"Is there any use in recriminations," asked Ned wearily, "you have to decide. And, after all, she--she was no wife for you--you are young yet----" Ted listening, cursed him for repeating the inward thought that had forced itself into his mind. "You have all the world before you--and----" for an instant the voice hesitated as if ashamed, uncertain, then went on. "I had made out a deed of gift to you of a hundred and fifty thousand pounds. It is about all I have left, and the works and all that must go to the heir, you know. You see I meant to disappear, and I meant to take your wife,--so this was just payment. It can be just payment still. I shall not trouble you again. But--but you must decide at once."
He stood waiting for a moment or two, his head resting as before upon his upraised arm upon the lintel; then he heard a step, and lifted his eyes to check what he knew all too well would come from Ted's lips. Did he not know it? Was it not the answer of the world where everything even honour had its price? And was it not far better, far wiser? Was it not what he himself desired?
"You will find the motor by the bridge," he said quietly. "You had better call some one from the village first, and then the doctor. The children will give evidence, some of them were quite big, and no one at New Park knows anything. Good-bye? I shan't see you again."
When Ted had gone, he closed the door, went downstairs, gathered up the tell-tale flowers and fruits which he had brought, climbed to the window-sill and removed the iris, so, putting them all into a basket, went back to the woods.
Before the car returned with its first consignment of help, the misty-blue wreaths of the hyacinths, darkening with the dusk, had hidden him.
[CHAPTER XXVIII]
He roused himself, for the night was passing. The last twinkling lights--the lights which he had been almost--unconsciously watching in the valley below him--had gone.
But one steady star remained. That came from the room where she lay dead. It seemed incredible. Such sudden endings to all things came into life sometimes, of course; still why should they come into his? It was unfair. He risked everything on this one stake. Bit by bit he had given up everything else. He had chased love to the outside edge of the world, and now--it had gone over the verge.
He stood up and stretched himself, wondering vaguely how he had passed the last few hours. He had slept for a while, he knew. That was at the beginning, after he had gone down to the hollow where they had sat together, and where he had planted the iris by the side of the narcissus which was too proud to look for its fellow in the earth-bounded pool at its feet. It had amused him--yes! positively amused him--to dig holes for the bulbs with his pen-knife, and make a grave--long and narrow like the window-sill--just such a grave as he remembered on hill and dale at Kashmir. And it was not an empty grave either; for he had buried in it the violets and the primroses, the lilies of the valley and all things sweet.
In that first hour he must have been almost crazy with grief.