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Page 30
'You were wrong not to ask her. One never can be sure. Oh, why didn't
you ask her?' His old friend spoke with great feeling.
He looked at her, surprised and eager. 'Do you really think she might
have cared for me?'
'Oh, you ought to have told her: you ought to have asked her,' she
repeated.
'Well--now you know why I went away.'
'Yes.'
'When I heard of her--her--death'--he could not bring himself to say
her suicide--'there was nothing else for me to do. It was so hideous,
so unutterable. To go on with my old life, in the old place, among the
old people, was quite impossible. I wanted to follow her, to do what
she had done. The only alternative was to fly as far from England, as
far from myself, as I could.'
'Sometimes,' Mrs. Kempton confessed by-and-bye, 'sometimes I wondered
whether, possibly, your disappearance could have had any such
connection with Mary's death--it followed it so immediately. I
wondered sometimes whether, perhaps, you had cared for her. But I
couldn't believe it--it was only because the two things happened one
upon the other. Oh, why didn't you tell her? It is dreadful,
dreadful!'
IV.
When he had left her, she sat still for a little while before the
fire.
'Life is a chance to make mistakes--a chance to make mistakes. Life
is a chance to make mistakes.'
It was a phrase she had met in a book she was reading the other day:
then she had smiled at it; now it rang in her ears like the voice of a
mocking demon.
'Yes, a chance to make mistakes,' she said, half aloud.
She rose and went to her desk, unlocked a drawer, turned over its
contents, and took out a letter--an old letter, for the paper was
yellow and the ink was faded. She came back to the fireside, and
unfolded the letter and read it. It covered six pages of note-paper,
in a small feminine hand. It was a letter Mary Isona had written to
her, Margaret Kempton, the night before she died, more than thirty
years ago. The writer recounted the many harsh circumstances of her
life; but they would all have been bearable, she said, save for one
great and terrible secret. She had fallen in love with a man who was
scarcely conscious of her existence; she, a little obscure Italian
music teacher, had fallen in love with Theodore Vellan. It was as if
she had fallen in love with an inhabitant of another planet: the
worlds they respectively belonged to were so far apart She loved
him--she loved him--and she knew her love was hopeless, and she could
not bear it. Oh, yes; she met him sometimes, here and there, at houses
she went to to play, to give lessons. He was civil to her: he was more
than civil--he was kind; he talked to her about literature and music.
'He is so gentle, so strong, so wise; but he has never thought of me
as a woman--a woman who could love, who could be loved. Why should he?
If the moth falls in love with the star, the moth must suffer.... I am
cowardly; I am weak; I am what you will; but I have more than I can
bear. Life is too hard--too hard. To-morrow I shall be dead. You will
be the only person to know why I died, and you will keep my secret.'
'Oh, the pity of it--the pity of it!' murmured Mrs. Kempton. 'I wonder
whether I ought to have shown him Mary's letter.'
WHEN I AM KING
'_Qu'y faire, mon Dieu, qu'y faire?_'
I had wandered into a tangle of slummy streets, and began to think it
time to inquire my way back to the hotel: then, turning a corner, I
came out upon the quays. At one hand there was the open night, with
the dim forms of many ships, and stars hanging in a web of masts and
cordage; at the other, the garish illumination of a row of
public-houses: _Au Bonheur du Matelot_, _Caf� de la Marine_,
_Brasserie des Quatre Vents_, and so forth; rowdy-looking shops
enough, designed for the entertainment of the forecastle. But they
seemed to promise something in the nature of local colour; and I
entered the _Brasserie des Quatre Vents_.
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