“You knew that I’d once been deceived by a woman,” he said. “Her name doesn’t matter. She deceived me, and my love for her died—as surely as a man dies if you stab him to the heart. She stabbed my love—and it died, and I swore then that I would give no other woman the power to hurt me as she had hurt me. When I met you I knew, almost at once, that you were a woman whom—if I allowed myself to—I might grow to love. I think it was your sincerity, your transparent honesty that won me. You were all I’d dreamed of in a woman—all that I hadn’t found in that other woman. But I was afraid. So I left Montricheux—went away at once. I didn’t want to care for you. I’d been too badly hit before. Cowardly, you’ll say, perhaps—you were never a coward, were you, Ann? Well, it may have been. Anyhow, I did go away and I tried to forget all about you. It wasn’t easy, God knows, and then, by a trick of fate, I found you again, at my cottage—living there, sister of the man with whom I’d just made a pact. After that it was a struggle between my joy at finding you there and my determination never to let myself care again for any woman.” He paused, but Ann did not speak, and after a minute he went on again:
“Well, you know how it ended. I was beaten. I loved you and I had to tell you so. When I yielded, I yielded entirely—gave you my utter love and faith. I believed in you completely—far more than I knew or even suspected at the time. And then, close on the top of that, I was told the story of how you had stayed at the Dents de Loup with Tony Brabazon. Even then I could hardly credit it. I came and asked you. And you didn’t deny it. It was true. What else could I think? I argued that you had thrown Brabazon over because I was a better ‘catch’ from, a worldly point of view—just as that other woman had thrown me over for a similar reason!—that you’d deliberately deceived me, that you’d been faithless both to Brabazon and to me, as you would be faithless to any other man who loved you.... Remember, it had been your seeming sincerity, your truth, your straightness which had first attracted me. And just as I had loved you for your truth, so then I hated you for your falseness—your unbelievable falseness.... Why didn’t you deny it all, Ann? Explain—clear the mists away from my eyes?”
“I was too proud—and hurt,” she said quiveringly.
“If you’d only stooped to explain—” He broke off, with a savage gesture. “Forgive me! What right have I to reproach or blame you? The whole fault was mine. Well, I believed you as disloyal and disingenuous as I had known you to be loyal and candid. And I went away. I went down into hell. You’ve at least the satisfaction of knowing that I paid for my distrust—paid for it to the last fraction owing—”
“Ah, don’t!” She raised her hand swiftly, imploringly. But he took no notice. He continued doggedly:
“Then, when I thought I had suffered all that a man could be called upon to suffer, I met Tony—Tony over head and ears in love with quite another woman, as unlike you—oh, your very antithesis! He used to talk to me sometimes. God knows I didn’t give him any encouragement! I hated the very sight of him. But he never guessed it. And one day he came and prattled out to me the story of an adventure he had had—at the Dents de Loup—how he got caught up there with a girl. And I knew, then, that it was your adventure, too—though of course he never mentioned your name. But it was as clear as daylight to me. It was as though scales had fallen from my eyes.... I knew then what I’d done. I’d pulled down our house of happiness about our heads. For a time I think I went mad. I could think of nothing except the fact that I’d made it impossible for me ever to come to you again—even to ask your forgiveness.”
He was silent a moment, leaning his arm on the chimney-piece and shading his face with his hand. When he again resumed it was with a palpable effort and his voice roughened.
“Afterwards, when I came to my senses, I saw that I must come to you. I had destroyed my own life—all that was worth while in it. But I had no right to destroy yours. So I’ve come back—to ask your forgiveness, Ann—if you can give it. And by forgiveness”—he eyed her steadily—“I mean all that forgiveness can hold—not just a mere form of words. I want the love I threw away—the right you once gave me to call myself your lover. If you don’t feel you can give it—I shan’t complain. I’ve no right to complain. I shall just go quietly out of your life. But if you can—now you know all—” He broke off. “Ann ... shall I go ... or stay?”
He made an involuntary movement towards her, then, checked himself abruptly and stood looking down at her in silence. From the ball-room there floated out the strains of the latest fox-trot, sounding curiously cheap and tawdry as they cut across the deep, almost solemn intensity that prevailed in the quiet room where a man had just stripped his soul naked to the eyes of the woman he loved and now stood as one awaiting judgment.
Ann remained silent. Speech seemed for a few moments a physical impossibility. She had been touched to the quick. Step by step she had gone with Eliot down into that place of torment where he had been wandering, suffering an agony of pain of which the keenest pang had taken birth in the bitter knowledge that it was of his own making, and in every fibre of her being she ached to give him back all that he had lost—all that he asked for. Ached to give it back to him complete, whole, unharmed—that love which had been his and which he had so piteously thrown away.