"I am glad you can give it so mild a name," said the girl coldly. "To me it seems the cruellest and the wickedest falsehood a man could possibly utter. Dear God! what has come over you, Geoff? Are you mad, or are you something worse, to come here and make this abominable lying charge against me—against me? And when you know in your heart that there is not one word of truth in it!"
"Oh, for God's sake, don't treat me as if I were a fool, Katharine. Who is there to impersonate you, and for what reason? I know what I know, I know what I've seen, what I've heard, what I've been through! Then what in heaven's name is the use of keeping up this idle pretence with me?"
"It is not a pretence—it is the truth, the simple and the absolute truth!" she replied with heat. "If they were the last words I had to say in this world, I would repeat on the very threshold of the one to come: I was not at Gleer Cottage last night. I came straight from Clavering Close to Wuthering Grange, and I never left my room for one instant from that time until I came down to breakfast this morning. Ailsa Lorne was with me when I returned; she will tell you that I am speaking the truth."
Yes, decidedly Ailsa Lorne would tell him; that Cleek acknowledged to himself. Had she not done so already? But again she might also have told him that she thought she heard Lady Katharine's bedroom door open in the night and some one steal out of it. Besides, there was another thing—the golden capsule of the scent bracelet—to be reckoned with. Hum-m-m! Was there, then, a possibility that Geoff Clavering was speaking the truth, and that it was Lady Katharine herself who was lying? Of course, in that case—— Stop a bit—they were going at it again, and he could not afford to lose a single word.
"I don't care a hang what Ailsa Lorne or anybody else will say; I know what I know," young Clavering flung in doggedly. "You can't tell me that I didn't see a thing when I did see it—at least, you can't and expect to make me believe it. Give me credit for a little common sense."
"How can I when your own words so utterly refute it, when you convict yourself out of your own mouth, when even the dead man himself is a witness to the utter folly of this charge?"
"De Louvisan?"
"Yes. He speaks for me!"
"What nonsense!"
"He speaks for me," she repeated, not noticing the interruption, "and if you will not believe a living witness, then you must believe a dead one. Uncle Raynor and Harry said this morning that the Count de Louvisan's body had been found, not lying on the ground, but lifted up and spiked to the wall; and you who claim to have seen me in that house last night claim also to have searched the place and found no one but me present. Will you tell me, then, how I could possibly have lifted the body of a man weighing ten or eleven stone at the least computation, much less have lifted it high enough to spike it to a wall?"
"One for the girl!" commented Cleek silently.
"You might have had help; there might have been somebody there who left before I arrived," replied Geoff.
"And another one for the man!" Cleek was obliged to admit. "Which of this interesting pair is doing the lying? They can't both be speaking the truth. At least, they can't unless—— By Jupiter! Hum-m-m! Quite so! Quite so! 'Write me down an ass, gentlemen,' and an ass with a capital A." Then the curious one-sided smile travelled up his cheek, and lingered there longer than usual.
Young Clavering's last remark had hurt the girl more than anything he had yet said; hurt her so deeply that she gave a little shuddering cry and, womanlike, broke into tears.
"That is the wickedest thing of all!" she said. "The very wickedest thing of all. I can't doubt any longer that you have made up your mind to bolster up this abominable thing by every possible insult to me!"
"Insult? What funny things are sometimes said by accident!" he flung back stridently. "I am likely to 'insult' you when I'm ready to stand by you through thick and thin, am I not? And to lie till I'm black in the face, so that I keep others from knowing what I know!"
"You don't know it—you can't know it! It never happened! I was not in that house last night, and you did not see me there!"
"Oh, well then, let us say I didn't," impatiently. "What does it matter one way or the other? Say I didn't, then! Say I murdered him; but, for God's sake, don't say I insult you when I have come here merely to show you how much I love you—how ready I am to fight the whole world for you. Come back into my arms, and let me tell you what I want to tell, dear. Come back, and don't fear anything or anybody on earth. They shan't touch you! They shan't lift a finger to harm you, say one single word against you; and God help the first that tries it, that's all! A man doesn't cease to love a woman just because she does a desperate thing for his sake. No, not he! If he's worthy of the name of man, he loves her all the better for it. That's how I love you! Better to-day than I ever loved you in all the days that were; better than I shall ever love anything in all the days that are to be. I don't care if you are red with the blood of a hundred men, you're the girl I love, the girl I mean to marry, the girl I'm going to stand up and fight for as long as there's breath left in my body!"
"Marry—marry?" Her voice struck through his even before he had finished speaking, and there was a sting in it that bit. "Do you think for one instant that I would marry you when you make such a charge as that against me? Do you think I would? Do you? I'd no more marry you than I would cut off my right hand, Geoff Clavering, after you have slandered me and lied about me like this."
"Kathie, dearest——"
"No—please! If you touch me I think I shall faint! Stay where you are! Let me alone! Ah, please do—please! I have suffered and suffered and suffered, but not like this; oh, never like this before! That you should say these things—you! That you should even dream of saying them! You ought to be ashamed of yourself—ashamed!"
"Kathie, darling——"
"No, no—don't, please don't; it would be wicked to touch me when I am suffering so much. I want to get back to my room— I want to lie down; my head will split if I don't. Please do not follow me; please stay where you are. I won't say a word to anybody; I promise you I won't. I'll try to bear it, I'll try to forget it. Nine years! Dear God, nine years; and—those marks totalled nine!"
He jumped as though some one had stabbed him; a red wave rushed up and crimsoned all his face, then flashed out of existence again and left it waxen white.
"Good God! you won't attempt to suggest——" he began, then lost the power of speaking altogether, and stood looking at her with blank eyes and with colourless lips hard shut as she crept on through the shadowy dusk to where the doorway of the ruin showed a pointed arch against the dimming saffron of a twilight sky. A moment her drooping figure stood there against that shield of yellow light, pausing irresolute with one foot on the edge of the drawbridge, one hand pressed to her head; then she turned and looked back at the place where he stood. But in the dim dusk of the ruin she could scarcely see him.
"I will never speak, I will never tell—even to the day I die I won't!" she said in a whisper; then waited an instant as if expecting a reply, and getting none, added yet more sadly, "Good-bye," and went across the drawbridge to the darkening gardens, and was gone.
For a minute the man made neither movement nor sound till of a sudden there came something so totally unexpected as to cause him to literally jump. Some one had given a none too perfect representation of a muffled sneeze, telling him that he was not alone.
"Who's there? Who are you?" he cried in an excited whisper
But nobody answered.
