He bent suddenly, and put his hand upon her shoulder. She did not even start now, but she uncoiled herself, with a shiver, and gazed up at him, without recognition, it seemed.
“What do you intend to do?” he said. “Where will you go?”
She only shook her head weakly and amazedly.
He stepped back, looked up into a blinding gloom of darkness and spinning flakes. The patterns these wrought seemed the very moral of Heaven’s enactments—hieroglyphics drawn upon a slate of night. He was not theologian enough to interpret them. For him—with a sense of being enclosed and shut down within a very confined vault of human suffering (with God, maybe, walking serene and unwitting high up on the sunny lifts of ether above the earth)—the issues of life were become brutally restricted. He had had aspirations. They had been crushed under by the heavy night that had dropped upon his world. Now, in a moment, he could feel only that he was alone with a woman who loved him without one thought of the meaning of the hieroglyphics; that it lay with him, unsupported, to direct the destinies of two souls—his own and another’s—that Fortune had isolated in tragic companionship.
And contrasted with the human piteousness of this other—this soul that had claimed him in the darkness into which his own had fallen—how did not the shibboleth of convention suddenly confess itself a ridiculous fetish of strings and patches—a block for a fashion-plate?
He had no plan of conduct at last but to drift—and, if by way of sunny pastures, so much the less troubled would he be.
His heart was moved to a dull aching passion in this first realising of its emancipation from a wounding thrall.
“Get up!” he cried violently. “Do you hear? Get up, and come with me!”
He turned away, and going a few paces, looked round to see if she were following. Ay, like a dog. She had risen and jumped to his order before it was well issued.
He strode on, the fall already making a soft cold mat to his feet. It was no great distance to his rooms; the Rue St Honoré was near deserted, and he went down it swiftly. Once again only he turned to see that the girl was not lagging. Then he cursed himself and came to a stop under a lamp. She was hobbling towards him as fast as her bleeding feet would permit her. He had never given a thought to this—that she had been driven half naked into the night. As she came up, she dumbly begged of him with a little pathetic smile, timid and conciliatory, not to be angry with her for halting. He saw a trickle of blood flow into the white carpet where she waited.