“Considering that it is you who made me begin to understand,” he said, “it is odd that you shouldn’t know what you have done. I don’t know who and what you are, or who or what I am, but I do know that we are It. It, life, call it what you please. And how is your cold?” he asked suddenly, placing his cigarette-end in his coffeecup.
The burning ash hissed in protest, and was still. Then Edith answered him.
“It isn’t any better, Hughie,” she said. “It won’t be better for a long time. Are you comfortable there? If not, let us move, because I have to talk to you.”
Once before she remembered having said to Peggy that she almost wanted Hugh to be unhappy so that she might comfort him, for she knew, or thought she knew, that she could always do that. But she had to make him unhappy first—strike this dreadful blow. Already, so to speak, he had seen her arm raised against him in the few words she had just spoken: he knew that some blow impended, and though his face was still eager and vivid, the expression on it seemed suddenly fixed. He waited—tense, rigid, while his hand that had just dropped the cigarette-end into his cup turned over at the wrist, like a dead hand, and dropped on to the table-cloth. Then he spoke below his breath.
“Quick—tell me quickly,” he said; “I can bear anything except waiting.”
She took the hand that lay on the table-cloth in both of hers, but it still lay, as if dead, not responding to her pressure.
“I have got consumption,” she said.
Hugh drew back his head a moment, blinking and wincing as if from a physical blow, and summer stopped.
Neither moved, neither spoke. Edith, having struck the inevitable blow, laid down the weapon, and her soul stood waiting, so to speak, listening eagerly for Hugh to call to her in his pain, so that she might go to him and comfort him and bind up the wound she had made. There was nothing nearer to her heart than that, nothing that she so desired, and nothing of all that had been could be so exquisite. Summer might have stopped, but on this winter’s day there was splendour of sun and snow. She had not foreseen that.
But just yet Hugh could not call to her, he could not even need her yet, for he was dizzy and reeling with the blow. He had no power to move: the very fact that a moment before all the depths of his nature—all the strength of his love for her—had been so dominant, so triumphant, made this paralysis the more complete. And in this stunning of his true and essential self, the surface perception, the mere habitual work of eyes and ears and touch seemed suddenly quickened, just as Edith’s had been when Sir Thomas told her this same thing. A little odour as of caramel came from the cup where he had dropped his cigarette-end, from the sugar no doubt, which had been burned before the sweet dregs quenched the red-hot ash: as his hand turned over on to the table-cloth he had knocked the spoon out of the saucer, and the clink of it as it fell sounded in his ears more clearly than even those four words which Edith had spoken. The lace curtains by the window out of which so short a time ago he and Edith had stepped on to the balcony just stirred in a little breeze that had arisen during the last half-hour; on the mantelpiece a striking clock jarred to show the hour was approaching. And the touch of Edith’s hands on his meant no more to him than would the touch of any other hand have meant. Hands touched him, anybody’s hands. Eyes looked at him, too, from that beloved face opposite, but they were anybody’s eyes, it was anybody’s face.