“Well?” she said again, more coldly this time. She was quite unable to understand this attitude of his. She was the injured party. It was she, not he who had trusted and been betrayed.
“I should like to explain.”
“Please do not apologize.”
George ground his teeth in the gloom.
“I haven’t the slightest intention of apologizing. I said I would like to explain. When I have finished explaining, you can go.”
“I shall go when I please,” flared Maud.
This man was intolerable.
“There is nothing to be afraid of. There will be no repetition of the–incident.”
Maud was outraged by this monstrous misinterpretation of her words.
“I am not afraid!”
“Then, perhaps, you will be kind enough to listen. I won’t detain you long. My explanation is quite simple. I have been made a fool of. I seem to be in the position of the tinker in the play whom everybody conspired to delude into the belief that he was a king. First a friend of yours, Mr. Byng, came to me and told me that you had confided to him that you loved me.”
Maud gasped. Either this man was mad, or Reggie Byng was. She choose the politer solution.
“Reggie Byng must have lost his senses.”
“So I supposed. At least, I imagined that he must be mistaken. But a man in love is an optimistic fool, of course, and I had loved you ever since you got into my cab that morning…”
“What!”
“So after a while,” proceeded George, ignoring the interruption, “I almost persuaded myself that miracles could still happen, and that what Byng said was true. And when your father called on me and told me the very same thing I was convinced. It seemed incredible, but I had to believe it. Now it seems that, for some inscrutable reason, both Byng and your father were making a fool of me. That’s all. Good night.”
Maud’s reply was the last which George or any man would have expected. There was a moment’s silence, and then she burst into a peal of laughter. It was the laughter of over-strained nerves, but to George’s ears it had the ring of genuine amusement.
“I’m glad you find my story entertaining,” he said dryly. He was convinced now that he loathed this girl, and that all he desired was to see her go out of his life for ever. “Later, no doubt, the funny side of it will hit me. Just at present my sense of humour is rather dormant.”
Maud gave a little cry.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry, Mr. Bevan. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t that at all. Oh, I am so sorry. I don’t know why I laughed. It certainly wasn’t because I thought it funny. It’s tragic. There’s been a dreadful mistake!”
“I noticed that,” said George bitterly. The darkness began to afflict his nerves. “I wish to God we had some light.”
The glare of a pocket-torch smote upon him.
“I brought it to see my way back with,” said Maud in a curious, small voice. “It’s very dark across the fields. I didn’t light it before, because I was afraid somebody might see.”
She came towards him, holding the torch over her head. The beam showed her face, troubled and sympathetic, and at the sight all George’s resentment left him. There were mysteries here beyond his unravelling, but of one thing he was certain: this girl was not to blame. She was a thoroughbred, as straight as a wand. She was pure gold.
“I came here to tell you everything,” she said. She placed the torch on the wagon-wheel so that its ray fell in a pool of light on the ground between them. “I’ll do it now. Only–only it isn’t so easy now. Mr. Bevan, there’s a man–there’s a man that father and Reggie Byng mistook–they thought… You see, they knew it was you that I was with that day in the cab, and so they naturally thought, when you came down here, that you were the man I had gone to meet that day–the man I–I–”
“The man you love.”
“Yes,” said Maud in a small voice; and there was silence again.