It was not her words that frightened him so much as her face. There was a dead look upon it, a dreadful, weary look, of something more than ordinary despair, of something fundamental, the expression of that hopeless taint of inherited fatalism, which he recognised dimly, and feared, as children fear the dark. For he could not comprehend it, his whole nature revolted—it was the point at which their individualities diverged. His instinct was to fight for his happiness, to fight for it with pain and trouble—hers to fold her hands, and let it drift to her or away.
It flashed across his mind that he had seen the same face somewhere, graven in stone, dead, immutable, the face of an image. Where, he could not say, but he had seen it. The thought frightened him the more. He was like a man fighting a nightmare, knowing all the time that it was something unreal, and suffering just the same. He felt that somewhere there must be the words, the words to break the despair of her face, to bring it back to life, to wrest the shadows from below the brown eyes that stared before them, large, lustreless, and pitifully hopeless, if only he could find them. Every man knows that feeling, that desperate search for just the right words, and sometimes they do not exist. He wracked his reason.
“My darling,” he cried, “it’s not true. Do you hear me, it’s not true—don’t yield to such a feeling, it’s dreadful. Fight against it, for God’s sake.”
He took her in his arms, she lay passively in them. He kissed her lips, her eyes, her hair—she yielded soft and unresponsive. Her face never changed.
“It was an accident. I know it, she would never have committed suicide! never! She had strong views about that—she was too religious, besides—” The fatuity of his words choked his utterance. Words! words! of what use were words against the whole bent of a nature? and he clenched his hands in despair. He would have given anything to penetrate for one moment the mystery of her being, to enter in, and share its isolation, to know the very springs of its instincts, that he might learn how to fight them.
In the stillness of the waning day he sat with his head in his hands, thinking, always thinking. The bees droned their dreamy song, and the world was flooded with a mellow, evening light.
It was no help to him that he was fighting an unreality, it only maddened him, made him desperate. In some moments if a man be tender-hearted, everything else goes by the board. He could not bear the sight of her suffering, he felt that he must pierce through that terrible calm, make her feel, it seemed to him a matter of life or death. He saw that there was one chance, suicidal and desperate, a chance that might mean the destruction of her love for him. He would have to take it, he could not sit there looking at the weary despair of that beloved face, feeling the tragedy she would carry away in her heart. He must tell her the truth. Half truths were no good. He must show her the whole, naked, sordid truth. The truth which he had intended should go down with him to the grave. Perhaps she would believe that.
Two lizards, meeting suddenly, began to fight furiously in the sunlight within three paces of them; he noticed them, and wondered dully which would win. Then he began to speak in a low matter of fact voice.
If he must tell her, he thought it should be in a way that would carry conviction. The sun glared into his eyes, and he pulled his hat low upon his forehead, with a feeling that he would, at all events, hide from her the foreboding of defeat that was in them.
“Are you listening to me?” he said.