Then he sat down and held his head in his hands for fear of jumping up, of seizing her and turning her to his eyes, and forcing her to admit that what lay now in ashes had been a letter from out the ashes of the past, from that other man, whom he could never see or comprehend, but who haunted his days and stood always between him and the sun of unconscious happiness.
“I hate letters!” she burst out as suddenly, and went precipitately out of the door and flying over the cliffs.
He made no move to follow, but sat there grimly, staring into the fire, and what he thought of darkly was not alone the past but of what lay ahead.
XLI
Inga had lied to him, and he had understood the reasons of her denial. Yet the fact remained that the first lie lay between them, the blade that cut ruthlessly through the veils of the summer’s illusion. Until then, he had lived in an unreal paradise. The world had been exiled, or, rather, from morning to night, in every mood of nature he had dominated where he had walked. There was a primitive directness, a savage charm about Inga that had carried him back to the healing savagery of the solitary world. Absorbed in the fulness of his artistic regeneration, falling into pleasant mental languor, an ease of the body and all the senses, he had forgotten in the quiet reveries of fire-lit evenings, that beyond the threshold there waited those irreconcilable enemies of the present—the haunted past and the inscrutable future. So completely did she blend into the roaming moods of his mind, so keenly intuitive of the moment to listen and the moment to dream that, at times, stretched indolently and gracefully before the roaring logs, she seemed to wait his pleasure with the mute loyalty of some friendly animal. Now, all at once, the spell had vanished.
He was a man alive to fierce, disturbing emotions, aware that, side by side with the blinding figure of passionate love, was that relentless, inevitable companion—primeval jealousy—exacting its ruthless toll for every narcotic moment of oblivion. She, too, was different, no longer the companion whose every word and every thought he possessed, but something that drew back from him before the clutching hunger of his soul, and veiled herself in the obscurity of the past—the eternal stranger—Woman.
He did not blame her—the crueler thing would have been to have told the truth. He felt this, and yet his whole nature rebelled against the intruder, which had crept in like weeds among the flowers. He could not speak to her; he could not meet her eyes. His own self seemed to have run away from him. He was incapable of rest or activity, and when she returned, he marveled at the calm in which she moved. The next day and the day after, something hot and red stood between his eyes and his canvas. He tried desperately to paint and remained bewildered by the void within him. He began a dozen sketches, swore, and scraped them out, and, after long, racking hours, remained with his head in his hands, staring at the terrifying white depth of his canvas that seemed to him to be something without end or beginning, a vast emptiness into which he had sunk all his hope.
The first day when she returned over the dripping rocks to join him for the long tramp home, she asked as usual: