I went to her at last, for all that I knew she loved me, in passionate self-abasement, white and a-tremble.She was staying with the Rockleys at Woking, for Shena Rockley had been at Bennett Hall with her and they had resumed a close intimacy; and I went down to her on an impulse, unheralded.I was kept waiting for some minutes, I remember, in a little room upon which a conservatory opened, a conservatory full of pots of large mauve-edged, white cyclamens in flower.And there was a big lacquer cabinet, a Chinese thing, I suppose, of black and gold against the red-toned wall.To this day the thought of Margaret is inseparably bound up with the sight of a cyclamen's back-turned petals.
She came in, looking pale and drooping rather more than usual.Isuddenly realised that Altiora's hint of a disappointment leading to positive illness was something more than a vindictive comment.She closed the door and came across to me and took and dropped my hand and stood still."What is it you want with me?" she asked.
The speech I had been turning over and over in my mind on the way vanished at the sight of her.
"I want to talk to you," I answered lamely.
For some seconds neither of us said a word.
"I want to tell you things about my life," I began.
She answered with a scarcely audible "yes.""I almost asked you to marry me at Pangbourne," I plunged."Ididn't.I didn't because--because you had too much to give me.""Too much!" she echoed, "to give you!" She had lifted her eyes to my face and the colour was coming into her cheeks.
"Don't misunderstand me," I said hastily."I want to tell you things, things you don't know.Don't answer me.I want to tell you."She stood before the fireplace with her ultimate answer shining through the quiet of her face."Go on," she said, very softly.It was so pitilessly manifest she was resolved to idealise the situation whatever I might say.I began walking up and down the room between those cyclamens and the cabinet.There were little gold fishermen on the cabinet fishing from little islands that each had a pagoda and a tree, and there were also men in boats or something, I couldn't determine what, and some obscure sub-office in my mind concerned itself with that quite intently.Yet I seem to have been striving with all my being to get words for the truth of things."You see," I emerged, "you make everything possible to me.
You can give me help and sympathy, support, understanding.You know my political ambitions.You know all that I might do in the world.
I do so intensely want to do constructive things, big things perhaps, in this wild jumble....Only you don't know a bit what I am.I want to tell you what I am.I'm complex....I'm streaked."I glanced at her, and she was regarding me with an expression of blissful disregard for any meaning I was seeking to convey.
"You see," I said, "I'm a bad man."
She sounded a note of valiant incredulity.
Everything seemed to be slipping away from me.I pushed on to the ugly facts that remained over from the wreck of my interpretation.
"What has held me back," I said, "is the thought that you could not possibly understand certain things in my life.Men are not pure as women are.I have had love affairs.I mean I have had affairs.
Passion--desire.You see, I have had a mistress, I have been entangled--"She seemed about to speak, but I interrupted."I'm not telling you," I said, "what I meant to tell you.I want you to know clearly that there is another side to my life, a dirty side.Deliberately Isay, dirty.It didn't seem so at first--"I stopped blankly."Dirty," I thought, was the most idiotic choice of words to have made.
I had never in any tolerable sense of the word been dirty.
"I drifted into this--as men do," I said after a little pause and stopped again.
She was looking at me with her wide blue eyes.
"Did you imagine," she began, "that I thought you--that I expected--""But how can you know?"
"I know.I do know."
"But--" I began.
"I know," she persisted, dropping her eyelids."Of course I know,"and nothing could have convinced me more completely that she did not know.
"All men--" she generalised."A woman does not understand these temptations."I was astonished beyond measure at her way of taking my confession.
...
"Of course," she said, hesitating a little over a transparent difficulty, "it is all over and past.""It's all over and past," I answered.
There was a little pause.
"I don't want to know," she said."None of that seems to matter now in the slightest degree."She looked up and smiled as though we had exchanged some acceptable commonplaces."Poor dear!" she said, dismissing everything, and put out her arms, and it seemed to me that I could hear the Lettish girl in the background--doomed safety valve of purity in this intolerable world--telling something in indistinguishable German--I know not what nor why....
I took Margaret in my arms and kissed her.Her eyes were wet with tears.She clung to me and was near, I felt, to sobbing.
"I have loved you," she whispered presently, "Oh! ever since we met in Misterton--six years and more ago."
