Who could Miss Percival be? It was a good name—better than Middleham, which had been her own, as good as Germain, which had been her husband's. Sanchia, an extraordinary name, an unusual name. It sounded Spanish and aristocratic. The Honourable Hertha de Speyne: she had known the daughter of a noble house so styled in her governess days, her days of drudgery, and even now it had a glamour for her, who had since hobnobbed with many honourables, flirted with many young lords, and been kissed by a duchess. Miss Sanchia Percival: the Honourable Sanchia Percival. No doubt this was a high lady. And she must be beautiful, or Jack wouldn't speak of her as he had. He hushed his voice down, he spoke as if she were a goddess, as if to disobey her call was out of the question. A dull heat stirred deeply within her, and she found herself setting her teeth together. No! Jack had brought her to this pass—and she would not be left there.
These were the thoughts of Mrs. Germain as she sat very still, with heavy-lidded eyes, listening to Senhouse's story. He ended it in these words: “You charmed me, Mary, and you still charm me. You are very sweet, and I shall never want a dearer mate than you might be, if you would. I vow to you that you are the only woman with whom I have wished to live, as we might live if you would. I can't make you see, I'm conscious, what I feel about Sanchia—but it's certainly not that. My little dear, can't you trust me?” He looked down, and saw her tears slowly dropping; he was very much moved, knelt by her side. She turned her face away, dangerously moved also. She struggled with her tears, her face contorted, her bosom heaving in riot. Senhouse took her hands, but she wrenched them away and covered her face with them. Passion grew upon her, passion of regret, of loss, of rage, of desire—“Oh, leave me, leave me! Oh, cruel, cruel! No man in the world could be so cruel—” and then she sprang up, and faced him, flushed and fierce as a woman whom love has made mad.
“I believed in you, I gave you everything I had. You have had it, and you leave me. I made no pretences—I told you all my secrets. You said that you loved me—and now you leave me. Go, please. I hope I shall never see you again.”
Her great eyes loomed in her hot face like beacons. Her colour was high, her lips vivid. She looked as beautiful as an Indian flower. She was fighting for her own like a cat. An absent, shadowy, icily-pure Sanchia could never contend with this quivering reality of scarlet and burning brown; and the man stood disarmed before her, watching her every movement and sensible of every call of her body. Her wild words provoked him, her beauty melted him; pity for her, shame, memories of what he had believed her, impossible visions of what she might be; he was tossed this way and that, was whirled, engulfed, overwhelmed. There is only one end to such strifes. With a short cry, he threw up his arms.
“God help us, I stay,” he said.
III
Hear now of the immediate end. This gentleman, a philosopher and poet, rich in theory, having reached a middle point in his career, had found that he had, without knowing it, encountered a Fact which had gripped him in a vital part, squeezed the very fibres of him, sucked him apparently dry of human juices, even of the zest to live, and presently departed, leaving him faint by the wayside. Not until he was clean gone did he have the least suspicion that it had been there, and (if he could have known it) the first glimmering of reawakening pulse in him was the considering of its nature. Brooding upon it, while he grieved over his languor, he discovered that it had not been hard and scaly, like your ordinary vampire, but soft-lipped, brown-eyed, warm-fleshed, cloudy-haired; in fact, a pretty woman. Now, in all his previous relations with that sex, while he had given much of himself, he had never met before with a woman whose need was the measure of her allure. If she had not wanted him so much, he would never have thought of her twice. But this was precisely what had happened. She had acted upon him as a vacuum upon air. Her helplessness, her ignorance, her appealing belief in him, her clinging power, heightening her physical charm, had sucked him in a stream; and when she was full of him, he was empty. She had been the first to find it out. Having trailed him in her wake for a season, against his instincts, against his conscience, she presently coaxed him to let her go. Let her go! He asked nothing better than to see her happy, and saw no other way of being so himself. When she had gone, and was safely married to an old admirer, our expended friend lay, like a gaffed salmon, faintly flapping on the bank. For a year or more he lay, and dated his recovery of tone from the moment of finding out the nature of his disaster. “She was hungry, and I fed her. She was thirsty, and I gave her drink. The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed, by all means, be the name of the Lord.”
He proposed now to resume his former life of sojourn in tents and desultory practice of the arts, a life which, as it was at once highly practical and entirely dependent upon enjoyment, we may call one of contemplative activity. For twenty years he had not lived in a house, slept in a bed, or owned anything beyond the barest necessities. (The only thing he had, indeed, found himself owning, had at last removed itself.) He had been by turns poet, painter-in-water-colours, tinker, botaniser, antinomian, and anarchist; and attributed his success in all these busy walks to the fact that he was as strongly averse to the possession of property as he was incapable of getting any. Here, then, was his capital, with which to commence the world again.