"Tell it," Katharine said gently.
Then he told her.
And as he told her Peer Gynt's stue faded from her eyes—the river: the birch-wood: the distant mountains: the valley: Norway. She was back in England once more. She saw a lonely man sitting dreaming by his fireside. She saw him go slowly up the staircase and hasten his step as he heard Marianne's voice calling to him in alarm. She saw the expression of shock and pain on Marianne's face. She heard him saying:
"It was only a dream—your dream and my dream—let it go the way of all dreams."
She saw him go down to the stable and saddle his horse. She saw him ride out into the darkness of the night. She saw him throw himself on the bed, worn out in body and spirit. She heard Alan calling to his father. She saw Marianne leaning back, dead, and with that terrible look of shock and pain on her poor dead face.
The very simplicity and directness of the man's story added to its significance. That he could tell it at all, showed his terrible need of telling it. That he could tell it thus unreservedly, showed his entire trust in her, and his entire freedom from any desire to give the impression that he had suffered without having inflicted suffering.
The directness was almost more than Katharine could bear. More than once she could have cried out to him to stop. But she had not the heart to check him; and on he went, his intensity, his frankness increasing the whole time.
"Yes," he said, "she left me; she died in that terrible way, and I was alive to fight with and face the possibility that I had caused her death. Hundreds of times I said that if I could have tuned myself to be more in harmony with the best that was in her and in me, my dreaming thoughts of her would never have broken through the bounds of kindness, would never have attained to that fierce acuteness which penetrated to her so ruthlessly in her own defenceless state of dreaming. By what force, by what process they reached her, I, in my ignorance, cannot pretend to know. I only know that our minds met each other then as they had never met in normal life."
He paused a moment. Katharine thought that he had come to the end of his power of telling. But before she had finished thinking that brief thought, he had begun again.
He said he had been tortured and puzzled by that dream until his reason nearly left him. There was no one to whom he could have confided it. He could not have told it to Knutty, for he never had been able to speak with her about Marianne. He could not talk it out with any one who might have given time and serious thought to such phenomena. Perhaps that might have helped him more than anything at the time: to have talked it out, analysed it, found the relative meaning of it, and satisfied his intelligence about it by means of some one else's intelligence. But that was an impossibility to him; and so it remained locked in his heart, gnawing at his heart whilst he battled with it alone.