As for Tyson, he had not a doubt on the subject. One morning he was
sitting in her room, watching her with a feverish, intermittent devotion.
He noticed her right arm as it hung along the counterpane, and the droop
of the beautiful right hand--the one beautiful thing about her now. He
remembered how he used to tease her about that little white spot on her
wrist, and how she used to laugh and shake down her ruffles or her
bangles to hide it. Even now she had the old trick; she had drawn the
sleeve of her night-gown over it, as she felt his gaze resting on it.
Strange--though she was still sensitive about that tiny blemish, she was
apparently indifferent to the change in her face. He wondered if she
realized how irreparably her beauty was destroyed, and as he wondered he
looked away, lest his eyes should wake that consciousness in her. He had
no idea how long they had been alone together. Time was not measured by
words, for neither had spoken much. He had taken Henley's "Verses" at
haphazard from the bookshelf and was turning over the pages, dipping here
and there, in the fastidious fashion of a man in no mind for any ideas
but his own. Presently he broke out in a voice that throbbed thickly with
emotion-"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul--"
He had found the music that matched his mood. He chanted-"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul."
Some clumsy movement of his foot shook the bed and jarred her. She drew
in her breath sharply.
"God forgive me!" he cried, "did I hurt you, darling?"
"I don't mind. It's worth it," said she.
At her look his sins rose up to his remembrance. He flung himself on his
knees beside the bed, shaken with his passion of remorse. He muttered a
wild, inarticulate confession.
"Don't, Nevill, don't," she whispered; "it made no difference. It's all
over and done with now."
He looked at her body and thought of the beauty of her soul. He broke
into vows and promises.
"Yes; it's all over. I swear I'll never look at another woman as long as
I live."
The pressure of her weak arms round his neck thrilled him with an
exquisite tenderness, a voluptuous pity. Surely, surely in his heart of
hearts he had never loved any woman as he loved her. She comforted him;
she whispered things too sacred for perfect utterance. It struck him from
time to time that she had no clear notion of the nature of the wrongs she
forgave, just as by some miracle her mind had dwelt apart from everything
that was base in her own marriage. Her ideas of evil were vague and
bodiless. She may have conceived Nevill to have been the victim of some
malign intellectual influence, the thrall, perhaps, of some Miss
Batchelor sans merci. There may have been mysteries, gulfs before which
she shuddered, dim regions which she could only just divine. He did not
know that with women like his wife there is all infinity between what
they realize and what they fear. Yet within its range of vision her love
was terribly clearsighted. And now, one by one, Tyson's sins fell from
him in the purifying fire of his wife's fancy.