She regarded him with faint amusement from his receding forehead and deep sunk eyes to the strange contrast of his small lightly poised feet. “You are very muddy,” she commented and cast a pathetic glance towards the floor, still fresh and clean from Mrs. Butler’s scrubbing.
“I am sorry,” he said, “very sorry. The fact is …”
“Don’t trouble to invent a lie,” she murmured abstractedly, her attention seeming to wander to the glowing heart of the fire. “You are looking for someone. Anybody can tell that. Unless you are flying from someone like the other man.”
“The other man?” he leant a little forward with excitement, and Andrews once again prepared himself for betrayal. The act of drinking from his cup, which had filled him with such humility, seemed now to underline what he considered the vileness of her treachery.
“The man you described,” she said, “the frightened, obstinate man.”
“He’s here?” Andrews could hardly catch Carlyon’s whisper. Carlyon’s right hand had hidden itself in an inner pocket.
“He slept here last night,” she said.
“And now?”
“He went with the morning, north, I think, but I don’t know.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Carlyon murmured. “He nearly ran into me, but escaped again in this wretched fog. He may return here then.”
She laughed. “I don’t think so,” and pointed to the corner where the unloaded gun stood. “Fear,” she added, “and shame.”
“And your brother?” he asked with a sudden, quick remnant of suspicion.
“He was not here last night, but I warned your friend that he would be here tonight. Shall I warn you?” she added.
“I am not afraid,” Carlyon answered, “nor ashamed.”
She looked again at his muddy clothes. “But you too are flying,” she asked, “from something?”
“From the law,” Carlyon replied with unhesitating frankness, “not from my friends—or from myself,” he added with brooding thoughtfulness.
“Why all this fuss?” she asked, her eyes, kindled in the red reflected glow of the fire, gazing up at him with passionate sincerity and condemning, in an equal judgment, his mud, his flight, his search.
He watched her with fascination and with a kind of difficulty, as though trying to cling with his eyes to some bright object obscurely shining at the bottom of a dark and deep well. “He’s a sort of Judas,” he said softly and reluctantly.
“He didn’t seem to be a man with money,” she said. “Are you certain?”
“No. But if I could meet him, I should know in a moment. He hasn’t the courage to hide anything.” He shivered slightly as a cold draught insinuated itself under the door.
“You are cold,” Elizabeth said. “Come to the fire.” He looked at her for a moment as though amazed at her friendliness and then advanced to the fire and let the heat and flame stain his hands a red gold. “Why can’t you leave him alone?” she asked. “Is he worth the trouble and risk?”
Out of their deep sockets Carlyon’s eyes peered cautiously, as though he wondered how far it was possible to make this serene stranger understand. “I knew him very well,” he said hesitatingly. “We were friends. He must have known me well. Now I hate him. I’m certain that this is hate.”
Her voice touched him like a slow warm flame. “Tell me,” she said.
He looked at her again with that impression of amazement slowly welling up from a dark, deeply hidden source. “You have a lovely voice,” he said. “It is just as though you were ready to play music to any stranger. You know who I am?” he asked.
“One of the Gentlemen,” she said, and waited.
“So was the man who was here last night. We were friends. I told him things I would not tell anyone now—what things I loved and why. And after three years with us he betrayed us to the law.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Someone must have done,” he said. “Six men are in gaol on a charge of murder. There was a fight and a gauger was shot, poor devil. Four of us escaped; the two men who are with me, and Andrews, who has done his best to avoid us. And when did he escape? Before we were surprised. I’m certain of that. Why is he afraid of meeting me? I know he is.” His eyes, having taken a sad, suspicious gaze at the world, seemed to hide themselves yet deeper in his skull. “You will not understand,” he said, “how he has spoilt everything. It was a rough life, but there seemed something fine in it—adventure, courage, high stakes. Now we are a lot of gaol-birds, murderers. Doesn’t it seem mean to you,” he cried suddenly, “that a man should be shot dead over a case of spirits? What a dull, dirty game it makes it all appear.”
She looked at him with pity but not with sympathy. “It must have been that all along,” she said.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, but I didn’t know,” he said. “Should I thank him for my enlightenment?”
She smiled at the tendrils of the fire uncurling themselves and folding again in bud. “Is a man’s death and your dream broken worth all this fuss?” she demanded with voice raised a little as though she would carry her protest against man’s stupidity beyond the room and out into the shrouding mist and night.
“You are so sane,” he said sadly. “You women are all so sane. A dream is often all there is to a man. I think that you are lovely, good and full of pity, but that is only a dream. You know all about yourself, how you are greedy for this and that, afraid of insects, full of disgusting physical needs. You’ll never find a man who will love you for anything but a bare, unfilled-in outline of yourself. A man will even forget his own details when he can, until he appears an epic hero, and it needs his woman to see that he’s a fool. Only a woman can love a real person.”
“You may
