She looked him full in the face and saw things there which she had never seen before. A great horror was upon him, a frightful awakening from the long, sensual sloth of his life.
Moving, working, in that great countenance, generally so impa.s.sive, uninfluenced by any emotion--at least to her long watchings--except by a moody irritation, she saw Doom, Fate, the Call of the Eumenides.
It came to the poor woman in a sudden wave of illuminating certainty.
She _knew_ the end had come.
And yet, strangely enough, she felt nothing but a quickening of the pulses, a swift embracing pity which was almost a joy in its breaking away of barriers.
If the end were here, it should be together--at last together.
For she loved this cruel, sinning man, this lover of light loves, this man of purple, fine linen, and the sparkling deadly wines of life.
"Kate!"
He said it once more.
Her manner changed. Shrinking, timidity, fear, fled for ever. In her overpowering rush of protecting love all the diffidences of temperament, all the bars which he had forced her to build around her instincts, were swept utterly away.
She went quickly up to him, folded him in her arms.
"Robert!" she said, "poor boy, the end has come to it all. I knew it must come some day. Well, we have not been happy. I wonder if _you_ have been happy? No, I don"t think so. But now, Robert, you have me to comfort you with my love once more, my poor Robert, once more, as in the old, simple days when we were young."
She led him to a couch.
He trembled violently. His decision of movement seemed to have gone.
His purpose of flight had for the moment become obscure.
And now, into this man"s heart came a remorse and regret so awful, a realisation so sudden and strong, so instinct with a pain for which there is no name, that everything before his eyes turned to burning fire.
The flames of his agony burnt up the veils which had for so long obscured the truth. They shrivelled and vanished.
Too late, too late, he knew what he had lost.
The last agony wrenched his brain round again to another and more terrible contemplation.
His thoughts were in other and outside hands, which pulled his brain from one scene to another as a man moves the eye of the camera obscura to different fields of view.
Incredible as it may seem, for the first time Llwellyn _realised what he had done_--realised, that is, in its entirety, the whole horror and consequences of that action of his which was to kill him now.
He had not _been able_ to see the magnitude and extent of his crime before--either at the time when it was proposed to him, except at the first moment of speech, or after its committal.
His brain and temperament had been wrapped round in the hideous fact of sensuality, which deadens and destroys sensation.
And now, with his wife"s thin arms round him, her withered cheek pressed to his, her words of glad love, a martyr"s swan song in his ears, he _saw_, _knew_, and _understood_.
Through the terror of his thoughts her words began to penetrate.
"I know, Robert--husband, I know. The end is here. But what has happened? Tell me everything, that I may comfort you the more. Tell me, Robert, _for the dear Christ"s sake_!"
At those words the man stiffened. "For the dear Christ"s sake!"
Suddenly, in the disorder and tumult of his tortured brain, came, quite foolishly and inconsequently, a quotation from an old French romance--full of satire and the keen cynicism of a period--which he had been reading:
"_"Tres volontiers," repart.i.t le demon.
"Vous aimez les tableaux changeans; Je veux vous contenter."_"
Yes! the devil who was torturing him now had shown him many moving aspects of life. _Les tableaux changeans!_
But now, at last, here was the worst moment of all.
"_For the dear Christ"s sake, tell me, Robert!_"
How could he tell _this_?
This was his last moment of peace, his last chance of any help or hope.
He had begun to cling to her, to mingle foolish tears with hers--the while his fired brain ranged all the halls of agony.
For if he told her--this gentle Christian lady, to whom he had been so unkind--then she would never touch him more.
The last hours--there was but little time remaining--would be alone.
ALONE!
This new revelation that her love was still his, wonder of mysteries!
this came at the last moments to aid him.
A last grace before the running waters closed over him. Was he to give this up?
The thought of flight lay like a wounded bird in his brain. It crept about it like some paralysed thing. Not yet dead, but inactive. Though he knew how terribly the moments called to him, yet he could not act.
The myriad agonies he was enduring now, agonies so various and great that he knew h.e.l.l had none greater, these, even these were alleviated by the wonder of his wife"s love.
The terrible remorse that was knocking at his heart could not undo that.
He clung to her.
"Tell me all about it, Robert. I will forgive you, whatever you have done. I have long ago forgiven everything in my heart. There are only the words to say."
She rested her worn, tired head on his shoulder. The sunbeams gave it a glory.
Again the man must suffer a terrible agony. She had asked him to tell her all his trouble in a voice full of gentle pleading.
_Whose voice did her voice recall to him; what fatal hour?_ A coa.r.s.er voice, a richer voice, trembling, so he had thought, with love for him.
"_Tell me everything, Bob!_" It was Gertrude"s voice.
The day of his undoing! The day when his horrid secret was wrested from him by the levers of his own pa.s.sions. The day which had brought him to this. _Finis coronat opus!_