A Romance of Wastdale Part 8

"I was listening to the brook," he said.

For a while they both stood quiet in the gloom of the porch.

"What do you hear in it?" he asked.

"I dare not tell you. What do you?"

"I hear all my days to come flowing down and down with a sound of tears."

"David!" she said, her voice breaking on the name.

He had often noticed the wonderful clearness of her eyes, and they shone very softly on him now. He drew her towards him in the gloom of the porch.

"Kitty!" he whispered, "tell me that it isn't true! Tell me I have been dreaming! I will believe you. I must believe you. For if I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything. You have been the light of my life, making the world real. If that dies out, I live in the dark, always."

Her heart sank lower with every word he uttered. She had hoped for forgiveness, for a recognition of the dead sin, with a belief in an atoning future. But he gave her no hint of that. Nay, his very phrases proved that the conception was beyond his reach. "If I lose faith in you, I lose faith in everything." The sentence showed the exotic sickliness of his faith, demonstrated it no vital inherent part of him rooted in his being, but an alien graft watered and kept alive by his pa.s.sion. He had not the st.u.r.diness to accept the facts, nor the sincerity to foresee the possibility of redemption. He would marry her. Yes! But his motive was an instinct of self-preservation rather than his love for her. She would still have to pose upon her pedestal, apeing the stainless G.o.ddess; he would still have to kneel at her feet, apeing the worshipper; and both in their hearts would know the hollowness of their pretence.

Kate realised the futility of such a marriage, and looking forward, caught a glimpse of the day when the sham would shred and vanish before the truth, like a morning mist at sunrise.

Gordon felt her whole frame relax and draw away from him. He clasped her hands; there was no response in them. He held her closer, placed one hand behind her head and turned her face up towards him, while the warm curls nestled and twined about his fingers.

"Kitty! Why don't you answer? Tell me that it isn't true! Every belief I have depends on that."

"Oh! Don't make me responsible for everything," she replied, with a flash of her old petulance. "I am only one woman in the world."

"But the only woman in the world for me. You know it. You said so yourself. Tell me that it isn't true! Lie to me, if you must!" he added, with a pa.s.sionate cry. "I will believe the lie."

"That could be of no use either to you or to me."

She spoke coldly, with the familiar feeling of repugnance reawakened by his effort to canonise her afresh. Besides, the knowledge of the truth vibrated in every tone of his voice, and his despairing resolve to crush and drown that knowledge added a sense of mockery to her repulsion.

"That could be of no use," she said. "There was just a chance of our joining hands again, but what you have said has destroyed it."

"I don't understand."

"You may some day."

"It _is_ true," she resumed. "All that you saw, all that you heard Austen Hawke say, all that I have told you--every word of it is true."

She turned from him and went back into the room, while Gordon sank upon the low coping of the garden fence.

The girl came out to him again after a while.

"Have you seen my shawl? I can't find it."

"Did you bring it away from the Inn?" Gordon asked, dully.

The question made Kate start. She must have left it there.

"Never mind," Gordon said; "I will get it back with the letters."

He pa.s.sed through the porch and took down a lanthorn from a nail in the wall.

"I will come up with you to the head of the Pa.s.s."

"Don't light it," she said. "It might be seen."

Very well!

He was on the point of replacing it, but stopped and asked--

"Did you bring one with your horse?"

"No!"

"Then I had better take it. It will keep you from stumbling when you are riding home. There is a scarf on the sofa."

Kate twisted it over her head and they pa.s.sed out softly into the lane.

CHAPTER VI

The wind had dropped with the advance of morning, and only an impalpable breath--a faint reminiscence of the wind it seemed--stirring the larch-clumps, dotted here and there along the lower edges of their path, broke the stillness for a moment as they pa.s.sed. They paused by the side of a watercourse which, descending from Great Gable, the mountain on their left, cut through the track on its way to the centre of the valley and caused a gap of some fifty feet. Stones planted at intervals uncertainly in the stream gave an insecure footing, and afforded the only traverse to the opposite side; and in the darkness their position was dimly shown, or, rather, could be hazily guessed at, by little points of white where the water swirled and broke about them.

"I must have crossed it when I came," said Kate, blankly. "But I don't remember. I don't seem to have noticed it at all. I should slip on the stepping-stones now."

"Let me carry you over!"

"No!" she replied quickly. "I crossed it safely before. I can do the same again."

There was a greater confidence in her words than in her voice, and she still hesitated on the brink. Instinctively she laid a hand upon Gordon's sleeve for steadiness, but drew it away hurriedly when she felt the contact of his arm. Her companion renewed his offer of help, but, without answering him, she stepped forward on to the nearest boulder. Her foot, set down timidly, slipped on its polished roundness. Gordon, however, was alert to her fatigue, and his arm was round her waist before she had completely lost her balance.

"Lean towards me," he said, and lightly lifted her back on to the bank. She remained for a second in his support, lulled by a physical feeling of security induced in her by the strong clasp of his arm.

Then she freed herself almost roughly, and silently faced the stream again.

"It will be best if I go first," said Gordon. "I can give you a hand then."

"Is there no other crossing?" she asked, straining her gaze vainly up and down the stream.

"No! Surely you can take that much help from me."

He planted himself as firmly as he could, Colossus-wise on the rocks.

"All right!" he said, and stretched out a hand towards her. She took it reluctantly and made a second trial, wavered as she reached the stone on which she had slipped, and secured her balance by tightening her grasp. So they proceeded until a wider interval than usual flowed between their footholds.

Gordon turned his head round to her.