Saxham's square, pale face was perfectly expressionless. He waited in silence to hear the rest.
"You know of whom I speak ..." said Lynette. "He was gay and beautiful and winning—not chivalrous, as I believed him; not honest, or sincere, or true. Months before we met at Gueldersdorp he was the husband of this actress—the woman I saw upon the stage to-night. And you knew all this, and never told me! You knew that his memory was sacred in my heart. A woman I was introduced to here in London once tried to blacken it. She said she wished to act towards me as a friend. I remember that I laughed in her face as I turned and left her. 'You thought to make me hate him,' I said. 'You have failed miserably. If it were possible to love him better—if I could honour his memory more than I do now, I would, because of the evil you have spoken of my dead!'"
She heard Saxham draw breath heavily. She went on with increased passion, and gathering resentment:
"All my life long I might have gone on in my blindness, honouring the dishonourable, cherishing the base, but for the idle gossip of two strangers in the theatre to-night—a man and a woman in the stalls behind us. They talked all the louder when the lights went down. They wondered 'why the Lavigne did not star on the programme as a Viscountess?' but, of course, they said, 'the Foltlebarres would never stand that! They were nearly wild when that handsome scamp of theirs married her—poor Beauty Beauvayse, of the Grey Hussars.' He and she had kept house together; there was a kiddie coming; they said the little woman played her cards uncommonly well!... The marriage was pulled off on the quiet at a Registrar's a week or so before Beau got his appointment on the Staff. Straight of the fellow, but afterwards, at Gueldersdorp, didn't he kick over the matrimonial pole? Somebody had seen his engagement to a Miss Something-or-other announced in a Siege newspaper, published the very day he got killed.... Poor beggar! Rough on him, and rough on the Foltlebarres, and a facer for Lessie ... and what price the girl?' And I was the girl!... It was of me they were talking!..."
Her lips writhed back from her white teeth. She winced and shuddered. "Oh! can't you see me sitting and listening, and every word vitriol, burning to the bone?"
"Why did you remain," said Saxham, wrung by pity, "to be tortured by such prurient prattlers? Why did you not get up and leave the place?"
"I could not move," she said.... "I could only sit and listen. Then the First Act ended, and the lights went up, and Lady Hannah touched my arm. I knew when our eyes met that she had heard as I had. She got up, saying, 'I think we have had enough of this?' and then we came away."
She caught her breath and bit her underlip, and he saw her eyes grow misty.
"She sent a Commissionaire to call a hansom.... She took my hand as we stood waiting in the empty vestibule. She said: 'Those chattering pies behind us have saved me some bad half-hours! Your husband, for some reason of his own, has never told you. And it has more than once occurred to me that if I were the true friend I want to be to both of you, I'd have proved it before now by telling you myself. But I've learned to be doubtful of my own inspirations!...' I asked her then if all they had said was true? She shrugged her shoulders and nodded: 'Pour tout dire, they let Beau down rather gently.... But if he never could tell the truth to a woman, he never went back on a man; and, after all, these things run in the blood. Passons l'éponge là-dessus. Forget him, and thank your good Angel you're married to an honourable man!'"
Saxham's eyes were on the carpet. He did not raise them or move a muscle of his face.