“I hate you and despise you for a cold-blooded, selfish coward!” So that was the way Kathleen felt! Charley’s tongue touched his lips quickly, for they were arid, and he slowly said:
“I assure you I have not tried to influence Billy. I have no remembrance of his imitating me in anything. Won’t you sit down? It is very fatiguing, this heat.”
Charley was entirely himself again. His words concerning Billy Wantage might have been either an impeachment of Billy’s character and, by deduction, praise of his own, or it may have been the insufferable egoism of the fop, well used to imitators. The veil between the two, which for one sacred moment had seemed about to lift, was fallen now, leaded and weighted at the bottom.
“I suppose you would say the same about John Brown! It is disconcerting at least to think that we used to sit and listen to Mr. Brown as he waved his arms gracefully in his surplice and preached sentimental sermons. I suppose you will say, what we have heard you say before, that you only asked questions. Was that how you ruined the Rev. John Brown—and Billy?”
Charley was very thirsty, and because of that perhaps, his voice had an unusually dry tone as he replied: “I asked questions of John Brown; I answer them to Billy. It is I that am ruined!”
There was that in his voice she did not understand, for though long used to his paradoxical phrases and his everlasting pose—as it seemed to her and all the world—there now rang through his words a note she had never heard before. For a fleeting instant she was inclined to catch at some hidden meaning, but her grasp of things was uncertain. She had been thrown off her balance, or poise, as Charley had, for an unwonted second, been thrown off his pose, and her thought could not pierce beneath the surface.
“I suppose you will be flippant at Judgment Day,” she said with a bitter laugh, for it seemed to her a monstrous thing that they should be such an infinite distance apart.
“Why should one be serious then? There will be no question of an alibi, or evidence for the defence—no cross-examination. A cut-and-dried verdict!”
She ignored his words. “Shall you be at home to dinner?” she rejoined coldly, and her eyes wandered out of the window again to that spot across the square where heliotrope and scarlet had met.
“I fancy not,” he answered, his eyes turned away also—towards the cupboard containing the liqueur. “Better ask Billy; and keep him in, and talk to him—I really would like you to talk to him. He admires you so much. I wish—in fact I hope you will ask Billy to come and live with us,” he added half abstractedly. He was trying to see his way through a sudden confusion of ideas. Confusion was rare to him, and his senses, feeling the fog, embarrassed by a sudden air of mystery and a cloud of futurity, were creeping to a mind-path of understanding.