Part 43 (1/2)

The next moment he sees her stagger in the starlight, and his heart smites him for his cruelty. He makes a hasty movement towards her, thinking that she is going to fall; but before he can reach her she has steadied herself, and faces him, livid, it is true, under her paint, but firm and collected beneath the stars. She has even recovered her laugh.

'Thank you,' she says, in a low but distinct voice, 'for the information that you have incidentally given me, even though you refused to let me have it direct. I have no further occasion to trouble you, and need only offer you my congratulations and my hopes that you and your bride will meet with some one to sweeten your married lives as you have sweetened mine.'

So saying, she turns to leave him. If he were wise he would let her go--would set no hindrance in her way; but which of us, in the crucial moment of our lives, is wise? Before his reason can arrest him, following only the impulse that forbids him to let the woman who for five years had sat crowned and sceptred in his heart thus leave him, he makes two hasty steps after her.

'Betty!'

At the sound of his voice, there comes a sort of wavering; but she does not stop or turn her head.

'Betty!' he repeats, overtaking her, and preventing her egress by setting his back against the wrought-iron gate; 'after all that has come and gone, are we to part like this?'

'How else do you wish us to part?' she inquires in a steely voice of the bitterest irony, while her eyes glitter, but not with tears; 'do you expect me to dance at your wedding?'

'There is no reason why you should not,' he answers firmly, looking steadily back at her. 'I have done you no wrong. Have you forgotten how, and with what solemnity, you sent me away from you for ever?'

'So I did,' cries she, breaking into a hard laugh. 'Do not tell any of my friends, or I should never hear the last of it. What an _acces_ of superst.i.tion I had that cold morning! I will do myself the justice to say, the first and last of its kind. I thought to save Franky by renouncing you, was not that it? If I had known how little there was to renounce, I might have spared myself the pains, might not I?--ha! ha!'

Again her merriment rings harshly on the soft air, and he can find no word of rejoinder.

'How you must have been laughing in your sleeve!' pursues she, still with that arid, withering mirth. 'Though the joke is against me, I cannot help laughing at myself when I think of it.'

But at that he breaks in:

'I looked so like laughing in my sleeve, did not I?' he asks, panting, and in a voice which emotion of the most painful quality he has ever felt renders indistinct.

'No one would believe it,' she goes on, unheeding, apparently unaware of his interruption, 'of a woman of my age, and who, as they say, has lived every minute of her life--I _have_ done that, have not I? But it is nevertheless Gospel truth that I was such a greenhorn as to be almost as sorry for you as I was for myself. I suppose,' with a sort of break in her dry voice, 'one gets into a stupid habit of thinking one's self indispensable!'

She pauses, and making no further effort to depart, stands silent, with set teeth and hands that unconsciously twist and tear the slight lace pocket-handkerchief between her fingers.

What can he say to her? By what words--save words of entreaty to her to put again the chain about his neck and the fetters upon his limbs--can he appease or comfort her? And sooner than utter such words, he would fall dead at her feet.

'Wretched superst.i.tion!' she says between her teeth, still rending the morsel of lawn in her fingers; 'how could _I_, of all people, have been such a fool as to be conquered by it? What did it matter to the Powers above--what did they care whether I kept or threw away the one miserable bit of consolation I had in my hideous life? The child would have got well all the same, while I--I--but perhaps' (her tone changing to one of alert suspicion), 'perhaps even then you had come to an understanding, you and she. Perhaps even then you were hoodwinking me. I was so easy to hoodwink--I, of all people, who had always thought myself so wide awake--ha! ha!'

Again that dreadful laugh a.s.sails his ear, and makes him s.h.i.+ver as if it were December's blasts that were biting, not May's breezes kissing his cheek.

'I never hoodwinked you!' he answers, in an agitation hardly inferior to her own; 'it was always plain-sailing between us. I went away because you sent me.'

'And you took me at my word?' cries she wildly. 'Yes, I know that then, at that moment, I meant you to take me at it; but I was out of my mind.

Hundreds of people less mad than I was then are in Bedlam. You might as well have listened to the ravings of a lunatic as to mine that day; and--you--took--me--at--my word!'

Her speech, which in its beginning was shrill and rapid, ends almost in a whisper.

'I thought you meant it,' he says miserably; 'before G.o.d, I thought you meant it!'

'The wish was father to the thought,' she says, again breaking into that laugh which jars upon him far more than would any tears or revilings; 'you believed it because you wished it. I showed you a handsome way out of your dilemma. I played into your hands. Without knowing it--oh, I think that you will believe it was without knowing it--I played into your hands. Without hurting my feelings--without quite giving the lie to all your glib vows--without any disagreeable shuffling--you were free! I set you free! _I!_ Oh, the humour of it! I wonder how you could have kept any decent countenance that morning! and I--I--never saw it. Oh, I must have been blinder than any mole or bat not to have seen it, but I did not!'

She pauses, as if suffocated; but in a moment or two has recovered breath and composure enough to resume:

'And I was _sorry_ for you. I do not know why I have a pleasure in showing up my own folly to you; but, as you say, it has always been plain-sailing between us, and one does not easily shake off an old habit. Yes, _sorry_ for you! Not at first. At first I could think of nothing but _him_; but he took a turn for the better very soon--G.o.d bless him! As long as he was only getting well, it was enough for me to think that I had him back--oh, quite enough!' some tears stealing, for the first time, into her scorching eyes; 'but when he was on his legs again, and everything going on as usual, then I began to see what I had done.'