第15章 CHAPTER III(2)

"Since this morning - it must have been: the cold dim dawn of to-day. Where have I been," he vaguely wailed, "where have I been?"He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all security his mild moan. "What a long dark day!"All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. "In the cold dim dawn?" she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. "As I didn't turn up you came straight - ?"She barely cast about. "I went first to your hotel - where they told me of your absence. You had dined out last evening and hadn't been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club.""So you had the idea of THIS - ?"

"Of what?" she asked in a moment.

"Well - of what has happened."

"I believed at least you'd have been here. I've known, all along,"she said, "that you've been coming."

"'Known' it -?"

"Well, I've believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month ago - but I felt sure. I knew you WOULD," she declared.

"That I'd persist, you mean?"

"That you'd see him."

"Ah but I didn't!" cried Brydon with his long wail. "There's somebody - an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay.

But it's not me."

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes.

"No - it's not you." And it was as if, while her face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a smile. "No, thank heaven," she repeated, "it's not you! Of course it wasn't to have been.""Ah but it WAS," he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks. "I was to have known myself.""You couldn't!" she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had herself done, "But it wasn't only THAT, that you hadn't been at home," she went on. "Iwaited till the hour at which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I've told you, while, failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn't come, by such a mercy, Ishould have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn't," said Alice Staverton, as if once more with her fine intentions - "it wasn't only that."His eyes, as he lay, turned back to her. "What more then?"She met it, the wonder she had stirred. "In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this morning I too saw you.""Saw ME - ?"

"Saw HIM," said Alice Staverton. "It must have been at the same moment."He lay an instant taking it in - as if he wished to be quite reasonable. "At the same moment?""Yes - in my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign. He had come to you."At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement, and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the window-bench and with his right hand grasping her left. "HE didn't come to me.""You came to yourself," she beautifully smiled.

"Ah I've come to myself now - thanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful face - this brute's a black stranger. He's none of ME, even as I MIGHT have been," Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. "Isn't the whole point that you'd have been different?"He almost scowled for it. "As different as THAT - ?"Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. "Haven't you exactly wanted to know HOW different? So this morning," she said, "you appeared to me.""Like HIM?"

"A black stranger!"

"Then how did you know it was I?"

"Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, has worked so over what you might, what you mightn't have been - to show you, you see, how I've thought of you. In the midst of that you came to me - that my wonder might be answered. So I knew," she went on; "and believed that, since the question held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again saw I knew it would be because you had -and also then, from the first moment, because you somehow wanted me. HE seemed to tell me of that. So why," she strangely smiled, "shouldn't I like him?"It brought Spencer Brydon to his feet. "You 'like' that horror -?"

"I COULD have liked him. And to me," she said, "he was no horror.

I had accepted him."

"'Accepted' - ?" Brydon oddly sounded.

"Before, for the interest of his difference - yes. And as I didn't disown him, as I knew him - which you at last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn't, my dear, - well, he must have been, you see, less dreadful to me. And it may have pleased him that I pitied him."She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his hand - still with her arm supporting him. But though it all brought for him thus a dim light, "You 'pitied' him?" he grudgingly, resentfully asked.

"He has been unhappy, he has been ravaged," she said.

"And haven't I been unhappy? Am not I - you've only to look at me!

- ravaged?"

"Ah I don't say I like him BETTER," she granted after a thought.

"But he's grim, he's worn - and things have happened to him. He doesn't make shift, for sight, with your charming monocle.""No" - it struck Brydon; "I couldn't have sported mine 'down-town.'

They'd have guyed me there."

"His great convex pince-nez - I saw it, I recognised the kind - is for his poor ruined sight. And his poor right hand - !""Ah!" Brydon winced - whether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, "He has a million a year," he lucidly added.

"But he hasn't you."

"And he isn't - no, he isn't - YOU!" she murmured, as he drew her to his breast.