“Think, if a man’s killed,” he brooded, “killed by violent means, what an outrage on the body. Blood spilt, that ran secretly and private in his veins. Bones, no one had ever seen. Entrails. What a bursting!”
She pictured his mind as a landscape ravaged by war, here a wreckage of stone and twisted iron, there a grave, here the stark Calvary of a stricken tree, there the bright blare of poppies striving for life amongst the rushes and rank weeds.
“You waste yourself,” she said; “you should be a martyr,—or a poet.”
She liked to stir him, by such calculated remarks.
“A second-rate poet? not I,” he sneered instantly; then, as the flattery stole over him, “More likely a martyr, of the two,” he said, responding.
“You waste yourself,” she repeated, drawing meanwhile slowly through her fingers the long silk fringe of a shawl that lay thrown across her sofa, “you waste yourself, out of contempt. You eagle with broken wings!”—she knew with what gluttony he accepted such metaphors, and amused herself when he wasn’t with her by thinking out new ones that she might serve up to him,—“you repudiate comfort, don’t you, in your dream of grandeur. Will you end, I wonder, by getting neither?” “No one speaks to me like your ladyship,” he muttered reluctantly. She laughed. She enjoyed pretending to an ideal of him that, his pride well fired, he would strain himself to live up to; an ideal, moreover, that coincided so adroitly with his own ideal of himself. “I never knew a man so vigorously reject the second-best. It was a pity,” she continued, smoothing out and patting down the fringe of the shawl, “that you never came across a woman to suit you.” She raised her eyes to watch him as she talked, and modulated her phrases according to the expression she found on his face, nor did she trouble to conceal the busy mischief in her own; there were advantages, certainly, in his blindness. “How would you have behaved, I wonder?” she went on; “you would have made a stormy lover, I fancy, once your resistance had been thrown to the winds. Stormy and exacting. Poor woman! Yet I dare say she wouldn’t have minded. Women are like that, you know. And for you,—no more loneliness, no more unsatisfied longings, no more misanthropy. I believe you’d have grown into a different man. You would probably have achieved a good deal.... But it would have taken a clever woman, a very clever woman, to steer you without your knowing that you were being steered.”
“Women in my walk of life don’t have time for cleverness, my lady,” he said acrimoniously, giving a literal answer to her words because he must ignore the meaning which he read into them, and which, as he well knew, she had intended him to read. Her ingenuity was tireless over insinuations that put him on the rack. Clever, she had said; she was clever enough! why hadn’t they, he wondered, appointed women to sit upon the tribunals of the Inquisition? “If you had been born into my class, or I into yours ...” he burst out.
“I don’t admit impertinence, you know, Dene,” she said in a voice of ice, “and anyway I am afraid I cannot give you any more time at present.”
VII
Thus, always. He hated his bondage, he despised while he coveted the woman, he hated her for holding him bound, but nothing, nothing was comparable to his hatred and disgust of himself in his inability to get free. Often he raved audibly, shaking his fists; and those who saw him stopped to listen to his mutterings, and thought what an alarming sight Silas Dene presented, with his wild blind eyes and furrowed mouth that mumbled and let drop the tiny river of saliva. He was often to be seen thus in the abbey, of an evening, prowling in the aisles; where occasionally on a Sunday he would be perceived by the rare visitor attracted to Abbot’s Etchery, that strange island of factory and Norman abbey emerging amidst the floods, sufficiently singular to be worth the journey out from Lincoln; and those who saw him there went away saying that not the least arresting sight in the desolate encampment was the blind man who in savagery and loneliness haunted the precincts of the abbey, and whose incoherent ravings could be readily changed by a little encouragement into a tirade of such vehemence, such angry bitterness, such bewildering aggression. They went away wondering what ailed him, to have made of him so baffling and solitary a figure.