"I would rather talk about it now, Philip. I don"t--I don"t at all understand what you mean. It is surely too late for us now to talk of marriage. The time remaining to us is too short to make it worth while."
Dering looked at her bewildered. Well as she spoke the language, she had remained very ignorant of England and of English law.
"I will try and explain to you," he said gently, "why Wingfield has made it quite clear to me that we shall have to go through some kind of a legal ceremony----"
"But there are so few months," she repeated, and he felt her trembling; "it is not as if you were likely to die before September; besides, if you were to do so, I should not care about the money."
For the first time a glimmer of what she meant, of what she was thinking, came into Dering"s mind. He felt strongly moved and deeply touched. This, then, was why she had seemed so preoccupied, so unlike herself, of late.
"My darling, surely you do not imagine--that I am thinking ... of leaving you?"
"No," and for the first time Louise, as she uttered the word, looked up straight into Dering"s face. "No, it was not of you that I was thinking--but of myself...."
"Let us sit down." Dering"s voice was so changed, so uneager, so cold, that Louise, for the first time during their long partnership, felt as if she was with a stranger. "I want to thoroughly understand your point of view. Do you mean to say that when we first arranged matters you intended our--our marriage to be, in any case, only a temporary union?"
He waited for an answer, looking at her with a still grimness, an unfamiliar antagonism, that raised in her a feeling of resentment, and renewed her courage. "Please tell me," he said again, "I think you owe me the truth, and I really wish to know."
Then she spoke. And though her hands still trembled, her voice was quite steady.
"Yes, Philip, I will tell you the truth, though I fear you will not like to hear it. When I first accepted the proposal you made to me, I felt convinced that, as regarded myself, the feeling which brought us together would be eternal, but I as fully believed that with you that same feeling would be only temporary. I was ready to remain with you as long as you would have me do so; but I felt sure that you would grow tired of me some day, and I told myself--secretly, of course, for I could not have insulted you or myself by saying such a thing to you then--I told myself, I say, that when that day came, the day of your weariness of me, I would go away, and make no further demand upon you."
"You really believed that I should grow tired of you,--that I should wish to leave you?"
Dering looked at her as a man might look at a stranger who has suddenly revealed some sinister and grotesque peculiarity of appearance or manner.
"Certainly I did so. How could I divine that you alone would be different from all the men of whom I had ever heard? Still, I loved you so well--ah, Philip, I did love you so--that I would have come to you on any terms, as indeed I did come on terms very injurious to myself. But what matters now what I then thought? I see that I was wrong--you have been faithful to me in word, thought, and deed----"
"Yes," said Dering fiercely, "by G.o.d, that is so! Go on!"
"I also have been faithful to you----" she hesitated. "Yes, I think I may truly say it, in thought, word, and deed,----"
Dering drew a long breath, and she went slowly on: "But I have realised, and that for some time past, that the day would come when I should no longer wish to be so--when I should wish to be free. I have gradually regained possession of myself, and, though I know I must fulfil all my obligations to you for the time I promised, I long for the moment of release, for the moment when I shall at last have the right to forget, as much as such things can ever be forgotten, these ten years of my life."
As she spoke, p.r.o.nouncing each word clearly in the foreign fashion, her voice gained a certain sombre confidence, and a flood of awful, hopeless bitterness filled the heart of the man sitting opposite to her.
"And have you thought," he asked in a constrained voice, "what you are going to do? I know you have sometimes regretted your work; do you intend--or perhaps you have already applied to Mr. Farningham?"
"No," she answered, and, un.o.bserved by him, for he was staring down at the tablecloth with unseeing eyes, a deep pink flush made her look suddenly girlish, "that will not be necessary. I have, as you know, regretted my work, and of late I have sometimes thought that, things being as they were, you acted with cruel thoughtlessness in compelling me to give it all up. But in my new life there will be much for me to do."
"I do not ask you," he said, suddenly, hoa.r.s.ely; "I could not insult you by asking...."
"I do not think," she spoke slowly, answering the look, the intonation, rather than the words, "that I am going to do anything unworthy."
But Dering, with sharp suspicion, suddenly became aware that she had changed colour, and that from pale she had become red. His mind glanced quickly over their comparatively small circle of friends and acquaintances--first one, then another familiar figure rose, hideously vivid, before him. He felt helpless, bewildered, fettered.
"Do you contemplate leaving me for another man?" he asked quietly.
Again Louise hesitated for a moment.
"Yes," she said at length, "that is what I am going to do. I did not mean to tell you now--though I admit that later, before the end, you would have had a right to know. The man to whom I am going, and who is not only willing, but anxious, to make me his wife, I mean his legal wife,"--she gave Dering a quick, strange look--"has great need of me, far more so than you ever had. My feeling for him is not in any way akin to what was once my feeling for you; that does not come twice, at any rate to such a woman as I feel myself to be; but my affection, my--my regard, will be, in this case, I believe, more enduring; and, as you know, I dearly love his children, and promised their mother to take care of them."
While she spoke, Dering, looking fixedly at her, seemed to see a shadowy group of shabby forlorn human beings form itself and take up its stand by her side--Jack Hinton, with his weak, handsome face, and shifty, pleading eyes; his two plain, neglected-looking girls; and then, cradled as he had so often seen it in Louise"s arms, the ugly and to him repulsive-looking baby.
What chance had he, what memories had their common barren past, to fight this intangible appealing vision?
He raised his hand and held it for a moment over his eyes, in a vain attempt to shut out both that which he had evoked, and the sight of the woman whose repudiation of himself only seemed to make more plainly visible the bonds which linked them the one to the other. Then he turned away, with a certain deliberation, and, having closed the door, walked quickly through the little hall, flinging himself bare-headed into the open air.
For the second time that day Philip Dering felt an urgent need of solitude in which to hold communion with himself. And yet, when striding along the dimly-lighted, solitary thoroughfares, the stillness about him seemed oppressive, and the knowledge that he was encompa.s.sed by commonplace, contented folk intolerable.
And so, scarcely knowing where his feet were leading him, he made his way at last into the broad, brilliantly lighted High Road, now full of glare, of sound, and of movement, for throngs of workers, pa.s.sing to and fro, were seeking the amus.e.m.e.nt and excitement of the street after their long, dull day.
Very soon Dering"s brain became abnormally active; his busy thoughts took the shape of completed half-uttered sentences, and he argued with himself, not so loudly that those about him could hear, but still with moving lips, as to the outcome of what Louise had told him that evening.
He was annoyed to find that his thoughts refused to marshal themselves in due sequence. Thus, when trying to concentrate his mind on the question of the immediate future, memories of Gerda Hinton, of the dead woman with whom he had never felt in sympathy, perhaps because Louise had been so fond of her, persistently intervened, and refused to be thrust away. His own present intolerable anguish made him, against his will, retrospectively understand Gerda"s long-drawn-out agony. He remembered, with new sharp-edged concern and pity, her quiet endurance of those times of ign.o.ble poverty brought about by Hinton"s fits of idleness; he realised for the first time what must have meant, in anguish of body and mind, the woman"s perpetual child bearing, and the deaths of two of her children, followed by her own within a fortnight of her last baby"s birth.
Then, with sudden irritation, he asked himself why he, Philip Dering, should waste his short time for thought in sorrowing over this poor dead woman? And, in swift answer, there came to him the knowledge why this sad drab ghost had thus thrust herself upon him to-night--
A feeling of furious anger, of revolt against the very existence of Jack Hinton, swept over him. So base, so treacherous, so selfish a creature fulfilled no useful purpose in the universe. Men hung murderers; and was Hinton, who had done his wife to death with refinement of cruelty, to go free--free to murder, in the same slow way, another woman, and one who actually belonged to Dering"s own self?
He now recognised, with bewilderment, that had Louise become his legal wife ten years ago, the thought of what she proposed to do would never have even crossed her mind.
The conviction that Hinton was not fit to live soon formed itself into a stable background to all Dering"s subsequent thoughts, to his short hesitations, and to his final determination.
After a while he looked at his watch, and found, with some surprise, that he had been walking up and down for over an hour; he also became aware, for the first time, that his bare, hatless head provoked now and again good-natured comment from those among whom he was walking.
He turned into a side-street, and taking from his pocket a small notebook, wrote the few lines which later played an important part in determining, to the satisfaction of his friends, the fact that he was, when writing them, most probably of unsound mind.
What Dering wrote down in his pocket-book ran as follows:
1. I buy a hat at Dunn"s, if Dunn be still open (which is probable).
2. I call on the doctor who was so kind to the Hintons last year and settle his account. It is doubtful if Hinton ever paid him--in fact, there can be no doubt that Hinton did _not_ pay him. I there make my will and inform the doctor that he will certainly be wanted shortly at Number 8, Lady Rich Road.
3. I buy that revolver (if guaranteed in perfect working order) which I have so frequently noticed in the p.a.w.nbroker"s window, and I give him five shillings for showing me how to manage it. Mem.
Remember to make him load it, so that there may be no mistake.
4. I wire to Wingfield. This is important. It may save Louise a shock.
5. I go to Hinton"s place, and if the children are already in bed I lock the door, and quietly kill him and then kill myself. If the children are still up, I must, of course, wait a while. In any case the business will be well over before the doctor can arrive.
Dering shut the notebook with a sigh of relief. The way now seemed clear before him, for he had put down exactly what he meant to do, and in case of doubt or forgetfulness he need only glance at his notes to be set again in the right way.
He spent a few moments considering whether it was his duty to write a letter to his employer. Finally he decided that there was no need to do so. They knew of his legacy; they were aware that he was leaving them; and everything, even now, was in perfect order for his successor.