Part 13 (1/2)

'No; I could not know that. How should I, for I did not know you? And I am glad that I didn't know.'

Drake spoke with some earnestness, and Clarice looked at him in surprise.

'It would have made my duty so much harder to do,' he explained.

With a little cry of irritation Clarice slipped her foot from the fender and moved from him back to the couch. She had given him the opportunity to escape from his position and he refused to make use of it; he seemed indeed unable to perceive it. However, she clung to it obstinately and repeated it.

'You could not know there was anything between us'; she emphasised the words deliberately. Drake mistook the intention of the emphasis.

'But was there,' he exclaimed, 'at the time? I didn't think of that, Miss Le Mesurier--'

'Oh no, no!' she interrupted. 'Not at the time.' The man was impracticable, and yet his very impracticability aroused in a measure her admiration. 'So you would have shot him just the same, had you known?'

'Shot him?' asked Drake almost absently.

'Yes.'

'Didn't I tell you? I beg your pardon. I didn't shoot him at all. I hanged him.'

Clarice was stunned by the words, and the more because of the dull, seemingly callous accent with which they were spoken.

'You hanged him!' she whispered, dropping the words one by one, as though she was striving to weigh them.

'Yes. I have been blamed for it,' he replied with no change of voice.

'People said I was damaging the prestige of the white man. The argument bothered me, I confess, but I think they were wrong. I should have damaged that prestige infinitely more if I had punished him secretly or--'

'Oh, don't!' she cried, with a sharp interruption, and she stared at him with eyes dilating in horror, almost in fear. 'You can discuss it like that,--the man I had been engaged to,--you hanged him!'

She ended with a moan of actual pain and covered her face with her hands.

On the instant Drake woke to a full comprehension of all that he had said, and understood something of the humiliation which it meant to her.

Clarice was sitting huddled in her chair, her fingers pressed lightly on her eyes, while now and again a s.h.i.+ver shot through her frame.

'Still I was bound to tell her,' Drake thought. He waited for a little, wondering whether she would look up, but she made no movement. An emerald ring upon her finger caught the light and winked at him maliciously, leering at him, he fancied. There was nothing more for him to say, and he quietly went out of the room.

The click of the door-handle roused Clarice. She saw that the room was empty, and, drawing a breath of relief, started out of her chair.

Standing thus she heard Drake's footsteps descending the stairs, and after a pause the slamming of the hall-door. Then she went to the fireplace and knelt down close to it, warming her hands at the blaze.

'The degradation of it!' she whispered.

CHAPTER VII

Bit by bit she sought to reconstruct the scene, piecing it together out of Drake's words; but somehow that scene would not be reconstructed. She gradually found herself considering Drake's words as a light thrown upon the man who spoke them, rather than as the description of an actual incident. The humiliation which she experienced made her shrink with a certain repulsion from her recollections of Gorley and dwell instead upon the contrasting tones in Drake's voice, the contrasting expressions upon his face when he spoke to her and when he merely narrated his story. In the first instance gentleness had been the dominant characteristic, in the second indifference; and that very indifference, while it repelled her, magnetised her thoughts.

Something indeed of the same process which had caused that appearance of indifference in Drake was now repeating itself in Clarice. Drake was superseding Gorley in her mind. She struggled against the obsession and morbidly strove to picture to herself the actual execution: the black troops ranged in a clearing before the smouldering village, looking up at one figure--Gorley's--spinning on a rope. But even upon that picture Drake's face obtruded. She thrust out her hands to keep it off, as though it was living and pressing in upon her; for a moment she tried to conjure up Gorley's face, but it was blurred--only his form she could see spinning on a rope, and Drake beneath it, his features clear like an intaglio and firm-set with that same sense of duty which had forced him sternly to recount to her the truth that afternoon. She recurred to her recent habit of comparing him with Mallinson. She had a vision of Mallinson, with the same experience to relate,--if that were imaginable--fidgeting through evasions, grasping at any diversion she might throw out for him to play with.