"Why do you assume that I should deceive him?"
"Because you would," he answered unhesitatingly. "You couldn't live with him and be absolutely sincere. He wouldn't understand it. You'd jar on his susceptibilities, and you haven't the moral courage to do that."
To Zella's absolute dismay, she began to weep uncontrollably. Something in her cousin's words, and in the violence of his unmistakable sincerity, hurt her unbearably.
"Thank God, you're crying," said James earnestly. "We may get to the back of it all now. Don't you see that he isn't any good to you, and never can be, nor you to him? He can never touch your reality, and what his may be, God only knows. I suppose it's there somewhere, smothered."
"James," said Zella, with the tears pouring down her face, "what is my reality? Nothing is real to me. I shall never, as long as I live, say this to anyone again, but nothing is real to me. I've only played at being unhappy, and at religion, and at every other emotion I've ever felt, and somewhere in the depths of me I've known all the time that I'm only pretending. Shall I never be sincere about anything? or only just as you said— being what the people with me expect and want me to be?"
"It's because you want to be liked, and because you want to be admired, and because you are naturally sympathetic; but it's most of all because you want to be loved. Don't you see, Zella? What good would Pontisbury's love do you when it wouldn't be for the real you at all, but only for the surface bit you showed him?"
"Nobody who knew me really would love me," said Zella, voicing for the first time in her life her deepest and most intimate conviction. "I am not true. I've always known it, ever since I was a little girl. I don't suppose there's a day," she said recklessly, "when I haven't spoken more or less insincerely, simply for the sake of effect."
"But it doesn't pay," said James with a curious simplicity. "You defeat your own ends. You try to be the same sort as other people, and you're miserable, and they aren't convinced; whereas, if you stick to being the kind of person you were created, your own sort find you out sooner or later, and then the other sort don't matter."
"It's been like that with me," said Zella. "I've tried to conform to the standards of all the people whom I've been with, until I have no standards of my own left."
"Yes, you have," he told her gently. "You know that it's been all humbug."
He looked at her compassionately, but with a curious detachment, in the moonlight.
"Oh," she wailed pitifully, "it will never come right. I'm what I've made myself, and Stephen does care for me. I want someone who will believe in me, who will tell me that I've not made a muddle of it all."
"No," said James; " that is the mistake you're making. You don't want someone who'll tell you you've not made a muddle of it all. You know you have, and that way lies salvation. You want someone who'll tell you that you have made a muddle of it all—and that it doesn't matter."
The music from the drawing-room stopped, and almost at once the sound of footsteps and voices drew near.
James took two steps forward, the ample Cardinal's robes completely shielding his cousin's tiny figure.
She raised an absurd lace handkerchief to her burning face.
"Where shall I take you?" he asked in a low tone.
"We can walk up and down the lower terrace," she replied in a steadier voice; and went down the steps.
Along the broad alley, where only one or two paper lanterns had found their way, he paced slowly beside her.
"Zella, are you all right? I don't ask you to forgive me for having upset you, for it was the only thing to do. But can't I help you?"
"You have—in a way. I've seen myself, for once in my life, without being a pretty picture."
There was a very bitter note in her voice.
"But, all the same, I don't say that you've convinced me about Stephen. Supposing I cared for him?"
"If you tell me that you want to marry Pontisbury more than you want anything on earth, it's different. I shouldn't say 'You'll have changed your mind in a year's time,' and 'First love never lasts,' and all the rest of it. You want it, and you're willing to take your risks for the sake of having what you want. One must take one's risks. That's another thing. But you don't want it, Zella."
"I don't know," she said faintly.
"Not when you're down on bedrock, as you've been to-night."
There was a silence.
"James," said Zella suddenly, stopping and facing him.
They stood still in the moonlight.
The sweeping folds of the scarlet drapery lent a strange dignity to his stooping shoulders and thin aquiline face. Her heart was beating violently, and she was for a moment unable to speak, but he faced her unquestioningly.
It was almost impossible that Zella's vanity should not have put the obvious interpretation upon his interference.
She was wrought up to a pitch of intense excitement, and the semi-darkness, together with the sense of unreality always inspired by fancy dress, gave her daring. Even the heavy unaccustomed plaits of hair swinging against either shoulder added to her sense of recklessness.
"Why have you told me all this? What makes you try and stop me?"
James looked at her with his melancholy gaze.
"Because," he said slowly, "the most important thing to me, though it sounds very odd, is trying to avoid muddles. I hate seeing them, and there are so many. Also because we were small children together, and there's the tie of blood between us; and also "—he paused for a moment, and Zella knew that he had never before put into words what he was about to say—" I care a great deal for Uncle Louis."
The very naivete of the remark carried conviction home to her.
The strangest and sharpest pang of the strange evening went through her, and for a moment her wide, frightened eyes glimpsed a vista of hitherto undreamed-of possibilities that receded even as she gazed
She caught her breath in a long gasp.
Her courage, like that of most imaginative people, rose in exact proportion to the demand made upon it.
When she spoke again her voice was quite steady:
"I see. The only thing you can do for me now is to forget everything I've said, and never, never to remind me of it again."
"I will never remind you of it unless you ask me to," he answered.
"I shall never do that," she said with conviction. "But I shall never forget, either, James, it's what you said just now—you and I are the same sort au fond, though we are so opposite. In a way I trust you more than anyone—your view, I mean. Tell me one thing. It ought to be, 'Do you think I shall ever be sincere?" but it isn't."
She paused.
"You have answered that question yourself, haven't you?" he said. "Whatever you are going to ask, it is because you really want to know, and not because it is the right question. You are sincere with the people who understand, Zella. The rest is a matter of more courage."
She shook her head, but gave him no other reply.
He waited for her question, and it came at last:
"Do you think that I shall ever be happy? Will it always be like this, a sort of self-cheating, trying to win the approbation and affection of anyone I am with, and only succeeding—if I do succeed—at the cost of being more or less insincere all the time? I want to be happy more than I want anything on earth: do you think that I ever shall be?"
"You know," he said slowly, "I can't really tell you that. I can't possibly know. But you want my opinion just for