“There is a thing I wish you to understand. Every woman could not.”
“I shall understand.”
“Because I know you will I need not enter into exact detail. You will not find what I say abnormal.”
There had been several pauses during his relation. Once or twice he had stopped in the middle of a sentence as if for calmer breath or to draw himself back from a past which had suddenly become again a present of torment too great to face with modern steadiness. He took breath so to speak in this manner again.
“The years pass, the agony of being young passes. One slowly becomes another man,” he resumed. “I am another man. I could not be called a creature of sentiment. I have given myself interests in existence—many of them. But the sealed tomb is under one’s feet. Not to allow oneself to acknowledge its existence consciously is one’s affair. But—the devil of chance sometimes chooses to play tricks. Such a trick was played on me.”
He glanced down at the two pictures at which she herself was looking with grave eyes. It was the photograph of Feather he took up and set a strange questioning gaze upon.
“When I saw this,” he said, “this—exquisitely smiling at me under a green tree in a sunny garden—the tomb opened under my feet, and I stood on the brink of it—twenty-five again.”
“You cannot possibly put it into words,” the Duchess said. “You need not. I know.” For he had become for the moment almost livid. Even to her who so well knew him it was a singular thing to see him hastily set down the picture and touch his forehead with his handkerchief.
She knew he was about to tell her his reason for this unsealing of the tomb. When he sat down at her table he did so. He did not use many phrases, but in making clear his reasons he also made clear to her certain facts which most persons would have ironically disbelieved. But no shadow of a doubt passed through her mind because she had through a long life dwelt interestedly on the many variations in human type. She was extraordinarily interested when he ended with the story of Robin.
“I do not know exactly why ‘it matters to me’—I am quoting her mother,” he explained, “but it happens that I am determined to stand between the child and what would otherwise be the inevitable. It is not that she has the slightest resemblance to—to anyone—which might awaken memory. It is not that. She and her mother are of totally different types. And her detestation of me is unconquerable. She believes me to be the worst of men. When I entered the room into which the woman had trapped her, she thought that I came as one of the creature’s damnable clients. You will acknowledge that my position presents difficulties in the way of explanation to a girl—to most adults in fact. Her childish frenzy of desire to support herself arises from her loathing of the position of accepting support from me. I sympathize with her entirely.”