In Accordance with the Evidence Part 22

I shook my head.

"Even then I cannot guess."

Then she began to tremble. She grasped the edge of the seat with her hand so that I should not see how she shook.

"Jeff," she said, in a low voice, "if you never want to see me again--I can't blame you if you don't--not after this."

I waited.

"Not that I shouldn't always, always love you. It will be my punishment--I shall have to bear it."

Still I waited.

"Yesterday it was you who offered it--now it's me--it will serve me right."

I thought she would never go on. "You mean our engagement, of course?" I said.

"Yes," she gulped.

"Why?" I asked suddenly.

"Because--because of what I've been beast enough to believe of you, Jeff."

"And that is----"

As I again waited for her to speak I looked round the courtyard. A clerk was at work in a first-floor window, and he caught my eye and looked away again. In another window an office boy stood with a pen in his mouth, turning the pages of a ledger. Then, after a while, and very disjointedly, Kitty went on:

"They said you said it yourself, and I--at first I didn't--but then I believed it. I know I was beastly about it once before--then we quarrelled--but I didn't mean what I said then--believe me, I didn't....

And," she went on, "I didn't know who--who--it was.... She never told me--you know what I mean.... I hate myself--now. I suppose I'm jealous--the green-eyed monster, Jeff--but they did say it--said you'd as much as said so yourself--and----"

I was beginning to get impatient with her rambling.

I said "And what?" but I don't think she heard me.

"So that's why I went to Louie herself--to ask her--right out----"

All at once I felt it coming.

"Well?"

But suddenly she buried her face in her hands, and her thin shoulders shook. Again I saw the clerk watching....

"Oh!" she moaned. "Can you ever, _ever_ forgive me?"

"For----"

"For ever thinking that you and Louie--that you and Louie----"

She lifted her piteous eyes to mine.

I think it was then that the Giant shook himself and fell in twain. He has been more or less roughly cobbled together since, and the halves rub on somehow side by side, but to this day the one man in me faints for the great sweet things of Life, while the other has the devil ever at his elbow.

The whole courtyard had swung round; I actually seemed, with my physical eye, to see it for some moments out of the vertical. Then it righted again, and the whole mystery of the previous evening dissolved in light.

"You and Louie--you and Louie----"

Yet again the courtyard seemed to lean and slide sideways for a moment; then I flung a blazing searchlight back across my memory.

Louie Causton's super-subtle mask. "So long since I saw a man, my dear--the Baboon?--oh, I should know which way to turn _then_!"

My half-admissions to Archie when he had tried with such persistency to get out of me who it was I was in love with.

Her failure to return to the college, that alone had thrown me into Kitty's arms rather than into her own.

That something, G.o.d knows what, that I might have said to Mackie when, after having eaten nothing, I had drunk with him.

Kitty's own desperate possessiveness and jealousy.

All these things fell into place as the coloured granules fall when the kaleidoscope is given a turn. I had been accused of being Miss Causton's lover!

As I remain that divided Giant henceforward until the end of my tale, I will divide my name also, and tell you of a colloquy that began within me between these two men--the honest, human, enraged Jeffries, and that other, whom I will call James Herbert, at whose elbow stood the devil.

"Ah!" choked Jeffries, flaming red.

"Quietly, quietly!" whispered his interlocutor.

"That's Merridew again!" choked the other.

"Quietly--keep your face--there's a clerk in that window watching you!"

"The whole world may see me--let me go and find him!" It was as if this Jeffries struggled to break away there and then.

"No, no--sit still--leave it to me, and keep your face before this weeping woman--_I_ was born where they understand these things!"

And after a h.e.l.lish minute--the voice of that one prevailed.

I turned to Kitty.

"Good gracious!" I remember I said, with an air almost of amused incredulity. "Why, who on earth told you that ridiculous tale?"

The one who came from the place where they understand these things was right. Kitty looked up. At first she seemed unable to believe her ears--unable to believe that I could treat the monstrous thing with amused disdain. Then, as she slowly realised, her face shone. She gave a quick glad cry.

"Jeff!"