“Then do I understand that you’re engaged to him?”
“I told him I wouldn’t be engaged again—that engagements for me had come
to be grotesque. I said that if we did it we’d—we’d just go somewhere
and be married.”
“If you did it? Then it’s possible—”
“No; because he’s expecting it. I’ve allowed him to expect it—just little
by little, you understand—and not seeing how far I was letting myself
in.... And now he’s told some people who used to know about it when I
was engaged to him before—and that binds me because it will get about—so
that if I were to break it off with him the second time I should be a
laughing-stock—and quite rightly.”
“Oh, Regina, how could you?”
Taking no note of the fact that for the first time in my life I had
called her Regina, she answered, simply: “I tell you I don’t know. If I
do know it was because I was so lonely—and I’m over twenty-six—and feel
older still—and nobody seemed to care about me but him—and I couldn’t
bear the idea of going on and never marrying any one at all—which is what
Elsie Coningsby said would happen to me—and what I’d been half wishing
for myself—and yet half afraid of.... And you—”
“Yes? What about me?”
“There was a nurse at Taplow, that Miss Farley—”
“Miss Farley! Oh, good God!”
“Well, how did I know? She was very pretty.”
“Could I see whether she was pretty or not?”
“And you were always joking with her and thanking her.”
“Of course I thanked her. What else could I do?”
“You needn’t have kissed her hand. I caught you doing that one day when I
was tidying up in your room.”
“Did you? Very likely. When a man is as helpless as I was his gratitude
often becomes maudlin.”
“I don’t know that you need call it that. He simply falls in love with
the pretty nurse who takes care of him. It was happening all the time
in the hospitals. But for me—right there in your room—and shut out from
everything—”
“But that wasn’t my fault. If I’d known you were there—”
“It was your fault at Atlantic City—and afterward—when I’d let you
see—far more than a girl should ever let any man see.”
“But you know how impossible it was for me then—till I’d told you who I
was.”
“I know it now. I didn’t know it before half an hour ago. And the time
when you told me that—that thing—at Rosyth—I had no idea whether or not
you meant.... And when you blame me for not coming down-stairs quicker
than I did—”
“I haven’t blamed you, Regina.”
“You can’t imagine what it was to be all at sea not merely as to what you
felt, but actually as to what you were—and had been. When you pulled the
pearls out of your pocket—and said you were that man—”
There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted,
and I had to give her time to regain her self-control.
“You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you
see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in
her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking
of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He
was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you
now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you
had about you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him
at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished,
something faithful and good.”
“Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no
counterpart in the nature.”
“Well, whatever it was I saw it—and all that year those two types had
been before my mind. Then when I was told that there were not two—that
there was only one—it was like asking me to understand that the earth had
only one pole, and that the North and the South Poles were identical.”
She surprised me with the question, “Did you ever read _La Dame aux
Camélias_?”