She was going to him. He was her man. All that she knew of the meaning of existence came from him. Moonlight and starlight and the mystery of the night shimmering through its veil of enchantment faded from her eyes. She felt nervous arms around her and kisses on her lips, and she heard him speaking the winged words of imagination, lifting her into his world of genius.
“A man doesn’t try to kill himself for a woman he doesn’t want.”
So spake Myra. Olivia walked, the dull tones in which the words were uttered thudding in her ears. It was her one hope of salvation. Kill himself! This was not a falsehood. She had seen the act with her own horror-stricken eyes. She remembered a phrase of Blaise Olifant’s: “He is being blackmailed by one lie.”
She realized, with sudden shock, her insignificant loneliness in the midst of this vast moonlit silence of the earth. In presence of the immensities she was of no account. For the first time she became aware of her own failure. She had been weighed in the balance of her love for her husband and had been found wanting. In the hour of his bitter trial, she had failed him. In the hour when a word of love, of understanding, which meant forgiveness, would have saved him, she had put him from her. She had lived on her own little vanities without thought of the man’s torture. She had failed him then. She had failed him to-day.
“A man doesn’t try to kill himself for a woman he doesn’t want.”
She strode on, her cheeks burning. All that of extravagance which he had done this past year had been for her sake. For all wrong he had done her, he had sought the final expiation in death. She had failed him again in this supreme crisis. She had whined to Myra that he no longer loved her. And she had not given him—that which even Myra was waiting for—a sign and a token.
She was going to him, nearing him. Already she entered the straggling end of Fanstead. How would he receive her? If he cast her off, she would perish in self-contempt. She went on. An unsuspecting Mrs. Pettiland had told her, in answer to a question which she strove to keep casual, the whereabouts of the Quantock Garage. The sign above an open gateway broke suddenly on her vision. She entered a silent courtyard. A light was burning in a loft above a closed garage, and a wooden flight of steps ran up to it. The door was open and on the threshold sat a man, his feet on the top stair, his head buried in his hands. She advanced, her heart in her mouth.
The moon shone full on him. She uttered a little whispering cry:
“Alexis!”
He started to his feet, gazed at her for a breathless second and scrambled with grotesque speed down the rickety staircase and caught her in his arms.