when consciousness returned, he found himself stretched at full length upon the couch.
lady tintagel knelt beside him, her arms around him.
he could feel the rapid beating of her heart; her soft, quick breathing, mingled with kisses, on his brow and hair. words of tenderness unthinkable poured from her lips.
he woke at once to vivid consciousness; but lay with eyes closed, waiting till he could gather up his strength, master himself, and take hold on calm speech.
and all the while her flood of tenderness poured over him. it was as if his helplessness had broken down all barriers, his loss of consciousness had burst the 134bonds of her reserve. the love and longing of those thirty years throbbed in her clasping arms.
“my love, my own! don’t go from me again. ah, when you wake you will remember all! nigel, you will remember.”
she held him closer to her breast. he felt the desperate strength in those poor clinging arms.
“dear god, when he awakes, he will remember! he will call his own wife by her name. he will know all at last. at last he will remember.”
her tears and kisses rained upon his face.
at length he spoke.
“loose me,” he said.
“mine,” she murmured, her trembling lips against his hair. “mine again, at last. i have waited so long—so long.”
he shrank away from her.
“loose me,” he said, “loose me and let me go. i do not want to hurt you.”
“you could not hurt me, nigel. i am 135past being hurt. my love would welcome pain.” yet her lips quivered. her eyes searched his. no answering light of love was in their sombre depths.
“you would loose me at once,” he said, “if you could know how much i loathe that you should hold and touch me.”
her arms fell away from him. she pressed her hands against her breasts, as if his words had been an actual blow. she recoiled from him, moving backwards on her knees, gazing at him in dumb dismay; then hid her stricken face in both her hands.
he sprang to his feet, crossed to the window, and flung aside a curtain.
dawn was breaking, in one pale silver streak on the horizon.
sea birds called to one another in the distance.
a chill mist lay on the lawn. in the corner of the veranda he could see the ghostly outline of the chair in which he had waited the night before.
136he turned back into the lighted room.
the fire burned low. he stirred the embers and threw on fresh logs.
he raised lady tintagel from her knees and led her to the couch.
“forgive me,” he said. “how i hate to give you pain! but our only hope is to be absolutely honest with ourselves and with each other.”
she lifted sorrowful eyes, but made no answer.
“will you forgive me if that which i must say is hard to hear? it would help me if you could say: ‘i will forgive you’”
her smile was sadder far than tears.
“we never forgave one another, nigel. if need for forgiveness arose, love had already met it, and swept it away. besides, i do not blame you for my pain. say what you will.”
he stood long silent, looking into the heart of the red embers.
at last he spoke.
“it is dangerous work,” he said, “to 137tamper with the dead. the dead are safe with god, at home in that eternal dwelling place. do you realise the awful wrong you did to me and to yourself, by that insistent call which brought me back? through all these years in the great life beyond, the fulness of my love would have been yours. that letter told you of a changeless tie—you mine, i yours, for ever. but it also spoke of a parting bravely borne, in faith and patience. a sorrow thus endured would have kept us both safe in the will of god. but you called me back, with passionate insistence, and—it seems—i responded to the passion of that appeal, and came. but in so doing, i put myself outside the supreme will. had i waited god’s time for my return to earthly life, i might have come strong in his strength and grace, filled with his holy spirit, ready to overcome, to rise at his command to a higher level than i had before attained. instead of which i am but a poor derelict, shipwrecked upon life’s ocean, drifting rudderless 138at the mercy of each wind of circumstance. and alas, i returned empty—emptied of that spark divine, which is the very essence of the life of man; emptied of aspiration; emptied of the capacity for love. i have no assurance of the love of god; i have no remembrance of my love for you; i have no power to feel love for others or to accept love offered me. for thirty wasted years i have been seeking, seeking, ever seeking, for earthly love, and now that i have found it, it is dead sea fruit—mere dust and ashes. i wander, god forsaken, like the demons of old, ‘walking through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none.’ i have no faith, i have no hope; i ask only for oblivion. ‘why hast thou disquieted me, to bring me up?’ you who call yourself my loving wife?
“one sentence in that letter which you say is my own, wakes in me a realisation of all that i have lost. ‘lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.’ my soul remembers that divine security; 139but i have left it, and there is no return. you thought, while i lay senseless i should remember things of time. not so, but in a lightning flash of revelation i saw again eternity.”
turning, he raised both arms, lifting his face with a light upon it which was not the dawn, nor any earthly light, but a pale reflection of the light of heaven.
“god’s will!” he said. “when we go home to that great dwelling place, our holy passion is to do his will. all earthly things—loves, hopes, desires—assume their right proportions. the one essential is the great will of god—that he in us, by us, through us, may in all things be glorified. all, in our earthly lives, which made for this, abides, and is ours still. all else is dross and cannot stand the fire—that purity of motive which is the very birthright of each immortal soul set free from earthly trammels of the flesh. to know his will and do it—this is life eternal; this is the joy supreme.”
140his arms dropped. the light faded from his countenance.
“i left it, at the call of earthly love. i stand before you empty, godless, damned.”
“nigel,” she said; “my heart is broken.”
“i would i had a heart to break,” he said.
the despair in her face left him cold. yet still her faithful love caught at a straw of comfort.
“at least we are together in our misery.”
“i am going,” he said.
“nigel! you will not leave me?”
“how can i stay? a year younger than your own daughter, i cannot stand in my rightful place—nor would i, if i could.”
“nigel, stay as my son.”
“how can i? i am not your son, and i will not be a rich woman’s protégé. i may have no capacity for love, but i have honour. i shall go, as i came, empty and alone. i will take nothing with me from 141this great house which you tell me is, in reality, my own.”
“nigel, there is one thing you must take with you. it was your tenderest gift to me. it has been so precious all these years; but now i have forfeited the right to wear it.”
she drew her wedding-ring from her finger.
“i have failed you, utterly.”
she held it out to him.
“the golden circlet, emblem of a love which is eternal, would mock me in my hopeless desolation. take it, nigel. it is all you can do for me. when you placed it on my finger, you had just said: ‘till death us do part’; and death has parted us.”
“not death,” he said. “life has parted us, not death.”
a heavy sense of sorrow and compunction gripped him.
“why do you ask me to do this? it leaves you neither wife nor widow.”
142“i am neither wife nor widow. i am not your widow, for you live. i am not your wife, for you loathe me, and are leaving me forever.”
“i do not loathe you,” he said, in low, remorseful tones. “but you have shewn me what i was; and you have made me what i am.”
a spasm of deathly agony wrung her heart. could he not spare her one cruel stab?
she pressed the ring upon him.
“take it, i implore you. and if ever the remembrance returns of all that this ring once meant to us, come back to me, and place it again upon my hand.”
he took it. for what had it stood when last he held it in his hand? the complete possession of a perfect love?
he slipped it on to his little finger.
his gnawing misery grew. why could he not say one word of kindness or of comfort to this stricken woman whose faithful heart was breaking?
143his hell was within him, “where the worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.”
he rose abruptly. “i must go!” he said.
he crossed to the garden door and flung it wide.
a stream of golden sunshine poured in, paling the artificial light, and flooding the room with radiance.
the sun had risen, a great golden ball, above the sea, and was slowly ascending from the pearly mist on the horizon.
“i must go,” he said, again; but a dreamy quality had come into his voice, and he leaned against the door post, gazing at the sunrise.
she came and stood beside him, and together they looked up to the rosy sky, flecked with soft billowy clouds of pearly whiteness, and down on the wide expanse of opal sea, reflecting in a royal highway from shore to horizon, the crimson glory of the rising sun.
144the water seemed to shout, once more, in a silent chorus of sparkling voices: “this is the way to the city of gold! leap from the cliff! take to the waters! this—and this only—is your road for home.”
suddenly a look of hope shone in his eyes. his whole figure sprang to alertness. he was transformed.
“i must go!” he cried. “there lies the way.” he pointed to the sparkling path upon the waters. “it is my only chance; my one way home.”
“not that, nigel! oh, not that!” her clinging hands caught at his coat. “you always said those who did that would lose—”
“lose!” he shouted. “what have i to lose? returned empty! i have nothing to lose.”
he wrenched himself free from her detaining fingers. he gave no backward 145glance. he sped across the lawn, like a hound loosed from the leash; leapt the iron gate, and disappeared down the zigzag path leading to the beach.
