‘Elizabeth! I must—I’ve got to speak to you!’
‘Let me go, will you!’
They began to struggle, and then stopped abruptly. Two of the Karens who had come out of the church were standing fifty yards away, gazing at them through the half-darkness with deep interest. Flory began again in a lower tone:
‘Elizabeth, I know I’ve no right to stop you like this. But I must speak to you, I must! Please hear what I’ve got to say. Please don’t run away from me!’
‘What are you doing? Why are you holding on to my arm? Let me go this instant!’
‘I’ll let you go—there, look! But do listen to me, please! Answer me this one thing. After what’s happened, can you ever forgive me?’
‘Forgive you? What do you mean, forgive you?’
‘I know I’m disgraced. It was the vilest thing to happen! Only, in a sense it wasn’t my fault. You’ll see that when you’re calmer. Do you think—not now, it was too bad, but later—do you think you can forget it?’
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about. “Forget it?” What has it got to do with me? I thought it was very disgusting, but it’s not my business. I can’t think why you’re questioning me like this at all.’
He almost despaired at that. Her tone and even her words were the very ones she had used in that earlier quarrel of theirs. It was the same move over again. Instead of hearing him out she was going to evade him and put him off—snub him by pretending that he had no claim upon her.
‘Elizabeth! Please answer me. Please be fair to me! It’s serious this time. I don’t expect you to take me back all at once. You couldn’t, when I’m publicly disgraced like this. But after all, you virtually promised to marry me—’
‘What! Promised to marry you? When did I promise to marry you?’
‘Not in words, I know. But it was understood between us.’
‘Nothing of the kind was understood between us! I think you are behaving in the most horrible way. I’m going along to the Club at once. Good evening!’
‘Elizabeth! Elizabeth! Listen. It’s not fair to condemn me unheard. You knew before what I’d done and you knew that I’d lived a different life since I met you. What happened this evening was only an accident. That wretched woman, who, I admit, was once my—well——’
‘I won’t listen, I won’t listen to such things! I’m going!’
He caught her by the wrists again, and this time held her. The Karens had disappeared, fortunately.
‘No, no, you shall hear me! I’d rather offend you to the heart than have this uncertainty. It’s gone on week after week, month after month, and I’ve never once been able to speak straight out to you. You don’t seem to know or care how much you make me suffer. But this time you’ve got to answer me.’
She struggled in his grip, and she was surprisingly strong. Her face was more bitterly angry than he had ever seen or imagined it. She hated him so that she would have struck him if her hands were free.
‘Let me go! Oh, you beast, you beast, let me go!’
‘My God, my God, that we should fight like this! But what else can I do? I can’t let you go without even hearing me. Elizabeth, you must listen to me!’
‘I will not! I will not discuss it! What right have you to question me? Let me go!’
‘Forgive me, forgive me! This one question. Will you—not now, but later, when this vile business is forgotten—will you marry me?’
‘No, never, never!’
‘Don’t say it like that! Don’t make it final. Say no for the present if you like—but in a month, a year, five years——’
‘Haven’t I said no? Why must you keep on and on?’
‘Elizabeth, listen to me. I’ve tried again and again to tell you what you mean to me—oh, it’s so useless talking about it! But do try and understand. Haven’t I told you something of the life we live here? The sort of horrible death-in-life! The decay, the loneliness, the self-pity? Try and realise what it means, and that you’re the sole person on earth who could save me from it.’
‘Will you let me go? Why do you have to make this dreadful scene?’
‘Does it mean nothing to you when I say that I love you? I don’t believe you’ve ever realised what it is that I want from you. If you like, I’d marry you and promise never even to touch you with my finger. I wouldn’t mind even that, so long as you were with me. But I can’t go on with my life alone, always alone. Can’t you bring yourself ever to forgive me?’
‘Never, never! I wouldn’t marry you if you were the last man on earth. I’d as soon marry the—the sweeper!’
She had begun crying now. He saw that she meant what she said. The tears came into his own eyes. He said again:
‘For the last time. Remember that it’s something to have one person in the world who loves you. Remember that though you’ll find men who are richer, and younger, and better in every way than I, you’ll never find one who cares for you so much. And though I’m not rich, at least I could make you a home. There’s a way of living—civilised, decent——’
‘Haven’t we said enough?’ she said more calmly. ‘Will you let me go before somebody comes?’
He relaxed his grip on her wrists. He had lost her, that was certain. Like a hallucination, painfully clear, he saw again their home as he had imagined it; he saw their garden, and Elizabeth feeding Nero and the pigeons on the drive by the sulphur-yellow phloxes that grew as high as her shoulder; and the drawing-room, with the watercolours on the walls, and the balsams in the china bowl mirrored by the table, and the bookshelves, and the black piano. The impossible, mythical piano—symbol of everything that that futile accident had wrecked!
‘You should have a piano,’ he said despairingly.
‘I don’t play the piano.’
He let her go. It was no use continuing. She was no sooner free of him than she took to her heels and actually ran into the Club garden, so hateful was his presence to her. Among the trees she stopped to take off her spectacles and remove the signs of tears from her face. Oh, the beast, the beast! He had hurt her wrists abominably. Oh, what an unspeakable beast he was! When she thought of his face as it had looked in church, yellow and glistening with the hideous birthmark upon it, she could have wished him dead. It was not what he had done that horrified her. He might have committed a thousand abominations and she could have forgiven him. But not after that shameful, squalid scene, and the devilish ugliness of his disfigured face in that moment. It was, finally, the birthmark that had damned him.
Her aunt would be furious when she heard that she had refused Flory. And there was her uncle and his leg-pinching—between the two of them, life here would become impossible. Perhaps she would have to go Home unmarried after all. Black beetles! No matter. Anything—spinsterhood, drudgery, anything—sooner than the alternative. Never, never would she yield to a man who had been so disgraced! Death sooner, far sooner. If there had been mercenary thoughts in her mind an hour ago, she had forgotten them. She did not even remember that Verrall had jilted her and that to have married Flory would have saved her face. She knew only that he was dishonoured and less than a man, and that she hated him as she would have hated a leper or a lunatic. The instinct was deeper than reason or even self-interest, and she could no more have disobeyed it than she could have stopped breathing.
Flory, as he turned up the hill, did not run, but he walked as fast as he could. What he had to do must be done quickly. It was getting very dark. The wretched Flo, who even now had not grasped that