“Yes.”
“Oh, poor thing—poor thing!”
They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw a few irrelevant words across the silence.
“One of the gardeners found them.”
“Poor thing!”
“It was sufficiently horrible.”
“Horrible—oh!” She had swung round again to her pole. “Poor Denis!
“I had to see her.” She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk now, could distend his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. “I had to identify her.” He rose nervously and began to pace the room. “It’s knocked the wind out of me. I—my God! I couldn’t foresee it, could I?” He halted before her with outstretched hands of argument. “I did all I could—it’s not
“Your fault? Denis!”
“She wouldn’t take the money—” He broke off, checked by her awakened glance.
“The money? What money?” Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. “Had you offered her
He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.
“No—no; after the case was decided against her. She seemed hard up, and I sent Hinton to her with a cheque.”
“And she refused it?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, I don’t know—the usual thing. That she’d only wanted to prove she was his wife—on the child’s account. That she’d never wanted his money. Hinton said she was very quiet—not in the least excited—but she sent back the cheque.”
Kate sat motionless, her head bent, her hands clasped about her knees. She no longer looked at Peyton.
“Could there have been a mistake?” she asked slowly.
“A mistake?”
She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange insistence of observation. “Could they have been married?”
“The courts didn’t think so.”
“Could the courts have been mistaken?”
He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. “Good God, Kate! We gave her every chance to prove her case—why didn’t she do it? You don’t know what you’re talking about—such things are kept from girls. Why, whenever a man of Arthur’s kind dies, such—such women turn up. There are lawyers who live on such jobs— ask your father about it. Of course, this woman expected to be bought off—”
“But if she wouldn’t take your money?”
“She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and she was desperate; we don’t know how many times she may have been through the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money out of the heirs of any man who—who has been about with them.”
Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified glance into it.
“But the child—the child was Arthur’s?”
Peyton shrugged his shoulders. “There again—how can we tell? Why, I don’t suppose the woman herself—I wish to heaven your father were here to explain!”
She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a gesture almost maternal.
“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said. “You did all you could. Think what a comfort you were to poor Arthur.”
He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or resistance.
“I tried—I tried hard to keep him straight!”
“We all know that—every one knows it. And we know how grateful he was—what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been dreadful to think of his dying out there alone.”
She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in her hold inert.
“It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among strangers.”
He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. “Among strangers,” he repeated absently.
She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. “That poor woman—did you ever see her while you were out there?”
