He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with the odd, irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his inquiry quite freshly and patiently. “Oh yes, I’ve repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn’t quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done.”
“Rather! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing
but
dreadful things. A great many of them I’ve at different times named to you, but there were others I couldn’t name.”
“They were too, too dreadful?”
“Too, too dreadful—some of them.”
She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful with a strange, cold light—a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it wasn’t rather a part of the cause, of the pale, hard sweetness of the season and the hour. “And yet,” she said at last, “there are horrors we have mentioned.”
It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a picture, talk of “horrors,” but she was to do, in a few minutes, something stranger yet—though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards—and the note of it was already in the air. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again such a high flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. “Oh yes, there were times when we did go far.” He caught himself in the act of speaking as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended, for him, clearly, more and more on his companion.
But she had now a soft smile. “Oh, far—!”
It was oddly ironic. “Do you mean you’re prepared to go further?”
She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. “Do you consider that we went so far?”
“Why, I thought it the point you were just making—that we
had
looked most things in the face.”
“Including each other?” She still smiled. “But you’re quite right. We’ve had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of them have been unspoken.”
“Then the worst—we haven’t faced that. I
could
face it, I believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel,” he explained, “as if I had lost my power to conceive such things.” And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded. “It’s spent.”
“Then why do you assume,” she asked, “that mine isn’t?”
“Because you’ve given me signs to the contrary. It isn’t a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn’t a question now of choosing.” At last he came out with it. “You know something that I don’t. You’ve shown me that before.”
These last words affected her, he could see in a moment, remarkably, and she spoke with firmness, “I’ve shown you, my dear, nothing.”
He shook his head. “You can’t hide it.”
“Oh, oh!” May Bartram murmured over what she couldn’t hide. It was almost a smothered groan.
“You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something you were afraid I would find out. Your answer was that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t, and I don’t pretend I have. But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now that it must have been, that it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This,” he went on, “is why I appeal to you. I’m only afraid of ignorance now—I’m not afraid of knowledge.” And then as for a while she said nothing: “What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you’re out of it. You’ve done. You’ve had your experience. You leave me to my fate.”
Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as if she had in fact a decision to make, so that her whole manner was a virtual confession, though still with a small, fine, inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender. “It
would
be the worst,” she finally let herself say. “I mean the thing that I’ve never said.”
It hushed him a moment. “More monstrous than all the monstrosities we’ve named?”
“More monstrous. Isn’t that what you sufficiently express,” she asked, “in calling it the worst?”
Marcher thought. “Assuredly—if you mean, as I do, something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable.”
“It would if it
should
happen,” said May Bartram. “What we’re speaking of, remember, is only my idea.”
“It’s your belief,” Marcher returned. “That’s enough for me. I feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me.”
“No, no!” she repeated. “I’m with you—don’t you see?—still.” And as if to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair—a movement she seldom made in these days—and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness. “I haven’t forsaken you.”
It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was, for the minute, almost like a recovery of youth. He couldn’t pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed—as capable still of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it. There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others. “Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer.”
She promptly shook her head. “Never!”
It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect. “Well, what’s better than that? Do you call that the worst?”
“You think nothing is better?” she asked.
She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. “Why not, if one doesn’t
know?
” After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened and something to his purpose came, prodigiously, out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate. “I see—if I don’t suffer!”
In her own look, however, was doubt. “You see what?”
“Why, what you mean—what you’ve always meant.”
She again shook her head. “What I mean isn’t what I’ve always meant. It’s different.”
“It’s something new?”
She hesitated. “Something new. It’s not what you think. I see what you think.”
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. “It isn’t that I
am
a donkey?” he asked between faintness and grimness. “It isn’t that it’s all a mistake?”
“A mistake?” she pityingly echoed.
That
possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind. “Oh, no,” she declared; “it’s nothing of that sort. You’ve been right.”
Yet he couldn’t help asking himself if she weren’t, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most lost if his history should prove all a platitude. “Are you telling me the truth, so that I sha’n’t have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I
haven’t
lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven’t waited but to see the door shut in my face?”
She shook her head again. “However the case stands
that
isn’t the truth. Whatever the reality, it
is
a reality. The door isn’t shut. The door’s open,” said May Bartram.
“Then something’s to come?”
She waited once again, always with her cold, sweet eyes on him. “It’s never too late.” She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still full of the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small, perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement. She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited. It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it, and it glittered, almost as with the white lustre of silver, in her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind, but all expectant. The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to sound. Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow, fine shudder, and though be remained staring—though he stared, in fact, but the harder—she turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
“Well, you don’t say—?”
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back, strangely pale. “I’m afraid I’m too ill.”
“Too ill to tell me?” It sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear that she would die without giving him light. He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had heard the words.
“Don’t you know—now?”
“ ‘Now’—?” She had spoken as if something that had made a difference had come up within the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them. “I know nothing.” And he was afterwards to say to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.
“Oh!” said May Bartram.
“Are you in pain?” he asked, as the woman went to her.
“No,” said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification. “What then has happened?”
She was once more, with her companion’s help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had found, blankly, his hat and gloves and had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. “What
was
to,” she said.
V.
He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, and as it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretch of their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry—or feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the beginning of the end—and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially with one of them that he was unable to keep down. She was dying, and he would lose her; she was dying, and his life would end. He stopped in the park, into which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent doubt. Away from her the doubt pressed again; in her presence he had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable warmth for him and least of a cold torment. She had deceived him to save him—to put him off with something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had begun to happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude—
that
was what he had figured as the beast in the jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her; for what else, on earth, could she have meant? It wasn’t a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom. But poor Marcher, at this hour, judged the common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend his pride to accept it. He sat down on a bench in the twilight. He hadn’t been a fool. Something had
been,
as she had said, to come. Before he rose indeed it had quite struck him that the final fact really matched with the long avenue through which he had had to reach it. As sharing his suspense, and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she had come with him every step of the way. He had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming than that?
Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on each of which he asked about her only again to have to turn away, she ended his trial by receiving him where she had always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were, consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant service left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too visible, to check his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what she wanted; the one thing more, for her own peace, while she could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything go; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up again, before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time. She showed how she wished to leave their affair in order. “I’m not sure you understood. You’ve nothing to wait for more. It
has
come.”