His other resolution was that he would not be with her alone.
But when, a few days after, she wrote asking him to come and see her on the following afternoon, he made no attempt to excuse himself. This was a formal challenge.
While she celebrated the rites of tea, and for some little time thereafter, she joined with such natural ease in his slightly fevered conversation on matters of the day that he began to hope she had changed what he could not doubt had been her resolve, to corner him and speak to him gravely. She was to all appearance careless now, smiling so that he recalled, not for the first time since that night at the opera, what was written long ago of a Princess of Brunswick: “Her mouth has ten thousand charms that touch the soul.” She made a tour of the beautiful room where she had received him, singling out this treasure or that from the spoils of a hundred bric-a-brac shops, laughing over her quests, discoveries, and bargainings. And when he asked if she would delight him again with a favourite piece of his which he had heard her play at another house, she consented at once.
She played with a perfection of execution and feeling that moved him now as it had moved him before. “You are a musician born,” he said quietly when she had finished, and the last tremor of the music had passed away. “I knew that before I first heard you.”
“I have played a great deal ever since I can remember. It has been a great comfort to me,” she said simply, and half-turned to him smiling. “When did you first detect music in me? Oh, of course: I was at the opera. But that wouldn’t prove much, would it?”
“No,” he said abstractedly, his sense still busy with the music that had just ended. “I think I knew it the first time I saw you.” Then understanding of his own words came to him, and turned him rigid. For the first time the past had been invoked.
There was a short silence. Mrs. Manderson looked at Trent, then hastily looked away. Colour began to rise in her cheeks, and she pursed her lips as if for whistling. Then with a defiant gesture of the shoulders which he remembered she rose suddenly from the piano and placed herself in a chair opposite to him.
“That speech of yours will do as well as anything,” she began slowly, looking at the point of her shoe, “to bring us to what I wanted to say. I asked you here today on purpose, Mr. Trent, because I couldn’t bear it any longer. Ever since the day you left me at White Gables I have been saying to myself that it didn’t matter what you thought of me in that affair; that you were certainly not the kind of man to speak to others of what you believed about me, after what you had told me of your reasons for suppressing your manuscript. I asked myself how it could matter. But all the time, of course, I knew it did matter. It mattered horribly. Because what you thought was not true.” She raised her eyes and met his gaze calmly. Trent, with a completely expressionless face, returned her look.
“Since I began to know you,” he said, “I have ceased to think it.”
“Thank you,” said Mrs. Manderson; and blushed suddenly and deeply. Then, playing with a glove, she added, “But I want you to know what was true.
“I did not know if I should ever see you again,” she went on in a lower voice, “but I felt that if I did I must speak to you about this. I thought it would not be hard to do so, because you seemed to me an understanding person; and besides, a woman who has been married isn’t expected to have the same sort of difficulty as a young girl in speaking about such things when it is necessary. And then we did meet again, and I discovered that it was very difficult indeed. You made it difficult.”
“How?” he asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” said the lady. “But yes—I do know. It was just because you treated me exactly as if you had never thought or imagined anything of that sort about me. I had always supposed that if I saw you again you would turn on me that hard, horrible sort of look you had when you asked me that last question—do you remember?—at White Gables. Instead of that you were just like any other acquaintance. You were just”—she hesitated and spread out her hands—“nice. You know. After that first time at the opera when I spoke to you I went home positively wondering if you had really recognized me. I mean, I thought you might have recognized my face without remembering who it was.”
A short laugh broke from Trent in spite of himself, but he said nothing.
She smiled deprecatingly. “Well, I couldn’t remember if you had spoken my name; and I thought it might be so. But the next time, at the Iretons’, you did speak it, so I knew; and a dozen times during those few days I almost brought myself to tell you, but never quite. I began to feel that you wouldn’t let me, that you would slip away from the subject if I approached it. Wasn’t I right? Tell me, please.” He nodded. “But why?” He remained silent.
“Well,” she said, “I will finish what I had to say, and then you will tell me, I hope, why you had to make it so hard. When I began to understand that you wouldn’t let me talk of the matter to you, it made me more determined than ever. I suppose
