He paused a moment, then observed,—
'Well, I'm quite worn out with all this rumpus! I shall go to bed. Good-night, Delicia!'
At this she turned and looked at him fully.
'Good-night!' she said.
Something in the transparent beauty of her face and the dark tragedy of her eyes awed him. She looked as if during the past few minutes she had risen above and beyond him to a purer atmosphere than that of earth. The majority of men hate women who look so; and Carlyon was painfully conscious that he had suddenly grown to hate Delicia. She had entirely changed, he thought. From a loving, tender idolater of his manly graces and perfections, she had become a proud, cynical, fault-finding, unforgiving 'virago.' This latter term did not suit her at all, but he considered that it did; for, as usual, by the aid of man's logic, he deemed himself the injured party and she the injuring. And irritated beyond measure at the queenly tranquillity of her demeanour, he muttered something profane under his breath, and dashing aside the portière with a clatter of its brazen rings and a violence that threatened to tear its very substance, he left the room.
As soon as he had gone, Delicia moved slowly to the door and shut and locked it after him; then as slowly returned to her chair, where, leaning her head back against the carved escutcheon, she quietly fainted.
CHAPTER XII
Next day Delicia was too weak and broken in body and spirit to leave her bedroom, which she had managed to reach by herself on recovering from her swoon. Her husband sent her a brief note of farewell by one of the servants. He was leaving London immediately for Paris, he said, 'and when all this nonsense had blown over,' he would return. Till then he was 'hers affectionately.' She crumpled the note in her hand and lay still, her fair head fallen wearily back among her pillows, and a great sense of exhaustion and fatigue numbing all her faculties. A batch of letters came by the mid-day post, letters from strangers and friends, all warmly testifying as usual to her genius; and as she read she sighed heavily and wondered what was the use of it all?
'They do not know I am dead!' she said to herself, 'That all my life is done with—finished! If I had never known the meaning of love; if I had never thought and believed that love was truly mine, how much better it would have been for me! I should have worked on contentedly; I should not have missed what I had no experience of, and I might—yes, I might have been really great. Now there is no hope for any more attainment—Love has murdered me!'
She rested in bed all day, dozing and dreaming and thinking; all night between the slow-pacing hours she had long waking intervals of strange, half-troubled, half-mystic musings. She saw herself, so she imagined, dead;—laid out in her coffin with flowers round her; but as she looked at her own stiffened corpse she knew it was not herself, she thus saw, but only the image of what she had been. She, Delicia, was another being—a being through whose fine essence light and joy were flowing. She fancied she heard sweet voices murmuring in her ears,—