A Romance of Wastdale Part 6

The question startled Gordon. He had been thinking of her, not of himself. Yes, to-morrow he would have to act. But how?

"I don't know," he answered. "I must have time to think. I have not mastered today yet."

"You will spare me as much as you can?"

There was something very pitiful in the childlike entreaty; at least so it seemed to Gordon. She was so young for all this misery. Her very humility pained him, all the more because it was so strange to him.

"I will spare you altogether, child," he replied. "You need not be afraid of me. I have loved you too well to hurt you now."

For a moment or two he paced about the room restlessly, trying to discover some means by which he could break the marriage off and take the blame upon himself. But no likely plan occurred to him. His brain refused to act. Disconnected sc.r.a.ps of ideas and ludicrous reminiscences, all foreign to the matter, forced themselves upon his mind, the harder he strove to think. He gave the effort up. He would be able to concentrate his attention better when he was alone.

Besides, he recollected he had not heard the whole story as yet. Some clue to an issue might perhaps be found in the untold remainder.

"Tell me the rest!" he said, returning to his chair.

"The rest?" she inquired. Gordon's generosity had pierced straight to her heart at last, and had sent the tears rolling down her cheeks.

"Yes! The rest of the story down to tonight."

"Oh! I can't," she cried. "Not now! I can't! If you had been rough and harsh, yes! But you have been so gentle with me.

"It will be the kindest way for me," Gordon replied. "I must know the truth some way or another, and I would rather have you tell it me than ferret it out for myself."

"Very well, then," she said, wearily; and for a s.p.a.ce there was silence in the room.

CHAPTER V

"My mother died," she began, "eight months after our engagement, and then I went out to Poonah on a visit to my uncle. It is just a year and a half since I started."

"Yea! I remember. I did not want you to go."

"And I insisted. You know why now."

"Yes! I know why now."

Gordon repeated her words with a s.h.i.+ver. If only he had understood her a little better, he thought.

Kate hardly noticed his interruption. She was staring straight into the fire and speaking in a dull monotone, with no spring in her voice.

She would have spared him now, had she been able, but she felt irresistibly impelled to lay all her disloyalty bare before his eyes--to show him at how empty a shrine he had been wors.h.i.+pping. It seemed to her almost as if some stronger will was prompting her, and the very sound of her words was thin and strange to her ears, as though some one else was speaking them at a great distance.

"Yes," she continued, "I wanted to get away from you--to slip out of my shackles for a time. So I went to Poonah, and--and there I found Austen."

"Austen! Austen!" Gordon burst out in a frenzy. "For G.o.d's sake, don't call him that!" and he brought his clenched fist down on the table with all his strength. The gla.s.ses on it rattled at the blow, and the tumbler which Hawke had used, standing close at the edge, fell and splintered on the floor. Gordon laughed at the sight.

"That was his gla.s.s," he explained. "He was here to-night, drinking with me," and he laughed again, harshly.

The girl hurriedly drew her skirts away from the broken fragments.

"I am sorry," Gordon said, recovering his composure, "I interrupted you. Go on!"

But there was a new hardness in his tone. Kate remarked it, and it grated on her painfully after his forbearance. She paused for a moment, looking at him anxiously. But he made no further sign, and she took up the burden of her tale again.

"There I found Mr. Hawke. I don't think I had ever given a thought to him before. But from this time he began to influence me, because of the difference between yourself and him. He paid me no respect, no deference, and outwardly, indeed, no attention; but all the time I felt that he was consciously and deliberately taking possession of me, and I made no struggle to resist him. He became my master--imposed himself upon me until I lost the sense of responsibility for my own actions. It was not that he gave me orders or even suggested them, but somehow I always realised what he wanted me to do, and did it. And I knew besides that he was conscious of my submission and counted on it."

Kate had relapsed into the impersonal commonplace manner which had characterised her speech before Gordon broke in. The words fell from her lips in a level regularity, without rise or fall, and she was abstractedly smoothing out one of the broad ribbons of her sash--an old trick of hers, very familiar to her listener. For all the emotion that she showed she might have been dissecting the character of an uninteresting acquaintance.

"So that is the way for men to win women!"

"Some women, yes!"

"Well, there is nothing like buying one's experience, they say."

The attempt at sarcasm only served to reveal the intensity of Gordon's suffering. He was sitting with his body bent forward and his chin pressed against his chest; his hands were clenched between his knees, and his whole att.i.tude told of the strain his self-repression caused him.

"Go on," he muttered.

"I have told you enough," she exclaimed, tossed out of her apathy by a sudden comprehension of the torture her story inflicted.

"No! no!" Gordon replied, hoa.r.s.ely. "Go on! Go on and finish it!"

"Well," she continued, her voice sinking into a tremulous whisper, "one evening I was left in the house alone. The rest had gone out to a dance, but I was worn out by the heat, and remained at home. It was very hot; there was hardly a breath of air, I remember, and I curled myself up in a long chair on the verandah and fell fast asleep. I was awakened by some one pulling my hair, and when I looked up I saw who it was."

"How long was that before you left India?"

"Two months."

"And during those two months you kept writing home to me and saying how slowly the time pa.s.sed."

Gordon spoke with an accent of incredulous wonder. Each moment thrust a new inconceivable fact before his eyes, and forced him to contemplate it. He felt that his world was toppling in ruins about him, much as it had done in that first year of his University life.

"That was not my fault," the girl exclaimed. "He made me do it. I wanted to write to you and break the engagement off; but he would not let me. I suppose he was afraid I should bother him to marry me himself," she concluded, contemptuously.

"And you obeyed him in that, too?"

"I tell you, I was at his mercy. He did what he liked with me. He made me write those letters to you;" and she added, with a certain softness, "and in a way, too, I was glad he did."

"Why?"

"Because even then I was afraid of him. I distrusted him, and you seemed a kind of anchor for me, and every letter an extra link in the cable."

The words touched Gordon strangely. The surface implication that he was valued merely as a convenient refuge from the consequences of folly did not occur to him. He applied a deeper meaning to them, and fancied that she had been willing to retain her hold on him for much the same reason which had made him cling to her--out of an instinctive need to feel something stable in a world of shadow. She had taken an open knife from the table and was mechanically tracing with its point the crimson lines upon her dress, and he thought her tired helplessness was the saddest sight man could ever see. Sentences out of the letters came back to him.

"So, in a way," he said, almost with a smile, "you meant what you wrote."

"Yes! What I wrote. But I wrote so little of them myself. I mean," she went on, noticing the surprise in the other's face, "I put the words down. He dictated them."