Believe me, you can trust the Kendalls.
They won’t give away our secret.”
“Good God, I should hope not, since they know nothing of it,” she replied.
“You make me feel like a backstairs servant, creeping to some attic with a groom.
I have known shame before, but this is the worst.”
Still the white frozen face that was not hers.
“You were not ashamed last night at midnight,” I said, “you gave your promise then, and were not angry.
I would have gone at once if you had bidden me.”
“My promise?” she said.
“What promise?”
“To marry me, Rachel,” I answered.
She had her candlestick in her hand.
She raised it, so that the naked flame showed on my face.
“You dare to stand there, Philip,” she said, “and bluster to me that I promised to marry you last night?
I said at dinner, before the Kendalls, that you had lost your senses, and so you have.
You know very well I gave you no such promise.”
I stared back at her.
It was not I who was out of my mind, but she.
I felt the color flame into my face.
“You asked me what I wanted,” I said, “as a birthday wish.
Then, and now, there was only one thing in the world I could ever ask, that you should marry me.
What else could I mean?”
She did not answer.
She went on looking at me, incredulous, baffled, like someone listening to words in a foreign language that cannot be translated or comprehended, and I realized suddenly, with anguish and despair, that so it was, in fact, between us both; all that had passed had been in error.
She had not understood what it was I asked of her at midnight, nor I, in my blind wonder, what she had given, therefore what I had believed to be a pledge of love was something different, without meaning, on which she had put her own interpretation.
If she was ashamed then I was doubly so, that she could have been mistaken in me.
“Let me put it in plain language now,” I said.
“When will you marry me?”
“But never, Philip,” she said, with a gesture of her hand, as if dismissing me.
“Take that as final, and forever.
If you hoped otherwise, I am sorry.
I had no intention to mislead you.
Now, good night.”
She turned to go, but I seized hold of her hand, and held it fast.
“Do you not love me then?” I asked.
“Was it pretense?
Why, for God’s sake, did you not tell me the truth last night and bid me go?”
Once again her eyes were baffled; she did not understand.
We were strangers, with no link between us.
She came from another land, another race.
“Do you dare to reproach me for what happened?” she said.
“I wanted to thank you, that was all.
You had given me the jewels.”
I think I knew, upon that instant, all that Ambrose had known too.
I knew what he had seen in her, and longed for, but had never had.
I knew the torment, and the pain, and the great gulf between them, ever widening.
Her eyes, so dark and different from our own, stared at both of us, uncomprehending.
Ambrose stood beside me in the shadows, under the flickering candlelight.
We looked at her, tortured, without hope, while she looked back at us in accusation.
Her face was foreign too, in the half light. Small and narrow, a face upon a coin.