(Inconceivable! Had she never for an instant understood? Ah, well, if _he_ had been so transfigured in her sight, she might well idealize Stanistreet.)

She went on impetuously, with inextricable confusion of persons and events. "Nevill--I wasn't kind to him. They said I didn't care--and I did--I did! It nearly broke my heart. Only I was afraid you'd think I loved him better than you, and so--I didn't take any notice of him. I thought he wouldn't mind--he was so little, you see; and then I thought some day I could tell him. Oh, Nevill--_do_ you think he minded?"

He bowed his head. He had not a word to say. He was trying to realize this thing. To keep his worthless love, she had given up everything, even to the supreme sacrifice of her motherhood.

Her fingers clutched the counterpane, working feverishly. She had had something else to say. But she was afraid to say it, to speak of that unspeakable new thing, her hidden hope of motherhood. He covered her hands with his to keep them still.

"You see it was all right, as it happened."

"Yes--as it happened. But I think it was a little hard on poor old Stanistreet."

"Sometimes I wonder if it _was_ fair. He used to say things; but I didn't take them in at the time. I didn't understand; and somehow now, I feel as if it had never happened. Perhaps it wasn't quite fair--but then I didn't think. I wonder why he's never been to see me."

"Can't say, Molly."

"He must have seen the fire in the papers--I hope he didn't think what you did. I mean--think--"

"What?"

"Think that I cared."

"Don't, Molly, for G.o.d's sake! I never thought it. I was in an infernal bad temper, that was all."

"So that hasn't made any difference?"

"Of course it hasn't."

"Nothing can make any difference now then, can it?"

It was too much. He got up and walked up and down the room. Poor Mrs.

Nevill Tyson, she had put his idea into words. She had suggested that there was a difference, and suggestion is a fatal thing to an unsteady mind. In that moment of fearful introspection he said to himself that it was all very well for her to say there was no difference. There was a difference. She was not exactly lying on a bed of roses; but in the nature of things her lot was easier than his. There was no comparison between the man's case and the woman's. He had not sunk into that serene apathy which is nine-tenths of a woman's virtue. He was not an invalid--neither was he a saint. It is not necessary to be a saint in order to be a martyr; poor devils have their martyrdom. Why could not women realize these simple facts? Why would they persist in believing the impossible?

His face was very red when he turned round and answered. "I can't talk about it, Molly. G.o.d knows what I feel."

This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.

He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the reading. He sat and watched her.

Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.

Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life.

He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead--that was the horrible thing. Beneath that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would be young when he was long past middle age.

He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage that had saved his life--for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable "accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved him all the better for it.

Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort--she stuck like a leech.

And now--the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification of the wrong, she too--She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood, which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that stagnant backwater of the soul where the sc.u.m of thought rises to the surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the manner of her kind.

No--no--no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before.

She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women would do he would not undertake to say; _she_ would only look at him with her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."

Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole--no. And what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.

Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his pa.s.sion had been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.

He could not look away. He rose and lifted the lamp-shade, throwing the pitiless light on the thing that fascinated him. She stirred in her sleep, turning a little from the light. He bent over her pillow and peered into her face. She woke suddenly, as if his gaze had drawn her from sleep; and from the look in her eyes he judged a little of the horror his own must have betrayed.

He shrank back guiltily, replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness, bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any earthly appet.i.te? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and perfect comprehension. He hid his face in his hands.

After that night he began to have a nervous dread of going into her room. He was always afraid that she would "say something." By this time his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation.

There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help a.s.sociating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find that he could not command its finest faculties at pleasure.

There was no disguising the detestable truth. He could attain no further.

From those heights of beautiful emotion where he had disported himself lately there could be no gradual lapse into indifference. It was a furious break-neck descent to the abominable end--repulsion and infinite dislike, tempered at first by a little remnant of pity. Every day her presence was becoming more intolerable to him. But, for the few moments that he perforce spent with her, he was more elaborately attentive than ever. As his tenderness declined his manner became more scrupulously respectful, (She would have given anything to have heard him say "You little fool," as in the careless days of the old life.) He had no illusions left. Not even to himself could he continue that pleasant fiction of the strong man with feelings too deep for utterance. Still, there were certain delicacies: if his love was dead he must do his best to bury it decently--anyhow, anywhere, out of his sight and hers.

He noticed now that, as he carried her from one room to the other, she turned her face from his, as she had turned it from the light.

And she was growing stronger.

One afternoon she heard the doctor talking to Nevill in the pa.s.sage. He uttered the word "change."

"Shall I send her to Bournemouth?" said Nevill.

"Yes, yes. Good-morning. Or, better still, take her yourself to the Riviera," sang out the doctor.

The door closed behind the eminent man, and Tyson went out immediately afterwards.

He came home late that night, and she did not see him till the afternoon of the following day, when he turned into the dining-room on his way out of the house. He was nervously polite, and apologized for having an appointment. She noticed that he looked tired and ill; but there was another look in his face that robbed it of the pathos of illness, and she saw that too.

"Nevill," said she, "I wish you'd go away for a bit."

"Where do you want me to go to?"

"Oh, anywhere." She considered a moment. "You'll be ill if you stop here.

You ought to go ever so far away. A sea-voyage would be the very thing."

"It wouldn't do me much good to go sea-voyaging by myself."

For a second her face brightened. "No--but--I shall be quite strong in another fortnight--and then--I could go out to you wherever you were, and we could come back together, couldn't we?"

There was no answer.

"You might go--to please me."

He laughed shortly. "I might go to please myself. But what's the good of talking about it when you know I can't."

"Well, if you'd rather wait, there's the Riviera"--he colored violently--"would that do for you?"

"Yes; I think it _would_ 'do' for me--just about."