第46章

"You realize it, I see," he said, and smiled wistfully. "Then perhaps you realize why you found me so unwilling to do the thing you craved.

Having treated me ungenerously, you came to cast yourself upon my generosity, asking me - though I scarcely think you understood - to beggar myself of life itself with all it held for me. God knows I make no pretence to virtue, and yet I think I had been something more than human had I not refused you and the bargain you offered - a bargain that you would never be called upon to fulfil if I did the thing you asked."At last she interrupted him; she could bear it no longer.

"I had not thought of it!" she cried. It was a piteous wail that broke from her. "I swear I had not thought of that. I was all distraught for poor Richard's sake. Oh, Mr. Wilding," she turned to him, holding out a hand; her eyes shone, filmed with moisture, "I shall have a kindness for you.., all my days for your... generosity to-day." It was lamentably weak, far from the hot expressions which she forced it to replace.

"Yes, I was generous," he admitted. "We will move on as far as the cross-roads." Again they ambled gently forward. Up the slope from the ford Diana and Jerry were slowly climbing; not another human being was in sight ahead or behind them. "After you left me," he continued, "your memory and your entreaties lingered with me. I gave the matter of our position thought, and it seemed to me that all was monstrously ill-done.

I loved you, Ruth, I needed you, and you disdained me. My love was aster of me. But `neath your disdain it was transmuted oddly." He checked the passion that was vibrating in his voice and resumed after a pause, in the calm, slow tones, soft and musical, that were his own. "There is scarce the need for so much recapitulation. When the power was mine I bent you unfairly to my will; you did as much by me when the power suddenly became yours. It was a strange war between us, and I accepted its conditions. To-day, when the power was mine again, mine to bring you at last to subjection, behold, I have capitulated at your bidding, and all that I held - including your own self- have Irelinquished. It is perhaps fitting. Haply I am punished for having wed you before I had wooed you." Again his tone changed, it grew more cold, more matter-of-fact. "I rode this way a little while ago a hunted man, my only hope to reach home and collect what moneys and valuables I could carry, and make for the coast to find a vessel bound for Holland. I have been engaged, as you know, in stirring up rebellion to check the iniquities and persecutions that are toward in a land Ilove. I'll not weary you with details. Time was needed for this as for all things, and by next spring, perhaps, had matters gone well, this vineyard that so carefully and secretly I have been tending, would have been, maybe, in condition to bear fruit. Even now, in the hour of my flight, I learn that others have come to force this delicate growth into sudden maturity. There! Soon ripe, soon rotten. The Duke of Monmouth has landed at Lyme this morning. I am riding to him.""To what end?" she cried, and he saw in her face a dismay that amounted almost to fear, and he wondered was it for him.