FullReads

It was obvious that she was a lady, but her speech had already told me that. What amazed me most where all amazed me was her self-possession.

I wondered what her impression of me was, as we sat, such a strangely assorted couple, one on each side of the fire. Did I indeed seem to her the quixotic, impetuous, and yet withal dreamy creature which my books show me to be? But I have often been told by those who know me well that I am much more than my books.

“I have not sat by a fire for how many months?” she said, her black eyes on the logs. “Let me see, last time was in a lonely cottage on the Cotswolds. It was a night like this, but colder, and a helpless old couple let me in, and allowed me to dry my clothes, and lie by their fire all night. Very unwise of them, wasn’t it? I might have murdered them in their beds.”

I began to feel rather uncomfortable.

“You are not undergoing a sentence for murder, are you?” I asked.

She looked at me for a moment, and then said:

“The desperate creature who escaped from gaol three days ago, and who was in for life for the murder of the man she lived with, and whose convict clothes I am wearing–whose clothes, I mean, are at this moment drying before your kitchen fire–is not the same woman who is now drinking your excellent coffee.”

“Do you mean to tell me you have never been in prison?”

“Yes, for a year; but I served my time and finished it four years ago.”

I wrung my hands. I was deeply disappointed in her. Her transparent duplicity, which could impose on no one, not even so unsuspicious a nature as mine, hurt me to the quick.

“Oh! you poor soul,” I said, “don’t lie to me. Indeed it isn’t necessary. I will do all I can for you. I will help you to get away. I will give you other clothes, and money, and we will bury these–these garments of shame. But don’t, for God’s sake, don’t lie to me.”

She looked gravely at me, as if she were measuring me, and seeing, no doubt, that I was not deceived, a dusky red rose for a moment to her face and brow.

“It is not easy to speak the truth to some people,” she said, her eyes dropping once more to the fire, “even when they are as compassionate and kind as you are.”

“Truthfulness is a habit that may be regained,” I said earnestly. “I myself, without half your temptations, was untruthful once.”

To associate oneself with the sins of others, to show one’s own scar, is not this sometimes the only way to comfort those overborne in the battle of life? Had I not chronicled my own failing in the matter of truthfulness when I foolishly and wickedly took blame on myself for the fault of one dear to me, in my first book, “With Broken Wing”? But I saw as I spoke that she had not read it, and did not realise to what I was alluding. I have so steadily refused to be interviewed that possibly also she had not even yet guessed who I was.

“I am sure–I am quite sure,” I went on after a moment, “that there is a great deal of good in you, that you are by nature truthful.”

“Am I? I wonder. Perhaps I was so once, in the early, untroubled days. But I have told many lies since then.”

She drank her coffee slowly, looking steadfastly into the fire, as if she saw in the wavering flame some reflection of another fire on another hearthstone.

“How good it is!” she said at last, putting her cup down. “How dreadfully good it is–the coffee and the fire, and the quiet room, and to be dry and warm and clean! How good it all is! And how little I thought of them when I had all these things!”