"She is no friend to you," I struggled on, "she is playing with you for
her own purposes; you will ..."
He swayed a little on his feet and said: "Bravo ... bravissimo. If we
can't forbid him, we will frighten him. Go on, my good fellow ..." and
then, "Come, go on ..."
I looked at his great bulk of a body. It came into my head dimly that I
wanted him to strike me, to give me an excuse--anything to end the scene
violently, with a crash and exclamations of fury.
"You absolutely refuse to pay any attention?" I said.
"Oh, absolutely," he answered.
"You know that I can do something, that I can expose you." I had a vague
idea that I could, that the number of small things that I knew to his
discredit and the mass of my hatred could be welded into a damning
whole. He laughed a high-pitched, hysterical laugh. The dawn was
beginning to spread pallidly above us, gleaming mournfully through the
glass of the palm-house. People began to pass, muffled up, on their way
out of the place.
"You may go ..." he was beginning. But the expression of his face
altered. Miss Granger, muffled up like all the rest of the world, was
coming out of the inner door. "We have been having a charming ..." he
began to her. She touched me gently on the arm.
"Come, Arthur," she said, and then to him, "You have heard the news?"
He looked at her rather muzzily.
"Baron Halderschrodt has committed suicide," she said. "Come, Arthur."
We passed on slowly, but de Mersch followed.
"You--you aren't in _earnest_?" he said, catching at her arm so that we
swung round and faced him. There was a sort of mad entreaty in his eyes,
as if he hoped that by unsaying she could remedy an irremediable
disaster, and there was nothing left of him but those panic-stricken,
beseeching eyes.
"Monsieur de Sabran told me," she answered; "he had just come from
making the _constatation_. Besides, you can hear ..."
Half-sentences came to our ears from groups that passed us. A very old
man with a nose that almost touched his thick lips, was saying to
another of the same type:
"Shot himself ... through the left temple ... _Mon Dieu_!"
De Mersch walked slowly down the long corridor away from us. There was
an extraordinary stiffness in his gait, as if he were trying to emulate
the goose step of his days in the Prussian Guard. My companion looked
after him as though she wished to gauge the extent of his despair.
"You would say '_Habet_,' wouldn't you?" she asked me.
I thought we had seen the last of him, but as in the twilight of the
dawn we waited for the lodge gates to open, a furious clatter of hoofs
came down the long street, and a carriage drew level with ours. A moment
after, de Mersch was knocking at our window.
"You will ... you will ..." he stuttered, "speak ... to Mr. Gurnard.
That is our only chance ... now." His voice came in mingled with the
cold air of the morning. I shivered. "You have so much power ... with
him and...."
"Oh, I ..." she answered.
"The thing must go through," he said again, "or else ..." He paused. The
great gates in front of us swung noiselessly open, one saw into the
court-yard. The light was growing stronger. She did not answer.
"I tell you," he asseverated insistently, "if the British Government
abandons my railway _all_ our plans ..."
"Oh, the Government won't _abandon_ it," she said, with a little
emphasis on the verb. He stepped back out of range of the wheels, and we
turned in and left him standing there.
* * * * *
In the great room which was usually given up to the political plotters
stood a table covered with eatables and lit by a pair of candles in tall
silver sticks. I was conscious of a raging hunger and of a fierce
excitement that made the thought of sleep part of a past of phantoms. I
began to eat unconsciously, pacing up and down the while. She was
standing beside the table in the glow of the transparent light. Pallid
blue lines showed in the long windows. It was very cold and hideously
late; away in those endless small hours when the pulse drags, when the
clock-beat drags, when time is effaced.
"You see?" she said suddenly.
"Oh, I see," I answered--"and ... and now?"
"Now we are almost done with each other," she answered.
I felt a sudden mental falling away. I had never looked at things in
that way, had never really looked things in the face. I had grown so
used to the idea that she was to parcel out the remainder of my life,
had grown so used to the feeling that I was the integral portion of her
life ... "But I--" I said, "What is to become of me?"
She stood looking down at the ground ... for a long time. At last she
said in a low monotone:
"Oh, you must try to forget."
A new idea struck me--luminously, overwhelming. I grew reckless.
"You--you are growing considerate," I taunted. "You are not so sure, not
so cold. I notice a change in you. Upon my soul ..."
Her eyes dilated suddenly, and as suddenly closed again. She said
nothing. I grew conscious of unbearable pain, the pain of returning
life. She was going away. I should be alone. The future began to exist
again, looming up like a vessel through thick mist, silent, phantasmal,
overwhelming--a hideous future of irremediable remorse, of solitude, of
craving.
"You are going back to work with Churchill," she said suddenly.
"How did you know?" I asked breathlessly. My despair of a sort found
vent in violent interjecting of an immaterial query.
"You leave your letters about," she said, "and.... It will be best for
you."
"It will not," I said bitterly. "It could never be the same. I don't
want to see Churchill. I want...."
"You want?" she asked, in a low monotone.
"You," I answered.
She spoke at last, very slowly:
"Oh, as for me, I am going to marry Gurnard."
I don't know just what I said then, but I remember that I found myself
repeating over and over again, the phrases running metrically up and
down my mind: "You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is.
You couldn't marry Gurnard; you don't know what he is." I don't suppose
that I knew anything to the discredit of Gurnard--but he struck me in
that way at that moment; struck me convincingly--more than any array of
facts could have done.
"Oh--as for what he is--" she said, and paused. "_I_ know...." and then
suddenly she began to speak very fast.
"Don't you see?--_can't_ you see?--that I don't marry Gurnard for what
he is in that sense, but for what he is in the other. It isn't a
marriage in your sense at all. And ... and it doesn't affect you ...
don't you _see_? We have to have done with one another, because ...
because...."