The Honour of the Clintons Part 32

He stopped and turned then. She expected him to come back on to the lawn; but he stood still, and she had to go up the path to him.

She lifted her face, that some men, but not he, would have called beautiful, to his, and smiled.

"It needn't happen, you know," she said.

He did not understand in the least, and looked his puzzlement--and his disgust of her. She dropped her eyes, and her seductive manner at the same time. "Come and sit down again," she said, "and let us talk sensibly. I have worked off my anger. Now let us see what can be done."

A slight gleam of hope came to him. Perhaps--now Susan was dead--she would see ... she could gain nothing....

He followed her to the seat obediently, and sat down.

"I have told you what I think of you," she said, speaking now coolly and evenly. "I had to do that to clear my mind. You have treated me with the meanest cruelty, and I mean every word I have said to you. I have suffered bitterly, and perhaps I have succeeded in showing you that I have it in my power to make you suffer in the same way. Revenge is very sweet, and I have tasted a little of it. But, after all, it can't do away with the past; and its savour soon goes. I shan't gain much by punis.h.i.+ng you, though you ought to be punished."

"No," he said eagerly. "You can gain nothing. And look at the terrible--awful suffering you would bring upon those who are innocent of any offence against you."

"Quite so," she said coolly. "I am glad you realise that. I meant you to."

"It would be inhuman," he went on. "You would never be forgiven for it--in this world or the next."

She laughed, this time without affectation. "You are really rather funny," she said. "Well now, what do you suggest? That I shall hold my tongue and go away? Back to America, for instance, and settle down there for good, perhaps under another name?"

He could hardly believe his ears. "You would do that?" he cried.

"I think perhaps I might be persuaded to. I am not unreasonable."

"If you did that," he broke out, his face aflame, "the blessing of the innocent would be yours to the end of your life. You would be their saviour; you----"

"I suppose I should," she interrupted dryly. "I should like that. But the trouble is, you see, that one can't live on the blessing of the innocent. It isn't sustaining enough. And I have very little to live on."

The light died slowly out of his face as he listened to her.

"You must help me," she said. "You are a rich man, and you can do it.

You allowed money to be paid before, to hush up this scandal; you offered a very large sum of money to free yourself of a mere disagreeable feeling of indebtedness, and took some risk in doing it too--I give you that much justice. I am glad Lord Sedbergh refused that money. Now you can lend it to me--I will pay you back some day--and a few thousands more. Let me have ten thousand pounds, Mr.

Clinton. You can ease your conscience of the wrong you have done me, and save your innocents at the same time--yourself, who are not innocent, into the bargain."

Perhaps she had mistaken the motives which had led him to refuse to pay money to Gotch, and really thought that he had done it only to save his own skin, knowing that it would be paid elsewhere; in which case nothing in this proposal would shock him. Or perhaps she relied overmuch on having frightened him into acquiescence with any proposal.

Otherwise, with all her powers of finesse, she would hardly have plumped out her demand in this careless fas.h.i.+on.

She had restored him in some degree to himself. "What!" he cried, his brows terrifically together. "After all you have said, you now want me to pay blackmail to _you_. It's an impudent proposal; and I refuse it."

She was quick to see her error. If he wanted his susceptibilities soothed, she was quite ready to do that.

"Oh, don't be absurd," she said. "I never really thought that you had looked on that transaction as blackmail; I only said so because I wanted to make you smart. Is it likely that I should be fool enough to suggest such a thing to you? Besides, whatever you may think of me, I am not a blackmailer; it wouldn't suit my book. You are not very clever, you know, Mr. Clinton. I will tell you what I want, and why I think you ought to help me to get it, as carefully as I can; and you must listen to me and try and understand it."

Poor man! How could he help listening to her, with so much at stake!

"The mischief is done," she said. "I am innocent, but I am smirched--poor me!--and although I could make you suffer, and would, I tell you frankly, if I could do it without hurting myself, I don't believe I could ever get back--not all the way. I don't know that I want to try; I am not young now, whatever I look, and I have no heart for the struggle. I am young enough, at any rate, to enjoy my life, if I can begin it again, in quite new surroundings, and not dogged by poverty. It isn't much I want. What is ten thousand pounds for life to a woman like me, who has spent that in a year? I have something of my own, but not much. This would make me secure against that horrible wolf at the door, which frightens me more than anything."

He was about to speak, but she silenced him with a lift of the hand, and said, "Let me go on, please. Why should _you_ give it to me? you were going to ask--I drop the pretence of a loan, though you can call it that if you like. Because you are the only person I can ask it of.

It is compensation; and n.o.body but you--except Humphrey, of course--has offended against me. Sedbergh _thinks_ I stole the star, and so does Mary Sedbergh, and it is true that that is all I was actually found guilty of. Under the circ.u.mstances they are not to be blamed. The coincidences--and the perjury--were too strong for me. They owe me nothing--except out of kindness to an old friend whom they had done injustice to."

"If you want me to listen to you in patience," said the Squire angrily, "you'll drop that impudent pretence of not having stolen the star. My daughter saw you at the cupboard; and you would have stolen the necklace if you could. You hardly take the trouble to hide that you're lying. You must take me for a fool."

"Shall I drop it?" she asked. "I think perhaps I will, with you. It is quite safe. I can take it up again if you drive me to action; and n.o.body will believe that I could have been such a fool as to admit to you that I had stolen it."

"You infamous creature!" he cried. "That was the plea you used before.

It didn't save you, and it won't save you this time."

She saw that she had made a mistake, but answered, "Well, no; perhaps it wouldn't save me. But you see the question wouldn't arise. If I did take it, I couldn't be punished for taking it twice. I could confess it to all the world now, and nothing further would happen.

Besides, you see, it will be _you_ who will be standing in the dock, for an offence into which the question of the star wouldn't come."

His eyes dropped. Her specious reasoning--before she had made the mistake of interrupting it with her insolent cynicism--had made some way with him, and allowed his mind to detach itself ever so little from that frightful picture.

"Oh, you can't be prepared to face that," she said, pursuing her recovered advantage; "and it would be too absurd--quixotic. The same reasons hold good here as they did before, when you allowed silence to be kept, and were prepared to pay not much less than I ask for. You save your children as well as yourself. Think what it would mean for that young girl of yours, when the time came for her to be married."

Ah! That was a sharper pang than she knew. Oh, for the sunny satisfaction of that walk across the park back again! And the sun s.h.i.+ning now on his black misery had only s.h.i.+fted a point or two.

"And the other one," went on the cool voice, "who was married the other day. Their father in the dock! in prison!"

He rallied again. "You can drop that nonsense too," he said. "It's a bogy that doesn't frighten me."

"Not the dock? I admit that you _might_ escape the prison--though Humphrey couldn't very well."

"Whatever mistake I may have made--and I'm not yet prepared to admit that I made any--I did nothing that I could be even asked to justify in a court of law."

"Well, I think you're wrong there. But in any case you would fear the court of your friends and neighbours and the whole public opinion of England hardly less than a court of law, wouldn't you?"

This was so true that he showed his sense of it in his face.

"Oh, my dear good man, how can you be so foolish as to run the risk of it? Look here, Mr. Clinton, supposing I admit the theft of the star, and say that I have deserved what I got for that, do I _really_ suffer nothing whatever by bearing the burden of Susan's far bigger theft all my life? Be honest now. Take it as a woman's weakness. Wouldn't it mean a good deal to me to be cleared of that?"

She waited for his answer, which was slow in coming. He fought hard against his inclination to give an evasive one. "Yes--it might--it would," he said.

"Then I bear it, and save her name, now she is dead; and your name. I save the honour of you Clintons, who think so much of yourselves. If I do that, and allow the shame you have fastened on to me to rest where it is, don't I deserve some little kindness from you--some help in the life I shall have to live, right away from all that has ever made my life worth living to me before, right away from all my friends? I should get _some_ of them back, you know, if it were known that _that_, at least, wasn't true of me."

Her voice was pleading. It affected him no more than by the sense of the words it carried. Perhaps if this had been her tone from the first it might have done so.

But the words themselves did affect him. They were true. If it could be regarded as only help that she wanted!

"This time," she said, "you wouldn't be doing injury to a living soul.

You would only be doing something towards setting right a wrong. You wouldn't even be doing anything that the law would blame you for.

Susan is dead. There is n.o.body who could be prosecuted."

"I could pay Sedbergh his money," he said slowly.

"Yes, you could do that," she took him up eagerly. "Honourably, now.

He could take it without any scruple. The Sedberghs would be sorry for me, I think. They would be glad that I had been helped. _They_ couldn't blame you. And who else could?"