Sanctuary | Page 4

with them."
Kate received this in silence. She had a sense of walking along a narrow ledge of consciousness above a sheer hallucinating depth into which she dared not look. But the depth drew her, and she plunged one terrified glance into it.
"But the child--the child was Arthur's?"
Peyton shrugged his shoulders. "There again--how can we tell? Why, I don't suppose the woman herself--I wish to heaven your father were here to explain!"
She rose and crossed over to him, laying her hands on his shoulders with a gesture almost maternal.
"Don't let us talk of it," she said. "You did all you could. Think what a comfort you were to poor Arthur."
He let her hands lie where she had placed them, without response or resistance.
"I tried--I tried hard to keep him straight!"
"We all know that--every one knows it. And we know how grateful he was--what a difference it made to him in the end. It would have been dreadful to think of his dying out there alone."
She drew him down on a sofa and seated herself by his side. A deep lassitude was upon him, and the hand she had possessed herself of lay in her hold inert.
"It was splendid of you to travel day and night as you did. And then that dreadful week before he died! But for you he would have died alone among strangers."
He sat silent, his head dropping forward, his eyes fixed. "Among strangers," he repeated absently.
She looked up, as if struck by a sudden thought. "That poor woman--did you ever see her while you were out there?"
He drew his hand away and gathered his brows together as if in an effort of remembrance.
"I saw her--oh, yes, I saw her." He pushed the tumbled hair from his forehead and stood up. "Let us go out," he said. "My head is in a fog. I want to get away from it all."
A wave of compunction drew her to her feet.
"It was my fault! I ought not to have asked so many questions." She turned and rang the bell. "I'll order the ponies--we shall have time for a drive before sunset."
II
With the sunset in their faces they swept through the keen-scented autumn air at the swiftest pace of Kate's ponies. She had given the reins to Peyton, and he had turned the horses' heads away from the lake, rising by woody upland lanes to the high pastures which still held the sunlight. The horses were fresh enough to claim his undivided attention, and he drove in silence, his smooth fair profile turned to his companion, who sat silent also.
Kate Orme was engaged in one of those rapid mental excursions which were forever sweeping her from the straight path of the actual into uncharted regions of conjecture. Her survey of life had always been marked by the tendency to seek out ultimate relations, to extend her researches to the limit of her imaginative experience. But hitherto she had been like some young captive brought up in a windowless palace whose painted walls she takes for the actual world. Now the palace had been shaken to its base, and through a cleft in the walls she looked out upon life. For the first moment all was indistinguishable blackness; then she began to detect vague shapes and confused gestures in the depths. There were people below there, men like Denis, girls like herself--for under the unlikeness she felt the strange affinity--all struggling in that awful coil of moral darkness, with agonized hands reaching up for rescue. Her heart shrank from the horror of it, and then, in a passion of pity, drew back to the edge of the abyss. Suddenly her eyes turned toward Denis. His face was grave, but less disturbed. And men knew about these things! They carried this abyss in their bosoms, and went about smiling, and sat at the feet of innocence. Could it be that Denis--Denis even--Ah, no! She remembered what he had been to poor Arthur; she understood, now, the vague allusions to what he had tried to do for his brother. He had seen Arthur down there, in that coiling blackness, and had leaned over and tried to drag him out. But Arthur was too deep down, and his arms were interlocked with other arms--they had dragged each other deeper, poor souls, like drowning people who fight together in the waves! Kate's visualizing habit gave a hateful precision and persistency to the image she had evoked--she could not rid herself of the vision of anguished shapes striving together in the darkness. The horror of it took her by the throat--she drew a choking breath, and felt the tears on her face.
Peyton turned to her. The horses were climbing a hill, and his attention had strayed from them.
"This has done me good," he began; but as he