If he had only loved her, if he had but dissembled and seemed to love her! Overwhelmed with grief he searched his mind for one reassuring recollection, for one instance which should acquit him of complicity in the tragic agony of her death, but he found none. He had neglected her, denied her, tried to evade that final moment when he must ask her to be his wife, and through all she had borne with him with a sweetness unusual in her stormy nature; she had loved him well enough to make allowances, to forgive, to overlook! And now passing away from him without a word, she had left only her final kiss of forgiveness on his cheek, the wild rush of her tears at their last parting. Henceforth he should never speak to her again, never hear her voice, never know how deeply she had suffered, never ask her forgiveness. The fact that the sequence of events was inevitable, that a woman no sooner seeks a man’s love than she loses it, gave him no relief. In his own eyes he had been little short of a monster of cruelty to a dying woman because, forsooth, he loved another—younger and more beautiful!
Memory, too, tormented him with the thought of Margaret, young, sweet, confiding as she had been when he had first known her and loved her; he thought less of the moment when she broke faith and married White; her fault was less now than his; the error of a beautiful, wilful girl seemed but a little thing before the awful fact of her wrecked life, her tragic death. Through all she had really loved him, that one thing seemed certain; her spirit in all its wild sweet waywardness had held to this one tie, her love for him, and when she had turned to him at last in her wretchedness seeking happiness, asking it, pleading for it like a child, she had received not bread but a stone! He knew now that no living woman could have misunderstood his coldness, his tardiness, his indifference, and in his cousin’s pale and averted face he read an accusing understanding.
He threw himself into a chair again and sat staring gloomily at the floor. “What madness!” he exclaimed at last, with sudden fury; “how dared Gerty neglect her so? She was ill, weak, unprotected!”
“Gerty was no more to blame than others,” Allestree observed quietly.
Fox threw back his head haughtily, and their eyes met. “I was willing to give her my life,” he said bitterly, “I had no more to give!”
Allestree rose. “It is over,” he replied gravely; “we cannot bring her back; come, you will go there, she would wish it, I know,” he added, “and there is no one else!”
The awful finality of those words and the reproach they carried was indisputable. Fox rose with a deep groan and went out with him, without a word, to face the greatest trial of all.
VIII
IN a little pension on the rue Neuve des Petits Champs, Rose Temple had been working patiently at her music for six months and more, studying under one of the great Italian teachers, a man who had trained more than one prima donna and was, therefore, chary of his encouragement. The enthusiasm which she had brought to her task having been gradually dispelled by sharp disappointments, she had struggled on, determined to succeed at last.
The first test of her voice before the maestro and his French critics had been a failure, a failure so complete that she came home to weep her heart out on the faithful shoulder of the elderly cousin who was her chaperon and comforter. The weakness of a voice, beautiful but not yet fully trained, her trepidation at singing before the maestro and his assembled judges, together with the long strain of preparation, had united in her undoing. She came back to the pension without a word of encouragement, feeling at heart that she would never sing a note again.