She was nervous, trembling with a sort of inward palpitation, which so often precedes intense effort, and he knew the only way to calm her was to let her produce as soon as possible the ideas burning within her.
She worked all day, never once pausing to eat or drink. Everest, knowing her intense preoccupation, and anxious to see her freed from the feverish tension possessing her, went away to his club, and then on to the new flat, leaving her alone, and thus free to work all the hours of light.
At five he returned, and as he opened the door of their sitting-room she rushed to him and kissed him passionately.
"It is done! It is finished! Come and look!" And she drew him over to the studio, and to the window, where the picture stood, facing the last western light, on the easel.
Everest almost started as his eyes fell on it. Its realism was so tremendous. The passion and the fury of it seemed to strike the spectator like a blow. It was a great picture, but horrible!—horrible as its title, written in glittering letters of gold paint, beneath it: "The Murderer."
Over a plain of snow, snow that covered foreground, middle distance and distance alike, one limitless, hostile plain, hurried a single figure, a fugitive, cowering figure, the folds of whose heavy coat, torn back by the merciless wind, revealed a face in which fear and every hideous, malignant emotion known to humanity struggled together. Behind him glowed, blood-red, a crimson sky, the light from which, exquisitely handled, by a truly master-hand, fell all across the snowy plain and caught and tinged with scarlet the foot-tracks the wretched wayfarer had left behind him; footsteps of blood indeed they seemed.
Awe-inspiring, terrible, fascinating, great in its grip of its horrible subject, the picture wounded, satisfied, attracted and repelled all at the same instant.
Everest turned from it to her and drew her into his arms. "I think it is a very, very great thing," he said gently.
"He murdered my pictures and I longed to murder him. I have lived, and slept, and lain down and got up with murder ever since. But now, it is over. I have exorcised the demon. It is all there in the picture. I have put it into that, and got rid of it. I am free again. Also I am content, happy again!" And she smiled up at him, the light of love and joy all rippling over her face. "It is greater than any you saw at Stossop, better than any he tore up, is it not?" she asked. "That's why I feel I can forgive him; he tore up all those, but then, his action inspired this, which is greater, so I am not really injured, after all. Besides, all that fire and rage and passion I felt seemed to be like a smelter, in which my talent found itself, gathered itself together, freed itself from all its dross of weakness or indecision, and flowed out in its true mould. I shall paint better now, always, I think, than I did."
She was wonderfully attractive to him in her excitement and enthusiasm. That great energy that was in his own system seemed roused and called into its full life by the display of it in another.