CHAPTER XXIV
Gerard gave the man who was holding the ponies a five-franc piece, and drove back at a break-neck pace. Minna’s revelation and taunts had set him in a frame of mind bordering on madness. He did not stop to question the truth of her statement. It cast too lurid a light upon the dark places of the mystery of four years ago. His egregious folly danced before his eyes. The wrong inflicted on a heroic woman and a loyal man loomed before him in ghastly significance. He could not hide behind sophistries. He was not a bad man, to contemplate the consequences of his actions with cynical complacency. Deep down in him lingered the conscience of the moral, if invertebrate, Briton. His conscience was appalled at the irreparable injury. Minna was suddenly transformed from the desired flesh feminine into an unthinkable hate. Irene assumed a new radiance of martyrdom.
In the searchlight that was sweeping his horizon, he saw her transcendent faith in his equal greatness of soul; saw, too, his own ignoble narrowness of comprehension. He had been a fool, besotted by his own brutality. He lashed the ponies viciously. A man translates into external fury the shudder that a flash of self-knowledge sends through his soul.
Yet the story he had heard was amazing; compelling credence, as Tertullian has it, quia impossible. All its elements were characterised by a marvellous intensity. What he had taken for a vulgar intrigue had really been a drama of fierce passions and noble heroisms, in which he alone had played a vulgar part. His gorge rose at the idea of the sorry figure he must have appeared in the eyes of each of the three.
The ponies dashed, sweating and dusty, up to the front of the Villa Benedetta, before he realised how the journey had been accomplished. Mrs. Delamere, summoned in haste, descended to meet him. Seeing him alone and agitated, and the ponies dripping, she grew pale.
“Where is Minna?”
“She has twisted her ankle. Wouldn’t drive back with me. You are to send a closed landau for her at once. You will find her at the Séjour du Soleil, on the road before you get to Var.”
“Aren’t you going back with the carriage?”
“No,” he replied brusquely. “You send it. You needn’t be alarmed. She is not hurt.”
“Then I suppose I may guess the reason——?”