第74章 CHAPTER XIX(1)

THE TRUTH

To Captain Tremayne, fretted with impatience in the diningroom, came, at the end of a long hour of waiting, Sylvia Armytage. She entered unannounced, at a moment when for the third time he was on the point of ringing for Mullins, and for a moment they stood considering each other mutually ill at ease. Then Miss Armytage closed the door and came forward, moving with that grace peculiar to her, and carrying her head erect, facing Captain Tremayne now with some lingering signs of the defiance she had shown the members of the court-martial.

"Mullins tells me that you wish to see me," she said the merest conventionality to break the disconcerting, uneasy silence.

"After what has happened that should not surprise you," said Tremayne. His agitation was clear to behold, his usual imperturbability all departed. "Why," he burst out suddenly, "why did you do it?"

She looked at him with the faintest ghost of a smile on her lips, as if she found the question amusing. But before she could frame any answer he was speaking again, quickly and nervously.

"Could you suppose that I should wish to purchase my life at such a price? Could you suppose that your honour was not more precious to me than my life? It was infamous that you should have sacrificed yourself in this manner."

"Infamous of whom?" she asked him coolly.

The question gave him pause. "I don't know!" he cried desperately.

"Infamous of the circumstances, I suppose."

She shrugged. "The circumstances were there, and they had to be met.

I could think of no other way of meeting them."

Hastily he answered her out of his anger for her sake: "It should not have been your affair to meet them at all."

He saw the scarlet flush sweep over her face and leave it deathly white, and instantly he perceived how horribly he had blundered.

"I'm sorry to have been interfering," she answered stiffly, "but, after all, it is not a matter that need trouble you." And on the words she turned to depart again. "Good-day, Captain Tremayne."

"Ah, wait!" He flung himself between her and the door. "We must understand each other, Miss Armytage."

"I think we do, Captain Tremayne," she answered, fire dancing in her eyes. And she added: "You are detaining me."

"Intentionally." He was calm again; and he was masterful for the first time in all his dealings with her. "We are very far from any understanding. Indeed, we are overhead in a misunderstanding already. You misconstrue my words. I am very angry with you. I do not think that in all my life I have ever been so angry with anybody. But you are not to mistake the source of my anger. I am angry with you for the great wrong you have done yourself."

"That should not be your affair," she answered him, thus flinging back the offending phrase.

"But it is. I make it mine," he insisted.

"Then I do not give you the right. Please let me pass." She looked him steadily in the face, and her voice was calm to coldness.

Only the heave of her bosom betrayed the agitation under which she was labouring.

"Whether you give me the right or not, I intend to take it," he insisted.

"You are very rude," she reproved him.

He laughed. "Even at the risk of being rude, then. I must make myself clear to you. I would suffer anything sooner than leave you under any misapprehension of the grounds upon which I should have preferred to face a firing party rather than have been rescued at the sacrifice of your good name."

"I hope," she said, with faint but cutting irony, "you do not intend to offer me the reparation of marriage."

It took his breath away for a moment. It was a solution that in his confused and irate state of mind he had never even paused to consider. Yet now that it was put to him in this scornfully reproachful manner he perceived not only that it was the only possible course, but also that on that very account it might be considered by her impossible.

Her testiness was suddenly plain to him. She feared that he was come to her with an offer of marriage out of a sense of duty, as an amende, to correct the false position into which, for his sake, she had placed herself. And he himself by his blundering phrase had given colour to that hideous fear of hers.

He considered a moment whilst he stood there meeting her defiant glance. Never had she been more desirable in his eyes; and hopeless as his love for her had always seemed, never had it been in such danger of hopelessness as at this present moment, unless he proceeded here with the utmost care. And so Ned Tremayne became subtle for the first time in his honest, straightforward, soldierly life. "No," he answered boldly, "I do not intend it."

"I am glad that you spare me that," she answered him, yet her pallor seemed to deepen under his glance.