HOW RYLTON'S EVIL GENIUS COMES TO HIM AND SPEAKS SWEET TREACHERIES
WITHIN HIS EAR; AND HOW HE RENOUNCES HER AND ALL HER DEEDS.
"You!" says Rylton. His voice is as low as her own, and strange--it
sounds strange even to himself. Her hands are lying on his arms--the
little hands he used to call snowflakes long ago. Great heaven!
_how_ long ago!
He does not repulse her--that is beyond him--but in this new strange
voice of his there is assuredly no welcome. He feels choking. The
dead past is so horribly dead that he cannot bear to look upon it.
He feels cold--benumbed. What is he to say to her, or she to him?
Must this battle be fought? And through all this weary wondering
there is ever present with him a strong fear.
If Tita should hear of this--if she should learn that Marian was
here to-night--with him--alone! His heart sinks within him. Not all
the waters of Jordan could wash him clean in her eyes.
A sudden anger against this woman rises within him. Has she not been
his undoing from first to last? Gently, but with determination, he
lifts her fingers from his arms.
"Is this wise?" says he.
"No one can know. _No_ one," says she hurriedly. "I have arranged it
all. I am staying with the Heriots, and when I heard at dinner that
you would be here to-night, I felt that I _should_--_must_ see you."
She flings back the soft furred cloak that is enfolding her with a
little rapid movement, as though stifling. It falls in a loose mass
at her feet, and leaves her standing before him a very picture of
beauty perfected. Beauty ripe, yet fresh!
All in black! From head to foot black clothes her. In her hair jet
stars are shining, round her neck jet sparkles, making more fair the
sweet fair flesh beneath; and her gown that clings around her
shapely limbs as though it loves them, is black, too, and glittering
with black beads.
She is looking her loveliest. Maurice takes a step towards her.
Nature (as poor a thing at times as it is often grand) compels this
step, then suddenly he stops. All at once, from the shadow of the
room, the memory of a small, sweet, angry, frowning little face
stands out.
"Still----" begins he.
"You need not be uneasy about me," says Marian, in the full egotism
of her nature, still believing herself as dear to him as in those
old days when he was at her feet. "I told them--the Heriot girl (who
_would_ follow me, and see to my bad headache)--that I should go for
a long walk in the park to ease the pain; I told her not to expect
me for some time. You know they let me do as I like. I ran through
the park, and at the village inn I engaged a fly."
"But the people at the inn?"
"They could not see me. They did not know me; and, besides, I felt I
could risk all to see you." She pauses. She lifts her beautiful face
to his, and suddenly flings herself into his arms. "Oh, Maurice! you
are free now--free! Oh! those _cursed_ days when your mother watched
and followed me. Now at last I can come to you, and you are free!"
"Free?"
"Yes, yes." She has raised herself again from his unwilling arms,
and is gazing at him feverishly. So wild is her mood, so exalted in
its own way, that she does not mark the coldness of his mien. "What
is that little fool to you? Nothing! A mere shadow in your path!"
"She is my wife," says Rylton steadily.
"And _such_ a wife!" Marian laughs nervously, strangely. "Besides,"
eagerly, "that might be arranged." She leans towards him. There is
something terrible to Rylton in the expression of her eyes, the
certainty that lies in them, that he is as eager to rid his life of
Tita as she is. "There are acts, words of hers that could be used.
On less"--again she goes close to him and presses the fingers of one
hand against his breast--"on far less evidence than we could produce
_many_ a divorce has been procured."
Rylton's eyes are fixed upon her. A sense of revulsion is sickening
him. How _her_ eyes are shining! So might a fiend look; and her
fingers--they seem to burn through his breast into his very soul.
"Acts--words--whose acts?" asks he slowly.
"Tita's."
"Lady Rylton's? What do you mean?"
He shakes himself suddenly free of the touch that has grown hateful
to him.
"I mean," says she boldly, still unconscious of his real meaning of
the abyss that lies before her, "that you can at any moment get rid
of her. You can at any moment get a divorce!"
"By lying?" says he, with agitation. "By"--vehemently--"dragging her
name into the dust. By falsely, grossly swearing against her."
"Why take it so much to heart?" says she, again coming close to him.
"She would not care, she would _help_ you. She could then marry her
cousin. We could all see how that was. Would it be such false
swearing after all?"
"Don't!" says Rylton, in a suffocating tone.
"Ah, Maurice, I understand you. I know how your honour revolts from
such a step, but it is only a step--one--_one,_ and then--_we_----"
She covers her eyes with her hands and leans heavily against the
table behind her. "We should be together--for ever," whispers she
faintly.
A long, long silence follows this. It seems to hold, to envelop the
room. It is like darkness! All at once Marian begins to tremble. She
lifts her head.
"You do not speak," says she. There is something frantic in her low
voice--an awful fear. The first dawn of the truth is breaking on
her, but as yet the light is imperfect. "You do not speak," she
repeats, and now her voice is higher, shriller; there is agony in
it. "You mean--you mean---- _What_ do you mean, Maurice?"
"What can I mean? You called me just now an honourable man."
"Ah, your honour!" says she bitterly.
"You, at least, can find no flaw in it," says he suddenly.
"No? Was it an honourable man who married that girl for her money,
loving me all the time? You," passionately, "you _did_ love me
then?"
There is question in her tone.
"The dishonour was to her, not to you," returns he, his eyes bent on
the ground.
"Oh, forget her! What has she got to do with us?" cries she, with a
sudden burst of angry misery, stung by the fact that he had given no
answer to that last question of hers. "You loved me once. You loved
me. Oh, Maurice," smiting her hands together, "you cannot have
forgotten that! You cannot. Why should _I_ remember if you forget?
Each kiss of yours, each word, is graven on my soul! When I am dead,
perhaps I shall forget, but not till then; and you--you, too--you
must remember!"
"I remember!"
He is looking white and haggard.
"Ah!"
There is a quick triumphant note in her voice.
"But what?" he goes on quickly. "What have I to remember about you?
That I prayed you on my knees day after day to give yourself to me.
To risk the chances of poverty, to marry me--and," slowly, "I
remember, too, your answer. It was always _'No'_. You loved me, you
said, but you would wait. Poverty frightened you. I would have given
my life for you, you would not give even your comfort for me. Even
when my engagement with--with----"
_"Your wife."_
The words come like a knife from between her clenched teeth.
"With Tita was almost accomplished--but not quite--I spoke to you
again, but you still held back. You let me go--you deliberately gave
me up to another. Was that love? I tell you," says he vehemently,
"that all the money the world contains would not have forced me from
you at that time. You of your own accord put me outside your life.
Was that love?"
"I was content to wait. I did not seek another in marriage. I, too,
was poor. But I swore to myself to live and die a pauper--for your
sake, if--if no help came to us." She pauses. A sigh--a cruel sigh
bursts from her lips. "No help came."
She is deadly white. A sudden reaction from hope, sure and glorious,
to horrible despair is mastering her. She had not thought, she had
not known she loved him so well until now, when it has begun to dawn
upon her that he no longer loves her.
In all her life no gladness had come to her until she met Rylton,
and then her heart went forth, but without the full generosity of
one who had been fed with love from its birth. Soured, narrowed by
her surroundings, and chilled by a dread of the poverty she had so
learned to fear, she had hung back when joy was offered to her, and
now that joy was dead. It would be hers never, never! The love on
which she had been counting all these days,
"For which I cry both day and night,
For which I let slip all delight,
Whereby I grow both deaf and blind,
Careless to win, unskilled to find,"
is hers no longer. Deaf and blind she has been indeed.
A little faintness falls on her; she sways, and Rylton, catching
her, presses her into a chair. His touch recalls her to life, and
rouses within her a sudden outbreak of passion.
"Maurice!"--she holds him with both her hands--"I will _not_ believe
it. It is not true! You love me still! You do, you do. I was"--she
lets his arms go and raises her hands to his shoulders, and, leaning
back, gazes with wild, beautiful, beseeching eyes into his
face--"wrong--foolish--_mad,_ I think, when I flung from me the only
good that Heaven ever gave me, but--but for all that you love me
still." She pauses. His eyes are on the ground; he looks like a
criminal condemned to death. "Say it, _say_ it," whispers she
hoarsely. There is a silence that speaks. He can feel the shudder
that runs through her. It nerves him.
"All this," he says--his voice is low and harsh, because of the
agony of the moment--"all this comes----"
He grows silent. He cannot say it. _She_ can.
_"Too late?"_
The words fall like a knell, yet there is a question in them, and
one that must be answered.
"Too late!" repeats he. He could have cursed himself, yet it had to
be done. He frees himself from her and stands back. "Why do you
compel me to say such things?" cries he violently.
But she does not hear him. She is looking into the distant corner of
the room as though--as one might suppose, seeing her earnest
gaze--she can there see something. Her dead life's hope, perhaps,
lying in its shroud. And perhaps, too, the sight is too much for
her, for after a moment or two she raises her hands to her eyes, and
clasps them there.
A sound breaks from her. In all his after life Rylton never forgets
it.
"Oh!" says she, and that is all--but it sounds like a last breath--a
final moan--an end.
Then all at once it is over. Whatever she has felt is done with for
the present. She takes down her hands, and looks round at him
deliberately. Her face is as the face of one dead, but her voice is
clear and cold and cutting as an east wind.
"It is this, then," says she, "that all is at an end between us. You
have tired of me. I have heard that men do tire. Now I know it. You
wish me dead, perhaps."
"No! Marian, No!"
"For that, I suppose, I should thank you. Thank the man who once
wanted so much to make me his wife. You _did_ wish to make me--your
wife?"
"Yes--yes. But that is all over," says he desperately.
"For you, yes! For me----"
She pauses.
"Great heavens!" cries Rylton. "Why go on like this? Why go into it
again? Was it my fault? At that time I was a poor man. I laid my
heart at your feet, but"--drawing a long breath--"I _was_ a poor
man. It all lay in that."
"Ah! You will throw that in my teeth always," says she--not
violently now, not even with a touch of excitement, but slowly,
evenly. "Even in the days to come. Yet it was not that that killed
your love for me. There was something else. Go on. Let me hear it."
"There is nothing to hear. I beg of you, Marian, to----"
"To let you off?" says she, with a ghastly attempt at gaiety. "No,
don't hope for that. There is something--something that has cost
_me_--everything. And I will learn it. No one's love dies without a
cause. And there is a cause for the death of yours. Be frank with
me, now, in this our last hour. Make me a confession."
Five minutes ago she would have thrown her arms round him, and
besought him, with tender phrases, to tell her what is on his mind.
Now she stands apart from him, with a cold, lifeless smile upon her
still colder lips.
"No! Do not perjure yourself," says she quickly, seeing him about to
speak. "Do you think I do not know? That I cannot see by your face
that there is something? I have studied it quite long enough to
understand it. Come, Maurice. The past is the past--_you_ have
decided that--and it is a merely curious mood that leads me to ask
you the secret of the great crime that has separated us. _My_ crime,
_bien entendu!"_
Rylton turns away from her with an impatient gesture, and goes back
to the hearthrug. To persist like this! It is madness!
"There was no crime," says he. "But"--frowning--"as we are on the
subject, and as you compel me to it, I----"
"No, don't speak. _Don't!"_ says she quickly.
She seems to cower away from him. She had solicited his
condemnation, yet when it came to the point she had no strength to
bear it. And after all, is she had only known, he was merely going
to accuse himself of having been over-foolish when he induced Tita
to ask her to Oakdean on a visit.
"As you will," says he listlessly. "I was merely thinking of----"
"I know--I know. Of course _she_ would make me out the worst in the
world, and I have reason to know that her cousin, Miss Hescott, told
you stories about me. There was a night when----
"When----"
"Ah, I was wrong there. I was merely thinking of----"
"Wrong!" says Rylton slowly.
His thoughts have gone back to that last interview with Margaret,
and what she had said about his folly in asking Marian on a visit to
Oakdean, considering all that had been said and done between them in
the old time.
"You remember it, then?" asks Marian. She looks at him. Her face is
still livid, and as she speaks she throws back her head and laughs
aloud--such a cruel, hateful laugh! "Well, I know it--I lied. I lied
then most abominably."
"Then?"
"That night on the balcony--I confess it. I know Minnie Hescott told
you."
Rylton's mind goes quickly back.
"That night," says he slowly, as if thinking, as if concentrating
his thoughts, "the night you led me to where----"
He hesitates.
"Does it hurt you to name her in my presence?" asks Mrs. Bethune in
a tone like velvet. "Well, spare yourself. Let us call her
'she'--the immaculate 'she.' Now you can go on with safety."
Her tone, her sneer, so evidently directed at Tita, maddens Rylton.
"You _say_ you lied that night," says he, with barely suppressed
fury. "And--I believe you. I was on the balcony with you, and you
told me then that you did not know where my wife was. At all events,
you gave me the _impression_ that you did not know where she was.
You made me a bet--you can't have forgotten it--that she was with
her cousin in the garden. I took the bet, and then you led me to the
arbour--the arbour where you _knew_ she was. All things seemed to
swear against her--all things save her cousin, Minnie Hescott."
"Minnie Hescott!" Marian Bethune laughs aloud. "Minnie and Tom
Hescott! Would a brother swear against a brother? Would a sister
give a brother away? No. And I will tell you why. Because it is to
the interest of each to support the other. Minnie Hescott would lie
far deeper than I did to save her brother's reputation, for with her
brother's reputation her own would sink. _I_ lied when I said I did
not know where your precious wife was at that moment, but I lied for
_your_ sake, Maurice--to save you from a woman who was betraying
you, and who would drag you down to the very dust with her."
Rylton lifts his head.
"To what woman are you alluding?" asks he shortly, icily.
"To Tita," returns she boldly. "I knew where she was that night; I
knew she would be with her cousin at that moment--the cousin she had
known and loved all her life. The cousin she had cast aside, _for
the moment,_ to take your title, and mount by it to a higher rank in
life." She takes a step towards him, her large eyes blazing. _"Now_
you know the truth," says she, with a vehemence that shakes her.
"Your love may be dead to me, but you shall know _her_ as she is!
Faithless! False as hell she is! _She_ shall not supplant me!"
She stands back from him, her hands outstretched and clenched. She
looks almost superb in her wicked wrath.
Rylton regards her steadily.
"You are tired," says he coldly. "You ought to get some rest. You
will sleep here to-night?"
There is a question in his tone.
"Why not? In this my old home--my home for years--your mother's
home."
"My mother is in Scotland," says he briefly.
Something is tearing at his breast. Her deliberate, her most cruel
attack on Tita has touched him to the quick.
"Don't be frightened!" says Mrs. Bethune, bursting out laughing.
"What are you thinking of--your reputation?"
"No!"
Manlike, he refrains from the obvious return. But she, in her mad
frenzy of despair and anger, supplies it.
"Mine, then? It is not worth a thought, eh? Who cares for me?
Whether I sink with the vile, or swim with the good? No! I'll tell
you what you are thinking of, Maurice." She lays her hand upon her
throat quickly, as if stifling, yet laughs gaily. "You are thinking
that that little _idiot_ may hear of my being here, and that she
will make a fuss about it--all underbred people love a fuss--and
that----"
She would have gone on, but Rylton has given up his neutral position
on the hearthrug--he has made one step forward, his face dark with
passion.
"Not another word!" says he in a sharp, imperious tone. "Not another
word about--MY WIFE!"
The last two words explain all. Mrs. Bethune stand still, as if
struck to the heart.
For a full minute she so stands, and then--"You are right. I should
not be here," says she. She turns, and rests her eyes steadily on
him. "So _that_ is my fault," says she, "that you love--_her!"_
Shame holds him silent.
"You _do_ love her?" persists she, playing with her misery,
insisting on it. She lays her hand upon her heart as if to stay its
beating. Is it going to burst its bonds? Oh, if it only might, and
at this moment! To think that she--that _girl_--should take her
place! And yet, had she not known? All through, had she not known?
She had felt a superstitious fear about her, and now--"You do not
speak?" says she. "Is it that you cannot? God knows I do not wonder!
Well," slowly, "good-night! good-bye!"
She goes to the door.
"You cannot go like this," says Rylton, with some agitation. "Stay
here to-night. I shall have time to catch the up-train, and I have
business in town; and besides----"
"Do not lie!" says she. She stops and faces him; her eyes are
aflame, and she throws out her right arm with a gesture that must be
called magnificent. It fills him with a sort of admiration. "I want
no hollow courtesies from you." She stoops, and gathering up her
wraps, folds them around her. Then she turns to him again. "As all
is dead between us." She stops short. "Oh no!"--laying her hand upon
her heart.--"As all is dead in _you_----"
Whether her strength forsakes her here, or whether she refuses to
say more, he never knows. She opens the door and goes into the hall,
and, seeing a servant, beckons to him.
Rylton follows her, but, seeing him coming, she turns and waves him
back. One last word she flings at him.
"Remember your reputation."
He can hear the bitterness of her laugh as she runs down the stone
steps into the fly outside. She had evidently told the man to wait.