A Romance of Wastdale Part 3

Hawke sat almost facing him in front of a table with his back towards a blazing fire. A number of letters lay before him, and he was evidently reading them aloud, for now and again he looked up with narrowed eyes and a crafty smile, much as Gordon remembered him when he held a winning hand at whist.

The s.e.x of his visitor was revealed by a shawl trailing on the hearthrug. But of her person, Gordon caught not so much as a glimpse.

For she stood on the near side of the room, concealed from him.

Hawke, as he finished each letter, placed it methodically on a file which lay by his side. One, however, seemed longer than the rest and afforded him peculiar interest. He turned back to the first page and read it a second time, pointing here and there to pa.s.sages with his finger. All at once the slender figure of a girl moved into the light.

She pa.s.sed round the table and stood behind Hawke's shoulder, her face gleaming pale as ivory from a cloud of tumbled hair. Gordon recognized her on the instant. It was Kate Nugent. She bent over Hawke as if to follow him more closely, and with a sudden clutch tore the paper from his hand and flung it into the fire. Hawke started to his feet, transfigured. Some such flame as was shrivelling the letter seemed to leap across his face. He pinned Kate's wrist to the table and thrust his head close down upon hers. What he said Gordon could not distinguish for the closed window, but he noticed a savage incisiveness about the movement of his lips, and saw the veins swell upon his forehead and along his throat.

For a moment the girl confronted him, returning glance for glance, but only for a moment. The defiance flickered out of her face, her lips shaped to an entreaty, and, with a meek gentleness which was infinitely pitiful, she unclasped the fingers about her wrist. She moved towards the window, stumbling as she went. She felt blindly for the catch, unfastened it as though her hands were numbed, and slowly lifted the sash.

CHAPTER III

She leaned against the sill, gazing into the darkness. After a while she turned. Hawke was watching her with a complacent smile.

"And it pleases you to torture me! You enjoy seeing a woman suffer. I couldn't have believed that any man could be such a coward and so mean!"

Hawke laughed pleasantly.

"Give them to me!" she cried.

"Think!" he answered in a mock appeal. "They will be my only consolation after you are married."

"Give them to me!" she cried again.

Hawke was standing by the fireplace and she moved towards him, changing her tone to one of wondering reproach.

"You can't mean to keep them! You are just laughing at me--for the minute. Yes! yes! I know. That was your way. But you will give me the letters in the end, won't you? Look! I will kneel to you for them.

Only give them to me!" And she sank on her knees at his feet before the fire.

"They will be much safer with me," he replied. "You might leave them about. David might pry. And it would strain even his innocence to misunderstand them."

"Can you think I should keep them?" she said with a s.h.i.+ver of disgust.

"Give them to me or burn them yourself! Yes!" she continued, feverishly, clutching his arm, "burn them yourself--now--here--and I will thank you all my life."

She stirred the coals into a blaze.

"See! They will burn so quickly," and she darted out her hands towards the file.

Hawke s.n.a.t.c.hed it away. "No, no!" he laughed. "You must vary your game if you mean to win."

He reached up and hung it on the mirror over his mantelpiece.

"There!" said he. "You will have to jump for them."

The girl stared at him incredulously; the words seeming to her some trick of her strained senses. But she glanced upwards to the file and sank back with a low moan.

"Will nothing touch you?" she said.

For a moment there was a pause. Only the noise of the brook laughing happily as it raced over the stones behind the house broke the silence in the room. Kate heard it vaguely, and it awoke a reminiscence.

"Do you remember?" she said. "At Poonah? There was a stream running past the verandah there."

She was speaking wearily, with closed eyes, and the firelight played upon a face as white and impa.s.sive as a wax mask.

"Yes! I remember," answered Hawke, his voice softening with the memory of those few months in India, The recollection was not of what they had thought or said or done--that would not have moved him; but simply of how he had felt towards her. He stood and watched her curiously.

The dark lashes began to glisten, and then all in a moment her apathy broke up, and she was shaking in an agony of tears.

"I was never so hard to you," she faltered between her sobs.

The words floated out freely to Gordon and set his senses reeling. In Hawke they deepened the phantom tenderness already aroused. There was something so childlike in their simplicity. Indeed, as she crouched upon the floor in her abandonment, her white frock stained by her long journey, her sash all crumpled, her loosened hair curling vagrantly about her neck, and her slender figure quivering down to the tips of her shoes, she looked little more than a child masquerading in the emotions of a woman.

He took down the file and swung it irresolutely to and fro upon his finger. Kate turned to him impulsively.

"Give them to me! You promised you would if I came to fetch them. You can't break that promise now! Think what you have made me risk!

Suppose they find out at home? It would have been cruel enough if that had been the only danger. But to bring me to the village where you and Dav--where you and he are the only strangers!"

"That was not my fault," Hawke interposed. "How could I tell he was going to blunder over here? I only met him this afternoon. However, you needn't be afraid. The fool's asleep."

Gordon felt an almost overpowering impulse to laugh aloud. The irony of the situation was the one thing which his mind could grasp.

However, he set his teeth fast to restrain the desire. He would learn all that was to be known first. He could disclose himself to Hawke afterwards.

"Are you sure he suspects nothing?" Kate asked.

"Perfectly. I was with him this evening, I tell you. He left his lamp burning, so that I had to wait until the place was quiet to put it out, for fear you should mistake the house. There is nothing to fear.

Why, he told me that he hadn't even existed until he met you."

"Don't!" Kate exclaimed.

"You need not reproach yourself for his credulity. They say it's quite good for a man to believe in a woman."

Kate remained silent, knowing that replies were but fuel to his sneers. But her eyes caught the clock and awoke her to the lapse of time.

"Look!" she cried. "It is past one. I must go back, and it is so far.

Give me the letters, I am tired."

Hawke determined to comply. So much the sight of her fresh, young beauty, drooping at his feet, had wrung from him. But he was an epicure where women were concerned. He took a natural delight in evoking their emotions, and when the display gratified him, he allowed no obtrusive knowledge of its cost to them to abridge his enjoyment.

So he merely repeated--

"They will be safe with me."

"I cannot trust you."

"Why not?"

The question rang cold and sharp, like the crack of a pistol. Kate looked at his face and realised that she had lost her ground. But, as she had said, she was tired. She was too over-wrought to choose her phrases.