NOTHING would make Gordon believe it. He even went so far as to assert that Ellen’s version must be the true one. Elissa might have taken Dick across in her boat, but there was no great harm in that. If, as he now learnt, she had that afternoon received a cruel note from Louise, he could quite understand why she had stayed in the garden and why she had not come in that night.
“Then why did she come here at all?” asked Louise.
“She has friends here, who are more loyal to her than you are.”
“Oh! has she?”
“I expect she came to say good-bye, poor woman.”
He felt that he understood it all exactly. She had stolen across, not meaning to speak to any of them but just to look in, once more, through the window at the friends she had lost. The thought was very painful to him, and his voice shook a little as he tried to convince Louise.
“Do you think so?” she asked coldly.
This was one of her most effective retorts, and it never failed to exasperate her opponent.
“I certainly think so. But in any case I am going over to Elissa immediately, to apologise and disclaim any part in your very callous treatment of her. She will perhaps be able to tell me if she did see Dick last night and if she rowed him across.”
“Oh, no, Gordon! No! You mustn’t do that!”
“And why not?”
“Well, supposing … well, suppose Dick was there.”
Gordon made no answer. He could not trust himself to speak. But it seemed to him, as he set off through the rain towards the boat-house, that he could not bear being married to Louise much longer.
She poisoned everything. The dishonesty of her mind tainted the whole of their companionship. For years he had endured it, admiring her beauty, her vivacity and her quick wits, and telling himself that all women are morally inferior, even the best of them. It was not her fault that she had the lie in the soul, she had been born with it. It was not her fault that he felt degraded, sometimes, at this close tie with a nature which he knew to be false. All married men must feel the same, and in the Golden Age of the world, which he understood so much better than his own time, this fact was generally recognised. Nobody ever thought then of trying to include a woman in the bright garland of friendship. Gordon himself had never thought of it until this summer, when his life had suddenly became irradiated with new happiness.
In Elissa he had found such a woman as he had not supposed to have existed anywhere. Her beauty ravished and soothed him, her sympathy was a stimulation, and she loved truth. She spoke what was in her mind, and her sincerity was as clear as the sunlight. She had drawn him towards his wife, in that brief period of their mutual love, so that they had enjoyed a harmony which they had never known in their lives before.
Now it was broken up. Louise had broken it and it was gone for ever. Not even the unsullied memory was to be left to him. They would not even allow him to mourn his loss. They had driven his friend away and they had filled their minds with evil against her. It was to protect himself and her against their unkind hearts that he set out across the lake, for he must stem this tide of evil and he must prove that they were wrong.
The rain fell in driving sheets and the waves ran so high that he could scarcely steer his boat. However hard he pulled, the next wave swung him round again. He could see neither the shore nor the island and when, after labouring for nearly an hour, he got close in to the mainland he saw that he was still half a mile north of Elissa’s cottage. It would be quicker to land and walk along the lake road. He beached his boat and set off at a jog-trot down the track.
He was soaked to the skin, and his heart beat painfully fast. Battling with the cold and the wet, buffeted by the wind, his courage began to fail him. If Dick should be there….
But Dick would not be there. Elissa would be sitting all alone by her warm fire and she would be delighted to see him. He would go in and sit with her, and get himself dry, and their friendship would be safe for ever, so that when he was old he could think tranquilly of those hours when they had all learnt Latin together in the sunlight. Truly he was doing a good deed, struggling along in the rain. Friendship was a thing to be preserved; it had meant more in his life than love or marriage. Some day he must tell Elissa all that he felt about friendship. She would understand. She had understood everything, from the very first, when she caught sight of the sundew in his pocket handkerchief.
The cottage emerged out of the curtain of rain. It had an empty, shut-up look. He knocked two or three times, but there was no reply, and he thought that the noise was muffled by the shrieking wind. At last he picked up a large stone, and hammered with that.
Still there was no answer. No one came. Yet she could not be out in such weather. Standing on tiptoe he peered through the panes of the little window into the untidy living-room. It looked quite deserted and dusty. The ashes were white on the hearth. In the corner he could see the ladder-like stairs to the half-loft where she slept. She must still be up there, asleep. After all it was very early. He looked at his watch and realised that it was still barely eight o’clock.
Yet he needed comfort and reassurance so badly that he could not make up his mind to go away. And it seemed as if there was, at last, some kind of movement in the little house. Someone was stirring.
His heart began to beat thickly.
There was somebody coming down the ladder, not Elissa, but a man, dishevelled, startled, half awake…. He did not go to the door. Perhaps he had not heard the knocking. But he came towards the window to look out at the inclement day. For a few seconds he and Gordon stared at each other through the panes, each petrified with horror and astonishment. And then with a faint groan, Gordon took flight. He set off again, jog-trotting up the track towards his boat. Soon the rain hid the cottage and the friendship that had perished there.
A sharp rheumatic stab took him in the back. He slackened his pace to a hasty shuffle, realising that he was in for a bout of lumbago.
“I’m too old,” he thought, “to get wet through like this.”
His eyes were filled with tears which ran down amid the raindrops on his cheeks. For he felt that he had, in those few seconds, witnessed the ruin of everything that was good and beautiful in the world. It was the triumph of evil, a cosmic calamity, not merely a misfortune to a small group of people. He had lost all that he held most dear, but his own loss was nothing compared with the wound to goodness, to happiness, to innocence.
He found his boat and began tugging away once more towards the island. And the only words which came into his mind were those which Elissa had sung, one day long ago, when they were all still innocent and happy.
Friendships decay … he kept thinking in a kind of dreary rhythm as he pulled at his oars. “And so may I follow with friendship’s decay. I’m too old …”
He got back at last, shivering and exhausted, and crept in to Louise. She was kind to him. She made him put on dry clothes and lighted a fire for him in their room. But a time came when he had to tell her.