“He will be appeased by her sacrifice of me?”
She paused a moment, as if with a cold irony for his grossness. “It is her heart he misses,” she then said.
He stood across the table from her, considering her. For the first time he seemed to see in full clearness the force of the passion that moved her. Her very being was centred in one loyalty, one devotion. She would, he felt sure, sacrifice any thing, any one, to it. He considered her and she kept her cold, ironic face uplifted to his scrutiny. There was desecration, he felt, in the blow his mind now prepared. Yet, as she was merciless, so he, too, must be. “How is it he comes to you and not to Tony?” he asked her. “How is it you know what he suffers?”
Unsuspecting, she was still ready to deal with him, since that was to be done with him. “I have always been like that. I have always known things and felt them, and sometimes seen them. I have known Malcolm since he was a child. There is nothing he has felt that I have not known. It frightened him, sometimes, to find that I had known everything.—The bond is not broken.”
“No. It is not. But do you see what I am going to tell Antonia to-morrow?” he said, not stirring as, with his folded arms, he looked across at her. “That such a bond as that sets her free. It’s you he comes for; you he misses. Realities take their place after death. Things come out. He didn’t know it while he was alive. You were too near for him to know it. But it’s you who are his mate. You are the creature nearest to him in the universe.”
She sat still for a moment after he had finished. Then she rose. Her little face, with its lighted glare, was almost terrifying. He saw, as he looked at her, that he had committed a sacrilege, yet he could not regret it.
“You know you lie,” she said.—It had been a sacrilege, yet it might help him and Tony, for now all her barriers were down.—“If that were true how could I wish to keep her for him? He is the creature nearest to me in the universe, but I am not near him. Never, never, never,” said Miss Latimer; and her voice, as she spoke, piped to a rising wail. “He was fond of me; never more than fond, and Antonia was the only woman he ever loved. I was with him in it all. I helped him sometimes to answer her letters, for she frightened him with her cleverness, and he was not like that; he was not clever in your way. And he would grow confused. Nothing ever brought us so near. It was of her we talked that last night, beside the fountain, in the flagged garden. It was then he told me that he knew, whatever happened to him, that he and Antonia belonged to each other forever.”
It was the truth, absolute and irrefutable. Yet, though before it, and her, in her bared agony, he knew himself ashamed, the light had come to him as it blazed from her. It gave him all he needed. He was sure now, as he had not been sure before, of what was not the truth. Malcolm, as a wraith, a menace, was exorcised. There was only Miss Latimer to deal with.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. “I was wrong. You convince me. But there’s something else.” She had dropped down again upon her chair and she had put up her hand to her face, and so she sat while he spoke to her. “You see, your love explains everything,” he said. “I mean, everything that needs explaining. Don’t think I speak as an enemy. It’s only that I understand you and what has happened to you, and to us, better than you do yourself. You are so sure of your fact that you feel yourself justified in giving it to Antonia in a symbol; so, as you say, to keep her for him. You are sure he is here; you are sure he suffers; and you feel it right to tell her you have seen him, to save her from herself, as you would see it; and from me.”
Her hand had dropped and the face she showed him was, in its bewilderment, in its desperation, its distraction, strangely young; like the face of a child judged by some standard it does not understand. “A symbol? What do you mean by a symbol?” she asked, and her voice was the reedy, piping voice of a child.