“O! if that’s your view! But, anyhow, she was seeming to accept mine,
when the infant hailed her, and she left me, and I bolted. You put too
much upon me—really you do, Val; and here’s the sequel. Ten minutes
ago she appeared in this room and told me that she had discovered the
reason—the real one this time.”
“And it was?”
“The baby—no less.”
“What! Does she——?”
“I don’t know from Adam. I was thinking over my answer; and when I
looked up, she was gone.”
“And you gave her no reply?”
“O yes! I told her I entirely agreed with her. I had to be honest.”
“Verender! You must come with me!”
“Go with you!”
“You’ve called the tune; you must pay the piper.”
“I don’t know what you mean. I’ll see you—cremated first!”
He stared at me a moment, his teeth showing, his eyes rounding in the
dusk, his fists clinching and unclinching; then he, too, was gone. And
I went and stood at the window, slinking into the curtains, and
feeling myself the most abused cur in all London.
V
For a fortnight this state continued in me, through alternations of
depression, self-accusation, and savage bursts of rebellion. On the
sixteenth day a brief note, begging me to call at his rooms, reached
me from Valentine.
“I won’t go,” I swore through my teeth, feeling an inclination to tear
the paper in them; and five minutes later was on my way.
“He shall justify me to myself,” I had thought. “I’ll let my
conscience be his footstool no longer.”
The fellow lived _en prince_ in Piccadilly. I found him in the midst
of a litter—boxes and packages and strewed floors—evidently on the
eve of a journey. He greeted me, twinkling, in high excitement—not a
trace of grievance or embarrassment in his manner.
“Leave those things, Phillips,” he said to his staid valet. “We’ll
finish by and by.”
The man left the room; and his master took me by the sleeve, while I
held myself in reserve—unconsciously, at the same time, softening to
his geniality.
“We’re off to Capri—Egypt,” he said, “following our late summer with
the swallows.”
“You and—Phillips?” I asked.
“I and my wife,” said he, with a laugh. “Hush! She’s seeing the baby
to sleep.”
He could say it without a blush; and they had been married, as I came
to learn, just a week! He led me on tiptoe to a distant room, and bade
me look through the opened door. Nanny, crowned, proud as any young
queen, with conscious maternity, was bent, singing softly, above a
little cot. The sight of her—Val’s wife—restored me at once to my
self-respect. I had done nothing after all, it seemed, but help to
precipitate an event I deplored. My shout had brought down the
avalanche. Henceforth my position was to be that of the amused
onlooker.
He let me stare; then led me away with all his old affectation of
pregnant mystery. We went out together—I don’t know why—into the
Green Park. It seemed remote and silent, and the better shadows of
night were beginning to troop under its trees. Then he spoke to me, as
follows:
“Verender, you have a right to know. You remember what you told me
that evening? I wasn’t just to you, perhaps. I foresaw issues to which
you must necessarily be blind. The baby stood between us, you said. It
did, but not in the way you meant to imply. I am its father.”
I listened perfectly silent, and very grave, as we stepped on
together.
“I will say of, not for, myself,” he continued, “that I had known
nothing of the fruits of a little moonlight idyll out in that Kent
village. I was hop-picking, as she was, but for a worser reason. Our
encounter in B—— Hospital was my first intimation of the truth. Till
that moment I had never considered, at least had been careless of, a
sequel; had never, of course, had a shadow of thought to identify the
patient with my victim. Then in a moment—Verender, her helplessness
found all that wasn’t bad in me. She didn’t know me—the curtain was
too thick. I determined to woo and win, as a stranger, what was
already my own. Was I right?”