She rose to her knees, clasping her hands again to him. Her hair was fallen over her cheeks; she looked a very small forlorn subject for extreme measures.
“I shall be near you,” she said, half-choking.
He took her arm and motioned her to her feet.
“It is understood, then. You had better go to bed now and rest and recover and get warm.”
He put a candle into her hand, led her to the door of the bedroom, thrust her gently within, and clicked the latch upon her. Then he went and stood over the fire.
What had he done? What was he doing? Even as he had spoken, making his condition, he had known that that was a wild absurdity, impossible of fulfilment. What had moved him to it but a sudden recrudescence of that self-mutilating spirit? He had had no deliberate thought to goad a willing jade, or to return, in kind, to love, the humiliation he had suffered from it. Yet he knew that he was doing so, and it was a perilous lust to indulge.
His heart was full of ache, his brain of phantoms. These were reflected, coming and going, in the still red logs of the fire. They represented, in a thousand aspects, the three ghosts that would haunt his life for evermore. All women—all fair and fateful shapes; and, of the three, the vilest, because she had figured for the purest, was the one that had come to claim him at the last. It was a fierce satire upon the lesson of ennobling ideals.
Pamela, and Théroigne, and Nicette. He felt it no sacrilege now to name this trinity in a breath. Indeed, which alone of the three had made it her sport to coquet with hearts, holding their suffering as nothing to the gratification of her vanity? Not either of those peasant girls of Méricourt—whose passionate blood would always rather flame to the ecstasy of pursuit than to the selfish rapture of being hunted for the sake of their own beautiful skins.
His thoughts swerved from one figure to another. This Lord Edward Fitzgerald—how had he come to usurp the very throne of desire? He knew a little of him by repute—had heard of the ardent young soldier and apostle of the new liberty, melancholy and something wild, breathing the spirit of romance. He had no grudge against him, at least. And what of Mr Sheridan, whose influence alone he had apprehended? Ghosts they were to him now. What profit was it to seek to analyse their bodiless significance?
Sweeping and shadowy, the smoke of all such phantoms reeled up the chimney. Only one face remained with him.