He went up-stairs and found Jean waiting for him in the hall. She had watched Blunt, swinging one arm, disappear in the fog, walking close to the sergeant. They had stopped at the cottage, where Burke peered in but did not enter. He saw what he expected to see. Blunt did not attempt to look. Then the two passed on through the white gates and were swallowed up. Jean knew that Derrick would now come to her soon.
“Oh, my dear,” she said, “who ever could have dreamed of this?”
He made no answer, for there was none, but the look on his face gave her a new throb of fear.
“I don’t know,” he said wearily, “but if it were not for you I would regret having done anything. As it is”—he made a helpless gesture—“see what I have done!”
“Has anything else happened?” she asked timidly.
“No, there’s nothing more to happen now. I’m thinking of Perkins down in the cottage, and that it was I who sent her there. I wish I hadn’t. God, how I wish that!”
“Jack,” she said swiftly, “don’t think of it that way! Dear one, don’t!”
“I’ve done a woman to death,” he said in a half-whisper.
“No, no”—she was trembling with a great longing to comfort him—“no one has. It was all written, and had to be. I am full of the horror of it, too, but you and all of us were only pawns. Perkins’s life was utterly unhappy, and her death, however terrible, can’t be more so. To me it all seems like some law.”
“I can’t explain. She killed my father, we all know that now, but why we don’t know. Nor did she really know why she should kill herself. You did not bring her to her death.”
“But if I had not acted as I have she would be alive now.”
With that his arms went out, and he held her close. For a moment they clung like children, moved by some common and half-understood impulse. Surrounded by something, they knew not what, it was good to be like this and touch each other in the shadows of life. It brought Derrick a throb of divine comfort, strange and new. It was his turn to feel not so utterly alone.
He told her, and what he had arranged with Burke.
“I’m glad. Just think of Martin all these years, how he must have loved her in spite of everything; what it must have cost him to go away as he did, and under suspicion, just to save her. And all that hidden behind his strange and threatening face. It could not have been anything he did that killed her love for him. Jack, dear, I can only feel pity, all the pity in the world, and you must feel only that, too. That poor woman would not want to live it all over again. And, oh, it does make me want to be understanding and merciful when I can to every one, always!”