Again the blackness gathered itself together, took a form, the form of a wave, towered up as a gigantic wave towers, rolled upon Artois to overwhelm him. He stood firm and received the shock. For he was beginning to understand. He was no longer confronting waves of hatred which were also waves of mystery.
He had thought that Hermione hated him, hated every one just then, because of what Ruffo had silently told her that day at Mergellina. But as he stood there in the dark at the door of that black chamber, hearing the distant murmur of the sea about the palace walls, there were borne in upon him, as if in words she told him, all the reasons for present hatred of him which preceded the great reason of that day; reasons for hatred which sprang, perhaps, which surely must spring, from other reasons of love.
His mind was exaggerating, as minds do when the heart is intensely moved, yet it discerned much truth. And it was very strange, but his now acute consciousness of a personal hatred coming to him from out of the darkness of this almost secret chamber, and of its complex causes, causes which nevertheless would surely never have produced the effect he felt but for the startling crisis of that day, this acute consciousness of a personal and fierce hatred bred suddenly in Artois a new sensation of something that was not hatred, that was the reverse of hatred. Vere had once compared him to a sleepy lion. The lion was now awake.
"Hermione," he said--and now his voice was strong and unfaltering--"I seem to have been listening to you all this time that I have been standing here. Surely I have been listening to you, hearing your thoughts. Don"t you know it? Haven"t you felt it? When I left the island, when I followed you, I thought I understood. I thought I understood what you were feeling, almost all that you were feeling. I know now how little I understood. I didn"t realize how much there was to understand. You"ve been telling me. Haven"t you, Hermione? Haven"t you?"
He paused. But there was no answer.
"I am sure you have been telling me. We must get down to the truth at last. I thought--till now I have thought that I was more able to read the truth than most men. You must often have laughed--how you must have laughed--secretly at my pretensions. Only once--one night in the garden on the island--I think I saw you laughing. And even then I didn"t understand. Mon Dieu!"
He was becoming fiercely concentrated now on what he was saying. He was losing all self-consciousness. He was even losing consciousness of the strange fact that he was addressing a void. It was as if he saw Hermione, so strongly did he feel her.
"Mon Dieu! It is as if I"d been blind all the time I have known you, blind to the truth of you and blinder still to my own truth. Perhaps I am blind now. I don"t know. But, Hermione, I can see something. I do know something of you and of myself. I do know that even now there is a link between us. You want to deny it. You wouldn"t acknowledge it. But it is there. We are not quite apart from each other. We can"t be that.
for there is something--there has always been something, since that night we met in Paris, at Madame Enthoven"s"--he paused again, so vividly flashed the scene of that dinner in Paris upon his memory--"something to draw us together, something to hold us together, something strong. Don"t deny it even now. Don"t deny it. Can"t I be of some help, even now? Don"t say I am utterly useless because I have been so useless to you, so d.a.m.nably useless in the past. I see all that, my wretched uselessness to you through all these years. I am seeing it now while I am speaking. All the time I"m seeing it. What you have deserved and what you have had!"
He stopped, then he said again:
"What you have deserved and what you have had from me! And from--it was so--it was the same long ago, not here. But till to-day you didn"t know that. I was wrong. I must have been wrong, hideously wrong, but I didn"t want you ever to know that. It isn"t that I don"t love truth. You know I do. But I thought that he was right. And it is only lately, this summer, that I have had any doubts. But I was wrong. I must have been wrong. It was intended that you should know. G.o.d, perhaps, intended it."
He thought he heard a movement. But he was not quite sure. For there was always the noise of the sea in the deserted chambers of the palace.
"It seems to me now as if I had always been deceived, mistaken, blind with you, about you. I thought you need never know. I was mad enough to think that. But I was madder still, for I thought--I must have thought--that you could not bear to know, that you weren"t strong enough to endure the knowledge. But"--he was digging deep now, searching for absolute truth: in this moment his natural pa.s.sion for truth, in one direction repressed for many years deliberately and consciously, in other directions, perhaps almost unconsciously frustrated, took entire possession of his being--"but nothing should ever be allowed to stand in the way of truth. I believe that. I know it. I must, I will always act upon the knowledge from this moment. Never mind if it is bitter, cruel.
Perhaps it is sometimes put into the world because of that. I"ve been a horrible _faineant_, the last of _faineants_. I protected you from the truth. With Gaspare I managed to do it. We never spoke of it--never. But I think each of us understood. And we acted together for you in that.
And I--it has often seemed to me that it was a fine thing to do, and that my motives in doing it were fine. But sometimes I have wondered whether they weren"t selfish--whether, instead of protecting you, I wasn"t only protecting myself. For it was all my fault. It all came about through me, through my weakness, my cursed weakness, my cursed weakness and whining for help." He grew scarlet in the dark, realizing how his pride in his strength, his quiet a.s.sumption with Hermione that he was the stronger, must often have made her marvel, or almost weep.
"I called you away. I called you to Africa. And if I hadn"t it would all have been different."
"No, it would all have been the same."
Artois started. Out of the darkness a voice, a low, cold, inexorable voice had spoken--had spoken absolute truth, correcting his lie:
"It would all have been the same!"
The woman"s unerring instinct had penetrated much further than the man"s. He had been feeling the sh.e.l.l; she plucked out the kernel. He had been speaking of the outward facts, of the actions of the body; she spoke of the inward facts, of the actions of the soul. Her husband"s sin against her was not his unfaithfulness, the unfaithfulness at the Fair, but the fact that all the time he had been with her, all the time she had been giving her whole self to him, all the time that she had been surrounding him with her love, he had retained in his soul the power to will to commit it. That he had been given an opportunity to sin was immaterial. What was material was that he had been capable of sinning.
Artois saw his lie. And he stood there silent, rebuked, waiting for the voice to speak again. But it did not speak. And he felt as if Hermione were silently demanding that he should sound the deeper depths of truth, he who had always proclaimed to her his love of truth.
"Perhaps--yes, it would have been the same," he said. "But--but--" His intention was to say, "But we should not have known it." He checked himself. Even as they formed themselves in his mind the words seemed bending like some wretched, flabby reed.
"It would have been the same. But that makes no difference in my conduct. I was weak and called to you. You were strong and came to me.
How strong you were! How strong it was of you to come!"
As if for the first time--and indeed it was for the first time--he really and thoroughly comprehended her self-sacrifice, the almost bizarre generosity of her implacably unselfish nature. He measured the force of her love and the greatness of her sacrifice, by the depth of her disillusion; and he began to wonder, almost as a child wonders at things, how he had been able during all these years quite simply, with indeed the almost incredible simplicity of man, never to be shared by any woman, to a.s.sume and to feel, when with Hermione, that he was the dominant spirit of the two, that she was, very rightly and properly, and very happily for her, leaning comfortably upon his strength. And in his wonder he knew that the real dominance strikes its roots in the heart, not in the head.
"You were strong, then, and you were strong, you were wonderfully strong, when--afterwards. On Monte Amato--that evening--you were strong."
His mind went to that mountain summit. The eyes of his mind saw the evening calm on Etna, and then--something else, a small, fluttering fragment of white paper at his feet among the stones. And, as if her mind read his, she spoke again, still in that low, cold, and inexorable voice.
"That piece of paper you found--what was it?"
"Hermione--Hermione--it was part of a letter of yours written in Africa, telling him that we were coming to Sicily, the day we were coming."
"It was that!"
The voice had suddenly changed. It struggled with a sob. It sank away in a sob. The sin--that she could speak of with a sound of calm. But all the woman in her was stricken by the thought of her happy letter treated like that, hated, denied, destroyed, and thrown to the winds.
"My letter! My letter!"
"Hermione!"
His heart spoke in his voice, and he made a step forward in the darkness.
"Don"t!"
The voice had changed again, had become sharp, almost cutting. Like the lash of a whip it fell upon him. And he stopped at once. It seemed to him as if she had cried out, "If you dare to give me your pity I shall kill you!"
And he felt as if just then, for such a reason, she would be capable of such an action.
"I will not--" He almost faltered. "I am not--coming."
Never before had he been so completely dominated by any person, or by any fate, or by anything at all.
There was again a silence. Then he said:
"You are strong. I know you will be strong now. You can"t go against your nature. I ought to have realized that as I have not realized it. I ought to have trusted to your strength long ago."
If he had known how weak she felt while she listened to him, how her whole being was secretly entreating to be supported, to be taken hold of tenderly, and guarded and cared for like a child! But he was a man. And at one moment he understood her and at another he did not.
"Gaspare and I--we wished to spare you. And perhaps I wished to spare myself. I think I did. I am sure I did. I am sure that was partly my reason. I was secretly ashamed of my cowardice, my weakness in Africa; and when I knew--no, when I guessed, for it was only that--what my appeal to you had caused--all it had caused--"
He paused. He was thinking of Maurice"s death, which must have been a murder, which he was certain had been a murder.
"I hadn"t--"
But the compelling voice from the darkness interrupted him.
"All?" it said.
He hesitated. Had she read his mind again?
"All?"
"The misery," he answered, slowly. "The sorrow that has lain upon your life ever since."
"Did you mean that? Did you only mean that?"
"No."
"What did you mean?"