"I have known it ever since that horrible old woman—Medusa in a bonnet all over flowers—pansies instead of snakes—talked about Cupid and Psyche. And you knew it, and made her stop to tell you all about it. There is some cruel mystery—something that involves my fate with that of the actress I saw the other night."
Mrs. Tregonell sat with her hands tightly clasped, her brows bent. She felt herself taken by storm, as it were, surprised into decision before she had time to make up her mind.
"Since you know so much, perhaps you had better know all," she said, gloomily; and then she told the story, shaping it as delicately as she could for a girl's ear.
Christabel covered her face with her clasped hands, and listened without a sigh or a tear. The pain she felt was too dull and vague as yet for the relief of tears. The horrible surprise, the sudden darkening of the dream of her young life, the clouding over of every hope, these were shapeless horrors which she could hardly realize at first. Little by little this serpent would unfold its coils; drop by drop this poison would steal through her veins, until its venom filled her heart. He, whom she had supposed all her own, with whose every thought she had fancied herself familiar, he, of whose heart she had believed herself the sole and sovereign mistress, had been one little year ago the slave of another—loving with so passionate a love that he had not shrunk from letting all the world know his idolatry. Yes, all those people who had smiled at her, and said sweet things to her, and congratulated her on her engagement, had known all the while that this lover, of whom she was so proud, was only the cast-off idolater of an actress; had come to her only when life's master-passion was worn threadbare, and had become a stale and common thing for him. At the first, womanly pride felt the blow as keenly as womanly love. To be made a mock of by the man she had so loved!
Kneeling there in dumb misery at her aunt's feet, answering never a word to that wretched record of her lover's folly, Christabel's thoughts flew back to that still grey autumn noontide at Pentargon Bay, and the words then spoken. Words, which then had only vaguest meaning, now rose out of the dimness of the past, and stood up in her mind as if they had been living creatures. He had compared himself to Tristan—to one who had sinned and repented—he had spoken of himself as a man whose life had been more than half lived already. He had offered himself to her with no fervid passion—with no assured belief in her power to make him happy. Nay, he had rather forced from her the confession of her love by his piteous representation of himself as a man doomed to early death. He had wrung from her the offer of a life's devotion. She had given herself to him almost unwooed. Never before had her betrothal appeared to her in this humiliating aspect; but now, enlightened by the knowledge of that former love, a love so reckless and self-sacrificing, it seemed to her that the homage offered her had been of the coldest—that her affection had been placidly accepted, rather than passionately demanded of her.
"Fool, fool, fool," she said within herself, bowed to the dust by this deep humiliation.
"My darling, why don't you speak to me?" said Mrs. Tregonell, tenderly, with her arm round the girl's neck, her face leaning down to touch that drooping head.
"What can I say? I feel as if my life had suddenly come to an end, and there were nothing left for me to do, except just to sit still and remember what has been."
"You mean to break with him?"
"Break with him! Why he has never been mine. There is nothing to be broken. It was all a delusion and a dream. I thought he loved me—loved me exactly as I loved him—with the one great and perfect love of a lifetime—and now I know that he never loved me—how could he after having only just left off loving this other woman?—if he had left off loving her. And how could he when she is so perfectly lovely? Why should he have ever ceased to care for her? She had been like his wife, you say—his wife in all but the name—and all the world knew it. What must people have thought of me for stealing away another woman's husband?"