That night she knew that she must leave Dartmoor, and go somewhere where
George Tanqueray could not follow her and find her. She was mortally
afraid of him. He had tracked and hunted her down swiftly and more
inevitably than any destroyer or pursuer.
In spite of him, indeed because of him, her passion for this solitude of
the moors was strong upon her, and she planned to move on the next day
into Somerset, to a place on Exmoor that she knew. She would leave very
early in the morning before Tanqueray could come to her.
She lay all night staring with hot eyes at the white walls that held
her. At daylight she dropped asleep and slept on into the morning. When
she woke she faced her purpose wide-eyed and unflinching. Her fear was
there also and she faced it.
She was down too late for any train that could take her away before
noon, and Tanqueray might come now at any time.
She was so late that the day's letters waited for her on the
window-sill. In her agitation she nearly missed seeing them. One was
from Gertrude, fulfilling punctually her pledge, assuring her as usual
that all was well. The other was from her brother-in-law, Henry. It was
very brief. Henry, after expressing the hope that she continued to
benefit by the air of Dartmoor, supposed that she would have heard that
Hugh was suffering from a chill he had caught by motoring without an
overcoat.
She had not heard it. She read Gertrude's letter again to make sure.
Among all the things, the absolutely unnecessary things, that Gertrude
had mentioned, she had not mentioned that. She had broken her pledge.
They kept things from her, then. Heaven only knew what they had kept.
She read Henry's letter again. There were no details, but her mind
supplied them as it grasped the sense of what he _had_ written. There
rose before her instantly a vision of Hugh lying in his bed ill. He had
a racing pulse, a flaming temperature. He was in for gastritis, at the
least, if it was not pneumonia. She saw with intolerable vividness a
long procession of terrors and disasters, from their cause, the chill,
down to their remotest consequences. Her imagination never missed one.
And instantly there went from her the passion of her solitude, and the
splendour of the moors perished around her like an imperfect dream, and
her genius that had driven her there and held her let go its hold. It
was as if it owned that it was beaten. She had no more fear of it. And
she had no more fear of George Tanqueray.
Nothing existed for her but the fear that hung round Brodrick in his
bed. This vision of calamity was unspeakable, it was worse than all the
calamities that had actually been. It was worse through its significance
and premonition than the illness of her little son; it was worse than
the loss of her little dead-born daughter; it brought back to her with a
more unendurable pang that everlasting warning utterance of Nina's,
"With you--there'll be no end to your paying." Her heart cried out to
powers discerned as implacable, "Anything but that! Anything but that!"
She had missed the first possible train to Waterloo, but there was
another from a station five miles distant which would bring her home
early in the evening. She packed hurriedly and sent one of the farm
people to the village for a fly. Then she paced the room, maddening over
the hours that she had still to spare.
Once or twice it occurred to her that perhaps, after all, Hugh was not
so very ill. If he had been Henry would have told her. He would have
suggested the propriety of her return. And Henry's brief reference to
Dartmoor had suggested continuance rather than return.
But her fear remained with her. It made her forget all about George
Tanqueray.
It was the sudden striking of ten o'clock that recalled to her her
certainty that he would come. And he was there in the doorway before her
mind had time to adjust itself to his appearance.
She fell on him with Hugh's illness as if it were a weapon and she would
have slain him with it.
He stood back and denied the fact she hurled at him. As evidence
supporting his denial, he produced his recent correspondence with the
editor. He had heard from him that morning, and he was all right then.
Jinny was being "had," he said.
He had not come there to talk about Brodrick, or to think about him. He
was not going to let Jinny think about him either.
He had come early because he wanted to find her with all the dreams of
the night about her, before her passion (he was sure of it) could be
overtaken by the mood of the cool morning.
Jinny had begun to pack her manuscript (she had forgotten it till now)
in the leather case it travelled in. She had a hat with a long veil on.
Tanqueray's gaze took in all this and other more unmistakable signs of
her departure.
"What do you think you're doing?" he said.
"I'm going back."
"Why?"
"Haven't I told you?"
Positively he had forgotten Brodrick.
He began all over again and continued, tenderly, patiently, with all his
cold, ascendant, dispassionate lucidity, till he had convinced her that
her fear was folly.
She was grateful to him for that.
"All the same," she said, "I'm going. I wasn't going to stay here in any
case."
"You were going?"
"Yes."
"And do you suppose I'm going to let you go? After last night?"
"After--last--night--I _must_ go. And I must go back."
"No. Remember what you said to me last night. We know ourselves and we
know each other now as God knows us. We're not afraid of ourselves or of
each other any more."
"No," she said. "I am not afraid."
"Well--you've had the courage to get so far, why haven't you the courage
to go on?"
"You think I'm a coward still?"
"A coward." He paused. "I beg your pardon. I forgot that you had the
courage to go back."
Her face hardened as they looked at each other.
"I believe after all," he said, "you're a cold little devil. You stand
there staring at me and you don't care a damn."
"As far as damns go, it was you, if you remember, that didn't care."
"Are you always going to bring that up against me? I suppose you'll
remind me next that you're a married woman and the mother of two
children."
"We do seem rather to have forgotten it," she said.
"Jinny--_that_ ought never to have happened. You should have left that
to the other women."
"Why, George, that's what you said six years ago, if you remember."
"You _are_----"
"Yes, I know I am. You've just said so."
"My God. I don't care what you are."
He came to her and stood by her, with his face close to her, not
touching hers, but very close. His eyes searched her. She stood rigid in
her supernatural self-possession.
"Jinny, you knew. You knew all the time I cared."
"I thought I knew. I did know you cared in a way. But not in this way.
This--this is different."
She was trying to tell him that hitherto his passion had been to her
such a fiery intellectual thing that it had saved her--as by fire.
"It isn't different," he said gravely. "Jinny--if I only wanted you for
myself--but that doesn't count as much as you think it does. If you
didn't suffer----"
"I'm not suffering."
"You are. Every nerve's in torture. Haven't I seen you? You're ill with
it now, with the bare idea of going back. I want to take you out of all
that."
"No, no. It isn't that. I want to go."
"You don't. You don't want to own that you're beaten."
"No. It's simpler than that. I don't care for you, George, not--not as
you want me to."