Part 10 (2/2)

”How startled you look!”

”I thought you were----” Kate checked herself in confusion, and a peal of laughter rippled through the room. It warned her of the part she had to play.

”What time is it?” she asked hastily.

”Ten o'clock! Your aunt would not have you called before. How is your head?”

Kate a.s.serted complete recovery and proceeded to dress, though with a languid dilatoriness which belied her statement. The house was nearly full of her women-folk relations, and she dreaded to face them. She looked at herself in the mirror and fancied every one would read her night's ride in her jaded pallor and the shadows about her eyes. Even her father noticed them when she entered the breakfast-room, with a ”You don't look over bright, Kitty!” The company was a.s.sembled in full force about the table, and she had to run the gauntlet of their smirking condolements. ”Never mind. I will put you right. It's bile.”

h.o.m.oeopathy smiled comfortably from behind the tea-urn, and Kate for the first time thanked Providence for the birth of Dr. Hahnemann. She noticed with relief that the meal was nearly over, but gained no respite thereby. For, after breakfast, there were new presents to be inspected and acclaimed--noticeably one from Poonah, a jade idol of most admired ugliness. Kate explained her s.h.i.+ver of repulsion by the carven malice of its features. Then followed consultations upon frocks, interspersed with eulogies of David and predictions of the happiness in store for well-a.s.sorted couples, plainly calling for enthusiastic answers nicely tempered by a diffident modesty. At times, indeed, the task almost exceeded her powers of endurance, and she felt madly spurred to hurl the truth like a bombsh.e.l.l into the midst of the flummery. She restrained herself, however, drawing a faint solace of amus.e.m.e.nt from a mental picture of the resultant chaos, and somehow or another the day wore on to its close. ”They will know in the morning,”

she reflected. But she was mistaken. It was not until the third day that the news of the liberation came.

Gordon quickened his pace as he reached the basin of the valley under an apprehension lest he should find the farm people already risen.

For, although it was still quite dark, there was all around him that universal movement, as if the earth itself were stirring from its sleep, which tells of an approaching dawn. The last two fields he covered at a run and regained the farm only to discover that his fears were groundless. The lamp in his parlour was still alight, but beginning to flicker for want of replenis.h.i.+ng. Gordon cautiously opened the door at the foot of the staircase and listened. But he could hear nothing but his own breathing; evidently no one was moving as yet. He returned into the room to blow out the lamp, but was checked by the sight of his writing case on a cabinet against the wall. He went to it, drew out a packet of letters, and, pulling up a chair to the table, read, by the last spurts of the light, those which Kate had sent to him from Poonah. How blind he must have been, he thought. Why, effort was visible in every line of them, coldness seeking to screen itself beneath a wealth of phrases. He commenced to speculate curiously which portions were Hawke's dictation and which her own work; otherwise the letters awakened no feeling in him.

Phrases here and there fixed his attention. ”You came into my life like a ray of sunlight into a musty room.” Yes! Hawke would have invented that, knowing how it would appeal to him. And, again, ”I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes”--a postscript, scribbled hastily and smudged, evidently Kate's own, and written covertly in Hawke's presence. The extinction of the lamp put an end to this unprofitable investigation, and Gordon gathered the letters together, placed them in the grate, and set them ablaze. He waited until the last spark had died out and a heap of black flaky ashes was all that was left of the false tokens which he had treasured as sacred, and then crept cautiously up to his room. For some time he remained by his window, thinking. He noticed the angle in the barn-wall from which Hawke had darted out, and it seemed to him that the century might well have run to its end since then. His mind wandered to a side-issue, jumping at a stray suggestion that Time was held to mark age only because it represented the conventional progress of self-knowledge.

But what if the knowledge of twenty years were crowded into one night?

Gordon felt that that had been the case with him. He understood so much now; for instance, the fancy which had fleetingly occurred to him that they both had been brought into the isolation of that valley to work out a predestined purpose. He understood that purpose, could explain it, and would demonstrate his explanation to the other's ignorance tomorrow. A gradual fading of colour from the sky made him correct himself. ”To-day,” he murmured, with something of quiet exultation in his voice. Only he must spare Kate; no suspicion must be allowed to connect her with the solution of his problem. ”I feel that I can rely on you whatever comes,” she had written. Well, he must prove to her that she was right--some way or another. The sound of movement in the interior of the house brought him back to the present and hinted the advantage of rest. So Gordon went to bed and slept dreamlessly until the sun stood high above the shoulder of Great End.

CHAPTER VIII

As Gordon was breakfasting next morning, the door was thrown open and Hawke strolled in from the lane.

”Well, have you got over your fatigue yet?” he asked, with a show of cordiality.

”Quite, thanks!”

Gordon let a moment or two slip before he found his tongue. For his new knowledge, acting vividly upon a somewhat morbid imagination, had not merely changed his conceptions of Hawke's character, but, with them, also his very impressions of his appearance. He had been unconsciously developing the man's features and body to express the qualities which he now attributed to him, moulding them, as it were, by the model of his own thoughts. So that, at the first, when Hawke stood before him in the flesh, clearly lit by the sunlight, which was pouring in through the open doorway, he hardly recognised his enemy.

The very colloquialism of his speech seemed incongruous and out of place.

”You slept soundly?” asked Hawke.

There was a shade of anxiety in the question appreciable by his observer, and a faint symptom of a sneer about the lips when the answer was received.

”Like a humming-top.”

”You are going over to Eskdale, aren't you?” Gordon resumed.

”I shall if I have time.”

”You have changed your plans?” The query was put with a sudden alacrity.

”More or less. Lawson arrived at the Inn this morning from Drigg.”

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