"It was me."
His brown hands trembled as he leaned heavily upon his stick.
"I was not d.i.c.k"s mistress, Roger."
"Were you his wife, then?"
"No."
"Then how did you come to----? But I don"t want to hear. I have no right to ask. I have heard enough."
He made as if to go.
Annette turned upon him in the dusk with a fierce white face, and gripped his shoulder with a hand of steel.
"You have not heard enough till you have heard everything," she said.
And holding him forcibly, she told him of her life in Paris with her father, and of her disastrous love affair, and her determination to drown herself, and her meeting with d.i.c.k, and her reckless, apathetic despair. Did he understand? He made no sign.
After a time, her hand fell from his shoulder. He made no attempt to move. The merciful mist enclosed them, and dimmed them from each other.
Low in the east, entangled in a clump of hawthorn, a thin moon hung blurred as if seen through tears.
"I did not care what I did," she said brokenly. "I did not care for d.i.c.k, and I did not care for myself. I cared for nothing. I was desperate. d.i.c.k did not try to trap me, or be wicked to me. He asked me to go with him, and I went of my own accord. But he was sorry afterwards, Roger. He said so when he was ill. He wanted to keep me from the river. He could not bear the thought of my drowning myself. Often, often when he was delirious, he spoke of it, and tried to hold me back.
And you said he wouldn"t take any trouble. But he did. He did, Roger. He made his will at the last, when it was all he could do, and he remembered about Hulver--I know he said you ought to have it--and that he must provide for Mary and the child. His last strength went in making his will, Roger. His last thought was for you, and that poor Mary and the child."
Already she had forgotten herself, and was pleading earnestly for the man who had brought her to this pa.s.s.
Roger stood silent, save for his hard breathing. Did he understand? We all know that "To endure and to pardon is the wisdom of life." But if we are called on to pardon just at the moment we are called on to endure!
What then? Have we _ever_ the strength to do both at the same moment? He did not speak. The twilight deepened. The moon drew clear of the hawthorn.
"You must go to Fontainebleau," she went on, "and find the doctor. I don"t know his name, but it will be easy to find him. And he will remember. He was so interested in poor d.i.c.k. And he brought the notary.
He will tell you who has the will. I remember now I was one of the witnesses."
"You witnessed it!" said Roger, astounded. His stick fell from his hands. He looked at it on the ground, but made no motion to pick it up.
"Yes, I witnessed it. d.i.c.k asked me to. Everything will come right now.
He wanted dreadfully to make it right. But you must forget about me, Roger. I"ve been here under false pretences. I shall go away. I ought never to have come, but I didn"t know you and Janey were d.i.c.k"s people.
He was always called d.i.c.k Le Geyt. And when I came to be friends with you both, I often wished to tell you, even before I knew you were his relations. But I had promised Mrs. Stoddart not to speak of it to anyone except----"
"Except who?" said Roger.
"Except the man I was to marry. That was the mistake. I ought never to have promised to keep silence. But I did, because she made a point of it, and she had been so kind to me when I was ill. But I ought not to have agreed to it. One ought never to try to cover up anything one has done wrong. And I had a chance of telling you, and I didn"t take it, that afternoon we drove to Halywater. Mrs. Stoddart had given me back my promise, and oh! Roger, I meant to tell you. But you were so nice I forgot everything else. And then, later on, when we were in the deserted garden and I saw the little lambs and the fishes, I was so dreadfully sorry that everything else went out of my head. I feel I have deceived you and Janey, and it has often weighed upon me. But I never meant to deceive you. And I"m glad you know now. And I should like her to know too."
Her tremulous voice ceased.
She stood looking at him with a great wistfulness, but he made no sign.
She waited, but he did not speak. Then she went swiftly from him in the dusk, and the mist wrapped her in its grey folds.
Roger stood motionless and rigid where she had left him. After a moment, he made a mechanical movement as if to walk on. Then he flung himself down upon his face on the whitening gra.s.s.
And the merciful mist wrapped him also in its grey folds.
Low in the east the thin moon climbed blurred and dim, as if seen through tears.
CHAPTER x.x.xVI
"The paths of love are rougher Than thoroughfares of stones."
THOMAS HARDY.
Roger lay on his face, with his mouth on the back of his hand.
Years and years ago, twenty long years ago, he had once lain on his face as he was doing now. He and d.i.c.k had been out shooting with the old keeper, and d.i.c.k had shot Roger"s dog by mistake. He had taken the catastrophe with a stolid stoicism and a bitten lip. But later in the day he had crept away, and had sobbed for hours, lying on his face under a tree. The remembrance came back to him now. Never since then, never in all those twenty years, had he felt again that same paroxysm of despair.
And now again d.i.c.k had inadvertently wounded him; d.i.c.k, who never meant any harm, had pierced his heart. The wound bled, and Roger bit his hand.
Time pa.s.sed.
He did not want to get up any more. If he could have died at that moment he would have died. He did not want to have anything more to do with this monstrous cheat called life. He did not want ever to see anyone again. He felt broken. The thought that he should presently get to his feet and stump home through the dusk to his empty rooms, as he had done a hundred times, filled him with a nausea and rage unspeakable. The mere notion of the pa.s.sage and the clothes-peg and the umbrella-stand annihilated him. He had reached a place in life where he felt he could not go on.
Far in the distance, carried to his ear by the ground, came the m.u.f.fled thud and beat of a train pa.s.sing beyond the village, on the other side of the Rieben. He wished dully that he could have put his head on the rails.
And the voice to which from a little lad he had never shut his ears, the humdrum, prosaic voice which had bidden him take thought for Mary Deane and her child, and Janey, and Betty Hesketh, and all who were "desolate and oppressed," that same small voice, never ignored, never silenced, spoke in Roger"s aching, unimaginative heart. The train pa.s.sed, and as the sound throbbed away into silence Roger longed again with pa.s.sion that it had taken his life with it. And the still small voice said, "That is how Annette felt a year ago."
He got up and pushed back the damp hair from his forehead. That was how Annette had felt a year ago. Poor, unwise, cruelly treated Annette! Even now, though he had heard her story from her own lips, he could not believe it, could not believe that her life had ever had in it any incident beyond tending her old aunts, and watering her flowers, and singing in the choir. That was how he had always imagined her, with perhaps a tame canary thrown in, which ate sugar from her lips. If he had watched her with such a small pet he would have felt it singularly appropriate, a sort of top-knot to his ideal of her. If he had seen her alarmed by a squirrel, he would have felt indulgent; if fond of children, tender; if jealous of other women, he should not have been surprised. He had made up a little insipid picture of Annette picking flowers by day, and wrapped in maiden slumber in a white room at night.
The picture was exactly as he wished her to be, and as her beautiful exterior had a.s.sured him she was. For Annette"s sweet face told half the men she met that she was their ideal. In nearly every case so far that ideal had been a masterpiece of commonplace; though if prizes had been offered for them Roger would have won easily. Her mind, her character, her individuality had no place in that ideal. That she should have been pushed close up against vice; that _she_, Annette, who sang "Sun of my soul" so beautifully, should have wandered alone in the wicked streets of Paris in the dawn, after escaping out of a home wickeder still; that she should have known treachery, despair; that she should have been stared at as the chance mistress of a disreputable man! _Annette!_ It was incredible.
And he had been so careful, at the expense of his love of truth, when they took refuge in Mary Deane"s house, that Annette should believe Mary Deane was a married woman and her child born in wedlock. And she, whose ears must not even hear that Mary had been d.i.c.k"s mistress, she, Annette, had been d.i.c.k"s mistress too, if not in reality, at any rate in appearance.
Roger"s brain reeled. He had forgotten the will. His mind could grasp nothing except the ghastly discrepancy between the smug picture of Annette which he had gradually evolved, and this tragic figure, sinned against, pa.s.sionate, desperate, dragging its betrayal from one man to another. Had she been d.i.c.k"s mistress? Was it really possible that she had not? Who could touch pitch and not be defiled? Women always denied their shame. How hotly Mary Deane had denied hers only a few months before the birth of her child!
Roger reddened at the thought that he was cla.s.sing Annette, his beautiful lady, with Mary. Oh! where was the real truth? Who could tell it him? Whom could he trust?
"_Janey._"
He said the word aloud with a cry. And Janey"s small brown face rose before him as he had known it all his life, since they had been children together, she the little adoring girl, and he the big condescending schoolboy. Janey"s crystal truthfulness, her faithfulness, her lifelong devotion to him, became evident to him. He had always taken them for granted, known where to put his hand on them, used them without seeing them, like his old waterproof which he could lay hold of on its peg in the dark. She had always been in the background of his life, like the Rieben and the low hill behind it against the grey sky, which he did not notice when they were there, but from which he could not long absent himself without a sense of loss. And Janey had no past. He knew everything about _her_. He must go to her now, at once. He did not know exactly what he wanted to say to her. But he groped for his stick, found it, noticed that the dew was heavy and that there would be no rain after all, and set off down the invisible track in the direction of the village, winking its low lights among the trees.
CHAPTER x.x.xVII
"Happiness is inextricably interwoven with loyalty, love, unselfishness, the charity that never fails. In early life we believe that it is just these qualities in those we love that make our happiness, just the lack of them that entail our misery. But later on we find that it is not so. Later on we find that it is our own loyalty, our own love and charity in which our happiness abides, as the soul abides in the body. So we discover at last that happiness is within the reach of all of us, the inalienable birthright of all of us, and that if by misadventure we have mislaid it in our youth we know where to seek it in after years.
For happiness is mislaid, but never lost."--M. N.