Nielsen stood looking after him.
“When a man talks to himself aloud, it is bad!” he said to himself. “When he talks, and clenches his hands comme ça, ah! that is very bad! That man is suffering!” He shrugged his shoulders, pointing mechanically with his stick after the figure.
“Yes, yes—I know. I do not like him, but I am sorry for him—he suffers verry grreatly.” He shook his head gravely, as he turned into the station.
. . . . . . . .
That supreme point, when for a time human nature recoils before suffering in a great lassitude, had not been reached by Giles Legard. Four days of torture had left him still capable of feeling.
Into his bedroom in the little grey villa the moon struck keenly and coldly; there was no other light. He had thrown off coat and waistcoat, and sat motionless, with his head bent on his arms folded across the back of his chair. Upon the table in front of him was a torn envelope and a half sheet of paper, folded and re-folded with innumerable creases. The room was empty of all other furniture except the bed, beside which, on a great rug of deerskin stretched over the bare panelling of the floor, Shikari lay, his head between his paws. In the bright moonlight all colours in the room gave way in a harsh contrasting of black and white, and outside the sea gleamed through the tops of the ghostly olives in silver ridges. Every now and then a loosened tendril of creeper swayed with the breath of a newly-born sea wind across the widely-opened casement. From his wife’s bedroom underneath came an occasional sound of hollow coughing.
Legard sat with his back turned to the window. The moonlight over the sea brought to him an agonising spasm of memory.... In return for an hour of mad, intoxicating passion, he had bartered everything! He took up the sheet of paper, looking at it dully as he twisted it in his hands. He had bartered everything! The thought was old, it seemed to him centuries since he had first realised it. Everything! There was not a shred left to him of his honour, or his self-respect; that did not seem to matter, he was beyond feeling it. But in that single hour of madness he had taken the happiness of the woman he loved—and with it his own—taken it, as it were, in his two hands, and flung it into the dust. Taken her well-being, her reserve, and her pride, and flung them brutally into the dust.
He read the letter mechanically again and again.
“I have tried, but I cannot see you. When you came near everything seemed to cry out at me. It is better that you should keep away—for you and for me. I cannot answer for myself.” That was all. No hope! No single stroke of the pen brought relief to his aching spirit.
He held the sheet of paper to catch the full of the moonlight; and her face rose above it, as he had seen it the one time since that night—a delicate, oval face, cold as the moonlight itself; averted and unseizable eyes, profound and dark, with the lids drooping over them and circles of black beneath; lips drawn together, cruelly set; cheeks colourless; between the brows a slight furrow; and over all the waving dark hair gathered back from the low forehead.