"Yes, Theo. It would be fatal to begin that way. I quite see how hard it is for her. But she must learn to understand. When it comes to active service, we women must be put altogether on one side. If we can't help, we are at least bound not to hinder."

Desmond watched her while she spoke with undisguised admiration.

"Would you say that with the same a.s.surance, I wonder, if it were John? Or if it happened to be--your own husband?"

A rush of colour flooded her face, but she had strength enough not to turn it aside.

"Of course I would."

"Then I sincerely hope you will marry one of us, Honor. Wives of that quality are too rare to be wasted on civilians!"

This time she bent her head.

"I should never dream of marrying any one--but a soldier," she answered very low. "Now I must go back to my poor Evelyn and help her to see things more from your point of view."

"How endlessly good to us you are," he said with sudden fervour. "I know I can count on you to keep her up to the mark, and not let her make herself too miserable while we are away."

"Yes--yes. I am only so thankful to be here with her--this first time."

He stood aside to let her pa.s.s; and she went out quickly, holding her head higher than usual.

He followed at a little distance, still perplexed and thoughtful, but refraining from the least attempt to account for her very unusual behaviour. What she did not choose to tell him he would not seek to know.

On the threshold of the drawing-room he paused.

His wife still stood where he had left her, disconsolately fingering her roses, her delicate face marred with weeping. Honor went to her straightway; and putting both arms round her kissed her with a pa.s.sionate tenderness, intensified by a no less pa.s.sionate self-reproach.

At the unnerving touch of sympathy Evelyn's grief broke out afresh.

"Oh, Honor--Honor, comfort me!" she sobbed, unaware of her husband's presence in the doorway. "You're the only one who really cares. And he is so--so pleased about it. That makes it worse than all!"

A spasm of pain crossed Desmond's face, and he turned sharply away.

"Poor little soul!" he reflected as he went; "shall I ever be able to make her understand?"

CHAPTER XVIII.

LOVE THAT IS LIFE!

"Love that is Life; Love that is Death, Love that is mine!"

--GIPSY SONG.

Not until night condemned her to solitude and thought did Honor frankly confront the calamity that had come upon her with the force of a blow, cutting her life in two, shattering her pride, her joy, her inherent hopefulness of heart.

The insignificant fact that her life was broken did not set the world a hair's breadth out of gear; and through the day she held her head high, looking and speaking as usual, because she still had faith and strength and courage; and, having these, the saddest soul alive will not be utterly cast down.

She spent most of her time with Evelyn; and succeeded in so far reconciling her to Theo's decision that Evelyn slipped quietly into the study, where he sat reading, and flinging her arms round him whispered broken words of penitence into the lapel of his coat; a proceeding even more disintegrating to his resolution than her att.i.tude of the morning.

Honor rode out to the polo-ground with them later on in the day, returning with Paul Wyndham, who stayed to dinner, a habit that had grown upon him since the week at Lah.o.r.e. She wondered a little afterwards what he had talked of during the ride, and what she had said in reply; but since he seemed satisfied, she could only hope that she had not betrayed herself by any incongruity of speech or manner.

During the evening she talked and played with a vigour and cheerfulness which quite failed to deceive Desmond. But of this she was unaware. The shock of the morning had stunned her brain. She herself and those about her were as dream-folk moving in a dream while her soul sat apart, in some vague region of s.p.a.ce, noting and applauding her body's irreproachable behaviour. Only now and then, when she caught Theo's eyes resting on her face, the whole dream-fabric fell to pieces, and stabbed her spirit broad awake.

Desmond himself could not altogether shut out anxious conjecture. By an instinct he could hardly have explained, he spoke very little to the girl, except to demand certain favourite pieces of music, most of which, to his surprise, she laughingly refused to play. Only, in bidding her good-night, he held her hand a moment longer than usual, smiling straight into her eyes; and the strong enfolding pressure, far from unsteadying her, seemed rather to revive her flagging fort.i.tude.

For who shall estimate the virtue that goes out from the hand-clasp of a brave man, to whose courage is added the strength of a stainless mind?

At last it was over.

She had left the husband and wife together, happy in a reconciliation of her own making; had dismissed Parb.u.t.ti, bolted the door behind her, and now stood like one dazed, alone with G.o.d and her grief, which already seemed old as the stars,--a thing preordained before the beginning of time.

She never thought of turning up the lamp; but remained standing very straight and still, her hands clenched, all the pride of her maidenhood up in arms against that which dominated her, by no will of her own.

She knew now, past question,--and the certainty crimsoned her face and neck,--that she had loved him unwittingly from the moment of meeting; possibly even from that earlier moment when she had unerringly picked out his face from among many others. Herein lay the key to her instinctive recoil from too rapid intimacy; the key to the peculiar quality of her intercourse with him, which had been from the first a thing apart; as far removed from her friendship with Wyndham as is the serenity of the foothills from the life-giving breath of the heights.

And now--now that she had been startled into knowledge, the whole truth must be confronted, the better to be combated;--the truth that she loved him--with everything in her--with every thought, every instinct of soul and body. Nay, more, in the very teeth of her shame and self-abas.e.m.e.nt, she knew that she was glad and proud to have loved him, and no lesser man, even though the fair promise of her womanhood were doomed to go down unfulfilled into the grave.

Not for a moment did she entertain the cheap consolatory thought that she would get over it; or would, in time, give some good man the husk of her heart in exchange for the first-fruits of his own. She held the obsolete opinion that marriage unconsecrated by love was a deadlier sin than the one into which she had fallen unawares; and which, at least, need not tarnish or sadden any life save her own. This last brought her sharply into collision with practical issues. In the face of her discovery, dared she--ought she to remain even a week longer under Theo's roof?

Her heart cried out that she must go; that every hour of intercourse with him was fraught with peril. The fact that his lips were sealed availed her nothing; for these two had long since pa.s.sed that danger point in platonic friendship when words are discarded for more direct communing of soul with soul. Theo could read every look in her eyes, every tone of her voice, like an open book, and she knew it; though she had never acknowledged it till now. All unconsciously he would wrest her secret from her by force of sympathetic insight; and she, who implicitly believed in G.o.d, who held suicide to be the most dastardly sin a human being can commit, knew that she would take her own life without hesitation rather than stand proven disloyal to Evelyn, disgraced in the eyes of the man she loved. She did not think this thing in detail. She merely knew it, with the instinctive certainty of a vehement temperament that feels and knows apart from all need of words.

Her character had been moulded by men--simple, upright men; and she had imbibed their hard-and-fast notions of honour, of right and wrong.

She had power to turn her back upon her love, to live out her life as though it were not, on two conditions only. No one must ever suspect the truth. No one but herself must suffer because of it. Conditions hard to be fulfilled.

"Oh, _Theo_!"

The cry broke from her unawares--a throb of the heart made vocal. It roused her to reality, to the fact that she had been standing rigidly in the middle of the room,--how long she knew not,--seeing nothing, hearing nothing, but the voice of her tormented soul.

She went forward mechanically to the dressing-table, and leaning her hands upon it, looked long and searchingly into her own face. Her pallor, the ivory sheen of her dress, and the unnatural l.u.s.tre of her eyes, gave her reflection a ghostly aspect in the dim light; and she shuddered. Was this to be the end of her high hopes and ideals,--of her resolute waiting and longing and praying for the very best that life and love could give? Was it actually she,--John's sister--her father's daughter--who had succ.u.mbed to this undreamed-of wrong?

At thought of them, and of their great pride in her, all her strained composure went to pieces. She sank into a chair and pressed both hands against her face. But no tears forced their way between her fingers. A girl reared by four brothers is not apt to fall a-weeping upon every provocation; and Honor suffered the more keenly in consequence.

Suddenly the darkness was irradiated by a vision of Theo, as he had appeared on entering the drawing-room that morning, in the familiar undress uniform that seemed a part of himself; bringing with him, as always, his own magnetic atmosphere of alertness and vigour, of unquestioning certainty that life was very much worth living. Every detail of his face sprang clearly into view, and for a moment Honor let herself go.

She deliberately held the vision, concentrating all her soul upon it, as on a face that one sees for the last time, and wills never to forget. It was an actual parting, and she felt it as such--a parting with the man who could never be her friend again.

Then, chafing against her momentary weakness, she pulled herself together, let her hands fall into her lap with a slow sigh that was almost a sob, and wondered, dully, whether sleep would come to her before morning. Certainly not until she had considered her position dispa.s.sionately,--neither ignoring its terrible possibilities, nor exaggerating her own sense of shame and disgrace,--and had settled, once for all, what honour and duty demanded of her in the circ.u.mstances.

One fact at least was clear. Her love for Theo Desmond was, in itself, no sin. It was a force outside the region of will,--imperious, irresistible. But it set her on the brink of a precipice, where only G.o.d and the high compulsion of her soul could withhold her from a plunge into the abyss.

"Mine own soul forbiddeth me: there, for each of us, is the eternal right and wrong." For Honor there could be no thought, no question of the false step, or of the abyss; and sinking on her knees she poured out her heart in a pa.s.sionate prayer for forgiveness, for light and wisdom to choose the right path, and power to walk in it without faltering to the end.

When at last she rose, her lips and eyes had regained something of their wonted serenity. She knew now that her impulse to leave the house at once had been selfish and cowardly; that Evelyn must not be deserted in a moment of bitter need; that these ten days must be endured for her sake--and for his. On his return, she could find a reasonable excuse for spending a month elsewhere till John should come to claim her. Never in all her life had she been called upon to make so supreme an effort of self-mastery; and never had she felt so certain of the ultimate result.

She turned up the lamp now, and looked her new life bravely in the face, strong in her reliance on a Strength beyond her own,--a Strength on which she could make unlimited demands; which had never failed her yet, nor ever would to the end of time.