"Love cannot be good. It brings no peace, no happiness—nothing but restless misery and burning pain. It makes you even willing to deceive him." Her lids fluttered and she caught her breath. "When another to whom I was dear, and who knew, said, 'Never tell him! I command you never to tell him!' I pretended to myself that the words had not been spoken out of pity, because my darling loved me too well to see me suffer; and I told myself that it was right to obey."
Saxham, following the yearning look that went back to that other's grave, heard the unforgettable voice uttering the command.
"He never dreamed of my miserable secret. He was so free, so frank, so open himself. He had nothing to hide—he was incapable of deceit! It never occurred to him—oh, Beau! Beau!"
Saxham's face was set like a mask carved in granite, but that other Saxham, within the man she saw through her tears, was wrung and twisted and wrenched in spasms and gusts of insane, uncontrollable, helpless laughter.
"Nothing to hide—incapable of deceit!" It seemed to him that the dead man, all that way down under the red earth and the grass and the flowers, must be laughing, too, at the Dop Doctor who was fool enough not to speak out and end the farce for ever.
Should he? Why not? But for what reason now, and to what end, since his virginal-pure, dew-pearled, Convent lily lay trodden in the mire? And yet, to look in those eyes....
They did not falter or droop under his again, as she told him in few and simple words the story of what had happened in the tavern on the veld.
"Now you know all!" she said; "now you understand!... Sister Tobias knows, too, and there is one other.... I do not speak of ..."—she shuddered and grew pale—"but of a man whom all of us here have learned to look up to, and believe in, and trust. No confidence has ever passed between us. I cannot give you any reason for this belief of mine in his knowledge of my story. I only feel that it is no secret to the Colonel, whenever he looks at me with those wise, kind, pitying eyes."
There was a look in Saxham's eyes that was not pity. The sunbeam that shone through the loose plait of her coarse straw hat, and gilded the edges of the red-brown hair-waves, aureoled again for him the head of Beatrice.
"I have no faith left, but I am capable of reverence," he had said to her.