Again she could not speak, but it was her joy that made her silent. She was no more to be disbelieved than an angel appearing in the vault, irradiating the darkness. Flowers sprang beneath her footsteps; her smile was life. And the memory of his own cynical vision of her smote him with a self-reproach that deepened tenderness. She was only subtle, only sinister, when shut away, unloved. She was womanly, meant for love only, and her folly made her the more lovable. Love was all that was left him. One month of love. His hands yielded to her hands; his eyes answered her eyes. The fragrance of the flowers was in the air, the flutter of heavenly garments. One month of life; but how flat, how mean, how dusty seemed the arduous outer world of the last years; how deep the goblet of enchantment that the unambiguous angel held out to him.
CHAPTER III
There were two cups to drink, for he had to put the cup of death to her lips. He told her all as they walked in the garden that afternoon; of the growing gravity of symptoms, the interview with the great specialist to whom his own doctor, unwilling to pronounce a final verdict, had sent him. He begged her to spare him further interviews. He was to die, that was evident; and doctors could do nothing for him. If pain came he promised that he would take what relief they had to give.
She leaned her head against his shoulder, weeping and weeping as they walked.
They were two lovers again, lovers shut into the straitest, most compassed paradise. On every side the iron walls enclosed them; there were no distances; there was no horizon. But within the circle of doom blossomed the mazy sweetness; the very sky seemed to have narrowed to the roofing of a bower.
To be in love again; to feel the whole world beating like a doubled pulse of you-and-I to and fro between them. She must weep, and he, with this newly born self, must know to the full the pang and bitterness; but the moments blossomed and smiled over the dread; because the dread was there. Sir Walter passed away like a shadow. Kitty saw him and came to her husband from the interview with a composure that almost made him laugh. It would have hurt her feelings for him to laugh at her, and he listened gravely while she told him that Sir Walter, now, was going to accept the big post in India that, for her sake, he had been on the point of refusing. He was going away that very night. She had been perfectly frank with him; she had explained to him—"quite simply and gently" said Kitty—that she had been very foolish and had let her friendship for him, her fondness, and her loneliness mislead her; yes, she had told him quite simply that he would always be a dear, dear friend, but that she was in love with her husband.
The poor toy. The child, with placid hands and unpitying eyes, had snapped it across the middle and walked away from it. He didn't need her to say it again; he saw that she had ceased completely to love Sir Walter. "And weren't you sorry for him at all?" he asked.
"Sorry? Of course, dear, how can you ask?" said Kitty. "I was as tender as possible. But you know, I can't but feel that he deserved punishment. Oh, I know that I did, too!—don't think me hard and self-righteous. But see—see, darling, what you have saved me from! Remember what he wanted me to do. Oh—it was wrong and cruel of him. I shall never be able to forgive him, just because I was so weak—just because I did listen."
"Ah, do forgive him—just because you were so strong that you never let him guess that you were weak," said Holland. He was very sorry for Sir Walter. And he was conscious, since he might not smile outwardly, of smiling inwardly over the ruthlessness of women towards the man, loved no longer, who has tarnished their image in their own eyes. The angel held him fast in Paradise, but something in him, a mere sense of humour, the humour of the outer world, perhaps, escaped her at moments, looked down at her, at himself, at Paradise, and accepted comedy as well as tragedy. It was only to these places of silence, loneliness and contemplation that Kitty did not come.
She shared sorrow and joy. She guessed too well at the terrors; she would be beside him, her very heart beating on his, through all the valley of the shadow; he would be able to spare her nothing, and even in death he would not be alone. And she was joy. The years of pining and lassitude, the toying with danger, the furnace of affliction that, in the library, had burned the dross from her soul, all had made another woman of Kitty from his girl-bride of six years before. She was joy; she knew how to make it, to give it. She surprised him continually with her inventiveness in rapture. When fear came upon them, she folded it from him with encircling arms. When fear passed, she seemed to lead him out into the dew and sunlight of early morning and to show him new paths, new flowers, new bowers of bliss. All artifice, all self-centred dreaminess, all the littler charms, dropped from her. She was as candid, as single-minded, as passionate as a newly created Eve, and she seemed dowered with a magic power of diversity in simplicity. There was no forethought or plan in her triumph over satiety. Like a flower, or an Eve, she seemed alive with the instinctive impulse that grows from change to change, from beauty to further beauty. Holland, summer-day after summer-day, was conscious only of joy and sorrow; of these, and of the still places where, sometimes, he seemed to hover above them. The serpent of weariness still slept.
"Tell me, dearest," said Kitty one day—how they talked and talked about themselves, recapturing every mutual memory, analysing long-forgotten scenes and motives, explaining themselves, accusing themselves, for the joy of being forgiven—"Tell me; you loved me so much that you were willing to give me up to him, to make me happy, and to save me;—but, if you hadn't been going to die—oh darling!—then you would have loved me too much to give me up, wouldn't you?"
His arm was about her, a book between them—unread, it usually was unread—and they were sitting in the re-consecrated summer-house; Kitty had insisted on that punishment for herself, had knelt down before her husband there and, despite his protest, had kissed his hands, with tears; the summer-house had become their sweetest retreat.
He answered her now swiftly, and with a little relief for the obvious answer: "But then I couldn't have set you free, dear."
"No;" Kitty mused. "I see. But—would the fear of losing me have made you re-fall in love with me? You know you only re-fell, darling, only knew how much you cared when you thought I was deceiving you, lying to you, in saying that I loved you; but you would have loved me—not in that dreadful, big, inhuman way—but loved me, just me—loved me enough to fight for me, wouldn't you?"
He looked into her adoring, insistent eyes and a little shadow of memory crossed his mind. Was she an altogether unambiguous angel? Was it there, the subtlety, in her eyes, her smile; something sweet, insinuating, insatiable? And as she fondled him, leaning close and questioning, it was as though a little eddy of dust from the outer world blew into Paradise through an unguarded gate. Well, why should not the dear angel have a little dust on its shining hair? It was a foolish angel, as he knew; and it lived for love, as he knew; and women who did that and who didn't get loved enough grew to look subtle—he remembered the swift train of thought. But Kitty was loved enough, so that there must be no subtlety to make her beauty stranger and less sweet, and in Paradise one forgot the outer world and need not consider it again; it was done with him and he with it, so that he answered, smiling, "I would have loved you for yourself; I would have fought for you."
"And won me," she murmured, hiding her face on his breast. "Oh, Nick, if only it had been sooner, sooner."
Her suffering sanctified even the shadow; but he remembered it; remembered that the dust had blown in. It lay, though so lightly, on the angel's hair, on the blossoms, on the bowers, and it made him think, at times, of the outer world, of his old judgments and values. He would have had to fight for her, of course; he would have had to save her; but it wouldn't have been because he had "re-fallen." That was a secret that he kept from Kitty; it belonged to the contemplative region of thought, where he was alone. And in Paradise, it seemed, one was forced to tell only half-truths.
Their ties with the outer world were all slackened during these days. No one knew the secret of the doomed honeymoon. The one or two