Part 38 (1/2)
”Yes;--I remember.”
”It has faded further and further away, her blue, hasn't it?”
”Yes,” he confessed.
”So that you are hardly friends, Jack?”
He paused for a moment, and then completed his confession:--”We are not friends.”
Valerie stood still, breathing as if with a little difficulty after the gradual ascent. The tall trees about them were dark and full of mystery on the pale mysterious sky. Through the branches they could see the glint of the moon's diminished disk.
”That is terrible, you know,” said Valerie, after they had stood in silence for some moments.
”I know it.”
”For both of you.”
”Worse for me, because I cared more, really cared more.”
”No, worse for her, for it is you who have judged and rejected her.”
”She thinks that it is she who has judged and rejected me.”
”She tries to think it; she does not always succeed. It has been bitter, it has been cruel for her.”
”Oh, yes, bitter and cruel,” he a.s.sented.
”Don't try to minimize her pain, Jack.”
”You feel that I can't care, much?”
”It is horrible for me to feel it. Think of her when I came, so secure, so calm, so surrounded by love and appreciation. And now”--Valerie walked on, as if urged to motion by the controlled force of her own insistence. Was it an appeal to him that Imogen, dispossessed of the new love, might find again the old love opening to her? He clung to the hope, though with a sickening suspicion of its folly.
”By my coming, I have robbed her of everything,” Valerie was saying, walking swiftly up the path and breathing as if with that slight difficulty--the sound of her breaths affected him with an almost intolerable sense of expectancy. ”She isn't secure;--she isn't calm. She is warped;--her faiths are warped. Her friends are changed to her. She has lost you. It's as if I had shattered her life.”
”Everything that wasn't real you have shattered.”
The rustic bench was reached and they paused there, though with no eyes for the shaft of mystic distance that opened before them. Jack's eyes were on her and he was conscious of a rising insistence in himself that matched and opposed her own.
”But you must be sorry for her pain,” said Valerie, and now, with eyes almost stern in their demand, she gazed at him;--”you must be sorry that she has had to lose so much. And you would be glad, would you not, to think that real things, a new life, were to come to her?”
He understood; even before the words, his fear, his presage, leaped forward to this cras.h.i.+ng together of all his hopes. And it seemed to him that a flame pa.s.sed through him, shriveling in its ardent wrath all trite reticences and decorums.
”No; no, I should not be glad,” he answered. His voice was violent; the eyes he fixed on her were violent. His words struck Imogen out of his life for ever.
”Why are you so cruel?” she faltered.
”I am cruel for _you_. I know what you want to do. You are going to give her _your_ life.”
Quick as a flash she answered--it was like a rapier parrying his stroke:--”Give?--what have I to do with it, if it comes to her?”
”Everything! Everything!” he cried.