“It does not matter,” she murmured.
“Nothing much matters now.”
Sylvester lay back in his corner with an air of utter fatigue, and closed his eyes. They travelled thus in silence for a long time. To Ella the world seemed to have come to a disgraceful end. The dying state of the old man to whom she was hurrying was in keeping with the general finality of things. She suffered a horrible humiliation too deep for coherent thought. Gradually, however, the sight of Sylvester opposite, cold and stern, acted upon her like an irritant. At one moment she was seized with an hysterical impulse to scream. She mastered it, fighting with scornful violence. Resentment began to burn within her, first dull, then increasing in intensity to fierceness. The flame fed a smouldering horror scarcely as yet realised. Roderick was in a police cell that night. He would be tried on a disgraceful charge. The result would be imprisonment. Clearer and clearer grew the significance of the term. As a woman in touch with the thinking world, she had interested herself in contemporary social problems. Our prison system had been among those in which she had played the pretty part of amateur reformer. As the Honorary Secretary of a society which had rapidly burned itself out with excessive zeal, she had learned many of the hateful facts. For a fortnight the fate of the tenderly nurtured gentleman condemned to the unutterable torture of imprisonment had been a nightmare. Her aunt had rediscovered a teacher of music, once a well-known singer, now voiceless through illness, Yvonne Latour, who had married a man called Joyce, a cultivated gentleman who deservedly had passed through the wintry sorrows of the gaol, and Yvonne had told her what they meant. Her own troubles, the Walden Art Colony, her relations with Roderick, had put the subject out of her mind; but now the recollection of these things grew more vivid every moment. Her own benumbing sense of humiliation was lost in the new shudder. Liar she knew Roderick to be; that he was a forger, reason forbade her to doubt. Yet by her yielding to his kisses that day, she had given him, as it were, some share of her flesh, and her own flesh quivered at the contaminating touch of the gaol.
The train thundered on. The windows of the carriage were opaque with steam. Opposite sat Sylvester like a sphinx, his cap drawn over his eyes, so that she could not see whether they were open or shut. Suddenly the brake grated and the wheels dragged beneath the carriage, and the train stopped with a jerk at a little, vaguely lighted station. Sylvester looked up mechanically and found the girl's eyes, deep and dark behind her veil, fixed upon him. She felt impelled to speak, yet altered her appeal at the instant the prearranged words were about to leave her lips. Instinctively she sought to wound him.
“If Uncle Matthew is dying, how could you leave his side? I thought you at least loved him.”
He stared at her for a moment without replying. It seemed incredible that any one should not perceive his torture of anxiety. He forgot the iron will whereby he had kept it hidden. To sit idly hour after hour, as he had done that day, poignantly conscious of every train that might have taken him to that one spot on the earth whither every fibre of his being was drawn, to disregard the piteous appeals made to him from time to time, to come and comfort the dying man whom he loved so passionately, had been an effort of almost superhuman strength. The inability of his questioner to realise his suffering bewildered him. At that instant of time it was his whole existence.
“A man's duty is above love or death,” he said coldly, after a pause. “I can't discuss it with you, for you would not understand. At least, I have served him in delivering you.”
She gripped the arms of the seat and for a while said nothing. Then as the train moved on, she spoke somewhat huskily, forcing herself to her point.
“Are you going to carry out your intentions—as regards—him?”
“Certainly.”