“You speak as coldly, as bitterly, as if you regarded me as your worst enemy—I who love you.” He came forward a step, and she drew back hurriedly.
“All that is over. I too have a confession to make.”
“Good heavens, what is it? Are you not what I thought you? Have you some history, some stain—? Don’t for pity’s sake tell me that!”
Hadria looked at him, with a cold miserable smile. “That is really amusing!” she cried; “I should not hold myself responsible to you, for my past, in any case. My confession relates to the present. I came up here with this pencil and paper, half resolved to write to you—I wanted to tell you that—that I find—I find my feelings towards you have changed——”
He gave a hoarse, inarticulate cry, and turned sharply round. His hands went up to his head. Then he veered suddenly, and went fiercely up to her.
“Then you are in earnest? You do hate me! for a sin dead and buried? Good God! could one have believed it? Because I was honest with you, where another man would have kept the matter dark, I am to be thrown over without a word, without a chance. Lord, and this is what a woman calls love!”
He broke into a laugh that sounded ghastly and cruel, in the serene calm of the churchyard. The laugh seemed to get the better of him. He had lost self-control. He put his hands on his hips and went on laughing harshly, yet sometimes with a real mirth, as if by that means only could he express the fierce emotions that had been roused in him. Mortified and furious as he was, he derived genuine and cynical amusement from the incident.
“And the devotion that we have professed—think of it! and the union of souls—ha, ha, ha! and the common interests and the deep sympathy—it is screaming! Almost worth the price I pay, for the sake of the rattling good joke! And by this grave! Great heavens, how humourous is destiny!” He leant his arms on the tomb-stone and laughed on softly, his big form shaking, his strange sinister face appearing over the stone, irradiated with merriment. In the dusk, among the graves, the grinning face looked like that of some mocking demon, some gargoyle come to life, to cast a spell of evil over the place.
“Ah, me, life has its comic moments!” His eyes were streaming. “I fear I must seem to you flippant, but you will admit the ludicrous side of the situation. I am none the less ready to cut my throat—ha, ha, ha! Admit, my dear Hadria—Mrs. Temperley—that it appeals also to your sense of humour. A common sense of humour, you know, was one of our bonds of union. What more appropriate than that we should part with shaking sides? Oh, Lord! oh, Lord! what am I to do? One can’t live on a good joke for ever.”
He grasped his head in his hands; then suddenly, he broke out into another paroxysm. “The feminine nature always the same, always, always; infinitely charming and infinitely volatile. Delicious, and oh how instructive!”