Part 33 (1/2)
She entered with hesitating step. Then he shut the door with an accentuated softness, and came to the table where he had sat with Rudyard. Mechanically she took the seat which Rudyard had occupied, and looked at him across the table with a dread conviction stealing over her face, robbing it of every vestige of its heavenly colour, giving her eyes a staring and solicitous look.
”Well, what is it? Can't you speak and have it over?” she asked, with desperate impatience.
”Fellowes' letter to you--Rudyard found it,” he said, abruptly.
She fell back as though she had been struck, then recovered herself.
”You read it?” she gasped.
”Rudyard made me read it. I came in when he was just about to kill Fellowes.”
She gave a short, sharp cry, which with a spasm of determination her fingers stopped.
”Kill him--why?” she asked in a weak voice, looking down at her trembling hands which lay clasped on the table before her.
”The letter--Fellowes' letter to you.”
”I dropped it last night,” she said, in a voice grown strangely impersonal and colourless. ”I dropped it in Rudyard's room, I suppose.”
She seemed not to have any idea of excluding the terrible facts, but to be speaking as it were to herself and of something not vital, though her whole person was transformed into an agony which congealed the lifeblood.
Her voice sounded tuneless and ragged. ”He read it--Rudyard read a letter which was not addressed to him! He read a letter addressed to me--he read my letter.... It gave me no chance.”
”No chance--?”
A bitter indignation was added to the cheerless discord of her tones.
”Yes, I had a chance, a last chance--if he had not read the letter. But now, there is no chance.... You read it, too. You read the letter which was addressed to me. No matter what it was--my letter, you read it.”
”Rudyard said to me in his terrible agitation, 'Read that letter, and then tell me what you think of the man who wrote it.' ... I thought it was the letter I wrote to you, the letter I posted to you last night. I thought it was my letter to you.”
Her eyes had a sudden absent look. It was as though she were speaking in a trance. ”I answered that letter--your letter. I answered it this morning. Here is the answer ... here.” She laid a letter on the table before him, then drew it back again into her lap. ”Now it does not matter. But it gives me no chance....”
There was a world of despair and remorse in her voice. Her face was wan and strained. ”No chance, no chance,” she whispered.
”Rudyard did not kill him?” she asked, slowly and cheerlessly, after a moment, as though repeating a lesson. ”Why?”
”I stopped him. I prevented him.”
”You prevented him--why?” Her eyes had a look of unutterable confusion and trouble. ”Why did you prevent it--you?”
”That would have hurt you--the scandal, the grimy press, the world.”
Her voice was tuneless, and yet it had a strange, piteous poignancy.
”It would have hurt me--yes. Why did you not want to hurt me?”
He did not answer. His hands had gone into his pockets, as though to steady their wild nervousness, and one had grasped the little weapon of steel which Rudyard had given him. It produced some strange, malignant effect on his mind. Everything seemed to stop in him, and he was suddenly possessed by a spirit which carried him into that same region where Rudyard had been. It was the region of the abnormal. In it one moves in a dream, majestically unresponsive to all outward things, numb, unconcerned, disregarding all except one's own agony, which seems to neutralize the universe and reduce all life's problems to one formula of solution.
”What did you say to him that stopped him?” she asked in a whisper of awed and dreadful interest, as, after an earthquake, a survivor would speak in the stillness of dead and unburied millions.
”I said the one thing to say,” he answered after a moment, involuntarily laying the pistol on the table before him--doing it, as it were, without conscious knowledge.