The Third Window Part 12

"I don't suppose we'll have another chance for a talk. You and Antonia are going to Cornwall, I hear."

She hesitated, looking across at him, still at the table, from the place where she had risen. "Yes. We are. I have a great deal to do."

"I know. But our train is not early. I should be very much obliged."

Under the compulsion of his courtesy she moved before him, reluctantly, to the library.

"You see"--Bevis following, closed the door behind them--"a great deal has happened to me since we talked yesterday. I've heard of things I did not know before. They have changed my life and Antonia's. And since it's owing to you that they've come, I think you'll own it fair that I should ask for a little more enlightenment."

His heart had stayed sunken in what was almost despair since Tony had left him. He had no plan; no hope. It was in a dismal sincerity that he made his request. There might be enlightenment. If there were, only she could give it. She was his antagonist; yet, unwillingly, she might show him some loophole of escape.

Reluctance evidently battled in her with what might be pride. She did not wish to show reluctance. She took a straight chair near the table at a little distance from the fire and sat there with rather the air of an applicant for a post, willing, coldly and succinctly, to give information.

Bevis limped up and down the room.

"Why have you been working against me?" he said at last. He stopped before her. "Or, no; I don't mean that. Of course you would work against me. You would have to. But why haven't you been straight with me? Didn't you owe it to me as much as to Tony to tell me what had happened?"

She looked back coldly at him. "I have not worked against you. I owe you nothing."

"Not even when what happened concerned me so closely?"

"It was for Antonia to tell you anything that concerned you." She paused and added, in a lower voice, "I should not choose to speak of some things to you."

"I see." He took a turn or two away. "Yes. After all, that's natural.

But now you see me defeated and cast out. So perhaps you'll be merely merciful." He stopped again and scrutinized her.

Yes; he had seen in her face yesterday what her hatred could be. It was--all defeated and cast out as he was--hatred for him he saw now, evident, palpable, like a sword. And why should she hate him so much?

Had she anything to fear? Like OEdipus before the Sphinx, he studied her.

"You believe that you saw Malcolm the other night?" She had not told him that she would be merciful, yet, apparently, she was willing to give information, since she sat there.

Something more evidently baleful came into her eyes as she answered, "It is not a question of belief."

"Of course; naturally. What I mean is--you did see him. Well, this is what I would like to know. Did you see him when you sat at the table with your head down, before we left the room?"

The question--he had not meditated it--it had come to him instinctively, like a whisper from some unseen friend--was as unexpected to her as it had been to him. She had expected, no doubt, to be questioned as to Malcolm's dress, att.i.tude, and demeanour. She kept her eyes fixed; but a tremor knotted her brows, as if with bewilderment.

"As I sat at the table?" she repeated. "How do you mean?"

He did not take his eyes off her. He seemed to slide his hand along a sudden clue and to find it holding.

"I mean the vision of him standing beside the fountain. Did it come to you first while we were at the window seeing nothing?"

She stared at him, and the bewilderment gained her eyes. "A vision? What do you mean by a vision? No. It was when you had gone. It was when I went to the window that I saw him standing there." Yet, even as she spoke, he saw that she was thinking with a new intensity.

Something had been gained. Safety required him, at the moment, not to examine it overmuch, not to arouse her craft. "I see," he said, as if a.s.senting, and again he turned from her and again he came back, with a new question. "You think he came because he is suffering?"

She had looked away from him while she thought, and as her eyes turned to him he saw the new edge to their hatred. "Yes. Suffering," she said.

And her eyes added: "Because of you."

"You told Tony he was suffering?"

"I answered her questions."

"He will be appeased by her sacrifice of me?"

She paused a moment, as if with a cold irony for his grossness. "It is her heart he misses," she then said.

He stood across the table from her, considering her. For the first time he seemed to see in full clearness the force of the pa.s.sion that moved her. Her very being was centred in one loyalty, one devotion. She would, he felt sure, sacrifice any thing, any one, to it. He considered her and she kept her cold, ironic face uplifted to his scrutiny. There was desecration, he felt, in the blow his mind now prepared. Yet, as she was merciless, so he, too, must be. "How is it he comes to you and not to Tony?" he asked her. "How is it you know what he suffers?"

Unsuspecting, she was still ready to deal with him, since that was to be done with him. "I have always been like that. I have always known things and felt them, and sometimes seen them. I have known Malcolm since he was a child. There is nothing he has felt that I have not known. It frightened him, sometimes, to find that I had known everything.--The bond is not broken."

"No. It is not. But do you see what I am going to tell Antonia to-morrow?" he said, not stirring as, with his folded arms, he looked across at her. "That such a bond as that sets her free. It's you he comes for; you he misses. Realities take their place after death. Things come out. He didn't know it while he was alive. You were too near for him to know it. But it's you who are his mate. You are the creature nearest to him in the universe."

She sat still for a moment after he had finished. Then she rose. Her little face, with its lighted glare, was almost terrifying. He saw, as he looked at her, that he had committed a sacrilege, yet he could not regret it.

"You know you lie," she said.--It had been a sacrilege, yet it might help him and Tony, for now all her barriers were down.--"If that were true how could I wish to keep her for him? He is the creature nearest to me in the universe, but I am not near him. Never, never, never," said Miss Latimer; and her voice, as she spoke, piped to a rising wail. "He was fond of me; never more than fond, and Antonia was the only woman he ever loved. I was with him in it all. I helped him sometimes to answer her letters, for she frightened him with her cleverness, and he was not like that; he was not clever in your way. And he would grow confused.

Nothing ever brought us so near. It was of her we talked that last night, beside the fountain, in the flagged garden. It was then he told me that he knew, whatever happened to him, that he and Antonia belonged to each other forever."

It was the truth, absolute and irrefutable. Yet, though before it, and her, in her bared agony, he knew himself ashamed, the light had come to him as it blazed from her. It gave him all he needed. He was sure now, as he had not been sure before, of what was not the truth. Malcolm, as a wraith, a menace, was exorcised. There was only Miss Latimer to deal with.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I was wrong. You convince me. But there's something else." She had dropped down again upon her chair and she had put up her hand to her face, and so she sat while he spoke to her. "You see, your love explains everything," he said. "I mean, everything that needs explaining. Don't think I speak as an enemy. It's only that I understand you and what has happened to you, and to us, better than you do yourself. You are so sure of your fact that you feel yourself justified in giving it to Antonia in a symbol; so, as you say, to keep her for him. You are sure he is here; you are sure he suffers; and you feel it right to tell her you have seen him, to save her from herself, as you would see it; and from me."

Her hand had dropped and the face she showed him was, in its bewilderment, in its desperation, its distraction, strangely young; like the face of a child judged by some standard it does not understand. "A symbol? What do you mean by a symbol?" she asked, and her voice was the reedy, piping voice of a child.

He pressed home his advantage. "You have not seen Malcolm. You believe that he is here and you believe he suffers. But you have not seen him.

On your honour;--can you look at me and say, on your honour, that you have seen him?"

She looked at him. She stared. And it was with the eyes of the desperate child. "How could I not have seen him? How could I have known?"

"The table rapped it out for you, because you are a medium. It's a mystery that such things should be; but you say yourself that, in life, your mind read Malcolm's. In the same way, the other night, it read Tony's. You saw what she saw. Everything is open to you."

She had risen and, with a strange gesture, she put her hand up to her head. "No--no. It was more than that. It was more than that. Antonia did not know. I did not know. No one knew, till I saw it; how he died. I saw him. Half his head was shot away."

He leaped to his triumph. "It was my mind that showed you that. I did know. I did know how he died. You read my mind as well as Tony's. Our minds built up the picture for you."

Her hand held to her head she stared at him. "It is not true! Not true!

You say so now when I have told you."

"Ask Tony if it's not true. I told her what you'd seen before she told me. Miss Latimer--I appeal to you. Our lives hang on you. Tell me the truth--tell it to me now, and to Tony to-night. You did not see him. Not what we mean by seeing. Not as Tony believes you saw. You had your inner vision while you leaned there on the table, and it convinced you of the outer. I've shown you how you built it up. Every detail of our knowledge was revealed to you. It's we who created Malcolm's ghost."

But she had turned away from him, and it was as if in desperate flight, blindly, pushing aside the chair against which she stumbled, still with her hand held as though to Malcolm's wound. "Not true! Not true!" she cried, and she flung aside the hand he held out to arrest her. "He is here! He has saved her! I saw him! Beside the fountain!"

IX

She was gone and he need not pursue her. Her desperation had given him all that he had hoped for, and there was no recantation, no avowal to be wrested from that panic. He had followed her to the door and he watched her mount the stairs, running as she went and without one backward glance. And when, at the end of the corridor above, he heard her door shut, he still stood in the open doorway, his head bent, his hands in his pockets, and took, it seemed in long draughts of recovery, full possession of his almost miraculous escape.