"Something back! What, in Heaven's name?"

His friend's name was on her tongue; but as soon as she thought of Bertie, hesitancy and indecision took possession of her, for she knew not what exactly Bertie had in fact told her. It was always as though Van Maeren had enclosed her in a magic circle, a spell of silence, which made it impossible for her to mention him; and even at this juncture he was an intangible presence, his name an unutterable word, his hints a mere inarticulate jangle.

"What--- what?" she gasped in bewilderment. "Oh, I do not know. If only I knew! But you are concealing something from me--and perhaps it is something about her, that woman!"

"But when I tell you that she--"

"No, no," she insisted, confirmed in her imaginings by her offended pride. "I know--I know. You men count such matters as nothing. A thing of the past; it is so all the world over, you say; and what I call something, you call nothing. And so I say there is something--that you are hiding, Frank."

"Eva, I swear--"

"Do not swear to it, for that would be a sin!" she shrieked out, wrought up, in spite of herself, to a paroxysm of insane belief in a thing of which she knew nothing certain. "For I feel it. I feel, it here, in me, about me, everywhere!"

He seized her by the wrists, carried away by his rage at her rejecting his a.s.severations, wounded in his proud consciousness of honour and truthfulness, and amazed at the depth of her infatuated distrust.

"Then you do not believe me," he said, with an oath. "You do not believe me?" And for the second time his tone offended and enraged her.

The exposure of their two antagonistic natures, with all their pa.s.sions and infirmities, brought them into collision.

"No; since you will have it--No!" she cried, and she wrenched herself free from his vice-like grasp with such violence that her slender wrists cracked. "Now you know it: I do not believe you. You are hiding something from me, and it has something to do with that woman. I feel it, and what I feel is to me undeniable. That creature, who dared to speak to you, has taken root in my imagination; I feel her close to me, smell her scent, and am so intensely conscious that there is still something between you and her that I am bold to say to you: 'You lie; you lie for her sake and are cheating me!'"

With a sort of low bellow, which broke from him involuntarily, he rushed at her, clenching his fists, and she mechanically shrank back. But he seized her hands again, enclosing them in his great strong fingers, so that she felt his power through her flesh, in her very bones.

"Oh"--and it was like muttering thunder; "you have no heart--none, that you can say such things to me! You are base, mean, even to think them!

'You feel, and you feel!' Yes. It is your own petty narrowness that you feel. You have nothing in you but base and contemptible incredulity!

Your whole nature is mean! Everything is at an end between us; I have nothing more to do with you, I was mistaken in you."

He flung her off, on to a sofa. There she remained, staring up at the ceiling with wide-open eyes. At the moment she was startled rather than angry, and did not fully understand the state of things. Her over-wrought brain was bewildered; she knew not what had happened.

For a minute he stood looking at her. His lips wore a sneer of contempt, and his eyes, half closed in scorn, glanced over her prostrate form; He saw how pretty she was; her graceful figure, stretched on the Turkish pillows, revealed the soft lines of its supple, girlish mould through the clinging folds of a thin pale green material; her hair, which had come loose, hung to the floor, like the red-gold fleece of some rare wild creature; her bosom heaved with spasmodic rapidity. She lay there like a ravished maid, flung aside in a fit of pa.s.sion. He saw all the charms that he had forfeited; deep wrath sprang up in him, a wild longing for the happiness he had lost; but his injured honour ousted regrets and longing. He turned away and left her there.

She remained on the same spot, in the same att.i.tude. She was full of obscure wonderment; darkness had fallen on her soul, as though, after being entrapped by falsehood, blindfolded by doubt, she had been led into a labyrinth and then suddenly released--her eyes unbound--in a dark chamber. Her soul indeed seemed to have bled to death; she could not yet know how deeply it was wounded, and in spite of her intolerable grief she still thought only of the darkness about her.

"How strange," she whispered. "But why? In Heaven's name, why?"

XIII.

After this there was a month of peace. A sudden calm had fallen on them both, full, for both alike, of silent, bitter grief. And, with it all, the insignificant commonplace of ordinary life, and the recurring, monotonous tasks of every day.

Even Bertie found himself breathing this strange, stagnant air. He wondered greatly what could have occurred. How simply, how easily, things had worked themselves out! He? No, he had done nothing; he could have done nothing. Events had merely followed each other. What had come about was the inevitable. And the possibility of a life free from care again lay before him; an eternity of comfort and wealth with Westhove, for whom he felt his old affection revive with the glow almost of a pa.s.sion, now that Frank, severed from Eva, though blaming himself indeed, needed consolation and sympathy. And Bertie's low, unctuous tones were full of sympathy. Oh, the dark melancholy of the first few days, the terrible grief of wondering, when now, his indignation cold, Frank asked himself, as Eva had asked herself, Why? Why, had this happened? What had he done? What had brought it about? And he could not see, could not understand; it was like a book out of which leaves have been torn so as to spoil the sense. He could comprehend neither himself and his fury, nor Eva and her doubts. All life seemed to him a riddle.

For hours together he would sit gazing out of the window, staring at the opaque dulness of the London fog, his eye fixed on that riddle. He rarely went out, but sat dreaming in White-Rose Cottage, which was lonely and quiet enough in its remote suburb. An enervating indifference possessed his stalwart frame; for the first time in his life he saw himself in a true light, and detected the vacillation and weakness deep down in his being, like a lymphatic stream traversing his sanguine physical vigour. He saw himself, as a mere child in resistance to the storm of rage, the blast of fury which had swept away his happiness.

And his suffering was so terrible that he could not entirely comprehend it; it seemed too all-embracing for the human mind.

These were days of dreary gloom which they spent together; Frank too dejected to go out of doors, Bertie creeping about very softly under the pressure of a vague dread and indefinable dissatisfaction. He felt Frank's friendship reviving, and, flattered by this revival, was conscious of a sentiment of pity, almost of sympathy; he tried to rouse Frank from his moodiness, and talked of a supper party--with ladies--on the old pattern. He made plans for going away, here or there, for a few days. He tried to persuade Westhove to take to work, mentioning the names of various great engineers who were to be found in London. But everything fell dead against Frank's obdurate melancholy, everything was swallowed up in the dark cloud of his dejection, which seemed incapable of more than one idea--one self-reproach, one grief. And the only solace of his life was always to have Bertie at his side; a closer intimacy to which Van Maeren himself was no less prompted, now that he had gained his selfish ends, having no further fear of impending poverty, and seeing always by him a consuming sorrow. Had he not rejected the notion that he had been the cause of it all? And had he not, during his late existence as an idle bachelor, become so super-fine a being that he felt a craving for the vague delights of sympathy; nothing more than sympathy, since no great and n.o.ble love, no strong and generous friendship could breathe in the complicated recesses of his soul, for lack of room and fresh air in those narrow cells built up on strange fallacies, and since love and friendship must pine and die there, like a lion in a boudoir.

Thus it was that he could still feel for Frank, could lay his hands on his shoulders and try to comfort him, could find words of affection--new on his lips--and unwonted phrases of consolation or cheering. Women, he would say, were so narrow-minded; they were nothing, they loved nothing, they were a mere delusion; no man should ever make himself miserable for a woman. There was nothing like friendship, which women could not even understand, and never felt for each other; a pa.s.sion of sympathy, the n.o.ble joy of affinity and agreement. And he believed what he said, sunning himself in Platonism with cat-like complacency, just as he basked in material ease and comfort, rejoicing in his raptures of friendship, and admiring himself for his lofty ideals.

But Frank's love for Eva had been, and was still, so absorbing, that he ere long-saw through this effete and decrepit devotion, and thence-forward it afforded him no solace. His depression wrapped him in darker folds. He forced himself to recall exactly everything that had happened; what Eva had said, what he had replied. And he laid all the blame on himself, exonerating Eva for her doubts; he cursed his own temper, his barbarous violence to a woman--and to her! What was to be done? Parted--parted for ever! It was a fearful thought that he might never see her again, that she could be nothing henceforth in his life.

Could it be no otherwise? Was all lost? Irrevocably?

No, no, no; the desperate denial rose up within him; he would triumph over circ.u.mstances; he would win back his happiness.

And she? How was she? Was she, too, suffering? Did she still doubt him, or had his vehemence, notwithstanding its brutality, made his innocence clear? But if it were so, if she no longer doubted him--and how could she?--good heavens, how wretched she must be! Grieving over her want of trust, with self-accusation even more terrible than his own--for his wrath had at any rate been justifiable, and her suspicions were not.

Was it so? Or was she, on the contrary, stricken almost to death, perhaps, by his cruelty, or filled with contempt for his lack of power to control his anger, which was like some raging wild beast? How was she? What was her mood? A pa.s.sionate desire to know pierced his heart now and again like a sword-thrust; to go to her, to pray for pardon, for restoration to the happiness he had thrown away, as he had flung her from him on that sofa. She would never admit him to her presence after so great an insult. But he might write.--Of course, a letter! His heart leaped with joy. What bliss to grovel, on paper, in the dust, at her feet; to humble himself in penitential prayers for mercy, and adoring words, while a.s.serting his dignity in the pride of his truth, and his anguish under her doubts! She would hearken, as a Madonna to a sinner; he would recover his lost happiness! And he tried to compose his letter, thrilling with the effort to find words, which still did not seem fervent or humble enough.

He spent a whole day over his task, polishing his phrases as a poet does a sonnet. And when at last it was finished he felt refreshed in spirit, with renewed hopes--a complete resurrection. He was convinced that his letter would remove every misunderstanding between him and Eva.

In the highest spirits he betook himself to Van Maeren, told his friend of the step he had taken, and all he hoped for. He spoke eagerly; his very voice was changed.

Bertie leaned back in his chair, rather grave and pale; but he controlled himself so far as to smile in answer to Westhove's smile, and he agreed in his antic.i.p.ations in words to which he vainly strove to give a ring of conviction.

"To be sure, of course, everything must come right again," he muttered; and the perspiration stood on his forehead under his chestnut curls.

XIV.

But an hour later, alone in his room that evening, he walked to and fro with such seething agitation as set every nerve quivering in his slight frame, as a storm tosses a rowing-boat. His soft features were distorted to a hideous expression of malignancy, with rage at his own impotence, and he strode up and down, up and down, like a beast in a cage, clenching his fists. Then it was for this that he had elaborated his tastes, had sharpened and polished all his natural gifts, and had directed all the powers of his mind like a battery charged with some mysterious fluid, on the secrets of a girl's love and life! A single letter, a few pages of tender words, and the whole work would be destroyed! For now, in his wrath, he suddenly saw and prided himself on the fact; he saw that he--very certainly he--had guided events to sever Frank and Eva. How could he even for a moment have doubted it?

And it was all to come to nought! Never, never! No, a thousand times, no! Awful, and infinitely far as the horizon, the perspective of life yawned before him--the dead level of poverty, the barren desert in which he must pine and perish of hunger. And in his horror of treading that wilderness every sinew of his lax resolve seemed strained to the verge of snapping.

He must take steps forthwith. An idea flashed through his brain like the zigzag of forked lightning. Yes; that was his only course; the simplest and most obvious means, a mere stroke of villany--as conventionality would term it.... No need here for any elaborate psychological _pros_ and _cons_; they were never of any use, they got entangled in their own complications. Simply a theatrical _coup_.

He took his hat and crept quietly out of the house, with a sneer of contempt, of scorn for himself, that he should have fallen so low. It was half-past ten. He hailed a cab, and laughed to hear the melodramatic sound of his own voice as he gave the driver Sir Archibald's address--the voice of a stage traitor. Then he shrank into a corner of the vehicle, his shoulders up to his ears, his eyes half closed and gazing out through the dim mystery of the night. Deadly melancholy lurked at the bottom of his soul.

He got out near Sir Archibald's house, walked a few yards to the door, and rang--and the minutes he waited in the darkness before the closed house seemed an eternity of intolerable misery, of horror, aversion, loathing of himself. His lips were pinched into a grimace of disgust.

A man-servant opened the door with a look of surprise at the belated visitor, a surprise which gave way to an impertinent stare when he saw that Van Maeren was alone, without Westhove. He bowed with insolent irony, and held the door wide open with exaggerated servility, for Bertie to enter.

"I must speak with you at once," said Bertie, coolly, "at once and alone."

The man looked at him, but said nothing.

"You can do me a service. I need your a.s.sistance--pressingly. Can I say two words to you without being seen by any one?"

"Now?" said the servant.

"Yes, now; without delay."

"Will you come in--into the servants' hall?"

"No, no. Come out and walk up and down with me. And speak low."