"Did you think you could do anything by trying?"
"I thought I could do a good deal. I had a hold on him, you see. I happen to be extremely useful to him in this branch of his business. I was trained for it; in fact, I"m hopelessly mixed up with it. Well, he can"t do very much without me, and I told him that if he didn"t give up the library I should give him up. It wasn"t a nice thing to have to say to your father--"
"And you said it?" Her face expressed both admiration and a certain horror.
"Yes. I told him he must choose between me and his bargain."
"That must have been hard."
"He didn"t seem to find it so. Anyhow, he hasn"t chosen me."
"I meant hard for you to have to say it."
"I a.s.sure you it came uncommonly easy at the moment."
"Don"t--don"t."
"I"m not going to defend him simply because he happens to be my father. I don"t even defend myself."
"You? You didn"t know."
"I knew quite enough. I knew he might cheat you without meaning to. I didn"t think he"d do it so soon or so infamously, but, to tell the truth, I went up to town on purpose to prevent it."
"I know--I know that was what you went for." She seemed to be answering some incessant voice that accused him, and he perceived that the precipitancy of his action suggested a very different interpretation. His position was odious enough in all conscience, but as yet it had not occurred to him that he could be suspected of complicity in the actual fraud.
"Why didn"t I do something to prevent it before?"
"But--didn"t you?"
"I did everything I could. I wrote to my father--if that"s anything; the result, as you see, was a cheque for the two hundred that should have been three thousand."
"Did it never occur to you to write to anybody else, to Mr. Jewdwine, for instance?"
She brought out the question shrinkingly, as if urged against her will by some intolerable compulsion, and he judged that this time they had touched what was, for her, a vital point.
"Of course it occurred to me. Haven"t you heard from him?"
"I have. But hardly in time for him to do anything."
He reflected. Jewdwine had written; therefore his intentions had been good. But he had delayed considerably in writing; evidently, then, he had been embarra.s.sed. He had not mentioned that he had heard from him; and why shouldn"t he have mentioned it? Oh, well--after all, why should he? At the back of his mind there had crawled a wriggling, worm-like suspicion of Jewdwine. He saw it wriggling and stamped on it instantly.
There were signs of acute anxiety on Miss Harden"s face. It was as if she implored him to say something consoling about Jewdwine, something that would make him pure in her troubled sight. A light dawned on him.
"Did you write to him?" she asked.
He saw what she wanted him to say, and he said it. "Yes, I wrote. But I suppose I did it too late, like everything else I"ve done."
He had told the truth, but not the whole truth, which would have been damaging to Jewdwine. To deny altogether that he had written would have been a clumsy and unnecessary falsehood, easily detected.
Something more masterly was required of him, and he achieved it without an instant"s hesitation, and with his eyes open to the consequences. He knew that he was deliberately suppressing the one detail that proved his own innocence. But as their eyes met he saw that she knew it, too; that she divined him through the web that wrapped him round.
"Well," she said, "if you wrote to Mr. Jewdwine, you did indeed do your best."
The answer, on her part, was no less masterly in its way. He could not help admiring its significant ambiguity. It was both an act of justice, an a.s.surance of her belief in him, and a superb intimation of her trust in Horace Jewdwine. And it was not only superb, it was almost humble in that which it further confessed and implied--her grat.i.tude to him for having made that act of justice consistent with loyalty to her cousin. How clever of her to pack so many meanings into one little phrase!
"I did it too late," he said, emphasizing the point which served for Jewdwine"s vindication.
"Never mind that. You did it."
"Miss Harden, is it possible that you still believe in me?" The question was wrung from him; for her belief in him remained incredible.
"Why should it not be possible?"
"Any man of business would tell you that appearances are against me."
"Well, I don"t believe in appearances; and I do believe in you. You are not a man of business, you see."
"Thank goodness, I"m not, now."
"You never were, I think."
"No. And yet, I"m so horribly mixed up with this business, that I can never think of myself as an honest man again."
She seemed to be considering whether this outburst was genuine or only part of his sublime pretence.
"And I could never think of you as anything else. I should say, from all I have seen of you, that you are if anything _too_ honest, too painfully sincere."
("Yes, yes," her heart cried out, "I believe in him, _because_ he didn"t tell the truth about that letter to Horace." She could have loved him for that lie.)
He was now at liberty to part with her on that understanding, leaving her to think him all that was disinterested and honourable and fine.
But he could not do it. Not in the face of her almost impa.s.sioned declaration of belief. At that moment he was ready rather to fall at her feet in the torture of his shame. And as he looked at her, tears came into his eyes, those tears that cut through the flesh like knives, that are painful to bring forth and terrible to see.
"I"ve not been an honest man, though. I"ve no right to let you believe in me."
Her face was sweeter than ever with its piteous, pathetic smile struggling through the white eclipse of grief.
"What have you done?"
"It"s not what I"ve done. It"s what I didn"t do. I told you that I knew the library was going to be sold. I told you that yesterday, and you naturally thought I only _knew_ it yesterday, didn"t you?"
"Well, yes, but I don"t see--"
She paused, and his confession dropped into the silence with an awful weight.
"I knew--all the time."
She leaned back in her chair, the change of bodily posture emphasizing the spiritual recoil.
"All the time, and you never told me?"