After dinner he would not let her leave him, but returned with her to
the drawing-room, and she said that he might smoke. He smoked odd
little Cuban cigarettes, whereof the odour was delicate and aromatic.
They had talked of everything; they had laughed and sighed over their
ancient joys and sorrows. We know how, in the Courts of Memory, Mirth
and Melancholy wander hand in hand. She had cried a little when her
husband and her brother were first spoken of, but at some comic
reminiscence of them, a moment afterwards, she was smiling through her
tears. 'Do you remember so-and-so?' and 'What has become of
such-a-one?' were types of the questions they asked each other,
conjuring up old friends and enemies like ghosts out of the past.
Incidentally, he had described Porto Rico and its negroes and its
Spaniards, its climate, its fauna and its flora.
In the drawing-room they sat on opposite sides of the fire, and were
silent for a bit. Profiting by the permission she had given him, he
produced one of his Cuban cigarettes, opened it at its ends, unrolled
it, rolled it up again, and lit it.
'Now the time has come for you to tell me what I most want to know,'
she said.
'What is that?'
'Why you went away.'
'Oh,' he murmured.
She waited a minute. Then, 'Tell me,' she urged.
'Do you remember Mary Isona?' he asked.
She glanced up at him suddenly, as if startled. 'Mary Isona? Yes, of
course.'
'Well, I was in love with her.'
'You were in love with Mary Isona?'
'I was very much in love with her. I have never got over it, I'm
afraid.'
She gazed fixedly at the fire. Her lips were compressed. She saw a
slender girl, in a plain black frock, with a sensitive, pale face,
luminous, sad, dark eyes, and a mass of dark, waving hair--Mary
Isona, of Italian parentage, a little music teacher, whose only
relation to the world Theodore Vellan lived in was professional. She
came into it for an hour or two at a time now and then, to play or to
give a music lesson.
'Yes,' he repeated; 'I was in love with her. I have never been in love
with any other woman. It seems ridiculous for an old man to say it,
but I am in love with her still. An old man? Are we ever really old?
Our body grows old, our skin wrinkles, our hair turns white; but the
mind, the spirit, the heart? The thing we call "I"? Anyhow, not a day,
not an hour, passes, but I think of her, I long for her, I mourn for
her. You knew her--you knew what she was. Do you remember her playing?
Her wonderful eyes? Her beautiful pale face? And how the hair grew
round her forehead? And her talk, her voice, her intelligence! Her
taste, her instinct, in literature, in art--it was the finest I have
ever met.'
'Yes, yes, yes,' Mrs. Kempton said slowly. 'She was a rare woman. I
knew her intimately,--better than any one else, I think. I knew all
the unhappy circumstances of her life: her horrid, vulgar mother; her
poor, dreamy, inefficient father; her poverty, how hard she had to
work. You were in love with her. Why didn't you marry her?'
'My love was not returned.'
'Did you ask her?'
'No. It was needless. It went without saying.'
'You never can tell. You ought to have asked her.'
'It was on the tip of my tongue, of course, to do so a hundred times.
My life was passed in torturing myself with the question whether I had
any chance, in hoping and fearing. But as often as I found myself
alone with her I knew it was hopeless. Her manner to me--it was one of
frank friendliness. There was no mistaking it. She never thought of
loving me.'
'You were wrong not to ask her. One never can be sure. Oh, why didn't
you ask her?' His old friend spoke with great feeling.
He looked at her, surprised and eager. 'Do you really think she might
have cared for me?'
'Oh, you ought to have told her: you ought to have asked her,' she
repeated.
'Well--now you know why I went away.'
'Yes.'
'When I heard of her--her--death'--he could not bring himself to say
her suicide--'there was nothing else for me to do. It was so hideous,
so unutterable. To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the
old people, was quite impossible. I wanted to follow her, to do what
she had done. The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as
far from myself, as I could.'
'Sometimes,' Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, 'sometimes I wondered
whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such
connection with Mary's death--it followed it so immediately. I
wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her. But I
couldn't believe it--it was only because the two things happened one
upon the other. Oh, why didn't you tell her? It is dreadful,
dreadful!'