THE CUTTING OF THE KNOT.
"You can manage it for me?" asked Willie Ruston.
"I suppose I can," answered Carlin; "but it's rather queer, isn't it, Willie?"
"I don't know whether it's queer or not; but I must talk to her for half-an-hour."
"Why not at Curzon Street?"
Ruston laughed a short little laugh.
"Do you really want the reason stated?" he inquired.
Carlin shook his head gloomily, but he attempted no remonstrance. He confined himself to saying,
"I hope the deuce you're not getting yourself into a mess!"
"She'll be here about five. You must be here, you know, and you must leave me with her. Look here, Carlin, I only want a word with her."
"But my wife——"
"Send your wife somewhere—to the theatre with the children, or somewhere. Mind you're here to receive her."
He issued his orders and walked away. He hated making arrangements of this sort, but there was (he told himself) no help for it. Anything was better than talking to Maggie Dennison before the world in a drawing-room. And it was for the last time. Removed from her presence, he felt clear about that. The knot must be cut; the thing must be finished. His approaching departure made a natural and inevitable end to it; and her mad suggestion of coming with him shewed in its real enormity as he mused on it in his solitary thoughts. For a moment she had carried him away. The picture of her pale eloquent face, and the gleam of her eager eyes had almost led him to self-betrayal; the idea of her in such a mood beside him in his work and his triumphs had seemed for the moment irresistible. She could double his strength and make joy of his toil. But it could not be so; and for it to be so, if it could be, he must stand revealed as a traitor to his friend, and be banned for an outlaw by his acquaintance. He had been a traitor, of course, but he need not persist. They—she and he—must not stereotype a passing madness, nor refuse the rescue chance had given them. There was time to draw back, to set matters right again—at least, to trammel up the consequence of wrong.
When she came, and Carlin, frowning perplexedly, had, with awkward excuses, taken himself away, he said all this to her in stumbling speech. From the exaltation of the evening before they fell pitiably. They had soared then in vaulting imagination over the bristling barriers; to-day they could rise to no such height. Reality pressed hard upon them, crushing their romance into crime, their passion to the vulgarity of an everyday intrigue. This secret backstairs meeting seemed to stamp all that passed at it with its own degrading sign; their high-wrought defiance of the world and the right dwindled before their eyes to a mean and sly evasiveness. So felt Willie Ruston; and Maggie Dennison sat silent while he painted for her what he felt. She did not interrupt him; now and again a shiver or a quick motion shewed that she heard him. At last he had said his say, and stood, leaning against the mantelpiece, looking down on her. Then, without glancing up, she asked,
"And what's to become of me, Willie?"
The sudden simple question revealed him to himself. Put in plain English, his rigmarole meant, "Go your way and I'll go mine." What he had said might be right—might be best—might be duty—might be religion—might be anything you would. But a man may forfeit the right to do right.
"Of you?" he stammered.
"I can't live as I am," she said.
He began to pace up and down the room. She sat almost listlessly in her chair. There was an air of helplessness about her. But she was slowly thinking over what he had said and realising its purport.
"You mean we're never to meet again?" she asked.
"Not that!" he cried, with a sudden heat that amazed himself. "Not that, Maggie. Why that?"
"Why that?" she repeated in wondering tones. "What else do you mean? You don't mean we should go on like this?"
He did not dare to answer either way. The one was now impossible—had swiftly, as he looked at her, come to seem impossible; the other was to treat her as not even he could treat her. She was not of the stuff to live a life like that.
There was silence while he waged with himself that strange preposterous struggle, where evil seemed good, and good a treachery not to be committed; wherein his brain seemed to invite to meanness, and his passion, for once, to point the better way.
"I wish to God we had never——" he began; but her despairing eyes stifled the feeble useless sentence on his lips.
At last he came near to her; the lines were deep on his forehead, and his mouth quivered under a forced smile. He laid his hand on her shoulder. She looked up questioningly.
"You know what you're asking?" he said.
She nodded her head.
"Then so be it," said he; and he went again and leant against the mantelpiece.
He felt that he had paid a debt with his life, but knew not whether the payment were too high.
It seemed to him long before she spoke—long enough for him to repeat again to himself what he had done—how that he, of all men, had made a burden that would break his shoulders, and had fettered his limbs for all his life's race—yet to be glad, too, that he had not shrunk from carrying what he had made, and had escaped coupling the craven with his other part.
"What do you mean?" she asked at last; and there was surprise in her tone.
"It shall be as you wish," he answered. "We'll go through with it together."
Though he was giving what she asked, she seemed hardly to understand.
"I can't let you go," he said; "and I suppose you can't let me go."
"But—but what'll happen?"
"God knows," said he. "We shall be a long way off, anyhow."
"In Omofaga, Willie?"
"Yes."
After a pause she rose and moved a step towards him.
"Why are you doing it?" she asked, searching his eyes with hers. "Is it just because I ask? Because you're sorry for me?"
She was standing near him, and he looked on her face. Then he sprang forward, catching her hands.
"It's because you're more to me than I ever thought any woman could be."
She let her hands lie in his.
"But you came here," she said, "meaning to send me away."
"I was a fool," he said, grimly, between his teeth.
She drew her hands away, and then whispered,
"And, Willie—Harry?"
Again he had nothing to answer. She stood looking at him with a wistful longing for a word of comfort. He gave none. She passed her hand across her eyes, and burst into sudden sobs.
"How miserable I am!" she sobbed. "I wish I was dead!"
He made as though to take her hand again, but she shrank, and he fell back. With one hand over her eyes, she felt her way back to her chair.
For five minutes or more she sat crying. Ruston did not move. He had nothing wherewith to console her, and he dared not touch her. Then she looked up.
"If I were dead?" she said.
"Hush! hush! You'd break my heart," he answered in low tones.
In the midst of her weeping, for an instant she smiled.
"Ah, Willie, Willie!" she said; and he knew that she read him through and through, so that he was ashamed to protest again.
She did not believe in that from him.
Presently her sobs ceased, and she crushed her handkerchief into a ball in her hand.
"Well, Maggie?" said he in hard even tones.
She rose again to her feet and came to him.
"Kiss me, Willie," she said; "I'm going back home."
He took her in his arms and kissed her. She released herself, and gazed long in his face.
"Why?" he asked. "You can't bear it; you know you can't. Come with me, Maggie. I don't understand you."
"No; I don't understand myself. I came here meaning to go with you. I came here thinking I could never bear to go back. Ah, you don't know what it is to live there now. But I must go back. Ah, how I hate it!"
She laid her hand on his arm.
"Think—if I came with you! Think, Willie!"
"Yes," he said, as though it had been wrung from him, "I know. But come all the same, Maggie," and with a sudden gust of passion he began to beseech her, declaring that he could not live without her.
"No, no," she cried; "it's not true, Willie, or you're not the man I loved. Go on, dear; go on. I shall hear about you. I shall watch you."
"But you'll be here—with him," he muttered in grim anger.
"Ah, Willie, are you still—still jealous? Even now?"
A silence fell between them.
"You shall come," he said at last. "What do I care for him or the rest of them? I care for nothing but you."
"I will not come, Willie. I dare not come. Willie, in a week—in a day—Willie, my dear, in an hour you will be glad that I would not come."
As she spoke, her voice grew louder. The words sounded like a sentence on him.
"Is that why?" he asked, regarding her with moody eyes.
She hesitated before she answered, in bewildered despair.
"Yes. I don't know. In part it is. And I daren't think of Harry. Let me think, Willie, that it's a little bit because of Harry and the children. I know I can't expect you to believe it, but it is a little, though it's more because of you."
"Of me?—for my sake, do you mean?"
"No; not altogether for your sake; because of you."
"And, Maggie, if he suspects?"
"He won't suspect," she said. "He would take my word against the world."
"They suspect—some of them—that woman Mrs. Cormack. And—does Marjory?"
"It is nothing. He won't believe. Marjory will not say a word."
"You'll persuade him that there was nothing——?"
"Yes; I'll persuade him," she answered.
She began to pull a glove on to her hand.
"I must go," she said. "It's nearly an hour since I came."
He took a step towards her.
"You won't come, Maggie?" he urged, and there was still eagerness in his voice.
"Not again, Willie. I can't stand it again. Good-bye. I've given you everything, Willie. And you'll think of me now and then?"
He was unmanned. He could not answer her, but turned towards the wall and covered his face with his hand.
"I shan't think of you like that," she said, a note of wondering reproach in her voice. "I shall think of you conquering. I like the hard look that they blame you for. Well, you'll have it soon again, Willie."
She moved towards the door. He did not turn. She waited an instant looking at him. A smile was on her lips, and a tear trickled down her cheeks.
"It's like shutting the door on life, Willie," she said.
He sprang forward, but she raised her hand to stay him.
"No. It is—settled," said she; and she opened the door of the room and walked out into the little entrance-hall.
It was a wet evening, and the rain pattered on the roof of the projecting porch. They stood there a moment, till her cabman, who had taken refuge in the lee of the garden wall, brought his vehicle up to the door. They heard a step creak behind them in the hall, and then recede. Carlin was treading on tip-toe away.
Maggie Dennison put out her hand and met Ruston's. She pressed his hand with strength more than her own, and she said, very low,
"I am dying now—this way—for my king, Willie," and she stepped out into the rain, and climbed into the cab.
"Back to where you brought me from," she called to the man, and leaning forward, where the cab lamps caught her face, so that it gleamed like the face of some marble statue, she looked on Willie Ruston. Her lips moved, but he heard no word. The wheels turned and the lamps flashed, and she was carried away.
Willie started forward a step or two, then ran to the gate and, leaning on it, watched the red lights as they fled away; and long after they were gone, he stood there, bareheaded, in the drenching rain. He did not think; he still saw her, still heard her voice, and watched her broad low brow. She still stood before him, not the fairest of women, but the woman who was for him. And the rumble of retreating wheels sounded again in his ears. She was gone.
How long he stood he did not know. Presently he felt an arm passed through his, and he was led back to the house.
Old Carlin took him through the hall into his own little study, where a bright fire blazed, and gave him brandy, which he drank, and helped him off with his wet coat, and put a cricketing jacket on him, and pushed him into an arm-chair, and hunted for a pair of slippers for him.
All this while neither spoke; and at last Carlin, his tasks done, stood and warmed himself at the fire, looking steadily in front of him, and never at his friend.
"You dear old fool," said Willie Ruston.
"Ah, well, well, you mustn't take cold. If you were laid up now, what the deuce would become of Omofaga?"
His small, sharp, shrewd eyes blinked as he spoke, and he glanced at Willie Ruston as he named Omofaga.
Willie sprang to his feet with an oath.
"My God!" he cried, "why do you do this for me? Who'll do anything for her?"
Carlin blinked again, keeping his gaze aloof. Then he held out his hand, and Willie seized it, saying,
"I'm—I'm precious hard hit, old man."
The other nodded and, as Willie sank back in his chair, stole quietly out of the room, shutting the door close behind him.
Willie Ruston drew his chair nearer the fire, and spread out his hands to the blaze. And as the heat warmed his frame, the stupor of his mind passed, and he saw some of what was true—a glimpse of his naked self thrown up against the light of the love that others found for him. And he turned away his eyes, for it seemed to him that he could not look long and endure to live. And he groaned that he had won love and made for himself so mighty an accuser of debts that it lay not in him to pay. For even then, while he cursed himself, and cursed the nature that would not be changed in him; even while the words of his love were in his ears, and her presence near with him; even while life seemed naught for the emptiness her going made, and himself nothing but longing for her; even then, behind regret, behind remorse, behind agony, behind self-contempt and self-disgust, lay hidden, and deeper hidden as he thrust it down, the knowledge that he was glad—glad that his life was his own again, to lead and make and shape; wherein to take and hold, to play and win, to fasten on what was his, and to beat down his enemies before his face. That no man could rob him of, and the woman who could would not. So, as Maggie Dennison had said, in the passing of an hour he was glad; and in the passing of a week he had learnt to look in the face of the gladness which he had and loathed.