Part 31 (1/2)
”But if you had, it would have been a relief----”
”No. Because I--I hadn't heard the truth. I didn't understand at all. I thought you had done _one_ unscrupulous thing. I didn't dream your whole life was--what it is. I loved you as much as ever. It would have broken my heart if you----”
”But now that you don't love me, it wouldn't break your heart.”
”I don't seem to have any heart,” Annesley sighed. ”It feels as if it had crumbled to dust. But it would break my life if you ended yours. If anything could be worse than what is, it would be that.”
”Very well, you can rid yourself of me in another way,” the man answered.
”You can denounce me--give me up to 'justice.' If you hand over the Malindore diamond to Ruthven Smith and tell him how you got it----”
”You must know I wouldn't do that!”
”Why not?”
”Because I--couldn't.”
”It needn't spoil your life. No one could blame you. I would tell the story of how I deceived you. You could free yourself--get a divorce----”
”Don't!” the girl cut him short. ”I'm not thinking of myself. I'm thinking of you. I can't love you again, and I wouldn't if I could, now that I--know. You're a different man. The one I loved doesn't exist and never did; yet you've told me your secret, and I'm bound to keep it. I don't need to stop and reflect about that. But as for what's to become of me, and how we're to manage not to let people guess that everything's changed, I don't know! I must think. I must think all to-night, until to-morrow. Perhaps by that time I can decide. Now--I beg of you to go and leave me--this moment. I can't bear any more and live.”
He stood looking at her, but she turned her head away with a petulant gesture of repulsion; and lest her eyes might feel the call of his she covered them with her hands. Her hopelessness, her loathing of him enclosed her like a wall of ice.
”So! The dream's over!” he said. ”'This woman to this man'! What a farce--what a tragedy!”
When she looked up again he had gone and the door between their rooms was shut.
The moon no longer lit the high window. With Knight's going darkness fell.
CHAPTER XX
THE PLAN
Annesley sat as Knight had left her for a long time--minutes, perhaps, or hours. But at last she was very tired and very cold, so tired that she threw herself weakly on the bed, in her dressing-gown, because she couldn't sit up. All through the rest of the dark hours she lay s.h.i.+vering, and did not even trouble to roll herself in the warm down coverlet spread lightly over the bed.
It seemed right, somehow, that she should be cold and miserable physically. She did not care or wish to be comfortable.
Over and over again she asked herself: ”What shall I do? What is to become of me--of both of us?” She tried to pray, but her heart was too hard toward the man who had trampled on her life and love for his own cruel purposes. It seemed to her that G.o.d would not hear a prayer sent up in such a mood; yet she did not want to soften her heart toward the sinner.
Because it had been so full of forgiveness before he poisoned the chalice with the bitter stream of confession, it was the more impossible to forgive now. It even seemed to Annesley that it would be monstrous to forgive, in the ordinary, human sense of the word, a man who was a living lie.
If there were room for thanksgiving in her wretchedness, it lay in the fact that her love had died a swift and sudden death. Had she gone on loving in spite of all, such love, she thought, must have brought death into her soul.
She did not know how to name her husband now. Even in thinking of him she would not call him ”Knight.”
What a mockery the name had been! How he must have laughed to know that she was fool enough to believe him a knight of chivalry, who had come like St. George to rescue her from the dragon!
She knew at last that the name he had not wished her to see in the parish register was Michael Donaldson. That meant, she supposed, that her name was Donaldson, too; a name he had dragged through the mire.