Part 54 (1/2)

She looked him full in the face and saw things there which she had never seen before. A great horror was upon him, a frightful awakening from the long, sensual sloth of his life.

Moving, working, in that great countenance, generally so impa.s.sive, uninfluenced by any emotion--at least to her long watchings--except by a moody irritation, she saw Doom, Fate, the Call of the Eumenides.

It came to the poor woman in a sudden wave of illuminating certainty.

She _knew_ the end had come.

And yet, strangely enough, she felt nothing but a quickening of the pulses, a swift embracing pity which was almost a joy in its breaking away of barriers.

If the end were here, it should be together--at last together.

For she loved this cruel, sinning man, this lover of light loves, this man of purple, fine linen, and the sparkling deadly wines of life.

”Kate!”

He said it once more.

Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away.

She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms.

”Robert!” she said, ”poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if _you_ have been happy? No, I don't think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young.”

She led him to a couch.

He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone.

His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure.

And now, into this man's heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire.

The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished.

Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost.

The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation.

His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.

Incredible as it may seem, for the first time Llwellyn _realised what he had done_--realised, that is, in its entirety, the whole horror and consequences of that action of his which was to kill him now.

He had not _been able_ to see the magnitude and extent of his crime before--either at the time when it was proposed to him, except at the first moment of speech, or after its committal.

His brain and temperament had been wrapped round in the hideous fact of sensuality, which deadens and destroys sensation.

And now, with his wife's thin arms round him, her withered cheek pressed to his, her words of glad love, a martyr's swan song in his ears, he _saw_, _knew_, and _understood_.

Through the terror of his thoughts her words began to penetrate.

”I know, Robert--husband, I know. The end is here. But what has happened? Tell me everything, that I may comfort you the more. Tell me, Robert, _for the dear Christ's sake_!”

At those words the man stiffened. ”For the dear Christ's sake!”