FOR a few moments Dick stared stupidly at the streaming window-pane where Gordon’s face had been. He was still only half awake. Then he remembered that he was in a hurry. It was late. He had slept too late and he must get into Killross so as to send his note up to the island. And then the half-realised horror settled down on him again. Gordon, Gordon, had been looking in through the window. Gordon had seen him. Gordon knew. There was no need now to send a note from Killross. They knew. He had been found out.
An impulse seized him to stop Gordon, to say something, he knew not what. He dashed to the door and ran through the rain to the lake-side, but there was no sign of Gordon or his boat. It was too late!
Swearing horribly Dick went back to the cottage. He did not know what time it was, for he had forgotten to wind his watch. He did not know in the least what to do next. His predicament left him stranded, with no plans for the future. For a little while he strove to avoid its full implications and busied himself with wondering how they could have found out, and what had brought Gordon, spying through the window, so soon upon his track. But the fact of being found out was in itself so dire that he could not juggle with these speculations for very long.
He had heard, he had been told, how a moment’s folly can ruin a man for life.
Now it appeared that he himself was such a man. His mind went back to yesterday, when he had not been ruined. It travelled from one scene to another as he tried to discover how this thing had happened.
There had been the picnic and the climb up the glen, and the view of the Ardfillan mountains and the decision to go away. But behind all that lay in some earlier time, some point in the last fortnight when he had left off worrying about Thring or feeling that it mattered what Thring would say. He could not remember when it was, and his mind came back to yesterday, the return to the island, the change of mood, the music and the hot moonlight. He saw that he had yielded to temptation. At the time it had not seemed so, nor did he think that it would have seemed so now if he had not been found out. This change in the whole course of his life seemed to have come as suddenly and as irrelevantly as the change in the weather.
“Because I slept too long,” he decided.
Indubitably he was ruined because he had slept too long. He had awakened to find himself cut off from everything that he valued in the world, from his wife, his children, his work, from the society and respect of his friends. He had awakened to find Gordon’s face, looking in at him, a stupid face, made formidable by its expression of horrified incredulity, the repulsion of a decent man confronted with infamy.
It was very cold in the cottage and he was shivering. During the few minutes when he ran down to the lake-side, the rain had soaked him. On the hearth the ashes of last night’s fire lay, white and scattered. He peeled off his wet shirt and knelt down to try and blow the smouldering turf into a flame again, but it was no use.
With a desolate curiosity he began to examine his surroundings, for he had never been inside the house until last night. It seemed as strange to find himself there as to find Gordon’s face peering in through the window at him. Into this room he must have come with Elissa, but he could remember nothing of it. He must have been mad. He had come there in the course of a violent dream which had begun in moonlight and changed to the glow of a turf fire on the walls of a house, and ending, not like a dream, in satiety, in darkness, in sleep that had lasted too long.
And then he heard a slight movement, up in the half-loft. Elissa was awake. A little while ago, not more than half an hour, he had awakened, up there, beside her. He had not meant to leave her so abruptly, but he came down to look for his watch, and there, at the window, was Gordon. Since when he had almost forgotten that she was still asleep, while the world came tumbling down about his ears. He wondered how long it would take her to remember last night, and to miss him.
Presently she called him softly:
“De-eck?”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m trying to blow up the fire. It’s cold.”
“Come up here, please.”
He climbed the ladder, still trying to remember when and how he had climbed it before. The half-loft was a little room, and the great curtained bed nearly filled it. Elissa lay, dishevelled, sleepy and warm, among the tumbled sheets, her long hair sprayed over the pillow. She raised herself on one elbow to look at him, and at the sight of his shirtless torso she gave a little exclamation.
“But you are wet!”
“Yes.”
“How is that?”
He told her what had happened and she said immediately:
“Then you need not go to Killross this morning, unless you wish.”
“I suppose not.”
He leant against the wooden bedpost and looked at her. Those strange eyes, so candidly desirous, were all that he could remember of the night. In the firelight he had seen them otherwise, the challenge gone, submissive and tender.
“Mine …” he thought, with a sudden wrenching sorrow. “She was mine.”
And Elissa, who knew all the moods of love as well as she knew the notes of a scale, did not ask why he sighed.