Dawkins opened the door for me and showed me into the familiar drawing-room. The long summer day was nearing its end, and only a dim twilight came through the open windows. Lola was standing rigid on the hearthrug, her hand shielding the whole of the right side of her face. With the free hand she checked my impetuous advance.
“Stop and look!” she said, and then dropped the shielding hand, and stood before me with twitching lips and death in her eyes. I saw in a flash the devastation that had been wrought; but, thank God, I pierced beneath it to the anguish in her heart. The pity—the awful, poignant pity—of it smote me. Everything that was man in me surged towards her. What she saw in my eyes I know not; but in hers dawned a sudden wonder. There was no recoil of shock, such as she had steeled herself to encounter. I sprang forward and clasped her in my arms. Her stiffened frame gradually relaxed and our lips met, and in that kiss all fears and doubts were dissolved for ever.
Some hours later she said: “If you are blind enough to care for a maimed thing like me, I can't help it. I shall never understand it to my dying day,” she added with a long sigh.
“And you will marry me?”
“I suppose I've got to,” she replied. And with the old pantherine twist of her body she slid from her easy-chair to the ground and buried her face on my knees.
And that is the end of my story. We were quietly married three weeks afterwards. Agatha, wishing to humour a maniac for whom she retained an unreasonable affection, came to the wedding and treated Lola as only a sweet lady could. But my doings passed her understanding. As for Jane, my other sister, she cast me from her. People who did these things, she maintained, must bear the consequences. I bore them bravely. It is only now that my name is beginning to be noised abroad as that of one who speaks with some knowledge on certain social questions that Jane holds out the olive branch of fraternal peace. After a brief honeymoon Lola insisted on joining me in Barbara's Building. A set of rooms next to mine was vacant, and Campion, who welcomed a new worker, had the two sets thrown into what house-agents term a commodious flat. She is now Lady Superior of the Institution. The title is Campion's, and for some odd feminine reason Lola is delighted with it.
Yes, this is the end of the story which I began (it seems in a previous incarnation) at Murglebed-on-Sea.
The maiming of Lola's beauty has been the last jest which the Arch-Jester has practised on me. I fancy he thought that this final scurvy trick would wipe Simon de Gex for ever out of the ranks of his rivals. But I flatter myself that, having snapped my fingers in his face, the last laugh has been on my side. He has withdrawn discomfited from the conflict and left me master of the ground. Love conquers all, even the Arch-Jester.
There are some who still point to me as one who has deliberately ruined a brilliant career, who pity me as one who has gone under, who speak with shrugged shoulders and uplifted eyebrows at my unfortunate marriage and my obscure and cranky occupation. The world, they say, was at my feet. So it was. But what the pitying critics lack the grace to understand is that better than to have it under one's feet is to have it, or that of it which matters, at one's heart.
I sit in this tiny hotel by the sea and reflect that it is over three years since I awoke from death and assumed a new avatar. And since my marriage, what have been the happenings?