Murder in Any Degree Part 21

At the memory of that miserable hopeless moment, in which he had resolved on flight, the tears, no longer to be denied, came dripping down his cheeks.

THE LIE

I

For some time they had ceased to speak, too oppressed with the needless anguish of this their last night. At their feet the tiny shining windows of Etretat were dropping back into the night, as though sinking under the rise of that black, mysterious flood that came luminously from the obscure regions of the faint sky. Overhead, the swollen August stars had faded before the pale flush that, toward the lighthouse on the cliff, heralded the red rise of the moon.

He held himself a little apart, the better to seize every filmy detail of the strange woman who had come inexplicably into his life, watching the long, languorous arms stretched out into an impulsive clasp, the dramatic harmony of the body, the brooding head, the soft, half-revealed line of the neck. The troubling alchemy of the night, that before his eyes slowly mingled the earth with the sea and the sea with the sky, seemed less mysterious than this woman whose body was as immobile as the stillness in her soul.

All at once he felt in her, whom he had known as he had known no other, something unknown, the coming of another woman, belonging to another life, the life of the opera and the mult.i.tude, which would again flatter and intoxicate her. The summer had pa.s.sed without a doubt, and now, all at once, something new came to him, indefinable, colored with the vague terror of the night, the fear of other men who would come thronging about her, in the other life, where he could not follow.

Around the forked promontory to the east, the lights of the little packet-boat for England appeared, like the red cinder in a pipe, slipping toward the horizon. It was the signal for a lover's embrace, conceived long ago in fancy and kept in tenderness.

"Madeleine," he said, touching her arm. "There it is--our little boat."

"Ah! _le p't.i.t bateau_--with its funny red and green eyes."

She turned and raised her lips to his; and the kiss, which she did not give but permitted, seemed only fraught with an ineffable sadness, the end of all things, the tearing asunder and the numbness of separation.

She returned to her pose, her eyes fixed on the little packet, saying:

"It's late."

"Yes."

"It goes fast."

"Very."

They spoke mechanically, and then not at all. The dread of the morning was too poignant to approach the things that must be said. Suddenly, with the savage directness of the male to plunge into the pain which must be undergone, he began:

"It was like poison--that kiss."

She turned, forgetting her own anguish in the pain in his voice, murmuring, "Ben, my poor Ben."

"So you will go--to-morrow," he said bitterly, "back to the great public that will possess you, and I shall remain--here, alone."

"It must be so."

He felt suddenly an impulse he had not felt before, an instinct to make her suffer a little. He said brutally:

"But you want to go!"

She did not answer, but, in the obscurity, he knew her large eyes were searching his face. He felt ashamed of what he had said, and yet because she made no protestation, he persisted:

"You have left off your jewels, those jewels you can't do without."

"Not to-night."

"You who are never happy without them--why not to-night?"

As, carried away by the jealousy of what lay beyond, he was about to continue, she laid her fingers on his lips, with a little brusk, nervous movement of her shoulders.

"Don't--you don't understand."

But he understood and he resented the fact that she should have put aside the long undulating rope of pearls, the rings of rubies and emeralds that seemed as natural to her dark beauty as the roses to the spring. He had tried to understand her woman's nature, to believe that no memory yet lingered about them, to accept without question what had never belonged longed to their life together, and remembering what he had fought down he thought bitterly:

"She has changed me more than I have changed her. It is always so."

She moved a little, her pose, with instinctive dramatic sense, changing with her changing mood.

"Do not think I don't understand you," she said quietly.

"What do you understand?"

"It hurts you because I wish to return."

"That is not so, Madeleine," he said abruptly. "You know what big things I want you to do."

"I know--only you would like me to say the contrary--to protest that I would give it all up--be content to be with you alone."

"No, not that," he said grudgingly, "and yet, this last night--here--I should like to hear you say the contrary."

She laughed a low laugh and caught his hand a little tighter.

"That displeases you?"

"No, no, of course not!" Presently she added with an effort:

"There is so much that we must say to each other and we have not the courage."

"True, all summer we have never talked of what must come after."

"I want you to understand why I go back to it all, why I wish every year to be separated from you--yes, exactly, from you," she added, as his fingers contracted with an involuntary movement. "Ben, what has come to me I never expected would come. I love, but neither that word nor any other word can express how absolutely I have become yours. When I told you my life, you did not wonder how difficult it was for me to believe that such a thing could be possible. But you convinced me, and what has come to me has come as a miracle. I adore you. All my life has been lived just for this great love; ah yes, that's what I believe, what I feel." She leaned swiftly to him and allowed him to catch her to him in his strong arms. Then slowly disengaging herself, she continued, "You are a little hurt because I do not cry out what you would not accept, because I do not say that I would give up everything if you asked it."

"It is only to _hear_ it," he said impulsively.

"But I have often wished it myself," she said slowly. "There's not a day that I have not wished it--to give up everything and stay by you. Do you know why? From the longing that's in me now, the first unselfish longing I have ever had--to sacrifice myself for you in some way, somehow. It is more than a hunger, it is a need of the soul--of my love itself. It comes over me sometimes as tears come to my eyes when you are away, and I say to myself, 'I love him,' and yet, Ben, I shall not, I shall never give up my career, not now, not for years to come."

"No," he said mechanically.

"We are two great idealists, for that is what you have made me, Ben.

Before I was always laughing, and I believed in nothing. I despised even what my sacrifice had won. Now, when I am with you, I remain in a revery, and I am happy--happy with the happiness of things I cannot understand. To-night, by your side, it seems to me I have never felt the night before or known the mystery of the silent, faint hours. You have made me feel the loneliness of the human soul, and that impulse it must have before these things that are beyond us, that surround us, dominate us, to cling almost in terror to another soul. You have so completely made me over that it is as though you had created me yourself. I am thirty-five. I have known everything else but what you have awakened in me, and because I have this knowledge and this hunger I can see clearer what we must do. You and I are a little romanesque, but remember that even a great love may tire and grow stale, and that is what I won't have, what must not be." Her voice had risen with the intensity of her mood. She said more solemnly: "You are afraid of other men, of other moods of mine--you have no reason. This love which comes to some as the awakening of life is to me the end of all things. If anything should wound it or belittle it, I should not survive it."