“Don’t you know—now?”
“’Now’—?” She had
spoken as if some difference had been made within
the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to
her bell, was already with them. “I know
nothing.” And he was afterwards to say
to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience,
such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted,
he washed his hands of the whole question.
“Oh!” said May Bartram.
“Are you in pain?” he asked as the woman
went to her.
“No,” said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take
her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly
contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed
once more his mystification.
“What then has happened?”
She was once more, with her companion’s help,
on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him,
he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached
the door. Yet he waited for her answer.
“What was to,” she said.
He came back the next day, but she was then unable
to see him, and as it was literally the first time
this had occurred in the long stretch of their acquaintance
he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry—or
feeling at least that such a break in their custom
was really the beginning of the end—and
wandered alone with his thoughts, especially with
the one he was least able to keep down. She was
dying and he would lose her; she was dying and his
life would end. He stopped in the Park, into
which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent
doubt. Away from her the doubt pressed again;
in her presence he had believed her, but as he felt
his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation
that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable warmth
for him and least of a cold torment. She had
deceived him to save him—to put him off
with something in which he should be able to rest.
What could the thing that was to happen to him be,
after all, but just this thing that had began to happen?
Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude—that
was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle,
that was what had been in the lap of the gods.
He had had her word for it as he left her—what
else on earth could she have meant? It wasn’t
a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and
distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed
and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common
doom. But poor Marcher at this hour judged the
common doom sufficient. It would serve his turn,
and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he
would bend his pride to accept it. He sat down
on a bench in the twilight. He hadn’t
been a fool. Something had been, as she
had said, to come. Before he rose indeed it had
quite struck him that the final fact really matched
with the long avenue through which he had had to reach
it. As sharing his suspense and as giving herself
all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she had
come with him every step of the way. He had lived
by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly,
damnably to miss her. What could be more overwhelming
than that?
