“My story is a simple one. Married to a man many years my senior—treated with a mild gravity which my girlish wilfulness took for harshness—a great many tears—a great longing for the tenderness that never came—a gay, buoyant nature meeting mine, changing, it seemed, my twilight into sunshine—and then—what you know.
“Do not judge me harshly, Raine. But forget me. Forget that I came and troubled your life. Even were my name free from blemish, I am not good enough to be your wife. Forget me, and take to your heart one who will make you happier than I could have done—one younger, sweeter, purer. And she loves you. Let her win you.
“I have suffered much to be able to write this. It is a farewell. To meet you would be too great pain for us both. This morning, as you know, I saw Mr. Hockmaster, and I have promised to marry him. Fate rules these things for us. To the day of my death I shall pray for your happiness.—K.S.”
Raine’s face grew hard as he read the letter. A man quickly wearies of successive emotions. His self-pride asserts itself and makes him rebel against falling into weaknesses of feeling. He had been angry at allowing himself to be drawn towards Felicia, and a natural reaction of loyalty to Katherine had followed. Now this was checked by her calm, unimpassioned words and the astounding intelligence of her engagement to Hockmaster. He was completely staggered. To his dismay, he became conscious of an awful void in his life. It seemed to be filled with purposeless shadows. He set his teeth and wrapped his strong man’s pride about him. The thought of himself as John a’ Dreams was a lash to his spirit. He crumpled up the paper in his hands and strode to and fro in his room.
She was to marry Hockmaster. It was incredible, preposterous, except on one hypothesis—the recrudescence of the old passion that had swept aside the social barriers for this man’s sake. It was the most galling thought of all, it racked him, drew him down to a lower plane of feeling, blinded his clear insight into delicate things. Perhaps if a man did not sink lower than himself on some occasions, he could not rise higher than himself on others.
He drew a chair to the open French window. The room, being on the top storey, had no balcony, but a wrought-iron balustrade fixed on the outside of the jambs. He leant his arms over it and looked into the familiar street. He hated it. Geneva was intolerable. As soon as his father was able to travel, he would shake the dust of it from off his feet. A bantering letter had come, that morning from his cousin, Mrs. Monteith, at Oxford. A phrase or two passed through his mind. Was he going to bring back two brides or half a one?
“How damned vulgar women can be at times!” he exclaimed angrily, and he rose with impatience from his chair, as if to drive Mrs. Monteith from his thoughts.
He unrolled Katherine’s crumpled letter and read it through again. Then he thrust it into his pocket and decided to go and sit with his father.
But, before he could reach the door, a knock was heard. He opened it, and to his surprise found Felicia.
“You—is my father—?”
“No. I want to speak to you. Can I?”
“Do you mind coming in? It is not very untidy.”
He held the door for her to pass in, then he closed it and came up to her enquiringly. Felicia stood in the middle of the room, with her hands behind her back, a favourite attitude. Her dark cheeks were flushed and her sensitive lips were parted, quivering slightly.
“It’s about Katherine!” she burst out suddenly. “Please let me talk, or I shall not be able to say what I want to. Since last night—when you kissed me—I have thought I might come to you—as your sister might—and because I care for you like that, I feel I can tell you. I have just been with Katherine. She is going away this afternoon.”
“At once?” asked Raine, startled at the apparent rapidity of events.
“Yes. Are you sending her away?”
“I? Oh no.”
“But why must she go, Raine? Tell me; need she go?”
“Katherine is mistress of her own actions.”
“Then you don’t care?”
She looked at him earnestly, with moist eyes. There was a note of passion in her voice, to which Raine, sympathetic, found himself responding.
“What is the use of my caring, since she is going of her own accord without a word from me?”
“But a word from you would make her stay.”
“What do you know about all this?” he asked abruptly.
“I know that you have broken her heart,” said Felicia. “Oh! knowing her—and loving her—it is hard not to forgive.”
“There is no question of forgiveness,” replied Raine. “Did she tell you I would not forgive her?”
“No. A woman does not need to be told these things—she knows them and feels them. Must a woman always, always, always suffer? Why can’t a man be great and noble sometimes—like Christ who forgave?”
“But, my dear child, you are talking wildly,” cried Raine earnestly. “God knows there is nothing to forgive. I knew long ago a shadow had been cast over her life—and I loved her. A strange freak of destiny brought the man here—last night, accidentally, he told me the details—and I loved her. I have not seen her. It is not I who drive her away. Read that, and you can see it is not I.”
He thrust the letter into her hand, and watched her as she read. Four-and-twenty hours ago, he would as soon have thought of crying his heart’s secrets aloud in the public streets, as of delivering them into the keeping of this young girl. But now it seemed natural. Her exalted mood had infected him, lifted him on to an unconventional plane.
The blood rushed to her cheeks as she read the lines in which reference was made to herself. When she had finished, she looked at him with a strange light in her eyes.
“And you are satisfied with this?” she said quickly.
“I am dumfounded by it. She has promised to marry this man.”
“And can’t you see why? Isn’t it as clear to you as the noonday?”
“The old love is stronger, I suppose.”
“Raine!” cried the girl, in ringing reproach. “How dare you say that, think it even? Can’t you see the agony that letter has cost her? To me it is quivering in every line. Why did you let that man go to her instead of yourself? Oh, heavens! if I were a man, and such a thing had happened regarding the woman I loved, I should have lain outside her door all night to guard her—I should have seen her, if hell-fire had been between us. But you let her suffer. You put your pride above your love, like a man—you were silent. You let her hear from this man that you knew—you left her to grapple with her shame alone.”
Felicia walked about the room like a young lioness. The words came in a flood. In the championing of her sister-woman she lost sense of conventional restrictions. Raine was no longer Raine, but the typefication of a sex against which she was battling for her own.
“Can’t you read into it all?” she continued. “Can’t you see the degradation she seemed to have fallen into in your eyes? But you only think of yourself—of your pride—of the bloom brushed off from your ideal. Never a thought for her—of the god hurled from her heaven. She would marry this man to cut herself adrift from you, to get out of your life without further troubling it—to ease your conscience, lest it should ever prick you for having left her. She is marrying him because her heart is broken—who else but a noble, high-souled woman could have written this letter? I better than she! Oh, Raine—if you have a spark of love for her left—go and throw yourself at her knees, before it is too late.”
Her voice broke towards the end. The strain was telling on her. She sank for rest upon the chair by the window, and laid her burning cheek against the iron balustrade. Raine came to her side.
“You can thrash me a little more, if you like.”
But the familiar, kindly tone suddenly awoke Felicia to the sense of their relations. She hung her head, confused.
“Forgive me,” she said. “I ought not to have spoken like that to you—I lost control over myself. You mustn’t think of what I have said.”
“I’ll think of it all through my life, Felicia,” said Raine.
A silence fell upon them. The girl was shaken and weary. Raine was confronting a new hope, that made his heart beat.
“Raine,” she said, after a while.
He did not reply. She looked up, and saw him staring into the street.
“By God!” he cried, suddenly, and before Felicia could realize what he was doing, he had seized his hat from the table and had rushed from tbe room, leaving tbe door open.
Felicia leant over tbe balustrade, and looked down. Katherine was there, near the corner, in the act of giving over her dressing-bag to a lad in a blue blouse, who had offered his services. Felicia watched until she saw Raine emerge beneath the archway, stride like a man possessed after Katherine, catch her up, and lay bis hand upon her arm, as she turned a startled face towards him. Then tbe tears came into her eyes, and she left tbe window and went down to her own room, where she locked herself in and cried miserably. Such is tbe apparently inconsequent way of women.
“Katherine,” said Raine, when he came up with her. She stopped, and looked at him speechlessly.
“I have just caught you in time,” he said, with masculine brusqueness. “We must talk together. Come into the Gardens.”
“I can’t,” she replied, hurriedly. “My train—”
“You can miss your train. Where are you going?”
“Lausanne,” she answered, weakly, with lowered eyes.
“There are quantities of trains. Come.” He drew her arm gently. She obeyed, powerless to resist. He found a seat away from the promenade. An old peasant was dozing at one end, and a mongrel was stretched at his feet. They were practically alone. The old man in his time had seen many English and innumerable pairs of lovers. Neither interested him. He did not even deign to turn a lustreless eye in their direction. The boy with the dressing-bag had meekly followed them, and stood by, politely, cap in hand. Did madame want him to wait with the bag?
“No,” replied Raine, pulling a franc from his pocket. “Take it to the concierge at the Pension Boccard.”
Katherine half rose, agitated.
“No, no. I must go to Lausanne. You mustn’t keep me.”
But the boy had dashed off, clutching his franc-piece. Raine bent down till the ends of his moustache nearly brushed her veil.
“I will keep you, Katherine, until you tell me-you love me no longer.”
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