CHAPTER XV.—THE SIGNING OF A DEATH WARRANT.
The balcony outside Katherine's room baked in the morning sun. A tiny patch of sunshine stood on the threshold of the open window like a hesitating guest. A cool breeze entered the room, fluttering the gay ribbons of a tambourine hanging against the wall.
Hockmaster had gone. She did not know whether it was the relief of his absence or the rush of air caused by the opening of the door that sent a fierce momentary thrill through her frame. Her eyes were burning, her throat parched, her body quivering in a passion of anger. She stood for a few seconds, with parted lips, breathing great draughts of the cool air, and mechanically unloosened the neck of her dress; it was strangling her. Then she turned, looking from right to left, like a caged creature panting for escape. Her glance fell upon the chair where Hockmaster had just sat. The edge of the rug at the feet was curled, the cushion flattened, the tidy disarranged—all hatefully suggestive of his continued presence. With a passionate movement, she rushed and restored the things to order, shaking the cushion with childish fierceness, till not a wrinkle was left. While the action lasted, it relieved her.
She crossed the room, sat for a moment. But every pulse in her throbbed. Motionlessness was impossible. She sprang to her feet and paced the room, moving her arms in passionate gestures.
Forgive him! Never—never in this world or the next. To have betrayed her—to Raine of all men. The thought in its fiery agony was almost unthinkable. The drawling, plaintive tone in which he had made his confession maddened her. The echo of his words pierced her brain.
The sudden meeting the night before had shaken her. After the ordeal of the dinner her nerves had given way, and she had lain awake all night with throbbing temples. She had risen, faint and ill, to read his note beseeching an interview. She had strung herself to go through with it. As the hours passed she had grown more self-possessed; while waiting, had put some extra tidying touches to her room, rearranged some flowers she had bought the day before. She had even smiled to herself. After all, what claim had this man upon her?
He had come, trim, point-device in his attire, looking scarcely a day older than when she had forsaken all for him. He had pleaded, owned himself a scoundrel, strengthening his cause by his very weakness.
“I was going to marry you, Kitty. Before God I was! On my return from Mexico. I thought I was going to make millions—become one of the little gods of the earth. No man living would have let go the chance. I guess I was to have made you more powerful than the ordinary run of queens. Who could have told those mines were a fraud? Van Hoetmann himself was deceived. I came back at once. You were gone. I tried to trace you. I lost you. And all these years I have been kind of haunted by it. Before I left Chicago, a man was bragging he had never brought a cloud upon a woman's life. I said to him: 'Sir, go down on your bended knees and thank Almighty God for it.'”
She had listened, at first rather sceptically. But gradually his earnestness had convinced her of his sincerity. She had loved him, as she had understood love in those far-off days, when her young shadowed nature had expanded like a plant to the light. A little tenderness remained, called from forgotten depths to the surface. She had spoken very gently to him, forgiven him, the sweeter woman prompting her.
And then he had urged marriage.
“It is what I have come to tell you, Kitty. Let me make amends for the past by devoting my life to your happiness. I am not right bad all through. I'll begin again to love you as I did when first I saw you in that white dress, among the roses of the verandah.”
She had smiled, shaken her head, it could never be. She was quite happy. He had done his part, she was satisfied with his intentions. But the amends she claimed was that he should never seek to see her again. Only on that condition, that he left Geneva at once, looking upon this as a final parting, could she give him her full, unqualified forgiveness. He had insisted, wearying her. She had risen, held out her hand to him.
“You must go. It is a generous impulse that urges you to make reparation in this manner, not love—”
She paused for a breath, instinctively trying him with a touchstone, and smiling as it failed to draw the response of passion.
“Let your conscience be easy. You wish to serve me—you have a trust—my honour—you can cherish it.”
And then the element of grotesque folly, that underlay this man's nature, had prompted him to satisfy the childlike craving for plenary shrift and absolution. He told her that he had confessed in an unguarded moment to Chetwynd, taken him further into his confidence. At first she had scarcely understood him—the suggestion had stunned, paralyzed her for a few seconds, during which his words seemed to strike her senses dimly, like rain in the night. The complete realization came with a rush—the shame, the degradation—the abyss that he had opened at her feet. Sudden overpowering hate of him had flooded her senses and burst all barriers of reserve and self-control.
He had committed the Unpardonable Sin, in a woman's eyes—the crime against her honour. To have won her, kissed her, cast her aside—that is in the heart of a woman to forgive. But not the other. He had betrayed her. Not only that, but he had stabbed to the very soul of her love. The sight of the weak man, who had added this crowning outrage to the havoc he had wrought in her life, goaded her into madness. The very tenderness, with which she had but lately regarded him, made the revulsion all the stronger.
“Oh God! I could kill you! I could kill you!” she had cried.
He had turned white to the lips, scared at the transformation of the calm, subdued woman into the fierce, quivering creature with glittering eyes and passion-strung words. The eternal, wild, savage woman, repressed for years in the depths of her soul, had leapt out upon him to rend him in her mad anger. She had pointed to the door, stamping her foot, driven him out of her sight. At the door he had paused, and looked at her with a strange mingling of manhood and submission in his eyes.
“I deserve my punishment—but I am not all bad. And so help me God, Kitty, my offer will hold good at any moment of my life!”
He had gone. She was alone, pacing the room, still shaken with the storm of elemental fury.
At last exhaustion weakened her. She drew aside the curtain before her bed, and threw herself down shivering with the shame that was eating into her bones.
“Oh, my God!” she moaned, “Oh, my God! That he should have learned—from him—”
She drew the sides of the pillow tight about her face. It was agony of degradation. Her body shuddered at the thought of his contempt, the shattering of his faith in her, the man's revolt at the brutality of the revelation. She had been dragged through the mire before his eyes. In her degradation she saw herself the object of his loathing.
The sharp striking of the little Swiss clock on her writing-table roused her. She raised a drawn face and looked in its direction. It was only eleven. She had thought hours had passed while she had lain there shivering. A little sense of dismay crept over her. If those few minutes had passed like hours, what would be the length of the hours themselves that had to be lived through that day?
If only she had sent him that letter, she thought bitterly. She might have fallen in his eyes, but not to those depths. He would have understood. The tremulous hope that his love would remain unclouded had sustained her. If only she could have spoken. A cynical irony seemed to govern the world.
She went to the window and looked into the street. A sudden impulse to go out of doors into the open air came over her and as quickly died away. She could not bear to walk along the street or in the public gardens—before hundreds of human eyes. Her soul felt naked and ashamed. If it had been country, where she could have gone and hidden herself in a quiet far-off corner, and laid her face upon the grass, and let the tree-branches whisper to her alone, it would have been different. She shrank from the contact of men and women—and yet her heart sank with a despairing sense of loneliness.
The consciousness of it came with a shock, as to one, who, on a North Country fell, suddenly finds himself isolated from outer things by an impenetrable mist. She hurried away from the window, sat down, through sheer physical weariness, on the chair by her writing-table, and buried her face in her hands.
A servant brought up a note. A fearful pang shot through her that it might be from Raine. The first glance showed her Hockmaster's handwriting. The envelope bore the printed heading of one of the cafés.
“If you have any pity, forgive me,”—it ran. “That I told you of my fault is proof of my earnest desire to begin a new life as regards you. I would give years of my life to win a kind word from you. All that was best and straightest in me spoke to you, Kitty. I am intensely miserable.”
She crumpled up the note and threw it aside. His misery indeed!
She looked at the clock. Half-past eleven. The thought came to her that all her life was to drag along at this pace, endless minutes to each hour.
The heat of her resentment against Hockmaster cooled down, but the poignancy of her shame remained. The impulsive hope that had risen at the first sight of the letter left a train of new reflections. How could she ever meet Raine again?
She rose once more, and resumed her weary, restless movements about the room.
“Never, never!” she cried. “His eyes would kill me—he would be kind—Oh God! I couldn't bear it. I would rather have him curse me! I would rather have him strike me! Oh, Raine, Raine, my darling, my love! I would have told you all—and you would have judged me from my own lips. You would not have put me from you. But this degradation—”
She was carrying death in her heart. She could not conceive the survival of his love. Men—unlike women—could not love, when once love had been turned to scorn. If they met, he would be considerate, kind, even pitiful. The thought of his contemptuous pity scorched her. The picture of him rose before her, frank, generous, honourable. She stopped short, as an agitating possibility occurred to her.
Might not quixotism lead him to renew his offer?
The idea haunted her, and gathering strength from her knowledge and her idealized conception of his nature, grew into a conviction. For a moment she gave herself up to the temptation of taking him at his word. She loved him with every yearning fibre in her body. Without him life was an appalling waste. It would be enough for her merely to be with him, seek now and then a caress from his hand.
But then came the passionate recoil. She shuddered, put up her hands before her face.
“Never!” she cried again. “I would rather die! My ignominy in his eyes is eternal. It would drag him down. He is too good to have a millstone like that tied around his neck.”
Yet the longing swept through her again, and her mind swayed to and fro. The hours crept on. She refused an offer of food made her by the servant. She felt as if it would choke her. She would ring if she wanted any later.
What was she to do? Her aching head throbbed as if it would burst. Hockmaster's note met her glance. She read it again. And this time she smoothed it out and replaced it slowly on the table. Her anger was dulled by despair. Nothing remained of her vehement indignation. It was the back-swing of the pendulum.
What was she to do? Raine she could never meet face to face. Yet the whole woman in her yearned to meet him. She must cut herself adrift, vanish wholly from his life. Destiny seemed to point out the course she must follow. She sat down, her chin in her hands, brooding over it until the sense of fatefulness numbed her mind. Fate had brought her back this other from the dark back ward of time. He had changed her life once. Was it not meant that he should fulfil the work he had begun? She must marry him. Raine would be saved. It would be a life of sadness, self-sacrifice. But then women were born for it.
Like many another woman, she was driven by an hour's despair to commit herself to a life-long unhappiness. She had counted the cost, and, unlike a man, blindly resolved to pay it. It is part of a woman's nature to trust herself to the irreparable. Katherine went to her table and wrote two letters—one to each man. The pen flew quickly, her intelligence illuminated by a false light. She sealed them, rang the bell, despatched them by the servant. It was done. She had burned her ships, committed herself irrevocably. A period of dull calm followed, during which she pretended to eat some food that she ordered, and read unintelligently an article in a review. But at last the words swam before her eyes. The review fell to the ground. The agony of her life came upon her, and she broke down utterly.
Felicia in the next room was humming an air. She had returned from her walk with Raine and was taking off her things. If she had been called upon suddenly to name the air, it would have slipped like a waking dream from her memory. The mingled altruistic and personal feelings of the past two hours had lifted her into an exalted mood, which was not altogether joyous. She was passing through one of those rare moments, when a young impressionable girl lives spiritually, without definite consciousness of personal needs, in a certain music of the soul. A sexual manifestation transcendentalized, if one pushes inquiry to the root of things. The magic of her sex had drawn the pain from a strong man's eyes and had touched his inner self.
Suddenly a sound struck upon her ear and the song died upon her lips. She listened, puzzled. It came again, a moan and a choking sob. Already somewhat overwrought, she held her breath, instinctively seeking some clue of association. She grasped it with a rush of emotion. Once she had heard that cry before, from a woman's depths, on the evening of poor little Miss Bunter's tragedy.
It was Katherine, on the other side of the wooden partition, crying her heart out. Fibres within the girl were strangely stirred, filling her with a great, yearning pity. At some moments of their lives women can touch the stars. Moved by an uncontrollable impulse she went out, knocked at Katherine's door and entered.
Katherine rose, looked at her half-bewildered; then the magnetism of the sympathy in Felicia's eyes and impulsively outstretched arms attracted her involuntarily. She made a step forward, and, with a little cry, half-sob, half-welcome, gave herself up to Felicia's clasp.
“I heard you. I had to come,” said Felicia. Katherine did not reply. For a long time they sat together without speaking, the elder woman's misery turned to sadness by the sweet and sudden tenderness. She cried softly in the girl's arms.
“It was good of you to come,” she said at last. “I had broken down—utterly broken down.”
“I felt it,” answered Felicia gently. She smoothed Katherine's ruffled fair hair with a light touch and kissed her forehead.
“It will come right in time, dear.”
But Katherine shook her head.
“Some things are final, irrevocable. The sun goes out of one's heart for ever and ever.”
“Could I do nothing for you? Practically I mean. You see, I know—a word—it might be in my power—”
She hesitated, touching upon delicate ground. Katherine lifted a tear-stained face, and looked at her curiously.
“You love him—and yet you would help me?”
“Because he loves you, dear,” said Felicia. “And because it has come upon me that I have been doing you a great wrong—in thinking badly of you.”
“What has made you think better of me?”
“Intuition, I suppose—and when I seemed to realize what his love for you meant. He could only love what was worthy of him.”
“That is why he can love me no more,” said Katherine in a low voice.
She paused for a moment, her breath coming quickly. Then she continued hurriedly, twining her fingers in a nervous clasp: “Things have happened that make it impossible for him to care for me—I shall never see him again. I am going away this afternoon—see,”—she pointed to a dressing-bag packed, but still open, lying on the table. “And I shall pass out of his life altogether.”
“But I don't understand!” cried Felicia, in grieved dismay. “What could make him cease to love you?”
“I have not been what the world calls a good woman, Felicia. God knows I have paid the penalty already—but the bitterest penalty of all is yet to be paid—the surrender of the longed-for Paradise, that only a woman who has lived as I have done can long for. Oh, my child, my dear, tender little girl, the way of the world is made hard for women sometimes.”
“Why should the women always suffer?” asked Felicia.
“Why? God knows. It is life.”
“If I were a man,” said Felicia, with a glow in her eyes, “I would think it dastardly to let a woman suffer, if I loved her.”
“There are some things that kill love,” replied Katherine bitterly.
“Has Raine told you so?”
“Ah, no. He is too generous.”
“Then how do you know?”
“My dear, when you leave a cut flower in the sun you know it will be withered up. There is no need for you to watch it to make sure.”
“But—if he still loves you? He did last night—he did this morning.”
Katherine gently laid her hand on the girl's lips.
“Hush! I told you. What I have done can't be undone.”
“But you love him, Katherine,” Felicia burst out impetuously.
“Don't you see I am signing my death-warrant?” cried Katherine.
Her voice vibrated and she looked at Felicia with shining eyes—“I shall love him till I die, as the best and wisest man of men that has ever walked the earth.”
She rose, crossed the room, came back and laid her hands upon Felicia's shoulders, and looked into her young, wondering eyes.
“Dear,” she said, “I shall always remember what you have done for me to-day. When you came in, I thought my heart was broken—but your tenderness stole over me like a charm—and now you see I can talk quite sensibly, and smile, just like my own self again. You must bid me good-bye, dear. I must go soon. But what I want to tell you is this. Think kindly of me—ah, don't you cry, child—there has been enough of tears to-day—think of me, dear, as a sister-woman, who stepped aside once out of the beaten track and for whom fate has been too much. And, Felicia dear, when I am gone—it will take very, very little to make Raine love you—”
“Ah, no!” cried Felicia passionately.
But Katherine smiled her sad, self-controlled smile.
“All, yes! He cannot help loving you—and so God give you happiness.”
“I can't bear you to go like this. I can't bear it!” cried Felicia.
“We all have to work out our destiny,” said Katherine. “Now good-bye, dear—God bless you.”
A few moments later, Katherine was alone again, finishing her preparations for departure.
CHAPTER XVI.—FELICIA VICTRIX.
“What you have learned about me,” Katherine had written to Raine, “I was to have told you last night. I had written to you a long letter, but I was too weak to send it. I resolved to tell it to your own ears. But it was impossible for me to speak to you last night for I was suffering too much.
“My story is a simple one. Married to a man many years my senior—treated with a mild gravity which my girlish wilfulness took for harshness—a great many tears—a great longing for the tenderness that never came—a gay, buoyant nature meeting mine, changing, it seemed, my twilight into sunshine—and then—what you know.
“Do not judge me harshly, Raine. But forget me. Forget that I came and troubled your life. Even were my name free from blemish, I am not good enough to be your wife. Forget me, and take to your heart one who will make you happier than I could have done—one younger, sweeter, purer. And she loves you. Let her win you.
“I have suffered much to be able to write this. It is a farewell. To meet you would be too great pain for us both. This morning, as you know, I saw Mr. Hockmaster, and I have promised to marry him. Fate rules these things for us. To the day of my death I shall pray for your happiness.—K.S.”
Raine's face grew hard as he read the letter. A man quickly wearies of successive emotions. His self-pride asserts itself and makes him rebel against falling into weaknesses of feeling. He had been angry at allowing himself to be drawn towards Felicia, and a natural reaction of loyalty to Katherine had followed. Now this was checked by her calm, unimpassioned words and the astounding intelligence of her engagement to Hockmaster. He was completely staggered. To his dismay, he became conscious of an awful void in his life. It seemed to be filled with purposeless shadows. He set his teeth and wrapped his strong man's pride about him. The thought of himself as John a' Dreams was a lash to his spirit. He crumpled up the paper in his hands and strode to and fro in his room.
She was to marry Hockmaster. It was incredible, preposterous, except on one hypothesis—the recrudescence of the old passion that had swept aside the social barriers for this man's sake. It was the most galling thought of all, it racked him, drew him down to a lower plane of feeling, blinded his clear insight into delicate things. Perhaps if a man did not sink lower than himself on some occasions, he could not rise higher than himself on others.
He drew a chair to the open French window. The room, being on the top storey, had no balcony, but a wrought-iron balustrade fixed on the outside of the jambs. He leant his arms over it and looked into the familiar street. He hated it. Geneva was intolerable. As soon as his father was able to travel, he would shake the dust of it from off his feet. A bantering letter had come that morning from his cousin, Mrs. Monteith, at Oxford. A phrase or two passed through his mind. Was he going to bring back two brides or half a one?
“How damned vulgar women can be at times!” he exclaimed angrily, and he rose with impatience from his chair, as if to drive Mrs. Monteith from his thoughts.
He unrolled Katherine's crumpled letter and read it through again. Then he thrust it into his pocket and decided to go and sit with his father.
But, before he could reach the door, a knock was heard. He opened it, and to his surprise found Felicia.
“You—is my father—?”
“No. I want to speak to you. Can I?”
“Do you mind coming in? It is not very untidy.”
He held the door for her to pass in, then he closed it and came up to her enquiringly. Felicia stood in the middle of the room, with her hands behind her back, a favourite attitude. Her dark cheeks were flushed and her sensitive lips were parted, quivering slightly.
“It's about Katherine!” she burst out suddenly. “Please let me talk, or I shall not be able to say what I want to. Since last night—when you kissed me—I have thought I might come to you—as your sister might—and because I care for you like that, I feel I can tell you. I have just been with Katherine. She is going away this afternoon.”
“At once?” asked Raine, startled at the apparent rapidity of events.
“Yes. Are you sending her away?”
“I? Oh no.”
“But why must she go, Raine? Tell me; need she go?”
“Katherine is mistress of her own actions.”
“Then you don't care?”
She looked at him earnestly, with moist eyes. There was a note of passion in her voice, to which Raine, sympathetic, found himself responding.
“What is the use of my caring, since she is going of her own accord without a word from me?”
“But a word from you would make her stay.”
“What do you know about all this?” he asked abruptly.
“I know that you have broken her heart,” said Felicia. “Oh! knowing her—and loving her—it is hard not to forgive.”
“There is no question of forgiveness,” replied Raine. “Did she tell you I would not forgive her?”
“No. A woman does not need to be told these things—she knows them and feels them. Must a woman always, always, always suffer? Why can't a man be great and noble sometimes—like Christ who forgave?”
“But, my dear child, you are talking wildly,” cried Raine earnestly. “God knows there is nothing to forgive. I knew long ago a shadow had been cast over her life—and I loved her. A strange freak of destiny brought the man here—last night, accidentally, he told me the details—and I loved her. I have not seen her. It is not I who drive her away. Read that, and you can see it is not I.”
He thrust the letter into her hand, and watched her as she read. Four-and-twenty hours ago, he would as soon have thought of crying his heart's secrets aloud in the public streets, as of delivering them into the keeping of this young girl. But now it seemed natural. Her exalted mood had infected him, lifted him on to an unconventional plane.
The blood rushed to her cheeks as she read the lines in which reference was made to herself. When she had finished, she looked at him with a strange light in her eyes.
“And you are satisfied with this?” she said quickly.
“I am dumfounded by it. She has promised to marry this man.”
“And can't you see why? Isn't it as clear to you as the noonday?”
“The old love is stronger, I suppose.”
“Raine!” cried the girl, in ringing reproach. “How dare you say that, think it even? Can't you see the agony that letter has cost her? To me it is quivering in every line. Why did you let that man go to her instead of yourself? Oh, heavens! if I were a man, and such a thing had happened regarding the woman I loved, I should have lain outside her door all night to guard her—I should have seen her, if hell-fire had been between us. But you let her suffer. You put your pride above your love, like a man—you were silent. You let her hear from this man that you knew—you left her to grapple with her shame alone.”
Felicia walked about the room like a young lioness. The words came in a flood. In the championing of her sister-woman she lost sense of conventional restrictions. Raine was no longer Raine, but the typefication of a sex against which she was battling for her own.
“Can't you read into it all?” she continued. “Can't you see the degradation she seemed to have fallen into in your eyes? But you only think of yourself—of your pride—of the bloom brushed off from your ideal. Never a thought for her—of the god hurled from her heaven. She would marry this man to cut herself adrift from you, to get out of your life without further troubling it—to ease your conscience, lest it should ever prick you for having left her. She is marrying him because her heart is broken—who else but a noble, high-souled woman could have written this letter? I better than she! Oh, Raine—if you have a spark of love for her left—go and throw yourself at her knees, before it is too late.”
Her voice broke towards the end. The strain was telling on her. She sank for rest upon the chair by the window, and laid her burning cheek against the iron balustrade. Raine came to her side.
“You can thrash me a little more, if you like.”
But the familiar, kindly tone suddenly awoke Felicia to the sense of their relations. She hung her head, confused.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I ought not to have spoken like that to you—I lost control over myself. You mustn't think of what I have said.”
“I'll think of it all through my life, Felicia,” said Raine.
A silence fell upon them. The girl was shaken and weary. Raine was confronting a new hope, that made his heart beat.
“Raine,” she said, after a while.
He did not reply. She looked up, and saw him staring into the street.
“By God!” he cried, suddenly, and before Felicia could realize what he was doing, he had seized his hat from the table and had rushed from the room, leaving the door open.
Felicia leant over the balustrade, and looked down. Katherine was there, near the corner, in the act of giving over her dressing-bag to a lad in a blue blouse, who had offered his services. Felicia watched until she saw Raine emerge beneath the archway, stride like a man possessed after Katherine, catch her up, and lay his hand upon her arm, as she turned a startled face towards him. Then the tears came into her eyes, and she left the window and went down to her own room, where she locked herself in and cried miserably. Such is the apparently inconsequent way of women.
“Katherine,” said Raine, when he came up with her. She stopped, and looked at him speechlessly.
“I have just caught you in time,” he said, with masculine brusqueness. “We must talk together. Come into the Gardens.”
“I can't,” she replied, hurriedly. “My train—”
“You can miss your train. Where are you going?”
“Lausanne,” she answered, weakly, with lowered eyes.
“There are quantities of trains. Come.” He drew her arm gently. She obeyed, powerless to resist. He found a seat away from the promenade. An old peasant was dozing at one end, and a mongrel was stretched at his feet. They were practically alone. The old man in his time had seen many English and innumerable pairs of lovers. Neither interested him. He did not even deign to turn a lustreless eye in their direction. The boy with the dressing-bag had meekly followed them, and stood by, politely, cap in hand. Did madame want him to wait with the bag?
“No,” replied Raine, pulling a franc from his pocket. “Take it to the concierge at the Pension Boccard.”
Katherine half rose, agitated.
“No, no. I must go to Lausanne. You mustn't keep me.”
But the boy had dashed off, clutching his franc-piece. Raine bent down till the ends of his moustache nearly brushed her veil.
“I will keep you, Katherine, until you tell me you love me no longer.”
“Don't torture me,” she said, piteously. “That is why I tried to avoid meeting—to spare us both. I knew your generosity.”
“My generosity,” echoed Raine, with effective interruption. “My longing, my needs, the happiness of my life! If you care for me, it is not torturing you to tell you I love you—I can't live a man's life without you. When I first read your letter, it crushed the soul out of me. I did not understand; afterwards I did. Some day you shall learn how. I love you, Katherine, need you, yearn for you.”
His passion grew as he looked at her, watching the faint colour come and go on the face beneath the veil. She seemed too fragile and delicate for the rude buffetings of the world. An immense wave of emotion swept through him. It was his indefeasible right to protect her, cherish her, hold her in his arms, close to him.
And Katherine was trembling, every chord in her vibrated. She could not speak. She flashed on him a quick, sidelong, feminine glance, and met his eyes fixed upon her. They were blue and strong, half-fierce, half-tender. The man's will and longing were in them. She shrank, and yet she looked again, loving him for their intensity. Raine spoke on as he had never known it had been in his power to speak. The old peasant dozed, regardless of their presence or of that of a little dusty child who squatted down by him to play with the dog. Through the trees and shrubs in front could be seen glimpses of white dresses, scraps of the passers-by on the path along the quay. But this quiet, somewhat unkempt corner remained undisturbed.
“I can't, I can't,” said Katherine, at last.
“I have pledged myself—I can't go back.”
“I will settle that matter,” he replied, with a half smile. “Leave it to me. Men understand one another. You are mine, Katherine, my darling, mine, my wife—if you love me.”
The tenderness of his voice thrilled through her. She raised her eyes to his, this time to be held there.
“Love you!”
He read her lips rather than heard them.
“And nothing again shall part us? You will marry me, Katherine?”
All the woman in her cried “yes,” but it also held her back.
“Will you love me in after years as now, Raine? Will you never come to think that this shame that has come to me was deserved? Think of it, dear, in your clear, honest way. You will never come to feel that you have given all your wealth for what, like most men, you should have trodden under foot? Your life's happiness—mine—depend upon your answering it from your heart of hearts, dear. Judge me now for ever and ever.”
“As God hears me,” said Raine, with the love in his voice. “To me you are ever the purest and the noblest and tenderest of women. You love me with a woman's love and I with a man's; and we will love soul to soul, dear, till we die. Our love, dear, is as sacred to me as the ghost I buried in it a few weeks ago. All this will be like a troubled dream—all the past, darling, in both our lives as shadows. Thank God!”
He put his arms suddenly round her, drew her to him, and kissed her. For both of them the world stood still, and the commonplace gardens were Eden, and the old peasant nodded his weatherbeaten head, and the mongrel and the dusty child looked on unastonished, like the beasts when the first apple was eaten.
Raine went, an hour or so after, to the Hôtel National and found Hockmaster outside, cultivating a dinner appetite with sherry and bitters. He jumped up when he perceived his visitor, and came towards him.
“Hello, Chetwynd! This is real friendly of you. Come and sit down—join me.”
Raine accepted the seat, but declined the sherry.
“Do you mind my asking you a very intimate question?” asked Raine.
“As many as you like,” said Hockmaster, with naïve effusion. “I have given you a sort of right to be familiar. Of course, whether I answer it is a matter for my discretion.”
“Precisely. But I hope you will. Are your feelings very deeply engaged in this affair with Mrs. Stapleton?”
“Sir,” said Hockmaster. “I've repaired a wrong that has set at rest a damned uneasy conscience.”
“From which I gather you have obeyed your conscience rather than your heart,” said Raine.
“I am going to be married,” replied Hockmaster, between the first puffs of a cigar he was lighting. “Perhaps you may not know that. So I guess I'd better fall back upon discretion. It is best in affairs between man and wife.”
“Yes, but suppose it was broken off?”
“What? My marriage?”
He stretched himself out in a comfortable attitude, his hands behind his head, and regarded Raine placidly.
“What sort of interest can the concerns of a worm like me have for you?”
“Every interest in the world,” replied Raine, flushing. “If it's merely a question of conscience on your part, I have no scruple in asking you to release Mrs. Stapleton from her engagement.”
“Did she send you?”
“Yes.”
“Tell you any reason?”
Hockmaster's tone irritated Raine. He rose quickly, thrusting his straw hat to the back of his head, and stood over the recumbent American, with his hands on his hips.
“Yes, she did. Mrs. Stapleton is going to marry me.”
The words brought the other to his feet with a force that nearly upset the small table in front of him.
“God alive, man!” he cried, realizing the whole situation in a rush. “Why on earth didn't you tell me before?”
The two men looked into one another's eyes. It was Raine who was first disconcerted. The intense distress of the other was too genuine for him not to feel touched.
“You're the first man for years,” said Hockmaster, “that I have felt drawn to in friendship; and I have been powerfully drawn to you. I would have cut off my head sooner than said or done anything to pain you Why didn't you stop me this morning?”
“I tried to dissuade you.”
Hockmaster threw away his extinct cigar, and put his hands in his pockets dejectedly.
“Yes, you did so; and I went on running knives into you. Why didn't you pitch me into the lake last night? I wish to God you'd do it now.”
“We will forget all that,” said Raine, kindly.
“You may, but I shan't. And she—for heaven's sake, ask her to forgive me. I was trying to do my best. You believe that, don't you?”
“With all my heart,” said Raine.
“And I'll tell you, Chetwynd,” continued Hockmaster, with a truer ring of feeling in his voice than Raine had ever perceived, “I meant to be a good man to her, to put down my cloak over every puddle in life for her to walk upon, to make her just as happy as I could. But I guess I've been a blamed fool. I've been a blamed fool all my life. First thing I remember was running away from school to live in the woods. At first it was glorious. Then it rained all night, and I crawled back next morning sick and miserable, and was put to bed for a month. I reckon I'll go home. My White Lead Company's going to burst like all the other bubbles. I heard this morning. An hour ago I thought, 'Anyway, I've found a good friend and a wife in Europe.' Now that's gone. But she'll be happy. You're worth twenty million of me. You won't see me again. I suppose I'm the sorriest man standing on the earth at the present moment; but you won't think worse of me than I am, will you?”
He looked sideways at Raine, in his odd, appealing way.
“Upon my soul,” cried Raine, in an outburst of generous feeling, grasping him by the shoulder, “I don't know whether you are not one of the most lovable men I have ever met!”
Raine walked back to the pension with love in his heart towards all mankind. God was in his heaven. All was right with the world.
He found Katherine and Felicia in the salon waiting for dinner, in company with Mme. Popea and Frau Schultz. Mme. Popea cried out on seeing him,—“Another happy one! What has made you all look so beatified?”
“The eternal beauty of humanity,” returned Raine, with a smile.
“And you have caught the plague of epigrams,” said Frau Schultz. “I asked Miss Graves why she had such a colour, and she said, 'because the world seemed wider to-day.' It's a new language.”
“It is the turn of madame,” said Mme. Popea, in her vivacious way.
Katherine laughed.
“This is not a parlour game, you know. But perhaps it is because I am going to dine.”
Raine's heart leapt at the little touch of gaiety. His eyes showed her his gladness. A stream of the other guests entered. She took advantage of the sudden filling of the salon to draw him to her side. A glance asked a tremulous question. He reassured her with a whisper, and they went out on to the balcony.
“I have told my father,” said Raine. “He will love you, dear.”
She pressed his arm for answer. There was a long silence, which Raine, half divining her mood, would not break. At last he said, lover-wise,—
“Tell me your thoughts, beloved.”
“I was thinking that I have lived thirty-one years, and I have never known till now what even freedom from care was. I seemed blinded by the light, like the prisoners let out from the Bastille. There is something awful in such happiness.”
“It shall be with you to the end,” said Raine.
“I know it,” she replied.
Then, after a pause,—
“I have told Felicia. Do you mind?”
“We owe her a great debt,” said Raine. “She came to me this afternoon, after leaving you.”
The blood rose in Katherine's cheeks, and she looked up timidly into his face.
“I think I shall bring her here to you. You will know what to say to her.”
She disappeared for a moment by the open window, and then returned with Felicia, whom she left with Raine. He came forward, and took both her hands in his.
“How can I ever repay you?”
“You have done too much for me already,” said Felicia.
There was a little combat of generous words.
The dinner-gong sounded the end of the talk.
“And the Pension Boccard,” he said; “you will have some pleasant memories of it?”
“Ah, yes. I owe too much to it.”
“How?” asked Raine.
“You may think it an odd thing to say, but it seems to have changed me from a girl into a woman.”
“Does that bring you happiness?”
“I don't know,” replied Felicia, musingly.
And then, after a pause,—
“I think so.”