Again she could not speak, but it was her joy that made her silent. She was no more to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers sprang beneath her footsteps; her smile was life. And the memory of his own cynical vision of her smote him with a self-reproach that deepened tenderness. She was only subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. She was womanly, meant for love only, and her folly made her the more lovable. Love was all that was left him. One month of love. His hands yielded to her hands; his eyes answered her eyes. The fragrance of the flowers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly garments. One month of life; but how flat, how mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer world of the last years; how deep the goblet of enchantment that the unambiguous angel held out to him.
CHAPTER III
There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give.
She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked.
They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower.
To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him—"quite simply and gently" said Kitty—that she had been very foolish and had let her friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband.
The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.
"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment. Oh, I know that I did, too!—don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see—see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh—it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak—just because I did listen."
"Ah, do forgive him—just because you were so strong that you never let him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come.