She turned from the window, came towards the steps. At the top of them, she saw Varney standing at the gate, not twenty yards away, and stopped dead. Then she came on down the stairs, down the graveled walk towards him.
"I"m going away at eight o"clock," he began without greeting, striving to make his voice casual. "I went to your house first--and--"
"You--followed me here?"
"Yes," he said, unsmiling. "I had to see you before I went--on matters of business--and--"
She was nearer to him now: for the first time he could see her eyes. In them lay a faint shadowiness like the memory of shed tears; but sweeping over that and blotting it out he saw a look which struck him like a blow.
"There is nothing for you to see me about, I think--any more," she said with a little laugh. "The game is up--isn"t that what they say in melodrama? My mother has told me all about it."
"Your mother has _told you_!" he echoed stupidly, as one to whom the words conveyed no meaning.
"She had not expected to see me so soon again, when I went off to lunch on my father"s yacht. The surprise was a little too much for her. You must try to forgive her," said Mary, and punctuated the observation with a small, final bow. "Will you open the gate for me?"
"No," said Varney, pulling himself sharply together. "Not like that."
The shock of her voice and look, even more than her words, had been stunning in their first unexpectedness. But now he remembered, with infinite relief, that of course she did not understand the matter at all; of course she would speak and look very differently when he had made his explanation.
"You think," Varney said, "that I _mind_ your knowing about our poor little plot--that I am found out and my plans are all upset? How on earth could you think that? Why, that"s all like something in another life. Don"t you know what my being here at this moment means? The thing is all over, Miss Carstairs--all past and done with an hour before you ever saw your mother. I gave it up voluntarily. When the time came, just now on the yacht, I found out that it was impossible--unthinkable--I couldn"t do it. The game was up then. That is one thing that your mother could not tell you, and it was to tell you this, and all the rest of it, that I followed you here."
She stood on the other side of the gate, hardly an arm"s length from him, looking at him; a figure so pretty, so dainty, so extremely decorative that she seemed incapable of giving anything but pleasure.
But in the eyes that met his own so unwaveringly, he read at once the contradiction of this.
"Yes, I suppose that would always be the way, wouldn"t it?--that whenever I found out, you were just going to tell me?"
If she had searched her mind for a way to strangle his headlong self-defence, she could not possibly have done it more effectually.
There followed a horrible pause.
"You mean ... that you do not believe me?"
"In the little while that I have known you, have you given me much reason to?"
"Can"t you see that that is exactly the reason I wanted to tell you all the truth now?"
"Why did you wait till _now_? Weren"t there chances to tell me this afternoon on my father"s yacht? But--there"s no use to speak of all this. It is enough that I know it now."
He was aware that her voice had lost that hard and polished lightness with which she had first struck at him; on this last sentence, he thought that it trembled a little; and in a flash, he saw the whole matter from her side of it, and for the moment ceased to think about himself.
He leaned his arms upon the green panel of the gate and looked down at her.
"Don"t think that I blame you for not taking my word. Probably I couldn"t expect it. We can"t very well argue about that.... And of course I have known all along--how you would feel about me, when you found out what I came here to do. I was ready for that--ready for you to be angry. But I don"t seem to have taken it in that you would be ...
hurt. That makes it a good deal worse."
She made no reply. She had lowered her heavy-fringed eyes; her slim, gloved hands were busily furling and unfurling her white parasol.
"There is nothing in this that need hurt you. Believe me in this, at any rate. Only three people are concerned in it. You will have no doubt of your mother. That she told you shows how impossible it was to her, even with Uncle Elbert wanting you so much. You will not mind about your father--not in any personal way. He is a stranger to you. That leaves only me."
Still she said nothing. It seemed to him that he had never looked at so still a face.
"For me, I might make you angry as any--acquaintance might--any stranger. But that is all. It is not ... as if we had been friends."
She raised her eyes, and the look in them seemed to give the lie to every word he had said.
"What do you call a friend? Did I not trust you--put myself in your power--fall confidingly in with your hateful plot--after I had been plainly warned not to? Oh, if I had only listened to Mr. Higginson, I should not have the humiliation of remembering that--hour on the yacht!"
The name stung him into instant recollection. He stood staring at her, and his face darkened.
In the first staggering revelation of her look, his sub-conscious mind had leapt instantly to the conclusion that his cunning enemy, having found out his secret, had betrayed it to Miss. Carstairs. Her first words had disposed of that. It was the tortured mother, not the professional sneak, who had been before him with his explanation. But now it rushed over him that he had an infinitely deeper grudge against the vanished spy. For it was Higginson, with his bribe-money, who had broken down the yacht; Higginson who would, in any case, have forced the return to Hunston; Higginson who had given this girl the right to think, as she did think, that she owed her escape wholly to an "accident" to the machinery.
He had thought that he had saved Uncle Elbert"s daughter from himself, and lo, his enemy had plucked the honor from him. The world should not be big enough for this man to elude his vengeance.
"You mention Mr. Higginson. Where is he?"
She glanced at him, impersonally, struck by the unconscious sternness of his voice.
"I do not know, but I am most anxious to see him--to thank him--"
"I am told that he left town at four o"clock. Perhaps you know his address in New York?"
"I do not," she answered coldly. "No doubt he went away hurriedly ...
frightened of you because of his kindness to me."
She came a step forward to the gate. Instantly his thought veered back to her and his tense face softened.
"How can I blame you," he said hurriedly, "for thinking the worst of me?
I"ve been thinking badly enough of myself, G.o.d knows. But don"t you know, can"t you imagine, that nothing could have held me to the miserable business a single moment after I saw you, had I not been bound by a solemn promise to your poor father?"
"My father! Oh, if he is the sort of man to plot a thing like this, and to bludgeon my mother into it, how could you endure to _promise_ to do it for him?"
"Because he is breaking his heart for you, and you didn"t know it. It seemed right that he should see you, since he wants to so much."
All her sense of the wrong he had done her flared up in anger at that.
"How do _you_--_dare_ say what seems right between my father and me? He is breaking his heart for me, he told you? Did he mention to you that she had _broken_ hers for him? Don"t you suppose that I have had time--and reasons--to decide which of them I belong to?"
"All this," he said, "was before I knew you."
About them hung the stillness of the country and the long empty road.
The woods stirred; a bird called; a portly hare poked his nose through the brush over the way, and suddenly scuttled off, his white flag up. In Mrs, Thurston"s yard, the quiet was profound.
"All his life," said Mary Carstairs, "my father has thought about nothing but himself. I am sorry for him--but he must take the consequences of that now. If he is lonely, it is his own making. If my mother has been lonely till it has almost killed her, that is his doing, too. For you--there was never any place in this. As for me, I owe him nothing. He must beg my mother"s forgiveness before he shall ever get mine."
She came forward another half-step and laid her hand upon the gate-latch with a movement whose definiteness did not escape him.
"You may take back that answer from me if you wish. And so, good-bye."
"Not good-bye," said Varney, instantly. "You must not say that."
"I am quite sure that I have nothing else left to say."