The Gap in the Curtain

And then some of the old tenderness must have come into her eyes and voice. 'Oh, Charles,' she cried, 'what has happened to us?'

It was the word 'us' that broke him down, for it told him that she too was at odds with life. He had a sudden flash of illumination. He saw that what he had once longed for was true, that her heart was his, and the realisation that not only life but love was lost to him was the last drop in his cup. He stood holding the gate, shaking like a reed, with eyes which, even in the half-light, seemed to be devoured with pain.

'You must have thought me a cad,' he stammered. 'I love you—I loved you beyond the world, but I dared not come near you … I am a dying man … I will soon be dead.'

His strength came back to him. He had a purpose now. He had found the only mortal in whom he could confide—must confide.

As they walked down the ride in the winter gloaming, with the happy lights of the house in the valley beneath them, he told her all, and as he spoke it seemed to him that he was cleansing his soul. She made no comment—did not utter a single word.

At the gate of the terrace gardens he stopped. His manner was normal again, and his voice was quiet, almost matter-of-fact.

'Thank you for listening to me, Pamela,' he said. 'It has been a great comfort to me to tell you this … It is the end for both of us. You see that, don't you? … We must never meet again. Goodbye, my dear.'

He took her hand, and the touch of it shivered his enforced composure. 'I love you … I love you,' he moaned …

She snatched her hand away.

'This is perfect nonsense,' she said. 'I won't … ' and then fled down an alley, as she had once fled from me at Flambard.

Charles had some food in his room, and went to bed, where he slept for the first time for weeks. He had been through the extremes of hell, and nothing worse could await him. The thought gave him a miserable peace. He wrote a line to his hostess, and left for London by the early train.

4

Chapter

He was sitting next afternoon in his rooms in Mount Street when a lady was announced, and Pamela marched in on the heels of his servant. The room was in dusk, and it was her voice that revealed her to him.

'Turn on the light, Crocker,' she said briskly, 'and bring tea for two.

As quick as possible, please, for I'm famishing.'

I can picture her, for I know Pamela's ways, plucking off her hat and tossing it on to a table, shaking up the cushions on the big sofa, and settling herself in a corner of it—Pamela no longer the affected miss of recent months, but the child of April and an April wind, with the freshness of a spring morning about her.

They had tea, for which the anxious Crocker provided muffins, rejoicing to see once again in the flat people feeding like Christians. Pamela chattered happily, chiefly gossip about Wirlesdon, while Charles pulled himself out of his lethargy and strove to rise to her mood. He even went to his bedroom, changed his collar and brushed his hair. When Crocker had cleared away the tea, she made him light his pipe. 'You know you are never really happy with anything else,' she said; and he obeyed, not having smoked a pipe since Newfoundland.

'Now,' she said at last, when she had poked the fire into a blaze, 'I want you to repeat very carefully all that rubbish you told me yesterday.'

He obeyed—told the story slowly and dispassionately, without the emotion of the previous day. She listened carefully, and wrote down from his dictation the exact words he had read in The Times. She knitted her brows over them. 'Pretty accurate, aren't they?' she asked. 'Not much chance of mistaken identity.'

'None,' he said. 'There are very few Otterys in the world, and every detail about me is correct.'

'And you believe in it?'

'I must.'

'I mean to say, you believe that you really saw that thing in The Times?

You didn't dream it afterwards?'

'I saw it as clearly as I am seeing you.'

'I wondered what tricks that old Professor man was up to at Flambard, but I had no notion it was anything as serious as this. What do you suppose the others saw? Uncle Ned is sure to know—I'll ask him.'

'He saw nothing himself—he told me so. Lady Flambard fainted, and he was looking after her.'

'She saw nothing either, then? I'm sorry, for I can't ask any of the men.

I don't know Mr Tavanger or Mr Mayot or Sir Robert Goodeve, and Reggie Daker is too much of a donkey to count. It would be too delicate a subject to be inquisitive about with strangers … You really are convinced that the Professor had got hold of some method of showing you the future?'

'Convinced beyond any possibility of doubt,' said Charles dismally.

'Good. That settles one thing … Now for the next point. The fact that you saw that stuff is no reason why it should happen. Supposing you had dreamed it, would you have allowed a dream, however vivid, to wreck your life?'

'But, Pamela dear, the case is quite different. Moe showed us what he called 'objective reality.' A dream would have been my own concern, but this came from outside, quite independent of any effort of mine. It was the result of a scientific experiment.'

'But the science may have been all cock-eyed. Most science is—at any rate, it changes a good deal faster than Paris fashions.'

'You wouldn't have said that if you had been under his influence. He didn't want me to die—he didn't make The Times paragraph take that form—he only lifted the curtain an inch so that I could see what had actually happened a year ahead. How can I disbelieve what science brought to me out of space, without any preparation or motive? The whole thing was as mathematical and impersonal as an eclipse of the moon in an almanack.'

'All right! Let's leave it at that. Assume that The Times is going to print the paragraph. The answer is that The Times is going to be badly diddled.

Somebody will make a bloomer.'

Charles shook his head. 'I've tried to think that, but well—you know, that kind of mistake isn't made.'

'Oh, isn't it? The papers announced Dollie's engagement to three different men—exact as you please—names and dates complete.'

'But why should it make a blunder in this one case out of millions?

Isn't it more reasonable to think that there is a moral certainty of its being right?'

Pamela was not succeeding with her arguments. They sounded thin to her own ears, in spite of her solid conviction at the back of them. She sat up, an alert, masterful figure, youth girt for command. She had another appeal than logic.

'Charles,' she said solemnly, 'this is a horrible business for you, and you've got to pull yourself together. You must defy it. Make up your mind that you're not going to give it another thought. Get back to your work, and resolve that you don't care a lop-eared damn for Moe or science or anything else. Lose your temper with fate and frighten the blasted hussy.' Tom Nantley had a turn for robust speech in the hunting-field, and his daughter remembered some of it.

Charles shook his head miserably.

'I've tried,' he said, 'but I can't. I simply haven't the manhood … I know it's the right way, but my mind is poisoned already. I've got a germ in it that fevers me … Besides, it isn't sense. You can't stop what is to be by saying that it won't be.'

'Yes, you can,' said the girl firmly. 'That's the meaning of Free Will.'

Charles dropped his head into his hands. The sight of Pamela thus restored to him was more than he could bear.

Then she had an inspiration.

'Do you remember the portrait in the dining-room at Wirlesdon of old Sir Somebody-Ap-Something—Mamma's Welsh ancestor? You know the story about him? He was on the side of Henry Tudor, and raised his men to march to