A man and a woman--nature had done the grouping--sat on a rustic seat,
in the late afternoon. The man was middle-aged, slender, swarthy, with
the expression of a poet and the complexion of a pirate--a man at whom
one would look again. The woman was young, blonde, graceful, with
something in her figure and movements suggesting the word "lithe." She
was habited in a gray gown with odd brown markings in the texture. She
may have been beautiful; one could not readily say, for her eyes denied
attention to all else. They were gray-green, long and narrow, with an
expression defying analysis. One could only know that they were
disquieting. Cleopatra may have had such eyes.
The man and the woman talked.
"Yes," said the woman, "I love you, God knows! But marry you, no. I
cannot, will not."
"Irene, you have said that many times, yet always have denied me a
reason. I've a right to know, to understand, to feel and prove my
fortitude if I have it. Give me a reason."
"For loving you?"
The woman was smiling through her tears and her pallor. That did not
stir any sense of humor in the man.
"No; there is no reason for that. A reason for not marrying me. I've a
right to know. I must know. I will know!"
He had risen and was standing before her with clenched hands, on his
face a frown--it might have been called a scowl. He looked as if he
might attempt to learn by strangling her. She smiled no more--merely sat
looking up into his face with a fixed, set regard that was utterly
without emotion or sentiment. Yet it had something in it that tamed his
resentment and made him shiver.
"You are determined to have my reason?" she asked in a tone that was
entirely mechanical--a tone that might have been her look made audible.
"If you please--if I'm not asking too much."
Apparently this lord of creation was yielding some part of his dominion
over his co-creature.
"Very well, you shall know: I am insane."
The man started, then looked incredulous and was conscious that he ought
to be amused. But, again, the sense of humor failed him in his need and
despite his disbelief he was profoundly disturbed by that which he did
not believe. Between our convictions and our feelings there is no good
understanding.
"That is what the physicians would say," the woman continued--"if they
knew. I might myself prefer to call it a case of 'possession.' Sit down
and hear what I have to say."
The man silently resumed his seat beside her on the rustic bench by the
wayside. Over-against them on the eastern side of the valley the hills
were already sunset-flushed and the stillness all about was of that
peculiar quality that foretells the twilight. Something of its
mysterious and significant solemnity had imparted itself to the man's
mood. In the spiritual, as in the material world, are signs and presages
of night. Rarely meeting her look, and whenever he did so conscious of
the indefinable dread with which, despite their feline beauty, her eyes
always affected him, Jenner Brading listened in silence to the story
told by Irene Marlowe. In deference to the reader's possible prejudice
against the artless method of an unpractised historian the author
ventures to substitute his own version for hers.