The strain upon Gordon's nerves had become intolerable. When he first
mounted the outhouse roof he had been wholly absorbed in the horror of
his conjecture that Hawke's midnight visitor was the girl to whom he
was betrothed, and the need of either verifying or disproving it was
the one thing clear to him amid the turmoil of his brain. Of what the
visit might actually imply he took no thought. Now, however, he knew;
the interview which he had witnessed left him not a glimmer of doubt.
But during the two years of their engagement, Kate Nugent had so grown
into the heart of his life, had become so real a part of him, that she
was not easily dethroned from his respect. He clung instinctively to a
vague hope that there might have been some compelling cause of which
he knew nothing to account for her subjection to Hawke. That this
subjection meant treachery to him, treachery of an unpardonable kind,
whatever its cause, he realised in a way, but as yet did he not feel
it. The blow had stunned his reason, had even dulled his senses, had,
in a word, struck at the very roots of his being. He was adrift in a
maze of bewilderment. The scene he was witnessing grew in the end
shadowy and unreal. Even Hawke seemed to lose his individuality; he
became just a detail in the sum of the mystery, a thing to be
explained, not a man to be punished. Gordon, in fact, was left
conscious of but one feeling--the overwhelming desire to see the woman
he had worshipped face to face with him, to speak with her, and
realising the necessity of getting solid ground beneath his feet, if
he was to accomplish his wish, he clambered from his perch--just too
soon to see Kate strike Hawke across the mouth, as her answer to the
last words he had only dimly heard.
Gordon reached the earth securely and crept softly back to his garden
gate. The sky had cleared during the last half hour, and the valley
lay pure and clean in the starlight. After a while a sound reached
him. It struck upon muffled senses at first, meaninglessly; but its
continued repetition fixed his attention, and he perceived that it was
the sound of Kate's footsteps on the stones again at the bottom of the
lane. She was returning. Gordon was still in that dazed condition when
the brain, unable to take a complete impression, or, to speak more
plainly, unable to combine its different impressions into one whole,
fixes itself upon some small particular sensation and magnifies that,
to the thorough exclusion of the rest. So, now as he listened to her
steps drawing nearer and nearer, he noticed acutely a difference in
the manner of her walk, a certain hesitancy, absent when she swept by
him on her way to the Inn. Then her footfalls had rung surely and
rhythmically, betokening some quest in view; now they wavered,
timidly, with uncertain beats as if the hope had gone out of her
limbs. The sound was somehow familiar to Gordon, and, curiously
ransacking his memories, he discovered the reason. He had marked women
walk like that, with the same weariness, with the same hopelessness,
late at night in the quiet of the London streets. This chance
association of ideas acted on him like a shock. It woke him from his
stupor, revivified him, set him with clear vision fronting facts. He
grasped the full meaning of Kate's interview with Hawke. It rose
before him like an acted scene in a play, and he recollected with a
sudden horror those last words, "They will cost more." How long was it
since he had climbed down from the outhouse roof? How long had he been
waiting by the gate? He had been unconscious of time. Hours might have
lapsed for all he knew. Meanwhile the steps drew nearer. He saw her
plainly advancing towards him. She was walking with her eyes on the
ground, and so did not observe him barring her path until she almost
knocked against him. She lifted her head, stood for a second looking
searchingly into his face, as if he were a ghost, the fancied
embodiment of her fears, and then, with an inarticulate moan like the
cry of the dumb, she reeled against the wall of the lane. Gordon heard
her breath coming and going in quick jets and the scrabbling of her
finger-nails as she clutched at the stones.
"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 to 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.