Chapter XVIII

Jocelyn remained standing where she was. Half-an-hour ago she would have run to Giles and flung herself into his arms, now she stood and looked at him, her hands clasped in front of her, waiting for the cloud of that terrible thought to pass by and let a gleam of daylight through.

“Dear, what is it, are you ill?”

Neither his voice, low and tender, nor the look of love in his eyes, nor the warm clasp of his hand upon her icy-cold fingers, were of any avail.

She drew her hands away from him and passed them over her brow, as if to sweep aside her thoughts.

“Let us go out--I want air. I can’t breathe in here, come!” The words were wild, but she was surprised at the even tones of her own voice. She had thought, if she once opened her lips, she must scream. She took her hat from the table and put it on, even glancing in the glass to set it straight. Her face seemed to her very much the same as usual--that was curious!

She led the way from the room, and into the hotel garden. Legard followed, bewildered and heavy at heart. Jocelyn walked swiftly, taking a little, stony path which ran winding upwards from the garden. Walls hemmed it in, and it was rutted where the water coursed down it in the heavy rains. It led to terraces of olive and almond trees sloping up the hill. She stopped in the shade of an old tree; she felt giddy and faint, and was glad to sit down. Giles threw himself beside her, waiting for her to speak. The brown lizards chased each other among the stones. Bees, hovering over the wild thyme, drummed softly with their wings; a cicala churred harshly from a branch above, and from far away came the faint, shrill strains of a goatherd’s pipe. A thin, brown haze of heat hung over the white buildings of the town below, and the sunlight threw delicate shadows from the trees on to the stone-strewn banks of rough grass.

Presently Jocelyn raised her arm and rested it against the mossy stem of the olive tree. She looked dazed, like one who had received a heavy blow, and she kept glancing from side to side, as if trying to find the way out of some unfamiliar place.

“When did Irma die?” she said suddenly.

Legard winced, he tried to answer steadily and without emotion, but there was fear in his heart, fear of her reading that which lay between him and his conscience.

“On Tuesday afternoon.”

“What did she die of, it was very sudden? Mr. Nielsen told me that--that--she took an overdose of morphia.” She spoke with hesitation, but hurriedly, as if afraid to give him time to deceive her. “Was it true?” she said, without looking at him.

“Yes,” muttered Giles. He also looked away. The mind of each of them was fixed solely upon its own grim terror, neither saw the spectre imaged in the thoughts of the other.

“She knew--everything?” Jocelyn said. It sounded like the expression of a conviction rather than a question.

“I don’t know--perhaps--I think so,” and he looked at her swiftly with a catch in his breath, for the spectre of her thoughts had peeped out at him, and he was very frightened.

“Look at me, darling!” he said pleadingly.

She looked at him, and across his mind fell the shadow of what lay before him.

“Good God! what are you thinking?”

“I am thinking,” said Jocelyn simply, “that I killed her--that’s all.”

It was not her words that frightened him so much as her face. There was a dead look upon it, a dreadful, weary look, of something more than ordinary despair, of something fundamental, the expression of that hopeless taint of inherited fatalism, which he recognised dimly, and feared, as children fear the dark. For he could not comprehend it, his whole nature revolted--it was the point at which their individualities diverged. _His_ instinct was to fight for his happiness, to fight for it with pain and trouble--_hers_ to fold her hands, and let it drift to her or away.

It flashed across his mind that he had seen the same face somewhere, graven in stone, dead, immutable, the face of an image. Where, he could not say, but he had seen it. The thought frightened him the more. He was like a man fighting a nightmare, knowing all the time that it was something unreal, and suffering just the same. He felt that somewhere there must be the words, the words to break the despair of her face, to bring it back to life, to wrest the shadows from below the brown eyes that stared before them, large, lustreless, and pitifully hopeless, if only he could find them. Every man knows that feeling, that desperate search for just the right words, and sometimes they do not exist. He wracked his reason.

“My darling,” he cried, “it’s not true. Do you hear me, it’s not true--don’t yield to such a feeling, it’s dreadful. Fight against it, for God’s sake.”

He took her in his arms, she lay passively in them. He kissed her lips, her eyes, her hair--she yielded soft and unresponsive. Her face never changed.

“It was an accident. I know it, she would never have committed suicide! never! She had strong views about that--she was too religious, besides--” The fatuity of his words choked his utterance. Words! words! of what use were words against the whole bent of a nature? and he clenched his hands in despair. He would have given anything to penetrate for one moment the mystery of her being, to enter in, and share its isolation, to know the very springs of its instincts, that he might learn how to fight them.

In the stillness of the waning day he sat with his head in his hands, thinking, always thinking. The bees droned their dreamy song, and the world was flooded with a mellow, evening light.

It was no help to him that he was fighting an unreality, it only maddened him, made him desperate. In some moments if a man be tender-hearted, everything else goes by the board. He could not bear the sight of her suffering, he felt that he _must_ pierce through that terrible calm, make her _feel_, it seemed to him a matter of life or death. He saw that there was one chance, suicidal and desperate, a chance that might mean the destruction of her love for him. He would have to take it, he could not sit there looking at the weary despair of that beloved face, feeling the tragedy she would carry away in her heart. He _must_ tell her the truth. Half truths were no good. He must show her the whole, naked, sordid truth. The truth which he had intended should go down with him to the grave. Perhaps she would believe that.

Two lizards, meeting suddenly, began to fight furiously in the sunlight within three paces of them; he noticed them, and wondered dully which would win. Then he began to speak in a low matter of fact voice.

If he must tell her, he thought it should be in a way that would carry conviction. The sun glared into his eyes, and he pulled his hat low upon his forehead, with a feeling that he would, at all events, hide from her the foreboding of defeat that was in them.

“Are you listening to me?” he said.

She bent her head, and he went on--

“I’ll tell you the truth. I never meant to tell you, but I must, because of this dreadful idea you have in your head.” Something clicked in his throat, but he threw up his head and that freed his voice. “D’you remember my leaving you on the road last Tuesday? I was going back then--to see--if I had killed her.”

Jocelyn shivered and made a motion as if she would have stopped him, but he went on speaking fast and evenly.

“That afternoon about three o’clock I went into her room. She was asleep--you know she took morphia every day to make her sleep. Every day, when she woke, she had to take a dose of another medicine, I’ve seen it dozens of times. She used to put the morphia under her cushions before going to sleep, for fear of taking it by mistake, I’ve seen that too. She always woke dazed, you see; she knew the danger of taking the wrong; I remember her telling me of it once.” His voice sounded to himself brutally matter of fact. He stared straight in front of him, plucking up the stiff grass by handfuls. “By some accident that day she left the morphia bottle on the table by her side, and”--he cleared his throat--“the other medicine wasn’t there.” Even the humming of the bees seemed to him to have ceased; he must speak the words into the silence of a breathless world. The lizards still fought in the sunshine.

“I--I saw what would happen--I knew it would kill her. I did nothing, I walked out of the room--I left her to die. Then I met you--you remember?” He forced himself to look at her face. There was no sign in it that she had even heard him.

“Don’t you see?” he cried, “_I_ killed her--” And he thought, “Have I gone through this for nothing?”

If she would only speak--move--do something!

“Don’t you believe me?”

“Yes.” The yellow sunlight played upon her face through the leaves, but its expression was unchanged.

He had a sudden, sickening foretaste of the knowledge that the real suffering of man must be worked through in an isolation grim as the grave itself. He had robbed himself for ever of any claim to her respect, to her love, and--for no use. He wondered that she did not shrink from him; he would have rather she did--it would have shown him that her will was still struggling for existence. “Jocelyn,” he cried, “for God’s sake, say something.”

“You did it for me,” she said at last, “it is all the same, you see; she died because of our sin, what does it matter whether it was by her own act, or by yours, or by mine? The shadow will always be there--always--always between us, setting us apart.”

It was a relief to hear her voice, even though the words were dreadful to hear. He got upon his feet, and paced to and fro, his face lined and twisted with thought, his lips quivering below the line of his dark moustache. The lizards, always fighting, darted between the stones.

“What is to be done, then?” he said, stopping in front of her, his tall, black figure between her and the sunlight.

“You must let me go, and forget me,” she said.

“My God! I can’t,” and he threw himself at her feet, his hands clasped on her knees, his eyes fixed on hers with a wild, despairing entreaty. “Jocelyn--darling--I can’t--I _can’t_!” and the goatherd’s pipe sent back a faint echo to that bitter cry.

She shivered, and her eyes contracted as if with unbearable pain; then she put out her hand, and touched his hair, it calmed him at once, but he clung to her.

“If you love me,” she said in a half choked voice, “be brave. I _can’t_ bear any more. I can’t face it--I must hide. I must go away, and hide from it.”

“My darling, you promised not to shut me away.”

“I can’t help it, I can’t _share_ suffering, it’s not in me. I must bear it by myself--I know it.”

He would have cried again in words of entreaty and reasoning, but she stopped him, rising to her feet.

“Give me an address, I will write to you. I promise to let you know what becomes of me.”

“You promise to tell me truly of yourself--everything--” his voice failed him. There was a film over his eyes, and he staggered from giddiness as he got up.

“Yes--everything,” she said very low, and the words seemed hardly to escape the barrier of her lips.

“Am I never to see you, never? My God! that is hard--”

“I _must_ be away from everything that reminds. I must hide. I _will_ forget. Can’t you see that I shall go mad? I _must_ have time.” Her voice rose hysterically for the first time, and she twisted her hands.

“Yes, sweet! I know, I know--” He soothed her like a child, and, with the need for that soothing, he felt some strength returning to him. He knew that he must use it quickly before it left him again.

“I will send you my address to-night,” he said, “I shall go away to-morrow. You promise to write. Go, dear, I won’t come with you.”

He caught her suddenly in his arms, and held her face to his, kissing it passionately. The tears ran down his face and wetted her cheeks--her eyes were dry.

“God keep you--remember I am always yours, to do as you please with.”

She did not speak. Her mournful eyes were lifted for a moment to his, the shadow of a smile quivered pitifully on the curve of her lips, and she was gone from his arms.

He flung himself upon the ground, and buried his face in the grass.

_PART III_