Again she nodded silently.
"Because I had been a criminal, I presume!"
"You've no right to say that — "
"What else can I think? You tell me you were afraid I might persuade you to become my wife — something which, for some inexplicable reason, you claim is impossible. What other explanation can I infer? What other explanation is needed? It's ample, it covers everything, and I've no warrant to complain — God knows!"
She tried to protest, but he cut her short.
"There's one thing I don't understand at all! If that is so, if your repugnance for criminal associations made you run away from me — why did you go back to Bannon?"
She started and gave him a furtive, frightened glance.
"You knew that?"
"I saw you — last night — followed you from Viel's to your hotel."
"And you thought," she flashed in a vibrant voice — "you thought I was in his company of my own choice!"
"You didn't seem altogether downcast," he countered, "Do you wish me to understand you were with him against your will?"
"No," she said slowly…. "No: I returned to him voluntarily, knowing perfectly what I was about."
"Through fear of him — ?"
"No. I can't claim that."
"Rather than me — ?"
"You'll never understand," she told him a little wearily — "never. It was a matter of duty. I had to go back — I had to!"
Her voice trailed off into a broken little sob. But as, moved beyond his strength to resist, Lanyard put forth a hand to take the white-gloved one resting on the cushion beside her, she withdrew it with a swift gesture of denial.
"No!" she cried. "Please! You mustn't do that… You only make it harder…"
"But you love me!"
"I can't. It's impossible. I would — but I may not!"
"Why?"
"I can't tell you."
"If you love me, you must tell me."
She was silent, the white hands working nervously with her handkerchief.
"Lucy!" he insisted — "you must say what stands between you and my love.
It's true, I've no right to ask, as I had no right to speak to you of
love. But when we've said as much as we have said — we can't stop there.
You will tell me, dear?"
She shook her head: "It — it's impossible."
"But you can't ask me to be content with that answer!"
"Oh!" she cried — "how can I make you understand?… When you said what you did, that night — it seemed as if a new day were dawning in my life. You made me believe it was because of me. You put me above you — where I'd no right to be; but the fact that you thought me worthy to be there, made me proud and happy: and for a little, in my blindness, I believed I could be worthy of your love and your respect. I thought that, if I could be as strong as you during that year you asked in which to prove your strength, I might listen to you, tell you everything, and be forgiven…. But I was wrong, how wrong I soon learned…. So I had to leave you at whatever cost!"
She ceased to speak, and for several minutes there was silence. But for her quick, convulsive breathing, the girl sat like a woman of stone, staring dry-eyed out of the window. And Lanyard sat as moveless, the heart in his bosom as heavy and cold as a stone.
At length, lifting his head, "You leave me no alternative," he said in a voice dull and hollow even in his own hearing: "I can only think one thing…"
"Think what you must," she said lifelessly: "it doesn't matter, so long as you renounce me, put me out of your heart and — leave me."
Without other response, he leaned forward and tapped the glass; and as the cab swung in toward the curb, he laid hold of the door-latch.
"Lucy," he pleaded, "don't let me go believing — "
She seemed suddenly infused with implacable hostility. "I tell you," she said cruelly — "I don't care what you think, so long as you go!"
The face she now showed him was ashen; its mouth was hard; her eyes shone feverishly.
And then, as still he hesitated, the cab pulled up and the driver, leaning back, unlatched the door and threw it open. With a curt, resigned nod, Lanyard rose and got out.
Immediately the girl bent forward and grasped the speaking-tube; the door slammed; the cab drew away and left him standing with the pose, with the gesture of one who has just heard his sentence of death pronounced.
When he roused to know his surroundings, he found himself standing on a corner of the avenue du Bois.
It was bitter cold in the wind sweeping down from the west, and it had grown very dark. Only in the sky above the Bois a long reef of crimson light hung motionless, against which leafless trees lifted gnarled, weird silhouettes.
While he watched, the pushing crimson ebbed swiftly and gave way to mauve, to violet, to black.
XIX
UNMASKED
When there was no more light in the sky, a profound sigh escaped Lanyard's lips; and with the gesture of one signifying submission to an omen, he turned and tramped heavily back across-town.
More automaton than sentient being, he plodded on along the second enceinte of flaring, noisy boulevards, now and again narrowly escaping annihilation beneath the wheels of some coursing motor-cab or ponderous, grinding omnibus.
Barely conscious of such escapes, he was altogether indifferent to them: it would have required a mortal hurt to match the dumb, sick anguish of his soul; more than merely a sunset sky had turned black for him within that hour.
The cold was now intense, and he none too warmly clothed; yet there was sweat upon his brows.
Dully there recurred to him a figure he had employed in one of his talks with Lucy Shannon: that, lacking his faith in her, there would be only emptiness beneath his feet.
And now that faith was wanting in him, had been taken from him for all his struggles to retain it; and now indeed he danced on emptiness, the rope of temptation tightening round his neck, the weight of criminal instincts pulling it taut — strangling every right aspiration in him, robbing him of the very breath of that new life to which he had thought to give himself.
If she were not worthy, of what worth the fight?…
At one stage of his journey, he turned aside and, more through habit than desire or design, entered a cheap eating-place and consumed his customary evening meal without the slightest comprehension of what he ate or whether the food were good or poor.
When he had finished, he hurried away like a haunted man. There was little room in his mood for sustained thought: his wits were fathoming a bottomless pit of black despair. He felt like a man born blind, through skilful surgery given the boon of sight for a day or two, and suddenly and without any warning thrust back again into darkness.
He knew only that his brief struggle had been all wasted, that behind the flimsy barrier of his honourable ambition, the Lone Wolf was ravening. And he felt that, once he permitted that barrier to be broken down, it could never be repaired.
He had set it up by main strength of will, for love of a woman. He must maintain it now for no incentive other than to retain his own good will — or resign himself utterly to that darkness out of which