SHE sat still without saying anything. It seemed to her as if she were on the platform at Manchester House singing the Italian song. Then the disfigured face of Carey—disfigured by vice as hers now by the accident—had become as nothing to her. She had seen only his eyes. She saw only his eyes now. He remained standing up in the faint light with the oars in his hands looking at her. Round about them tinkled the bells above the nets.
“You heard me call?” he said at last, almost roughly.
She nodded.
“How did you—?” she began, and stopped.
“I was there this evening when you came in. I heard your boy singing. I was under the shadow of the woods.”
“Why?”
All this time she was gazing into Carey’s eyes, and had not seen in them that he was looking, for the first time, at her altered face. She did not realise this. She did not remember that her face was altered. The expression in his eyes made her forget it.
“I wanted something of you.”
“What?”
He let the oars go, and sat down on the little seat. They were close to each other now. The sides of the boats touched. He did not answer her question.
“I know I’ve no business to speak to you,” he said. “No business to come after you. I know that. But I was always a selfish, violent, headlong brute, and it seems I can’t change.”
“But what do you want with me?”
Suddenly she remembered—put her hands up to her face with a swift gesture, then dropped them again. What did it matter now? He was the last man who would look upon her in life. And now that she remembered her own condition she saw his. She saw the terror of his life in his marred features, aged, brutalised by excess. She saw, and was glad for a moment, as if she met someone unexpectedly on her side of the stream of fate. Let him look upon her. She was looking upon him.
“What do you want?” she repeated.
“I want a saviour,” he said, staring always straight at her, and speaking without tenderness.
“A saviour!”
For a moment she thought of the Bible, of religion; then of her sensation that she had been caught by a torturer who would not let her go.
“Have you come to me because you think I can tell you of saviour?” she said.
And she began to laugh.
“But don’t you see me?” she exclaimed. “Don’t you see what I am now?”
Suddenly she felt angry with him because his eyes did not seem to see the dreadful change in her appearance.
“Don’t you think I want a saviour too?” she exclaimed.
“I don’t think about you,” he said with a sort of deliberate brutality. “I think about myself. Men generally do when they come to women.”
“Or go away from them,” she said.
She was thinking of Robin then, and Fritz.
“Did you know Robin Pierce was here to-day?” she asked.
“Yes. I saw him leave you.”
“You saw—but how long have you been watching?”
“A long time.”
“Where do you come from?”
He pointed towards the distant lights behind her and before him.
“Opposite. I was to have stayed with Ulford in Casa Felice. I’m staying with him over there.”
“With Sir Donald?”
“Yes. He’s ill. He wants somebody.”
“Sir Donald’s afraid of me now,” she said, watching him closely. “I told him to live with his memory of me. Will he do that?”
“I think he will. Poor old chap! he’s had hard knocks. They’ve made him afraid of life.”
“Why didn’t you keep your memory of me?” she said, with sudden nervous anger. “You too? If you hadn’t come to-night it would never have been destroyed.”
Her extreme tension of the nerves impelled her to an exhibition of fierce bitterness which she could not control. She remembered how he had loved her, with what violence and almost crazy frankness. Why had he come? He might have remembered her as she was.
“I hate you for coming,” she said, almost under her breath.
“I don’t care. I had to come.”
“Why? Why?”
“I told you. I want a saviour. I’m down in the pit. I can’t get out. You can see that for yourself.”
“Yes,” she answered, “I can see that.”
“Give me a hand, Viola, and—you’ll make me do something I’ve never done, never been able to do.”
“What?” she half whispered.
“Believe there’s a God—who cares.”
She drew in her breath sharply. Something warm surged through her. It was not like fire. It was more like the warmth that comes from a warm hand laid on a cold one. It surged through her and went away like a travelling flood.
“What are you saying?” she said in a low voice. “You are mad to come here to-night, to say this to me to-night.”
“No. It’s just to-night it had to be said.”
Suddenly she resolved to tell him. He was in the pit. So was she. Well, the condemned can be frank with one another though all the free have to practise subterfuge.
“You don’t know,” she said, and her voice was quiet now. “You don’t know why it was mad of you to come to-night. I’ll tell you. I’ve come out here and I’m not going back again.”
He kept his eyes on hers, but did not speak.
“I’m going to stay out here,” she said.
And she let her hand fall over the side of the boat till her fingers touched the water.
“No,” he said. “You can’t do that.”
“Yes. I shall do it. I want to hide my face in the water.”
“Give me a hand first, Viola.”
Again the warmth went through her.
“Nobody else can.”
“And you’ve looked at me!” she said.
There was a profound amazement in her voice.
“It’s only when I look at you,” he said, “that I know there are stars somewhere beyond the pit’s mouth.”
“When you look at me—now?”
“Yes.”
“But you are blind then?” she said.
“Or are the others blind?” he asked.
Instinctively, really without knowing what she did, she put up her hand to her face, touched it, and no longer felt that it was ugly. For a moment it seemed to her that her beauty was restored.
“What do you see?” she asked. “But—but it’s so dark here.”
“Not too dark to see a helping hand—if there is one,” he answered.
And he stretched out his arm into her boat and took her right hand from the oar it was holding.
“And there is one,” he added.
She felt a hand that loved her hand, and there was no veil over her face. How strange that was. How utterly impossible it seemed. Yet it was so. No woman can be deceived in the touch of a hand on hers. If it loves—she knows.
“What are you going to do, Viola?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a sound almost of shame, a humble sound, in her voice.
“I can’t do anything,” she murmured. “You would know that to-morrow, in sunlight.”
“To-morrow I’ll come in sunlight.”
“No, no. I shall not be there.”
“I shall come.”
“Oh!—good-night,” she said.
She began to feel extraordinarily, terribly excited. She could not tell whether it was an excitement of horror, of joy—what it was. But it mounted to her brain and rushed into her heart. It was in her veins like an intoxicant, and in her eyes like fire, and thrilled in her nerves and beat in her arteries. And it seemed to be an excitement full of passionate contradictions. She was at the same time like a woman on a throne and a woman in the dust—radiant as one worshipped, bowed as one beaten.
“Good-night, good-night,” she repeated, scarcely knowing what she said.
Her hand struggled in his hand.
“Viola, if you destroy yourself you destroy two people.”
She scarcely heard him speaking.
“D’you understand?”
“No, no. Not to-night. I can’t understand anything to-night.”
“Then to-morrow.”
“Yes, to-morrow-to-morrow.”
He would not let go her hand, and now his was arbitrary, the hand of a master rather than of a lover.
“You won’t dare to murder me,” he said.
“Murder—what do you mean?”
He had used the word to arrest her attention, which was wandering almost as the attention of a madwoman wanders.
“If you hide your face in the water I shall never see those stars above the pit’s mouth.”
“I can’t help it—I can’t help anything. It’s not my fault, it’s not my fault.”
“It will be your fault. It will be your crime.”
“Your hand is driving me mad,” she gasped.
She meant it, felt that it was so. He let her go instantly. She began to row back towards Casa Felice. And now that mystical attention of which she had been conscious, that soul watching the night, her in the night, was surely profounder, watched with more intensity as a spectator bending down to see a struggle. Never before had she felt as if beyond human life there was life compared with which human life was as death. And now she told herself that she was mad, that this shock of human passion coming suddenly upon her loneliness had harmed her brain, that this cry for salvation addressed to one who looked upon herself as destroyed had deafened reason within her.
His boat kept up with hers. She did not look at him. Casa Felice came in sight. She pulled harder, like a mad creature. Her boat shot under the archway into the darkness. Somehow—how, she did not know—she guided it to the steps, left it, rushed up the staircase in the dark and came out on to the piazza. There she stopped where the waterfall could cast its spray upon her face. She stayed till her hair and cheeks and hands were wet. Then she went to the balustrade. His boat was below and he was looking up. She saw the tragic mask of his face down in the thin mist that floated about the water, and now she imagined him in the pit, gazing up and seeking those stars in which he still believed though he could not see them.
“Go away,” she said, not knowing why she said it or if she wished him to go, only knowing that she had lost the faculty of self-control and might say, do, be anything in that moment.
“I can’t bear it.”
She did not know what she meant she could not bear.
He made a strange answer. He said:
“If you will go into the house, open the windows and sing to me—the last song I heard you sing—I’ll go. But to-morrow I’ll come and touch my helping hand, and after to-morrow, and every day.”
“Sing—?” she said vacantly. “To-night!”
“Go into the house. Open the window. I shall hear you.”
He spoke almost sternly.
She crossed the piazza slowly. A candle was burning in the hall. She took it up and went into the drawing-room, which was in black darkness. There was a piano in it, close to a tall window which looked on to the lake. She set the candle down on the piano, went to the window, unbarred the shutters and threw the window open. Instantly she heard the sound of oars as Carey sent his boat towards the water beneath the window. She drew back, went again to the piano, sat down, opened it, put her hands on the keys. How could she sing? But she must make him go away. While he was there she could not think, could not grip herself, could not—She struck a chord. The sound of music, the doing of a familiar action, had a strange effect upon her. She felt as if she recovered clear consciousness after an anaesthetic. She struck another chord. What did he want? The concert—that song. Her fingers found the prelude, her lips the poetry, her voice the music. And then suddenly her heart found the meaning, more than the meaning, the eternal meanings of the things unutterable, the things that lie beyond the world in the deep souls of the women who are the saviours of men.
When she had finished she went to the window. He was still standing in the boat and looking up, with the whiteness of the mist about him.
“When you sing I can see those stars,” he said. “Do you understand?”
She bent down.
“I don’t know—I don’t think I understand anything,” she whispered. “But—I’ll try—I’ll try to live.”
Her voice was so faint, such an inward voice, that it seemed impossible he could have heard it. But he struck the oars at once into the water and sent the boat out into the shadows of the night.
And she stood there looking into the white silence, which was broken only by the faint voices of the fishermen’s bells, and said to herself again and again, like a wondering child:
“There must be a God, there must be; a God who cares!”
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