They were alone together, Lisa having slipped away, taking the boy with her, when she found the revelation inevitable. Let them fight it out, these two; and if this Englishwoman loved her dead brother better than her living husband, and chose to desert that noble husband, and thus show of what poor stuff she was made, there was Lisa who adored him, who would follow him through the world, if he would let her, with fidelity that neither time nor trouble could change.
Eve stood for a few moments mutely looking at the blurred photograph, the wretched production of an itinerant photographer’s camera, in which one hand was out of focus, jointless, fingerless, monstrous. Poor as the image was, it brought back the days of her childhood as vividly as if it had been the finest work of art that Venice, in her golden age of Titian, Tintoret, and Veronese, could have produced. How well she remembered him! How dearly she had loved him! His holidays had been a season of boisterous gladness, his return to school or university a time of mourning. He had given interest and delight to all her childish amusements. He had taught her to ride. He had taught her to shoot with an airgun, which was one of his choicest possessions. He had taught her to serve at tennis, to play billiards on the worn-out table, where the balls rattled against the cushions as on cast iron. He had done all these things in a casual way, never sacrificing any inclination or engagement of his own to her pleasure—but in after days, when he had vanished out of her life, she knew not whither, it seemed to her that he had been the kindest and most unselfish of brothers. And he was dead, had been dead for years, cut off in the prime of his manhood by a remorseless hand. He was dead, and the man who had slain him stood before her, undaunted, impenitent—her husband.
And the boy whose treble voice sounded now and again from the next room—the child from whose lightest contact she had shrank with jealous abhorrence—that child was of her kindred, no matter how basely born. He was all that was left to her of the brother she had loved, and it was not for her to shrink from him.
XXIX
“ ’Tis Not the Same Now, Never More Can Be”
Vansittart was the first to break that agony of silence.
“Does this mean the end of love?” he asked. “Is all over and done with between you and me? Is love only a dream that we have dreamed?”
“Yes; it is a dream,” she answered, looking at him with tearless eyes, which had more misery in them than all the tears he had ever seen in the eyes of women. “It is something perhaps to have believed one’s self happy for two blessed years. You have been so good to me—so good to poor Peggy. She loved you almost as much as I did. You have been all goodness—and you did not know that he was my brother. Yet, yet, when you killed him you must have known that some heart would be broken. No, I can never forget how good you have been—or how dear. Don’t think that I can change in an hour from love to hate. No, no; that cannot be. To my dying day I must love you—but I cannot live with the man who killed my brother. I can never be your wife again. That is all over. We must be strangers on this side of the grave.”
“A hard sentence, Eve; it could not be harder if I were a deliberate murderer. And yet perhaps it is no more than I deserve—perhaps even the gallows would be no more than my desert—”
“The gallows! Oh, God, could they kill you because—?”
The words died in her throat, choked by the agony of a great fear.
“But no one knows—no one will ever know,” she cried. “She will never tell”—pointing to the door. “She loves you too dearly.”
“No, she will not tell.”
“Is there anyone else who knows?”
“Only her aunt, who may be trusted. No, I don’t think I am in any danger from the law,” he said carelessly, as if that hardly mattered. “But you—you are my supreme judge; and you look upon me as a murderer. Well, perhaps you are right. Let me sophisticate with myself as I will, in that one moment I was in mind and instinct a homicide. When I struck that blow I did not care about consequences. All the savage impulses within me were raging. Yes, I was a murderer. And you say that we must part! That is your sentence?”
She nodded yes.
“Very well; then I must do all I can to make our parting easy and reputable. The world will wonder and talk, but we must bear that. I think I know a way of lessening the scandal. You will live at Merewood, and I will travel. That will make things easy.”
“Live at Merewood without you! Not for all the world. I can go back to Fernhurst to my sisters. What does it matter where I live? The worst is that I must live. You will let me give them some of my pin-money, I know, so that I may not be a burden
