So he was left, confronting Miss Latimer; and Tony was between them.
He did not look at Miss Latimer. His being was absorbed in contemplation of the dead woman. With sickening sorrow he reconstructed the moments that had led her to this act. It had not been unintentional. He remembered her still look, her ineffable gentleness of the day before. She had intended then; or, if not then, the grief that had come upon them both had fixed her in her design.
She had escaped. She had taken refuge from herself, knowing her longing heart must betray her did she linger. She had perhaps, in some overwhelming scepticism, taken refuge, in what she craved to be unending sleep, from the haunting figure of her husband. Or perhaps it had been in atonement to Malcolm and she had believed herself going to him. But no; but no; the dull hammer-stroke of conviction fell again and again upon his heart; it had been in despair that she had gone. In going she had turned her back upon her joy.
He had looked a long time when a consciousness of something unfitting pressed in upon his drugged absorption. Looking up from Tony’s dear, strange face, he saw that Miss Latimer’s eyes were on him and that she was not weeping. Shrivelled, shrunken as she appeared, sitting there, her hair dishevelled, a bright Chinese robe wrapped round her, there was in her gaze none of the fear or the bewilderment of the night before. It saw him, and its cruel radiance was for him; yet it passed beyond him. Free, exultant, it soared above him, above Tony, like a bird rising in crystal heights of air at daybreak. His mind fell back, blunted, from its attempt to penetrate her new significance. He only knew that she did not weep for Tony, that she rejoiced that Tony was dead, and an emotionless but calculating hatred rose in him.
“You see you’ve killed her,” he said. “It wasn’t too late last night. If you’d gone in to her last night, after you left me, you could have saved her.”
And if he, last night, had gone in to Tony, he could have saved her. He thought of his long vigil. During all those hours that he had guarded her, she had been sinking, sinking away from him. He remembered his vision of her piteous, helpless hands lying on the table. She had stretched herself upon the darkness and it had sucked her down.
Miss Latimer’s radiant gaze was upon him; but she made him no reply.
“Curse you!” said the young man. “Curse you!”
She saw him, but it was like the bird, gazing down from its height at the outsoared menace of a half-vanished earth. And her voice came to him now as if from those crystal distances.
“No,” she said, “Antonia has saved herself. You drove her to it. You made it her only way.”