He looked at her rather muzzily.
“Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide,” she said. “Come, Arthur.”
We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.
“You—you aren’t in earnest?” he said, catching at her arm so that we swung round and faced him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes, as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken, beseeching eyes.
“Monsieur de Sabran told me,” she answered; “he had just come from making the constatation. Besides, you can hear …”
Half-sentences came to our ears from groups that passed us. A very old man with a nose that almost touched his thick lips, was saying to another of the same type:
“Shot himself … through the left temple … Mon Dieu!”
De Mersch walked slowly down the long corridor away from us. There was an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emulate the goose step of his days in the Prussian Guard. My companion looked after him as though she wished to gauge the extent of his despair.
“You would say ‘Habet,’ wouldn’t you?” she asked me.
I thought we had seen the last of him, but as in the twilight of the dawn we waited for the lodge gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs came down the long street, and a carriage drew level with ours. A moment after, de Mersch was knocking at our window.
“You will … you will …” he stuttered, “speak … to Mr. Gurnard. That is our only chance … now.” His voice came in mingled with the cold air of the morning. I shivered. “You have so much power … with him and. …”
“Oh, I …” she answered.
“The thing must go through,” he said again, “or else …” He paused. The great gates in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw into the courtyard. The light was growing stronger. She did not answer.
“I tell you,” he asseverated insistently, “if the British Government abandons my railway all our plans …”
“Oh, the Government won’t abandon it,” she said, with a little emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we turned in and left him standing there.
In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.
“You see?” she said suddenly.
“Oh, I see,” I answered—“and … and now?”
“Now we are almost done with each other,” she answered.
I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life, had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her life … “But I—” I said, “What is to become of me?”
She stood looking down at the ground … for a long time. At last she said in a low monotone:
“Oh, you must try to forget.”
A new idea struck me—luminously, overwhelming. I grew reckless. “You—you are growing considerate,” I taunted. “You are not so sure, not so cold. I notice a change in you. Upon my soul …”
Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal, overwhelming—a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of craving.
“You are going back to work with Churchill,” she said suddenly.
“How did you know?” I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query.
“You leave your letters about,” she said, “and. … It will be best for you.”
“It will not,” I said bitterly. “It could never be the same. I don’t want to see Churchill. I want. …”
“You want?” she asked, in a low monotone.
“You,” I answered.
She spoke at last, very slowly:
“Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard.”
I don’t know just what I said then, but I remember that I found myself repeating over and over again, the phrases running metrically up and down my mind: “You couldn’t marry Gurnard; you don’t know what he is. You couldn’t marry Gurnard; you don’t know what he is.” I don’t suppose that I knew anything to the discredit of Gurnard—but he struck me in that way at that moment; struck me convincingly—more than any array of facts could have done.
“Oh—as for what he is—” she said, and paused. “I know. …” and then suddenly she began to speak very fast.
“Don’t you see?—can’t you see?—that I don’t marry Gurnard for what he is in that sense, but for what he is in the other. It isn’t a marriage in your sense at all. And … and it doesn’t affect you … don’t you see? We have to have done with one another, because … because. …”
I had an inspiration.
“I believe,” I said, very slowly, “I believe … you do care. …”
She said nothing.
“You care,” I repeated.
She spoke then with an energy that had something of a threat in it. “Do you think I would? Do you think I could? … or dare? Don’t you understand?” She faltered—“but then. …” she added, and was silent for a long minute. I felt the throb of a thousand pulses in my head, on my temples. “Oh, yes, I care,” she said slowly, “but that—that makes it all the worse. Why,
