PAGE 7
The Deliverer
by
She uttered a sudden, breathless laugh. “My name is here already,” she said, pointing with a finger that shook slightly at some minute characters cut into the second bar of the gate.
He bent and looked at the inscription–two names cut with infinite care, two minute hearts intertwined beneath.
Nina watched him with a scornful little smile on her lips.
“Artistic, isn’t it?” she said.
He straightened himself abruptly, and their eyes met. There was a curious glint in his that she had never seen before. She put her hand sharply to her throat. Quite suddenly she knew that she was afraid of this monster to whom she had given herself–horribly, unreasonably afraid.
But he did not speak, and her scare began to subside.
“Now I’m going to wish,” she said mounting the lowest bar of the gate.
He spoke then, abruptly, cynically.
“Really,” he said, “what can you have to wish for now?”
She looked back at him defiantly. Her eyes were on a level with his. Because he had frightened her, she went the more recklessly. It would never answer to let him suspect this power of his.
“Something that I’m afraid you will never give me,” she said, a bitter ring in her voice.
“What?” he asked sharply.
“Among other things, happiness,” she said. “You can never give me that.”
She saw him bite his lip, but he controlled himself to speak quietly.
“Surely you make a mistake,” he said, “to wish for something which, since you are my wife, can never be yours!”
She laughed, still standing on the gate, and telling herself that she felt no fear.
“Very well,” she said, “I will wish for a Deliverer first.”
“For what?”
His naked fist banged down upon the gate-post, and she saw the blood start instantly and begin to flow. She knew in that moment that she had gone too far.
Her fear returned in an overwhelming flood. She stumbled off the gate and faced him, white to the lips.
A terrible pause followed, in which she knew herself to be fighting him with every inch of her strength. Then suddenly, without apparent reason, she gave in.
“I was joking,” she said, in a low voice. “I spoke in jest.”
He made her a curt bow, his face inflexibly stern.
“It is good of you to explain,” he said. “With my limited knowledge of your character and motives, I am apt to make mistakes.”
He turned from her abruptly with the words, and, shaking the blood from his hand, bound the wound with his handkerchief.
“Shall we go on?” he said then.
And Nina accompanied him, ashamed and afraid. She felt as if at the last moment she had asked for quarter; and, contemptuously, because she was a woman, he had given it.
IV
A GREVIOUS WOUND
After that moment of madness by the wishing-gate Nina’s wanton desire to provoke to wrath the monster to whom she was chained died a sudden and unnatural death. She was scrupulously careful of his feelings from that day forward, and he treated her with a freezing courtesy, a cynical consideration, that seemed to form a barrier behind which the actual man concealed himself and watched.
That he did watch her was a fact of which she was miserably conscious. She knew with the certain knowledge of intuition that he studied her continually. She was perpetually under the microscope of his criticism, and there were times when she told herself she could not bear it. He was too much for her; too pitiless a tyrant, too stern a master. Her life was becoming insupportable.
A fortnight of their honeymoon had passed away, when one morning Wingarde looked up with a frown from a letter.
“I have had a summons to town,” he said abruptly.
Nina’s heart leapt at the words, and her relief showed itself for one unmanageable second in her face.
He saw it, and she knew he saw it.
“I shall be sorry,” he said, with cutting sarcasm, “to curtail your enjoyment here, but the necessity for my presence is imperative. I should like to catch the two-thirty this afternoon if you can be ready by then.”