She believed him, and was exalted by triumph. ‘Ah,’ she cried, ‘you do love me. You are becoming a man at last. That would be a good death to die.’
‘Body and soul of you,’ he went on fiercely, ‘hateful and glorious—I might destroy them, mightn’t I, but never could I be rid of them. I know there is no escape, Isabel. And now surely you can let me be. I am bound to you now and for always. Isn’t that enough?’
Isabel smiled. ‘Enough,’ she cried. ‘It is everything; now or later, what does it matter? I win. I win. Kingston,’ she added, dropping indifferently from the heights of emotion to the plain lands of prose, with something of that unconscious ease which one might have imagined in the nature of a woman like Isabel the Queen, the very prose of whose life was emotion, and whose emotion was so practical as to be daily prose of her existence—‘ah, Kingston, I am tired. I am simply dropping with weariness. Are we going to get down off this mountain to-night? Because, if not, I must try to sleep in that hut we saw. And I know you will not be able to run away from me.’
‘Sleep, by all means, if you can,’ he answered. ‘There is no going down through this mist. Luckily the night will be fairly warm, and by morning the clouds will have broken. But you will be hideously uncomfortable, I am afraid.’
‘No,’ she replied; ‘I am naturally primitive. I have never minded roughing it.’
Exhausted by their discord of wills, they now, by mutual consent, talked coolly and indifferently, casting memory behind them.
Kingston helped Isabel to find the hut, and did what he could to make it habitable. Then, leaving her to get what rest she might, he returned to his thorny vigil under the old beacon. The air was motionless, and not ungenial in its temperature. Enveloped above and below in blank darkness, he had the sensation of being balanced softly in space. The calm, after the ardent misery of their dialogue, was inexpressibly refreshing. He abandoned himself to its placid influences, and instead of devoting the night to a thrashing out of all the many difficulties that threatened his relations with Gundred and with Isabel, he let it drift him away into the domain of peace. He hardly knew how completely exhausted he had been, and it was with the surprise which always attends us when we find ourselves doing prosaic things that seem at variance with the high dramatic moments of life they follow, that at last he found himself floating quietly off in sleep.
Anguish was still there, deep down in his heart—a bruised feeling of hunger and dissatisfaction, a great shame for himself, and a great pity for his wife, as well as a firm resolve that she should not suffer. But passion had dulled the edge of its own intensity; only dull aching pains were left, rather than acute stabbing ones. Disappointment and hopelessness possessed him in an inexorable but not agonizing grip. In fact, he was too weary to feel the full weight of the yoke that was laid upon him. Cradled in the great silence, his tired consciousness sank at last to rest.