“Go,” Andrews repeated. “Don’t you understand I want to be alone with her.” He clenched his hands in a spasm of fear, fear of the grief which must come when there was no voice to distract him, and yet, if his father were to be slain, he must be alone.
Carlyon rose and Andrews handed him the pistol. “You may need this,” he said. “Listen. Will you promise never to interfere with me again?”
“I promise,” Carlyon said. “We’ve been fools. That’s all done with.”
“I didn’t mean the past,” Andrews said. “Promise.”
“I promise.” They did not shake hands again for Andrews suddenly turned and stood with his back to the door fighting the impulse to cry out to Carlyon, “Don’t go. I’m afraid to be alone.” His hands over his eyes he felt the touch of tears for the first time. Yet none of them was because his friend had gone and he would not see him again. As his enmity for Carlyon seemed now only a child’s foolish and dangerous game with fire, so also his love. It was like a dream recalled after many hours—without reality. The two musics had fought for final mastery—one alluring, unreal, touched with a thin romance and poetry, the other clear-cut, ringing, sane, a voice carved out of white marble. One had gone out from him into a vague world, the other was silent in death, but silence had conquered.
He was alone with the body of his love and he dared not loose his hands from his face. If he had lived with her a little longer he might have come to believe in an immortality and a resurrection, but now both heart and brain denied the possibility. Spring and summer and winter might come and go through the centuries, but their individual bodies would never meet. He had hardly begun to hear her voice and he had scarcely touched her body, and now he would neither hear nor touch ever again. He knew now how a second could crawl, and he could not bear the thought of the passage of empty years.
Dropping his hands but with eyes lowered so that he should not see her face he knelt beside Elizabeth’s chair. “Do you know,” he asked in a whisper, “that it was I that killed you?” For was there anything of himself that was not his father? His father was his lust, and his cowardice had been fashioned by his father. He would find out. He had a plan, but he dared not think of it too closely, lest his father fearing defeat and death should make a last struggle and gain ascendency.
His own knife. He had left it to guard her and with it she had taken her life. What depth of terror and disillusionment must have led her to that sacrifice. He thought of her frightened, despairing, afraid of betraying him. She had whispered “soon” in unbelief, but she must have hoped, until it was too late for hope and she knew that he would not return.
He lifted her hand and put it on his mouth. “Why were you so wise?” he whispered. “My love, my love, if you had waited Carlyon would have come.” Spring, summer, autumn, winter. “Did you think I loved you so little that I could go on forever and ever without you?” He began to weep not freely but with dry, lacerating, interrupted sobs which left him breathless and exhausted. His brain felt wearied out and yet he could not rest. Sights and sounds, disconnected, many of them meaningless, trod on each other’s heels, trampled across his brain till it felt aching and bleeding. A sprig of blackberries in a muddy lane, a shrill voice talking, talking in a crowded bar, a man with scrubby beard, a wheel that turned endlessly with gathering speed, a shock of stars that plunged across a great dark gap of space, voices raised in shouts, the whistle of wind in spars, the sound of water, a red face plunged at him shrieking questions, and then silence, a white face lit by candles, and darkness and an aching heart.
The fourth time. The fourth time he would find peace. He needed it now more than ever in his life before. Even extinction was not so dreaded as the continuance of this aching nightmare. He put his head upon Elizabeth’s knees and said aloud between ungainly efforts to retrieve his breath, “I’ll try.”
Very faint through the sound of his own hard breathing he heard the gravel of the path grate beneath a number of feet. For the second time he raised his eyes to Elizabeth’s face. The vacant eyes no longer horrified him. He saw them as hope, a faint hope that might be a stirring of belief. Something had gone out of them to leave them thus, and how could a tangible knife have struck so intangible a something? If there is anything of you in this room, he thought, you shall see. Again he kissed her hands and again the sound of the shifting gravel came to him.
He realised then that his time with Elizabeth was a matter of minutes only, and that he would not even be allowed to see her into the grave. Taking the body in his arms he held it to him with a greater passion than he had ever shown in life. Although he thought that he was spilling his words vainly into an unhearing silence he whispered into her ear the first proud words he had ever said, “I shall succeed.” Then he closed her eyes, for he did not want so beautiful a body shamed by their imbecility before strangers, and laid her back in the chair. His hands clenched he waited for the door to open, waited but with no apprehension, clear in a double duty of salvation, of his friend from pursuit and of himself from his father.
The many feet had come
