Colin spoke again. But the ecstasy of direct inspiration had died out of his voice. For a little while he had been like one possessed; now he was himself again, terrible indeed but not terror itself, Satanic but not Satan.
“Violet, if you don’t come,” he said, “I shall go and get Dennis. I said I would go up and say good night to him, and he shall dress and come with me to the chapel. Rather like Abraham taking Isaac to sacrifice him: rather Biblical. It’s you or he. I mean precisely what I say. He will obey me.”
Violet’s choice made itself without any question. But it was made under the compulsion of Love, and under Love’s protection.
“Then of course I will come,” she said. “You’ve given me my choice and there it is. But you won’t like it if I come, Colin. I should only despise and scoff at what you believe in. And the power on which you lean is failing, and you know it. Where’s the ecstasy that filled you just now? It has all evaporated: it has leaked away.”
Rage and rebel as he might, he knew the truth of what she said, reading it in her quiet eyes, and her pitiful mouth. Definitely, and for the first time to his full consciousness, he had failed. Something stronger than the wind of the powers of the air had interposed between him and its inspiration.
He looked at her with quiet hellish eyes.
“I think you will be sorry for this, Vi,” he said.
Some inner plane on which this scene had been transacted seemed to her to slide away again. She had been on it: it had sustained her. Now she was back again on normal levels, conscious only of a supreme fatigue. But the memory of that uplifting still held her. One power had englobed her, another him, and somehow, inscrutably, the two had come into direct contact, and at the touch his had been shattered like a film of glass.
“I do not think so,” she said. “I think I shall be glad of it, thankful for it, as long as I live.”
He turned on her, but his eyes were no longer bright with that quality with which he had heard the wind rise and roar.