Part 5 (1/2)

”Where are they?”

”Here!” Hawke tapped his breast pocket as he spoke.

”Fulfil your bargain! Give them to me!”

”They will cost more.”

CHAPTER IV

The strain upon Gordon's nerves had become intolerable. When he first mounted the outhouse roof he had been wholly absorbed in the horror of his conjecture that Hawke's midnight visitor was the girl to whom he was betrothed, and the need of either verifying or disproving it was the one thing clear to him amid the turmoil of his brain. Of what the visit might actually imply he took no thought. Now, however, he knew; the interview which he had witnessed left him not a glimmer of doubt.

But during the two years of their engagement, Kate Nugent had so grown into the heart of his life, had become so real a part of him, that she was not easily dethroned from his respect. He clung instinctively to a vague hope that there might have been some compelling cause of which he knew nothing to account for her subjection to Hawke. That this subjection meant treachery to him, treachery of an unpardonable kind, whatever its cause, he realised in a way, but as yet did he not feel it. The blow had stunned his reason, had even dulled his senses, had, in a word, struck at the very roots of his being. He was adrift in a maze of bewilderment. The scene he was witnessing grew in the end shadowy and unreal. Even Hawke seemed to lose his individuality; he became just a detail in the sum of the mystery, a thing to be explained, not a man to be punished. Gordon, in fact, was left conscious of but one feeling--the overwhelming desire to see the woman he had wors.h.i.+pped face to face with him, to speak with her, and realising the necessity of getting solid ground beneath his feet, if he was to accomplish his wish, he clambered from his perch--just too soon to see Kate strike Hawke across the mouth, as her answer to the last words he had only dimly heard.

Gordon reached the earth securely and crept softly back to his garden gate. The sky had cleared during the last half hour, and the valley lay pure and clean in the starlight. After a while a sound reached him. It struck upon m.u.f.fled senses at first, meaninglessly; but its continued repet.i.tion fixed his attention, and he perceived that it was the sound of Kate's footsteps on the stones again at the bottom of the lane. She was returning. Gordon was still in that dazed condition when the brain, unable to take a complete impression, or, to speak more plainly, unable to combine its different impressions into one whole, fixes itself upon some small particular sensation and magnifies that, to the thorough exclusion of the rest. So, now as he listened to her steps drawing nearer and nearer, he noticed acutely a difference in the manner of her walk, a certain hesitancy, absent when she swept by him on her way to the Inn. Then her footfalls had rung surely and rhythmically, betokening some quest in view; now they wavered, timidly, with uncertain beats as if the hope had gone out of her limbs. The sound was somehow familiar to Gordon, and, curiously ransacking his memories, he discovered the reason. He had marked women walk like that, with the same weariness, with the same hopelessness, late at night in the quiet of the London streets. This chance a.s.sociation of ideas acted on him like a shock. It woke him from his stupor, revivified him, set him with clear vision fronting facts. He grasped the full meaning of Kate's interview with Hawke. It rose before him like an acted scene in a play, and he recollected with a sudden horror those last words, ”They will cost more.” How long was it since he had climbed down from the outhouse roof? How long had he been waiting by the gate? He had been unconscious of time. Hours might have lapsed for all he knew. Meanwhile the steps drew nearer. He saw her plainly advancing towards him. She was walking with her eyes on the ground, and so did not observe him barring her path until she almost knocked against him. She lifted her head, stood for a second looking searchingly into his face, as if he were a ghost, the fancied embodiment of her fears, and then, with an inarticulate moan like the cry of the dumb, she reeled against the wall of the lane. Gordon heard her breath coming and going in quick jets and the scrabbling of her finger-nails as she clutched at the stones.

”Is it you?” she said, attempting a light surprise. ”How you startled me! I am late, very late. I was delayed. I came over to--to----”

”To recover your letters,” Gordon broke in bitterly upon her labouring effort to dig up an excuse. ”You were right to come late. That kind of errand can't be run by daylight.”

Kate drew herself up and moved toward him, but he thrust his hands out with a gesture of repulsion to check her approach.

”Those last three letters?”

”He has them still.”

”Come in!” Gordon said. The relief he experienced gave a gentleness to the tone of his voice. That loathsome dread at all events was dispelled. For even then he did not doubt the truth of her words.

”Come in!” and he turned and went into the parlour. The girl followed him in silence, drew a chair close to the dying fire and hung over it, s.h.i.+vering. Gordon lit the lamp, saying--

”Yes; it is cold. These April nights always are up here.”

Kate looked at the clock, and Gordon's eyes followed her gaze. The hands pointed to half-past one. He had heard her implore Hawke that it was past the hour, some time before he quitted his post of observation. So there could have been but the briefest interval between her departure and his own.

”Be quick! What do you want with me? I have no time to lose!”

Kate flung the words at him petulantly. The knowledge that she had been discovered exasperated her against Gordon.

”Well, why don't you speak?”

She turned towards him. Gordon was still standing at the table by the lamp. For, now that his object was attained and she was alone with him, he found no words to express the questions he had meant to ask.

The light fell full upon the delicate beauty of her face, and indeed nearly drove the questions themselves from his mind. ”You always look to me as if you had just come out of a convent,” he had once said to her; and that sentence most exactly indicated the nature of the pa.s.sion he had felt for her--an intense love refined and exalted by a blind, unreasoning reverence. There was, in truth, a certain air of spirituality about her manifest to most people on their first introduction. But it belonged to the face, not to the expression. It was due to the fragile purity of her features, not to the mind which animated them, and was consequently more noticeable when she was in repose. The impression, as a rule, wore off upon a closer acquaintance, but Gordon had fallen in love and saw her always through the mist of his feelings.

So the memory of all that she had meant to him kept him silent now.

His thoughts seemed almost a sacrilege--plainly impossible to speak unless Kate gave him a decided lead. He waited and watched her. The skin of her wrist had broken when Hawke gripped it, and every now and then a drop of blood would fall on to her white dress and trickle down in a red wavering line. The sight somehow fascinated Gordon, and as each drop fell he waited and watched for the next.

To Kate, his silence became intolerable. She would have preferred reproaches, abuse, even violence--anything, in a word--to this leaden reticence. For it accused her more sharply than any words. Her lover had always been as an easy book to her keen intelligence, and she could read clearly enough that what kept his lips locked now was the conflict between his new knowledge and his old loyalty. In a flash she imagined Hawke's behaviour under the like circ.u.mstances and contrasted it with Gordon's bearing. Side by side the two men toed the line for her mental inspection, and the result was a feminine outcry against Fate, the Powers above and below--what you will, in a word, except her concrete self.

”What brought you over here?” she cried. ”You said you were going to Ravengla.s.s. You told me so. What brought you over to Wastdale?”