“But the last three weeks?” she said, reluctantly. “How can you ask me to believe?”
He had expected this, and he met it steadily enough; nevertheless his courage faltered. To deceive this woman, even to justify himself, had in the last halfhour become something sacrilegious.
“The last three weeks must be buried,” he said, hurriedly. “No man could free himself suddenly from—from a vice.” He broke off abruptly. He hated Chilcote; he hated himself. Then Eve's face, raised in distressed appeal, overshadowed all scruples. “You have been silent and patient for years,” he said, suddenly. “Can you be patient and silent a little longer?” He spoke without consideration. He was conscious of no selfishness beneath his words. In the first exercise of conscious strength the primitive desire to reduce all elements to his own sovereignty submerged every other emotion. “I can't enter into the thing,” he said; “like you, I give no explanations. I can only tell you that on the day we talked together in this room I was myself—in the full possession of my reason, the full knowledge of my own capacities. The man you have known in the last three weeks, the man you have imagined in the last four years, is a shadow, an unreality—a weakness in human form. There is a new Chilcote—if you will only see him.”
Ewe was trembling as he ceased; her face was flushed; there was a strange brightness in her eyes She was moved beyond herself.
“But the other you—the old you?”
“You must be patient.” He looked down into the fire. “Times like the last three weeks will come again—must come again; they are inevitable. When they do come, you must shut your eyes—you must blind yourself. You must ignore them—and me. Is it a compact?” He still avoided her eyes.
She turned to him quietly. “Yes—if you wish it,” she said, below her breath.
He was conscious of her glance, but he dared not meet it. He felt sick at the part he was playing, yet he held to it tenaciously.
“I wonder if you could do what few men and fewer women are capable of?” he asked, at last. “I wonder if you could learn to live in the present?” He lifted his head slowly and met her eyes. “This is an—an experiment,” he went on. “And, like all experiments, it has good phases and bad. When the bad phases come round I—I want you to tell yourself that you are not altogether alone in your unhappiness—that I am suffering too—in another way.”
There was silence when he had spoken, and for a space it seemed that Eve would make no response. Then the last surprise in a day of surprises came to him. With a slight stir, a slight, quick rustle of skirts, she stepped forward and laid her hand in his.