“Tell no one!” she echoed. “What! not Philip even? Not your oldest friend. Ah! be sure, whatever the evidence might be against you, his heart never condemned you for one instant.”
“I believe it. Yet all you can do for me, all I implore you to do for me, is to keep silence forever on my name. To-day, accident has made me break a vow I never thought but to keep sacred. When you recognized me, I could not deny myself, I could not lie to you; but, for God's sake, tell none of what has passed between us!”
“But why?” she pursued—“why? You lie under this charge still—you cannot disprove it, you say; but why not come out before the world, and state to all what you swear now to me, and claim your right to bear your father's honors? If you were falsely accused, there must have been some guilty in your stead; and if—”
“Cease, for pity's sake! Forget I ever told you I was guiltless! Blot my memory out; think of me as dead, as I have been, till your eyes called me back to life. Think that I am branded with the theft of your brother's name; think that I am vile, and shameless and fallen as the lowest wretch that pollutes this army; think of me as what you will, but not as innocent!”
The words broke out in a torrent from him, bearing down with them all his self-control, as the rush of waters bears away all barriers that have long dammed their course. They were wild, passionate, incoherent; unlike any that had ever passed his lips, or been poured out in her presence. He felt mad with the struggle that tore him asunder, the longing to tell the truth to her, though he should never after look upon her face again, and the honor which bound silence on him for sake of the man whom he had sworn under no temptation to dispossess and to betray.
She heard him silently, with her grand, meditative eyes, in which the slow tears still floated, fixed upon him. Most women would have thought that conscious guilt spoke in the violence of his self-accusation; she did not. Her intuition was too fine, her sympathies too true. She felt that he feared, not that she should unjustly think him guilty, but that she should justly think him guiltless. She knew that this, whatever its root might be, was the fear of the stainless, not of the criminal life.
“I hear you,” she answered him gently; “but I do not believe you, even against yourself. The man whom Philip loved and honored never sank to the base fraud of a thief.”
Her glorious eyes were still on him as she spoke, seeming to read his very soul. Under that glance all the manhood, all the race, all the pride, and the love, and the courage within him refused to bear in her sight the shame of an alien crime, and rose in revolt to fling off the bondage that forced him to stand as a criminal before the noble gaze of this woman. His eyes met hers full, and rested on them without wavering; his head was raised, and his carriage had a fearless dignity.
“No. I was innocent. But in honor I must bear the yoke that I took on me long ago; in honor I can never give you or any living soul the proof that this crime was not mine. I thought that I should go to my grave without any ever hearing of the years that I have passed in Africa, without any ever learning the name I used to bear. As it is, all I can ask is now—to be forgotten.”
His voice fell before the last words, and faltered over them. It was bitter to ask only for oblivion from the woman whom he loved with all the strength of a sudden passion born in utter hopelessness; the woman whose smile, whose beauty, whose love might even possibly have been won as his own in the future, if he could have claimed his birthright. So bitter that, rather than have spoken those words of resignation, he would have been led out by a platoon of his own soldiery and shot in the autumn sunlight beside Rake's grave.