With the sunset in their faces they swept through the keen-scented autumn
air at the swiftest pace of Kate’s ponies. She had given the reins to
Peyton, and he had turned the horses’ heads away from the lake, rising by
woody upland lanes to the high pastures which still held the sunlight. The
horses were fresh enough to claim his undivided attention, and he drove in
silence, his smooth fair profile turned to his companion, who sat silent
also.
Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions which were
forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted
regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the
tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the
limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some
young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she
takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and
through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment
all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes
and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men
like Denis, girls like herself--for under the unlikeness she felt the
strange affinity--all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with
agonized hands reaching up for rescue. Her heart shrank from the horror of
it, and then, in a passion of pity, drew back to the edge of the abyss.
Suddenly her eyes turned toward Denis. His face was grave, but less
disturbed. And men knew about these things! They carried this abyss in
their bosoms, and went about smiling, and sat at the feet of innocence.
Could it be that Denis--Denis even--Ah, no! She remembered what he had been
to poor Arthur; she understood, now, the vague allusions to what he had
tried to do for his brother. He had seen Arthur down there, in that coiling
blackness, and had leaned over and tried to drag him out. But Arthur was
too deep down, and his arms were interlocked with other arms--they had
dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning people who fight
together in the waves! Kate’s visualizing habit gave a hateful precision
and persistency to the image she had evoked--she could not rid herself of
the vision of anguished shapes striving together in the darkness. The
horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a choking breath, and felt
the tears on her face.
Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention
had strayed from them.
“This has done me good,” he began; but as he looked his voice changed.
“Kate! What is it? Why are you crying? Oh, for God’s sake, _don’t_!”
he ended, his hand closing on her wrist.
She steadied herself and raised her eyes to his.
“I--I couldn’t help it,” she stammered, struggling in the sudden release of
her pent compassion. “It seems so awful that we should stand so close to
this horror--that it might have been you who--”
“I who--what on earth do you mean?” he broke in stridently.
“Oh, don’t you see? I found myself exulting that you and I were so far from
it--above it--safe in ourselves and each other--and then the other feeling
came--the sense of selfishness, of going by on the other side; and I tried
to realize that it might have been you and I who--who were down there in
the night and the flood--”
Peyton let the whip fall on the ponies’ flanks. “Upon my soul,” he said
with a laugh, “you must have a nice opinion of both of us.”
The words fell chillingly on the blaze of her self-immolation. Would
she never learn to remember that Denis was incapable of mounting such
hypothetical pyres? He might be as alive as herself to the direct demands
of duty, but of its imaginative claims he was robustly unconscious. The
thought brought a wholesome reaction of thankfulness.
“Ah, well,” she said, the sunset dilating through her tears, “don’t you see
that I can bear to think such things only because they’re impossibilities?
It’s easy to look over into the depths if one has a rampart to lean on.
What I most pity poor Arthur for is that, instead of that woman lying
there, so dreadfully dead, there might have been a girl like me, so
exquisitely alive because of him; but it seems cruel, doesn’t it, to let
what he was not add ever so little to the value of what you are? To let him
contribute ever so little to my happiness by the difference there is
between you?”
She was conscious, as she spoke, of straying again beyond his
reach, through intricacies of sensation new even to her exploring
susceptibilities. A happy literalness usually enabled him to strike a short
cut through such labyrinths, and rejoin her smiling on the other side; but
now she became wonderingly aware that he had been caught in the thick of
her hypothesis.
“It’s the difference that makes you care for me, then?” he broke out, with
a kind of violence which seemed to renew his clutch on her wrist.
“The difference?”
He lashed the ponies again, so sharply that a murmur escaped her, and he
drew them up, quivering, with an inconsequent “Steady, boys,” at which
their back-laid ears protested.
“It’s because I’m moral and respectable, and all that, that you’re fond of
me,” he went on; “you’re--you’re simply in love with my virtues. You
couldn’t imagine caring if I were down there in the ditch, as you say, with
Arthur?”
The question fell on a silence which seemed to deepen suddenly within
herself. Every thought hung bated on the sense that something was coming:
her whole consciousness became a void to receive it.
“Denis!” she cried.
He turned on her almost savagely. “I don’t want your pity, you know,” he
burst out. “You can keep that for Arthur. I had an idea women loved men for
themselves--through everything, I mean. But I wouldn’t steal your love--I
don’t want it on false pretenses, you understand. Go and look into other
men’s lives, that’s all I ask of you. I slipped into it--it was just a case
of holding my tongue when I ought to have spoken--but I--I--for God’s sake,
don’t sit there staring! I suppose you’ve seen all along that I knew he was
married to the woman.”