She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow.
Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.
He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to between them.
She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of circ.u.mstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.
At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched out, still and pa.s.sive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut their way under her eyelids with a p.r.i.c.king pain. Every now and then the burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen laid his hands on her, had pa.s.sed. She could have judged her pain to be wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all pa.s.sion of flesh and blood.
In the morning the gla.s.s showed her a face thinned in one night; the skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated; eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable, not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing was accomplished.
Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came to her and dressed her burn and bandaged it.
"This thing has got to heal," he said, "before I go."
She saw his going now as her own deed. It was she, not Brodrick, who was sending him to Manchuria. It was she who had pushed him to the choice between poverty and that dangerous exile. It was all done six weeks ago when she handed him over to Jane Holland. She was aware that in his desperate decision Brodrick counted for more than Jane, and Laura Gunning for more than Brodrick; but behind them all she saw herself; behind all their movements her own ruinous impulse was supreme.
She asked herself why she had not obeyed the profounder instinct that had urged her to hold him as long as she had the power to hold? For she had had it. In his supersensual way he had cared for her; and her nature, with all its murkiness, had responded to the supersensual appeal. Her pa.s.sion for Owen was so finely strung that it exulted in its own reverberance, and thus remained satisfied in its frustration, sublimely heedless of its end. There had been moments when she had felt that nothing could take Owen from her. He was more profoundly part of her than if they had been joined by the material tie. She was bound to him by bonds so intimately and secretly interwoven that to rupture any one of them would kill her.
She knew that, as a matter of fact, he was not the first. But her experience of Tanqueray was no help to her. Separation from Tanqueray had not killed her; it had made her more alive, with the fierce vitality of pa.s.sion that bore hatred in its blood. She had no illusion as to the nature of her feelings. Tanqueray had a devil, and it had let loose the unhappy beast that lurked in her. That was all.
Owen, she knew, had seen the lurking thing, but he had not played with it, he had not drawn it; he had had compa.s.sion on the beast. And this terrible compa.s.sion hung about her now; it kept her writhing. Each day it screwed her nerves tighter to the pitch. She told herself that she preferred a brutality like Tanqueray"s which would have made short work of her.
As yet she had kept her head. She was on her guard, her grip to the throat of the beast.
She was now at the end of Owen"s last day. He had come and gone. She had endured the touch of his hands upon her for the last time. Her wound was inflamed, and she had had peace for moments while it gnawed into her flesh, a tooth of fire, dominating her secret pain. He had stood beside her, his body touching hers, unaware of the contact, absorbed in his service to her suffering. And as he handled the wound, he had praised her courage.
"It"ll hurt like h.e.l.l," he had said, "before it"s done with you. But when it hurts most it"s healing."
That night she did not sleep. Neither did he. As she lay in bed she could hear his feet on the floor, pacing his narrow room at the back, above hers.
Her wild beast woke and tore her. She was hardly aware of the sound of his feet overhead. It was indifferent to her as traffic in the street.
The throb of it was merged in the steady throb of her pa.s.sion.
The beast was falling now upon Laura"s image and destroying it. It hated Laura as it had once hated Tanqueray. It hated her white face and virginal body and the pathos that had drawn Owen to her. For the beast, though savage, was not blind. It discerned; it discriminated. In that other time of its unloosing it had not fallen upon Jane; it had known Jane for its fellow, the victim of Tanqueray"s devilry. It had pursued Tanqueray and clung to him, and it had turned on him when he beat it back. It could have lain low for ever at Owen"s feet and under the pity of his hands. It had no quarrel with spirit. But now that it saw Laura"s little body standing between it and Owen, it broke out in the untamed, unrelenting fury of flesh against flesh.
The sound of Owen"s feet continued, tramping the floor above her. She sat up and listened. It was not the first time that she had watched with him; that she had kept still there to listen till all her senses streamed into that one sense, and hearing gave the thrill of touch. She had learned to know his mood by his footstep. She knew the swinging, rhythmic tread that beat out the measure of his verse, the slow, lingering tread that marked the procession of his thoughts, and the troubled, jerking tread that shook her nerves, that sent through her, like an agonized pulse, the vibration of his suffering.
It shook her now. She received and endured his trouble.
She had got out of bed and dressed and went up-stairs to Owen"s door, and knocked softly. She heard him stride to the door with the impetus of fury; it opened violently, and she swept past him into the room.
His mood softened at the sight of her haggard face and feverish eyes. He stood by the door, holding it so that it sheltered her yet did not shut her in.
"What is it, Nina?" He was contemplating her with a certain sad perplexity, a disturbance that was pure from all embarra.s.sment or surprise. It was as if he had foreseen that she would do this.
"You"re ill," he said. "Go down-stairs; I"ll come to you."
"I"m not ill and I"m not mad. Please shut that door."
He shut it.
"Won"t you sit down?"
She smiled and sat down on his bed, helpless and heedless of herself.
Prothero sat on the edge of a packing-case and gazed at her, still with his air of seeing nothing at all remarkable in her behaviour.
Her eyes wandered from him and were caught by the fantastic disorder of the room. On his writing-table a revolver, a microscope, and a case of surgical instruments lay in a litter of ma.n.u.scripts. A drawer, pulled from its chest, stood on end by the bedside; the contents were strewn at her feet. With a pang of reminiscence she saw there the things that he had worn, the thin, shabby garments of his poverty; and among them a few new things bought yesterday for his journey. An overcoat lay on the bed beside her. He had not had anything like that before. She put out her hand and felt the stuff.
"It ought to have had a fur lining," she said, and began to cry quietly.
He rose and came to her and put his hand on her shoulder. Her sobbing ceased suddenly. She looked up at him and was still, under his touch.
"You don"t want to go," she said. "Why are you going?"
"Because I have to. It"s the only thing, you see, there is to do."
"If it wasn"t for me you wouldn"t have to. If you die out there it will be my doing."
"Won"t it be the proprietors of the "Morning Telegraph" who"ll be responsible--if I die?"
"I set them on to you."
"Did you? I rather hoped they"d pitched on me because I was the best man for the job."
"The best man--to die?"
"War correspondents don"t die. At least they don"t set out with that intention."
"You _will_ die," she said slowly; "because everything I care for does."
"Why care," he said, "for things that are so bent on dying?"
"I care--because they die."
Her cry was the very voice of mortality and mortality"s desire. Having uttered it she seemed suddenly aware of what she had done.
"Why shouldn"t I tell you that I care for you? What does it matter? That ends it."
She rose.
"I know," she said, "I"ve broken all the rules. A woman shouldn"t come and tell a man she cares for him."
"Why not?" he said simply.
"I tell you, I don"t know why not. I only know that I"m so much more like a man than a woman that the rules for women don"t apply. Why shouldn"t I tell you? You know it--as G.o.d knows it."
"I know it as a man knows it. I told you I"d been there."
"Owen--shall I ever be where you are now?"