“I am glad I came,” said Katherine. “It was nice of you to think of this boat. It is fresher on the water.”
She was happy; he was by her side. The little canopy of lanterns above their heads seemed to draw them together, isolate them from the outer world. The lights whirled around her as in a dream. Raine too, for all his man's lesser emotional impressibility, felt a slight exaltation, a continuance of the strange sense of the unreality of things. As the moments passed, this common mood grew in intensity.
They spoke of the incident of the dinner-table, but like other things it seemed to lose perspective. Meanwhile the old wizened boatman, apparently far away in the bows, rowed stolidly round and round within the basin formed by the quays and jetties.
“It is a mad story,” said Katherine. “Almost fantastic. What object had he? Was he a fiend, or a coward, or what?”
“Both,” said Raine. “With a soft sentimental heart. A fiend that is half a fool is ever the blackest of fiends. He is irresponsible for his own hell.”
“Are all men like that who make life a hell for women?”
“In a way. Men are blind to the consequences of their own actions. Apply the truism specially. Or else they see only their own paths before them. Sometimes men seem 'a little brood.' I often wonder how women can love them.”
“Do you think you could ever be cruel to a woman?”
“I could never lie to her, if you mean that. The woman who loves me will find me straight, however much of an inferior brute I might be otherwise.”
“Don't,” said Katherine. “You frighten me--the suggestion--”
“But you asked me whether I could be cruel.”
“A woman's thoughts and speech are never so intense as a man's. You throw a lurid light on my words and I shrink from them. Forgive me. I know that you could be nothing but what was good and true-hearted.”
Raine looked at her. Her face was delicate in its strength, very pure in its sadness. The dim light by which it was visible suggested infinite things beyond that could be revealed in a greater brightness. He felt wonderfully drawn to her.
“Men have been cruel to you. That is why you ask.”
“Ah no!” she said, turning away her head quickly. “I will never call men cruel. I have suffered. Who has not? The greatest suffering--it is the greatest suffering in life--that which comes between man and woman.”