Part 89 (1/2)
His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the intense vibration of the tones. There was a pause in which they seemed still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the pa.s.sionate pulse of sound.
”I didn't mean to tell you. I know you'd rather think it wasn't so.
And I would have let you think it if it hadn't been for what you told me--what I made you tell me.”
”I don't understand. What did I tell you?”
”You told me the truth.” He spoke with a sudden savage energy. ”How could I go on lying after that?”
She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes there was pain and a vague terror.
”I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it.
But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one condition, and I know that I can't possibly fulfil the condition, what am I to do? Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for doing if you knew?”
Till now she had left the ma.n.u.script lying in her lap, where unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch. But as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an irresistible impulse of rejection. He knew that he was answered.
”If I had,” he said, ”in one sense I should have done you no wrong.
All this would be nothing to the world which would read these poems.
But when I knew that it made all the difference to _you_--”
She turned, as he had seen her turn once and only Once before, in reproach that was almost anger.
”To me? Do you suppose I'm thinking of myself?”
”Perhaps not. That doesn't prevent my thinking of you. But I was thinking of myself, too. Supposing I had done this thing that you would have loathed; even though you had never known it, I should have felt that I had betrayed your trust, that I had taken something from you that I had no right to take, something that you would never have given me if you had known. What was I to do?”
She did not answer him. Once before, he remembered, when his honour was in difficulties, she had refused to help it out, left it to struggle to the light; which was what it did now.
”It would have been better to have said nothing and done nothing.”
He expected her to close instantly with that view of his behaviour which honour had presented as the final one, but this she did not do.
”If you had said nothing you might have done what you liked.”
”I see. It's my saying it that makes the difference?”
”That is _not_ what I meant. I meant that you were free to publish what you have written. You are not free to say these things to me.”
”For the life of me I don't know why I said them. It means perdition for my poems and for me. I knew that was all I had to gain by telling you the truth.”
”But it _isn't_ the truth. You know it isn't. You don't even think it is.”
”And if it were, would it be so terrible to you to hear it?”
She did not answer. She only looked at him, as if by looking she could read the truth. For his face had never lied.
He persisted. ”If it were true, what would you think of me?”
”I should think it most dishonourable of you to say so. But it isn't true.”
He smiled. ”Therefore it can't be dishonourable of me to say so.”