His lips were trembling pitifully, and Tatiana rushed forward, threw her arms about him, and pressed his face against her breast as she would have done with Pavlo.
“Hush!” she murmured over him. “Hush! God knows what He does. It is best for her like this--for you--for all of us.”
Gently she knelt down, still holding him, and there was silence in the room. Far down below the cliffs the whistle of some sea-birds winging their way home cut the clear air that blew softly in at the windows, and Preston, who had never known a mother’s caress, suddenly burst into a passion of tears.
“It is not as if you had loved her,” she murmured, “as if it had been all your doing. You have many excuses. We cannot think altogether harshly of her--now, of course, but relationship does not exclude justice; and the blame is not all upon you, be assured of that.”
He drew slightly away from her and stared at her in amazement.
“That is my secret, and will remain so,” she consoled. “Suffice it that I do know, and--absolve you.”
“Don’t!” she implored, drying his eyes with her scrap of a handkerchief. “Don’t say things like that.... You have paid enough already.”
“Paid!” he scoffed through set teeth. “Paid, with a ducking and a few bruises? You call that paying?”
She was silent. What should she do? Tell him the whole truth while she was about it--give him the whole terrific dose at one draught? Would this be wiser, more merciful? Would one desperate shock counteract the other? All this raced across her mind while she smoothed the telltale flatness of the pillow, the uncrumpled sheet with its embroidered crest and crown. She was for energetic measures by nature, by conviction based upon a deep knowledge of life, but still she hesitated; and, quite carried beyond himself by her silence, he made a violent effort to sit up.
Just an instant too late she pressed him down with both her strong, tender hands on his shoulders.
“Oh!” he said, faintly, understanding as in the revealing light of a lightning flash. “Oh! I have paid back a little, then? _Tant mieux!_” And this time he lay quite still, his struggle over.
One path there is, one only door Of refuge from the blank Before, And urge with reasons not a few Regret and Gratitude thereto.