“I know—I felt like that too—he is so charming, and has such nice eyes. It is hard to believe he could be such a brute—but you would have had to believe Nonie Valetta to-night. It is clear that she is one of his victims. Of course her husband is a dreadful cad and they say kicks her, and that no doubt makes her the bitter and wretched woman she is, but every one knows she is desperate about Kinsella. She as good as admitted it to-night though she knows how I detest that kind of thing and that she would get no sympathy—but she told me, looking as white as a ghost, that I ought to warn you as she had warned Anna Cleeve some months ago, that he is married. It was really too bad of him to start a flirtation with Anna Cleeve. They were always riding together and so on and every one thought it would come to an engagement, and then suddenly the whole thing came to a full stop, and now they never speak to each other. The only people who knew the real reason were he and Anna Cleeve, but now it appears that Mrs Valetta told Anna that he was a married man and that she should tax him with it, and Anna did. She asked him point blank and instead of answering he laughed in her face and said, ‘It is women like you and Mrs Valetta who kick a man’s soul into hell.’ Then he walked off and has never spoken to her since. One would think that her brother would have risen in arms against such treatment, but no! The curious thing is that men are always ready to believe in Tony Kinsella. Anna Cleeve is practically engaged to Herbert Stanfield now, a Salisbury man, but she is frightfully unhappy, and every one says it was nothing but pique made her do it. Mr Stanfield is very nice but Tony Kinsella would spoil any woman’s taste for a merely nice man—he is so alive and vivid and extraordinarily bigger than most men about—don’t you think so? Anyway, I thought I’d just warn you, dear. As I told Mrs Valetta, I was sure there was not the slightest necessity—that you’ve had heaps of good offers and threw over one of the best matches in England because you were so hard to please (too hard, I think, but that’s neither here nor there). Anyway, I let her know that it was very unlikely you would consider any man out here good enough for you. All the same, I know how fascinating Anthony Kinsella is and it is just as well that you should know these things—so there you are. And now good-night. I’m so dead tired, aren’t you? What a crazy night!”
A crazy night indeed! I don’t know how I lived through what was left of it. My body lay still and anguished, but my mind wandered in a wilderness of wretchedness and misery where it sometimes seemed no gleam of hope or happiness could ever penetrate again. I had said that I believed no word of it all, but left alone with Judy’s haunting tale ringing in my head, how was it possible to dismiss the whole thing as a tissue of lies from beginning to end? Facts, such as his marriage, must be true. No woman would invent a thing that could be so easily disproved. He must have been married at some time (oh, God! that thought was hard to bear even if she had died since). If she hadn’t died—ah! that was too terrible to think of. Then what of Anna Cleeve? and Mrs Valetta? Blind as I wished to be I knew there was some truth in both these tales. Deaf as I had tried to be, had I not heard everywhere round me hints of his intimacies with women? Had he not said to me with exceeding bitterness: “You will hear my name blown back upon the breeze of fame—of a kind”? And then: “You cannot love me without sorrow, Deirdre.”
Oh! was it all true? Could it be true? Darkness engulfed me. I know not how I passed the terrible year-long hours. But at last my little silver travelling-clock struck five and I found myself staring at the first red stripes of dawn upon the walls.
Chapter Seven.
War Calls.
“Off thro’ the dark with the stare to rely on,
(Alpha, Centauri, and something Orion).”
When we met at the breakfast table the bloom of the dawn was on none of us. Mrs Valetta was pale and haggard as a murderess. Judy, cross and dishevelled, had a black smudge on her nose and was utterly out of tune with life because the boys had all mysteriously disappeared during the night, and she had been obliged to get the breakfast herself. I was not left long in ignorance of my own worn and unlovely appearance.
“You look like a ghost, Deirdre,” said my sister-in-law. “No more midnight revels for you! Really, dear, you are dreadfully white and your lips have quite a blue tint. What on earth is the matter?”