heart must betray her did she linger. She had perhaps, in some
overwhelming scepticism, taken refuge, in what she craved to be unending
sleep, from the haunting figure of her husband. Or perhaps it had been
in atonement to Malcolm and she had believed herself going to him. But
no; but no; the dull hammer-stroke of conviction fell again and again
upon his heart; it had been in despair that she had gone. In going she
had turned her back upon her joy.
He had looked a long time when a consciousness of something unfitting
pressed in upon his drugged absorption. Looking up from Tony's dear,
strange face, he saw that Miss Latimer's eyes were on him and that she
was not weeping. Shrivelled, shrunken as she appeared, sitting there,
her hair dishevelled, a bright Chinese robe wrapped round her, there was
in her gaze none of the fear or the bewilderment of the night before. It
saw him, and its cruel radiance was for him; yet it passed beyond him.
Free, exultant, it soared above him, above Tony, like a bird rising in
crystal heights of air at daybreak. His mind fell back, blunted, from
its attempt to penetrate her new significance. He only knew that she did
not weep for Tony, that she rejoiced that Tony was dead, and an
emotionless but calculating hatred rose in him.
"You see you've killed her," he said. "It wasn't too late last night. If
you'd gone in to her last night, after you left me, you could have saved
her."
And if he, last night, had gone in to Tony, he could have saved her. He
thought of his long vigil. During all those hours that he had guarded
her, she had been sinking, sinking away from him. He remembered his
vision of her piteous, helpless hands lying on the table. She had
stretched herself upon the darkness and it had sucked her down.
Miss Latimer's radiant gaze was upon him; but she made him no reply.
"Curse you!" said the young man. "Curse you!"
She saw him, but it was like the bird, gazing down from its height at
the outsoared menace of a half-vanished earth. And her voice came to him
now as if from those crystal distances.
"No," she said, "Antonia has saved herself. You drove her to it. You
made it her only way."
"You drove her to it, you cursed liar! I could have made her happy. It
was me she loved. Yes, take that in, more than she loved Malcolm.
Nothing stood between us but your lies. You determined and plotted it,
when the weapon was put into your hands by our folly. You've killed her,
and you are glad that she is dead."
She did not pause for his revilement. Her mind was fixed in its
exultation. "No; it was Malcolm she loved more dearly. She chose between
you. She knew herself too weak to stay. He came for her and she has gone
to him. He has forgiven her. The husband and the wife are together."
Bevis leaned his head against the bedpost and closed his eyes. The idle
folly of his fury dropped from him. He felt only a sick loathing and
exhaustion. "Leave me," he muttered. "You'll not grudge me what I have
left. Leave me with her. Never let me see your face again."
Almost as if with a glad docility, drawing, in the spring sunlight, her
brilliant robe about her, Miss Latimer rose, and her face kept the
glitter of its supernatural triumph. She obeyed as if recognizing to the
full his claim upon the distenanted form lying there. For a moment only
she paused beside the bed and looked down at the dead woman, and he
seemed then, dimly, and now indifferently, to see on her lips the
pitiless smile of a priest above a sacrificial victim.
Then the rustle of her robe passed round the room. The door closed
softly behind her, and he was alone with all that was left him of Tony.
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
U. S. A
End of Project Gutenberg's The Third Window, by Anne Douglas Sedgwick