d.i.c.k Wantele got up from his chair. He put his hand on the back of it and stared down into his cousin"s face.
"Once, many years ago, Athena spoke to me as if such a thing would be possible," he said.
He never lied, he never had lied--in words--to Richard Maule, and he was not going to begin now.
"You mean in Italy, when I was ill?"
Wantele nodded his head, and then he felt gripped--in the throes of a horrible fear. It was as if a pit had suddenly opened between his cousin and himself, between the man whom he loved,--whose affection and respect he wished above all things to retain, for they were all that remained to him,--and his miserable self. He wondered whether the secret thing he feared showed itself in his face.
Richard Maule slowly got up. Wantele made an instinctive movement to help him, but the other waved him off, not unkindly, but a little impatiently.
"d.i.c.k?" he said. "My boy, I want to ask you a question--an indiscreet question. You need not answer it, but if you answer it, please answer it truly."
Wantele opened his mouth and then closed it again. He could not think of the words with which to entreat the other man to desist----
Richard Maule, looking at him, knew the answer to his question before he had uttered it, but even so he spoke, obsessed by the cruel wish _to know_.
"In Italy----?" His voice sank to a m.u.f.fled whisper, but he did not take his eyes, his suffering, sunken eyes, from Wantele"s tortured face.
Still the other did not--could not--speak.
"I knew it. At least I felt sure of it." He sighed a quick convulsive sigh, and then in mercy averted his eyes.
"But never here?" he muttered questioningly. "Everything was over by the time we came back here?"
"Yes, Richard. I swear it."
"I knew that too--at least I felt sure of it. I"m afraid you must have suffered a good bit, d.i.c.k?"
The younger man nodded his head. "I have loathed and I have despised myself ever since."
"I"m sorry you did that. I"m sorry I waited till now to tell you that I knew, that I understood."
"How you must have hated me!" said Wantele sombrely.
"Never, d.i.c.k. I--I knew her by then. If you had been the first"--he quickly amended his phrase--"if I had been fool enough to believe you were the first, I think it would have killed me. As it was," his voice hardened, "it only made me curse myself for my blind folly--folly which brought wretchedness and shame on you, d.i.c.k, and--and now, I fear, on Jane Oglander"--he saw the confirmation he sought on the other"s face.
"It"s about Jane I wish to speak to you to-night. For a moment I ask of you to think of me as G.o.d----"
Wantele stared at Richard Maule; it was the first time his cousin had ever uttered the word in his presence.
"If I were G.o.d--Providence--Fate--and gave you your choice, would you choose that Lingard should marry Jane or that you should marry her?"
And as Wantele still stared at him in amazement: "Take it from me--I have never deceived you--that the choice is open to you. I don"t wish to hurry you. Take a few moments to think it over."
"I--I don"t understand," stammered Wantele.
"There is no necessity for you to understand. In fact I hope that, after to-night, you will dismiss the whole of this conversation from your mind. But I repeat--the choice is open to you."
And he added, musingly, "I think, d.i.c.k, that with the others out of the way you could make Jane happy--in time." But there was doubt--painful, deliberating doubt, in his tone.
Wantele shook his head.
"I don"t agree," he said shortly. "You see, Richard, Jane"--he moistened his lips--"Jane"s never loved me. She loves Lingard. And so, if G.o.d gave me the choice, I would give her to Lingard."
"You think well of the man?" Maule spoke lightly, and as if he himself had no reason to dissent from any word commending the soldier.
"You mustn"t ask me to judge Lingard"--the words were difficult to utter, and he brought them out with difficulty. "I"ve been there, you see. I know what the poor devil"s going through. I loved you, Richard--but that didn"t save me. Lingard loved Jane, I believe he still loves her, and--and I should take him to be a man jealous of his honour--but neither his love nor his honour has saved him."
Wantele began walking up and down the room with long nervous strides.
Then he stopped short--"What is it you mean to do, Richard?" he asked.
Richard Maule hesitated. He knew very well what he now meant to do, but he did not intend that his cousin should have any inkling, either now or hereafter, of his decision. And d.i.c.k, as he knew well, was not easily deceived. Still, he put his mind, the mind which was in some ways clearer, harder, than it had been before his illness, to the task.
"There are three courses open to me," he said slowly. "The one is to allow matters to remain as they are, _in statu quo_; the second is to do what Jane Oglander suggests--allow my wife to bring a suit for the dissolution of our marriage, and to allow it to go undefended--it is that which I should have done, d.i.c.k, had your answer been other than it was."
"And the third course?" Wantele was looking at his cousin fixedly.
"The third course, which I may probably adopt, will be for me to begin proceedings for divorce. I take it that Lingard knows nothing of the real woman? I mean, he looks at Athena as she looks at herself?"
Wantele nodded. That was certainly a good way in which to describe Lingard"s mental att.i.tude.
"But I have not quite made up my mind as to the best course," said Richard Maule. "I shall think the matter over for a day or two. But I fear--and I don"t mind telling you, d.i.c.k, that the thought isn"t exactly a pleasant one to me--that it must be what I said just now."
He beckoned to the other to come nearer, and Wantele did so, his pale face full of pain and anger.
"I want you to understand," his cousin added, in a low voice, "that when I"ve said that I"ve said all. The business won"t affect me as it would most men. I never gave a thought to the world"s opinion in old days, and why should I do so now?"
He spoke hesitatingly, awkwardly. It was disagreeable to him to be thus lying to his cousin--to be filling the heart of the man who loved him with a flood of indignant pity and pain. But the tragi-comedy had to be played out.
"I shall really feel very much more comfortable when it"s all over," he said. "I don"t fancy even lawyers waste as much time as they used to do over this kind of thing. And this case is so simple, so straightforward.
I shall be sorry for the Kayes. But they must have known it. I fancy everybody in this neighbourhood knew it. People will pity Athena; they will agree that she had every excuse----"
He leant back in his chair. There was nothing more to say.
"Shall I call Carver?" asked Wantele solicitously.
"No. Not now. But I should be obliged if you will tell him that I shall want him in an hour. I shall try and read for a while by the fire."
Richard Maule waited till he heard the sounds of his cousin"s quick footsteps die away. Then he rose feebly and walked over to the recess which had been fitted up as a medicine cupboard in the days of his childhood, when drugs were more the fashion than they are now.
In a wide-necked, gla.s.s-stoppered bottle were the crystals of chloral which he had long used in preference to the more usual liquid form. He knew to a nicety the dose which he himself could take with safety, the dose which sometimes failed to induce sleep.
He now measured out in his hand some three times his usual dose.
Had d.i.c.k Wantele"s answer been different, Richard Maule would have administered to himself the crystals he now held in his hand. But d.i.c.k"s decision--what the man of average morality would have regarded as his n.o.ble and unselfish decision--had signed another human being"s death-warrant.
The thought that this was so suddenly struck Richard Maule as the most ironic of the many avenging things he had known to happen in our strange world. And, almost for the first time since he had formed his awful conception of the meaning of life, he knew the cruel joy of laughing with the G.o.ds, instead of writhing under their lash.