‘Ourself,’ she answered triumphantly—‘ourself, awake, brought to life, welded together again. We have come out of a hundred ages. Do you suppose that we come together now for the first time? How do we know each other, then? This that we feel is the song of many dead souls calling in each of us to the many dead souls that have loved us in the other. We have been bound together since first we met in the far-away distance of things. Love is that. Love is never a new thing. Love is the oldest thing in the world. It has lived through a hundred thousand deaths of the body, and gathered strength and knowledge at every stage of its journey. It’s a jewel of a hundred thousand memories crushed together and crystallized into a pure sparkle of lights. It’s a chain of a hundred thousand links, each heavier than the last, and more golden. Kingston, the chain is round us and round us. Tie it tighter, tighter, for ever and ever. We will live everlastingly in this land of splendid bondage.’
‘Isabel, what is it the wise people of the East say?’ answered Kingston, in the stupefaction of ecstasy. ‘They pledge themselves to one another for half a dozen lives or more. Isabel, that is what you mean. You and I are both bound together. We’ll plight our troth again now, far ahead into the future. For a score of existences, Isabel. Our love was not born a minute ago; it will not die to-morrow. It goes on and on, whatever bodies it takes to clothe itself. Our love is the only thing of us that goes on. And nothing can destroy it. It is ourselves. You are mine, Isabel, and I am yours—you are me, and I, you, not only now, in these shapes of ours, but through half a hundred more that are not yet born, Isabel. Isabel, what do words and talking matter? We cannot get away from each other; we are the same person. Now and always, Isabel. But we will never lose ourselves again; we must always recognise each other.’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘again and again and again. For ever and always. You have been trying to cut me, Kingston—me! trying to cut yourself.’
‘You are chained to me, Isabel, and I to you! I will never break the chain at my end; you must never try to break it at yours.’
‘No; we are always the same person henceforth. Why, there is no bond. We are too close together now even to be bound.’
She stood gazing at him, her eyes, her pose, her manner inspired with conquest. The blank, sickening ferocity of passion seized him as he answered her look. It caught him by the throat, swept him away in a rapture of agony. To crush that beauty of hers, to mangle it, strangle it, absorb it utterly in himself, became at once the one blinding, obliterating need that filled his whole consciousness. An insatiable thirst of her loveliness possessed him. The keen, flame-like delirium of his desire was a devastating pain. His whole being moaned with the aching torment of it. The sight of her, the thought of her, went through him, pierced him, rent his innermost heart in twain. The drunken glory of suffering that held him on the wheel of knives was a frenzy very different from that placid repletion which had been his ideal—how long ago?—of the great ideal passion. Now at last he knew what passion was—the parching, gorgeous misery of it, the straining, leaping martyrdom. The ancient secret madness that once had dwelt in the orderly rooms of his father’s heart now stirred again in the son’s, and bled once more, under the wounds of ecstasy, as once, for a wild hour, it had bled long since at the hands of that ill-fated, forgotten woman whose place was now usurped by Isabel. Kingston, his calmer self destroyed by the red intoxication, moved towards his fate, vaguely, blindly.
‘Isabel—Isabel!’ he murmured with dry, cracking lips, groping hands outstretched to take her.
And Isabel welcomed his coming as the crown of life. She threw his arms wide and waited, glowing and transfigured.
The ghostly twilight of the mist was round her, behind her. The face it revealed was fierce with joy, exquisite in its vividness. The dark hair drifted round it, and the throat rose vivid and white from the low-cut collar of her dress, thrown back splendidly, an ivory column. The neck of her dress was fastened awry by a little brooch, whose diamonds gleamed dully in the pale glooming.
And in an instant the man’s flaming drunkenness had passed—passed utterly, in a spasm of torment almost beyond his bearing. As sometimes we are torn painfully, violently from the gay madness of a happy dream by the sound of a bell or some other noise that penetrates to our consciousness from the outer world beyond our vision, so now, in the crisis of his passion, the sight of his wife’s brooch at Isabel’s throat recalled Kingston Darnley, with a jarring crash, to the horrible realities of life. Isabel, characteristically buttonless and pinless, had borrowed it from Gundred to make good the deficiencies of her blouse. His arms fell, the light of his eyes grew dull, and died. His body stood motionless, and his spirit went down into the abyss of hell.