"I don"t know. Yes. No, I don"t know. It wasn"t the same thing."
"Never mind. It"s very good of you to tell me."
"I didn"t mean to."
"What made you tell me?"
"Seeing the children. I thought I could go on deceiving you; but when I saw them I knew I couldn"t."
"I see." His voice softened. "You told me because of them. I"m glad you told me." He paused on that.
"Well," he said, "we must make the best of it."
"That makes no difference?"
"No. Not now."
She sighed.
"How long ago was it?" he asked.
"Five years. Charley Tailleur was the first."
"What?"
"The first. There were others; ever so many others. I"m--that sort."
"I don"t believe you."
"You"ve got to believe me. You can"t marry me, and you"ve got to see why."
She also paused. Her silences were terrible to him.
"I thought you did see once. It didn"t seem possible that you couldn"t.
Do you remember the first time I met you?"
He remembered.
"I thought you saw then. And afterward--don"t you remember how you followed me out of the room--another night?"
"Yes."
"I thought you understood, and were too shy to say so. But you didn"t.
_Then_--do you remember how I waited for you at the end of the garden?--and how we sat out on the Cliff? I was trying then--the way I always try. I thought I"d make you--and you--you wouldn"t see it. You only wanted to help me. You were so innocent and dear. That"s what made me love you."
"Oh," he groaned. "Don"t."
But she went on. "And do you remember how you found me--that night--out on the Cliff?"
She drew back her voice softly.
"I was sure then that you knew, and that when you asked me to come back with you----"
"Look here, Kitty, I"ve had enough of it."
"You haven"t, for you"re fond of me still. You are, aren"t you?"
"Oh, my G.o.d! how do I know?"
"_I_ know. It"s because you haven"t taken it in. What do you think of this? You"ve known me ten days, and ten days before that I was with Wilfrid Marston."
[Ill.u.s.tration: ""I want to make you loathe me ... never see me again.""]
He had taken it in at last. She had made it real to him, clothed it in flesh and blood.
"If you don"t believe me," she said, "ask him. That"s what he came to see me for. He wanted me to go back to him. In fact, I wasn"t supposed to have left him."
He put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to steady his mind to face the thing that stunned it.
"And you"re telling me all this because----" he said dully.
"Because I want to make you loathe me, so that you can go away and be glad that you"ll never see me again. And if it hurts you too much to think of me as I am, to think that you cared for me, just say to yourself that I cared for _you_, and that I couldn"t have done it if I"d been quite bad."
She cried out, "It would have been better for me if I had been. I shouldn"t _feel_ then. It wouldn"t hurt me to see little children. I should have got over that long ago; and I shouldn"t have cared for you or them. I shouldn"t have been able to. We get like that. And then--I needn"t have let you care for me. That was the worst thing I ever did.
But I was so happy--so happy."
He could not look at her; he covered his face with his hands, and she knew that he cared still.
Then she came and knelt down beside him and whispered. He got up and broke away from her and she followed him.
"You can"t marry me _now_," she said.
And he answered, "No."
CHAPTER XIX
He did not leave her. They sat still, separated by the length of the little room, staring, not at each other, but at some point in the distance, as if each brain had flung and fixed there the same unspeakable symbol of its horror.
Her face was sharp with pain, was strangely purified, spiritualised by the immortal moment that uplifted her. His face, grown old in a moment, had lost its look of glad and incorruptible innocence.
Not that he was yet in full possession of reality. His mind was sunk in the stupor that follows after torture. It kept its hold by one sense only, the vague discerning of profound responsibility, and of something profounder still, some tie binding him to Kitty, immaterial, indestructible, born of their communion in pain.
It kept him by its intangible compulsion, sitting there in the same small room, divided from her, but still there, still wearing that strange air of partic.i.p.ation, of complicity.
And all the time he kept saying to himself, "What next?"