She ceased playing as he came and stood beside her, and in the hush that fell between them, the echo of light laughter floated to them from the rooms above. It was a discord, a false note in the intensity of the theme.
Philip bent towards her, almost touching the white hair with his lips; it was a moment of exquisite uncertainty. Then she struck the notes again, and a plaintive prelude stole out, while in a low voice, monotonous yet musical, that seemed but the continuation of the melody, she said rather than sang:
"I am a woman,
Therefore I may not
Fly to him, cry to him,
Bid him delay not.
What though he part from me,
Tearing my heart from me,
Hurt without cure!"
Her voice faltered, sank into silence, her hands fell from the keys and lay motionless upon her lap. Philip, to whom the first line of her song had come not as a surprise, but as an expected climax, bent forward eagerly. Once again he heard the mocking voice of his vision, once again the faint sweet perfume of violets stole upward, robbing him of the reality of the present, restoring to him the past with all its unfulfilled promise and its hope.
It was the passion of surprise, not of arrangement or premeditation, that held him, and that swaying him against his better self, made him speak from the emotion of the moment.
"Adèle," he said, his voice low and restrained. "Adèle, you have doubtless heard my story; you know that I have been the sport, the plaything of one woman's vanity for all the better years of my life; and yet I dare to offer you the heart she has scorned. Adèle, will you accept it? Will you restore my faith and belief in womanhood; that faith and trust which another woman has so nearly destroyed? Hush, wait one moment before you speak. Yes, I know I am almost a stranger to you, I have seen you but half-a-dozen times; you know but little of me, and that little is not of the best. And, I too, what do I know of you? Nothing, save what Esther was pleased to tell us all concerning you. I realise that your past is seared and crossed by sorrow and grief, but always, Adèle, always since first I saw you, you have haunted me, you have possessed me, you have laid me under a spell. Break that spell now by saying you will listen to me; by telling me that at last, however late in life, my faith, my belief, my trust shall not be given in vain."
He stopped, and she looking up quickly saw the flush of earnestness upon his face, the light of eagerness in his eyes. She let fall her glance, and a little smile—was it of triumph or of pity?—crept out about the mouth, that died ere he could catch its curves. She had listened to him apparently without surprise, and without betraying emotion of any kind; her voice fell dull and cold when she spoke.
"You proffer a strange request, Mr. Tremain, and one not easy of reply. Is it possible you can be in earnest? Have you not heard my story? Has not the whole of Madame Newbold's world become cognisant of its details? Do you not know that Adèle Lamien is a woman on whom rests the blight of suspicion, if not of guilt? A woman whose life has been one of no common misery. Do you realise what it means to be suspected of crime, branded as a fugitive, an outcast? Can you gauge the depths of misery contained in the words ruined and repudiated? Do you not know that one spot upon a woman's reputation, though incurred through no fault of her own, stamps her for ever in the eyes of your world. Can you, knowing all this, realising it, yet ask me to listen to your words of vehemence? You, Philip Tremain! Ah, do you not know I would give my very heart's happiness if I might so listen? No, no; that is not what I mean. You are mad, Mr. Tremain, mad with the desire born of a moment's passion."
"I am not mad, Adèle," he urged. "I ask you again to listen to me, and I tell you again that I neither care nor wish to know more of your past than you desire to tell me. Cannot we forget that, cannot I make for you a future that shall outlive your past? Nay, wait one moment, there is something more I must say. You know I have no fresh first devotion to offer you, I have not even a heart swept and garnished for your acceptancy. I did not wish to love you, I am not sure I love you even now; all I know is that you draw me to you with invisible chains; that you take from me all resistance, all desire to resist."
"Ah," she exclaimed, with infinite bitterness, "you speak as a man. We women do not so easily break the bonds that have held us for so long. Suppose I were to take you at your word, suppose I were to listen to you, to your own undoing? What would be the outcome of it? I, a woman, Adèle Lamien, who perchance has looked shame in the face, who may have swept the by-ways of wickedness with her skirts, I to demand of you this sacrifice, and for what? That you may hear my name spoken in whispers and with bated breath; that you may see me pointed at in scorn and derision; that never may you look at me, never see my face, without the bitter memory of my buried past rising up between us. No, this may not be; you have loved before, it is not love you feel now, it is resentment, disappointment, anger. Put by your fancy of the hour, Mr. Tremain, and let Adèle Lamien fade out of your life even as she has come into it, an accident only. Do you not remember the fable and fate of the poor Cigale?