As nearly as a man may read the soul of a woman, he had read hers, with a vision supernaturally sharpened by pain. He had seen in her face the shame, the agony of violated reserve, the bitter wounding of her pride—the pride, which for no single moment had foreseen that ending. He had known that she was thinking, “I am a thing apart, but for the accident of concealment, a thing of shame.” He had recognised that in the reaction of her feelings there was a physical repulsion to himself, a desire to hurt because she had been hurt. He had understood what it was costing her to go about as usual, and keep her vizor down to the world. He had known in her a courage he did not possess himself, an untameable pride. All this he had seen in that face. That which he had not seen was the mysterious weakness of woman, the greatest and the most pitiful of all qualities.
He rose from his seat, went into his dressing-room, and poured some brandy from a shooting flask. When he had drunk it he came back again to his bedroom. He walked up and down once or twice softly, clenching his hands, and mechanically taking care that his footsteps made no noise on the bare, slippery floor. Then he put his hand into the breastpocket of his coat, took out a revolver, and dropped it into the table-drawer. As he did so he gave a queer little laugh. He had carried it about with him for three days, and it was like parting with an old friend. It had been comforting to feel the weight of it in his pocket, with the thought that there was always that escape from the grinding torture of the slowly moving hours.
He shut the drawer with a bang of finality. The brandy had cleared his brain, and he saw that for several reasons the end was not that way. He must see it out. He began to perceive also that it was a grimmer and a harder thing than he had imagined for a human being to abandon hope; and yet, as the bang of the shut drawer echoed in the silent room, he felt that it was even more grim and hard to go on living. He knew all the time that, of those two thoughts, he would never find out which was the truer, because of a deeply-rooted instinct, cowardly-heroic, which would drive him to live while he was sane.
He threw himself at full length upon the floor, pressing his face into the soft rug, and Shikari woke up to lick his outstretched hands. The moonlight passed on over the house and left him there.
Some time in the dense darkness he crawled to his knees, and bowed himself against the bed in a prayer, unconvinced, faithless, and voiceless, a mere straining after rest in the hard pressure of his face against the cool covering of the bed, after peace in the touch of his knees upon the floor.
He fell asleep so. When he woke it was with a vague contempt of himself that had no sting in it, and, half-dressed as he was, he fell asleep again upon the bed in sheer exhaustion.
CHAPTER XII
The sun staring into his room awoke him. As he stretched himself, the sight of his own half-dressed figure brought him with a cruel jerk to a sense of reality.
Yet, in spite of the agony of returning consciousness, there was a glow of resolution in his mind, another dawning of hope. He shrank before the acknowledgment of it. To his indolent, pleasure-loving nature, a resigned acceptance of the worst meant relief. He resented the renewed vitality which brought suspense, and a fresh struggle against the abandonment of hope. With every movement of his muscles in the morning air came another balancing of the possibilities. Effort of any sort, other than the purely physical, was painful to him; he shrank from beginning again a mental contest against overpowering odds, and all the time the struggle was renewing itself within him. It was his nature to shrink from obstacles, and to hate the rough of life, yet when he encountered it, something in him always forced him forward against his will. He began to calculate the earliest minute at which he might see Jocelyn.
He dressed hastily, swallowed some coffee and a roll, and ordered his pony. While waiting for it he paced restlessly up and down the little garden. Once, when he passed her window, he saw his wife’s figure moving feebly from her bedroom to her sitting-room. He had heard her talking, had heard her cough, had even heard her laughing, but it was all he had seen of her for three days. He turned away hastily, and walked down into the road to wait....