The Tragic Bride

by Francis Brett Young

"I think you look sad to-night," he said. "Are you sorry that you came?"

"No, no—of course not. It's the moonlight that makes me paler than usual. But I'm always pale. You shouldn't look at me so closely, Arthur."

"I love to look at you. It isn't always that I get the chance. I just wanted to be certain that you weren't anxious. You don't think that we oughtn't to have come here?"

"No, why shouldn't we?" she said, turning her face away.

Then suddenly, in the edge of the copse beyond the nearest field, the nightingale began. The song was so beautiful in the stillness of the night that even Mrs. Payne, who had other things to think of, felt its influence. It was a strange, unearthly moment.

"You hear it?" Arthur whispered; but Gabrielle did not answer; she laid her hand on his sleeve and Arthur trembled at her touch. So they stood listening, close together, while Arthur took the hand that held him. She smiled and turned her eyes towards him but they could not look at each other for long. She surrendered herself to his arms and they kissed.

Mrs. Payne saw their faces close together in the dusk and their shadowy bodies entwined. She could bear it no longer, but turned and groped her way back along the privet hedge to the door from which she had first come. She did not know where she was going or how she went until she found that she had reached her own bedroom again. There, in her dressing-gown, she threw herself on the bed and fell into a fit of violent sobbing. She lay there shaken by sobs like a disconsolate child. Over in the coppice the nightingale sang exultantly as if he knew of the wonder that his song had revealed to the lovers who listened to him with their lips together.

XIX

It seemed to Mrs. Payne an endless time before she heard the steps of Gabrielle returning. She thanked heaven when she knew that she was coming back alone. The bedroom door closed and the sound pulled her together. It suggested to her that the time had now come when something must be done, and though it would have been much pleasanter to let the matter stand over until the morning, she knew that nothing could be gained by waiting, since all of the three people concerned were at that moment awake, and the crisis of the affair had been reached.

The reasons that had dissuaded her from tackling Arthur himself when first her suspicions were aroused still held. She regarded a scene with him as dangerous, for she could not be certain that a big emotional disturbance would not throw him back into his old nature, quite apart from the fact that it would wound her motherly heart. Against Gabrielle, on the other hand, she knew that she could steel herself. Gabrielle was a woman, a woman younger than herself, and, what was more, a visitor in her house. She was satisfied that she could tell Gabrielle what she thought of her, and, in a single interview bring this most uncomfortable and dangerous state of affairs to an end.