Rainham turned at random out of Grove Road, walking aimlessly, and
very fast, without considering direction. He had passed the girl's
arm through his own as they left the house; and in a sort of
stupefied obedience she had submitted. To her, too, one way was the
same as another, as dreary and as vain. With Rainham, indeed, after
the tension of the last few minutes, into which he had crowded such
a wealth of suffering and of illumination, a curious stupor had
succeeded. For the moment he neither thought nor suffered: simply,
it was good to be out there, in the darkness--the darkness of
London--after that immense plunge, which was still too near him,
that he should attempt to appreciate it in all its relations.
By-and-by would be the season of reckoning, the just and delicate
analysis, by nicely critical nature, of all that he had deliberately
lost, when he might run desperately before the whips of his own
thought; now he felt only the lethargy which succeeds strenuous
action, that has been, in a measure, victorious; the physical
well-being of walking rapidly, vaguely, through the comfortable
shadows, allowing the cold rain to pelt refreshingly upon his face
and aching temples. And it was not until they had gone so through
several streets, whose names were a blank to him, that Rainham
bethought him, with a touch of self-reproach, of his companion, and
how ill her thin garments and slender figure were calculated to
suffer the downpour, which he only found consoling. He drew her into
the shelter of a doorway, signalled to a passing cab; and just then,
the light of an adjacent street lamp falling upon her face, he
realized for the first time in its sunken outline the progress of
her malady.
"I beg your pardon," he said gently; "I did not understand that you
were ill. You must tell me where you are lodging, and I will take
you back." Then, as though he anticipated her hesitation, a tribute
to her old ambiguity, become so useless, he added dryly: "You can
tell me your address; you have no reason to hide yourself now."
She glanced up at him furtively, shrinking back a little as though
she feared his irony.
"I live in Charlotte Street, No. --. But pray let me go alone, sir!
It will not be your way."
"I have rooms in Bloomsbury," he answered. "It will be entirely on
my way."
And the girl made no further protest, when he handed her into the
cab, an inconvenient four-wheeler which had responded to his signal,
and, after giving the driver the address which she had indicated,
took his place silently beside her. Perhaps something of Rainham's
own lethargy had infected her, after a scene so feverish; or perhaps
she could not but feel dimly, and in a manner not to be analysed,
how that, distant and apart as they two seemed, yet within the last
hour, by Rainham's action, between her life and his a subtile,
invisible chord had been stretched, so that the order of her going
might well rest with him.
She cast furtive glances at him from time to time as he sat back,
obscure in his corner, gazing out with eyes which saw nothing at the
blurred gas-lamps, and the red flashes of the more rapid vehicles
which outstripped them. And now that the first stupefying effect of
his intervention was wearing away--it seemed like a mad scene in a
theatre, or some monstrous dream, so surprising and unreal--her
primitive consciousness awoke, and set her wondering, inquiring,
with bewilderment that was akin to terror, into the motives and
bearing of their joint conduct. It had seemed to her natural enough
then, as do the most grotesque of our sleeping visions when they are
passing; but now that she was awake, relieved from the coercion of
his eyes, she was roundly amazed at her own complicity in so
stupendous a fiction. What had he made her do? Why had he taken this
sin of another's on his own shoulders? Eve's piteous cry of
"Philip!" at his entry recurred to her--the intimate nature of her
appeal. The scent was promising; but it opened out vistas of a
loyalty too fantastic and generous to be true. Her mature cynicism
of a girl of the people, disillusioned and abused, flouted the idea.
Did she not know "gentlemen" and the nature of their love? The girl
was hardened by ill-usage, bitter from long brooding over her
shame. She was glad when he turned to her at last, breaking a
silence which the sullen roar of London outside and beyond them, the
dreary rattling of the cab, seemed only to heighten, with a sudden
gesture of despair.
"If I had only known! If you had only told me two years ago!"
The suppressed passion in his voice, his air, terrified the girl.
She bent forward trembling.
"Ah! what have I done, what have I done?" she moaned. "How did I
know that it would all come like this? I meant no harm, sir. He
persuaded me to deceive you after I had found out who he really was,
to put you off the scent, keeping his name a secret. He said he had
a right to ask that. He told me he was married, though he wasn't
then. And afterwards he made me move, when you were abroad: he
wanted my address not to be known. That was the condition he made of
his seeing after the child; he swore he would provide for her then,
and bring her up like a lady. And he sent me the money for a bit
pretty regular. Oh, it was only for her sake, I promise you that! I
wouldn't have touched a brass farthing for myself. But, after all,
she _was_ his child. And then, somehow or other, the money didn't
come. He went away--he was away all the summer--and he said he had
so many calls on him, such expenses."
"Ah, the scoundrel!" cried Rainham, between his set teeth.
The girl took him up, hardly with an echo of his own resentment,
rather with a sort of crushed directness, as one who acknowledged a
bare fact, making no comment, merely admitting the obscure
dreariness of things.
"Yes; he was a scoundrel. He was bad all along. I think he has no
heart. And he has made me bad too. I was a good enough girl of old,
before I knew him. Only something came over me to-night when I found
_her_ there, with that big house and the servants, and all that
luxury, and thought how he couldn't spare a few pounds to bring his
own child up decent. Oh, I was vile to-night. I frightened her.
Perhaps it was best as it happened. It dazed her. She'll remember
less. She'll only remember your part of it, sir."
She glanced across at him with timid eyes, which asked him to be so
good as to explain: all that had confused her so.
"I don't understand," she murmured helplessly--"I don't understand."
He ignored the interrogation in her eyes with a little gesture, half
irritable and half entreating, which coerced her.
"How did you come there?" he asked. "What was the good----"
His question languished suddenly, and he let both hands fall slowly
upon his knees. In effect, the uselessness of all argument, the
futility of any recrimination in the face of what had been
accomplished, was suddenly borne in upon him with irresistible
force: and his momentary irritation against the malice of
circumstance, the baseness of the man, was swallowed up in a rising
lassitude which simply gave up.
The girl continued after a while, in a low, rapid voice, her eyes
fixed intently upon the opal in an antique ring which shone faintly
upon one of Rainham's quiet hands, as though its steady radiance
helped her speech:
"It was all an accident--an accident. I was sick and tired of
waiting and writing, and getting never a word in reply. My health
went too, last winter, and ever since I have been getting weaker and
worse. I knew what that meant: my mother died of a decline--yes, she
is dead, thank God! this ten years--and it was then, when I knew I
wouldn't get any better, and there was the child to think of, that I
wanted to see him once more. There was a gentleman, too, who
came----"
She broke off for a moment, clasping her thin hands together, which
trembled as though the memory of some past, fantastic terror had
recurred.
"It doesn't matter," she went on presently. "He frightened me, that
was all. He had such a stern, smooth-spoken way with him; and he
seemed to know so much. He said that he had heard of me and my
story, and would befriend me if I would tell him the name of the man
who ruined me. Yes, he would befriend me, help me to lead a
respectable life."
Her sunken eyes flashed for a moment, and her lip was scornfully
curled.
"God knows!" she cried, with a certain rude dignity, "I was always
an honest woman but for Cyril--Dick she called him."
The intimate term, tossed so lightly from those lips, caused Rainham
to quiver, as though she had rasped raw wounds. It was the concrete
touch giving flesh and blood to his vision of her past. It made the
girl's old relation with Eve's husband grow into a very present
horror, startlingly real and distinct.
"Go on," he said at last, wearily.
"Ah, I didn't tell him, sir," she explained, misinterpreting his
silence. "I wouldn't have done that. He sore angered me, though he
may have meant well. He was set on seeing the child then, but I
wouldn't let him. It came over me after he was gone that that,
maybe, was what he came for--the child. Someone might have put him
on to take her from me--some society. Oh, I was at my wits' end,
sir! for, you see, she is all I have--all--all! Then I made up my
mind to go and see him. Bad as he is, he wouldn't have let them do
it. Oh, I would have begged and prayed to him on my knees for that."
She stopped for a moment, hectic and panting. She pressed both hands
against her breast, as though she sought composure. Then she
continued:
"It was all a mistake, you know, my being shown in there to-night! I
would never have sought her out myself, being where she is. Oh, I
have my pride! It was the servant's mistake: he took me for a
fitter, no doubt, from one of the big dressmakers. Perhaps there was
one expected, I don't know. But I didn't think of that when I came
in and found her sitting there, so proud and soft. It all came over
me--how badly he had used me, and little Meg there at home, and hard
Death coming on me--and I told her. It seemed quite natural then, as
though I had come for that, just for that and nothing else, though,
Heaven knows, it was never in my mind before. I was sorry
afterwards. Yes, before you came in with _him_ I was sorry. It wasn't
as if I owed her any grudge. How could she have known? She is an
innocent young thing, after all--younger than I ever was--for all
her fine dresses and her grand ladyish way. It was like striking a
bit of a child.... God forgive him," she added half hysterically,
"if he uses her as bad as me!"
Rainham's hand stole to his side, and for a moment he averted his
head. When he turned to her again she was uncertain whether it was
more than a pang of sharp physical pain, such as she well knew
herself, which had so suddenly blanched his lips.
"For pity's sake, girl," he whispered, "be silent."
She considered him for a moment silently in the elusive light, that
matched the mental twilight in which she viewed his mood. His
expression puzzled, evaded her; and she could not have explained the
pity which he aroused.
"I am sorry," she broke out again, moved by an impulse which she did
not comprehend. "You did it for her."
"Oh, for her! What does it matter since it is done? Say that it was
an accident--a folly--that I am sorry too."
"No," said the girl softly; "you are glad."
He shrugged his shoulders with increasing weariness, an immense
desire to have the subject ended and put away with forgotten things.
"I am glad, then. Have it as you like."
But she resumed with a pertinacity which his irritated nerves found
malignant.
"If it was that," she said ambiguously, "you had better have held
your tongue. You had only to gain---- Ah, why did you do it? What
was the good?"
He made another gesture of lassitude; then, rousing himself, he
remarked:
"It was a calculation, then, a piece of simple arithmetic. If it
gives her a little peace a little longer, why should three persons
suffer--be sacrificed--when two might serve?"
"Oh, him!" cried the girl scornfully; "he can't suffer--he hasn't a
heart!"
Rainham looked up at her at last. His fingers ceased playing with
his ring.
"Oh, let me count for a little," he murmured, with a little, ghastly
laugh.
The girl's eyes looked full into his, and in a moment they shone out
of her face, which was suffused with a rosy flush that made her
almost beautiful, with the illumination of some transcendent idea.
"Ah, you _are_ a gentleman!" she cried.
In the tension of their nerves they were neither aware that the cab
had come to a standstill, and before he could prevent her, she had
stooped swiftly down and caught his hand passionately to her lips.
"Heaven forgive me! How unhappy you must be!" she said.