A Spirit in Prison

by Robert Hichens

He thought he heard a movement. But he was not quite sure. For there was always the noise of the sea in the deserted chambers of the palace.

“It seems to me now as if I had always been deceived, mistaken, blind with you, about you. I thought you need never know. I was mad enough to think that. But I was madder still, for I thought—I must have thought—that you could not bear to know, that you weren’t strong enough to endure the knowledge. But”—he was digging deep now, searching for absolute truth: in this moment his natural passion for truth, in one direction repressed for many years deliberately and consciously, in other directions, perhaps almost unconsciously frustrated, took entire possession of his being—“but nothing should ever be allowed to stand in the way of truth. I believe that. I know it. I must, I will always act upon the knowledge from this moment. Never mind if it is bitter, cruel. Perhaps it is sometimes put into the world because of that. I’ve been a horrible faineant, the last of faineants. I protected you from the truth. With Gaspare I managed to do it. We never spoke of it—never. But I think each of us understood. And we acted together for you in that. And I—it has often seemed to me that it was a fine thing to do, and that my motives in doing it were fine. But sometimes I have wondered whether they weren’t selfish—whether, instead of protecting you, I wasn’t only protecting myself. For it was all my fault. It all came about through me, through my weakness, my cursed weakness, my cursed weakness and whining for help.” He grew scarlet in the dark, realizing how his pride in his strength, his quiet assumption with Hermione that he was the stronger, must often have made her marvel, or almost weep. “I called you away. I called you to Africa. And if I hadn’t it would all have been different.”

“No, it would all have been the same.”

Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable voice had spoken—had spoken absolute truth, correcting his lie:

“It would all have been the same!”

The woman’s unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the man’s. He had been feeling the shell; she plucked out the kernel. He had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body; she spoke of the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her husband’s sin against her was not his unfaithfulness, the unfaithfulness at the Fair, but the fact that all the time he had been with her, all the time she had been giving her whole self to him, all the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was material was that he had been capable of sinning.

Artois saw his lie. And he stood there silent, rebuked, waiting for the voice to speak again. But it did not speak. And he felt as if Hermione were silently demanding that he should sound the deeper depths of truth, he who had always proclaimed to her his love of truth.

“Perhaps—yes, it would have been the same,” he said. “But—but—” His intention was to say, “But we should not have known it.” He checked himself. Even as they formed themselves in his mind the words seemed bending like some wretched, flabby reed.

“It would have been the same. But that makes no difference in my conduct. I was weak and called to you. You were strong and came to me. How strong you were! How strong it was of you to come!”

As if for the first time—and indeed it was for the first time—he really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders at things, how he had been able during all these years quite simply, with indeed the almost incredible simplicity of man, never to be shared by any woman, to assume and to feel, when with Hermione, that he was the dominant spirit of the two, that she was, very rightly and properly, and very happily for her, leaning comfortably upon his strength. And in his wonder he knew that the real dominance strikes its roots in the heart, not in the head.