The man touched his hat, half deferential, half impudent.
“’Tis through the secret passage your ladyship, so to speak, opened to us—a locked door in the little cellar beyant.”
I shrunk from him.
“You said—what did you say was in it?”
“What but a show of venison, miss—piled to the roof, one might say. He must ’a made a ryle living out o’ deer-stealing, by your leave.”
He had—and that was the whole truth of the secret he had withheld from me! All the time I had been torturing my fears into madness, he had been abroad in the midnight woods, murdering, not men, but deer; in league with an ignoble crew for a paltry gain. This romance of a social ostracism revenging itself on a social hypocrisy: savage, melancholy, yielding to love only the troubled sweetness of its soul—what did it confess itself at last? O, glorious, to be first consul to a little republic of poachers! To vindicate one’s independence by picking the pockets of the king! It was all explained now—the whisperings, the draggings, the creaking carts—in that butchers’ shambles, the secret store of a gang of deer-stealers. He was no better than a cutpurse. In my bitter mortification, I could have wept tears of shame. “I am justified of my act,” I cried to myself. “Better that he should think me a traitor now, than live to curse me for withholding my hand when there was time and opportunity to save him!”
Nevertheless, when they led him forth presently bound and quiet, I could not face his eyes, but cowered before the unspoken reproach and sorrow in them. He came up quite close to me.
“It was your own fault,” I muttered in my hair. “Why would you never tell me?”
“I was wrong,” he said, quite simply. “You must forgive me for what I have taken from you, Diana. If it is any comfort to you to know, the poor little unrealised bond between us reconciles me to this—and all that is to come.”
I felt as if my heart broke then and there. I was conscious of the red earl watching us. The other turned to him, with a laugh like death’s.