“I suppose I needn’t have said all that,” he observed drearily. “However, it doesn’t much matter what I say.”
Philip had a horror of improving the occasion, but he could hardly let such a chance of a word in season slip. He was, too, keenly wounded by this.
“You don’t recollect, my dear fellow,” he said, “that we are all doing our best, and that it is hard not to be hurt by words like those.”
“Oh, for God’s sake don’t preach,” cried Evelyn.
Philip flushed for a moment rather angrily, but re-collected himself.
“Indeed, I hope not,” he said with a laugh. “Now are you ready to give me my revenge at picquet?”
It was quite dark behind the curtains, though to Evelyn, who lay there, whatever the light was, it would have been dark in any case, and in a grosser darkness than that, a darkness of despair unilluminable by any sun, he pondered these things, his own helplessness, his blindness, the horror of his own face, and the dead weight of his indebtedness to Philip, the one man in all the world whose charity, from the very nature of things, was most unbearable. Together, poor fellow they formed a blank wall which it seemed hopeless to try to scale; indeed, he no longer really wanted to scale it, he only wanted to be allowed to sit down and have not only sight, but hearing and feeling and taste and smell closed forever, for death was surely a thing far less bitter than this living death in life. He could no longer now look forward to the future at all; it required all his energies to get through the hour that was present, without some breakdown; decent behaviour for the moment, when he was with any of the others, was the utmost he was capable of, and even of that he often felt incapable. And his energies, such as they were, were gradually failing before the hourly task. He was in no sense beginning ever so slightly to get used to it all, and the trials of each day, so far from making the trials of the next more easy to contemplate or to bear, only weakened his powers of bearing them. It was all so hopeless; for him hope was dead, and the last chord of her lyre had snapped.
But he did not feel this dully and vaguely; the very vividness and alertness of his nature which had made life so passionately sweet to him before made his hopelessness just as passionately felt now. He, too, like Tom Merivale, but with less of set purpose and more of instinct in his choice, had been in love with life, and that fire which had gone out had left not mere grey ash, but something burningly cold, and life was now as actively terrible to him as it had once been lovely.
There was the muffled sound of talking in the hall, and next moment the steps of two people entered, and Madge spoke. The other step went on towards the fireplace.
“Evelyn not here?” she said. “I suppose he’s gone to the library for tea.”