PAYMENT
She forced a laugh. "Oh, there's a lot more to be said," she called
after him, in a voice almost gay. "Please come back."
He took no notice of her, but went on.
She sprang up, a look of alarm on her face, and took a few quick steps
across the grass.
"Mr. Clinton!" she said. "Mr. Clinton! I have a proposal to make to
you."
He stopped and turned then. She expected him to come back on to the
lawn; but he stood still, and she had to go up the path to him.
She lifted her face, that some men, but not he, would have called
beautiful, to his, and smiled.
"It needn't happen, you know," she said.
He did not understand in the least, and looked his puzzlement--and his
disgust of her. She dropped her eyes, and her seductive manner at the
same time. "Come and sit down again," she said, "and let us talk
sensibly. I have worked off my anger. Now let us see what can be
done."
A slight gleam of hope came to him. Perhaps--now Susan was dead--she
would see ... she could gain nothing....
He followed her to the seat obediently, and sat down.
"I have told you what I think of you," she said, speaking now coolly
and evenly. "I had to do that to clear my mind. You have treated me
with the meanest cruelty, and I mean every word I have said to you. I
have suffered bitterly, and perhaps I have succeeded in showing you
that I have it in my power to make you suffer in the same way. Revenge
is very sweet, and I have tasted a little of it. But, after all, it
can't do away with the past; and its savour soon goes. I shan't gain
much by punishing you, though you ought to be punished."
"No," he said eagerly. "You can gain nothing. And look at the
terrible--awful suffering you would bring upon those who are innocent
of any offence against you."
"Quite so," she said coolly. "I am glad you realise that. I meant you
to."
"It would be inhuman," he went on. "You would never be forgiven for
it--in this world or the next."
She laughed, this time without affectation. "You are really rather
funny," she said. "Well now, what do you suggest? That I shall hold
my tongue and go away? Back to America, for instance, and settle down
there for good, perhaps under another name?"
He could hardly believe his ears. "You would do that?" he cried.
"I think perhaps I might be persuaded to. I am not unreasonable."
"If you did that," he broke out, his face aflame, "the blessing of the
innocent would be yours to the end of your life. You would be their
saviour; you----"
"I suppose I should," she interrupted dryly. "I should like that. But
the trouble is, you see, that one can't live on the blessing of the
innocent. It isn't sustaining enough. And I have very little to live
on."
The light died slowly out of his face as he listened to her.
"You must help me," she said. "You are a rich man, and you can do it.
You allowed money to be paid before, to hush up this scandal; you
offered a very large sum of money to free yourself of a mere
disagreeable feeling of indebtedness, and took some risk in doing it
too--I give you that much justice. I am glad Lord Sedbergh refused
that money. Now you can lend it to me--I will pay you back some
day--and a few thousands more. Let me have ten thousand pounds, Mr.
Clinton. You can ease your conscience of the wrong you have done me,
and save your innocents at the same time--yourself, who are not
innocent, into the bargain."
Perhaps she had mistaken the motives which had led him to refuse to pay
money to Gotch, and really thought that he had done it only to save his
own skin, knowing that it would be paid elsewhere; in which case
nothing in this proposal would shock him. Or perhaps she relied
overmuch on having frightened him into acquiescence with any proposal.
Otherwise, with all her powers of finesse, she would hardly have
plumped out her demand in this careless fashion.
She had restored him in some degree to himself. "What!" he cried, his
brows terrifically together. "After all you have said, you now want me
to pay blackmail to _you_. It's an impudent proposal; and I refuse it."
She was quick to see her error. If he wanted his susceptibilities
soothed, she was quite ready to do that.
"Oh, don't be absurd," she said. "I never really thought that you had
looked on that transaction as blackmail; I only said so because I
wanted to make you smart. Is it likely that I should be fool enough to
suggest such a thing to you? Besides, whatever you may think of me, I
am not a blackmailer; it wouldn't suit my book. You are not very
clever, you know, Mr. Clinton. I will tell you what I want, and why I
think you ought to help me to get it, as carefully as I can; and you
must listen to me and try and understand it."
Poor man! How could he help listening to her, with so much at stake!
"The mischief is done," she said. "I am innocent, but I am
smirched--poor me!--and although I could make you suffer, and would, I
tell you frankly, if I could do it without hurting myself, I don't
believe I could ever get back--not all the way. I don't know that I
want to try; I am not young now, whatever I look, and I have no heart
for the struggle. I am young enough, at any rate, to enjoy my life, if
I can begin it again, in quite new surroundings, and not dogged by
poverty. It isn't much I want. What is ten thousand pounds for life
to a woman like me, who has spent that in a year? I have something of
my own, but not much. This would make me secure against that horrible
wolf at the door, which frightens me more than anything."
He was about to speak, but she silenced him with a lift of the hand,
and said, "Let me go on, please. Why should _you_ give it to me? you
were going to ask--I drop the pretence of a loan, though you can call
it that if you like. Because you are the only person I can ask it of.
It is compensation; and nobody but you--except Humphrey, of course--has
offended against me. Sedbergh _thinks_ I stole the star, and so does
Mary Sedbergh, and it is true that that is all I was actually found
guilty of. Under the circumstances they are not to be blamed. The
coincidences--and the perjury--were too strong for me. They owe me
nothing--except out of kindness to an old friend whom they had done
injustice to."
"If you want me to listen to you in patience," said the Squire angrily,
"you'll drop that impudent pretence of not having stolen the star. My
daughter saw you at the cupboard; and you would have stolen the
necklace if you could. You hardly take the trouble to hide that you're
lying. You must take me for a fool."
"Shall I drop it?" she asked. "I think perhaps I will, with you. It
is quite safe. I can take it up again if you drive me to action; and
nobody will believe that I could have been such a fool as to admit to
you that I had stolen it."
"You infamous creature!" he cried. "That was the plea you used before.
It didn't save you, and it won't save you this time."
She saw that she had made a mistake, but answered, "Well, no; perhaps
it wouldn't save me. But you see the question wouldn't arise. If I
did take it, I couldn't be punished for taking it twice. I could
confess it to all the world now, and nothing further would happen.
Besides, you see, it will be _you_ who will be standing in the dock,
for an offence into which the question of the star wouldn't come."
His eyes dropped. Her specious reasoning--before she had made the
mistake of interrupting it with her insolent cynicism--had made some
way with him, and allowed his mind to detach itself ever so little from
that frightful picture.
"Oh, you can't be prepared to face that," she said, pursuing her
recovered advantage; "and it would be too absurd--quixotic. The same
reasons hold good here as they did before, when you allowed silence to
be kept, and were prepared to pay not much less than I ask for. You
save your children as well as yourself. Think what it would mean for
that young girl of yours, when the time came for her to be married."
Ah! That was a sharper pang than she knew. Oh, for the sunny
satisfaction of that walk across the park back again! And the sun
shining now on his black misery had only shifted a point or two.
"And the other one," went on the cool voice, "who was married the other
day. Their father in the dock! in prison!"
He rallied again. "You can drop that nonsense too," he said. "It's a
bogy that doesn't frighten me."
"Not the dock? I admit that you _might_ escape the prison--though
Humphrey couldn't very well."
"Whatever mistake I may have made--and I'm not yet prepared to admit
that I made any--I did nothing that I could be even asked to justify in
a court of law."
"Well, I think you're wrong there. But in any case you would fear the
court of your friends and neighbours and the whole public opinion of
England hardly less than a court of law, wouldn't you?"
This was so true that he showed his sense of it in his face.
"Oh, my dear good man, how can you be so foolish as to run the risk of
it? Look here, Mr. Clinton, supposing I admit the theft of the star,
and say that I have deserved what I got for that, do I _really_ suffer
nothing whatever by bearing the burden of Susan's far bigger theft all
my life? Be honest now. Take it as a woman's weakness. Wouldn't it
mean a good deal to me to be cleared of that?"
She waited for his answer, which was slow in coming. He fought hard
against his inclination to give an evasive one. "Yes--it might--it
would," he said.
"Then I bear it, and save her name, now she is dead; and your name. I
save the honour of you Clintons, who think so much of yourselves. If I
do that, and allow the shame you have fastened on to me to rest where
it is, don't I deserve some little kindness from you--some help in the
life I shall have to live, right away from all that has ever made my
life worth living to me before, right away from all my friends? I
should get _some_ of them back, you know, if it were known that _that_,
at least, wasn't true of me."
Her voice was pleading. It affected him no more than by the sense of
the words it carried. Perhaps if this had been her tone from the first
it might have done so.
But the words themselves did affect him. They were true. If it could
be regarded as only help that she wanted!
"This time," she said, "you wouldn't be doing injury to a living soul.
You would only be doing something towards setting right a wrong. You
wouldn't even be doing anything that the law would blame you for.
Susan is dead. There is nobody who could be prosecuted."
"I could pay Sedbergh his money," he said slowly.
"Yes, you could do that," she took him up eagerly. "Honourably, now.
He could take it without any scruple. The Sedberghs would be sorry for
me, I think. They would be glad that I had been helped. _They_
couldn't blame you. And who else could?"
The Squire knitted his brows hard, and tried to think, but couldn't.
He could only feel. Release might be in view from the chains that
already seemed to have begun to rust on him.
"I can't see my way," he said. "I must think it over."
With her eyes fixed sharply and anxiously on him, she had seemed to be
reading his very thoughts. She had influenced him; she could do
nothing more by repetition of her plea; he must have time to think it
over--and _would_ have time, whatever she might say; he was that sort
of man.
She rose from the seat. "I know you must have time," she said. "I
know that the sum I ask for is a large one, especially if you are going
to add another seven thousand on to it; but I can't take less. I won't
take less. But remember what it buys you, Mr. Clinton, when you think
it over. If you refuse me this money which you owe me for what you
have done to me, if ever man owed woman anything, I shall speak out and
bring it home to you. I would rather have peace for the rest of my
days, and ease, than perpetual fighting. But I shall be ready to
fight, if you refuse me, for I shall get _something_ out of that."
He rose too. "You needn't go over all that again," he said. "If I
consider it right to do this I will do it. If not, no threats will
weigh with me."
"Very well," she said. "If you accept, as of course you will, for it
_is_ right to do it, you will want to see me again to settle details.
Probably you won't want to pay the money all at once, and we can
arrange that. You will want to be assured that I shan't come down on
you again, that my silence will be absolutely unbroken. I can satisfy
you as to that too; I have thought out a way. There will be other
details to settle. You won't want to see me down here again. You must
come to see me in London. I will help you in every way I can."
She gave him an address.
"Now I will go," she said. "Show me a way out without my passing the
house."
They walked round the lower end of the lake together, neither of them
speaking a word. He took her to a gate leading into a lane. "If you
follow that to the left," he said, "you will come to the village."
She went through the gate which he held open for her. Then she turned
and looked at him out of level eyes, and said before she walked away:
"If you do what I ask, you will hear nothing more of me after we have
settled matters. If you don't, I will punish you somehow--in
addition--for not receiving me into your house."