Lynette Saxham came into the consulting-room that was on the ground-floor
of the house in Harley Street, behind the room where patients waited their
turn. Her quick, light step and the silken rustling of the lining of her
gown broke the spell that had bound the man who sat motionless in the
armchair before the Sheraton writing-table, staring with fixed eyes and
gripping the arms of his chair with unconscious force ...
A faint, pleasant odour of Russia leather and camphor-wood came from the
dwarf bookcases that dadoed the walls. The room was quite dark; the two
high windows, screened by clear muslin blinds running on gilded rods,
showed pale parallelograms of cold twilight. The coachhouse and stable
building at the end of the paved yard showed as a cube of blackness. One
window in the centre of the wall was lighted up, and on its white cotton
blind the shadows of a man and woman acted a Domestic Play.
Perhaps Saxham had been watching this? The shadow-man seemed to sit at a
table reading a newspaper by the light of the lamp behind him, the shadow
woman sat nearer the window, employed upon some homely kind of needlework.
Her outline when she rose, showed that the woman's great, mysterious
ordeal, the sacrament of keenest anguish by which her dearest and most
sacred joy is won, was very close upon her. She passed behind the man as
if to fetch something, stopped behind his chair, and drew her arm about
his neck, leaning her cheek down to his so that their two shadows became
one.
The starving waif outside the window of the cook-shop knows no more
excruciating aggravation of his pangs than to look at food, and yet keeps
on looking. It may have been like this with Saxham, empty of all love, and
gnawed by the tooth of a sharper hunger than that which is merely
physical. He started out of his lethargy when his wife's voice reached
him.
"Owen!... Why, you are sitting in the dark!"
Lynette heard someone moving among the shadows. The electric reading-lamp
upon the writing-table diffused a mellow radiance under its green silk
shade. Two other globes sprang into shining life, and showed her, smiling,
and shrinking a little from the sudden incursion of light, as Saxham, with
the quiet, unhurried, scrupulous courtesy he always showed towards his
wife, received the heavy driving-mantle of sables that she dropped from
her shoulders, and laid it over a chair. A frosty breath from the outer
atmosphere clung to it, but the silken lining was penetratingly warm, and
instinct with the sweetness of the woman, so much so that it was agony to
the man....
She wore a white cloth gown of elegantly-simple cut, that revealed with
unostentatious art the lovely lines of the slender shape. A knot of white
and golden freesias, exhaling a clean, delicate perfume, was fastened at
her breast; her wonderful red-brown hair was shaded by a broad-brimmed
brown felt hat of Vandyke shape, with creamy drooping plumes. The rare
promise of her beauty had fulfilled itself in the last six months. She was
bewilderingly lovely.
She drew out the jewelled pins that fastened her hat, and threw it down,
and took a favourite seat of hers beside the fire, and looked across at
the man who was her husband, smiling faintly as she held her little foot,
delicately shod, high-arched and slim, to the blaze of the wood-fire.
"Do I interfere with your work? Are any patients waiting?"
"It is past my hour for seeing patients," said Saxham, with a smile. "And
if anyone were waiting, you are an older client, and have the prior
claim."
"We will have tea in here, then," she said, and touched the bell, adding:
"I am fond of this room."
It was just now a place that was dear to Saxham. He came across to the
hearth and stirred the fire to a ruddier blaze, and stood at the opposite
side of it, leaning an arm upon the mantelshelf. The shining mirror above
it reflected a square black head that was getting grizzled, and the
profile of a face that was haggard and worn.
The servant came with tea, and drew down the upper blinds, shutting out
that mocking shadow-play at which Saxham had been staring. As Lynette
busied herself with the shining silver and delicate Japanese porcelain,
there was a chance of studying, unobserved, the beloved book of her
face--a locked book to Saxham since that day in the Cemetery at
Gueldersdorp.
Ah, what a face it was! It fascinated and held him. Such long, thick,
shadowy eyelashes, sweeping the white cheeks! Such a low, wide, perfectly
modelled forehead above them, with fine arched eyebrows, much darker than
the richly rippling, parted hair that was coiled and twisted and roped
into a mass behind the small, delicate ears, as though its owner were
impatient of its luxuriance. Such a close-folded, mysterious mouth, with
deep-cut curves, hiding the pure white, rather overlapping teeth. An
irregular nose, rather square-ended, with eager nostrils; a rounded chin,
with a little cleft in it, went to the making of the face that Saxham and
many others thought so beautiful.
Only something was wanting to it. "Animation," the physiognomist would
have said. "Vitality, mobility." "Health," might have thought the ordinary
observer, mistaking the bluish shadows under the drooped eyelids and about
the mouth and nostrils for the usual signals of debility.
But Saxham, when he looked into the golden-hazel eyes, so often hidden by
the thick white eyelids, with their deep fringe of black-brown lashes,
said to himself with bitterness: "She is quite well. Nothing on earth is
wrong with her, except that she is not happy! I can give her everything
else on earth, it seems, but what she needs most of all!"
Let Joy, that radiant torch of the soul, illuminate those dim windows, let
Happiness sink like sweet rain into the dry heart, and the whole woman
would awaken into vivid glowing beauty, like the parched South African
veld after the spring rains. Red tulips would bloom between the boulders;
exquisite glowing pelargoniums and snow-white or pale-blue iris would
clothe the baked earth. The ice-plant would no longer be the only green
thing growing in the crannies of the rock. Delicate ferns and dew-gemmed
pitcher-plants would quiver there, and the spikes of the many-coloured
gladioli would thrust from the earth like spears; and the sweet-scented
clematis and the passion-vine would trail and blossom in rose and white
and purple on the edges of the kloofs and gorges, every stem and leaf and
bud and blossom growing and rejoicing in the balmy breeze and the glorious
June sunshine; the cruel, lashing rains, the devastating floods, and the
burning droughts forgotten as though they had never been.
Meanwhile the heavy fringe of dark lashes drooped wearily on Lynette's
white cheeks, and the long-limbed, slight, supple body leaned back in the
favourite chair by the fireside with a little air of languor that only
added to her allure. And Saxham, looking at her, said again in his heart:
"Her children--let them settle the money upon her children!"
She had learned to love, and thrilled at the touch of passion. Well,
Beauvayse was dead, but Love would come again. He would read its
resurrection in the radiance of those eyes. Then, exit Saxham! Such a
marriage as theirs could be easily dissolved, but he would not take the
easy road. He had decided. His should be the strait and narrow way of
death. His death was a debt he owed her. You are to learn why!
While he reviewed, for the thousandth time, this determination of his, and
told himself again how the thing should be done, his tea had grown quite
cold. She leaned forwards and touched his sleeve in drawing his attention
to the neglected cup, and flushed because he started and looked at her so
strangely.
He never, if it could be avoided, touched her. Her old shrinking from him
had worn away. His companionship, though he did not guess it, was to her
desirable--even dear. The light, firm tread of his small muscular feet,
the curt, decided utterance, made welcome music in her ears. She would
watch him without his knowledge when they went abroad together. The esteem
in which his peers and seniors held him, the deference with which his
opinions were solicited and listened to gave her strange delightful throbs
of pride.
She had felt the first stirring of that pride in him when the man who had
been the thinking brain and the beating heart of beleaguered Gueldersdorp
had said, wringing her husband's hand:
"'_If_' you have been of any use to me.... 'If'.... You have been my right
hand and my mainstay from first to last, Saxham, and while I live I shall
remember it!"
Brave words--heartsome words for the hearing of a woman who had loved him.
Lynette was almost sorry that she did not.
He did not believe that he had won any hearts in Gueldersdorp. His
curtness, his roughness, his harshness had been unfavourably commented
upon many and many a time. Yet when he left them, how the people cheered!
What volumes of roaring sound from lusty throats had bidden him good-bye
and God-speed!
"Hurrah for the Doctor! Three cheers for Saxham! Don't forget us, Doc!
Come back again! God bless you, Saxham! Bravo, Saxham! Saxham! Saxham!
Hurrah!"
A woman who had loved him would have wept for joy. A pity his wife did
not!
How strangely Owen had looked at her just now, when she had brushed his
sleeve lightly with her finger-tip! How curious it was that he never
touched her if he could help it! She had quite forgotten having told him
that, while she liked to know him near, she could not endure the thought
of being taken by him, caressed by him, held in his embrace.... That had
been the frank, truthful expression of her feelings at the time. She did
not recoil so from his contact now. She had not realised how deeply her
words had wounded the man's great, suffering, patient heart. Spoken, they
had passed from her memory. It is so natural for a fair, sweet woman to
forget! It is so impossible for a man who has been stabbed to help
remembering, with the deep, bleeding wound unclosed!
There was another thing that Saxham did not know. Although, as time went
on, the beloved image of the Mother, cherished in the innermost shrine of
her adopted daughter's heart, suffered no change in the clear, firm beauty
of its outlines or deterioration in the richness of its tender and austere
and gracious colouring; and each new day supplied some fresher garland of
old imperishable memories to grace it with;--that Shape with the
grey-green jewel-eyes and the gay mouth that laughed had faded--faded! She
would not own it even to herself, but the keen edge of her grief for
Beauvayse was blunted. The anniversary of his death, occurring in the
coming month of February, was to be a solemn retreat of sacred prayer for
her. But it was the Mother's death-day also, when to the palm of martyrdom
had been added the Saint's crown. She was going to spend three days at the
Kensington Convent, where the dead nun had taken the vows. She told Saxham
now of the arrangement she had made through Lady Castleclare, who was
intimate with the Superior.
"It will be a little like old times," she said to Saxham, "living in a
Convent again. And there are many Sisters there who knew Mother, and loved
her----"
Her eyes swam in sudden tears. And Saxham, as he looked at her, felt his
heart contract in a spasm of bitter jealousy. All that love for the dead,
and not a crumb for the living! He saw Beauvayse, his rival still,
stretching a hand from the grave to keep her from him. And he could have
cried aloud:
"Those tears are for a trickster who cheated you into loving him. Listen,
now, and I, who have never lied, even to win you, will show him to you as
he really was!..."
But he did not yield to the temptation to enlighten her. A vision rose up
before him of a dying man on a camp-bed, and he heard his own voice
saying:
"I will never tell her! I will not blacken any man's reputation to further
my own interests!"
She was speaking, telling him something. He came back out of the fierce
mental struggle to listen to the voice that was so sweet and clear, and
yet so cold, so cold....
"Imagine it! I met an old friend to-day at my dressmaker's in Conduit
Street. Not a man. A girl who was a pupil at the Convent at
Gueldersdorp--or, rather, I should say a woman, for she is married."
Saxham asked:
"Is she an Englishwoman or a Colonial?"
"She is of mingled French and Dutch blood. She was a Miss Du Taine. Her
father was a member of the Volksraad at Pretoria. He controls large
interests on the Rand, and has an estate near Johannesburg. She is married
to an English gentleman. He is very rich, and has a title. She told it me,
but I have forgotten it. She asked me to drive home and lunch with
her...." She hesitated. "I did not want to go," she said.
"Well, and what happened then?" Saxham asked.
"I made some kind of excuse, and hailed a hansom, and drove to Lady
Castleclare's. I lunched with her. She is always very kind. She thought
the pearls were beautiful. But--but surely they cost you a great deal of
money?"
She touched a string of the gleaming, milky things that encircled her
white throat above the lace cravat. Saxham said, smiling:
"They did not cost more than I could afford to pay. I am glad you liked
them. I told Marie to put them on your dressing-table, where you would be
likely to see them in the morning."
"You are too good to me!" she said, with quivering lips, looking at him.
Her white hand wavered in the air, as though she meant to stretch it out
to him.
"It is not possible to be too good--to you!" said Saxham curtly. He would
not see the outstretched hand. She drew it back, and faltered:
"You give me everything----"
"You have given _me_ what I most wanted in the world!" he lied bravely.
"But"--she rose and stood beside him on the hearthrug, tall, and fair, and
slender, and oh! most seductively, maddeningly sweet to his adoring
thought--"but you take nothing for yourself. That bedroom of yours at the
top of the house is wretchedly bare and comfortless; and then, those
absurd pictures!"
She laughed ruefully, recalling the row of pictorially-illustrated nursery
rhymes that adorned the brown-paper dado of Saxham's third-floor bedroom,
the previous tenant having been a family man.
"--Little Miss Muffet and Georgy Porgy; the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds,
and the Cow that jumped over the Moon. How can you endure them?"
She looked at him, and was startled by the set grimness of his face and
the thunderous lowering of the black smudge of eyebrow. He said:
"You went to my room to-day. Why?"
She crimsoned, and stammered:
"It was this morning, after you had gone out. I--it struck me that your
linen ought to be overlooked and put to rights from time to time. How did
you know?"
He did not explain that the perfume of her hair, of her breath, of her
dress, had lingered when she had gone, to tempt and taunt and torture him.
He said nothing of the little knot of violets that had dropped from her
breast upon the floor, and he had found there. His heart beat against it
even then. He answered:
"You told me yourself. And, as for the linen, let it be. The housekeeper
knows that she is expected to attend to it."
"She isn't your wife!"
Her golden eyes flashed at him rebelliously. He was provoking her, in his
innocence of all intention, as a subtle wooer might have planned to do.
"I am extremely glad that she is not." His mouth relaxed in a smile, and
his thunderous brows smoothed themselves. "And now, don't you think you
ought to go and dress? You are dining with Lady Hannah and Major Wrynche
at The Carlton at seven, and going on to a theatre." He held his watch
out. "Six-thirty now," he said, and restored the chronometer to his
waistcoat pocket.
"Very well." She moved a step or two in the direction of the door, and
turned her head as gracefully as a young deer, and looked back at him.
"But you are coming, too?" she said, and her eyes were very soft.
He shook his head.
"It is impossible. I have several urgent cases to visit, and there is an
article for the _Scientific Review_." He moved his hand slightly in the
direction of some sheets of manuscript that lay upon the blotting-paper.
"I have a heavy night's work before me with that alone. My excuses have
already been telephoned to Lady Hannah."
"Owen!"----
She spoke his name in a whisper.
--"Owen!"
"Yes?"
"Couldn't I?--would you care to have me?--may I stay and dine at home with
you?"
"And disappoint your friends!... Most certainly not. Unless, indeed"--his
tone warmed to interest--"unless you are not feeling well?"
"I am perfectly well, thanks!" she said coldly.
"Then go to your dinner and your play, child," said Saxham, with the smile
that changed and softened his harsh features almost into beauty. "I will
drive with you to The Carlton, and fetch you from the play. Which of the
theatres have you decided to patronise?"
"Lady Hannah and the Major left the choice to me," she said, with a little
touch of girlish importance, "so I telephoned to Nickalls in Bond Street
for a box at The Leicester. He had not got one; he sent me three stalls
for 'The Chiffon Girl' at The Variety instead. It is a revival. I don't
quite know what that means," she added, rather puzzled by Saxham's silence
and the grimness of his face. "You do not mind at all? You do not think it
is the kind of play the Mother would not have liked me to see?"
"No!" said Saxham curtly, and with averted eyes.
She bent her head to him as he opened the door, and went away to her own
rooms on the floor above, the drawing-room that was upholstered and hung
with delicate, green-and-white, rose-garlanded Pompadour brocade, and
graceful water-colours from famous hands, and furnished with every luxury
and elegance that the heart of woman could desire; the charming boudoir,
pink as a sea-shell, and full of new books and old china; the bedroom,
with the blue-and-white decorations, where an ivory Crucifix that had
always stood upon the Mother's writing-table hung above the dainty bed....
"I think he is a little hard on me at times," she said, as she passed
through the warm, firelit, perfumed rooms that were fragrant with the
narcissi and violets and lilies that were sent in by his orders, and
strewn with the costly, pretty trifles that she, who had been used to the
barrack-like bareness of the Convent, delighted in like a child, and the
gleaming mirrors gave her back her loveliness. "He treats me as if I were
a stranger. And, after all, I am his wife...."
Saxham's patients found him even curter and more brusque in manner than
usual that evening, and the article for the _Scientific Review_ made
little way. He threw down his pen at last, and leaned his head upon his
hands and wondered, staring at the unfinished page of manuscript with eyes
that saw no meaning in the sentences, whether any man born of woman had
ever been so great a fool as the man who had written them?
To have made that promise of secrecy to the dead traitor was an act of
sheer, quixotic folly. To have kept it was madness, nothing less. And yet
Saxham knew that he would keep it always. That if she ever learned the
truth, it would be hinted by the chance remark of some stranger, gathered
from a paragraph in some newspaper. There was a small-print line at the
bottom of the quarter-column devoted by the compilers of Whittinger's
"Peerage" to the Marquisate of Foltlebarre, which might have enlightened
her. He turned to it now, and read:
"Viscountess Beauvayse, Esther, dau: of Samuel Levah, Esq.,
of Finsbury, E.C., mar: June, 1899, the late John Basil
Edward Tobart, Lieut. Grey Hussars, 11th Viscount Beauvayse.
Killed in action during the defence of Gueldersdorp, Feb.,
1900, while atta: as Junior aide to the Staff of Colonel
Commanding H.M. Forces, leaving issue one dau: The Hon.
Alyse Rosabel Tobart, now aged eighteen months."
At the Clubs, Service and Civil, Saxham had heard the impromptu marriage
of the late John Basil Edward Tobart freely discussed. The story of his
subsequent entanglement "with some girl or other at Gueldersdorp" had been
mooted in his presence a dozen times by Society chatterers, whose
enjoyment of the scandal would have been pleasantly stimulated by the
knowledge that "Saxham, M.D., F.R.C.S., late Attached Medical Staff," was
married to the girl. But they did not know, and she ...
What use--what use in her knowing? Of what avail could be the melting of
the ice about her heart, the loosening of the fetters of her tongue, the
quickening of her nature, the miracle vouchsafed? Of none, now, for a
reason! Saxham told himself, in those hours when he propped his burning
forehead on his hands and looked into the starless night of his desolate
soul, that he had ceased even to desire that she should come to love him.
Far better that she should never know!
It was growing late, and he had promised to fetch her from the theatre.
The silver clock upon the mantelshelf chimed ten. He had stretched his
hand to the telephone to ring up his motor-brougham from the garage, when
he heard the click of her latchkey in the outer door and the silken
whisper of her garments passing quickly through the hallway. Then came a
knock at the consulting-room door--sharp, quick, imperious, oddly unlike
Lynette's soft tap.... At the summons Saxham made two strides across the
carpet and opened to her, a question on his lips.
"Why have you come back so early? Has anything happened?"
Even as he asked, her look told why. She knew....
She knew.... Her face was rigid, a pure white mask of ivory; there was not
a trace of colour even in the set lips. Her eyes burned upon him, twin
flames of dark amber, steady under levelled brows. She was wrapped in a
long ermine-caped and bordered black brocade mantle, that gleamed with jet
_passementerie_; a scarf of white lace covered her head. It hid the
red-brown hair with the Clytie ripple in it, and the great silken coils,
transfixed by a sapphire and diamond dagger, that were massed at the nape
of the slender neck. Seen so, she was nunlike in her chaste severity, but
for those stern, resentful eyes.
"I have come to tell you that I am no longer in ignorance. I have found
out what you have hidden from me so long--what the Wrynches knew and would
not tell me; what the world has known while I sat in the dark...."
A spasm wrung her mouth. Saxham rolled a chair towards her. He said
guardedly, avoiding her eyes:
"Until you acquaint me in detail with what you have heard, I cannot
explain or defend myself. Will you not sit down? You are looking pale and
overwrought."
She laid one slight gloved hand upon the chair-back, and leaned upon it.
"I would rather stand, if you have no objection, whilst I tell you what I
have learned to-night. I dined alone with Lady Hannah at the Carlton; we
went together to the theatre--Major Wrynche had had a summons to attend at
Marlborough House."
She untied the knot of lace beneath her chin, and stripped away the long
gloves with nervous haste and impatience, and tossed them with the scarf
upon the chair beside her, and went on:
"I had heard much of 'The Chiffon Girl.' I wanted to see it. When the
First Act began I wondered very much why they called it a Musical Comedy,
when the noise the orchestra made could hardly be called music; and there
was no comedy--only slang expressions and stupid jokes. But the actress
who sang and danced in the principal part ... Miss Lavigne ..." She had
loosened her mantle; now she let it drop upon the Eastern carpet, emerging
from its blackness as a slender, supple, upright shape in clinging,
creamy-white draperies; her exquisite arms bare to the shoulder, and
clasped midway by heavy, twisted bracelets of barbaric gold, her
nymph-like bosom swelling from the folded draperies of the low-cut bodice
like a twin-budded narcissus flowering from the pale calyx, her sweet
throat clasped about with Saxham's gift of pearls.
"She could not sing, though the people applauded and encored her"--there
was a gleam of disdain in the golden eyes--"but she was very pretty ...
she danced with wonderful grace and lightness ... it was like a swallow
dipping and darting over the shallows of the river-shore--like a branch of
red pomegranate-blossoms swayed and swung by a spring breeze.... I admired
her, and yet I was sorry for her.... To have to pose and bound and whirl
before all those rows and rows of staring faces night after night!..."
Saxham did not smile. But a muscle twitched in his cheek as he said:
"She would hardly thank you for pitying her."
"She would be right to resent my pity!" Lynette burst out with sudden
vehemence. "She has been injured, and I was the cause! Oh! how could you
be so cruel as to let me go on loving him? Was it kind? Was it fair to
yourself and me?"
Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He waited in
silence to hear the rest.
"You know of whom I speak ..." said Lynette. "He was gay and beautiful and
winning--not chivalrous, as I believed him; not honest, or sincere, or
true. Months before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this
actress--the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And you knew all this,
and never told me! You knew that his memory was sacred in my heart. A
woman I was introduced to here in London once tried to blacken it. She
said she wished to act towards me as a friend. I remember that I laughed
in her face as I turned and left her. 'You thought to make me hate him,' I
said. 'You have failed miserably. If it were possible to love him
better--if I could honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because
of the evil you have spoken of my dead!'"
She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on with increased passion,
and gathering resentment:
"All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness, honouring the
dishonourable, cherishing the base, but for the idle gossip of two
strangers in the theatre to-night--a man and a woman in the stalls behind
us. They talked all the louder when the lights went down. They wondered
'why the Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Viscountess?' but, of
course, they said, 'the Foltlebarres would never stand that! They were
nearly wild when that handsome scamp of theirs married her--poor Beauty
Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars.' He and she had kept house together; there
was a kiddie coming; they said the little woman played her cards
uncommonly well!... The marriage was pulled off on the quiet at a
Registrar's a week or so before Beau got his appointment on the Staff.
Straight of the fellow, but afterwards, at Gueldersdorp, didn't he kick
over the matrimonial pole? Somebody had seen his engagement to a Miss
Something-or-other announced in a Siege newspaper, published the very day
he got killed.... Poor beggar! Rough on him, and rough on the
Foltlebarres, and a facer for Lessie ... and what price the girl?' And I
was the girl!... It was of me they were talking!..."
Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced and shuddered. "Oh!
can't you see me sitting and listening, and every word vitriol, burning to
the bone?"
"Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, "to be tortured by such
prurient prattlers? Why did you not get up and leave the place?"
"I could not move," she said.... "I could only sit and listen. Then the
First Act ended, and the lights went up, and Lady Hannah touched my arm. I
knew when our eyes met that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying, 'I
think we have had enough of this?' and then we came away."
She caught her breath and bit her underlip, and he saw her eyes grow
misty.
"She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom.... She took my hand as we
stood waiting in the empty vestibule. She said: 'Those chattering pies
behind us have saved me some bad half-hours! Your husband, for some reason
of his own, has never told you. And it has more than once occurred to me
that if I were the true friend I want to be to both of you, I'd have
proved it before now by telling you myself. But I've learned to be
doubtful of my own inspirations!...' I asked her then if all they had said
was true? She shrugged her shoulders and nodded: '_Pour tout dire_, they
let Beau down rather gently.... But if he never could tell the truth to a
woman, he never went back on a man; and, after all, these things run in
the blood. _Passons l'eponge la-dessus._ Forget him, and thank your good
Angel you're married to an honourable man!'"
Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise them or move a muscle
of his face.
"She told me to forget him. It is easier to forgive him; there are deceits
that smirch the soul of the deceived no less than the deceiver. He lied to
the Mother--that I cannot pardon! Perhaps some day--but I do not know.
Lady Hannah called you honourable.... I needed no one to tell me what you
are and have always been! You hide the things that other men boast of....
You are loyal even to those you scorn. You kept his secret. I have
reproached you to-night for keeping it, even while I honoured you in my
heart!"
"Do not honour me," said Saxham harshly, "for behaving with common
decency! Can a man tell tales on another who is dead? To commit murder
would be a crime less cowardly. I do myself mere justice when I say that I
am incapable of an act so vile! Nor would I blacken a living man to make
myself show whiter in any man's--or woman's eyes!"
She was no longer pale. A lovely colour flushed her, and her eyes were
wistful and very kind. Her draperies rustled as she moved towards him.
"Owen ..." she said, and her white hands were held out to him, and her
sweet mouth quivered, and her voice was a sigh, "I am alive at last to
your infinite generosity. I beg you to forgive me for being blind before!"
"Generosity," said Saxham, "does not enter into the question. My silence
has no merits whatever. What good could I have gained by telling you?" He
lifted his eyes, and met hers full, dropping the words coldly one by one.
"The advantage one has ceased to desire can hardly be called gain, in any
sense of the word. And--I have left off crying for the moon. Even were you
willing to give it me, I have ceased to wish for your love!"
She looked at him with piteous, incredulous wistfulness, as he told the
hardy lie. His mask of a face revealed nothing, but he could not disguise
the rage of hunger for her that ravened in his famished eyes. They were
upon her lips, her throat, the lovely curves of her young bosom even as he
spoke; she felt them as the kisses of a fierce, possessive mouth, and
glowed with sudden shame, and something more. He saw her beauty change
from the pale rose to the fire-hearted crimson, tore away his eyes, and
mastered himself. He stepped back, and the still out-stretched, quivering
hands dropped nervelessly at her sides.
"You have asked me to pardon you," he said, "for some fancied lack of
perception. It is I who owe an apology to you. Try and forgive me for
having married you.... I should have known from the first that no good or
happiness could ever come of a contract like ours."
"Have I ever said I was unhappy?" she demanded. Her breath came quick and
short.
"Your face has said so very often," returned Saxham, looking at it,
"though you were too considerate to tell me so in words. But I ask you on
this night that sees you freed from an illusion, to have courage and not
yield to depression. Your fetters may be broken sooner than you think!"
"Owen!..."
She was paler than before, if that could be possible. She swayed a little,
and caught at the back of a chair that was near, and there was terror in
her darkened, dilated eyes....
"Do you say this to prepare me? Have you any illness? Do you mean that you
are going to die?"
"I meant nothing ..." answered Saxham, "except that men are mortal,
sometimes fortunately for the women who are bound to them! Go to bed, my
child; to sleep will do you good."
"Good-night," she said, and dropped her head, and went away. He opened
the door for her, and locked it after her, and went back to the
writing-table, and sat in his chair. He gripped the arms of it in anguish,
and the sweat of agony stood on the broad forehead where a woman who had
loved him would have laid her lips.
He had repelled her, slighted her, wounded her.... He knew what it had
cost him not to take those offered hands.... He was tortured and wrung in
body and in soul as he took a key that hung upon his chain and unlocked a
deep drawer, and took a flask from it that gurgled as if some mocking
sprite had laughed aloud when he shook it close to his ear. He whom she
had praised as honourable was a traitor no less than the dead man. He had
said to her, months ago in the Cemetery at Gueldersdorp:
"I may die, but I will never fail you!"
He had not died, and he had failed her. The Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp was
drinking hard again.