CHAPTER XXXI

THE REPUDIATION

"Escape me? Never-- Beloved! While I am I and you are you, So long as the world contains us both, Me the loving and you the loth, While the one eludes must the other pursue." --ROBERT BROWNING.

The delicate veil of sapphire which June calls night was drawn across the splendour of the sky; and it was like the device of a beauty who wears a transparent gauze to enhance the glitter of her diamonds.

In the north still lingered a supernal glow, the hint of the day that has no night.

The fragrance of unseen cottage gardens was all about Hubert as he walked slowly up the lane from the inn. There was no moon. The glimmer of starshine made mysterious radiance, yet left a soft, velvet dusk, without the clean-cut lights and shades of moonlight.

He had bathed, changed, dined. Now he was coming to ascertain the result of his daring experiment. Had he succeeded, as he hoped, in showing Melicent her own heart?

He had no remorse. The thing was necessary; it had to be done. Could he stand by and see a proud girl wreck three lives?

It was very dark among the lilacs by the cottage gate. Peering through the thick boughs, he started; for there was no lamplight, either in the parlour or the room above it. And he believed that she had fled from him.

This gave a jolt to the pleasing elation of his spirits. Walking on the grass, he approached the open door without noise. Then he halted.

The casements of the parlour were wide open to the summer night. On the window-sill lay a girl's abased head, the fair hair just touched by the star-glimmer, the face hidden in her arms.

She lay very still, and was apparently not weeping. He went up to her, resisting with firmness his great desire to lay his hand upon her hair. For the first time in years he spoke the name that stood for all his ambitions.

"Millie," he said softly.

She sat up quickly. He hardly knew what expression he had expected to see; but the indignation of her eyes was a surprise.

"Oh, I wonder how you dare come near me!" she cried.

"I won't come near you. I'll stay outside here," he said hastily, with a bewildered sense of having lost the thread of the situation.

"You certainly won't come in at my invitation."

"No, of course," he said meekly, his head fairly spinning with wonder; "but I thought you would see I had to come and beg your pardon."

She stood up, withdrawing herself into the room, as if she meant to escape.

"There are things that are unpardonable," she said coldly.

He contemplated this idea. "Do you mean that you never can forgive me?"

"Perhaps I mean that I never can forgive myself," she said chokingly. "You--you have humbled my pride to the dust. Lance ... trusts me, and I have ... How am I to face him?"

"Then you mean to stick to that--to go on with your engagement--to marry Lancelot--in spite of what happened to-day?" he asked hastily.

She stood up straight in a long, loose, pale-coloured gown, half lost, half seen in the faint light. The glint of the stars swam in her eyes.

"May I ask what else you expected?"

He was at a loss. Ready enough had he been to console her, to tell her that Fate was too strong for her, to urge her to correct her mistake before it was too late. Her present attitude stunned him, and bereft him of words. The dashing of the high hopes with which he had come bred in him a sudden sense of being wronged.

"Millie," he expostulated, "do you know what you said--up there when the water rushed out upon you? You called out: '_Bert! Bert!_'"

There was silence. He saw her start.

"Did I say that?" she said slowly. "Then it is I who have betrayed myself, and you--are not so much to blame as I thought. I can believe that it excited you a little to find that I knew you, and made you think of old times." She hesitated, seeming at a loss what to say or do; her embarrassment was obvious, her distress manifest. Then, with sudden determination, she came near the window again. "If that is true, I suppose I must forgive you," she said stiffly, "and we must both forget a mad moment."

He could hardly believe his ears. "Is that all you have to say?" he demanded harshly.

"The less we either of us say the better, surely, concerning such an affair."

The man drew in his breath sharply. "After all that has come and gone?" he panted.

"Captain Brooke, for a moment this afternoon I allowed myself and you to forget that I am engaged to your friend. I must remind you of it now."

"I wish to God that I had let him drown in the drift!" he flung out. "Or that I had drowned myself--!"

"I don't wish to be hard or unkind, but I cannot listen to you. I am going to close the window."

He inserted his shoulder, so that she could not close it. The expression of his eyes was such that she dare not face him.

"Answer me one question," he commanded brusquely. There was a growl in his voice that she knew of old as a storm-signal. "I have a right to ask it, and you ought to answer--you _shall_ answer! When I kissed you to-day ... _was it against your will?_"

Her expression made him feel as if he had slashed her across the face. Had she accepted defeat in that moment--said anything to appease the man's mounting wrath--he might have kept his head. But pain or insult had never the effect of softening Melicent, but only of stiffening her. His taunt stung her to real anger, and, in the midst of her stifled consciousness that she was fighting a losing battle, she clutched at her indignation as at a blade with which she might wound. She had moved towards the door with the intention of escape, but now she returned to the window.

"You think you have the right to ask me that?" she said, with the same ruthless arrogance that she might have used to him in Africa. "You say that to me--you, who hope to turn into something that people may take for an English gentleman! ... You did that this afternoon to get a hold over me! I know your threat! You needn't say it! You mean that, if I don't tell Lance, you will! ... And you suppose I care if you do, or what you do, or anything about you...!"

Before she had got so far, Bert had flung his leg over the sill and vaulted lightly into the room. He came quite close to her, but spoke quietly, under his breath, with an air of desperately holding himself in.

"All right!" he said. "You say you don't care, do you? Well, then, if you say so, I say you lie! You lie, do you hear me?"

"You had better go away before you grow unpardonable," said the girl coldly.

"I'll go when I've said what I'm going to say, and not before. I'm going to tell you the cold truth here and now. The Brooke farce is played out, we know each other, and you shall hear what I have to say! _You--kissed--me_ to-day!--great God! do you suppose I don't _know_ that you did?--and you did it because--"

Slight things decide momentous issues. Even then an appeal, the smallest sign of surrender on the girl's part, would have brought him crouching to her feet. But she flung back her head, and looked him in the eyes to show how little she feared him; and she laughed.

That let loose the tempest. All in a moment he broke off his husky, difficult words. All in a moment he had her by the waist, crushing her to him as if holding her against an army. There was no love in the fierce hold, only the determination that she should hear the cruel words that he spoke into her ear:

"Because you love me! Because you love me! Because you're mine--mine--mine!"

She disdained to struggle, as she disdained to plead. She made no effort to fling him off. Her silent, passive contempt brought him to himself in a flash.

The girl who, that golden afternoon had yielded to his spell, had weakened, had been as it were his to take, now lay like a lifeless thing in his ungentle hold. He realised what he had done.

When he let her go, she did, by an effort, stand alone. Her laugh of scorn was quenched. She lifted one hand to hide the quivering of her mouth, but did not move at once, perhaps because she feared to fall. He turned away from the still, silent, accusing figure with a kind of roar of helpless strength, of baffled will.

"The same, the same as ever," he said. "The woman's way! To make me feel a great, rough brute, when all the time it's you that are cruel. Yes! As cruel as a fiend."

To and fro he paced, to and fro upon the floor; then, with sense of defeat in overwhelming bitterness, got to his knees at her feet.

He knew that his fatal moment of uncontrolled temper had undone all that the past weeks had gained so painfully and slowly. Beneath his shame was an undercurrent of conviction that he was right and she wrong. But what was right or justice in face of Melicent's inflexibility?

"I'm sorry. I'm a brute. But it's your fault. You know what you can do with me," he said chokingly.

"Get up!" said her exhausted voice. "Get up, do! Go away. You see you are ... impossible. I thought you had improved, but you see it's all ... just as bad as ever."

"Millie!"

"Don't touch me."

"You know I am not such a hound as to think I have any hold ... or to use it, if I had?"

"What does it matter to me?" She moved: he held a fold of her gown. "Are you going to detain me?" she asked. "Because if so, I shall call Mrs. Barrett. This is not love--oh, no, nor anything like it; it's simply your fixed determination to have your own way. I've always known it, all these years--that you were not beaten, that you meant to try again. Not for love of me, but simply because to conquer me is your fixed idea. And this afternoon you thought you had succeeded. Well, you haven't, that's all."

He got to his feet, utterly humbled, reduced to abject pleading:

"Millie, see me again! Don't let it end here! I've lost my head, and don't know what I am saying. Give me a chance to talk things out--"

"Never, never, never!" she shuddered, making for the door. There she turned upon him. "You are a savage! If you knew how I hate savagery! You are a Boer! If you knew how I hate the Boers! I'll marry a man who knows how to treat a woman, not one whose civilisation is only skin-deep." He took two maddened strides towards her. "Has that hurt you? Very well, then, you can kill me, you know. I wonder you don't."

He passed a hand over his hair like one pushing a veil from his eyes.

"I can tell you why I don't," he said, in tones that rapped out sharp as a rapier thrust. "It's because you're not worth it."

Almost before he had spoken, he had turned about, sprung from the window, and disappeared. The starshine glimmered in the silent room where a moment ago had been such storm and stress.

Melicent stood alone, in possession of the field. The suddenness of the withdrawal of the besieging forces took her breath. The Parthian shot, fired in the moment of flight, reached her heart and quivered there.

She gave a strangled low cry, as if physically hurt.

At last, it seemed, the long struggle was over. Not because Bert realised that she was out of reach, but because suddenly he had awoke from his dream to find her not worth fighting for.

She told herself that, whatever the means, the thing was done, and finally done now. There would be no more vehement assaults for her to dread.

Yet something unpleasantly like remorse was gnawing at her heart. She knew she had said things she did not mean; in the heat of battle she had caught up every missile....

Well, now it was over. Silence and solitude were profound. The air which had vibrated to Bert's rage and Bert's repentance was so still that the nightingale's song sounded too loud in her ears.

"All over!" she said aloud; and the words sounded strange and horrible.

"All over!" She crept upstairs to a sleepless night; but this of late had been no rare thing with her.

* * * * * * * *

In the early morning she went away to London, choosing a route to the station which should not take her past the inn.

And for weeks the grey walls of Lone Ash rose higher in their dignified beauty, unseen by the eyes of her for whom they were being raised, and whose genius had called them into being.