The Imaginary Marriage Part 53

Something wrong. She too saw it, but it did not disturb her as it did Helen.

"Yes, four days--five--I forget," he said, scarcely realising what an admission was this from him, who awhile ago had counted every hour jealously that had kept them apart.

For a few minutes they talked of indifferent things, each knowing it for a preliminary of something to follow.

He had come to tell her something, Joan felt.

"She has something to say to me," Johnny knew. So for a few minutes they fenced, and then it was he who broke away.

He rose, and began to move about the room, as a man disturbed in his mind usually does. She sat calm and expectant, watching him, a faint smile on her lips, a kindness and a gentleness in her face that made it inexpressibly sweet.

"I think, Johnny, you have something to say to me."

"Something that I hate saying. Joan, last night a man--a man I have never seen before--came to see me."

She stiffened. The faint smile was gone; her face had become as a mask, hard and cold, icy.

"Yes?"

"A man who had something to tell me--you will do me the justice to believe that I did not wish to hear him, that I tried to silence him, but he would not be silenced. He told me lies! foul lies about you!

lies!" Johnny said pa.s.sionately, "things which I, knowing you, know to be untrue. Yet he told them. I drove him out of the place. Then he came back. He had remembered what his errand was--blackmail. He came to me for money. But--but he did not stay, and then--" Johnny paused. He had reached the window, and stood staring out into the garden, yet seeing nothing of its beauty.

"You know," he went on, "that I do not ask you nor expect you to deny--there is no need. What he said I know to be untrue. The man was a villain, one of the lowest, but he has been paid."

"Paid?" she said. She stared.

"Not in money," Johnny said shortly, "in another way."

"You--you struck him?"

"No. I would have; but he saw the danger and fled from it--fled from the punishment that I would have meted out to him to a harder that Fate had in store for him."

"I don't understand."

"Just outside my gate he was knocked down by a car and very badly injured; it is hardly probable that he will live. The people who knocked him down came hammering on my door. We got him to the Cottage Hospital.

In spite of everything I felt sorry for the poor wretch--but that has nothing to do with it now. I came to tell you what happened."

"And yet do not ask me to explain?"

"Of course not!" He swung round and faced her for a moment. "Do you think I would put that indignity on you, Joan?"

"You are very generous, Johnny--why?"

She waited, listening expectantly for his answer. It was some time in coming.

"I am not generous. I simply know that for you to be other than honourable and innocent, pure and good, would be an impossibility."

"Why do you know that?"

"Because I know you."

She smiled. The answer she had almost dreaded to hear had not come. Yet it should have been so simple, so ample an answer to her question. Had he said, "Because I love you," it would have been enough; but he had said, "Because I know you"; and so she smiled.

"Johnny, I have something to say to you. Do you remember the day when you asked me to be your wife? I was frank and open to you then, was I not?"

"You always are."

"I told you that if you wished it I would agree, but that I did not love you as a woman should love the man to whom she gives her life."

"I do not forget that."

"Perhaps in your heart you harboured a hope that one day the love that I denied you then might come?"

"I think I did."

"You were giving so much and asking for so little in return. That was not fair, and it would not be fair for me to allow you to harbour a hope that can never come true."

He turned slowly and looked at her.

"A woman cannot love--twice," she said slowly.

Johnny Everard flushed, then paled.

"Why do you say that?"

"Because it is true." She paused; the red dyed her cheeks. "What you were told last night were lies--poor lies. You do not ask me to deny them, dear, and so I won't. Yet, behind those lies, there was a little truth. There is a man, and I cared for him--care for him now and always shall care for him. He has been nothing to me, and never will be; but because he lived, because he and I have met, the hope that you had in your heart that day, can come to nothing. And now--now I have something more to tell you. It is this. You, who can love so finely, must ask for and have love in return. You think you love me, yet because I do not respond you will tire in time of that love. You will realise how bad a bargain you have made, and then you will regret it. Is there not someone"--her voice had grown low and soft--"someone who can and does give you all the love your heart craves for, someone who will be grateful to you for your love, and who will repay a thousandfold? Would not that be better than a long hopeless fight against lovelessness, even--even if you loved her a little less than you believe you love--me?

Remember that it would rest with you and not with another, you who are generous, who could not refuse to give when so much is given to you."

Joan's voice faltered for a moment. "It would be your own heart on which you would have to make the call, Johnny, not on the heart of another.

You would have more command over your own heart than you ever could over the heart of another."

"Joan, what do you mean? What does this mean?"

"I am trying so hard to be plain," she said almost pitifully.

"Who is this other you are talking about, this other--who loves me?"

She was silent.

"What do you know of her, Joan, this other?"

And still she was silent, for how could she betray Ellice's secret?

"Tell me," he said.

"Don't you know? Can't you guess?"

His face flushed. A week ago he might have answered, "I cannot guess!"

To-day he knew the answer, yet how did Joan know?