“It’s no good,” she cried almost petulantly. “This little world has
made us what we are. Don’t you see—don’t you see what I am? I can make
love. I can make love and be loved, prettily. Dear, don’t blame me. I
have given you all I have. If I had anything more—I have gone through
it all over and over again—thought it out. This morning my head aches,
my eyes ache.
“The light has gone out of me and I am a sick and tired woman. But I’m
talking wisdom—bitter wisdom. I couldn’t be any sort of helper to you,
any sort of wife, any sort of mother. I’m spoilt.
“I’m spoilt by this rich idle way of living, until every habit is
wrong, every taste wrong. The world is wrong. People can be ruined by
wealth just as much as by poverty. Do you think I wouldn’t face life
with you if I could, if I wasn’t absolutely certain I should be down
and dragging in the first half-mile of the journey? Here I am—damned!
Damned! But I won’t damn you. You know what I am! You know. You are too
clear and simple not to know the truth. You try to romance and hector,
but you know the truth. I am a little cad—sold and done. I’m—. My dear,
you think I’ve been misbehaving, but all these days I’ve been on my
best behaviour.... You don’t understand, because you’re a man.
“A woman, when she’s spoilt, is _spoilt_. She’s dirty in grain. She’s
done.”
She walked on weeping.
“You’re a fool to want me,” she said. “You’re a fool to want me—for my
sake just as much as yours. We’ve done all we can. It’s just
romancing—”
She dashed the tears from her eyes and turned upon me. “Don’t you
understand?” she challenged. “Don’t you know?”
We faced one another in silence for a moment.
“Yes,” I said, “I know.”
For a long time we spoke never a word, but walked on together, slowly
and sorrowfully, reluctant to turn about towards our parting. When at
last we did, she broke silence again.
“I’ve had you,” she said.
“Heaven and hell,” I said, “can’t alter that.”
“I’ve wanted—” she went on. “I’ve talked to you in the nights and made
up speeches. Now when I want to make them I’m tongue-tied. But to me
it’s just as if the moments we have had lasted for ever. Moods and
states come and go. To-day my light is out...”
To this day I cannot determine whether she said or whether I imagined
she said “chloral.” Perhaps a half-conscious diagnosis flashed it on my
brain. Perhaps I am the victim of some perverse imaginative freak of
memory, some hinted possibility that scratched and seared. There the
word stands in my memory, as if it were written in fire.
We came to the door of Lady Osprey’s garden at last, and it was
beginning to drizzle.
She held out her hands and I took them.
“Yours,” she said, in a weary unimpassioned voice; “all that I had—such
as it was. Will you forget?”
“Never,” I answered.
“Never a touch or a word of it?”
“No.”
“You will,” she said.
We looked at one another in silence, and her face full of fatigue and
misery.
What could I do? What was there to do?
“I wish—” I said, and stopped.
“Good-bye.”