I had an instinct to rush from the room, but I overcame it.
“Shall I go now?” I asked presently. She was staring at me with her haunting eyes.
“You are well-masked—or can it be possible that you don’t care!—I misjudged you, then. I thought you honoured honour in men and women above all things—Tony thought so too—he said, ‘she is like a clear stream of water—and I am thirsty for clean water.’ Tell me if those were cruel words to hear from the lips of a man I had loved and given all to, Deirdre Saurin.”
Given all to! Was this what I had come to hear from the arid lips of this cruel woman! Was my faith to be shattered at last! But my heart rejected the thought even before she spoke again.
“Given all that was best in me. He was no saint, but because in long past days on the Rand he was Claude Valetta’s friend he would not steal Claude Valetta’s wife—charmed that wife never so sweetly, and loved he never so deeply. For he did love me—as he never loved any of the others—and in the end I should have won—I saw the day coming—felt it close—when he would have taken me from my wretched life to some other land. Then he went to Ireland—and came back a changed man.”
This again found me gazing at her amazed and bewildered.
“Ah!” she mocked. “You think you were the first girl he loved—it is not so. There was a girl in Ireland—a girl at a ball, who first dragged him from me.”
“A girl at a ball—”
“She took him back to old dreams, he said—her beauty and her purity—but he was married, and she was not—so he came away quick—he went back to his dreams on the veldt for many months after that. Poor Tony! how he loved a woman he could put in a shrine!—his trouble was that they wouldn’t stay there when he was about. And the women out of shrines had their call for him too.—After the girl in Ireland Rhodes got him for awhile with his dreams of Empire—but he was coming straight, straight back to me—I knew it from his letters, when he met you—where did he meet you?—Oh! what brought your feet straying out to Africa to trample on my hopes!”
What could I say? I was bitterly sorry for her and glad for myself—and broken-hearted for myself! What could I say? I was silent.