Part 8 (1/2)

”I was listening to the brook,” he said.

For a while they both stood quiet in the gloom of the porch.

”What do you hear in it?” he asked.

”I dare not tell you. What do you?”

”I hear all my days to come flowing down and down with a sound of tears.”

”David!” she said, her voice breaking on the name.

He had often noticed the wonderful clearness of her eyes, and they shone very softly on him now. He drew her towards him in the gloom of the porch.

”Kitty!” he whispered, ”tell me that it isn't true! Tell me I have been dreaming! I will believe you. I must believe you. For if I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything. You have been the light of my life, making the world real. If that dies out, I live in the dark, always.”

Her heart sank lower with every word he uttered. She had hoped for forgiveness, for a recognition of the dead sin, with a belief in an atoning future. But he gave her no hint of that. Nay, his very phrases proved that the conception was beyond his reach. ”If I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything.” The sentence showed the exotic sickliness of his faith, demonstrated it no vital inherent part of him rooted in his being, but an alien graft watered and kept alive by his pa.s.sion. He had not the st.u.r.diness to accept the facts, nor the sincerity to foresee the possibility of redemption. He would marry her. Yes! But his motive was an instinct of self-preservation rather than his love for her. She would still have to pose upon her pedestal, apeing the stainless G.o.ddess; he would still have to kneel at her feet, apeing the wors.h.i.+pper; and both in their hearts would know the hollowness of their pretence.

Kate realised the futility of such a marriage, and looking forward, caught a glimpse of the day when the sham would shred and vanish before the truth, like a morning mist at sunrise.

Gordon felt her whole frame relax and draw away from him. He clasped her hands; there was no response in them. He held her closer, placed one hand behind her head and turned her face up towards him, while the warm curls nestled and twined about his fingers.

”Kitty! Why don't you answer? Tell me that it isn't true! Every belief I have depends on that.”

”Oh! Don't make me responsible for everything,” she replied, with a flash of her old petulance. ”I am only one woman in the world.”

”But the only woman in the world for me. You know it. You said so yourself. Tell me that it isn't true! Lie to me, if you must!” he added, with a pa.s.sionate cry. ”I will believe the lie.”

”That could be of no use either to you or to me.”

She spoke coldly, with the familiar feeling of repugnance reawakened by his effort to canonise her afresh. Besides, the knowledge of the truth vibrated in every tone of his voice, and his despairing resolve to crush and drown that knowledge added a sense of mockery to her repulsion.

”That could be of no use,” she said. ”There was just a chance of our joining hands again, but what you have said has destroyed it.”

”I don't understand.”

”You may some day.”

”It _is_ true,” she resumed. ”All that you saw, all that you heard Austen Hawke say, all that I have told you--every word of it is true.”

She turned from him and went back into the room, while Gordon sank upon the low coping of the garden fence.

The girl came out to him again after a while.

”Have you seen my shawl? I can't find it.”

”Did you bring it away from the Inn?” Gordon asked, dully.

The question made Kate start. She must have left it there.