Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman. Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration. He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again. He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves. And as she saw it now he would see it all the days of his life. He felt like the living captive bound to the dead in some infernal triumph of Fate. Dead and not dead—that was the horrible thing. Beneath that mask that was not Molly, Molly was alive. She would live, she would be young when he was long past middle age.
He found it in him to think bitterly of the little thing for the courage that had saved his life—for that. Of all her rash and inconsiderate actions this was the worst. Courage had never formed part of his feminine ideal; it was the glory of the brute and the man, and she should have left it to men and to brutes like him. And yet if that detestable "accident," as she called it, had happened to him, she would have loved him all the better for it.
Odd. But some women are made so. Marion Hathaway was that sort—she stuck like a leech.
And now—the frivolous, feather-headed little wife, whom he had held so cheap and wronged so lightly, urging her folly as almost a justification of the wrong, she too—She appalled him with the terrific eternity of her love. Was it possible that this feeling, which he had despised as the blind craving and clinging of the feminine animal, could take a place among the supreme realities, the things more living than flesh and blood, which in his way he still contrived to believe in? The idea made him extremely uncomfortable, and he put it from him. He had drifted into that stagnant backwater of the soul where the scum of thought rises to the surface. Molly was better than most women; but, poor little thing, there was nothing transcendent about her virtues. She loved him after the manner of her kind.
No—no—no. She loved him as no other woman had ever loved him before. She loved him because she believed in him against the evidence of her senses. If she only knew! A diabolical impulse seized him to awaken her then and there and force her to listen to a full confession of his iniquities, without reticence and without apology. Surely no woman's love could stand before that appalling revelation? But no; what other women would do he would not undertake to say; she would only look at him with her innocent eyes, reiterating "It makes no difference."
Would he have cared more if she had cared less? On the whole—no. And what if she had been a woman of a higher, austerer type? That woman would have repelled him, thrown him back upon himself. She had drawn him by her very foolishness. He had been brought back to her, again and again, by the certainty of her unreasoning affection. By its purity also. That had saved him from falling lower than a certain dimly defined level. If there was a spark of good in him he owed it to her. He had never sunk so low as in that intolerable moment when he had doubted her. For the behavior of the brute is low enough in all conscience; but below that is the behavior of the cad. Tyson had his own curious code of morals.
Yes; and in the raw enthusiasm of remorse he had made all manner of vows and promises, and he felt bound in honor to keep them. He had talked of a rupture with the past. A rupture with the past! You might as well talk of breaking with your own shadow. The shadow of your past. Imbecile expression! The past was in his blood and nerves; it was bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh. It was he. Or rather it was this body of his that seemed to live with a hideous independent life of its own. And yet, even yet, there were moments when he caught a glimpse of his better self struggling as if under the slough of dissolution; the soul that had never seen the sun was writhing to leap into the light. He would have given the whole world to be able to love Molly. There was no death and no corruption like the death of love; and the spirit of his passion had been too feeble to survive its divorce from the flesh.
He could not look away. He rose and lifted the lamp-shade, throwing the pitiless light on the thing that fascinated him. She stirred in her sleep, turning a little from the light. He bent over her pillow and peered into her face. She woke suddenly, as if his gaze had drawn her from sleep; and from the look in her eyes he judged a little of the horror his own must have betrayed.
He shrank back guiltily, replaced the shade, and sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed. She looked at him. His whole frame trembled; his eyes were blurred with tears; the parted lips drooped with weakness, bitterness, and unappeased desire. Did she know that in that moment the hunger and thirst after righteousness raged more fiercely than any earthly appetite? It seemed to him that in her look he read pity and perfect comprehension. He hid his face in his hands.
After that night he began to have a nervous dread of going into her room. He was always afraid that she would "say something." By this time his senses, too, were morbidly acute. The sight and smell of drugs, dressings, and disinfectants afflicted him with an agony of sensation. There was no escaping these things in the little flat, and he could not help associating his wife with them: it seemed as if a crowd of trivial and sordid images was blotting out the delicate moral impressions he had once had. Tyson was paying the penalty of having lived the life of the senses; his brain had become their servant, and he was horrified to find that he could not command its finest faculties at pleasure.