s generosity had pierced straight to her heart at last, and had sent the tears rolling down her cheeks.
“Yes! The rest of the story down to tonight.”
“Oh! I can’t,” she cried. “Not now! I can’t! If you had been rough and harsh, yes! But you have been so gentle with me.
“It will be the kindest way for me,” Gordon replied. “I must know the truth some way or another, and I would rather have you tell it me than ferret it out for myself.”
“Very well, then,” she said, wearily; and for a space there was silence in the room.
CHAPTER V
“MY MOTHER DIED,” she began, “eight months after our engagement, and then I went out to Poonah on a visit to my uncle. It is just a year and a half since I started.”
“Yea! I remember. I did not want you to go.”
“And I insisted. You know why now.”
“Yes! I know why now.”
Gordon repeated her words with a shiver. If only he had understood her a little better, he thought.
Kate hardly noticed his interruption. She was staring straight into the fire and speaking in a dull monotone, with no spring in her voice. She would have spared him now, had she been able, but she felt irresistibly impelled to lay all her disloyalty bare before his eyes — to show him at how empty a shrine he had been worshipping. It seemed to her almost as if some stronger will was prompting her, and the very sound of her words was thin and strange to her ears, as though some one else was speaking them at a great distance.
“Yes,” she continued, “I wanted to get away from you — to slip out of my shackles for a time. So I went to Poonah, and — and there I found Austen.”
“Austen! Austen!” Gordon burst out in a frenzy. “For God’s sake, don’t call him that!” and he brought his clenched fist down on the table with all his strength. The glasses on it rattled at the blow, and the tumbler which Hawke had used, standing close at the edge, fell and splintered on the floor. Gordon laughed at the sight.
“That was his glass,” he explained. “He was here to-night, drinking with me,” and he laughed again, harshly.
The girl hurriedly drew her skirts away from the broken fragments.
“I am sorry,” Gordon said, recovering his composure, “I interrupted you. Go on!”
But there was a new hardness in his tone. Kate remarked it, and it grated on her painfully after his forbearance. She paused for a moment, looking at him anxiously. But he made no further sign, and she took up the burden of her tale again.
“There I found Mr. Hawke. I don’t think I had ever given a thought to him before. But from this time he began to influence me, because of the difference between yourself and him. He paid me no respect, no deference, and outwardly, indeed, no attention; but all the time I felt that he was consciously and deliberately taking possession of me, and I made no struggle to resist him. He became my master — imposed himself upon me until I lost the sense of responsibility for my own actions. It was not that he gave me orders or even suggested them, but somehow I always realised what he wanted me to do, and did it. And I knew besides that he was conscious of my submission and counted on it.”
Kate had relapsed into the impersonal commonplace manner which had characterised her speech before Gordon broke in. The words fell from her lips in a level regularity, without rise or fall, and she was abstractedly smoothing out one of the broad ribbons of her sash — an old trick of hers, very familiar to her listener. For all the emotion that she showed she might have been dissecting the character of an uninteresting acquaintance.
“So that is the way for men to win women!”
“Some women, yes!”
“Well, there is nothing like buying one’s experience, they say.”
The attempt at sarcasm only served to reveal the intensity of Gordon’s suffering. He was sitting with his body bent forward and his chin pressed against his chest; his hands were clenched between his knees, and his whole attitude told of the strain his self-repression caused him.
“Go on,” he muttered.
“I have told you enough,” she exclaimed, tossed out of her apathy by a sudden comprehension of the torture her story inflicted.
“No! no!” Gordon replied, hoarsely. “Go on! Go on and finish it!”
“Well,” she continued, her voice sinking into a tremulous whisper, “one evening I was left in the house alone. The rest had gone out to a dance, but I was worn out by the heat, and remained at home. It was very hot; there was hardly a breath of air, I remember, and I curled myself up in a long chair on the verandah and fell fast asleep. I was awakened by some one pulling my hair, and when I looked up I saw who it was.”
“How long was that before you left India?”
“Two months.”
“And during those two months you kept writing home to me and saying how slowly the time passed.”
Gordon spoke with an accent of incredulous wonder. Each moment thrust a new inconceivable fact before his eyes, and forced him to contemplate it. He felt that his world was toppling in ruins about him, much as it had done in that first year of his University life.
“That was not my fault,” the girl exclaimed. “He made me do it. I wanted to write to you and break the engagement off; but he would not let me. I suppose he was afraid I should bother him to marry me himself,” she concluded, contemptuously.
“And you obeyed him in that, too?”
“I tell you, I was at his mercy. He did what he liked with me. He made me write those letters to you;” and she added, with a certain softness, “and in a way, too, I was glad he did.”
“Why?”
“Because even then I was afraid of him. I distrusted him, and you seemed a kind of anchor for me, and every letter an extra link in the cable.”
The words touched Gordon strangely. The surface implication that he was valued merely as a convenient refuge from the consequences of folly did not occur to him. He applied a deeper meaning to them, and fancied that she had been willing to retain her hold on him for much the same reason which had made him cling to her — out of an instinctive need to feel something stable in a world of shadow. She had taken an open knife from the table and was mechanically tracing with its point the crimson lines upon her dress, and he thought her tired helplessness was the saddest sight man could ever see. Sentences out of the letters came back to him.
“So, in a way,” he said, almost with a smile, “you meant what you wrote.”
“Yes! What I wrote. But I wrote so little of them myself. I mean,” she went on, noticing the surprise in the other’s face, “I put the words down. He dictated them.”
“What!”
A sudden fury seized upon Gordon. For the first time since he had been talking with Kate, he realised Hawke the man, a living treacherous being, flesh and blood, that could be crushed and killed. The idea sent a thrill through his veins. The lust for revenge sprang up, winged and
armed, in a flame of hatred. His imagination pictured the scene, clear cut as a cameo; he saw the keen, pointed face bending over Kate’s shoulder; he heard him unctuously rolling out loving phrases, savouring them as he spoke, and chuckling over the deceit.
He turned on Kate in a frenzy.
“He dictated them; and he laughed as he did it, I suppose. Did he laugh? Tell me! Did he laugh?”
Gordon shook the girl’s arm savagely, his face livid and working with passion. His aspect terrified her. She dared not tell him the truth, and she turned away with a shudder.
“That is answer enough,” and he dropped her arm and began again pacing about the room. Now, however, he walked quietly and softly, with his shoulders rounded and his head thrust forward. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and there was something catlike in his tread, which reminded Kate irresistibly of Hawke. Indeed, to her fevered eyes, he began to change and to grow like his enemy in face and bearing.
“Don’t,” she whispered. “You frighten me. You remind me of him.”
The words recalled Gordon to himself. There was something else he wished to know. What was it? He beat his forehead with the palms of his hands in the effort to recollect. If only he could banish Hawke from his mind until she had gone! At last the question took shape.
“The letters he was reading to you?”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 181