The Hermit of Far End Part 39

Sara descended from the ladder before she replied. Then she remarked composedly--

"It has taken precisely seven days, apparently, for that sense of responsibility to develop."

"On the contrary, for seven days my thirst for knowledge has been only restrained by the pointings of conscience."

"Then"--she spoke rather low--"was it conscience pointing you--away from Sunnyside?"

His hazel eyes flashed over her face.

"Perhaps it was--discretion," he suggested. "Looking in at shop windows when one has an empty purse is a poor occupation--and one to be avoided."

"Did you want to come?" she persisted gently.

Half absently he had cut off a piece of dead wood from the rose-bush next him and was twisting it idly to and fro between his fingers. At her words, the dead wood stem snapped suddenly in his clenched hand. For an instant he seemed about to make some pa.s.sionate rejoinder. Then he slowly unclenched his hand and the broken twig fell to the ground.

"Haven't I made it clear to you--yet," he said slowly, "that what I want doesn't enter into the scheme of things at all?"

The brief speech held a sense of impending finality, and, in the silence which followed, the eyes of the man and woman met, questioned each other desperately, and answered.

There are moments when modesty is a false quant.i.ty, and when the big happinesses of life depend on a woman's capacity to realize this and her courage to act upon it. To Sara, it seemed that such a moment had come to her, and the absolute sincerity of her nature met it unafraid.

"No," she said quietly. "You have only made clear to me--what you want, Garth. Need we--pretend to each other any longer?"

"I don't understand," he muttered.

"Don't you?" She drew a littler nearer him, and the face she lifted to his was very white. But her eyes were shining. "That night--when I fell from the car--I--I wasn't unconscious."

For an instant he stared at her, incredulous. Then he swung aside a little, his hand gripping the pillar against which he had been leaning till his knuckles showed white beneath the straining skin.

"You--weren't unconscious?" he repeated blankly.

"No--not all the time. I--heard--what you said."

He seemed to pull himself together.

"Oh, Heaven only knows what I may have said at a moment like that," he answered carelessly, but his voice was rough and hoa.r.s.e. "A man talks wild when the woman he's with only misses death by a hair's breath."

Sara's lips upturned at the corners in a slow smile--a smile that was neither mocking, nor tender, nor chiding, but an exquisite blending of all three. She caught her breath quickly--Trent could hear its soft sibilance. Then she spoke.

"Will you marry me, please, Garth?"

He drew back from her, violently, his underlip hard bitten. At last, after a long silence--

"No!" he burst out harshly. "No! I can't!"

For an instant she was shaken. Then, buoyed up by the memory of that night when she had lain in his arms and when the agony of the moment had stripped him of all power to hide his love, she challenged his denial.

"Why not?" Her voice was vibrant. "You love me!"

"Yes . . . I love you." The words seemed torn from him.

"Then why won't you marry me?"

It did not seem to her that she was doing anything unusual or unwomanly.

The man she loved had carried his burden single-handed long enough. The time had come when for his own sake as well as for hers, she must wring the truth from him, make him break through the silence which had long been torturing them both. Whatever might be the outcome, whether pain or happiness, they must share it.

"Why won't you marry me, Garth?"

The little question, almost voiceless in its intensity, clamoured loudly at his heart.

"Don't tempt me!" he cried out hoa.r.s.ely. "My G.o.d! I wonder if you know how you are tempting me?"

She came a little closer to him, laying her hand on his arm, while her great, sombre eyes silently entreated him.

As though the touch of her were more than he could bear, his hard-held pa.s.sion crashed suddenly through the bars his will had set about it.

He caught her in his arms, lifting her sheer off her feet against his breast, whilst his lips crushed down upon her mouth and throat, burned against her white, closed lids, and the hard clasp of his arms about her was a physical pain--an exquisite agony that it was a fierce joy to suffer.

"Then--then you do love me?" She leaned against him, breathless, her voice unsteady, her whole slender body shaken with an answering pa.s.sion.

"Love you?" The grip of his arms about her made response. "Love you?

I love you with my soul and my body, here and through whatever comes Hereafter. You are my earth and heaven--the whole meaning of things--"

He broke off abruptly, and she felt his arms slacken their hold and slowly unclasp as though impelled to it by some invisible force.

"What was I saying?" The heat of pa.s.sion had gone out of his voice, leaving it suddenly flat and toneless. "'The whole meaning of things?'"

He gave a curious little laugh. It had a strangled sound, almost like the cry of some tortured thing. "Then things _have_ no meaning----"

Sara stood staring at him, bewildered and a little frightened.

"Garth, what is it?" she whispered. "What has happened?"

He turned, and, walking away from her a few paces, stood very still with his head bent and one hand covering his eyes.

Overhead, the sunshine, filtering in through the green trellis of leafy twigs, flaunted gay little dancing patches of gold on the path below, as the leaves moved flickeringly in the breeze, and where the twisted growth of a branch had left a leafless aperture, it flung a single shaft of quivering light athwart the pergola. It gleamed like a shining sword between the man and woman, as though dividing them one from the other and thrusting each into the shadows that lay on either hand.

"Garth----"

At the sound of her voice he dropped his hand to his side and came slowly back and stood beside her. His face was almost grey, and the tortured expression of his eyes seemed to hurt her like the stab of a knife.

"You must try to forgive me," he said, speaking very low and rapidly. "I had no earthly right to tell you that I cared, because--because I can't ask you to marry me. I told you once that I had forfeited my claim to the good things in life. That was true. And, having that knowledge, I ought to have kept away from you--for I knew how it was going to be with me from the first moment I saw you. I fought against it in the beginning--tried not to love you. Afterwards, I gave in, but I never dreamed that--you--would come to care, too. That seemed something quite beyond the bounds of human possibility."

"Did it? I can't see why it should?"

"Can't you?" He smiled a little. "If you were a man who has lived under a cloud for over twenty years, who has nothing in the world to recommend him, and only a tarnished reputation as his life-work, you, too, would have thought it inconceivable. Anyway, I did, and, thinking that, I dared to give myself the pleasure of seeing you--of being sometimes in your company. Perhaps"--grimly--"it was as much a torture as a joy on occasion. . . . But still, I was near you. . . . I could see you--touch your hand--serve you, perhaps, in any little way that offered. That was all something--something very wonderful to come into a life that, to all intents and purposes, was over. And I thought I could keep myself in hand--never let you know that I cared--"

"You certainly tried hard enough to convince me that you didn't," she interrupted ruefully.

"Yes, I tried. And I failed. And now, all that remains is for me to go away. I shall never forgive myself for having brought pain into your life--I, who would so gladly have brought only happiness. . . . G.o.d in Heaven!"--he whispered to himself as though the thought were almost blinding in the promise of ecstasy it held--"To have been the one to bring you happiness! . . ." He fell silent, his mouth wrung and twisted with pain.