He came back to her. She had not moved. "I am not afraid to tell you all this. You are so big-hearted, so human; you will understand, you can forgive. It is all past. Loving you tells a man that he has done with evil. Will you not trust me?"
She put her hands in his. "I am trusting you," she said, "with all my life. Don't make a muddle of it, dear, if you can help it."
It was an odd wooing, as Tommy laughingly told herself when she came to think it over in her room that night. But that is how it shaped itself.
What troubled her most was that he had not been quite frank with Peter, so that Peter had to defend her against herself.
"I attacked you so suddenly," explained Peter, "you had not time to think. You acted from instinct. A woman seeks to hide her love even from herself."
"I expect, after all, I am more of a girl than a boy," feared Tommy: "I seem to have so many womanish failings."
Peter took himself into quite places and trained himself to face the fact that another would be more to her than he had ever been, and Clodd went about his work like a bear with a sore head; but they neither of them need have troubled themselves so much. The marriage did not take place till nearly fifteen years had passed away, and much water had to flow beneath old London Bridge before that day.
The past is not easily got rid of. A tale was once written of a woman who killed her babe and buried it in a lonely wood, and later stole back in the night and saw there, white in the moonlight, a child's hand calling through the earth, and buried it again and yet again; but always that white baby hand called upwards through the earth, trample it down as she would. Tommy read the story one evening in an old miscellany, and sat long before the dead fire, the book open on her lap, and shivered; for now she knew the fear that had been haunting her.
Tommy lived expecting her. She came one night when Tommy was alone, working late in the office. Tommy knew her the moment she entered the door, a handsome woman, with snake-like, rustling skirts. She closed the door behind her, and drawing forward a chair, seated herself the other side of the desk, and the two looked long and anxiously at one another.
"They told me I should find you here alone," said the woman. "It is better, is it not?"
"Yes," said Tommy, "it is better."
"Tell me," said the woman, "are you very much in love with him?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Because, if not--if you have merely accepted him thinking him a good catch--which he isn't, my dear; hasn't a penny to bless himself with, and never will if he marries you--why, then the matter is soon settled. They tell me you are a business-like young lady, and I am prepared to make a business-like proposition."
There was no answer. The woman shrugged her shoulders.
"If, on the other hand, you are that absurd creature, a young girl in love--why, then, I suppose we shall have to fight for him."
"It would be more sporting, would it not?" suggested Tommy.
"Let me explain before you decide," continued the woman. "**** Danvers left me six months ago, and has kept from me ever since, because he loved me."
"It sounds a curious reason."
"I was a married woman when **** Danvers and I first met. Since he left me--for my sake and his own--I have received information of my husband's death."
"And does ****--does he know?" asked the girl.
"Not yet. I have only lately learnt the news myself."
"Then if it is as you say, when he knows he will go back to you."
"There are difficulties in the way."
"What difficulties?"
"My dear, this. To try and forget me, he has been ****** love to you. Men do these things. I merely ask you to convince yourself of the truth. Go away for six months--disappear entirely. Leave him free--uninfluenced. If he loves you--if it be not merely a sense of honour that binds him--you will find him here on your return. If not--if in the interval I have succeeded in running off with him, well, is not the two or three thousand pounds I am prepared to put into this paper of yours a fair price for such a lover?"
Tommy rose with a laugh of genuine amusement. She could never altogether put aside her sense of humour, let Fate come with what terrifying face it would.
"You may have him for nothing--if he is that man," the girl told her; "he shall be free to choose between us."
"You mean you will release him from his engagement?"
"That is what I mean."
"Why not take my offer? You know the money is needed. It will save your father years of anxiety and struggle. Go away--travel, for a couple of months, if you're afraid of the six. Write him that you must be alone, to think things over."
The girl turned upon her.
"And leave you a free field to lie and trick?"
The woman, too, had risen. "Do you think he really cares for you?
At the moment you interest him. At nineteen every woman is a mystery. When the mood is past--and do you know how long a man's mood lasts, you poor chit? Till he has caught what he is running after, and has tasted it--then he will think not of what he has won, but of what he has lost: of the society from which he has cut himself adrift; of all the old pleasures and pursuits he can no longer enjoy; of the luxuries--necessities to a man of his stamp--that marriage with you has deprived him of. Then your face will be a perpetual reminder to him of what he has paid for it, and he will curse it every time he sees it."
"You don't know him," the girl cried. "You know just a part of him--the part you would know. All the rest of him is a good man, that would rather his self-respect than all the luxuries you mention--you included."
"It seems to resolve itself into what manner of man he is," laughed the woman.
The girl looked at her watch. "He will be here shortly; he shall tell us himself."
"How do you mean?"
"That here, between the two of us, he shall decide--this very night." She showed her white face to the woman. "Do you think I could live through a second day like to this?"
"The scene would be ridiculous."
"There will be none here to enjoy the humour of it."
"He will not understand."