Again the blackness gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon Artois to overwhelm him. He stood firm and received the shock. For he was beginning to understand. He was no longer confronting waves of hatred which were also waves of mystery.
He had thought that Hermione hated him, hated every one just then, because of what Ruffo had silently told her that day at Mergellina. But as he stood there in the dark at the door of that black chamber, hearing the distant murmur of the sea about the palace walls, there were borne in upon him, as if in words she told him, all the reasons for present hatred of him which preceded the great reason of that day; reasons for hatred which sprang, perhaps, which surely must spring, from other reasons of love.
His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes, causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation of something that was not hatred, that was the reverse of hatred. Vere had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was now awake.
“Hermione,” he said—and now his voice was strong and unfaltering—“I seem to have been listening to you all this time that I have been standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your thoughts. Don’t you know it? Haven’t you felt it? When I left the island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I thought I understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I know now how little I understood. I didn’t realize how much there was to understand. You’ve been telling me. Haven’t you, Hermione? Haven’t you?”
He paused. But there was no answer.
“I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at last. I thought—till now I have thought that I was more able to read the truth than most men. You must often have laughed—how you must have laughed—secretly at my pretensions. Only once—one night in the garden on the island—I think I saw you laughing. And even then I didn’t understand. Mon Dieu!”
He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He was losing all self-consciousness. He was even losing consciousness of the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.
“Mon Dieu! It is as if I’d been blind all the time I have known you, blind to the truth of you and blinder still to my own truth. Perhaps I am blind now. I don’t know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do know something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a link between us. You want to deny it. You wouldn’t acknowledge it. But it is there. We are not quite apart from each other. We can’t be that. for there is something—there has always been something, since that night we met in Paris, at Madame Enthoven’s”—he paused again, so vividly flashed the scene of that dinner in Paris upon his memory—“something to draw us together, something to hold us together, something strong. Don’t deny it even now. Don’t deny it. Can’t I be of some help, even now? Don’t say I am utterly useless because I have been so useless to you, so damnably useless in the past. I see all that, my wretched uselessness to you through all these years. I am seeing it now while I am speaking. All the time I’m seeing it. What you have deserved and what you have had!”
He stopped, then he said again:
“What you have deserved and what you have had from me! And from—it was so—it was the same long ago, not here. But till to-day you didn’t know that. I was wrong. I must have been wrong, hideously wrong, but I didn’t want you ever to know that. It isn’t that I don’t love truth. You know I do. But I thought that he was right. And it is only lately, this summer, that I have had any doubts. But I was wrong. I must have been wrong. It was intended that you should know. God, perhaps, intended it.”