CHAPTER XXV

NOW you know why it is I was crying,” said Clare, and as she spoke she laughed. “Oh, I am crying because I am the happiest girl in the world,” she continued. “Was there ever any one so fortunate in the world? I don't believe it. I thought that the idea of my hoping that he would ever come to love me was too ridiculous—and it is ridiculous, you know, when you think of it—when you think of me—me—a mere nobody—and of him—him—the man whose name is in every one's mouth. Ah! I think it must be some curious dream—no, I feel that I have read something like it somewhere—there is a memory of King Cophetua in the story. Was he here—was he really here? Why do you stare at me in that way? Ah, I suppose you think that I have suddenly gone mad? Well, I don't blame you. The whole story sounds absurd, doesn't it?”

Agnes had taken a step or two back from the girl and was gazing at her. The expression that was on her face as she gazed had something of amazement in it and something of fear. Her lips moved as if she were trying to speak; but at first her words failed to come. When, at last, they became audible, there was a gasp between each word.

“You said—you told me—twice—yes, twice—that you loved some one else—some one—Oh, my God! I never guessed that it was he—he”—“Why, who else should it be? When he came beside me aboard the steamer—yes, on the very first day we met—I knew that my fate was bound up with his.”

“Fate—Fate—that was his word, too. Fate!”

“I felt it. I felt that even if he had never thought of me I should still be forced to follow him till I died. And how strange it was—but then, everything about love is a mystery—he told me just now, in this very room, that he had just the same feeling. He said he felt that Fate”—

“Ah, Fate again—Fate!”

“And why not? My dearest Agnes, there is a good Fate as well as an evil one. How unjust men are! When anything unhappy takes place, they cry out against Fate: but when anything good happens, they never think of giving Fate the credit of it! We are going to change all that. I have already begun. I feel that I could compose the Fate theme—something joyous—ah, what did I say the other evening?—something with trumpets in it—that is what my Fate theme would be: pæans of joy rushing through it.”

“That is what the lover thinks, the lover who has not got the eyes of Fate—the eyes that see the end of the love and not merely the beginning.”

“But love—love—our love—can have no end. Love is immortal; if it were anything less it would cease to be love.”

“Poor child! Poor child! You have fathomed the mystery of Fate, and now you would fathom the mystery of Love. You will tell me in a few minutes all there is to be known of Love and Fate.”

“My dearest Agnes, your words have a chili about them, or is it that I am sensitive at this moment? A whisper of an east wind over a garden of June roses—those were your words—I am the June roses. Oh no; I am not in the least conceited—only June roses.”

She laughed as she made a gesture of dancing down the room.

Agnes's gesture was not one of merriment. She put her hands up to her face with a little cry that turned the girl's rapture of life to stone.

“What—what can you mean?” she said, after a long silence.

Agnes looked at her for a moment, then turned away from her, and walked slowly and with bowed head to the fire.

“Punishment—his punishment—I meant it to be his punishment,” she whispered. “I did not think of her—I did not mean her to share it—she is guiltless.”

She bent her head down upon the coloured marbles of the high mantelpiece, and looked into the fire.

Clare came behind her, laying a hand carelessly upon her shoulder.

Agnes started and shrank from the touch of her hand.

“Do not caress me,” she sad. “I was to blame. It was I who should have seen all that every one else must have seen; I should have seen and warned you. I should have sent you away—taken you away before it was too late. I should have stood between you and him. But I was selfish—blinded by my own selfishness.”

“Why should you have stood between us?” asked the girl, with a puzzled expression. “Oh, you cannot possibly be talking about him and me: no one in one's senses would talk about standing between us. Heavens above! Ah, tell me that you do not mean him and me—to stand between Claude and me? I warn you before you speak that nothing that lives—no power of life or death—shall stand between us. If he were to die I should die too. I know what love is.”

“And I know what Fate is. My poor child, my poor child! You have done no wrong. You are wholly innocent. If you go away you may still save yourself—yourself and him.”

The girl laughed again.

“For God's sake don't laugh; let me entreat of you,” cried Agnes, almost piteously.

“My poor Agnes,” said Clare, “I pity you if you have any thought that you can separate us now. I will not ask you what is on your mind—what foolish notion you have about a mésalliance. Of course I know as well as you can tell me that yesterday I was a nobody; but I am different to-day. I am the woman that Claude Westwood loves, and if you fancy that that woman is a nobody you are sadly mistaken.”

“Child—child—if you knew all!”

“I don't want to know all—I don't want to know anything,” said Clare. “I assure you, my dear Agnes, that I have no curiosity in my nature on this particular point. He loves me—that is enough for me. I don't want to become acquainted with any other fact in the universe. Any one who fancies that—that—Oh, my dear Agnes, do you really suppose that Claude Westwood—the man who fought his way from the clutches of those savages—the most terrible in the world—the man who fought his way through the long forest of wild animals, deadly serpents, horrible poisonous unshapely creatures never before seen by the eye of man—and the swamps—a world of miasma, every breath meaning death—do you really suppose that such a man would allow any power to stand between him and the woman whom he loves? Think of it—think of the man and what he has done, and then talk to me if you can of any obstruction lying in our way to happiness.”

“I pity you—I pity you! That's all I can say.”

“You have no reason to pity me. I am the happiest girl in this world—in this world?—in any world. Heaven holds no happiness that is greater than mine. Ah, my dearest, you have been so kind to me—you and Fate—I have no thought for you that is not full of love. What woman would do as you have done for me? Who would be so kind to a stranger—perhaps an impostor?”

“I wish to show my kindness now; that is why I entreat of you, with all my soul, to leave this place—never to see Claude Westwood again.”

Clare was at the further end of the room, but when Agnes had spoken she returned slowly to her side.

“Agnes,” she said, in a low and serious voice, “Agnes, if you wish me to leave your house I shall do so at once—this very evening. You have the right to turn me out—no, I do not wish to make use of such a phrase. I should say that you have a right to tell me that your plans do not admit of my being your visiter longer than to-night; and, believe me, I will not accuse you of any lack of courtesy or kindness toward me. I shall simply go away. But if you tell me that I am to forsake the man who loves me and whom I love, I shall simply tell you that you know me as imperfectly as you know him.”

“As imperfectly as I know him!” said Agnes, slowly. Her eyes were upon Clare as she spoke; then she went to the window and looked out. There was a pause of long duration before the girl once again moved to her side, saying:

“Dear Agnes, cannot you see that in this matter nothing that you might do or say could move me? If you were to tell me that he is a criminal—that he is the wickedest man living, I should not change in my love for him.”

“I pity you, with all my soul,” said Agnes. “And if the time comes when you will, with bitterness and tears, admit that I warned you—that I advised you to place between you the broadest and deepest ocean that flows—you will hold me blameless.”

“I will admit that you have done your best to separate us,” said Clare, smiling, as she put an arm round Agnes. Her smile was that of an elder sister humouring a younger. “And now we will say no more about this horrid affair, if you please. We shall be to each other what we were before Claude Westwood came here to disturb us.”

“God help you!” said Agnes, suffering her cheek to be kissed by the girl.

She went into another room, and as she went she fancied that she could hear Clare laughing—actually laughing at the idea of anything coming between her and love for Claude Westwood. She sank down upon a sofa and stared at a picture that hung on the opposite wall.

“She will not hear me—she will not hear me; and now it is too late to make any move,” she said. “I meant that he should be punished, but God knows that I never meant that his punishment should be like this! And she—poor child! poor child! Why should she be punished?”

She remained seated there for a long time thinking her thoughts, racked with self-upbraiding at first, whispering, “If I had but known—if I could but have known!” But at the end of an hour she had become more calm. The darkness of the evening obscured everything in the room in which she sat, but she did not ring for a light. It was in the darkness that she stood up, saying, as if to reassure herself:

“It is not my punishment, but the punishment of Heaven that has fallen on him. It is not I, but Heaven, whose hand is ready to strike. It is the justice of God. I will not come between him and God.”

She dined, as usual, face to face with Clare, and there was nothing in the girl's manner to suggest that she had taken in the smallest measure to heart anything that Agnes had said. She did not even seem to have thought it worth her while to consider the possibility of her warnings having some foundation. She had simply smiled at them—the smile of the indulgent, elder sister. Her warning had produced no impression upon her.

She was full of the details of her work. She had not been idle during the afternoon, she said. Oh no; every hour was precious. And then she went on to tell of the fear that had been haunting good Mr. Shackles—the fear lest the Arctic winter might be less rigorous than the best friends of Mr. Westwood (and Mr. Shackles) could wish, thereby making possible the return to England of the distinguished explorer, who, it was understood had been devoting all his spare time and tallow in the region of ninety degrees north latitude—or as near to it as he could get—to the writing of a book. Mr. Shackles's dread was lest the Arctic regions should shoulder Central Africa out of the market—a truly appalling cataclysm, Clare said, and one which should be averted at any sacrifice.

Agnes listened to her, as the doctor listens to the prattle of the patient who, he knows, will not be alive at the end of the week. She listened to her, making her own remarks from time to time as usual, but, even when she and Clare were left alone together, alluding in no way to the fact that they had had a conversation in the afternoon on the subject of Mr. Westwood.

The next day Claude appeared at The Knoll. He did not go through the hall into the studio. He thought it only polite to turn into the drawingroom, where the butler said Miss Mowbray was to be found.

She had scarcely shaken hands with him before he said:

“Clare has told you all, I suppose?”

“She told me that you had confessed to her what you confessed to me,” said Agnes.

“What I confessed to you?” he repeated in a somewhat startled tone. “What I confessed—long ago?”

“Well, that is not just what I meant to say,” replied Agnes. “You confessed to me a few days ago that you had fallen in love with her. But curiously enough, the way you took me up serves to lead in the same direction. Only you were, of course, a different person altogether in those days: we change every seven years, don't we?”

“I am the luckiest man alive!” said he, ignoring her disagreeable reminiscence. “I am no longer young and my adventures have told on me, and yet—I am sure you told her that you considered me the luckiest man living!”

“I told her that if she wished to be happy she should put an ocean between you and herself.”

His voice was full of reproach—a kind of grieved reproach, as he said:

“You told her that? Why should you tell her that? Is it because of the past—that foolish past of a boy and girl”—

“No: I was not thinking of the past; it was of the future I was thinking,” she said.

“The future?”

“Yes; and that is what I am thinking of now when I implore of you to leave her—to leave your book—everything—and fly to the uttermost ends of the earth to escape the blow which is about to fall upon you.”

“I am sorry that I cannot see my way to take your advice,” said he. “I do not share your fears for the future. But whatever Fate may have in store for me, of one thing I am assured: the hardest blow will seem as the falling of a feather when she is beside me. I am sorry that you, my oldest friend—But I am sure that later on you will change your views. No one knows better than I do that such a girl as she might reasonably expect to have a younger man at her feet; but I think I know myself, and I am sure that I shall be to her a sympathetic husband.”

He had gone to the door while he was speaking.

“You will wish that you had never seen her,” said Agnes.

“Will you force me to wish that I had never seen you?” he said, in a low voice. He had not yet lost the tone of reproach which he conceived to be appropriate to the conversation that had originated with her.

This last sentence stung her. For a moment she felt as she had done on that night when she had flung down his miniature and trampled on it. Her face became deathly pale. But she controlled herself.

“I will answer that question of yours another time,” she said quietly.

He returned to her.

“Forgive me for having said what I did,” he cried. “I spoke thoughtlessly—brutally.”

“But I promise you that I will answer you, all the same,” said she. “Clare is in her studio.”