“Ah, that is the worst sting of death,” he cried bitterly, “the influence of the dead which blights the living. Is there no hope, Eve—no hope? Is your mind made up?”
“Alas! alas! I have no choice.”
“Take time to think, at least, before you act.”
“Time to think? Why, I have been thinking for an eternity. It is ages since that woman put this picture in my hand. Oh, I have thought, Jack. I have thought. If I could shut my eyes and say I forget—if I could say the past is past, and the dead are no better for our tears and our sacrifices, our crape gowns, or the roses we plant on their graves—if I could be like the heathens who said, ‘Let us be happy to-day, for to-morrow we die,’ how gladly would I blot thought and memory from my brain! But you see while I live I must think and remember; and every hour of my life with you would be darkened by one hideous memory. I should see my brother in his blood-stained winding-sheet standing between us. There are some things that cannot be, that heart, and mind, and conscience cry out against, and our marriage is one of those things. Oh, it was wicked, wicked, to marry me, knowing what you knew.”
“Was it wicked? If it was, I don’t repent of that sin. I repent my first crime—the crime of bloodshed—not my second, the crime of making you my wife. I have had two years of bliss. How many men can say as much? Well, since you are resolute—have weighed what you are doing, and still decide against me, I will leave you in peace. If the memory of those years cannot plead for me, all words are idle.”
She heard the strangled sob in his voice as he turned from her and went slowly to the door: but she did not call him back. She stood like a woman of stone till the door closed on him, and the outer door opened and shut again. Then she clasped her hands above her head with a distracted gesture, and rushed out upon the balcony to see the last of him. She leant over the high iron rail to watch him as he sprang into the waiting hansom. She saw him drive away, and did not shriek to him to come back, though her whole being, brain, heart, nerves, yearned after him with despairing love. She watched till the cab vanished from her sight, hidden by the foliage on the Embankment, and then she dragged herself slowly back to the room, as a wounded animal crawls to its lair, and flung herself upon Lisa’s sofa, a broken-hearted woman.
“Could I act otherwise,—could I, could I?” she asked herself. “My brother, my own flesh and blood! Even if I had not loved him, could I live with the man who killed him?”
Lisa crept into the room, while Eve sat sobbing, with her face hidden in the sofa pillow. Lisa crept to her side, and sat on the ground by her, pitying her, and looking up at her with mute doglike tenderness. “What have you done?” she asked at last. “Have you sent him from you—your husband who loves you?”
“Yes, he is gone. It is our fate.”
“Fate!” cried Lisa, contemptuously. “What is fate? It is you, not Fate, that make the parting. If you loved him you would not let him go.”