It was carrying him toward her, as usual, at a quick confident pace, which nevertheless lagged a little, she noticed, as he emerged from the beech-grove and struck across the lawn. He walked as though he were tired. She had meant to wait for him on the terrace, held in check by her usual inclination to linger on the threshold of her pleasures; but now something drew her toward him, and she went quickly down the steps and across the lawn.
“Denis, you look tired. I was afraid something had happened.”
She had slipped her hand through his arm, and as they moved forward she glanced up at him, struck not so much by any new look in his face as by the fact that her approach had made no change in it.
“I am rather tired.—Is your father in?”
“Papa?” She looked up in surprise. “He went to town yesterday. Don’t you remember?”
“Of course—I’d forgotten. You’re alone, then?” She dropped his arm and stood before him. He was very pale now, with the furrowed look of extreme physical weariness.
“Denis—are you ill? Has anything happened?”
He forced a smile. “Yes—but you needn’t look so frightened.”
She drew a deep breath of reassurance. He was safe, after all! And all else, for a moment, seemed to swing below the rim of her world.
“Your mother—?” she then said, with a fresh start of fear.
“It’s not my mother.” They had reached the terrace, and he moved toward the house. “Let us go indoors. There’s such a beastly glare out here.”
He seemed to find relief in the cool obscurity of the drawing-room, where, after the brightness of the afternoon light, their faces were almost indistinguishable to each other. She sat down, and he moved a few paces away. Before the writing-table he paused to look at the neatly sorted heaps of wedding-cards.
“They are to be sent out tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
He turned back and stood before her.
“It’s about the woman,” he began abruptly—“the woman who pretended to be Arthur’s wife.”
Kate started as at the clutch of an unacknowledged fear.
“She was his wife, then?”
Peyton made an impatient movement of negation. “If she was, why didn’t she prove it? She hadn’t a shred of evidence. The courts rejected her appeal.”
“Well, then—?”
“Well, she’s dead.” He paused, and the next words came with difficulty. “She and the child.”
“The child? There was a child?”
“Yes.”
Kate started up and then sank down. These were not things about which young girls were told. The confused sense of horror had been nothing to this first sharp edge of fact.
“And both are dead?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know? My father said she had gone away—gone back to the West—”
“So we thought. But this morning we found her.”
“Found her?”
He motioned toward the window. “Out there—in the lake.”
“Both?”
“Both.”
She drooped before him shudderingly, her eyes hidden, as though to exclude the vision. “She had drowned herself?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, poor thing—poor thing!”
They paused awhile, the minutes delving an abyss between them till he threw a few irrelevant words across the silence.
“One of the gardeners found them.”
“Poor thing!”
“It was sufficiently horrible.”
“Horrible—oh!” She had swung round again to her pole. “Poor Denis! You were not there—_you_ didn’t have to—?”
“I had to see her.” She felt the instant relief in his voice. He could talk now, could distend his nerves in the warm air of her sympathy. “I had to identify her.” He rose nervously and began to pace the room. “It’s knocked the wind out of me. I—my God! I couldn’t foresee it, could I?” He halted before her with outstretched hands of argument. “I did all I could—it’s not my fault, is it?”
“Your fault? Denis!”
“She wouldn’t take the money—” He broke off, checked by her awakened glance.
“The money? What money?” Her face changed, hardening as his relaxed. “Had you offered her money to give up the case?”
He stared a moment, and then dismissed the implication with a laugh.
“No—no; after the case was decided against her. She seemed hard up, and I sent Hinton to her with a cheque.”
“And she refused it?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say?”
“Oh, I don’t know—the usual thing. That she’d only wanted to prove she was his wife—on the child’s account. That she’d never wanted his money. Hinton said she was very quiet—not in the least excited—but she sent back the cheque.”
Kate sat motionless, her head bent, her hands clasped about her knees. She no longer looked at Peyton.
“Could there have been a mistake?” she asked slowly.
“A mistake?”
She raised her head now, and fixed her eyes on his, with a strange insistence of observation. “Could they have been married?”
“The courts didn’t think so.”
“Could the courts have been mistaken?”
He started up again, and threw himself into another chair. “Good God, Kate! We gave her every chance to prove her case—why didn’t she do it? You don’t know what you’re talking about—such things are kept from girls. Why, whenever a man of Arthur’s kind dies, such—such women turn up. There are lawyers who live on such jobs—ask your father about it. Of course, this woman expected to be bought off—”
“But if she wouldn’t take your money?”
“She expected a big sum, I mean, to drop the case. When she found we meant to fight it, she saw the game was up. I suppose it was her last throw, and she was desperate; we don’t know how many times she may have been through the same thing before. That kind of woman is always trying to make money out of the heirs of any man who—who has been about with them.”
Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified glance into it.
“But the child—the child was Arthur’s?”
Peyton shrugged his shoulders. “There again—how can we tell? Why, I don’t suppose the woman herself—I wish to heaven your father were here to explain!”
She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a gesture almost maternal.
“Don’t let us talk of it,” she said. “You did all you could. Think what a comfort you were to poor Arthur.”
He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or resistance.
“I tried—I tried hard to keep him straight!”
“We all know that—every one knows it. And we know how grateful he was—what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been dreadful to think of his dying out there alone.”
She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in her hold inert.
“It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among strangers.”