She held him closer, already feeling, in spite of his words, the first agony of their inevitable farewell.
“You love me!” she said, “you must never leave me. Kiss me, and promise me that you will never leave me.”
Grief and horror had broken down every barrier of reserve between them. The pent-up passion on his side, the intense unconscious tenderness on hers seemed to meet and blend in the one consuming thought that they belonged to each other—that, in the awful struggle between the force of circumstances and the force of life—they might have to part.
“Why should we two matter in so large a world?” she cried. “Surely we need not suffer so much just for the discipline of our own souls? I cannot, cannot, cannot go away. I can't live without you. I can't die without you. I am tired of being alone. I am tired of trying to forget you. And I have tried so hard.”
Her face, from which all colour and joy and animation had departed, seemed like a June rose dead, in all its perfection, on the tree. One may see many such in a garden after a sudden frost.
“You mustn't leave me. They all frighten me. I have no one but you,” she continued; “God will understand. He doesn't ask any one to be alone. He wasn't even crucified—alone. He didn't enter into Paradise—alone. Ask me to do anything, but don't ask me to go away—to go back to Wrexham. You are much stronger than I am. If you thought you ought to cut out your heart by little pieces, you would do it. But you must think of me. They may have all my money—that is all they care for. But I must have you.”
Although she made the appeal, he had resolved, in silence, long before, that, come what might, he would not give her back. The decision rose on the instant, without hesitation, doubt, or misgiving—a deliberate choice between two courses.
“You cannot return to Parflete,” he said quietly. “Don't despair. Your marriage with him may be annulled. That aspect of the question is revolting, abominable; but we are both in such a false position now that we owe it as much to other people as we do to ourselves to put everything in a true light. You are so brave, Brigit——“
“I am tired of being brave.”
Her slender arms tightened about his neck; he could feel, from the whole abandonment of her attitude and the slight weight of her childish form, how little fitted she was physically for the squalid ordeal of the law-courts. If she could live at all through horrors of the kind, it would have to be by a miracle. And has one the right to hope for miracles where the question of happiness or unhappiness in human love is the egoistic point at stake? But, right or no right, there was in them both that supreme and fatal force of affection which, if it be unusual, is at least usual enough to be at the root of most mortal tragedies.