He goes forward and finds a magnificent mansion, blazing with light in every window, but apparently deserted.He enters and finds room after room prepared for guests.A fine meal is laid ready and he enjoys it.He discovers the softest of beds and soon is fast asleep;but when he is safely snoring back creep all the guests out of the forest, hideous and evil, warped and deformed, maimed and rotten with disease.They had left the house, that he might be lured in it, knowing that he would never come whilst they were there.And so they creep into all the rooms, flinging their horrible shadows upon the gleaming walls, and gradually they steal about the bed...
Maggie forgot the end of the story.The traveller escaped, or perhaps he did not.Perhaps he was strangled.But that moment of his awakening, when his startled eyes first stared upon those horrible faces, those deformed bodies, those evil smiles! What could one do, one naked and defenceless against so many?
Maggie thought of this story during Martin's convalescence.She seemed to see the evil guests, crowding back, one after the other into his soul, and as they came back they peeped out at her, smiling from the lighted windows.She saw that his plan was to thrust before her the very worst of himself.He said: "Well, I've tried to get rid of her and she won't go.That's her own affair, but if she stays, at least she shall see me as I am.No false sentimental picture.I'll cure her."It was the oldest trick in the world, but to Maggie it was new enough.At first she was terrified.In spite of her early experience with her father, when she had learnt what wickedness could be, she was a child in all knowledge of the world.Above all she knew very little about her own sex and its relation with men.But she determined that she must take the whole of Martin; in the very first days of her love she had resolved that, and now that resolution was to be put to the test.Her terrified fear was lest the things that he told her about himself should affect her love for him.She had told him years before: "It isn't the things you've done that I mind or care about: it's you, not actions that matter." But his actions were himself, and what was she to do if all these things that he said were true?
Then she discovered that she had indeed spoken the truth.Her love for him did not change; it rather grew, helped and strengthened by a maternal pity and care that deepened and deepened.He seemed to her a man really possessed, in literal fact, by devils.The story of the lighted house was the symbol, only he, in the bitterness and defiance of his heart, had invited the guests, not been surprised by them.
He pretended to glory in his narration, boasting and swearing what he would do when he would return to the old scenes, how happy and triumphant he had been in the midst of his filth--but young and ignorant though she was she saw beneath this the misery, the shame, the bitterness, the ignominy.He was down in the dust, in a despair furious and more self-accusing than anything of which she had ever conceived.
Again and again, too, although this was never deliberately stated, she saw that he spoke like a man caught in a trap.He did not blame any one but himself for the catastrophe of his life, but he often spoke, in spite of himself, like a man who from the very beginning had been under some occult influence.He never alluded now to his early days but she remembered how he had once told her that that "Religion" had "got" him from the very beginning, and had weighted all the scales against him.It was as though he had said: "I was told from the very beginning that I was to be made a fighting-ground of.I didn't want to be that.I wasn't the man for that.I was chosen wrongly."He only once made any allusion to his father's death, but Maggie very soon discovered that that was never away from his mind."Iloved my father and I killed him," he said one day, "so I thought it wise not to love any one again."Gradually a picture was created in Maggie's mind, a picture originating in that dirty, dark room where they were.She saw many foreign countries and many foreign towns, and in all of them men and women were evil.The towns were always in the hour between daylight and dark, the streets twisted and obscure, the inhabitants furtive and sinister.
The things that those inhabitants did were made quite plain to her.
She saw the dancing saloons, the women naked and laughing, the men drunken and besotted, the gambling, the quarrelling, drugging, suicide--all under a half-dead sky, stinking and offensive.
One day, at last, she laughed.
"Martin," she cried, "don't let's be so serious about it.You can't want to go back to that life--it's so dull.At first I was frightened, but now!--why it's all the same thing over and over again.""I'm only telling you," he said; "I don't say that I do want to go back again.I don't want anything except for you to go away.I just want to go to hell my own fashion.""You talk so much about going to hell," she said."Why, for ten days now you've spoken of nothing else.There are other places, you know.""You clear out and get back to your parson," he said."You must see from what I've told you it isn't any good your staying.I've no money.My health's gone all to billyoh! I don't want to get better.
Why should I? Perhaps I did love you a little bit--once--in a queer way, but that's all gone now.I don't love any one on this earth.Ijust want to get rid of this almighty confusion going on in my head.
I can't rest for it.I'd finish myself off if I had pluck enough.Ijust haven't."
"Martin," she said, "why did you write all those letters to me?""What letters?" he asked.
"Those that Amy stopped--the ones from abroad.""Oh, I don't know," he looked away from her."I was a bit lonely, Isuppose."
