The strain upon Gordon's nerves had become intolerable. When he first mounted the outhouse roof he had been wholly absorbed in the horror of his conjecture that Hawke's midnight visitor was the girl to whom he was betrothed, and the need of either verifying or disproving it was the one thing clear to him amid the turmoil of his brain. Of what the visit might actually imply he took no thought. Now, however, he knew; the interview which he had witnessed left him not a glimmer of doubt. But during the two years of their engagement, Kate Nugent had so grown into the heart of his life, had become so real a part of him, that she was not easily dethroned from his respect. He clung instinctively to a vague hope that there might have been some compelling cause of which he knew nothing to account for her subjection to Hawke. That this subjection meant treachery to him, treachery of an unpardonable kind, whatever its cause, he realised in a way, but as yet did he not feel it. The blow had stunned his reason, had even dulled his senses, had, in a word, struck at the very roots of his being. He was adrift in a maze of bewilderment. The scene he was witnessing grew in the end shadowy and unreal. Even Hawke seemed to lose his individuality; he became just a detail in the sum of the mystery, a thing to be explained, not a man to be punished. Gordon, in fact, was left conscious of but one feeling--the overwhelming desire to see the woman he had worshipped face to face with him, to speak with her, and realising the necessity of getting solid ground beneath his feet, if he was to accomplish his wish, he clambered from his perch--just too soon to see Kate strike Hawke across the mouth, as her answer to the last words he had only dimly heard.
Gordon reached the earth securely and crept softly back to his garden gate. The sky had cleared during the last half hour, and the valley lay pure and clean in the starlight. After a while a sound reached him. It struck upon muffled senses at first, meaninglessly; but its continued repetition fixed his attention, and he perceived that it was the sound of Kate's footsteps on the stones again at the bottom of the lane. She was returning. Gordon was still in that dazed condition when the brain, unable to take a complete impression, or, to speak more plainly, unable to combine its different impressions into one whole, fixes itself upon some small particular sensation and magnifies that, to the thorough exclusion of the rest. So, now as he listened to her steps drawing nearer and nearer, he noticed acutely a difference in the manner of her walk, a certain hesitancy, absent when she swept by him on her way to the Inn. Then her footfalls had rung surely and rhythmically, betokening some quest in view; now they wavered, timidly, with uncertain beats as if the hope had gone out of her limbs. The sound was somehow familiar to Gordon, and, curiously ransacking his memories, he discovered the reason. He had marked women walk like that, with the same weariness, with the same hopelessness, late at night in the quiet of the London streets. This chance association of ideas acted on him like a shock. It woke him from his stupor, revivified him, set him with clear vision fronting facts. He grasped the full meaning of Kate's interview with Hawke. It rose before him like an acted scene in a play, and he recollected with a sudden horror those last words, "They will cost more." How long was it since he had climbed down from the outhouse roof? How long had he been waiting by the gate? He had been unconscious of time. Hours might have lapsed for all he knew. Meanwhile the steps drew nearer. He saw her plainly advancing towards him. She was walking with her eyes on the ground, and so did not observe him barring her path until she almost knocked against him. She lifted her head, stood for a second looking searchingly into his face, as if he were a ghost, the fancied embodiment of her fears, and then, with an inarticulate moan like the cry of the dumb, she reeled against the wall of the lane. Gordon heard her breath coming and going in quick jets and the scrabbling of her finger-nails as she clutched at the stones.
"Is it you?" she said, attempting a light surprise. "How you startled me! I am late, very late. I was delayed. I came over to--to----"
"To recover your letters," Gordon broke in bitterly upon her labouring effort to dig up an excuse. "You were right to come late. That kind of errand can't be run by daylight."
Kate drew herself up and moved toward him, but he thrust his hands out with a gesture of repulsion to check her approach.
"Those last three letters?"
"He has them still."
"Come in!" Gordon said. The relief he experienced gave a gentleness to the tone of his voice. That loathsome dread at all events was dispelled. For even then he did not doubt the truth of her words.
"Come in!" and he turned and went into the parlour. The girl followed him in silence, drew a chair close to the dying fire and hung over it, shivering. Gordon lit the lamp, saying--
"Yes; it is cold. These April nights always are up here."
Kate looked at the clock, and Gordon's eyes followed her gaze. The hands pointed to half-past one. He had heard her implore Hawke that it was past the hour, some time before he quitted his post of observation. So there could have been but the briefest interval between her departure and his own.
"Be quick! What do you want with me? I have no time to lose!"
Kate flung the words at him petulantly. The knowledge that she had been discovered exasperated her against Gordon.
"Well, why don't you speak?"
She turned towards him. Gordon was still standing at the table by the lamp. For, now that his object was attained and she was alone with him, he found no words to express the questions he had meant to ask. The light fell full upon the delicate beauty of her face, and indeed nearly drove the questions themselves from his mind. "You always look to me as if you had just come out of a convent," he had once said to her; and that sentence most exactly indicated the nature of the passion he had felt for her--an intense love refined and exalted by a blind, unreasoning reverence. There was, in truth, a certain air of spirituality about her manifest to most people on their first introduction. But it belonged to the face, not to the expression. It was due to the fragile purity of her features, not to the mind which animated them, and was consequently more noticeable when she was in repose. The impression, as a rule, wore off upon a closer acquaintance, but Gordon had fallen in love and saw her always through the mist of his feelings.
So the memory of all that she had meant to him kept him silent now. His thoughts seemed almost a sacrilege--plainly impossible to speak unless Kate gave him a decided lead. He waited and watched her. The skin of her wrist had broken when Hawke gripped it, and every now and then a drop of blood would fall on to her white dress and trickle down in a red wavering line. The sight somehow fascinated Gordon, and as each drop fell he waited and watched for the next.
To Kate, his silence became intolerable. She would have preferred reproaches, abuse, even violence--anything, in a word--to this leaden reticence. For it accused her more sharply than any words. Her lover had always been as an easy book to her keen intelligence, and she could read clearly enough that what kept his lips locked now was the conflict between his new knowledge and his old loyalty. In a flash she imagined Hawke's behaviour under the like circumstances and contrasted it with Gordon's bearing. Side by side the two men toed the line for her mental inspection, and the result was a feminine outcry against Fate, the Powers above and below--what you will, in a word, except her concrete self.
"What brought you over here?" she cried. "You said you were going to Ravenglass. You told me so. What brought you over to Wastdale?"
She spoke fiercely, almost vindictively, and it seemed as if the pair had suddenly changed places, as if she were the accuser and he the culprit, standing meekly self-condemned. Indeed, to complete the illusion, there was even a tinge of remorse in his tone as he answered her.
"God, perhaps. Who knows?"
"Oh! yes, yes, yes!" she went on. "Preach to me! Preach to me! Go on! Only be quick about it and make the sermon short!"
"Don't, Kitty!" he said, and added, wistfully, "It can't be your true self that is speaking."
"Yea, it is," she replied, struggling with a sense of pity for him (evoked by the quiet sadness of his voice). "My very own self, my real true self, that you have never known--that you neverwouldknow. You always had wrong ideas about me. I tried to open your eyes at first, but it was no good, and I gave it up. You always dressed me up in virtues that didn't fit me. I used to feel as if I were wearing a strait-waistcoat."
Gordon drew up a chair and sat opposite to her on the other side of the fireplace.
"Then it was all my fault," he said.
Kate glanced at him quickly, but there was no trace of irony in his manner. He was speaking quite seriously. As a matter of fact, it had just begun to dawn on him that a frank expectation of ideal behaviour is the most exacting form of tyranny a man can exercise over a woman.
"No," she replied. "No! It was my fault. I ought never to have become engaged to you; for I never loved you, even at the beginning. Oh, it is no use shirking the truth now," she went on, as Gordon rose with a cry of pain. "I never loved you. I realised that very soon after we were engaged. I had always liked you. I liked you better than any man I had met, and so in time I thought I might come to love you as well. I don't know whether I ever should have reached that if I had been left alone. But you made it impossible. You would not see that I had faults and caprices. You would not see that those very faults pleased me, that I meant to keep them, that I did not want to change. No! Whenever you came to me, I always felt as if I was being lifted up reverently and set on a very high and a very small pedestal. And there I had to stand, with my heels together, and my toes turned out, in an attitude of decorum until you had gone. Well, you want people with flat heels to enjoy that. I always wore high ones, and the attitude tired me."
Instinctively she stretched one foot out as she spoke. The sparkle of the firelight on the buckle caught Gordon's eye, and he saw that she was wearing thin kid slippers with a strap across the instep.
"You must be wet through," he exclaimed.
"No," she answered. "I rode to the head of the Pass, and left the horse tied up to the footbridge over the stream. It was dry enough the rest of the way."
"You rode over here!" he exclaimed. "Then they must have known you were coming?"
"Who must have known?" she asked, in a sudden alarm.
"Your father and your aunt. She is staying with you still, I suppose."
"Yes. But they knew nothing, of course. My father had some people to dinner to-night. I left them early, saying that I was tired. I should have had no time to change if I had thought of it, as it was close on ten. I had told Martin, our groom, that I should want a horse--you know he would do anything for me--and he had it ready saddled. So I locked my room door, took the key with me, and came away just as I was."
She stopped abruptly. The mention of her home aroused her to the consequences of her detection. Up till now the fact that Gordon had found her out had alone possessed her mind. Now, however, she was compelled to look forward. What would he do? He was to have married her in a week, in just seven days. Would he disclose the truth? She scanned his face for an answer to her conjectures.
Gordon was leaning against the mantelshelf above her, and his eyes met her inquiring gaze.
"Well?" he asked.
"So you see," she faltered, "I am pretty safe for to-night; but to-morrow?"
"To-morrow?" He seemed not to have grasped her drift.
"Yes! To-morrow," she repeated. "What do you mean to do?"
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 scraps 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 space there was silence in the room.
"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 shiver. 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 worshipping. 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 God's sake, don't call him that!" and he brought his clenched fist down on the table with all his strength. The glasses 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 glass," 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 attitude 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, hoarsely. "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 passed."
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."
"What!"
A sudden fury seized upon Gordon. For the first time since he had been talking with Kate, he realised Hawke the man, a living treacherous being, flesh and blood, that could be crushed and killed. The idea sent a thrill through his veins. The lust for revenge sprang up, winged and armed, in a flame of hatred. His imagination pictured the scene, clear cut as a cameo; he saw the keen, pointed face bending over Kate's shoulder; he heard him unctuously rolling out loving phrases, savouring them as he spoke, and chuckling over the deceit.
He turned on Kate in a frenzy.
"He dictated them; and he laughed as he did it, I suppose. Did he laugh? Tell me! Did he laugh?"
Gordon shook the girl's arm savagely, his face livid and working with passion. His aspect terrified her. She dared not tell him the truth, and she turned away with a shudder.
"That is answer enough," and he dropped her arm and began again pacing about the room. Now, however, he walked quietly and softly, with his shoulders rounded and his head thrust forward. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, and there was something catlike in his tread, which reminded Kate irresistibly of Hawke. Indeed, to her fevered eyes, he began to change and to grow like his enemy in face and bearing.
"Don't," she whispered. "You frighten me. You remind me of him."
The words recalled Gordon to himself. There was something else he wished to know. What was it? He beat his forehead with the palms of his hands in the effort to recollect. If only he could banish Hawke from his mind until she had gone! At last the question took shape.
"The letters he was reading to you?"
"They were notes and appointments written when we were both at Poonah," she answered, submissively. "I never thought that he would keep them, though I might have known he would."
"And the three he has still?"
"They were the only real letters I ever wrote to him. There were four, but I burned one to-night."
"Yes! I saw."
"I wrote them on the way home, from Calcutta, Aden, Brindisi and the last from London the evening I arrived."
"You have never written since?"
"Never! Nor have I seen him since until he compelled me to come to-night."
She stopped suddenly, as if some new idea had crossed her mind. In a moment, however, she began again, but she was speaking to herself.
"No. I had to come. There was no other way. I dared not leave those letters in his hands. Oh! how I hate him!"
She uttered the words with a slow intensity which enforced conviction, looking straight at Gordon; and he saw a flame commence to glow in the depths of her eyes and spread until her whole face was ablaze with it.
"Do you mean that?" he queried, almost eagerly.
"Can you doubt it?" she replied, starting to her feet. "Oh, yes, you would! I forgot. Oh, David, if only you had understood me better!"
It was what he had been saying to himself, with a deep self-reproach, and her repetition of his thought, coupled with a weary gesture of despair, exaggerated the feeling on him by the addition of a very lively pity.
"So that is true, then?" he asked, hesitatingly. "You no longer care for him?"
The mere weakness of the question betokened a mind in doubt, as to its choice of action, betrayed a certain tentative indecision.
"I never really cared for him," she answered.
A look of actual gladness showed in the man's face. They were standing opposite to one another, and the girl shut her eyelids tight, as if the sight hurt her.
"That pleases you!" she exclaimed, twisting her hands convulsively. "Ah! Don't you understand? It is the most horrible part of it all to me--that I never cared for him. It doubles my shame. He dominated me when he was with me, close to me, by my side; but I never cared for him. I had realised that by the time I reached England, and my last letter was to tell him so."
Her whole attitude expressed humiliation. Had she been able to look back upon a passion overmastering both Hawke and herself, and encircling them in a ring of flame which, by its very brightness, made the world beyond look colourless and empty, she could have found some plea to alleviate her consciousness of guilt. As it was, however, the episode appeared nakedly sordid to her recollection, unredeemed by even a flavour of romance.
"So you never really cared for him!"
Gordon's earnest insistence struck her as singular. He seemed to have taken no note of the last words, but dwelt upon that one point--clung to it, it appeared. What difference could it make to him, she wondered, whether she had cared or not; the sin lay between them none the less. She watched his face for the solution. Perplexity was shown in the contracted forehead and in a tremulous twitching of the lips. As a matter of fact, Gordon was hunting a will-o'-the-wisp of hope, and it had led him to the brink of a resolve. Should he take the leap, or soberly decline it! He hesitated, half made up his mind, took one short halting step towards Kate and stopped, checked by a new thought.
"You said you would have broken off our engagement had he allowed you!"
"Yes! I said that."
"Why didn't you when you returned to England and felt free from him?"
The girl gained a hint of his drift more from his manner than his question, and answered him warily, with a spark of hope.
"Because, as I told you, I relied on you so much, and I felt the need of some one I could trust more than ever then. Besides, every one approved of the marriage."
An abrupt movement warned her that she had chosen a wrong turning. A quick traverse, however, brought her out upon the right road again.
"It is not so easy for a girl to cut the knot. She must find explanations to justify her--valid not only to her parents, but to the man. And I knew you would not let me go so lightly. I knew that I meant all the world to you."
She paused, but Gordon gave no sign, and she repeated her words with a nervous smile.
"It sounds queer, but it is true all the same. I knew that I meant all the world to you."
Again she waited, but with a like result. He was still pondering, still in doubt. The way in which he drew his breath, now in short, jerky catches, now in a long, labouring sigh, made that plain to her. Her shot had failed of its aim.
A sudden gust of the wind brought the rustle of the trees through the open door. Kate looked at the clock; the hands made one threatening line.
"Two o'clock!" she cried, with a start. "I must get back to Keswick while they are still asleep--asleep." She spoke the word again with a melancholy longing in her voice which was indescribably sad.
"You will write, then," she resumed, "and break it off."
Gordon nodded assent, and she turned away in search for something.
The action helped to decide Gordon by pointing out the necessity of decision. What course should he take? He had thought to choose his path on careful reflection when Kate was on her way back to Keswick; but he saw now that would be too late. It would be time enough then to consider the consequences of his choice, how best to cope with them and force them to his service; but the choice itself could not be deferred. For if he let her go quietly without another word the matter would be settled finally, the choice determined, a prison wall raised to further effort. What course should he take? The question pressed urgently for an immediate answer.
He went to the door and out into the porch. The sudden slip into night seemed to him a symbol of what his life would mean if he kept silence. His mind played with the idea and carried it further. It pictured him standing alone in the empty darkness and the girl behind him alone in the empty light. The beck, too, at the back of the house, whispered its music in his ears and pleaded with him.
A timid hand was laid on his arm: Kate was by his side.
"David!"
"I was listening to the brook," he said.
For a while they both stood quiet in the gloom of the porch.
"What do you hear in it?" he asked.
"I dare not tell you. What do you?"
"I hear all my days to come flowing down and down with a sound of tears."
"David!" she said, her voice breaking on the name.
He had often noticed the wonderful clearness of her eyes, and they shone very softly on him now. He drew her towards him in the gloom of the porch.
"Kitty!" he whispered, "tell me that it isn't true! Tell me I have been dreaming! I will believe you. I must believe you. For if I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything. You have been the light of my life, making the world real. If that dies out, I live in the dark, always."
Her heart sank lower with every word he uttered. She had hoped for forgiveness, for a recognition of the dead sin, with a belief in an atoning future. But he gave her no hint of that. Nay, his very phrases proved that the conception was beyond his reach. "If I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything." The sentence showed the exotic sickliness of his faith, demonstrated it no vital inherent part of him rooted in his being, but an alien graft watered and kept alive by his passion. He had not the sturdiness to accept the facts, nor the sincerity to foresee the possibility of redemption. He would marry her. Yes! But his motive was an instinct of self-preservation rather than his love for her. She would still have to pose upon her pedestal, apeing the stainless goddess; he would still have to kneel at her feet, apeing the worshipper; and both in their hearts would know the hollowness of their pretence.
Kate realised the futility of such a marriage, and looking forward, caught a glimpse of the day when the sham would shred and vanish before the truth, like a morning mist at sunrise.
Gordon felt her whole frame relax and draw away from him. He clasped her hands; there was no response in them. He held her closer, placed one hand behind her head and turned her face up towards him, while the warm curls nestled and twined about his fingers.
"Kitty! Why don't you answer? Tell me that it isn't true! Every belief I have depends on that."
"Oh! Don't make me responsible for everything," she replied, with a flash of her old petulance. "I am only one woman in the world."
"But the only woman in the world for me. You know it. You said so yourself. Tell me that it isn't true! Lie to me, if you must!" he added, with a passionate cry. "I will believe the lie."
"That could be of no use either to you or to me."
She spoke coldly, with the familiar feeling of repugnance reawakened by his effort to canonise her afresh. Besides, the knowledge of the truth vibrated in every tone of his voice, and his despairing resolve to crush and drown that knowledge added a sense of mockery to her repulsion.
"That could be of no use," she said. "There was just a chance of our joining hands again, but what you have said has destroyed it."
"I don't understand."
"You may some day."
"Itistrue," she resumed. "All that you saw, all that you heard Austen Hawke say, all that I have told you--every word of it is true."
She turned from him and went back into the room, while Gordon sank upon the low coping of the garden fence.
The girl came out to him again after a while.
"Have you seen my shawl? I can't find it."
"Did you bring it away from the Inn?" Gordon asked, dully.
The question made Kate start. She must have left it there.
"Never mind," Gordon said; "I will get it back with the letters."
He passed through the porch and took down a lanthorn from a nail in the wall.
"I will come up with you to the head of the Pass."
"Don't light it," she said. "It might be seen."
Very well!
He was on the point of replacing it, but stopped and asked--
"Did you bring one with your horse?"
"No!"
"Then I had better take it. It will keep you from stumbling when you are riding home. There is a scarf on the sofa."
Kate twisted it over her head and they passed out softly into the lane.
The wind had dropped with the advance of morning, and only an impalpable breath--a faint reminiscence of the wind it seemed--stirring the larch-clumps, dotted here and there along the lower edges of their path, broke the stillness for a moment as they passed. They paused by the side of a watercourse which, descending from Great Gable, the mountain on their left, cut through the track on its way to the centre of the valley and caused a gap of some fifty feet. Stones planted at intervals uncertainly in the stream gave an insecure footing, and afforded the only traverse to the opposite side; and in the darkness their position was dimly shown, or, rather, could be hazily guessed at, by little points of white where the water swirled and broke about them.
"I must have crossed it when I came," said Kate, blankly. "But I don't remember. I don't seem to have noticed it at all. I should slip on the stepping-stones now."
"Let me carry you over!"
"No!" she replied quickly. "I crossed it safely before. I can do the same again."
There was a greater confidence in her words than in her voice, and she still hesitated on the brink. Instinctively she laid a hand upon Gordon's sleeve for steadiness, but drew it away hurriedly when she felt the contact of his arm. Her companion renewed his offer of help, but, without answering him, she stepped forward on to the nearest boulder. Her foot, set down timidly, slipped on its polished roundness. Gordon, however, was alert to her fatigue, and his arm was round her waist before she had completely lost her balance.
"Lean towards me," he said, and lightly lifted her back on to the bank. She remained for a second in his support, lulled by a physical feeling of security induced in her by the strong clasp of his arm. Then she freed herself almost roughly, and silently faced the stream again.
"It will be best if I go first," said Gordon. "I can give you a hand then."
"Is there no other crossing?" she asked, straining her gaze vainly up and down the stream.
"No! Surely you can take that much help from me."
He planted himself as firmly as he could, Colossus-wise on the rocks.
"All right!" he said, and stretched out a hand towards her. She took it reluctantly and made a second trial, wavered as she reached the stone on which she had slipped, and secured her balance by tightening her grasp. So they proceeded until a wider interval than usual flowed between their footholds.
Gordon turned his head round to her.
"You must let go of me here!"
"Must I?"
"Yes! or I may slip and drag you in."
She only realised how hard had been her grip when she relaxed it, and the consequent knowledge of the assistance she had needed gave her a momentary sense of loneliness now that it was removed. Gordon was just able to bridge the distance between the boulders with the full reach of his stride. That on which he now stood, however, was flat and broad, a platform that gave sure footing.
"You will have to spring," he cried. "I can catch you. I am solid enough here."
"I can't," she replied, "I daren't move."
She stood looking into the water bubbling at her feet, and its swift flow made her feel giddy and insecure.
"What am I to do?" she cried plaintively.
"You must jump," Gordon answered. "It is the only way. Jump boldly! Don't be afraid, I will catch you."
The ring of confidence in his voice enheartened her, and she tried to face the leap, but recoiled from it. Why had she refused his offer, was her first thought; why had he not renewed it, her second. The stone on which she was standing rolled with the movement, and she uttered a cry.
"Dav--," she began, and shore the name of its tail.
In a moment he was by her side, standing on the bed of the channel and the water up to his thighs. The girl clung to him.
"I seem to have lost my nerve altogether," and she essayed a laugh unsuccessfully.
"You are tired, that's all."
"Yes, I am tired," she answered, "very tired."
And she leaned her weight upon him, resting her arm on his shoulders. Their muscular breadth renewed in her the feeling of protection, and she waited expectantly for him to propose again to carry her, or, better still, to just lift her up without a word and so spare her a repast of her own words. To all seeming, however, Gordon was waiting too. "He means the request to come from me," she thought. As a matter of fact, nothing was farther from his reflections. The experience of the past few hours had rendered the perfect control of his faculties impossible, and the shuttles in the loom of his mind, set at work by the touch of any chance suggestion, were weaving his thoughts in a grotesque inconsequence. The tension of her attitude recalled the pedestal on which he had perched her, as she said, to the undoing of them both. He had a vision of a pair of tiny feet, delicately shod in grey kid slippers, straining to fix high heels firmly on a smooth sloping surface.
Kate threw out a more patent suggestion.
"I am very tired, and this stone is not over restful."
"I was just thinking," he answered abstractedly, "it must be as awkward as my pedestal."
The unconscious sarcasm stung her to the quick.
"Don't laugh at me!" she pleaded, and realised that she was pleading.
"Laugh at you?" he replied. "Good God! I have got to finish my laugh at myself first, and I think it will take me all my life."
"For believing in me?" she asked rather sadly. The bitterness of his remark seemed to show her that he grasped at last the full folly of his faith in her. It was the goal at which she had been aiming, and yet, now that it was reached, she felt a keen pang of regret.
"No! For demanding so much myself."
The knowledge that she had mistaken his meaning gratified her and, indeed, raised him in her respect. The words, spoken at another time, would only have served to strengthen her old conception of him, and to justify that lurking contempt for his humility which formed a factor in her ready reliance upon his services. Now, however, she stood in sore need of his help; he was there dominating her plainly by the superiority of his physical strength, and he could afford to be humble, nay, rather bettered his position by the contrast.
Kate gave in and said weakly:
"I am afraid that I shall have to ask you to carry me across after all."
"It is what I came back for," he answered, no suspicion of her thoughts occurring to him. He lifted her slight figure with an absence of effort or jerk which told of practised sinews, and Kate clasped her hands behind his neck and nestled down into his arms with a child's sigh of content. To Gordon the sigh conveyed no direct or immediate meaning. His fanciful tendency to symbolism made it expressive only of the relief she had experienced on stepping down from her pedestal.
Had he but known it, however, he was nearer to her heart than he had ever been. He was showing himself in the man's shape which most appealed to her. He was the protector, not the attendant, with strength to be appreciated as masterful, not to be carelessly used and forgotten. Had he stopped dead in mid-stream and asserted his cause with a like mental force, claiming her and her sins to himself with the courage of a confident love, he would have undone the harm of his maladroit pleading in the porch.
It was the crucial moment of his life. But his dominance was of the body, not the spirit, and he passed through it without an inkling of its importance.
The next moment he reached the farther bank and set her silently on the ground, apart from him.
From this point the path rose steeply along the side of Great Gable, and as they mounted, the brisk freshness of the air revived the girl's languid spirits. Her lassitude and the feeling of helpless weakness which it engendered gradually gave place to a lively buoyancy. A new vigour entered her limbs. Gordon was walking a few paces ahead of her, the lanthorn swinging at his side on a shoulder-strap, and now and again he turned to help her over some rough portion of the track. But the way was almost as familiar to her as it was to him, and as they rose she needed his assistance less and less. The limpid clearness of the night, too, contributed in no small measure to this invigoration of her nature. The sky was unstained by a cloud, and glittered with a multitude of stars that shone like points of silver, so that the darkness below had a certain translucency. One seemed to see right into the heart of the night; at the same time, the landmarks and boundary walls in the valley--always productive of a sense of limit--were invisible, and the very mountains appeared but deeper shadows, a massing of the darkness, as it were, at separate spots, with here and there a gap from the faint glimmer of a snowdrift. The journey thus appealed to Kate's senses by its aspect of spaciousness and filled her with a new and strange feeling of liberty. The feeling penetrated to her mind and set in motion a train of thought which, in turn, gave back to it a fresh strength and colour. A consciousness of distinct relief forced itself into evidence as the main result to her of Gordon's chance visit to Wastdale Head, and obliterated to a great degree the shame of the disclosures which had paved the way for it. She was free alike from the brutal authority of Austen Hawke and from the irksome tyranny of Gordon's adoration; for the former's power rested upon its concealment and was killed by Gordon's discovery of its existence. Every trace of it would vanish when he recovered the three remaining letters. Of the means by which they were to be regained she took no more thought than Gordon at this time did himself. She was too absorbed by her newly-found freedom to foresee the possibility of danger there. Its forcible pre-occupation of her mind indeed blinded her to all ideas which hinted antagonism. She barely wasted a conjecture on the pretext which her companion would select for the breaking off of their engagement almost on the eve of their marriage. She just caught a dim glimpse of him taking the blame upon himself, and was restfully content to leave the exact solution in his hands. "I will spare you altogether," he had said; and she knew him well enough for complete assurance that he would keep his word. That she owed her liberty entirely to the generosity of her lover, she hardly felt at all now; from habit, she was incapable of accounting that quality of his at its true value. For a moment, it is true, at the outset of her interview with him in the farm-house, she appreciated with some accuracy the measure of his devotion; but this estimation was due merely to the immediate succession of his presence to that of Hawke and to the pronounced contrast between their attitudes. As their conversation wore on, however, his voice, his words, and certain tricks of manner, gradually brought back to her the familiar conceptions of character which she had always associated with them. And in consequence of the return of those conceptions, the old habit of expecting sacrifices from him as his usual tribute reasserted itself afresh. Her sense of liberty was thus unmarred by doubts or fears, and the rebound of her nature from a preceding despair gave to it a double exhilaration. She drank in the night air with a keen pleasure, its brisk sharpness seeming somehow to harmonise with her thoughts. She would begin her life anew to-morrow, using her knowledge as a clear light for the guiding of her steps. She had a vision of morning mists clearing off a long white road and leaving it vividly distinct--a road in Normandy.
The influence of the hour and the locality was no less predominant over her fellow-traveller, but it led his thoughts in a far opposite direction. All the way up that wearisome ascent he was strewing his steps with the dead leaves of his illusions. The edifice of idealism which he had built up, fancy upon fancy, with such care and such seeming solidity, crumbled in an irresistible decay and forced him to the contemplation of its ruins. And the surrounding space, shapeless and empty of life, stimulated his poignant sense of desolation. He tried to picture and place actual features of the dale, to map out the darkness by his recollections of what it hid. Across there would be the dark mouth of Peer's Ghyll; or had he passed it?--above his head the cliffs of Great Gable, with its familiar Pinnacle; now he should be opposite the bathing-pool at the bottom of the valley. But it was all uncertainty and surmise, and so far was Gordon from drawing solace from his conjectures, that the intervening gloom, by its sensuous effect, helped largely to re-animate and nurse his old belief in the shifty unreality of things. He came to feel certain of nothing except the narrow strip of path he trod and the light footsteps behind which were following him for the last time, and of which the sound to his ears was exquisitely sad.
They had reached the highest point of the track, where two masses of rock, ranged on either side, form a ruined gateway to the Pass. From there the ground slopes quickly to the Styhead Tarn, and as they skirted its edge they heard the welcoming neigh of Kate's horse. It was tied to the far end of a primitive footbridge which spans the beck in the valley but a few yards beyond. Gordon lit the lanthorn and fastened it to the saddle, and, standing on the end of the bridge, lifted the girl on to the horse's back. For a moment they remained there, she in the shadow, he with the light streaming full on his face, and then without a word Kate gathered up the reins and rode off eastwards along the Pass. She felt that he was still standing on the bridge in the darkness, but she never turned her head. After a while, she heard him cry out her name "Kitty!" The sound echoed down the hollow in a despairing wail, like a death-cry, and was faintly repeated by the mountains that closed her in, but she only pressed her horse the harder, and rode more steadily towards her home.