The Beggar Man Part 37

"You!" She answered him in pa.s.sionate desperation. It was her last throw for happiness.

She counted the flying seconds before he spoke, with her thudding heartbeats, and they seemed to stop when he laughed.

"You can hardly expect me to believe that," he said.

She found her voice with a great effort.

"I know ... but it's the truth--all the same."

She was fighting for something greater than life--happiness! And though with each moment since she came into the room it seemed to be more surely eluding her, she went on, hardly knowing what she said:

"I know you don't believe me--but it's true.... I never cared for--for Mr. Digby ... but ... but I was jealous ... of Peg!" Her voice faltered over the little name, and it was with an effort that she forced herself to continue. "You seemed to like her ... better than me ... and--and ...

I was jealous...." She spoke the words again pa.s.sionately, conscious of their unconvincing sound, their parrot-like repet.i.tion.

Forrester came towards her till but a step divided them.

"You expect me to believe that?" he asked hoa.r.s.ely. "When I've been waiting all these weeks, all these months for you to give me one look ... one smallest hope ... when I've been a beggar at your feet, hoping against hope that some day you'd throw me a smile...." He swung round from her with a pa.s.sionate gesture of disbelief.

She had pleaded to him in vain, and she knew it. She had humbled herself unavailingly. The room swam giddily before her eyes as she looked at Forrester. Such a man for a woman to love, and yet she, blind as she had been, had not seen until too late, all that she was throwing away.

She made a little inarticulate sound of despair and Forrester turned.

He stepped past her and opened the door.

"I am leaving here early in the morning," he said. "I shall not trouble you again. Good-bye."

Something seemed to snap in Faith's heart. She stumbled towards him and would have fallen at his feet but for his upholding hand. She broke into wild, incoherent words, clinging to him desperately.

"Don't leave me ... I can't bear it.... I love you. Forgive me. I've n.o.body in all the world ... oh, forgive me ... forgive me...."

"Faith!" The Beggar Man spoke her name with a great cry. For a moment he held her from him, looking into her face with eyes of pa.s.sionate hope and disbelief. Then he caught her to his heart.

She clung to him like a lost child that has suddenly found its home again; the dread of the future without him found its reaction in a storm of tearless sobbing.

"Don't leave me--oh, don't leave me," was all she could say again and again.

He took her up in his arms and carried her over to the big chair by the fire, as if she had been a child; he spoke to her gently, soothing her, comforting her, forgetting his own troubles in his infinite pity for her, till she lay quiet at last, her face hidden against him, her hands clinging to his coat as if even now she feared that he might leave her.

Above her head the Beggar Man looked out into the silent room with sad eyes; he had got his happiness at last, but at what a cost!

He knew that he owed everything to Peg, and for a moment he lost himself in the past, with a vivid memory of her, her bold, defiant beauty, and swinging gipsy earrings.

That she had cared for him, he knew well enough; the light in her eyes had told him that at the last, if never before.

But Peg was dead, and the past gone forever....

He looked down at Faith, and found her eyes upon him with a new wistfulness and humility in their brown depths that awoke all the old love and protective tenderness he had once known for her; and the vivid memory of Peg paled and faded away as he bent to kiss his wife with pa.s.sionate thankfulness--a Beggar Man at her feet no longer, but a King, come proudly to his Throne.