“They were notes and appointments written when we were both at Poonah,” she answered, submissively. “I never thought that he would keep them, though I might have known he would.”
“And the three he has still?”
“They were the only real letters I ever wrote to him. There were four, but I burned one to-night.”
“Yes! I saw.”
“I wrote them on the way home, from Calcutta, Aden, Brindisi and the last from London the evening I arrived.”
“You have never written since?”
“Never! Nor have I seen him since until he compelled me to come to-night.”
She stopped suddenly, as if some new idea had crossed her mind. In a moment, however, she began again, but she was speaking to herself.
“No. I had to come. There was no other way. I dared not leave those letters in his hands. Oh! how I hate him!”
She uttered the words with a slow intensity which enforced conviction, looking straight at Gordon; and he saw a flame commence to glow in the depths of her eyes and spread until her whole face was ablaze with it.
“Do you mean that?” he queried, almost eagerly.
“Can you doubt it?” she replied, starting to her feet. “Oh, yes, you would! I forgot. Oh, David, if only you had understood me better!”
It was what he had been saying to himself, with a deep self-reproach, and her repetition of his thought, coupled with a weary gesture of despair, exaggerated the feeling on him by the addition of a very lively pity.
“So that is true, then?” he asked, hesitatingly. “You no longer care for him?”
The mere weakness of the question betokened a mind in doubt, as to its choice of action, betrayed a certain tentative indecision.
“I never really cared for him,” she answered.
A look of actual gladness showed in the man’s face. They were standing opposite to one another, and the girl shut her eyelids tight, as if the sight hurt her.
“That pleases you!” she exclaimed, twisting her hands convulsively. “Ah! Don’t you understand? It is the most horrible part of it all to me — that I never cared for him. It doubles my shame. He dominated me when he was with me, close to me, by my side; but I never cared for him. I had realised that by the time I reached England, and my last letter was to tell him so.”
Her whole attitude expressed humiliation. Had she been able to look back upon a passion overmastering both Hawke and herself, and encircling them in a ring of flame which, by its very brightness, made the world beyond look colourless and empty, she could have found some plea to alleviate her consciousness of guilt. As it was, however, the episode appeared nakedly sordid to her recollection, unredeemed by even a flavour of romance.
“So you never really cared for him!”
Gordon’s earnest insistence struck her as singular. He seemed to have taken no note of the last words, but dwelt upon that one point — clung to it, it appeared. What difference could it make to him, she wondered, whether she had cared or not; the sin lay between them none the less. She watched his face for the solution. Perplexity was shown in the contracted forehead and in a tremulous twitching of the lips. As a matter of fact, Gordon was hunting a will-o’-the-wisp of hope, and it had led him to the brink of a resolve. Should he take the leap, or soberly decline it! He hesitated, half made up his mind, took one short halting step towards Kate and stopped, checked by a new thought.
“You said you would have broken off our engagement had he allowed you!”
“Yes! I said that.”
“Why didn’t you when you returned to England and felt free from him?”
The girl gained a hint of his drift more from his manner than his question, and answered him warily, with a spark of hope.
“Because, as I told you, I relied on you so much, and I felt the need of some one I could trust more than ever then. Besides, every one approved of the marriage.”
An abrupt movement warned her that she had chosen a wrong turning. A quick traverse, however, brought her out upon the right road again.
“It is not so easy for a girl to cut the knot. She must find explanations to justify her — valid not only to her parents, but to the man. And I knew you would not let me go so lightly. I knew that I meant all the world to you.”
She paused, but Gordon gave no sign, and she repeated her words with a nervous smile.
“It sounds queer, but it is true all the same. I knew that I meant all the world to you.”
Again she waited, but with a like result. He was still pondering, still in doubt. The way in which he drew his breath, now in short, jerky catches, now in a long, labouring sigh, made that plain to her. Her shot had failed of its aim.
A sudden gust of the wind brought the rustle of the trees through the open door. Kate looked at the clock; the hands made one threatening line.
“Two o’clock!” she cried, with a start. “I must get back to Keswick while they are still asleep — asleep.” She spoke the word again with a melancholy longing in her voice which was indescribably sad.
“You will write, then,” she resumed, “and break it off.”
Gordon nodded assent, and she turned away in search for something.
The action helped to decide Gordon by pointing out the necessity of decision. What course should he take? He had thought to choose his path on careful reflection when Kate was on her way back to Keswick; but he saw now that would be too late. It would be time enough then to consider the consequences of his choice, how best to cope with them and force them to his service; but the choice itself could not be deferred. For if he let her go quietly without another word the matter would be settled finally, the choice determined, a prison wall raised to further effort. What course should he take? The question pressed urgently for an immediate answer.
He went to the door and out into the porch. The sudden slip into night seemed to him a symbol of what his life would mean if he kept silence. His mind played with the idea and carried it further. It pictured him standing alone in the empty darkness and the girl behind him alone in the empty light. The beck, too, at the back of the house, whispered its music in his ears and pleaded with him.
A timid hand was laid on his arm: Kate was by his side.
“David!”
“I was listening to the brook,” he said.
For a while they both stood quiet in the gloom of the porch.
“What do you hear in it?” he asked.
“I dare not tell you. What do you?”
“I hear all my days to come flowing down and down with a sound of tears.”
“David!” she said, her voice breaking on the name.
He had often noticed the wonderful clearness of her eyes, and they shone very softly on him now. He drew her towards him in the gloom of the porch.
“Kitty!” he whispered, “tell me that it isn’t true! Tell me I have been dreaming! I will believe you. I must believe you. For if I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything. You have been the light of my life, making the world real. If that dies out, I live in the dark, always.”
Her heart sank lower with every word he uttered. She had hoped for forgiveness, for a recognition of the dead sin, with a belief in an atoning future. But he gave her no hint of that. Nay, his very phrases proved that the conception was beyond his reach. “If I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything.” The sentence showed the exotic sickliness of his faith, demonstrated it no vital inherent part of him rooted in his being, but an alien graft watered and kept alive by his passion. He had not the sturdiness to accept the facts, nor the sincerity to foresee the possibility of redemption. He would marry her. Yes! But his motive was an instinct of self-preservation rather than his love for her. She would still have to pose upon her pedestal, apeing the stainless goddess; he would still have to kneel at her feet, apeing the worshipper; and both in their hearts would know the hollowness of their pretence.
Kate realised the futility of such a marriage, and looking forward, caught a glimpse of the day when
the sham would shred and vanish before the truth, like a morning mist at sunrise.
Gordon felt her whole frame relax and draw away from him. He clasped her hands; there was no response in them. He held her closer, placed one hand behind her head and turned her face up towards him, while the warm curls nestled and twined about his fingers.
“Kitty! Why don’t you answer? Tell me that it isn’t true! Every belief I have depends on that.”
“Oh! Don’t make me responsible for everything,” she replied, with a flash of her old petulance. “I am only one woman in the world.”
“But the only woman in the world for me. You know it. You said so yourself. Tell me that it isn’t true! Lie to me, if you must!” he added, with a passionate cry. “I will believe the lie.”
“That could be of no use either to you or to me.”
She spoke coldly, with the familiar feeling of repugnance reawakened by his effort to canonise her afresh. Besides, the knowledge of the truth vibrated in every tone of his voice, and his despairing resolve to crush and drown that knowledge added a sense of mockery to her repulsion.
“That could be of no use,” she said. “There was just a chance of our joining hands again, but what you have said has destroyed it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You may some day.”
“It is true,” she resumed. “All that you saw, all that you heard Austen Hawke say, all that I have told you — every word of it is true.”
She turned from him and went back into the room, while Gordon sank upon the low coping of the garden fence.
The girl came out to him again after a while.
“Have you seen my shawl? I can’t find it.”
“Did you bring it away from the Inn?” Gordon asked, dully.
The question made Kate start. She must have left it there.
“Never mind,” Gordon said; “I will get it back with the letters.”
He passed through the porch and took down a lanthorn from a nail in the wall.
“I will come up with you to the head of the Pass.”
“Don’t light it,” she said. “It might be seen.”
Very well!
He was on the point of replacing it, but stopped and asked —
“Did you bring one with your horse?”
“No!”
“Then I had better take it. It will keep you from stumbling when you are riding home. There is a scarf on the sofa.”
Kate twisted it over her head and they passed out softly into the lane.
CHAPTER VI
THE WIND HAD dropped with the advance of morning, and only an impalpable breath — a faint reminiscence of the wind it seemed — stirring the larch-clumps, dotted here and there along the lower edges of their path, broke the stillness for a moment as they passed. They paused by the side of a watercourse which, descending from Great Gable, the mountain on their left, cut through the track on its way to the centre of the valley and caused a gap of some fifty feet. Stones planted at intervals uncertainly in the stream gave an insecure footing, and afforded the only traverse to the opposite side; and in the darkness their position was dimly shown, or, rather, could be hazily guessed at, by little points of white where the water swirled and broke about them.
“I must have crossed it when I came,” said Kate, blankly. “But I don’t remember. I don’t seem to have noticed it at all. I should slip on the stepping-stones now.”
“Let me carry you over!”
“No!” she replied quickly. “I crossed it safely before. I can do the same again.”
There was a greater confidence in her words than in her voice, and she still hesitated on the brink. Instinctively she laid a hand upon Gordon’s sleeve for steadiness, but drew it away hurriedly when she felt the contact of his arm. Her companion renewed his offer of help, but, without answering him, she stepped forward on to the nearest boulder. Her foot, set down timidly, slipped on its polished roundness. Gordon, however, was alert to her fatigue, and his arm was round her waist before she had completely lost her balance.
“Lean towards me,” he said, and lightly lifted her back on to the bank. She remained for a second in his support, lulled by a physical feeling of security induced in her by the strong clasp of his arm. Then she freed herself almost roughly, and silently faced the stream again.
“It will be best if I go first,” said Gordon. “I can give you a hand then.”
“Is there no other crossing?” she asked, straining her gaze vainly up and down the stream.
“No! Surely you can take that much help from me.”
He planted himself as firmly as he could, Colossus-wise on the rocks.
“All right!” he said, and stretched out a hand towards her. She took it reluctantly and made a second trial, wavered as she reached the stone on which she had slipped, and secured her balance by tightening her grasp. So they proceeded until a wider interval than usual flowed between their footholds.
Gordon turned his head round to her.
“You must let go of me here!”
“Must I?”
“Yes! or I may slip and drag you in.”
She only realised how hard had been her grip when she relaxed it, and the consequent knowledge of the assistance she had needed gave her a momentary sense of loneliness now that it was removed. Gordon was just able to bridge the distance between the boulders with the full reach of his stride. That on which he now stood, however, was flat and broad, a platform that gave sure footing.
“You will have to spring,” he cried. “I can catch you. I am solid enough here.”
“I can’t,” she replied, “I daren’t move.”
She stood looking into the water bubbling at her feet, and its swift flow made her feel giddy and insecure.
“What am I to do?” she cried plaintively.
“You must jump,” Gordon answered. “It is the only way. Jump boldly! Don’t be afraid, I will catch you.”
The ring of confidence in his voice enheartened her, and she tried to face the leap, but recoiled from it. Why had she refused his offer, was her first thought; why had he not renewed it, her second. The stone on which she was standing rolled with the movement, and she uttered a cry.
“Dav — ,” she began, and shore the name of its tail.
In a moment he was by her side, standing on the bed of the channel and the water up to his thighs. The girl clung to him.
“I seem to have lost my nerve altogether,” and she essayed a laugh unsuccessfully.
“You are tired, that’s all.”
“Yes, I am tired,” she answered, “very tired.”
And she leaned her weight upon him, resting her arm on his shoulders. Their muscular breadth renewed in her the feeling of protection, and she waited expectantly for him to propose again to carry her, or, better still, to just lift her up without a word and so spare her a repast of her own words. To all seeming, however, Gordon was waiting too. “He means the request to come from me,” she thought. As a matter of fact, nothing was farther from his reflections. The experience of the past few hours had rendered the perfect control of his faculties impossible, and the shuttles in the loom of his mind, set at work by the touch of any chance suggestion, were weaving his thoughts in a grotesque inconsequence. The tension of her attitude recalled the pedestal on which he had perched her, as she said, to the undoing of them both. He had a vision of a pair of tiny feet, delicately shod in grey kid slippers, straining to fix high heels firmly on a smooth sloping surface.
Kate threw out a more patent suggestion.
“I am very tired, and this stone is not over restful.”
“I was just thinking,” he answered abstractedly, “it must be as awkward as my pedestal.”
The unconscious sarcasm stung her to the quick.
“Don’t laugh at me!” she pleaded, and realised that she was pleading.
“Laugh at you?” he replied. “Good God! I have got to finish my laugh at myself first, and I think it will take me all my lif
e.”
“For believing in me?” she asked rather sadly. The bitterness of his remark seemed to show her that he grasped at last the full folly of his faith in her. It was the goal at which she had been aiming, and yet, now that it was reached, she felt a keen pang of regret.
“No! For demanding so much myself.”
The knowledge that she had mistaken his meaning gratified her and, indeed, raised him in her respect. The words, spoken at another time, would only have served to strengthen her old conception of him, and to justify that lurking contempt for his humility which formed a factor in her ready reliance upon his services. Now, however, she stood in sore need of his help; he was there dominating her plainly by the superiority of his physical strength, and he could afford to be humble, nay, rather bettered his position by the contrast.
Kate gave in and said weakly:
“I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to carry me across after all.”
“It is what I came back for,” he answered, no suspicion of her thoughts occurring to him. He lifted her slight figure with an absence of effort or jerk which told of practised sinews, and Kate clasped her hands behind his neck and nestled down into his arms with a child’s sigh of content. To Gordon the sigh conveyed no direct or immediate meaning. His fanciful tendency to symbolism made it expressive only of the relief she had experienced on stepping down from her pedestal.
Had he but known it, however, he was nearer to her heart than he had ever been. He was showing himself in the man’s shape which most appealed to her. He was the protector, not the attendant, with strength to be appreciated as masterful, not to be carelessly used and forgotten. Had he stopped dead in mid-stream and asserted his cause with a like mental force, claiming her and her sins to himself with the courage of a confident love, he would have undone the harm of his maladroit pleading in the porch.
It was the crucial moment of his life. But his dominance was of the body, not the spirit, and he passed through it without an inkling of its importance.
The next moment he reached the farther bank and set her silently on the ground, apart from him.
From this point the path rose steeply along the side of Great Gable, and as they mounted, the brisk freshness of the air revived the girl’s languid spirits. Her lassitude and the feeling of helpless weakness which it engendered gradually gave place to a lively buoyancy. A new vigour entered her limbs. Gordon was walking a few paces ahead of her, the lanthorn swinging at his side on a shoulder-strap, and now and again he turned to help her over some rough portion of the track. But the way was almost as familiar to her as it was to him, and as they rose she needed his assistance less and less. The limpid clearness of the night, too, contributed in no small measure to this invigoration of her nature. The sky was unstained by a cloud, and glittered with a multitude of stars that shone like points of silver, so that the darkness below had a certain translucency. One seemed to see right into the heart of the night; at the same time, the landmarks and boundary walls in the valley — always productive of a sense of limit — were invisible, and the very mountains appeared but deeper shadows, a massing of the darkness, as it were, at separate spots, with here and there a gap from the faint glimmer of a snowdrift. The journey thus appealed to Kate’s senses by its aspect of spaciousness and filled her with a new and strange feeling of liberty. The feeling penetrated to her mind and set in motion a train of thought which, in turn, gave back to it a fresh strength and colour. A consciousness of distinct relief forced itself into evidence as the main result to her of Gordon’s chance visit to Wastdale Head, and obliterated to a great degree the shame of the disclosures which had paved the way for it. She was free alike from the brutal authority of Austen Hawke and from the irksome tyranny of Gordon’s adoration; for the former’s power rested upon its concealment and was killed by Gordon’s discovery of its existence. Every trace of it would vanish when he recovered the three remaining letters. Of the means by which they were to be regained she took no more thought than Gordon at this time did himself. She was too absorbed by her newly-found freedom to foresee the possibility of danger there. Its forcible pre-occupation of her mind indeed blinded her to all ideas which hinted antagonism. She barely wasted a conjecture on the pretext which her companion would select for the breaking off of their engagement almost on the eve of their marriage. She just caught a dim glimpse of him taking the blame upon himself, and was restfully content to leave the exact solution in his hands. “I will spare you altogether,” he had said; and she knew him well enough for complete assurance that he would keep his word. That she owed her liberty entirely to the generosity of her lover, she hardly felt at all now; from habit, she was incapable of accounting that quality of his at its true value. For a moment, it is true, at the outset of her interview with him in the farm-house, she appreciated with some accuracy the measure of his devotion; but this estimation was due merely to the immediate succession of his presence to that of Hawke and to the pronounced contrast between their attitudes. As their conversation wore on, however, his voice, his words, and certain tricks of manner, gradually brought back to her the familiar conceptions of character which she had always associated with them. And in consequence of the return of those conceptions, the old habit of expecting sacrifices from him as his usual tribute reasserted itself afresh. Her sense of liberty was thus unmarred by doubts or fears, and the rebound of her nature from a preceding despair gave to it a double exhilaration. She drank in the night air with a keen pleasure, its brisk sharpness seeming somehow to harmonise with her thoughts. She would begin her life anew to-morrow, using her knowledge as a clear light for the guiding of her steps. She had a vision of morning mists clearing off a long white road and leaving it vividly distinct — a road in Normandy.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 182