But when he returned to the bedside, and stood again by the sleeping body of his wife, he was overcome by nausea. Distaste for the task paralysed his will. He felt as a sensitive man would feel if he were forced to crush a beetle with his naked finger. As an excuse for delay he began examining the instrument in his hand, which was a perfectly ordinary pair of household scissors having, as all scissors have, one sharp end and one blunted. The sharp end interested him most. He scrutinized its point and pressed it against the ball of his thumb; and the thought flashed to him, as though the devil himself had whispered it: ‘This is sharp enough—one thrust under the left ear.’ He shuddered, recoiled from the idea, and burned with shame and fear for having ever had it. And, while still suffocating with the sense of his own guiltiness, there crept into his consciousness the nightmare conviction that he was being watched. He could not see his wife, his gaze being fixed on the scissors, but he knew that she had opened her eyes.
Gubbins couldn’t explain to me the horror of that moment. He merely bowed his head on my mantelpiece and closed his eyes as if to shut out an evil vision. For when, after an age of immobility and silence, he forced himself to look at the face on the bed, he saw the cruel lips curled in a smile of final triumph; and even the opaque eyes seemed for once to shine. And what, for Gubbins, gave the last turn to the screw of terror was that the woman was not looking at him at all. Her gaze, full of evil beatitude, was fixed on the ceiling. For several minutes, minutes that throbbed with his agony, she neither moved nor spoke; and at last, very slowly, she moved a little higher on to the pillow and, still smiling insanely, bared her throat for him to strike. Gubbins was convinced that she ardently desired him to stain his soul with her blood.
Well, as you know, he didn’t murder her: not that time, at any rate. He escaped, as he said, from hell. But I think I would as soon go to hell as have to live through those last fifteen months of his. For now she had completed his enslavement; now she had got his miserable little soul between her finger and thumb. Added to all her old grievances, those daggers with which to stab at his conscience, she had another and a more sensational one: this terrible sin, this attempt upon her life. Spiritual blackmail prolonged for twenty years. No wonder he set fire to the place.
A SENSITIVE MAN
A SENSITIVE MAN
THE sight of Elsie’s drawn face, that pallid mask of desolation, moved Wyvern to a self-pity that savoured exquisitely on the tongue. To watch suffering and to be unable to relieve it was a cruel experience. He hardly dared to conjecture how much she had suffered during the last few days of suspense while he, the only man in the world for her, had been trying to make up his mind on a matter affecting the destinies of three persons. He could not dislike Elsie: she had a certain fragile winsomeness and she was still, though her first bloom was gone, pathetically young. Everything she said to-night did but strengthen his conviction of her intellectual immaturity. Between his mind and hers there was a great gulf fixed. Now Marion—Marion was so different. That did not mean that he had no pity left for Elsie. Not at all. His heart was wrung for the one no less than for the other. That was his tragedy: he had a threefold burden. From that point of view he had to admit himself the most luckless of the three.
‘I know my little wife will understand. Her Jim has been quite frank with her.’
Elsie leaned forward, chin in hands, staring fixedly at distance. Only her extreme pallor showed her to be suffering. For the rest, her brow was knitted as though she concentrated all her power upon some problem that as yet baffled her.
‘Yes, Jim, I understand. I understand that you’re so much more sensitive than other men, and can’t resist beauty. Your gift carries penalties with it, and acute susceptibility is one of them. But....’
He glowed in appreciation of her. She was really unique. ‘Only one woman in a thousand could see that,’ he said warmly. ‘And my little wife is that one. She is the dearest....’