The Painted Veil

She gave a startled cry.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Notwithstanding the darkness of the shuttered room he saw her face on a sudden distraught with terror.

“Someone just tried the door.”

“Well, perhaps it was the amah, or one of the boys.”

“They never come at this time. They know I always sleep after tiffin.”

“Who else could it be?”

“Walter,” she whispered, her lips trembling.

She pointed to his shoes. He tried to put them on, but his nervousness, for her alarm was affecting him, made him clumsy, and besides, they were on the tight side. With a faint gasp of impatience she gave him a shoehorn. She slipped into a kimono and in her bare feet went over to her dressing-table. Her hair was shingled and with a comb she had repaired its disorder before he had laced his second shoe. She handed him his coat.

“How shall I get out?”

“You’d better wait a bit. I’ll look out and see that it’s all right.”

“It can’t possibly be Walter. He doesn’t leave the laboratory till five.”

“Who is it then?”

They spoke in whispers now. She was quaking. It occurred to him that in an emergency she would lose her head and on a sudden he felt angry with her. If it wasn’t safe why the devil had she said it was? She caught her breath and put her hand on his arm. He followed the direction of her glance. They stood facing the windows that led out on the verandah. They were shuttered and the shutters were bolted.

Kitty was not crying now. She was dry-eyed, calm, and though her voice was low it was steady.

“Do you want me to go?”

“It’s Hobson’s choice, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“It’s only fair to you to tell you that if your husband brought an action for divorce and won it I should not be in a position to marry you.”

It must have seemed an age to him before she answered. She rose slowly to her feet.

“I don’t think that my husband ever thought of bringing an action.”

“Then why in God’s name have you been frightening me out of my wits?” he asked.

She looked at him coolly.

“He knew that you’d let me down.”

She was silent. Vaguely, as when you are studying a foreign language and read a page which at first you can make nothing of, till a word or a sentence gives you a clue; and on a sudden a suspicion, as it were, of the sense flashes across your troubled wits, vaguely she gained an inkling into the workings of Walter’s mind. It was like a dark and ominous landscape seen by a flash of lightning and in a moment hidden again by the night. She shuddered at what she saw.

“He made that threat only because he knew that you’d crumple up at it, Charlie. It’s strange that he should have judged you so accurately. It was just like him to expose me to such a cruel disillusion.”

Charlie looked down at the sheet of blotting paper in front of him. He was frowning a little and his mouth was sulky. But he did not reply.

“I suppose I’ve been like this between two and three months.”

“Am I the father?”

She gave a little gasp. There was just a shadow of a tremor in his voice; it was dreadful that cold self-control of his which made the smallest token of emotion so shattering. She did not know why she thought suddenly of an instrument she had been shown in Hong Kong upon which a needle oscillated a little and she had been told that this represented an earthquake a thousand miles away in which perhaps a thousand persons had lost their lives. She looked at him. He was ghastly pale. She had seen that pallor on him once, twice before. He was looking down, a little sideways.

“Well?”

She clasped her hands. She knew that if she could say yes it would mean everything in the world to him. He would believe her, of course he would believe her, because he wanted to; and then he would forgive. She knew how deep was his tenderness and how ready he was, for all his shyness, to expend it. She knew that he was not vindictive; he would forgive her if she could but give him an excuse to, an excuse that touched his heart, and he would forgive completely. She could count on him never to throw the past in her teeth.