PAGE 5
A Liberal Education
by
* * * * *
Mrs. Branscome received him impassively at the appointed time. David saw that he was expected to speak to the point, and a growing scorn for his own insistence urged him to the same course. He plunged abruptly into his subject and his manner showed him in the rough, more particularly to himself.
“What I came back to ask you is just this. You know–you must know–that I would have come, whatever the consequence. Why did you not send for me after, after–?”
“Why did I not send for you?” Mrs. Branscome took him up, repeating his words mechanically, as though their meaning had not reached her. “You don’t mean that you never received my letter. Oh, don’t say that! It can’t have miscarried, I registered it.”
“Then you did write?”
This confirmation of her fear drove a breach through her composure.
“Of course, of course, I wrote,” she cried. “You doubt that? What can you think of me? Yes, I wrote, and when no answer came, I fancied you had forgotten me–that you had never really cared, and so I–I married.”
Her voice dried in her throat. The thought of this ruin of two lives, made inevitable by a mistake in which neither shared, brought a sense of futility which paralysed her.
The same idea was working in Hilton’s mind, but to a different end. It fixed the true nature of this woman for the first time clearly within his recognition, and the new light blinded him. Before, his imagined grievance had always coloured the picture; now, he began to realise not only that she was no more responsible for the catastrophe than himself, but that he must have stood in the same light to her as she had done to him. The events of the past few months passed before his mind as on a clear mirror. He compared the gentle distinction of her bearing with his own flaunting resentment.
“I am sorry,” he said, “I have wronged you in thought and word and action. The fact is, I never saw you plainly before; myself stood in the way.”
Mrs. Branscome barely heeded his words. The feelings her watchfulness had hitherto restrained having once broken their barriers swept her away on a full flow. She recalled the very terms of her letter. She had written it in the room in which they were standing. Mr. Branscome had called just as she addressed the envelope–she had questioned him about its registration to Switzerland, and, yes, he had promised to look after it and had taken it away. “Yes!” she repeated to herself aloud, directing her eyes instinctively towards her husband’s study door. “He promised to post it.”
The sound of the words and a sudden movement from Hilton woke her to alarm. David had turned to the window, and she felt that he had heard and understood. The silence pressed on her like a dead weight. For Hilton, this was the crucial moment of his ordeal. He had understood only too clearly, and this second proof of the harm a petty sin could radiate struck through him the same fiery repulsion which had stung him to revolt when he quitted Marston’s rooms. He flung up the window and faced the sunset. Strips of black cloud barred it across, and he noticed, with a minute attention of which he was hardly conscious, that their lower edges took a colour like the afterglow on a Swiss rock mountain. The perception sent a riot of associations through his brain which strengthened his wavering purpose. Must he lose her after all, he thought; now that he had risen to a true estimation of her worth? His fancy throned Kate queen of his mountain home, and he turned towards her, but a light of fear in her eyes stopped the words on his lips.
“I trust you,” she said, simply.
The storm of his passions quieted down. That one sentence just expressed to him the debt he owed to her. In return–well, he could do no less than leave her her illusion.
“Good-bye,” he said. “All the good that comes to us, somehow, seems to spring from women like yourself, while we give you nothing but trouble in return. Even this last misery, which my selfishness has brought to you, lifts me to breathe a cleaner air.”
“He must have forgotten to post it,” Mrs. Branscome pleaded.
“Yes; we must believe that. Good-bye!”
For a moment he stayed to watch her white figure, outlined against the dusk of the room, and then gently closed the door on her. The next morning David left England, not, however, for Grindelwald. He dreaded the morbid selfishness which grows from isolation, and sought a finishing school in the companionship of practical men.