Part 88 (1/2)
”Tell me,” he said at length, ”do I inspire you with antipathy? Am I physically repulsive to you, or disagreeable? Answer me frankly, for in that case I would--cease to urge my suit with you, and go upon my way, wherever it might lead me.”
She looked at him, and there was no shrinking in her regard--only a gentle friendliness, as far removed from the feeling he would have roused in her as the North is from the South.
”I will tell you exactly how I feel towards you.” He writhed under the knowledge that it was possible to her to a.n.a.lyse and to explain. ”I like you, Dr. Saxham. I am deeply grateful to you----”
”Grat.i.tude!” He shrugged his shoulders. ”You owe me none; and even if you did, what use is grat.i.tude to a man who asks for love?”
”I trust you; I rely upon you,” she said. ”It is--pleasant to me to know that you are near.” A line of perplexity came between the dark fine eyebrows; the sweet colour in her face wavered and sank. ”But--if you were to touch me--to take me in your arms--I----” She s.h.i.+vered.
”You need not say more!” If she was pale, Saxham's stern, square face was ashen. His eyes glowered and fell under hers, and a purple vein swelled in the middle of his broad white forehead. ”I understand!”
”You do not understand quite yet.” She moved away from the Mother's grave, saying to him with a slight beckoning gesture of the hand, ”Please come!...”
Saxham followed her, hearing the harsh, jeering laughter of that other Saxham above the faint rustle of her dress. His covetous, despairing eyes dwelt on her and clung about her. Ah! the exquisite poise of the little head, with its red-brown waves and coils; the upright, slender elegance of shape, like a young palm-tree; the long, smooth, undulating step with which she moved between the graves, picking her way with sedulous, delicate care among the little crowding white-painted crosses; the atmosphere of girlish charm and womanly allurement that breathed from her and environed her!...
His torpid pulses throbbed again. The voice began again its whispering at his ear.
”You cannot live without her. Accept her conditions. Better to be unhappy in the sight and sound and touch of her, unpossessed, than to be desperate, lacking her. Accept her conditions with a mental reservation.
Trust to Time, the healer, to bring change and forgetfulness. Or, break your promise to that dead man, and tell her--as he would have had you tell her, remember!--as he would have had you tell her!--that when he asked her hand in marriage, he was the wedded husband of the dancer, Lessie Lavigne!”
He knew where she was leading him--to Beauvayse's grave. The voice kept whispering, urging as they went. He saw and heard as a man sees and hears in a dream the pair of b.u.t.terflies that hovered yet about the fresh flowers her hands had gathered and placed there. One jewel-winged, diamond-eyed insect rose languidly and wavered away as Lynette's light footsteps drew near. The other remained, poised upon the lip of a honeyed, waxen blossom, with closed, vertically-held wings and quivering antennae, sucking its sweet juices as greedily as the dead man had drunk of the joy of life.
Now she was speaking:
”Dr. Saxham, I have brought you here because I have something to tell you that _he_”--her face quivered--”should have been told. When you spoke a little while ago of openness and candour--when you said that you would never mislead or deceive me for your own advantage, that I should know the worst of you together with the best--you held up before me, quite unknowingly, an example that showed me--that proved to me”--her voice wavered and broke--”how much I am your inferior in honesty and truth!”
”_You_ my inferior!” Saxham almost laughed. ”_I_ an example of light and leading, elevated for your guidance! If you were capable of irony----”
He broke off, for she went on as though he had not spoken:
”When first we met--I mean yourself and me--I remember telling you, upon a sudden impulse of confidence and trust in you, what I had determined my life-work was to be----”
”Dear, innocent-wise enthusiast,” thought Saxham, ”dreaming over your impossible plan for regenerating the world! Beloved child-Quixote, tilting at the Black Windmills, how dare I, who was once the Dop Doctor of Gueldersdorp, love you and seek you for my own? Madness--madness on the face of it!” But, madness or sanity, he could not choose but love her.
”Your life-work!... It was to be carried out among _those others_ whose voices you heard calling you. See,” he said, with the shadow of a smile, ”how I remember everything you say, or have ever said, in my hearing!”
”You think too well of me,” she broke out, with sudden energy.
”It is not possible to think too well of you!”
”You think so now, perhaps, but when you know----”
Her eyes brimmed and the tears welled over her white under-lids. She put up both her little hands, and rubbed the salt drops away with her knuckles, like a child.
”When I have told you, you will alter--you cannot help but alter your opinion!”
”No!” denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.