"No!" denied Saxham; and the monosyllable seemed to drop from his grim lips like a stone. Her bosom heaved with short, quick sobs.
"I meant to go out into the world, and meet those women who think and work for women, and hear all they have to say, and learn all they have to teach. Then——"
She was Beatrice again, as she turned her face full on Saxham, and once more the virginal veil fell, and he was conscious of strange abysses of knowledge opening in those eyes.
"—Then I meant to seek out those women and girls and children of whom I spoke to you, those who lie fettered with chains that wicked men have riveted, in the dark dungeons that their tyrants and torturers have quarried out of the living rock, out of the reach of fresh air and sunshine, beyond the reach of those who would pity and help ... I meant to go down to them, and comfort them, and raise them up. I meant to have said: 'Trust me, believe me, listen to me, follow me! For my sorrow is your sorrow, and my wrong your wrong, and my shame yours—O! my poor, poor unhappy sisters!...'"
There was a great drumming and surging of the blood in Saxham's ears. His heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her knees amongst the grasses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the butterfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too, his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled maiden Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.
Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of those eyes—the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.
"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful, cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and worshipped—I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a man's face came near—I said in my heart that Love should never find a dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be to those poor sisters of mine what she was—oh, my darling! my darling!—to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and at last——"
She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands, and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs between the gasped-out sentences:
"—At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to those others—I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things—things that come back and burn you—and his breath upon your cheek drowns out your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off caring.... Love has made you indifferent as well as unkind!"
She looked up at Saxham from where she crouched down at his feet among the grasses, and her distress melted some of the ice that was closing round his heart.