power me so that I wanted to stagger out, walk straight before me, stagger on and on till I dropped. In the end I lost myself in thought. I woke with a start to her voice saying positively:
“No. Not even in this room. I can’t close my eyes. Impossible. I have a horror of myself. That voice in my ears. All true. All true.”
She was sitting up, two masses of tawny hair fell on each side of her tense face. I threw away the pillows from which she had risen and sat down behind her on the couch. “Perhaps like this,” I suggested, drawing her head gently on my breast. She didn’t resist, she didn’t even sigh, she didn’t look at me or attempt to settle herself in any way. It was I who settled her after taking up a position which I thought I should be able to keep for hours—for ages. After a time I grew composed enough to become aware of the ticking of the clock, even to take pleasure in it. The beat recorded the moments of her rest, while I sat, keeping as still as if my life depended upon it with my eyes fixed idly on the arrow of gold gleaming and glittering dimly on the table under the lowered gas-jet. And presently my breathing fell into the quiet rhythm of the sleep which descended on her at last. My thought was that now nothing mattered in the world because I had the world safe resting in my arms—or was it in my heart?
Suddenly my heart seemed torn in two within my breast and half of my breath knocked out of me. It was a tumultuous awakening. The day had come. Dona Rita had opened her eyes, found herself in my arms, and instantly had flung herself out of them with one sudden effort. I saw her already standing in the filtered sunshine of the closed shutters, with all the childlike horror and shame of that night vibrating afresh in the awakened body of the woman.
“Daylight,” she whispered in an appalled voice. “Don’t look at me, George. I can’t face daylight. No—not with you. Before we set eyes on each other all that past was like nothing. I had crushed it all in my new pride. Nothing could touch the Rita whose hand was kissed by you. But now! Never in daylight.”
I sat there stupid with surprise and grief. This was no longer the adventure of venturesome children in a nursery-book. A grown man’s bitterness, informed, suspicious, resembling hatred, welled out of my heart.
“All this means that you are going to desert me again?” I said with contempt. “All right. I won’t throw stones after you . . . Are you going, then?”
She lowered her head slowly with a backward gesture of her arm as if to keep me off, for I had sprung to my feet all at once as if mad.
“Then go quickly,” I said. “You are afraid of living flesh and blood. What are you running after? Honesty, as you say, or some distinguished carcass to feed your vanity on? I know how cold you can be—and yet live. What have I done to you? You go to sleep in my arms, wake up and go away. Is it to impress me? Charlatanism of character, my dear.”
She stepped forward on her bare feet as firm on that floor which seemed to heave up and down before my eyes as she had ever been—goatherd child leaping on the rocks of her native hills which she was never to see again. I snatched the arrow of gold from the table and threw it after her.
“Don’t forget this thing,” I cried, “you would never forgive yourself for leaving it behind.”
It struck the back of the fur coat and fell on the floor behind her. She never looked round. She walked to the door, opened it without haste, and on the landing in the diffused light from the ground-glass skylight there appeared, rigid, like an implacable and obscure fate, the awful Therese—waiting for her sister. The heavy ends of a big black shawl thrown over her head hung massively in biblical folds. With a faint cry of dismay Dona Rita stopped just within my room.
The two women faced each other for a few moments silently. Therese spoke first. There was no austerity in her tone. Her voice was as usual, pertinacious, unfeeling, with a slight plaint in it; terrible in its unchanged purpose.
“I have been standing here before this door all night,” she said. “I don’t know how I lived through it. I thought I would die a hundred times for shame. So that’s how you are spending your time? You are worse than shameless. But God may still forgive you. You have a soul. You are my sister. I will never abandon you—till you die.”
“What is it?” Dona Rita was heard wistfully, “my soul or this house that you won’t abandon.”
“Come out and bow your head in humiliation. I am your sister and I shall help you to pray to God and all the Saints. Come away from that poor young gentleman who like all the others can have nothing but contempt and disgust for you in his heart. Come and hide your head where no one will reproach you—but I, your sister. Come out and beat your breast: come, poor Sinner, and let me kiss you, for you are my sister!”
While Therese was speaking Dona Rita stepped back a pace and as the other moved forward still extending the hand of sisterly love, she slammed the door in Therese’s face. “You abominable girl!” she cried fiercely. Then she turned about and walked towards me who had not moved. I felt hardly alive but for the cruel pain that possessed my whole being. On the way she stooped to pick up the arrow of gold and then moved on quicker, holding it out to me in her open palm.
“You thought I wouldn’t give it to you.
“Not without the woman,” I said sombrely.
“Take it,” she said. “I haven’t the courage to deliver myself up to Therese. No. Not even for your sake. Don’t you think I have been miserable enough yet?”
I snatched the arrow out of her hand then and ridiculously pressed it to my breast; but as I opened my lips she who knew what was struggling for utterance in my heart cried in a ringing tone:
“Speak no words of love, George! Not yet. Not in this house of ill-luck and falsehood. Not within a hundred miles of this house, where they came clinging to me all profaned from the mouth of that man. Haven’t you heard them—the horrible things? And what can words have to do between you and me?”
Her hands were stretched out imploringly, I said, childishly disconcerted:
“But, Rita, how can I help using words of love to you? They come of themselves on my lips!”
“They come! Ah! But I shall seal your lips with the thing itself,” she said. “Like this. . . ”
SECOND NOTE
The narrative of our man goes on for some six months more, from this, the last night of the Carnival season up to and beyond the season of roses. The tone of it is much less of exultation than might have been expected. Love as is well known having nothing to do with reason, being insensible to forebodings and even blind to evidence, the surrender of those two beings to a precarious bliss has nothing very astonishing in itself; and its portrayal, as he
