XXI
After a while he rose, impelled once more within. A lamp had been lit in the bedroom, and, in its radiance, the countenance on the pillow glistened like the skin of a lemon. As before, Mrs. Caley left the room as he entered; and he thought that, as she passed him, she snarled like an animal.
He sat bowed by the bed. A moth perished in the flame of the lamp, and the light flickered through the room—it seemed that Lettice grimaced, but it was only the other. Her face had grown sharper: it was such a travesty of her that, somehow, he ceased to associate it with Lettice at all. Instead he began to think of it as something exclusively of his own making—it was what he had done with things, with life.
The sheet lay over the motionless body like a thin covering of snow on the turnings of the earth; it defined her breasts and a hip as crisply as though they were cut in marble effigy on a tomb of youthful dissolution. He followed the impress of an arm to the hand; and, leaning forward, touched it. A coldness seemed to come through the cover to his fingers. He let his hand stay upon hers—perhaps the warmth would flow back into the cold arm, the chill heart; perhaps he could give her some of his vitality. The possibility afforded him a meager comfort, instilled a faint glow into his benumbed being. His hand closed upon that covered by the linen like a shroud. He sat rigid, concentrated, in his effort, his purpose. The light flickered again from the fiery perishing of a second moth.
A strange feeling crept over him, a deepened sense of suspense, of imminence. He fingered his throat, and his hand was icy where it touched his burning face. He stood up in an increasing, nameless disturbance.
A faint spasm crossed the drained countenance beneath him; the mouth fell open.
He knew suddenly that Lettice was dead.
There her clothes lay strewn on the chair and floor, the long, black stockings and the rumpled chemise strung with narrow blue ribband. She had worn them on her warm, young body; she had tied the ribband in the morning and untied it at night, untied it at night ... it was night now.