“Ah, that’s not true!” she cried.
“Go, then, if she’s more to you than I am. I’m used to that.”
She moved away from him. Why did he not help her? He was a man; he loved her, but he was cruel. Ah, the thought warmed her, it was his love that made him cruel: he needed her; he was lonely. Under her cloak, she clasped her gloved hands in a helplessness which must be conquered. What shall I do? she asked the stars. Across the river the cliff was sombre; it seemed to listen and to disapprove. The stars were kinder: they twinkled, they laughed, they understood, and the lights on the bridge glowed steadily with reassurance. She turned back to Francis Sales. “You must trust me,” she said firmly. He put his hands heavily on her shoulders. “I won’t let you go.”
A murmur, inarticulate and delighted, escaped her lips. This was what she wanted. Very small and willing to be commanded, she leaned against him. “What will you do with me?” she whispered, secure in his strength. She laughed. “You will have to take me away yourself!”
“You wouldn’t come,” he said with unexpected seriousness.
So close to him that the wind could not steal the words, she answered, “I would do anything for one I loved.”
The memory of her own voice, its tenderness and seduction, startled her in the solitude of her room. She had not known she could speak like that. She dropped her face into her hands, and in the rapture of her own daring and in the recollection of the excitement which had frozen them into a stillness through which the beating of their hearts sounded like a faint tap of drums, there came the doubt of her sincerity.
Had she really meant what she said? Yet she could have said nothing else. The words had left her lips involuntarily, her voice, as though of itself, had taken on that tender tone. She could not have failed in that dramatic moment, but now she was half afraid of her undertaking. Well, her hands dropped to her sides, she had given her word; she had promised herself in an heroic surrender and her very doubts seemed to sanctify the act.
For a long time she sat by the fire, half undressed, her immature thin arms hanging loosely, her sombre eyes staring at the fire. She wished this night might go on for ever, this time of ecstasy between a promise and its fulfilment. She had seen disillusionment in another and did not laugh at its possibility for herself; it would come to her, she thought, as it had come to her mother, who had hoped her daughter would find happiness in love; and Henrietta wondered if that gentle spirit was aware of what was happening.
The thought troubled her a little, and from her mother, who had been a neglected wife, it was no more than a step to that other, lying on her back, tortured and lonely. If Christabel Sales had a daughter, what would be her fierce young thoughts about this thief, sitting by the fire in a joy which was half misery? Yet she was no thief: she was only picking up what would otherwise be wasted. It seemed to her that life was hardly more than a perpetual and painful choice. Some one had to be hurt, and why should it not be Christabel? Or was she hurt enough already? And again, what good would she get from Henrietta’s sacrifice? No one would gain except Henrietta herself, she could see that plainly, and she was prepared to suffer; she was anxious to suffer and be justified.