But of old, in Normandy, she had pledged herself to join him with no delay when free, if ever free!

So now she was free.

One side of him glowed in illumination; the other was black as Winter night; but light subdues darkness; and in a situation like Beauchamp's, the blood is livelier than the prophetic mind.

'Why did you tell me to marry? What did that mean?' said he. 'Did you wish me to be the one in chains? And you have come quite alone!--you will give me an account of everything presently:--You are here! in England! and what a welcome for you! You are cold.'

'I am warmly clad,' said Renee, suffering her hand to be drawn to his breast at her arm's-length, not bending with it.

Alive to his own indirectness, he was conscious at once of the slight sign of reservation, and said: 'Tell me...' and swerved sheer away from his question: 'how is Madame d'Auffray?'

'Agnes? I left her at Tourdestelle,' said Renee.

'And Roland? He never writes to me.'

'Neither he nor I write much. He is at the military camp of instruction in the North.'

'He will run over to us.'

'Do not expect it.'

'Why not?'

Renee sighed. 'We shall have to live longer than I look for...' she stopped. 'Why do you ask me why not? He is fond of us both, and sorry for us; but have you forgotten Roland that morning on the Adriatic?'

Beauchamp pressed her hand. The stroke of Then and Now rang in his breast like a bell instead of a bounding heart. Something had stunned his heart. He had no clear central feeling; he tried to gather it from her touch, from his joy in beholding her and sitting with her alone, from the grace of her figure, the wild sweetness of her eyes, and the beloved foreign lips bewitching him with their exquisite French and perfection of speech.

His nature was too prompt in responding to such a call on it for resolute warmth.

'If I had been firmer then, or you one year older!' he said.

'That girl in Venice had no courage,' said Renee.

She raised her head and looked about the room.

Her instinct of love sounded her lover through, and felt the deficiency or the contrariety in him, as surely as musical ears are pained by a discord that they require no touchstone to detect. Pa.s.sion has the sensitiveness of fever, and is as cruelly chilled by a tepid air.

'Yes, a London house after Venice and Normandy!' said Beauchamp, following her look.

'Sicily: do not omit Syracuse; you were in your naval uniform: Normandy was our third meeting,' said Renee. 'This is the fourth. I should have reckoned that.'

'Why? Superst.i.tiously?'

'We cannot be entirely wise when we have staked our fate. Sailors are credulous: you know them. Women are like them when they embark... Three chances! Who can boast of so many, and expect one more! Will you take me to my hotel, Nevil?'

The fiction of her being free could not be sustained.

'Take you and leave you? I am absolutely at your command. But leave you?

You are alone: and you have told me nothing.'

What was there to tell? The desperate act was apparent, and told all.

Renee's dark eyelashes lifted on him, and dropped.

'Then things are as I left them in Normandy?' said he.

She replied: 'Almost.'

He quivered at the solitary word; for his conscience was on edge. It ran the shrewdest irony through him, inexplicably. 'Almost': that is, 'with this poor difference of one person, now finding herself worthless, subtracted from the list; no other; it should be little to them as it is little to you': or, reversing it, the substance of the word became magnified and intensified by its humble slightness: 'Things are the same, but for the jewel of the province, a l.u.s.tre of France, lured hither to her eclipse'--meanings various, indistinguishable, thrilling and piercing sad as the half-tones humming round the note of a strung wire, which is a blunt single note to the common ear.

Beauchamp sprang to his feet and bent above her: 'You have come to me, for the love of me, to give yourself to me, and for ever, for good, till death? Speak, my beloved Renee.'

Her eyes were raised to his: 'You see me here. It is for you to speak.'

'I do. There's nothing I ask for now--if the step can't be retrieved.'

'The step retrieved, my friend? There is no step backward in life.'

'I am thinking of you, Renee.'

'Yes, I know,' she answered hurriedly.

'If we discover that the step is a wrong one?' he pursued: 'why is there no step backward?'

'I am talking of women,' said Renee.

'Why not for women?'

'Honourable women, I mean,' said Renee.

Beauchamp inclined to forget his position in finding matter to contest.

Yet it is beyond contest that there is no step backward in life. She spoke well; better than he, and she won his deference by it. Not only she spoke better: she was truer, distincter, braver: and a man ever on the look-out for superior qualities, and ready to bow to them, could not refuse her homage. With that a saving sense of power quitted him.

'You wrote to me that you were unchanged, Nevil.'

'I am.'

'So, then, I came.'

His rejoinder was the dumb one, commonly eloquent and satisfactory.

Renee shut her eyes with a painful rigour of endurance. She opened them to look at him steadily.

The desperate act of her flight demanded immediate recognition from him in simple language and a practical seconding of it. There was the test.

'I cannot stay in this house, Nevil; take me away.'

She named her hotel in her French English, and the sound of it penetrated him with remorseful pity. It was for him, and of his doing, that she was in an alien land and an outcast!