Bridge at a penny a hundred was apparently an innocent occupation--at anything higher, an awful example.
"Then we"ll play for a penny a hundred," declared Lady Susan good-humouredly, when Miss Caroline had explained her scruples. "Who"ll play? You will, Mr. Tempest? And you, Robin? That"ll make one table. What about you others?"
"I don"t play bridge," said Brett mendaciously, adding _sotto voce_ to Lady Susan: "A least, I can"t afford to play for a penny a hundred, beloved aunt." Then aloud: "Besides, Ann wants to see all over the boat, so I"m going to trot her round."
Ann laughed in spite of herself, never having expressed any such desire as was thus coolly attributed to her. But she submitted good-naturedly enough to being carried off by Brett on a tour of inspection, whilst Lady Susan and the rector, accompanied by Robin and Miss Caroline, went below to play bridge, leaving Mrs. Hilyard and Coventry alone together on deck.
A silence fell between them. Throughout the whole time which had elapsed since they had both come to live at Silverquay they had never before been actually alone. By tacit consent they had mutually avoided such a happening, and now, without any possibility of escape, it seemed to Cara that they were suddenly enfolded in a solitude which shut out the rest of the world entirely.
She twisted her fingers nervously together, vibrantly conscious of Coventry"s tall, silent figure beside her, and her breath struggled a little in her throat at the memory of all that had once linked their lives together, of which there remained now only an abiding bitterness and contempt.
The silence seemed to close round her like a pall, suffocating her. She felt she could not endure it a minute longer.
"I hardly expected to see you here to-night," she said at last, the usual sweetness of her voice roughened by reason of the effort it cost her to speak at all.
"No. Dinner-parties aren"t quite in my line," returned Eliot dryly. "But, having been fool enough to say I"d come, I keep my word."
He glanced towards her as he spoke, and she flushed faintly beneath his scrutiny. The latter part of the speech p.r.i.c.ked her like an arrow sped from the past, though it was difficult to estimate from the man"s impa.s.sive face whether or no he had actually intended to imply a deeper significance than the surface meaning which the words conveyed. Cara felt that she must know--at any cost she must know.
"Is that meant as a--protest?" she asked, a.s.suming an air of playful indifference which she was very far from feeling. "Am I intended to take it as a rebuke?"
Perhaps the light detachment of her manner jangled some long-silent chord, roused an echo from the past, for his face darkened.
"You can take it so, if you wish," he said curtly.
She was silent. In that brief question and answer she had covertly appealed for mercy and had received judgment--the same judgment which had been p.r.o.nounced against her years ago. She had never thought it possible that Eliot would learn to care for her again. She knew the man too well to believe that he would have any love left to give the woman who had despoiled him of all a man values--broken his faith, destroyed the ideals that had once been his. Moreover, she had seen clear down into his soul that day at Berrier Cove, when Ann had come within an ace of death, and she knew that on the ruins of the old love a new love was building.
But, deep within her, she had hoped that Eliot"s savage bitterness towards her might have softened with the pa.s.sage of time--that perhaps he had learned to tincture his contempt for her with a little understanding and compa.s.sion, allowing something in excuse for youth and for the long, grinding years of poverty which had ground the courage out of her and driven her into making that one ghastly mistake for which life had exacted such a heavy penalty. She knew now that she had hoped in vain. He was as merciless as he had been that day, ten years ago, when he had turned away and left her alone in an old Italian garden, with the happy sunlight and the scent of flowers mocking the half-realised despair at her heart.
"Then you haven"t ever--forgiven me?" she said at last, haltingly.
He stared at her.
"Isn"t that rather a curious question to ask? You killed everything in life that mattered--d.a.m.ned my chances of happiness once and for always.... No, I don"t think I"ve forgiven you. I"ve endeavoured to forget you." He paused, then added with a brief, ironic laugh: "It was a queer joke for fate to play--bringing us both to the same neighbourhood."
"I didn"t know," said Cara hastily. "You know that, don"t you? I had no idea you lived here when I bought the Priory. Even when I heard--afterwards--that a Mr. Coventry owned Heronsmere, I never dreamed it could be you. You see, I was told he was very wealthy--"
"And the Coventry you knew was--poor!"
It was like the thrust of a rapier, and Cara winced under the concentrated scorn of the bitter speech.
"You are very merciless," she said, her voice shaken and uneven.
"Then leave it at that," he rejoined indifferently. "I"ve no particular grounds for being anything else. The past is dead--and it won"t stand resurrection."
"Does the past ever die?" she demanded, a note of despair in her voice.
"I think not."
He looked at her curiously--at the beautiful face, a trifle worn and shadowed, with its sad eyes and that strangely patient curve of mouth.
"What do you mean?" he asked sharply.
"One pays, Eliot."
He shrugged his shoulders.
"Oh, yes, one pays. But, in this particular instance, I thought it was I who paid and you who took delivery of the goods."
She sprang up.
"Then you were wrong!" she exclaimed in low, pa.s.sionate tones that, in spite of himself, moved him strangely. "If you paid, I paid, too--every day of my life. Oh, I had my punishment"--with a little laugh that held more anguish than any tears. "Full measure, pressed down, running over."
He bent his sombre gaze on her.
"I don"t think I understand," he said slowly.
"Don"t you?" With a swift movement she thrust back the loose tulle sleeve which veiled her arm, uncovering the ugly, rust-coloured scar which marred its whiteness.
"That--that--?" He stammered off into a shocked silence, his eyes fastened on the scar, so unmistakably that of a burn.
"That is the symbol of my married life," she said with a curious enforced calm. She let her sleeve fall back into its place. "Did you never hear?
Dene drank--it was no secret. He was quite mad at times."
"And he--ill-treated you?"
"When it amused him. He had a pa.s.sion for cruelty. I never knew it till I married him. I found out afterwards he had been the same even as a child.
He loved torturing things." She paused, then added with a simplicity that was infinitely pitiful: "So you see, I had my punishment."
"I was abroad. I never knew," said Eliot, as though in extenuation of something of which he inwardly accused himself. "I never knew," he repeated resentfully. "By G.o.d!"--with a sudden suppressed violence which was the more intense by reason of its enforced restraint--"if I"d known, I"d have freed the woman I once loved from degradation such as that!"
Used so unconsciously, without intent, the word "once" wounded her more cruelly than any of his deliberately harsh and bitter utterances had had power to do. It set her definitely outside his life, relegated her to a past that was dead and done with--made her realise more completely than anything else could have done that, as far as Eliot was concerned, she no longer counted in his scheme of existence.
"_The woman I once loved_"--Cara clenched her hands, and bit back the cry of pain which fought for utterance. For an instant she felt sick with pain--as though some one had turned a knife in a raw wound. Then, with an effort, she regained her self-control.
"Thank you," she said gently. "But no one could have helped me--least of all you, even had you been in England."
They fell silent for a while. Eliot stood staring out across the moon-flecked waters, and in the silver radiance which made the night almost as light as day Cara could see the harsh lines which the years had graved upon his, face, the grim closing of the lips, and the weariness that lay in his eyes. Half timidly she laid her hand on his arm.
"I wish I could give you back your happiness," she said unevenly.
He turned and looked at her, and now there was neither pity nor compa.s.sion in his gaze--only that hardness of granite with which she was all too familiar.
"Unfortunately, that"s out of your power," he said coldly. "You only had power to wreck it."
He glanced down distastefully at the hand on his sleeve, and she withdrew it hastily. But, with a sudden strength of purpose, born of her infinite longing to repair the harm she had done, she persisted, daring his anger.
"There"s Ann," she said simply.
She was surprised it hurt so little to put it into words--the fact that he loved another woman. But, since the day she had first realised that he cared for Ann, she had been schooling herself to a certain stoical resignation. She recognised that she had forfeited her own claim to love when she had married Dene Hilyard because he had more of this world"s goods than the man to whom she had given her heart, and she felt no actual jealousy of Ann--only a wistful envy of the girl for whom the love of Eliot Coventry might yet create the heaven on earth which she herself had thrown away.