'What can you explain?—how can you explain?' he said roughly. 'Are you going to tell me why my cousin and comrade hates me and plots against me?—why she has inflicted this slight and outrage upon me—why, finally, she has poisoned against me the heart of the woman I love?'
He saw her shrink. Did a cruel and secret instinct in him rejoice? He was mad with rage and misery, and he was incapable of concealing it.
She knew it. As he dropped his head again in an angry stare at the grass between them, she was conscious of a sudden childish instinct to put out her hand and stroke the black curls and the great broad shoulders. He was not for her; but, in the old days, who had known so well as she how to soothe, manage, control him?
'I can't tell you those things—certainly,' she said, after a pause. 'I can't describe what doesn't exist.'
And to herself she cried: 'Oh! I shall lie—lie—lie—like a fiend, if I must!'
'What doesn't exist'?' he repeated scornfully. 'Will you listen to my version of what has happened—the barest, unadorned tale? I was your host and Miss Foster's. I had begun to show the attraction that Miss Foster had for me, to offer her the most trifling, the most ordinary attention. From the moment I was first conscious of my own feeling, I knew that you were against me—that you were influencing—Lucy'—the name dropped from his lips in a mingled anguish and adoration—'against me. And just as I was beginning to understand my own heart—to look forward to two or three last precious weeks in which to make, if I could, a better impression upon her, after my abominable rudeness at the beginning—you interfered—you, my best friend! Without a word our party is broken up; my chance is snatched from me; Miss Foster is spirited away. You and she disappear, and you leave me to bear my affront—the outrage done me—as best I may. You alarm, you distress all your friends. Your father takes things calmly, I admit. But even he has been anxious. Aunt Pattie has been miserable. As for me—'
He rose, and began to pace up and down before her; struggling with his own wrath.
'And at last'—he resumed, pausing in front of her—'after wandering up and down Italy, I find you—in this remote place—by the merest chance. Father Benecke said not a word. But what part he has played in it I don't yet understand. In another half-hour I should have been off; and again you would have made the veriest fool of me that over walked this earth. Why, Eleanor?—why? What have I done to you?'
He stood before her—a superb, commanding presence. In his emotion all unshapeliness of limb or movement seemed to have disappeared. Transfigured by the unconsciousness of passion, he was all energy and all grace.
'Eleanor!—explain! Has our old friendship deserved this? Why have you done this thing to me?—And, my God!'—he began to pace up and down again, his hands in his pockets—'how well—how effectually you have gone to work! You have had—Lucy—in your hands for six weeks. It is plain enough what has been going on. This morning—on that hill—suddenly,'—he raised his hand to his brow, as though the surprise, the ecstacy of the moment returned upon him—'there among the trees—was her face! What I said I shall never remember. But when a man feels as I do he has no need to take thought what he shall say. And she? Impatience, coldness, aversion!—not a word permitted of my long pilgrimage—not a syllable of explanation for this slight, this unbearable slight that had been put upon me as her host, her guardian, for the time being! You and she fly me as though I were no longer fit to be your companion. Even the servants talked. Aunt Pattie and I had to set ourselves at once to devise the most elaborate falsehoods, or Heaven knows where the talk would have spread. How had I deserved such a humiliation?—Yet, when I meet Miss Foster again, she behaves as though she owed me not a word of excuse. All her talk of you and your health! I must go away at once—because it would startle and disturb you to see me. She had already found out by chance that I was here—she had begged Father Benecke to use his influence with me not to insist on seeing you—not to come to the convent. It was the most amazing, the most inexplicable thing! What in the name of fortune does it mean? Are we all mad? Is the world and everyone on it rushing together to Bedlam?'