The Prelude to Adventure Part 21

He came at once to the point.

"I want your permission to ask your daughter to marry me, Mrs. Craven."

There was a long silence between them. He seemed, in his inner consciousness, to be carrying on a dialogue.

"You see," he said to the Shadow, "I have forestalled you. I shall ask Margaret Craven this evening to marry me. You cannot prevent that . . .

you _cannot_."

And a voice answered: "All things betray Thee Who betrayest Me."

"You have known us a very short time, Mr. Dune." Mrs. Craven's voice came to him from a great distance.

He felt as though he were speaking to two persons. "Time has nothing to do with falling in love, Mrs. Craven."

He saw to his intense amazement that she was greatly moved. She, who had always seemed to him a mask, now was suddenly revealed as suffering, tortured, intensely human. Her thin white hands were pressed together.

"I am a lonely, unhappy woman, Mr. Dune. Margaret is now all that is left to me. Everything has been taken from me. Rupert--" Her voice was lost; very slowly tears rolled down her cheeks. She began again desperately. "Margaret is all that I have got. If I were left alone it would be too much for me. I could not endure the silence."

It was the more moving in that it followed such stern reserve. His own isolation, the curious sense that he had that they were, both of them, needing protection against the same power (it seemed to him that if he raised his eyes he would see, on the opposite wall, the shadow of that third Presence); this filled him with the tenderest pity, so that suddenly he bent down and kissed her hand.

She caught his with a fierce convulsive movement, and so they sat in silence whilst he felt the pulse of her hand beat through his body, and once a tear rolled from her cheek on to his wrist.

"You understand . . ." she said at last. "You understand. I have always seen that you know. . ." Then she whispered, "How did you know?"

"Know?" He was bewildered, but before she could speak again the door opened and Margaret Craven came in.

She moved with that restrained emotion that he had seen in her when he had first met her. She was some great force held in check, some fire that blazed but must be hidden from the world, and as she bent over her mother and kissed her the embrace had in it something of pa.s.sionate protest; both women seemed to a.s.sert in it their right to quite another sort of life.

He saw that his moment with Mrs. Craven had pa.s.sed. That fire, that humanity had gone from her and she lay back now on her sofa with the faint waxen lids closed upon her eyes, her hands thinly folded, almost a dead woman.

Margaret kissed her again--now softly and gently, and Olva went with her from the room.

3

He was prepared to find that Rupert had told her everything. He thought that he saw in the gravity and sadness of her manner, and also in the silence that she seemed deliberately at first to place between them, that she was waiting for the right moment to break it to him. He felt that she would ask him gravely and with great kindness, but that, in the answer that he would give her, it must be all over . . . the end. The pursuit would be concluded.

Then suddenly in the way that she looked at him he knew that she had been told nothing.

"I'm afraid that mother is very unwell. I'm afraid that you must have found her so."

"If she could get away---" he began.

"Ah! if we could all get away! If only we could! But we have talked of that before. It is quite impossible. And, even if we could (and how glad I should be!), I do not know that it would help mother. It is Rupert that is breaking her heart!"

"Rupert!"

For answer to his exclamation she cried to him with all the pent-up suffering and loneliness of the last weeks in her voice--

"Ah, Mr. Dune, help me! I shall go mad if something doesn't happen; every day it is worse and I can't grapple with it. I'm not up to it.

If only they'd speak out! but it's this silence!" She seemed to pull herself together and went on more quietly: "You know that Rupert and I have been everything to one another all our lives. We have never had a secret of any kind. Until this last month Rupert was the most open, dearest boy in the world. His tenderness with my mother was a most wonderful thing, and to me!--I cannot tell you what he was to me. I suppose, for the very reason that we were so much to one another, we did not make any other very close friends. I had girls in Dresden, of course, and there were men at school and college for whom he cared, but I think there can have been few brothers and sisters who were so entirely together in every way. A month ago that all ceased."

She flung her head back with a sharp defiant movement as though the memory of it hurt her.

"I've told you this before. I talked to you about it when you were here last. But since then he has become much worse and I am afraid that anything may happen. I have no one to go to. It is killing my mother, and then--you were a friend of his."

"I hope that I am now."

"That is the horrible part of it. But it seems now that all this agitation, this trouble, is directed against you."

"Against me"

"Yes, the other evening he spoke about you--here--furiously. He said you must never come here again, that I must never speak to you again.

He said that you had done dreadful things. And then when I asked him he could not tell me anything. He seemed--and you must look on it in that light, Mr. Dune--as though he were not in the least responsible for what he said. I'm afraid he is very, very ill. He is dreadfully unhappy, and yet he can explain nothing. I too have been very unhappy, and mother, because we love him."

"If he wishes that I should not come here again---" Olva began.

"But he is not responsible. He really does not know what he is doing.

He never had the smallest trouble that he did not confide it to me, and now---"

"I have noticed, of course," Olva said "that lately his manner to me has been strange. I would have helped him if he would let me, but he will not. He will have nothing to say to me . . . I too have been very sorry about it. I have been sorry because I am fond of Rupert, but also--there is another, stronger reason--because I love you, Margaret."

As he spoke he got up and stood by her chair. He saw her take in his last words, at first with a wondering gravity, then with a sudden splendour so that light flooded her face; her arms made a little helpless gesture, and she caught his hand.

He drew her up to him out of her chair; then, with a fierce pa.s.sionate movement, they held one another and clung together as though in a desperate wild protest against the world.

"You can't touch me now--I've got her," he seemed to fling at the blank face of the old mirror.

It was his act of defiance, but through his exultation he caught the whisper--it might again have been conveyed to him through the shrill s.h.i.+vering notes of the "Valse Triste"--"Tell her--tell her--now. Trust her. Dear son, trust Me . . . it must be so in the end."

"Now," he heard her say, "I can stand it all."

"When you came into this room weeks ago," she went on, "I loved you; from the very first instant. Now I do not mind what any one can do."

"I too loved you from the first instant."

"You were so grave. I tried at first not to think of you as a person at all because I thought that it was safer, and then gradually, although I fought against you, I could not keep you out. You drove your way in. You understood so wonderfully the things that I wanted you to understand.

Then Rupert and mother drove me to want you more and more. I thought that you liked me, but I didn't know. . . ." Then with a little s.h.i.+ver she clung to him, pressing close to him. "Oh! hold me, hold me safe."

The room was now gathering to itself that dusk that gave it its strangest air. The fire had fallen low and only shone now in the recesses of the high fireplace with a dull glimmer. Amongst the shadows it seemed that the Presence was gravely waiting. As Olva held Margaret in his arms he felt that he was fighting to keep her.

In the dark hollow of the mirror he thought that he saw the long white road, the mists, the little wood and some one running. . . .

It seemed to him that Margaret was not there, that the room was dark and very heavy, that some bell was ringing in his ear. . . . Then about him a thousand voices were murmuring: "Tell her--tell her--tell her the truth."

With a last effort he tried to cry "I will not tell her."

His lips broke on her name "Margaret." Then, with a little sigh, tumbling forward, he fainted.