His mental clarity was unrelieved by weariness. No shadow dimmed the keen crystal of his brain. He was at tension, like a bowstring that is stretched continually. He realised this, thinking: "Presently I will cut the bow-string, and the bow shall have rest! Even if my once-boasted will-power rea.s.serted itself--even if I rose triumphant for the second time, cured of my vile craving, I do not the less owe my debt to the woman I have married. I promised her that I would die rather than fail her. I failed her! There is no excuse!"

LXXIII

The West End pavements were shining wet. Belated cabs spun homewards with sleepy revellers. Neat motor-broughams slid between the kerbs and rounded corners at unrebuked excess-speeds, winking their blazing head-lights at drowsy policemen m.u.f.fled in oilskin capes. On all these accustomed things the blue-white arc-lights shone.

The most belated of all the hansom cabs in London stopped at the door of the house in Harley Street as the narrow strip of sky between the grim, drab-faced houses began to be dappled with the leaden grey of dawn. A faint moon reeled northwards, hunted by sable shapes of screaming terror, pale Venus clinging to her tattered robe. The house was all black and silent, a dead face with blinded windows. Did Saxham wake behind them? Or did he sleep, not to wake again?

Lynette tried her latchkey. The unchained door swung backwards. She pa.s.sed into the house silently, a tall, slender shape. A light was shining under the consulting-room door. Her heart leaped to greet it. She kissed her hand to it, and turned, moving noiselessly, and put up the chain of the hall-door. She felt for the switch of the electric light, and snapped it on.

She was jarred and aching and weary with her journey; but it was a very fair woman whom she saw reflected in the hall-mirror as she unpinned her hat and tossed it upon the hall-table, and pa.s.sed on to the consulting-room door--a woman whose face was strange to herself, with that new fire, and decision, and strength of purpose in it; a woman with glowing roses of colour in her cheeks, and eager, shining eyes.

All through the long hours of the journey she had pictured him, her husband, bending over his work, sleeping in his chair, or in his bed. Yet behind these pictures was another image that started through their lines and colours dreadfully, persistently, and the image was that of a dead man. She thrust it from her for the hundredth time, as the door-handle yielded to her touch. She went into the room. Saxham was not there.

The lamp shed its circle of light upon the consulting-room writing-table.

The armchair stood aside, as though hastily pushed back.... Signs of his recent presence were visible. The fireplace was heaped high with the ashes of burned papers; the acrid smell of their burning hung still on the close air.

She glanced back at the table. All its drawers stood open. Ledgers and case-books stood on it, neatly arrayed. A thick packet, heavily sealed, was addressed in Saxham's small, firm handwriting to Major Bingham Wrynche, Plas Bendigaid, Herion, South Wales. There were other letters in an orderly pile.

She glanced at the uppermost. It bore her own name. She took it and kissed it, and put it in her breast. There was an enclosure, heavy, and of oval shape. She wondered what it might be? As she did so, she looked at the letter hers had covered, and read what was written on the cover in the small, firm hand:

"'To the Coroner.' ... Merciful G.o.d!..."

The cry broke from her without her knowledge. The room rang with it as she turned and ran. With the nightmare-feeling of running up dream-stairs, of feeling nothing tangible under her footsteps, with the dreadful certainty that of all those crowding pictures of him seen through the long hours in the racing Express, only the one that she had not dared to look at was the real, true picture of Saxham now.

Higher, higher, in a series of swift rushes, she mounted like the dream-woman in her dream. From solid cubes of darkness to grey landing-glimmers. To the third-story bedroom that had never been done up.

In the company of Little Miss m.u.f.fet, the Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds, and Georgy Porgy, would he be lying, cold and ghastly, with a wound across his throat?

But the room was unoccupied; the bed had not been slept in. Pale dawn peeping in at the corners of the scanty blinds a.s.sured her of that. Where might she find him? Where seek him?

Fool! said a voice within her; there is but one answer to such a question!

Where has he gone night after night? Coward, you knew, and yet avoided!...

What threshold has he crossed when the world was sleeping round him? By whose vacant pillow has his broken heart sought vain relief in tears?

She pa.s.sed downstairs, gliding noiselessly over the thick carpets, and went into the room it had been his pleasure to furnish and decorate as his wife's boudoir. Its seash.e.l.l pinkness was merged in darkness, faintly striped by the grey dawn-glimmer, but the door of the bedroom that opened from it was ajar. Light edged the heavy fold of the portiere curtain and made a pool upon the carpet. She held her breath as she stole to the door, and, trembling, looked in. He was there, kneeling by the bed. His heavily-shouldered black figure made a blotch upon the dainty white and azure draperies; his arms were outflung upon the silken counterpane.

A rush of thanks sprang from her full heart to Heaven as she heard the heavy sighing breaths that proved him living yet.

She would have gone to him and touched him then, but the sound of his voice took courage from her, and drew her strength away. He spoke, lifting his face to the ivory Crucifix that hung upon the wall above the bed-head.

It was a voice of groanings rather than the quiet voice with which she was familiar. She comprehended that a soul in mortal anguish was speaking aloud to G.o.d.

"I cannot live!" groaned Saxham. "I am weary, body and spirit. What I have borne I have borne in the hope of laying my burden down. Everything is ready! I have cleared the way; my loins are girded for departure. All I asked was to lie down in the earth and wake again no more. All I asked--and what happens? My dead faith quickens again in me. I must bow my neck once more to the yoke of the Inconceivable! I must perforce believe in Thee again! I hear the voice of the pale thorn-crowned Victim, saying, 'I am Thy G.o.d who lived and suffered and died for thee! Live on, then, and suffer also, and pa.s.s to the Life Eternal when thine hour comes!' O G.o.d!--my G.o.d! have I not earned deliverance? Have I not borne anguish enough?"

His fierce, upbraiding voice died out in inarticulate mutterings. His head fell forwards upon his arms. Presently he lifted it, and cried out, as if replying to some unseen speaker:

"If a self-sought death entails eternal torment, am I not in h.e.l.l here upon earth? How else, when to live is to hold her in bondage, knowing that she longs and pines to be free? And yet, to go out into the dark and leave her! never again to see her! never more to feel the light of her eyes flow into me! Never to hear her voice--to be of my own deed separate from her throughout Eternity--that were of all the Judgments that are Thine to scourge with the most terrible that Thou couldst lay upon my soul!"

A sob tore him. He moaned out brokenly:

"Give me a sign, if Thou art indeed merciful! Show me that there is relenting in Thee! Grant me the hope, at least, that my great renunciation may open a gate by which, after cycles of expiatory suffering, I may at last pa.s.s through to where she dwells in Thy Brightness. Give me to see her face with a smile on it--to touch her hand--after all--after all! The lips I have never kissed, may they not be mine, O G.o.d--mine one day in Heaven? If Thou art Love, there should be love there."

She glided over the deep carpet, stretched out a timid hand, and touched his shoulder. He lifted his great square head, and slowly looked round.

The black hair, mingled with white, clung damp to the broad forehead. His eyes were bloodshot, strained, and haggard, and wild. Sorrow was charted deep upon the haggard features. Amazement struck them into folly as he started up, stammering out her name, and clutching for support at the bra.s.s rail that was at the foot of the bed.

"Lynette! You.... It is you?..." He shook, staring at her with dilated eyes.

"Owen, you are ill. You speak and look so strangely. It is me--really me!"

she said, trying to speak calmly through the tumult of her heart.

"I am not ill. How is it that you are here?"

He lifted a hand to his strained and smarting eyes and moved it to and fro before them. He was staring at her still, but with pupils that were less dilated, and the veins upon his broad forehead were no longer purple now.

"Have I talked nonsense? I had dozed, and you startled me coming upon me.... Why have you?..." He strove to speak and look as usual. "Has anything happened, that you have come back?"

She pressed her hands together, wrestling for collected thought and clear, explicit utterance, though the room rocked about her, and the floor seemed to rise and fall beneath her feet.

"Something happened. I have come back from Wales to tell you that I ... I cannot live upon your friendship any longer! I--I must have more, or I shall die!"

He knew all. She had met the man whose look and breath and touch had revealed to her her own misery. Chained to her harsh yoke-fellow; denied Love's bread and wine of life! He looked at her, and answered coldly:

"You shall not die. You shall be free! If you had waited until to-morrow----"

"It is already day," she told him, and, as though to confirm her, a neighbouring steeple-clock clanged twice. He moved uneasily as his eyes fell on the disordered coverlet, half dragged from the bed and trailing on the floor. They shunned hers as he said, a dark flush rising through his haggard pallor:

"I beg your pardon for the intrusion here. But you were away.... I could not sleep, and the house was lonely.... Is your maid with you? Surely you are not alone?"

She bent her head with a faint smile.

"Quite alone. I did not wish for a companion."

"It was not wise----" he began, and took a step door-wards. "I will call one of the servants," he added, and was going, when he remembered, and stopped, saying hoa.r.s.ely:

"I forgot. They are gone. I have sent them all away!"

She looked at him in silence. He continued:

"I have paid and dismissed them. You will think it curious--you will know the reason later--I have written to you to explain."

"I found upon your table a letter addressed to me," she said. He started, knitting his black brows.

"You have not read it?" he asked, breathing quickly.

"Not yet." She touched her bosom, where the letter lay. "I have it here."

"Please do not open it! Give me back the letter!" He stretched out his hand to take it, and breathed more freely when she drew it out and gave it to him. And a sweet wild pang shot through him; the paper was so warm and fragrant from the nest where it had lain so short a time. But he mastered the emotion and tore open the envelope. He took from it the enclosure, wrapped in folds of tissue-paper, and put it in her hand, saying, as he thrust the letter in his coat-pocket: