CHAPTER XIX
But how? Have not her inward misgivings warned her all along? Yet it can be only by intuition. Even had any one seen her in Rumsey Brake—the very fire of hell seems to scorch her at the suggestion—even had any one seen her, what opportunity has that unknown talebearer had of betraying her to Rupert? Rupert returned only half an hour ago, and has had speech of no one but herself and the servants. Is the porter at the station likely to have conveyed the news of her unfaithfulness to him, as an agreeable item of local intelligence, while shouldering his portmanteau? or the coachman to have shouted it through the front window of the brougham? Yet to the abject terror of the girl’s guilty consciousness, either of these absurdities seems more likely than that the significance of her fiancé’s tone in reiterating his question came there by accident? He knows, if not by the ordinary processes and channels, yet by right of that terrible plate-glass window into her soul, of which he has always had the monopoly. All her life he has saved her the trouble of explanations, by a mastery of her thoughts which makes utterance of them superfluous. If she allows him, he will save her trouble to-day.
Athwart the darkness of her terror of discovery flashes an arrow of light. If he knows already, what use is there in further feigning? If he knows by intuition, he will know by the same means how she has struggled; how utterly against her own will has been her disloyalty. Already an insidious sense of relief and comfort is beginning to steal over her in the flashed idea of how easy he will make it to her; of how perfectly his unselfish insight will apprehend by what innocent steps she has grown guilty towards him; and again he will be the brother from whom she has no secrets; together they will acknowledge the fatal error of their late attitude towards each other; together they will admire, with easy minds and steadfast countenances, the cheerfulness of the nursery wall papers. And her uncle? And her debt?—the debt whose colossal obligation the partner and cause of her unfaithfulness has so fully admitted; has so little blinked the overmastering necessity of paying? It is all packed into thirty seconds—relief, hope, recurring terror and despair; the thirty seconds between his question, and the one with which—how unlike her in its shiftiness—she answers him.
“Why shouldn’t it? Do not you think there are enough already?”
“Quite; but all the same there is another.”
“What do you mean?” A sort of false stoutness of heart is coming to her aid. It is impossible that he can know except by intuition, and what is known only by intuition may be safely and successfully denied and given the lie to, if only it is done with enough brazenness and pertinacity.
He answers her with a collected insistence that shows her of how little use her unworthy subterfuges have been or ever can be, as between these two.
“We have not been taken away to a madhouse; we have not gone on the drink; we have not got double pneumonia; but it is to us that this last casualty has happened!”
She stands before him disarmed, her poor toy weapons knocked out of her shaking hand; yet she essays one more feeble parry with her helpless buttoned foil.