“Sit down, Christine,” he said gently, “I am not ready to begin yet. I want to talk to you.”
She looked surprised, but sank upon the lounge and he seated himself by her side. The utter lassitude of her expression made his task seem desperately hard to begin.
“I have something to tell you, dear Christine,” he said, “but I want you to make me a promise first. If the few poor little services I have been able to render you, and the interest and sympathy I have tried to express to you have done anything at all, I think they must have convinced you that I am your true, devoted friend and that you can trust me. Tell me this, Christine; you do trust me—don’t you?”
“More than any one on earth—but that is too little,” she said hastily—“as much as I could ever have trusted any one—as much as I trusted those who have been unworthy—and with a feeling that the knowledge of their unworthiness could never affect a thing so high as my faith in you.”
“Thank God that it is so. And now, Christine, I call the God we both adore and fear to witness that I will be true to your faith in me, to the last recess of my mind, no less than to the last drop of my blood. See, Christine, I swear it on my cross,” and he drew it out, touching the picture as he did so. “Give me your hand,” he said, “and we will hold this sacred cross between my hand and yours, and I will tell you this thing, and you must try to feel that I am not only your knight but also your dear brother, in whom all the confidence you have expressed to me is strengthened by the added bond of relationship. Christine, my sister, I want you to realize that there is an ordeal before you which it will take all the strength that you can summon to bear with fortitude. At first you will think it intolerable—impossible to be borne, and I do not pretend to tell you that the blow will not be awful, beyond words. I only want to say to you now, when you are calm enough to listen, that it is not so hopeless and terrible as it will look at first—that there is light beyond, though at first you may not be able to see it. Try to keep that in your mind if you can.”
She had given him her hand and they clasped the cross between them. All the time that he was speaking she looked at him with a calm and unbelieving wonder in her large eyes. As he paused she shook her head with grave incredulousness and said quietly:
“You do not know me, Mr. Noel. I thought you understood a little, but you are wrong if you think there is anything you could tell me for which I should care so much. I do not suppose I could make you understand it, but my heart is dead and buried in my baby’s grave, and nothing could make me feel as you expect me to feel. The two or three people that I—know” (Noel knew by the pause she made that she had wanted to say love, but couldn’t, in honesty, use the word) “are all well. I have just come from them—even Dr. Belford I have seen to-day—but if you were going to tell me they were all dead I could not care a great deal—at least not in the way you expect me to care—for what you have to tell me. It may be wicked to have so hard a heart, but I cannot help it. There is absolutely nothing in all the world that could make me feel in the way you think I ought to feel at what you have to tell me.”
“I did not say ought,” said Noel, “there is no ought about it. It is a thing inevitable. Oh, Christine, there is no way to lead up to it. I must just tell you and beg you, for my sake at least, to try to bear it.”
“You had better tell me,” she said. “You will see how I can bear it.”
The calm security of her tones, the passionless wonder of her quiet face were almost maddening. They made him fear the more the effect of the shock when it should come.