She took it and read it through once and a second time. I told her the story of my dealings with Mr. Rookley, from the moment of his coming to me at the Jesuit College in Paris, to the morning when I fled from Blackladies, and so much of his dealings with me as I was familiar with. It was, in fact, much the same story that I had told to my Lord and Lady Derwentwater, and contained little mention of Mr. Herbert, except the fact that he was painting my portrait, and no mention whatsoever of Mr. Herbert's wife. For I found that the whole account of my proceedings since I had come to England, fell very naturally into two halves, each of which to all seeming was in itself complete. She heard me out to the end, and then in low, penitent voice, for which it seemed to me there was no occasion—
"I knew nothing of this," she said, "or I would never so much as have uttered Mr. Rookley's name. I could not know. You will bear me out in this; I could not know." And she turned to me with the sweetest appeal in her grey eyes and a hand timidly outstretched.
"Indeed," said I, earnestly, "I will. You could not know, and I can well believe Mr. Jervas Rookley's conduct was very different to you." With that I took her hand, and again took it gingerly by the finger-tips. Thereupon she snatched it away, and got quickly to her feet.
"And for whom——" she began, and stopped, while she very deliberately fastened a button of her glove which was already buttoned.
"For whom—what?" said I.
"It is no matter," she said carelessly, and then, "For whom was the picture intended?" and as though she was half-ashamed of the question, she ran lightly down the hillside without waiting for an answer.
"For no one," I cried out after her. "It was intended to hang in the great hall of Blackladies." But she descended into the house, and I—I passed through the orchard and up the hillside behind it, and over the crest of the fell, until ridge upon ridge opened out beneath the overarching sky, and the valleys between them became so many furrows drawn by a giant's plough. And coming into that great space and solitude where no tree waved, no living thing moved, no human sound was heard, I dropped upon the ground, pressing a throbbing face down among the cool bracken, and twining my fingers about the roots of ferns. It was the blackest hour that had ever till then befallen me; mercifully I could not know that it was but a foretaste of others yet blacker which were to follow. Something very new and strange was stirring within me; I loved her. The truth was out that afternoon. I think it was her questioning which taught it me. For it brought Mrs. Herbert into my thoughts, and so I learned this truth by the bitterest of all comparisons. I saw the two faces side by side, and then the one vanished and the other remained. Here, I thought, was my life just beginning to take some soul of meaning; here was its usual drab a-flush with that rosy light, as of all the sunrises and all the sunsets which had ever brightened across the world—and I must give it up, and through my own fault. There was the hardest part of the business—through my own fault! The knowledge stung and ached at my heart intolerably. There was nothing heroical in the reparation which I purposed; here was no laying down of one's life at the feet of one's mistress, with a blithe heart and even a gratitude for the occasion, such as I had read of in Mr. Curwen's romances—and how easy that seemed to me at this moment!—it was the mere necessary payment for a sordid act of shame.
It was drawing towards night when I rose to my feet and came down the mountain-side to Applegarth, and, as the outcome of my torturing reflections, one conviction, fixed very clearly in my mind before, had gained an added impulsion. I must needs hasten on this reparation. It was not, I am certain, the fear that delay in the fulfilment would weaken my purpose, which any longer spurred me; but of those two faces which had made my comparison: one, as I say, had vanished from my thoughts, the other now occupied them altogether, and it seemed to me that if by any chance I missed the opportunity of atonement, I should be doing the owner of that face an irreparable wrong.
Miss Dorothy Curwen came late from her room to supper, and the moment she entered the parlour where Mr. Curwen and I were waiting, it appeared that something had gone amiss with her, and that we were in consequence to suffer. Her face was pale and tired, her eyes hostile, and asperity was figured in the tight curve of her lips. From the crown of her head to the toe-tips, she was panoplied in aggression, so that the very ribands seemed to bristle on her dress.
It was plain, too, that she did but wait her opportunity. Mr. Curwen provided it by a question as to her looks, and a suggestion that her health was disordered.