The long nights became even harder to endure, for now they would feel so terribly divided. Their days would be heavy with misunderstandings, their nights filled with doubts, apprehensions and longings. They would often have parted as enemies, and therein would lie the great loneliness of it.
As time went on they grew deeply despondent, their despondency robbing the sun of its brightness, robbing the little goat-bells of their music, robbing the dark of its luminous glory. The songs of the beggars who sang in the garden at the hour when the santa noche smelt sweetest, those songs would seem full of a cruel jibing: ‘A-a-a-y! Before I saw thee I was at peace, but now I am tormented because I have seen thee.’
Thus were all things becoming less good in their sight, less perfect because of their own frustration.
6
But Mary Llewellyn was no coward and no weakling, and one night, at long last, pride came to her rescue. She said: ‘I want to speak to you, Stephen.’
‘Not now, it’s so late—to-morrow morning.’
‘No, now.’ And she followed Stephen into her bedroom.
For a moment they avoided each other’s eyes, then Mary began to talk rather fast: ‘I can’t stay. It’s all been a heart-breaking mistake. I thought you wanted me because you cared. I thought—oh, I don’t know what I thought—but I won’t accept your charity, Stephen, not now that you’ve grown to hate me like this—I’m going back home to England. I forced myself on you, I asked you to take me. I must have been mad; you just took me out of pity; you thought that I was ill and you felt sorry for me. Well, now I’m not ill and not mad any more, and I’m going. Every time I come near you you shrink or push me away as though I repelled you. But I want us to part quickly because. . . .’ Her voice broke: ‘because it torments me to be always with you and to feel that you’ve literally grown to hate me. I can’t stand it; I’d rather not see you, Stephen.’
Stephen stared at her, white and aghast. Then all in a moment the restraint of years was shattered as though by some mighty convulsion. She remembered nothing, was conscious of nothing except that the creature she loved was going.
‘You child,’ she gasped, ‘you don’t understand, you can’t understand—God help me, I love you!’ And now she had the girl in her arms and was kissing her eyes and her mouth: ‘Mary . . . Mary. . . .’