But _how_? Have not her inward misgivings warned her all along? Yet it
can be only by intuition. Even had any one seen her in Rumsey Brake--the
very fire of hell seems to scorch her at the suggestion--even had any
one seen her, what opportunity has that unknown talebearer had of
betraying her to Rupert? Rupert returned only half an hour ago, and has
had speech of no one but herself and the servants. Is the porter at the
station likely to have conveyed the news of her unfaithfulness to him,
as an agreeable item of local intelligence, while shouldering his
portmanteau? or the coachman to have shouted it through the front window
of the brougham? Yet to the abject terror of the girl’s guilty
consciousness, either of these absurdities seems more likely than that
the significance of her _fiancé’s_ tone in reiterating his question came
there by accident? He _knows_, if not by the ordinary processes and
channels, yet by right of that terrible plate-glass window into her
soul, of which he has always had the monopoly. All her life he has saved
her the trouble of explanations, by a mastery of her thoughts which
makes utterance of them superfluous. If she allows him, he will save her
trouble to-day.
Athwart the darkness of her terror of discovery flashes an arrow of
light. If he knows already, what use is there in further feigning? If he
knows by intuition, he will know by the same means how she has
struggled; how utterly against her own will has been her disloyalty.
Already an insidious sense of relief and comfort is beginning to steal
over her in the flashed idea of how easy he will make it to her; of how
perfectly his unselfish insight will apprehend by what innocent steps
she has grown guilty towards him; and again he will be the brother from
whom she has no secrets; together they will acknowledge the fatal error
of their late attitude towards each other; together they will admire,
with easy minds and steadfast countenances, the cheerfulness of the
nursery wall papers. And her uncle? And her debt?--the debt whose
colossal obligation the partner and cause of her unfaithfulness has so
fully admitted; has so little blinked the overmastering necessity of
paying? It is all packed into thirty seconds--relief, hope, recurring
terror and despair; the thirty seconds between his question, and the one
with which--how unlike her in its shiftiness--she answers him.
“Why shouldn’t it? Do not you think there are enough already?”
“Quite; but all the same there _is_ another.”
“What do you mean?” A sort of false stoutness of heart is coming to her
aid. It is impossible that he can know except by intuition, and what is
known only by intuition may be safely and successfully denied and given
the lie to, if only it is done with enough brazenness and pertinacity.
He answers her with a collected insistence that shows her of how little
use her unworthy subterfuges have been or ever can be, as between these
two.
“We have not been taken away to a madhouse; we have not gone on the
drink; we have not got double pneumonia; but it is to _us_ that this
last casualty has happened!”
She stands before him disarmed, her poor toy weapons knocked out of her
shaking hand; yet she essays one more feeble parry with her helpless
buttoned foil.
“We don’t seem much the worse for it, whatever it is,” she answers,
trying to laugh.
“Don’t we? I think you can’t have looked in the glass lately.”
She puts up her hand with a gesture of futile anger to her face, as if
to chastise it for its blabbing treachery; but speech has gone from her.
“I do not want you to tell me anything about it,” Rupert says in a
steady voice. “It could not be pleasant for you, and it would do me no
good. I wished to bring you out--not on the high-road; that was your own
precautionary measure”--with a faint stinging touch of sarcasm--“but out
of possible eye and earshot, to consult with you.” She turns her woeful
eyes, in a deep humiliation of asking upon him; but words are still
denied her. “To consult you as to how we are to get ourselves out of
this _impasse_.” Once again her dumb look seeks to penetrate his
meaning. “It would be perfectly simple if it were only we two; we might
settle it between ourselves. It is, of course, my father who
complicates it.”
The voice is still even and quiet, but its matter-of-fact composure
affects her far more than any raving denunciation could do. What does it
take for granted? And why? She must speak, must protest, must find out
how much he knows.
“You are implying that you wish our engagement to end? Have
you--any--any reason for it?”
“_Haven’t_ I?”
The question thus returned upon her would strike her once more dumb, if
she did not wrench a faint retort out of herself.
“You--you know your own feelings best.”
“And _yours_?”
Oh, if he would choose any other weapon of torture--any reviling, any
accusation, any sneer, any reproach, anything but these questions that,
terrible in their brevity, seem to lay her helpless soul even more naked
before him than his lifelong habit of divining her, joined to who knows
what added knowledge have already done.
“I had--I have no intention of breaking it!”
“I am quite”--“in the dark as to what you mean,” she would have added,
but the superfluous lie dies unborn. “You meant to marry me--_still_?”
Then she touches the depth of her degradation; hearing the anguish of an
incredulity that is yet belief in her confession of such an intended
treason against him pierce through his self-control.
“Did I quite deserve _that_?”
Her wretched head drops on her breast, and she stands at his mercy,
attempting no further denial. But, as she has never in her life appealed
to him in vain for help or sympathy, so, even now, the old habit is too
strong for him.
“We must keep our heads clear!” he says, after a moment or two, in a
voice that is no longer anguished or reproachful, but has regained its
level of colourless quiet. “We must think it out. If we could stave off
the marriage for a few weeks or months, I see a way out of the
difficulty.”
Her lips are apart by reason of the shortness of her breath, but she
forces them together to frame the two words--
“What way?”
His face, at whose unfamiliar rigidity her spirit has quailed, softens.
“I would not have told you so suddenly in any other case,” he says, with
all his old gentle considerateness; “but now--at the pass we have
arrived--it may come to you almost as a relief.”
“_What_ may come?”
“Your--your sacrifice would not avail the old man for very long! He--he
is not going to get well.”
She stares at him, not half comprehending. “Gout does not--does
not--_kill_ people!” she stammers.
“No. But in his case the doctors have discovered that it is complicated
by a fatal disease, which has already made great progress; so that, as I
say, if we can only stave it off for a while--not a long while--things
will come all right!”
“_All right!_ Do you call that all _right_?” she cries it out in an
agony, taking in now the full meaning of his words; while, in flood, a
miserable realization of this new calamity pours over her soul.
_Her men!_ who had loved her so well; upon her fond tendance of whom she
had prided herself! One is not; the second is only to be rescued by the
hand of death from a more quickly slaying knowledge of her false
cruelty; and, as to the third, now that the mask so steadily held before
his face as long as there was any need for it has dropped away,--she can
see that she has killed his heart!
“Is it quite certain?” she asks, as soon as her dry mouth allows a husky
whisper to creep through it. “Is there no hope?”
“It may be sooner, it may be later; but it must come!” He pauses a
moment or two, to let her take it in; then, very gently, “So that if we
can only hit upon some plausible reason for postponement----”
She breaks in like a sudden hurricane. “No! _no!_ NO!! If he is going to
die, he _shall_ have his little bit of happiness first! You _must_ marry
me! You cannot be so inhuman as to refuse!” Then, seeing, or fancying, a
start of shocked negation on his part, “I have done nothing bad enough
to make it a disgrace to you, and it need be only nominal!”
“And his hopes?” Like three icy drops the low words fall on the flame of
her passion; and for a minute or two entirely quench it. Then it springs
up again alive and alight.
“He will be dead before he knows that they are not to be realized.”
There is a heavy silence; while, before her mental vision, the dreadful
programme she has drawn up of their future life unrolls itself. What his
thoughts are she cannot tell; nor whether he will accept or reject her
offer. Even when he does speak, she remains still in the dark, for he
only says--
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“When he is dead?”
She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to
this--that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to
whom she has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is
to be regarded only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which
she has brought upon them all!
“When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a
question.
“You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”--with a
smile, cruel in its gentleness--“I am afraid I am too great a coward to
release you by suicide!”
She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of
horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him;
that is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward.
He has been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no
reason for disbelieving him! They have been standing still on the
high-road; but now she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is
a moment or two before he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they
step along side by side, the sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears,
the acrid sweetness of hawthorn in their nostrils, and death in their
hearts.
“Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there
would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a
matter-of-fact voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of
his face and a slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that,
under the circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a
publicity that would be painful to you.”
She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking
of some one else.
“And if it were _not_ got rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it
would, of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for
you.”
At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun
to envelop it.
“There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly.
He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now,
but you will not think so always.”
“Always! always!” she repeats choking.
He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will
not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by any _spoken_
contradiction of her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of
something more feasible.”
His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last
time in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that
he does not care much after all--that his finicking womanish nature is
incapable of the pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at
the profile beside her in the lined patience of its self-government,
knocks the unworthy prop from under her self-esteem.
They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the
sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their
juicy pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching
mouthfuls out of the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking
flowers, and wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of
Mother Nature herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a
ploughboy. Married birds sing the joys of the nest and the family, and
one blackbird seems to keep pace with them as they go, merely to mock
them with his liquid telling that, as his Creator had done, he finds his
world of the hedge and the pasture and the new green tree very good.
Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of the jar with the
surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of the
conversation brings with it.
“Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time we
have.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“If you are quite resolved not to marry me----”
“I am quite resolved.”
“You have never told me why?” She says it faintly, glancing at him with
that new and most uncharacteristic shiftiness which she feels that his
all-noticing eye must already have observed.
“If you wish I will tell you.”
“No!” she answers with almost inaudible haste. “It is enough for me that
you no longer wish it! I do not doubt that you have good reasons;
but”--growing more distinct in a feverish sophistry of desire to put
herself in the right--“let it be clearly understood that it is not _I_
who go back from the bargain! I _was_--I _am_ willing to fulfil it.”
“Thank you.”
The courteous irony of his gratitude stings her back into muteness; and
again they walk on, unconscious of time or distance.
“I am willing to tell you what I have done, what happened, how it came
about!”
“But I am not willing to hear.”
Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought
to bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal
crushes her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight.
“Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word
that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!”
He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust--only a
million times intensified--that she has formerly seen him make at any
instance of glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners.
“Yes, I take your word! Only”--with that shudder in his voice--“don’t
say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”
She bows her head in profound humiliation, accepting that stinging
chastisement as so much less than her due; while at the same moment a
contradictory flash of repulsion from him for being able at such a
moment to see the æsthetic side of the situation whizzes through her
consciousness. Between them they have slain all talk that can be
possible at such a moment. Incapable of thought, her brain a caldron of
boiling miseries, Lavinia sets one foot before the other, plodding
blindly on; while Rupert--she has never possessed the plate-glass window
into his soul, which he has always had into hers, so that what memories,
projects, torments, occupy his mind during that last half-hour she never
knows.
The sound of a church clock rouses both--her from amid her steam of
boiling vapours; him from his unread thoughts. They have reached a part
of the road where the railway runs parallel to it, and a gate, faced by
another on the opposite side, gives entrance to the line. They pause to
listen and count, impatient of the interval between the deliberate
strokes.
“_Seven!_ Surely it can’t be seven! He will put himself into a fever if
we are late.”
Man and girl look at each other in shocked surprise, their own
calamities for the moment entirely sponged off their memories.
“And--is it possible?” throwing an astonished glance of apprehension
around--“we are close to Rivers Sutton! It will take us quite an hour
to get home.”
“Not if we run along the line!” The shot-out suggestion is Lavinia’s.
“The line!” Rupert echoes doubtfully.
“Yes, the line!” she repeats in a passion of irritation at his
hesitancy. “Are you afraid of being run over, or of the penalty of forty
shillings?”
The gate is locked, but they are on its other side in a minute, and
racing along the grass edge that borders the metals. For the time every
idea is abolished from both their minds, but that of reaching home with
the least possible delay. In a perfect unanimity of distressful haste
they speed along, scarcely spending words for fear of wasting breath
after the first outburst of remorseful ejaculations.
“How could we have forgotten him?”
“The specialist told me that the least friction or worry was above all
things to be avoided.”
They run along for a while in perfect silence, their long legs skimming
over the abounding spring flowers that always seem to relish the railway
bank.
Then Lavinia cries out, “What time is it now?”
Without a break in his run, Rupert pulls out his watch, looks at it,
holds it to his ear, and answers in a key of acute annoyance--
“It has stopped!”
“And Rivers Sutton Church clock does not strike the quarters?”
“No.”
“It can’t be more than ten minutes past,” she rejoins, panting a
little, though not much, for she is a muscular modern girl, and in good
condition; “for I hear the 7.10: it has just left Rivers Sutton
station.”
“It is always late.”
Lavinia casts a glance over her shoulder, still flying along, to see
whether the train, faintly heard coming up behind them, is yet in sight;
and, having done so, pulls herself up to a stop with such sudden
violence that her knees rock under her. The horrified cry that
accompanies her arrested motion stays Rupert’s flying steps too, though
the impetus of his going carries him several paces beyond her before he
can stop himself. Astonishment at what can have checked a haste so
urgent as hers makes him too look round, gives to his sight also the
object that has frozen her flight into a paralysis of still horror. A
curve of the line hides the approaching train from their sight, though
their ears plainly inform them of its increasing nearness; but at what
appears to be about halfway between the point at which they stand and
the curve, though in reality it is much nearer to themselves, a little
child is clearly seen standing out against the strong yellow light of
the May evening--a little child obviously at that most dangerous age
which has legs to toddle, but no judgment to guide those legs. Probably
it has crept through a gap in the hedge from the pointsman’s cottage,
which they had passed close to the locked and climbed gate; but the two
spectators of its prowess have no time to speculate as to how it came
into its present position of imminent peril.
“It is all right; it is on the up line,” Rupert says, with a sort of
hiss.
“No, it isn’t; it is on the down.”
An instantaneous thought leaps from one pair of eyes to the other; and
in Rupert’s Lavinia reads a blind terror. That sixtieth part of a second
reveals to her that it has been the apprehension of her lifetime to find
such a terror in his eyes at some such crisis of his existence--the
predominating, all-mastering, terror of an injury to his own skin. If
the endangered infant is to be saved, it will not be by him. Without a
second glance at her companion--yes, she is _almost_--would to God she
could be _quite_ sure afterwards that she had not thrown him one glance
of contempt or reproach!--she rushes back along the way she has come at
the highest speed of which her already strained limbs and labouring
lungs are capable, taking instinctively to the metals themselves, so as
not to be impeded by grass and flowers. Will she be in time? She tries
to shout a warning to the little toddling thing, but not a sound louder
than a useless dissonant whisper will issue from her protesting throat.
The train is coming round the curve. The engine, with its rocking train
of carriages, is rounding into sight. Thank God, it has not got up its
full steam yet; it is not going nearly at its highest speed. If it were,
there would not be a chance. As it is, there is just a possibility. It
all depends upon whether she can hold out. Yes, she _will_ hold out,
even if she drops down dead the moment afterwards. No, she _can’t_; her
powers are going to abandon her just too soon, just when she is within
a hundred yards of the object to be rescued. She staggers--recovers
herself--runs a couple of yards--staggers again; drops on her knees, and
then falls flat--happily half on to the up line. She has just sense
enough left to drag herself quite on to it--just sight and hearing
enough left to be aware of a hatless figure making the air sing in its
mad rush past her to meet the locomotive, before consciousness leaves
her.