Chapter V

He found Kitty alone in the drawing-room, alone, with empty hands and empty, waiting eyes. He saw that she had wept, and that his departure, only a brief note to break it to her, had added deep indignation to her sorrow. She was no longer timid, nor cowed by the change she felt in him. She had cast aside subtlety and appeal. It was a challenge that met him in her eyes.

He had intended to tell her his news at once and the preparatory smile was on his lips as he entered, a smile, though he did not know this, strangely like that smile of reassurance and consolation that had met her in the library a month ago.

But she gave him no time for a word.

Leaping from her chair she faced him, and with a vision still clearer than that which had showed him subtlety a month ago, he saw now her pettiness, her piteousness, her girlish violence and weakness. "Cruel! Cruel! Cruel!"—she cried.

He remained standing at a little distance from her, looking at her sadly and appealingly. Her words of reproach rushed forth and overwhelmed him like a frenzied torrent.

"To leave me without a word, after last night! You treat me like a dog that one kicks aside because it wearies one with its love. You have no heart—I've felt it for days and days!—No heart! You hate me! You despise me! And what have I done to deserve it but love—love—love you—like the poor dog! But I know—I know—It is Sir Walter. You can't forgive me that—It has poisoned everything—that ignorant folly of mine. At first you thought you could forgive, and then you grew to hate me. And I—I—" her voice choked, gasped into sobs;—"I have only loved you—loved you—more and more——"

"Kitty, you are mistaken," said Holland. "I've never given Sir Walter a thought." It was a reed she grasped at in the torrent, he saw that well;—a desperate hope.

"It's false!" she cried. "You have! You thought at first that you would be magnanimous and save me,—you could be magnanimous because you were going to die—it's easy enough to be magnanimous if you are going to die! easy enough to be peaceful and sad—and to stand there and smile and smile as if you were only sorry for me. But you found out that you were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really forgive me, and then you hated me."

"Kitty—you know that you do not believe what you are saying."

"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have forgiven me?"

"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you—that day, Kitty, on the lawn,—it would have been more difficult to save you."

"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"

"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that I had still a month to live with you."

His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the poison in her veins that maddened her.

She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words, but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.

"It was, then, because it was only for a month."

He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"

"That you loved me."

Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.

"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"

The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed, been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean—you mean—" she stammered—"Oh—you don't believe that I love you—You believe that it could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.

Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you; but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could. It wasn't real."

"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference—the cruel difference. You love me in that terrible way—the way that could give me up and not mind; but I am in love with you;—that's the dreadful difference. Men get over it; but women are always in love."

Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the brooding dream; for men the active dusty world. Yet even here, on the threshold of a secret, absurd, yet perhaps, in its absurdity, lovelier than man's sterner visions, he felt that, for her sake, he must draw her away from the contemplation of it. That was one thing he had learned, for Kitty. She, too, must manage to fly—or fall—out of the nest; she must get, in some way, more dust into her life. He had forgotten the news he was to tell her; he had forgotten all but her need.

"Perhaps that is true, dear Kitty," he said; "but isn't it, in a way, that women are merely in love. It's not with anybody; or, rather, it is with anybody—with me or with Sir Walter; I mean, anybody who seems to promise more love. Horrible I sound, I know. Forgive me. But I wish I could shake you out of being in love. I want you to be more my comrade than you have been. Don't let us think so much of love."

But Kitty moaned: "I don't want a comrade. I want a lover."

And, in the silence that followed, lifting her head suddenly, she fixed her eyes on him.

"You talk as if we could be comrades," she said. "You talk as if we were to go on living together. What did the doctor say? I don't believe that you are going to die."

He felt ridiculous now. The real tragedy was there, between them; but the tragedy upon which all their fictitious romance had been built was to tumble about their ears.

It was as if he had all along been deceiving, misleading her, acting on false pretences, winning her love by his borrowed funereal splendour. Almost shamefacedly, looking down and stammering over the silly confession, he said: "It was all a mistake. I'm not going to die."

He did not look at her for some moments. He was sure that she was deaf and breathless with the crash and crumbling.

Presently, when he did raise his eyes, he found that she was staring at him, curiously, intently. She had found herself: she had found him; and—oh yes—he saw it—he was far from her. The stare, essentially, was one of a hard hostility. She had been betrayed and robbed; she could not forgive him.

"Kitty," he said timidly, "are you sorry?"

Her sombre gaze dwelt on him.

"Tell me you're not sorry," he pleaded.

She answered him at last: "How dare you ask me that? How dare you ask me whether I am sorry that you are not going to die? You must know that it is an insult."

"I mean—if I disappointed—failed you so—"

"I must wish you dead? You have a charming idea of me."

How her voice clashed and clanged with the hardness, the warfare, the uproar of the outer world. After the hush, the gentleness of Paradise, it was like being thrown, dizzy and bewildered, among the traffic and turmoil of a great city.

"Don't be cruel," he murmured.

"I? Cruel!" she laughed.

She got up and walked up and down the room. A fever of desperate, baffled anger burned in her. He saw that she did not trust herself to speak. She was afraid of betraying, to herself and to him, the ugly distortion of her soul.

He was not to die; he was not her lover; and Kitty was the primitive woman. She could be in love, but she could not love unless pity were appealed to. His loss of all passion had killed her romance. His loss of all pathos had, perhaps, killed even human tenderness. For it was he who had drawn away. She was humiliated to the dust.

And that she made a great effort upon herself, so that to his eyes the ugliness might not be betrayed, he guessed presently when, looking persistently away from him and out at the garden—their garden! alas!—where a fine rain fell silently, she said: "I am glad that your sorrow is over. I hope that you will find happier things—and realler things—than you have found in this month. I will remember all that you have said to-day. I think that you have cured me for ever. I shall not be in love again."

"Kitty! Kitty!" he breathed out. She hurt him too much, the poor child, arming its empty heart against him. "Don't speak like that. Remember—the month has been beautiful."

The tears rose in her eyes, but the hostility did not leave them. "Beautiful? When it has not been real?"

"Can't we remember the beauty—make something more real?" he now almost wept. But there it was, the shallow, the hard child's heart. He was not in love with her. And, like a nest of snakes, the memory of all her humiliations—her appeals, her proffered love, his evasions and withdrawals—was awake within her. She smiled, a smile that, seeking magnanimity, found only bitterness. "You must speak for yourself, dear Nicholas. For me it was real, and you have spoiled the beauty."

The servants came in while she spoke and she moved aside to make way for the placing of the tea-table. Traces of the fever were upon her yet; her delicate face was flushed, her eyes sparkled. But she had regained the place she meant to keep. She would own to no discomfitures deeper than those that were creditable to her. Moving here and there, touching the flowers in a vase, straightening reviews scattered on a table, she was even able to smile again at him a smile almost kind, and keeping, before him, as well as for the servants, all the advantage of composure.

That smile would often meet him throughout life, and so he would see her, moving delicately and gracefully, making order and comeliness about her, for many years. She set the key. It was the key of their future life together, Holland knew, as he heard her say: "Do sit down and rest. You must want your tea after that tiresome journey."