“Do you remember what I said to you? That was the truth.”
“Not one hour afterward I was told that often—oh, often and often!—you walked together in the forest.”
“Then you were falsely told. It was not so.”
“Was the truth—and ‘is’ the truth.—You are earnest to clear her from every shadow of association with you. Why?”
“Why?” Aderhold’s eyelids flickered. “Why? It seems to me easy to know why. I was not born of so low condition that I would see the innocent dragged to a place like this.”
A moment’s dead silence; then Carthew spoke with a regathered and dangerous passion. “Others are here—dragged here for their own sinful activities, and accused likewise of being your hail fellows and boon companions. There are here a youth to whom it is said you taught atheism, and Mother Spuraway and Grace Maybank and your housekeeper at the Grange and others. Do you grieve for them that they are here?”
“Aye,” said Aderhold; “I grieve for them. Piteous, wronged souls! I tell you, I have had naught to do with them, nor they with me!”
Carthew’s voice quivered, and he struck one hand into the other. “Words are locked doors, but not the voice with which the words are uttered! ‘Piteous wronged souls’ that my gentleman born of no low condition feels grief for and would deliver if he might from gaol and judgement—and Joan Heron whom his voice only trembles not before, only caresses not because he would guard her from the ruin of his favour!—What good to loom there against me and thrust that, too, from you? You love her! You love her! And now I will know if she loves you! And when I know that I will know what I shall do!”
“You are mad! Her life and mine touch not, save as this Hawthorn music jangles our names together! I shall presently be dead. I know it, and you know it. Leave her living, her and these others! You have the power. Leave them living!”
“Power!” the other burst forth. “I have no power to save her. She is bound with a hundred cords! Had I not fallen ill I might have—or I might have not— But now it is too late. I cannot!” His helplessness was real enough, and it made—if he would not feel it too crushingly—a dark bubbling-up of heat, violence, murky and passionate substance a necessity to him. He gave it way.