"Acts--words--whose acts?" asks he slowly.
"t.i.ta"s."
"Lady Rylton"s? What do you mean?"
He shakes himself suddenly free of the touch that has grown hateful to him.
"I mean," says she boldly, still unconscious of his real meaning of the abyss that lies before her, "that you can at any moment get rid of her. You can at any moment get a divorce!"
"By lying?" says he, with agitation. "By"--vehemently--"dragging her name into the dust. By falsely, grossly swearing against her."
"Why take it so much to heart?" says she, again coming close to him.
"She would not care, she would _help_ you. She could then marry her cousin. We could all see how that was. Would it be such false swearing after all?"
"Don"t!" says Rylton, in a suffocating tone.
"Ah, Maurice, I understand you. I know how your honour revolts from such a step, but it is only a step--one--_one,_ and then--_we_----"
She covers her eyes with her hands and leans heavily against the table behind her. "We should be together--for ever," whispers she faintly.
A long, long silence follows this. It seems to hold, to envelop the room. It is like darkness! All at once Marian begins to tremble. She lifts her head.
"You do not speak," says she. There is something frantic in her low voice--an awful fear. The first dawn of the truth is breaking on her, but as yet the light is imperfect. "You do not speak," she repeats, and now her voice is higher, shriller; there is agony in it. "You mean--you mean---- _What_ do you mean, Maurice?"
"What can I mean? You called me just now an honourable man."
"Ah, your honour!" says she bitterly.
"You, at least, can find no flaw in it," says he suddenly.
"No? Was it an honourable man who married that girl for her money, loving me all the time? You," pa.s.sionately, "you _did_ love me then?"
There is question in her tone.
"The dishonour was to her, not to you," returns he, his eyes bent on the ground.
"Oh, forget her! What has she got to do with us?" cries she, with a sudden burst of angry misery, stung by the fact that he had given no answer to that last question of hers. "You loved me once. You loved me. Oh, Maurice," smiting her hands together, "you cannot have forgotten that! You cannot. Why should _I_ remember if you forget?
Each kiss of yours, each word, is graven on my soul! When I am dead, perhaps I shall forget, but not till then; and you--you, too--you must remember!"
"I remember!"
He is looking white and haggard.
"Ah!"
There is a quick triumphant note in her voice.
"But what?" he goes on quickly. "What have I to remember about you?
That I prayed you on my knees day after day to give yourself to me.
To risk the chances of poverty, to marry me--and," slowly, "I remember, too, your answer. It was always _"No"_. You loved me, you said, but you would wait. Poverty frightened you. I would have given my life for you, you would not give even your comfort for me. Even when my engagement with--with----"
_"Your wife."_
The words come like a knife from between her clenched teeth.
"With t.i.ta was almost accomplished--but not quite--I spoke to you again, but you still held back. You let me go--you deliberately gave me up to another. Was that love? I tell you," says he vehemently, "that all the money the world contains would not have forced me from you at that time. You of your own accord put me outside your life.
Was that love?"
"I was content to wait. I did not seek another in marriage. I, too, was poor. But I swore to myself to live and die a pauper--for your sake, if--if no help came to us." She pauses. A sigh--a cruel sigh bursts from her lips. "No help came."
She is deadly white. A sudden reaction from hope, sure and glorious, to horrible despair is mastering her. She had not thought, she had not known she loved him so well until now, when it has begun to dawn upon her that he no longer loves her.
In all her life no gladness had come to her until she met Rylton, and then her heart went forth, but without the full generosity of one who had been fed with love from its birth. Soured, narrowed by her surroundings, and chilled by a dread of the poverty she had so learned to fear, she had hung back when joy was offered to her, and now that joy was dead. It would be hers never, never! The love on which she had been counting all these days,
"For which I cry both day and night, For which I let slip all delight, Whereby I grow both deaf and blind, Careless to win, unskilled to find,"
is hers no longer. Deaf and blind she has been indeed.
A little faintness falls on her; she sways, and Rylton, catching her, presses her into a chair. His touch recalls her to life, and rouses within her a sudden outbreak of pa.s.sion.
"Maurice!"--she holds him with both her hands--"I will _not_ believe it. It is not true! You love me still! You do, you do. I was"--she lets his arms go and raises her hands to his shoulders, and, leaning back, gazes with wild, beautiful, beseeching eyes into his face--"wrong--foolish--_mad,_ I think, when I flung from me the only good that Heaven ever gave me, but--but for all that you love me still." She pauses. His eyes are on the ground; he looks like a criminal condemned to death. "Say it, _say_ it," whispers she hoa.r.s.ely. There is a silence that speaks. He can feel the shudder that runs through her. It nerves him.
"All this," he says--his voice is low and harsh, because of the agony of the moment--"all this comes----"
He grows silent. He cannot say it. _She_ can.
_"Too late?"_
The words fall like a knell, yet there is a question in them, and one that must be answered.
"Too late!" repeats he. He could have cursed himself, yet it had to be done. He frees himself from her and stands back. "Why do you compel me to say such things?" cries he violently.
But she does not hear him. She is looking into the distant corner of the room as though--as one might suppose, seeing her earnest gaze--she can there see something. Her dead life"s hope, perhaps, lying in its shroud. And perhaps, too, the sight is too much for her, for after a moment or two she raises her hands to her eyes, and clasps them there.
A sound breaks from her. In all his after life Rylton never forgets it.
"Oh!" says she, and that is all--but it sounds like a last breath--a final moan--an end.
Then all at once it is over. Whatever she has felt is done with for the present. She takes down her hands, and looks round at him deliberately. Her face is as the face of one dead, but her voice is clear and cold and cutting as an east wind.
"It is this, then," says she, "that all is at an end between us. You have tired of me. I have heard that men do tire. Now I know it. You wish me dead, perhaps."
"No! Marian, No!"
"For that, I suppose, I should thank you. Thank the man who once wanted so much to make me his wife. You _did_ wish to make me--your wife?"
"Yes--yes. But that is all over," says he desperately.
"For you, yes! For me----"