"Living--and likely to live!"
Her answer expressed fervent gratitude. "Thank God for it!"
I looked at her, astonished as she had been astonished when she looked at me.
"Susan, Susan," I cried--"must I own it? I love you!"
She came nearer to me with timid pleasure in her eyes--with the first faint light of a smile playing round her lips.
"You say it very strangely," she murmured. "Surely, my dear one, you ought to love me? Since the first day when you gave me my French lesson--haven't I loved You?"
"You love me?" I repeated. "Have you read--?" My voice failed me; I could say no more.
She turned pale. "Read what?" she asked.
"My letter."
"What letter?"
"The letter I wrote to you before we were married."
Am I a coward? The bare recollection of what followed that reply makes me tremble. Time has passed. I am a new man now; my health is restored; my happiness is assured: I ought to be able to write on. No: it is not to be done. How can I think coolly? how force myself to record the suffering that I innocently, most innocently, inflicted on the sweetest and truest of women? Nothing saved us from a parting as absolute as the parting that follows death but the confession that had been wrung from me at a time when my motive spoke for itself. The artless avowal of her affection had been justified, had been honored, by the words which laid my heart at her feet when I said "I love you."
. . .
She had risen to leave me. In a last look, we had silently resigned ourselves to wait, apart from each other, for the day of reckoning that must follow Rothsay's return, when we heard the sound of carriage-wheels on the drive that led to the house. In a minute more the man himself entered the room.
He looked first at Susan--then at me. In both of us be saw the traces that told of agitation endured, but not yet composed. Worn and weary he waited, hesitating, near the door.
"Am I intruding?" he asked.
"We were thinking of you, and speaking of you," I replied, "just before you came in."
"We?" he repeated, turning toward Susan once more. After a pause, he offered me his hand--and drew it back.
"You don't shake hands with me," he said.
"I am waiting, Rothsay, until I know that we are the same firm friends as ever."
For the third time he looked at Susan.
"Will you shake hands?" he asked.
She gave him her hand cordially. "May I stay here?" she said, addressing herself to me.
In my situation at that moment, I understood the generous purpose that animated her. But she had suffered enough already--I led her gently to the door. "It will be better," I whispered, "if you will wait downstairs in the library." She hesitated. "What will they say in the house?" she objected, thinking of the servants and of the humble position which she was still supposed to occupy. "It matters nothing what they say, now." I told her. She left us.
"There seems to be some private understanding between you," Rothsay said, when we were alone.
"You shall hear what it is," I answered. "But I must beg you to excuse me if I speak first of myself."
"Are you alluding to your health?"
"Yes."
"Quite needless, Lepel. I met your doctor this morning. I know that a council of physicians decided you would die before the year was out."
He paused there.
"And they proved to be wrong," I added.
"They might have proved to be right," Rothsay rejoined, "but for the accident which spilled your medicine and the despair of yourself which decided you on taking no more."
I could hardly believe that I understood him. "Do you assert," I said, "that my medicine would have killed me, if I had taken the rest of it?"
"I have no doubt that it would."
"Will you explain what you mean?"
"Let me have your explanation first. I was not prepared to find Susan in your room. I was surprised to see traces of tears in her face. Something has happened in my absence. Am I concerned in it?"
"You are."
I said it quietly--in full possession of myself. The trial of fortitude through which I had already passed seemed to have blunted my customary sense of feeling. I approached the disclosure which I was now bound to make with steady resolution, resigned to the worst that could happen when the truth was known.
"Do you remember the time," I resumed, "when I was so eager to serve you that I proposed to make Susan your wife by making her rich?"
"Yes."
"Do you remember asking me if I was thinking of the play we saw together at Rome? Is the story as present to your mind now, as it was then?"
"Quite as present."
"You asked if I was performing the part of the Marquis--and if you were the Count. Rothsay! the devotion of that ideal character to his friend has been my devotion; his conviction that his death would justify what he had done for his friend's sake, has been my conviction; and as it ended with him, so it has ended with me--his terrible position is my terrible position toward you, at this moment."
"Are you mad?" Rothsay asked, sternly.
I passed over that first outbreak of his anger in silence.
"Do you mean to tell me you have married Susan?" he went on.
"Bear this in mind," I said. "When I married her, I was doomed to death. Nay, more. In your interests--as God is my witness--I welcomed death."
He stepped up to me, in silence, and raised his hand with a threatening gesture.
That action at once deprived me of my self-possession. I spoke with the ungovernable rashness of a boy.
"Carry out your intention," I said. "Insult me."
His hand dropped.
"Insult me," I repeated; "it is one way out of the unendurable situation in which we are placed. You may trust me to challenge you. Duels are still fought on the Continent; I will follow you abroad; I will choose pistols; I will take care that we fight on the fatal foreign system; and I will purposely miss you. Make her what I intended her to be--my rich widow."
He looked at me attentively.
"Is that your refuge?" he asked, scornfully. "No! I won't help you to commit suicide."
God forgive me! I was possessed by a spirit of reckless despair; I did my best to provoke him.