An Unpardonable Liar Part 6

CHAPTER III.

NO OTHER WAY.

George Hagar was the first to move. He turned and looked at Mrs. Detlor.

His mind was full of the strangeness of the situation--this man and woman meeting under such circ.u.mstances after twelve years, in which no lines of their lives had ever crossed. But he saw, almost unconsciously, that she had dropped his rose. He stooped, picked it up and gave it to her. With a singular coolness--for, though pale, she showed no excitement--she quietly arranged the flower at her throat, still looking at the figure on the platform. A close observer would occasionally have found something cynical--even sinister--in Mark Telford's clear cut, smoothly chiseled face, but at the moment when he wheeled slowly and faced these two there was in it nothing but what was strong, refined and even n.o.ble. His eyes, dark and full, were set deep under well hung brows, and a duskiness in the flesh round them gave them softness as well as power. Withal there was a melancholy as striking as it was unusual in him.

In spite of herself Mrs. Detlor felt her heart come romping to her throat, for, whatever this man was to her now, he once was her lover. She grew hot to her fingers. As she looked, the air seemed to palpitate round her, and Mark Telford to be standing in its shining hot surf tall and grand. But, on the instant, there came into this lens the picture she had seen in George Hagar's studio that morning. At that moment Mildred Margrave and Baron were entering at the other end of the long, lonely nave. The girl stopped all at once and pointed toward Telford as he stood motionless, uncovered. "See," she said, "how fine, how n.o.ble he looks!"

Mrs. Detlor turned for an instant and saw her.

Telford had gazed calmly, seriously, at Mrs. Detlor, wondering at nothing, possessed by a strange, quieting feeling. There was, for the moment, no thought of right or wrong, misery or disaster, past or future, only--this is she! In the wild whistle of arctic winds he had sworn that he would cease to remember, but her voice ran laughing through them as it did through the blossoms of the locust trees at Tellavie, and he could not forget. When the mists rose from the blue lake on a summer plain, the rosy breath of the sun bearing them up and scattering them like thistledown, he said that he would think no more of her; but, stooping to drink, he saw her face in the water, as in the hill spring at Tellavie, and he could not forget. When he rode swiftly through the long prairie gra.s.s, each pulse afire, a keen, joyful wind playing on him as he tracked the buffalo, he said he had forgotten, but he felt her riding beside him as she had done on the wide savannas of the south, and he knew that he could not forget.

When he sat before some lodge in a pleasant village and was waited on by soft voiced Indian maidens and saw around him the solitary content of the north, he believed that he had ceased to think; but, as the maidens danced with slow monotony and grave, unmelodious voices, there came in among them an airy, sprightly figure, singing as the streams do over the pebbles, and he could not forget. When in those places where women are beautiful, gracious and soulless, he saw that life can be made into mere convention and be governed by a code, he said that he had learned how to forget; but a pale young figure rose before him with the simple reproach of falsehood, and he knew that he should always remember.

She stood before him now. Maybe some premonition--some such smother at the heart as Hamlet knew--came to him then, made him almost statue-like in his quiet and filled his face with a kind of tragical beauty. Hagar saw it and was struck by it. If he had known Jack Gladney and how he worshiped this man, he would have understood the cause of the inspiration. It was all the matter of a moment. Then Mark Telford stepped down, still uncovered, and came to them. He did not offer his hand, but bowed gravely and said, "I hardly expected to meet you here, Mrs. Detlor, but I am very glad."

He then bowed to Hagar.

Mrs. Detlor bowed as gravely and replied in an enigmatical tone, "One is usually glad to meet one's countrymen in a strange land."

"Quite so," he said, "and it is far from Tellavie."'

"It is not so far as it was yesterday," she added.

At that they began to walk toward the garden leading to the cloisters.

Hagar wondered whether Mrs. Detlor wished to be left alone with Telford.

As if divining his thoughts, she looked up at him and answered his mute question, following it with another of incalculable gentleness.

Raising his hat, he said conventionally enough: "Old friends should have much to say to each other. Will you excuse me?"

Mrs. Detlor instantly replied in as conventional a tone: "But you will not desert me? I shall be hereabout, and you will take me back to the coach?"

The a.s.surance was given, and the men bowed to each other. Hagar saw a smile play ironically on Telford's face--saw it followed by a steellike fierceness in the eye. He replied to both in like fashion, but one would have said the advantage was with Telford--he had the more remarkable personality.

The two were left alone. They pa.s.sed through the cloisters without a word.

Hagar saw the two figures disappear down the long vista of groined arches.

"I wish to heaven I could see how this will all end," he muttered. Then he joined Baron and Mildred Margrave.

Telford and Mrs. Detlor pa.s.sed out upon a little bridge spanning the stream, still not speaking. As if by mutual consent, they made their way up the bank and the hillside to the top of a pretty terrace, where was a rustic seat among the trees. When they reached it, he motioned to her to sit. She shook her head, however, and remained standing close to a tree.

"What you wish to say--for I suppose you do wish to say something--will be brief, of course?"

He looked at her almost curiously.

"Have you nothing kind to say to me, after all these years?" he asked quietly.

"What is there to say now more than--then?"

"I cannot prompt you if you have no impulse. Have you none?"

"None at all. You know of what blood we are, we southerners. We do not change."

"You changed." He knew he ought not to have said that, for he understood what she meant.

"No, I did not change. Is it possible you do not understand? Or did you cease to be a southerner when you became"--

"When I became a villain?" He smiled ironically. "Excuse me. Go on, please."

"I was a girl, a happy girl. You killed me. I did not change. Death is different. * * * But why have you come to speak of this to me? It was ages ago. Resurrections are a mistake, believe me." She was composed and deliberate now. Her nerve had all come back. There had been one swift wave of the feeling that once flooded her girl's heart. It had pa.s.sed and left her with the remembrance of her wrongs and the thought of unhappy years--through all which she had smiled, at what cost, before the world!

Come what would, he should never know that, even now, the man he once was remained as the memory of a beautiful dead thing--not this man come to her like a ghost.

"I always believed you," he answered quietly, "and I see no reason to change."

"In that case we need say no more," she said, opening her red parasol and stepping slightly forward into the sunshine as if to go.

There ran into his face a sudden flush. She was harder, more cruel, than he had thought were possible to any woman. "Wait," he said angrily, and put out his hand as if to stop her. "By heaven, you shall!"

"You are sudden and fierce," she rejoined coldly. "What do you wish me to say? What I did not finish--that southerners love altogether or--hate altogether?"

His face became like stone. At last, scarce above a whisper, he said: "Am I to understand that you hate me, that nothing can wipe it out--no repentance and no remorse? You never gave me a chance for a word of explanation or excuse. You refused to see me. You returned my letter unopened. But had you asked her--the woman--the whole truth"--

"If it could make any difference, I will ask her to-morrow."

He did not understand. He thought she was speaking ironically.

"You are harder than you know," he said heavily. "But I will speak. It is for the last time. Will you hear me?"

"I do not wish to, but I will not go."

"I had met her five years before there was anything between you and me.

She accepted the situation when she understood that I would not marry her.

The child was born. Time went on. I loved you. I told her. She agreed to go away to England: I gave her money. The day you found us together was to have been the last that I should see of her. The luck was against me.

It always has been in things that I cared for. You sent a man to kill me"--

"No, no. I did not send any one. I might have killed you--or her--had I been anything more than a child, but I sent no one. You believe that, do you not?"

For the first time since they had begun to speak she showed a little excitement, but immediately was cold and reserved again.

"I have always believed you," he said again. "The man who is your husband came to kill me"--

"He went to fight you," she said, looking at him more intently than she had yet done.

A sardonic smile played for a moment at his lips. He seemed about to speak through it. Presently, however, his eyes half closed as with a sudden thought he did not return her gaze, but looked down to where the graves of monks and abbots, and sinners maybe, were as steps upon the river bank.

"What does it matter?" he thought. "She hates me." But he said aloud: "Then, as you say, he came to fight me. I hear that he is dead," he added in a tone still more softened. He had not the heart to meet her scorn with scorn. As he said, it didn't matter if she hated him. It would be worth while remembering, when he had gone, that he had been gentle with her and had spared her the shame of knowing that she had married not only a selfish brute, but a coward and a would be a.s.sa.s.sin as well. He had only heard rumors of her life since he had last seen her, twelve years before, but he knew enough to be sure that she was aware of Fairfax Detlor's true character. She had known less still of his life, for since her marriage she had never set foot in Louisiana, and her mother, while she lived, never mentioned his name or told her more than that the Telford plantation had been sold for a song. When Hagar had told him that Detlor was dead, a wild kind of hope had leaped up in him that perhaps she might care for him still and forgive him when he had told all. These last few minutes had robbed him of that hope. He did not quarrel with the act The game was lost long ago, and it was foolish to have dreamed for an instant that the record could be reversed.

Her answer came quickly: "I do not know that my husband is dead. It has never been verified."