"Yes. Honestly I believe she was incapable of looking, as one might say, all round the subject. You see"—Chloe hesitated, not sure how far the suggestion was permissible—"she had once been in an asylum, and possibly her brain had never worked quite normally since that tragedy on the cliffs."
"No, it is possible she was the victim of a sort of monomania," conceded Anstice. "In which case no other person would be connected in her mind with the affair save the one against whom the campaign was directed. It is a pretty lame explanation, I own, but then the workings of the human mind are so extraordinarily incomprehensible sometimes that I, for my part, have very nearly ceased being surprised at anything a man or woman may be disposed to do!"
"Tochatti tells me she grew very uneasy when things began to look really black," continued Chloe. "She had not understood when she started that letters of this kind rendered one liable to imprisonment sometimes; and she was horrified when she discovered that fact. I believe she would willingly have undone the harm she had done if it had been possible; for she couldn't help seeing, as the days went on, that I was in grave danger of incurring the penalty of her fault. Once, at least, I am sure she nerved herself to tell the whole truth——"
"Her good intentions evidently went to pave a place which shall be nameless," said Major Carstairs dryly. "After all, her affection for you seems to have been a very pinchbeck affair, Chloe, if she could calmly stand by and see you suffer for her wickedness. And for my part I don't see how you can be expected to forgive her."
For a second Chloe sat silently in her corner of the couch; and in her face were the traces of the conflicting emotions which made for a moment a battlefield of her soul.
After all Chloe Carstairs was a very human woman; and it is not in human nature to suffer a great wrong and feel no resentment against those who have inflicted that wrong. Had she been able to forgive Tochatti immediately, to condone her wickedness, to restore the woman to her old place in her esteem, Chloe had been something less—or more—than human; and that she was after all only mortal was proved by her answer to Carstairs' last speech.
"I don't think I have forgiven her—yet——" she said very quietly. "At the same time I don't care to doubt the genuineness of her affection for me. I would rather think that she turned coward at the notion of suffering punishment, and let me endure it in her place through a selfish terror which forbade her to own up and take the blame herself."
"Well—if you look at it like that——" Major Carstairs was evidently not satisfied; and Chloe, possibly feeling unable, or reluctant, to make any further excuse for Tochatti, hurried on with her tale.
"Another factor in Tochatti's determination not to suffer herself is to be found in her dread of a prison as a sort of asylum like that in which she had been confined abroad. I don't know what kind of institution that had been, but she evidently retains to this day a very vivid recollection of the horrors she then endured; and her heart failed her at the bare thought of returning to such a frightful existence as she had then experienced. At any rate"—she suddenly abandoned her apologia—"she could not face it; and so she allowed me to take the blame; and by reiterating the fact that she could not write—a theory which the other servants held, in common with me——"
"But had you never seen her write? It seems odd, all the years she had been in your service!"