Richard, following them into the room, made a desperate appeal to Nelly. ‘Send the woman away, sweetheart! Send her away! I must and will talk to you!’
Making a brave effort to gather up all her mental and physical energy, Nelly extricated herself from Mrs Shotover’s clutches; turning sternly upon her, she said in a tone that the old lady seemed to recognize as not to be controverted, ‘I must see him alone. You must leave us alone, please. You needn’t be afraid. He is my husband. It will not be for long. Go now, dear, and leave us by ourselves.’
Like some eighteenth-century caricature of a defeated Juno, obedient to the commands of an irresistible daughter of Jove, the indignant old woman retreated, muttering vague threats. Nelly closed the door and turned the key in the lock. But she astonished Richard by waving him back when he tried to take her in his arms.
‘My darling! my sweetheart!’ he cried, making a second attempt to embrace her. Again she drew away from him and, wrapping herself closely in her dressing gown, clutched at it as if it had been protecting armour, her hands against her breast.
‘Nelly!’ he whispered with an intensity in his voice that betrayed an emotion which she had never noted in him before.
She looked straight into his eyes. ‘Have you given up that woman?’ she said, repeating the words as if in the presence of some formidable tribunal. ‘Do you promise me that never, under any circumstances, you’ll see her again?’
Richard murmured the word ‘yes’ and added hoarsely, ‘I will never see her again without your consent.’
As soon as those words had been uttered Nelly’s face changed and her whole body seemed to relax and unbend, as if relieved from an unbearable load.
She turned whiter still and, taking her hand away from his, clasped her fingers tightly together while her mouth also compressed itself into an almost hard expression.
‘What do you mean?’ she said.
‘You needn’t look so scared, my dearest one, it’s all over now and thank God there are no complications!’
She bit her underlip; her eyebrows twitched; her fingers clasped one another so violently that they became white as her face.
If one of his demons had whispered into his ear some huge palpable lie at that juncture and had compelled him to utter it, the situation might still have been saved for both of them. But by a cruel irony in things the good in him — if such an instinct for confession was good — drove him so fast that no demon’s help arrived.
‘You know you told me to look after Catharine?’ he said.
A tiny little red spot appeared on both her cheeks, but she only answered by a barely perceptible nod.
‘Well, I did take care of her.’ He gave a little uneasy laugh. ‘And she took care of me. In fact we lived together in Charlton Street right up to the end. She slept in your room and I slept in the sitting room. We were always good — like two monks — and I left her much happier when I came away.
‘Elise Angel is teaching her to dance; and I’ve no wish to see her again, any more than I want to see—’
The figure upon the bed sat up absolutely erect, like a lovely image of judgement. Her eyes were blazing with anger. She tried twice to speak, the indignation within her strangling the words. Then at last in a low cold frozen tone, ‘I can’t stand it. This is the end. I must ask you to go away at once please. You can write to me and I will answer your letters. But this is the end of everything between us. I can’t live with you any more, Richard. Will you go quickly, please? No! No! Don’t touch me! I can’t bear it. I suppose you don’t want to drive me insane, do you? No! No! I must ask you to go at once. Now — quickly! Before they come to answer this!’
And in a sort of panic terror lest he should touch her, she flung up her hand and pulled violently at the bell rope which hung above her bed.
But he did not attempt to touch her after that: he did not utter one single word. A kind of dizziness came over him and a dull knocking in his brain like the knocking of the hammer of fate. He heard the bell she had rung resound loudly in some room below. Like a man who has been shot through the heart but still retains his consciousness, he mechanically unlocked the door, opened it quickly, ran down the stairs and was out of the house and halfway down the drive before the shapes and figures of the external world renewed themselves in his brain.
Once clear of the Furze Lodge premises, his first mad flight, like the flight of Christian from the City of Destruction or like Adam from the gates of Paradise, subsided into a shambling and weary shuffle.
He became irritatingly aware of two little subordinate annoyances, which vexed him out of all proportion; vexed him as an exhausted patient after an operation might be vexed by a buzzing fly: he had left both his hat and his stick in Mrs Shotover’s hall.
He missed his stick the worst of the two losses, as he never went out without it, and the absence of it gave him a most unpleasant feeling, as if he were disarmed, humiliated, not properly himself, and exposed to universal ridicule.
He missed his hat, because the sun was hot with that peculiar heavy relaxing heat of a warm day in February.
With slow, bewildered and drifting steps he made his way down the lane till it led across the open Downs. Other emotions began to succeed that first sense of blackness and the knocking of a great hammer inside his skull. He found himself making a kind of articulate appeal to his unborn child, crying upon it to intervene and soften its mother’s harshness. He had the sensation of the child being actually conscious, and of its stretching out its arms to him, while Nelly sternly repressed it and forced it to be still.
Then out of the depths of his wretchedness his pride rose to the surface; and as he walked he pulled himself together and ceased shuffling and dragging his feet. He no longer held his mouth open like a panting dog. His eyes lost something of their hunted animal look.
Very gravely, knowing perfectly well what he did, he cursed the possessive instinct in women, their savage jealousy, their insatiable vindictiveness.
She can never have really loved me, he thought; not as I have loved her. It must have been a kind of infatuation. Otherwise she couldn’t treat me like this — after I told her everything; after I promised to give up everyone!
It did not at that moment occur to him that compared with his own ‘love’, which was simple physical desire compounded with pure affection, her love was one of the vast terrible tragic forces quite beyond the balances of good and evil, which spring up out of the deepest levels of nature. It did not occur to him that if she had loved him less, she would have shown more generosity. He was in fact unconsciously comparing her primitive indignation not with his own masculine tenderness but with that ‘love of the saints’ which neither men nor women are often permitted to reach: the love that forgives — not out of a lower intensity of feeling but out of a deeper intensity. An emotion of that sort was as far beyond his own reach as it was beyond hers; thus when his pride began to rise to the surface, mingled with a bitter sensual memory of how beautiful she had looked in her anger, he found it possible to curse her as he strode forward.
I am alone again, he thought within his heart, alone, alone, alone! I’ll go straight back to Paris — Paris that is wise and indulgent, Paris that has always understood me … To be quite alone in the world, to fight for one’s own hand, that is the only thing! I’ll have a flat in the rue des Arts; and I’ll know no living soul except gamins and grisettes. Damn these good women! They have hearts of marble. To be absolutely alone in the world, that is the thing! To love nothing but beauty! All these women, every one of them, are ready to destroy everything, to murder everything, in order to possess, to possess!