"I'm wiser than you. Wiser beyond words." She turned her eyes to me and they shone with tears.
"I wouldn't have you say anything--but what you're saying," she said. "But it's nonsense, dear. You know it's nonsense as you say it."
I tried to keep up the heroic note, but she would not listen to it.
"It's no good," she cried almost petulantly. "This little world has made us what we are. Don't you see--don't you see what I am? I can make love. I can make love and be loved, prettily.
Dear, don't blame me. I have given you all I have. If I had anything more--. I have gone through it all over and over again--thought it out. This morning my head aches, my eyes ache.
The light has gone out of me and I am a sick and tired woman.
But I'm talking wisdom--bitter wisdom. I couldn't be any sort of helper to you, any sort of wife, any sort of mother. I'm spoilt.
I'm spoilt by this rich idle way of living, until every habit is wrong, every taste wrong. The world is wrong. People can be ruined by wealth just as much as by poverty. Do you think I wouldn't face life with you if I could, if I wasn't absolutely certain I should be down and dragging in the first half-mile of the journey? Here I am--damned! Damned! But I won't damn you.
You know what I am! You know. You are too clear and simple not to know the truth. You try to romance and hector, but you know the truth. I am a little cad--sold and done. I'm--. My dear, you think I've been misbehaving, but all these days I've been on my best behaviour.... You don't understand, because you're a man.
A woman, when she's spoilt, is SPOILT. She's dirty in grain.
She's done."
She walked on weeping.
"You're a fool to want me," she said. "You're a fool to want me--for my sake just as much as yours. We've done all we can.
It's just romancing--"
She dashed the tears from her eyes and turned upon me. "Don't you understand?" she challenged. "Don't you know?"
We faced one another in silence for a moment.
"Yes," I said, "I know."
For a long time we spoke never a word, but walked on together, slowly and sorrowfully, reluctant to turn about towards our parting. When at last we did, she broke silence again.
"I've had you," she said.
"Heaven and hell," I said, "can't alter that."
"I've wanted--" she went on. "I've talked to you in the nights and made up speeches. Now when I want to make them I'm tongue-tied. But to me it's just as if the moments we have had lasted for ever. Moods and states come and go. To-day my light is out..."
To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imagined she said "chloral." Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it on my brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak of memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the word stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.
We came to the door of Lady Osprey's garden at last, and it was beginning to drizzle.
She held out her hands and I took them.
"Yours," she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; "all that I had--such as it was. Will you forget?"
"Never," I answered.
"Never a touch or a word of it?"
"No."
"You will," she said.
We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue and misery.
What could I do? What was there to do?
"I wish--" I said, and stopped.
"Good-bye."
IV
That should have been the last I saw of her, but, indeed, I was destined to see her once again. Two days after I was at Lady Grove, I forget altogether upon what errand, and as I walked back to the station believing her to be gone away she came upon me, and she was riding with Carnaby, just as I had seen them first.
The encounter jumped upon us unprepared. She rode by, her eyes dark in her white face, and scarcely noticed me. She winced and grew stiff at the sight of me and bowed her head. But Carnaby, because he thought I was a broken and discomfited man, saluted me with an easy friendliness, and shouted some genial commonplace to me.
They passed out of sight and left me by the roadside....
And then, indeed, I tasted the ultimate bitterness of life. For the first time I felt utter futility, and was wrung by emotion that begot no action, by shame and pity beyond words. I had parted from her dully and I had seen my uncle break and die with dry eyes and a steady mind, but this chance sight of my lost Beatrice brought me to tears. My face was wrung, and tears came pouring down my cheeks. All the magic she had for me had changed to wild sorrow. "Oh God!" I cried, "this is too much," and turned my face after her and made appealing gestures to the beech trees and cursed at fate. I wanted to do preposterous things, to pursue her, to save her, to turn life back so that she might begin again. I wonder what would have happened had I overtaken them in pursuit, breathless with running, uttering incoherent words, weeping, expostulatory. I came near to doing that.
There was nothing in earth or heaven to respect my curses or weeping. In the midst of it a man who had been trimming the opposite hedge appeared and stared at me.
Abruptly, ridiculously, I dissembled before him and went on and caught my train....
But the pain I felt then I have felt a hundred times; it is with me as I write. It haunts this book, I see, that is what haunts this book, from end to end.
