Reginald's revelations were followed by a long silence, interrupted only
by the officiousness of the waiter. The spell once broken, they
exchanged a number of more or less irrelevant observations. Ethel's mind
returned, again and again, to the word he had not spoken. He had said
nothing of the immediate bearing of his monstrous power upon her own
life and that of Ernest Fielding.
At last, somewhat timidly, she approached the subject.
"You said you loved me," she remarked.
"I did."
"But why, then--"
"I could not help it."
"Did you ever make the slightest attempt?"
"In the horrible night hours I struggled against it. I even implored you
to leave me."
"Ah, but I loved you!"
"You would not be warned, you would not listen. You stayed with me, and
slowly, surely, the creative urge went out of your life."
"But what on earth could you find in my poor art to attract you? What
were my pictures to you?"
"I needed them, I needed you. It was a certain something, a rich colour
effect, perhaps. And then, under your very eyes, the colour that
vanished from your canvases reappeared in my prose. My style became more
luxurious than it had been, while you tortured your soul in the vain
attempt of calling back to your brush what was irretrievably lost."
"Why did you not tell me?"
"You would have laughed in my face, and I could not have endured your
laugh. Besides, I always hoped, until it was too late, that I might yet
check the mysterious power within me. Soon, however, I became aware that
it was beyond my control. The unknown god, whose instrument I am, had
wisely made it stronger than me."
"But why," retorted Ethel, "was it necessary to discard me, like a
cast-off garment, like a wanton who has lost the power to please?"
Her frame shook with the remembered emotion of that moment, when years
ago he had politely told her that she was nothing to him.
"The law of being," Reginald replied, almost sadly, "the law of my
being. I should have pitied you, but the eternal reproach of your
suffering only provoked my anger. I cared less for you every day, and
when I had absorbed all of you that my growth required, you were to me
as one dead, as a stranger you were. There was between us no further
community of interest; henceforth, I knew, our lives must move in
totally different spheres. You remember that day when we said good-bye?"
"You mean that day when I lay before you on my knees," she corrected
him.
"That day I buried my last dream of personal happiness. I would have
gladly raised you from the floor, but love was utterly gone. If I am
tenderer to-day than I am wont to be, it is because you mean so much to
me as the symbol of my renunciation. When I realised that I could not
even save the thing I loved from myself, I became hardened and cruel to
others. Not that I know no kindly feeling, but no qualms of conscience
lay their prostrate forms across my path. There is nothing in life for
me but my mission."
His face was bathed in ecstasy. The pupils were luminous, large and
threatening. He had the look of a madman or a prophet.
After a while Ethel remarked: "But you have grown into one of the
master-figures of the age. Why not be content with that? Is there no
limit to your ambition?"
Reginald smiled: "Ambition! Shakespeare stopped when he had reached his
full growth, when he had exhausted the capacity of his contemporaries. I
am not yet ready to lay down my pen and rest."
"And will you always continue in this criminal course, a murderer of
other lives?"