No scorn could stand against the impression of such charges advanced with
heat and conviction. They shook him. They were yet vibrating in the air
of that stuffy hotel-room, terrific, disturbing, impossible to get rid
of, when the door opened and Flora de Barral entered.
He did not even notice that she was late. He was sitting on a sofa
plunged in gloom. Was it true? Having himself always said exactly what
he meant he imagined that people (unless they were liars, which of course
his brother-in-law could not be) never said more than they meant. The
deep chest voice of little Fyne was still in his ear. "He knows,"
Anthony said to himself. He thought he had better go away and never see
her again. But she stood there before him accusing and appealing. How
could he abandon her? That was out of the question. She had no one. Or
rather she had someone. That father. Anthony was willing to take him at
her valuation. This father may have been the victim of the most
atrocious injustice. But what could a man coming out of jail do? An old
man too. And then--what sort of man? What would become of them both?
Anthony shuddered slightly and the faint smile with which Flora had
entered the room faded on her lips. She was used to his impetuous
tenderness. She was no longer afraid of it. But she had never seen him
look like this before, and she suspected at once some new cruelty of
life. He got up with his usual ardour but as if sobered by a momentous
resolve and said: "No. I can't let you out of my sight. I have seen you. You have told
me your story. You are honest. You have never told me you loved me."
She waited, saying to herself that he had never given her time, that he
had never asked her! And that, in truth, she did not know!
I am inclined to believe that she did not. As abundance of experience is
not precisely her lot in life, a woman is seldom an expert in matters of
sentiment. It is the man who can and generally does "see himself" pretty
well inside and out. Women's self-possession is an outward thing;
inwardly they flutter, perhaps because they are, or they feel themselves
to be, engaged. All this speaking generally. In Flora de Barral's
particular case ever since Anthony had suddenly broken his way into her
hopeless and cruel existence she lived like a person liberated from a
condemned cell by a natural cataclysm, a tempest, an earthquake; not
absolutely terrified, because nothing can be worse than the eve of
execution, but stunned, bewildered--abandoning herself passively. She
did not want to make a sound, to move a limb. She hadn't the strength.
What was the good? And deep down, almost unconsciously she was seduced
by the feeling of being supported by this violence. A sensation she had
never experienced before in her life.