The Tigress Part 51

"How you've changed!" she observed, not seeming to notice his speech, and speaking herself in a certain tone of absolute childlike wonder, which was not the least of the weapons in her a.r.s.enal of personal persuasion. "Why, you've lines across your forehead--at your age, too!

Lines that I can see even from here."

"Never mind," he said; and then some impulse led him to go over and kneel beside her, conscious only of an acute wonder as to what would come next. "Never mind, dear girl, listen to me."

She put her hand upon his head. "And white hairs," she pursued, tracing them with an astonished finger. "At your age, too. One--five. Why, I can count eight."

"Never mind," he repeated, pulling down the impertinent finger and wondering as he did so that its fresh imprisonment left him so pitifully, piteously unthrilled. "Never mind--I don't care what I look like any more.

"It's all so futile--life is so empty--things seem to me so very, very trivial. What are wrinkles beside things--untellable things--that stone one's immortality and make one wish that on the Judgment Day G.o.d Himself wouldn't know!"

Even as he spoke he caught himself questioning whether she believed him--whether his words stirred any feeling in her.

She dropped her eyes and pulled her hand free.

"I know what you mean," she said in a toneless voice. "I had such secrets, too. But they're not what people fancy them to be. People think I killed my husband; but I didn't. I did what you've done--what we all do. I killed myself."

He looked at her. It was such a pitiless, relentless glare--that into which her words thrust his consciousness.

"I can't believe that yours were like mine," he said miserably. "No one can ever have done what I have done. Yes, you're right--and it has killed me."

She didn't seem greatly interested.

"But I didn't come to talk of that," he exclaimed quickly. "I came to ask of you two things. Will you grant them?"

She turned her head, leaving only her profile showing. "Certainly not,"

she said. "I will grant you nothing."

"You mustn't say that. You don't know what I'm asking."

"You're married," she told him, "and I won't have a thing to do with you. I hate the love-making of married men. It's dangerous, too, for they always talk."

That dull, heavy red that had been crimson before he took on chains stole over his face.

"I'll tell you without asking, then," he said. "It may not be the great and tremendous thing to you that it is to me. I think, perhaps, that you may even laugh."

"Very likely," she a.s.sented.

He rose and went to the chimney-piece and stood there, striving for greater quietude. It was a long moment--minutes long.

Then, finally, he threw over his shoulder, "Nina, you must hear me. I'm going away. I'm going to cut it all. Suetonius was pretty bad, but you can be tracked by a mother-in-law until life becomes hideous. I--"

"But everybody knew why your betrothal was called off," she said with simple finality; "and then you deliberately married the girl even after that."

"I know--I know--I know," he cried in irritation; "but those things must be written in the Book of Fate. Some curses must be launched beyond recall. At any rate, it's done. We both know that."

"Yes, we know that," she agreed simply.

"And now I am going away, and I'm not sure that I shall ever return. But I want an object in going, and I would rather have it something in connection with you than anything else on earth. I've thought what I want to do, and I wish you'd give me permission to do it.

"Of course there was a man you loved, and of course you love him yet.

Equally of course he accounts for everything, and of course he's still alive or you'd be a better woman. If he was dead he'd have a hold over you that would keep you straight."

"How funny for you to know all that!" she exclaimed, opening her eyes very wide. "You certainly have been learning." Then she broke forth into laughter. "And if it were the duke now!"

"Don't laugh," he cried angrily. "I tell you I'm in earnest. I know that there's a man, and that he's somewhere. Well, then, I want to go where he is, and to see him face to face, and to try to right whatever separates you. I've got to get away--and far away--and I'll be able to build some sort of respect for myself if I know that I've a good purpose and a clean mission."

She wasn't laughing now. He was very much in earnest, and she had caught some of his seriousness. It was contagious.

"I understand what persons like you and me can suffer, and how much they need help, and how the mock of love unfulfilled can drive them into hideous rocks and sink them in a seething whirlpool of temptations. I can read your life like a book now--can read it by the lurid light of my own burning wreck. And so I know that whatever might happen you would be forgivable. And it's what I know--what I have learned--that I want to tell him. And whatever is wrong--if he believes it--if I can make him believe--However, it--" And there he stopped--broke off abruptly.

Nina was staring at him hard.

He had spoken so fast and in such a pa.s.sion of pleading that he appeared to be for the moment breathless. She sat there before him in the low chair she had chosen, and her eyes were fixed on him.

He had poured forth the last phrases with his head bowed and his hands gripping the edge of the velvet-draped shelf behind him.

It was she who spoke next.

"There is no one for you to go to," she said--"no one in all the wide world. As to my husband, it was a kind of accident. But really I didn't care if it hadn't been. All my crimes are against myself. I've injured no one else. Do you understand?"

He nodded dumbly, feeling rather blank.

"There is no 'man' in my life," she went on. "I never have 'loved' as women are supposed to love. I've just liked men--liked them as such--that was all."

She paused briefly, looking at him, expecting some word; but he was silent.

"I've never been really bad," she continued. "I've never wanted to be bad. But I like to be kissed, and I've been so unhappy through just sheer loneliness that I could only remember a few of the commandments, and the marriage service not at all."

Sir Caryll Carleigh stood very still there, trying to read her meaning in her face, but failing.

"Pretty nearly every one thinks I was in love with Kneedrock," she pursued presently. "You may ask him about that if you like. And they think that we made way with poor Darling between us. But they are wrong."

She paused again, in doubt whether or not to say more--whether or not to tell the truth--the whole truth--as she had never told it before.

Carleigh neither urged nor encouraged, but of her own free will she decided. It was due him in a way, and frank confession might probably be the best thing for her. She had carried the burden alone now for five years, always growing heavier, and the temptation to share it was too much for her.

"He was cleaning his gun, you see"--that was how she began it; just that simply--"and a cartridge sh.e.l.l stuck in the barrel. He tried to get it out, and then he held it--the gun, I mean--and asked me to try--with a sharp thing, you know. He thought that it was an empty sh.e.l.l and so did I. But it wasn't. That was all."

Carleigh shivered ever so slightly. "You cannot say that you didn't kill him, then," he declared.

She pursed her lips a bit thoughtfully. Already she felt better. She had not misjudged the effect--she _was_ relieved.

"No; because of course I did. But, on the other hand, of course I didn't. Anyhow, it mattered very little. I was so mad over life and living that his death seemed a very small event to me. I couldn't remember a thing at first.

"The shot seemed to have stunned my memory. But it all came back later--horridly. The scene, I mean. Yet the event--the fact that poor Darling was gone--appeared of so little importance. And I foolishly expected the world to see it as I did."

"But the world didn't?"

"No"--she shook her head quite seriously--"the world chose to talk, and has talked ever since. So very stupidly, too."