Sisters Part 12

"Well, if you will forgive me--she asked me, in effect, when I was coming to marry you, and why I had kept the engagement a secret so long." He paused, one dark red blush, to note the effect of so brutal a stroke.

She said, meeting his eyes for the first time:

"And you believed it at once--of ME?"

"No, Miss Pennycuick. I laughed. I said to myself: 'Here is another of Miss Francie's mare's nests.' But when I read on--she told me so many things--they were incredible, but still I felt I had to sift the matter; and since I came up today, other people--I've been to Five Creeks and had a talk with Jim Urquhart--now I don't know what to think; at least, there is but one thing that I can think."

The chair she had taken had a high back, and against this she laid her head, as if too weary to support it. Lack of sleep and appet.i.te had paled her florid colour to a sickly hue, and she looked wan and languid as a dying woman. But still he did not pity her, as he must have done had her face been half as beautiful as Deb's or Francie's.

"Miss Pennycuick," he continued, as she kept silence, "I want to get the hang of this thing. Will you tell me straight--yes or no--have you been giving it out that I left Redford two years ago engaged to you?"

Her first impulse was to cry out: "Oh, no, no! Not quite so bad as that!" But on second thoughts she said:

"Yes--practically."

Sudden rage seemed to seize him. He sat up, he crossed his knees, he uncrossed them, he twisted this way and that, he muttered "Good G.o.d!"

as if the pious e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n had referred to the Other Person, and his stare at her was cruel.

"But--but--I have been racking my brains to remember anything--surely I never gave you--I am perfectly convinced, I have the best reason for being absolutely certain, that I could not have given you--"

"Never!" she broke in. "Of course not. It was all my own invention."

"You admit it? Thank you. You formally relieve me of the imputation I have so long lain under without knowing it, of having run away from my duty?"

She said lifelessly: "We thought you were dead."

"Hah! I see. You thought it didn't matter what you said of a dead man?

But dead men's characters should be all the more sacred because they cannot defend them. I should be sorry indeed to leave behind me such a reputation as I seem to have hereabouts--though, indeed, a man is very helpless in these cases. He is at a hopeless disadvantage when a woman is his traducer. I can see that Jim Urquhart will never be a friend of mine again, whatever happens."

"He shall know the truth. Everybody shall know the truth," said Mary.

"How can everybody know the truth? Only by my own affidavit, and that would not be believed. Besides, it is not for me to deny--at the cost of branding a lady a liar."

It was the straight word, regardless of manners, with this sea-bred man.

"You need not. I know how to do it so that people will believe. I am going to write a letter to the newspaper--a plain statement, that will fully exonerate you."

He nearly jumped out of his chair with the fright she gave him.

"You will do nothing so ridiculous!" he exclaimed angrily.

"It is the only way," said she--"the only way to make sure."

"If you do," he menaced her, "I shall simply write another for the next issue to flatly contradict you."

"Then you would be a liar."

"That doesn't matter in the least. I must be a man first. I am not going to let you ruin yourself."

"Ah, that is done already! Nothing can make it worse--for me."

He looked at her, taking in the words, in some sort understanding them.

She lifted her eyes to look at him, and what he saw behind the look went to his kindly heart. He "felt" for her for the first time.

"May I go now?" she whispered.

His answer was to move to a seat beside her.

"I wish you would tell me," he said, in more humane tones, "how you came to do it. I would like to understand, and I can't, for the life of me. You must have had some reason. DID I do anything, unknowing--"

She shook her head hopelessly.

"No. You were only kind and good, as you would have been to anyone."

"Kind and good? Rubbis.h.!.+ It was you--all of you--who were kind and good. Oh, I don't forget what you did for me, and never shall. I feel"--it was the very feeling that had so oppressed him in the case of the lady at Sandridge--"under a load of obligation to you that I can never hope to discharge. But still--but still--though I trust I showed some of the grat.i.tude I felt--I cannot remember how I came to give you the idea--I must have done something, I suppose; one is a blundering fool without knowing it--"

"No," she protested--"no, no! It was my own idea entirely."

"But I can't reconcile that with your character, Miss Pennycuick."

"Nor can I," she laughed bitterly.

"There's a mystery somewhere. Did anybody tell you anything? Did Miss Frances put constructions on innocent appearances? Did--"

"No," Mary resolutely stopped him. "It is good of you to try to make excuses, but there is no excuse for me--none. Francie only said what she knew. I let them believe you were my lover; I am twenty-seven--I never had one--and--and--oh, I thought that, at least, you might be mine when you were dead! I did not mean to be a liar, as you called me--yes, that is the right word--"

"Forgive me for using it," he muttered. "You do not realise at first that you are lying, when you only act lies and don't speak them. And I DID think that perhaps, that possibly--of course, I was ridiculously wrong--it was atrocious, unforgivable--I don't ask you to forgive me--I don't want you to--but those dear days when our little boy--oh, you know!--and when you kissed me that night beside his grave--"

"WHAT!" A lightning change came over the young man, as if the word had been an electric current suddenly shot into him. "KISSED YOU?"

"It was nothing; you did not know you did it--"

"But here--hold on--this is serious. DID I kiss YOU? You are sure you are not dreaming?"

"I would not be very likely to dream that," she said, with a strange smile. "But of course it was only--at such a time--as you would have kissed your sister--anybody. Your very forgetting it shows that."

But a dim memory was awakening in him, frightfully perturbing to his mind.

"I KISSED you!" he repeated, and slowly realised that he had been that consummate a.s.s. The poor baby's dead hand had retained its old power to entrap a simpleton unawares.

Well, simpleton or not, Guthrie Carey was Guthrie Carey--sailor-bred, accustomed to meet vital emergencies with boldness and promptness; accustomed also to take his own views of what was a man's part at such times. While she implored him to say no more about that kiss, crying shame upon herself for mentioning it, he sat in silence, thinking hard.

As soon as she had done, he spoke:

"Miss Pennycuick, I now understand everything. You are completely justified. It is I who have been to blame." And he then, in precise language, such as no real lover could have used, but still as prettily as was possible under the circ.u.mstances, requested the honour of her hand in marriage.

To his astonishment, she laughed. It was a wild-sounding cackle, and quickly turned into a wail.

"Ah-h! Ah-h-h!" She faced him again, head up and hands down. "That, Mr Carey, is the one way out of it that is utterly, absolutely, eternally impossible."