“What is she like on the whole?”
“Dull and moody sometimes, wandering about the place, hardly speaking at all. Once or twice she stayed in her room all day and refused all food. But at other times she will follow me about wherever I go, clinging to me like a child, eager to help. Sometimes she will commit some horrible little cruelty, and be ashamed of it afterwards and try to hide it. If she could speak of it at all, confide in anyone it would be better I think. But she does not seem able to.”
North sat staring into the fire with haggard eyes, the deep lines of his face very visible as the flames leapt and fell.
“It will send her out of her mind if it goes on,” he said at length.
Ruth did not answer. Her silence voiced her own exceeding dread; it seemed to North terrible. If she should fail he knew that it would be one of the worst things which had ever happened to him. In that moment he knew how much she had come to stand for in his mind. He kept his eyes upon the fire and did not look at her. He dreaded to see that fear again in her eyes, dreaded to see her weak. It was as if the evil of the world was the only powerful thing after all. And he knew now that he had begun to hope, things deep down in his consciousness had begun to stir, to come to life.
But presently Ruth spoke again, and, looking up, he met the old comforting friendliness of her smile. Her serenity had returned. Her face looked white and very worn, but it was no longer marred with fear.
“I am sorry,” she said, “and I am ashamed to have been so foolish, to have let myself think for a moment that we should fail. Hate is very strong and very terrible; but love is stronger and very beautiful. Let us only make ourselves into fit instruments for its power. We must. If Karl von Schäde lasts beyond, so too, more surely still, does Dick Carey. Why should we be afraid? Will you give to Karl von Schäde the instruments for his power and deny them to the friend you loved? And is it so difficult after all? Think what he must have suffered, his poor body broken into pieces, his mind full of anguish that his country was ruined, beaten, and full of the horrors he had seen and which he attributed to us. Think of those last awful hours of his, and have you at least no pity? Try for it, reach out for it, get yourself into that mind which you knew as Dick Carey. Take Karl van Schäde into it too in your thought.”
She stopped, her voice broken, but the light that shone in her face was like a star.
“I will try,” said Roger North.
In the pause that followed the approaching clatter of Lady Condor’s re-entry was almost a relief. She brought them back into the regions of ordinary everyday things. Violet, too, was laughing, getting more like herself. The tension relaxed.