“Toppie, dear Toppie,” Giles pleaded. “She is not a bad woman. Wrong; but not bad. You can’t judge of these things. I’m not defending her.—It’s only that, seeing her, seeing all the beauty she has made in her life, I cannot feel about her mistakes as I should have thought I would. That’s why you felt me strained in speaking of her. It was a shock to me. And I didn’t want you to know. Put it away now, Toppie, I do beg of you. It has nothing, nothing to do with us. She’s a very beautiful, a very unfortunate woman, and it’s only by chance that we’ve stumbled upon these unhappy things in her past.”
Oh, the fatal background to his words! He knew how false they were, spoken to Toppie, for all that there was of truth in them for himself. “Let’s go home,” he urged, “and not talk about it any more.”
Toppie stood, her eyes fixed as if in careful scrutiny upon the distance. She had raised her hand, as he spoke, and pressed her fingers, bent, against her lips. He saw that she kept herself with a great effort from breaking into tears.
“It’s not that,” she uttered with difficulty. “It’s you.” And now she moved away. “I’m going home from here. I would rather be alone, please.”
The road led over the common to Heathside; there was a short cut through the woods to the Rectory.
“But, Toppie—I do implore you.” Poor Giles with his rough head and great round eyes stood and pleaded. “What have I done? What have you against me?”
“It’s everything, everything,” Toppie murmured. “It’s all I’ve felt in you this afternoon. I’ve stumbled—from one hidden thing to another.—It gives me dreadful thoughts. It’s as if”—she stopped again, her eyes still fixed on the distance—“as if there might be anything. She’s changed you so much.” And, her eyes coming to him at last, she spoke on, helpless in the urgency of her half-seen fear:—“It’s as if she might have changed Owen;—if he had ever come to know her as well as you have.”
Suddenly, at this climax, Giles found himself prepared. “What if she had?” he demanded, and it was like riding, with a great thrust, to the top of the breaker that threatened to engulf them. “What if she had made him judge things more kindly? No doubt she would have changed him. He would have felt her beauty, too. But she wouldn’t have changed him towards you, Toppie; any more than she has me.”
Then Toppie drew back. Seeing suddenly where she stood, seeing her fear as a disloyalty, she drew away. She looked at Giles and he saw the door, as it were, mercifully or terribly close against him and Toppie, demanding no further lies, shut herself away. “Perhaps you are right,” she said slowly, and each word came with an effort, for they were, doubtless, the only false words Toppie had ever uttered. “Perhaps I am too ignorant of the world. I do not judge your friend. But if I knew her, I could not think her beautiful. I could not think a wicked woman beautiful. We must be different in that.—I’ll go home now. I’d rather be alone. Good-bye.”
She moved away into the wood.