She woke to realisation and awareness, starting out of her daze of horror.
‘No, don’t!’ She flung herself between them with arms spread.
‘Annet, please!’ He dropped the briefcase then to grasp her by the arm and pluck her out of the way, his voice a wail of despair.
Annet tore herself out of his grip and dropped like a bird, stretching her body upon Tom’s on the ground, winding her arms about him fiercely. Her cheek was pressed against his, her hair spread silken and cool over his forehead and eyes. Breast to breast, her chin upon his shoulder, she clung to him tenaciously with all her slight, warm, dear weight, covering him from harm.
‘Annet!’
‘No, you shan’t, I won’t let you!’
And she felt nothing for him, nothing at all! That was worse than the drain of blood out of his burning shoulder, worse than the terror of death. She felt nothing for him, all her agony and resolution was to save her darling from damning himself beneath a still greater load of guilt, a second and more deliberate murder.
Faint and sick, Tom lay quaking with his new knowledge of her. She had never needed him to show her her duty. He should have known it. She had run up here to her meeting without even a coat, without so much as a handkerchief by way of luggage. She never meant to go! It was for something quite different she came. And all he had done, with his interference and his disastrous want of understanding, was at best to subject himself to her humiliating pity, and at worst to destroy himself. Live or die, this was the only way he would ever have her arms round him.
He braced his one good hand feebly against her shoulder and tried to push her away from him, outraged by this admission to her mercy while he was excluded from her heart. Light as she was, she clung and would not be dislodged. He was too weak to lift her weight from him. He could not even break her hold. He felt the tears burst from his closed eyelids and dew her cheek, but she did not seem to be aware of them, and he could not even turn his head aside and spare her his humiliation and distress. There was no help for it; he had to submit, he had to hear them fight out their last conflict over his body.
‘Get up, Annet! There’s no time—’ Blacklock was all but weeping.
‘No! You shan’t touch him, I won’t let you. Not again!’
‘Let him live, then, I don’t care! Anything, whatever you want, only come, quickly! Get up – I won’t hurt him, I won’t touch him. Only come on, we’ve only got a few hours at the most.’
She unwound her arms from Tom very gently and carefully, and rose from the ground. She kept her body between the wounded man and the gun still, her hands spread on the air, ready to turn and cover him again at the first false word or gesture. Slowly she drew herself upright, and faced her lover.
Low and clearly: ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not coming.’
He could not believe it. He stared, the gun drooping and trembling in his hand. ‘Annet!’
‘Peter, don’t go! Come back with me, it’s the only way. Come back and face them. Oh, why did you? Why did you? There wasn’t anything I wanted, except you. Surely you knew that? And now there’s nothing we can do except go back together. Can’t you see that?’
He repeated: ‘Annet!’ whimpering, unable to understand but already transfixed with terror.
‘I’ll stay with you, don’t be afraid.’ She went towards him, her hands out to touch him, and he gave back before her as though she had been an advancing fire. ‘As long as they let me, I’ll stay with you. I won’t forsake you. Only don’t run, and hide, and kill again. You’d have to, once you began running. Stop now! That poor old man!’ she said, and her voice was a soft, dreadful cry of pain. ‘Come back with me and give yourself up. Darling, darling, trust me and come! I can’t bear the other way for you, it’s too horrible.’
He couldn’t believe it. He drew breath, sobbing, fumbling towards her and starting away again. ‘You must come! You said you’d come! Oh, God! Oh, God! Annet, you can’t abandon me!’ No louder than the stirring of the breeze that came so late, his voice wept and raged, and Tom could not stop hearing it.
‘I’m not abandoning you, I’m here with you. As long as they let me I shall be with you. Always, everywhere. But I won’t go away with you. What we’ve done we’ve done, we have to stand to it now. Come back with me!’
Helpless under their feet, the blood draining steadily out of him into the ground, Tom shut eyes and ears and willed his senses to withdraw from them and leave him darkened and out of reach. But there was no escape. He tried to turn on his face, clawing at the ground with his one good hand, struggling to drag himself away by the fistfuls of long grass that brushed cold along his cheek; but he could move only by inches, and there was no place to hide.
Where was his conception of love now, beside this tormented passion? They had forgotten him. For each of them no one existed but the other; he pleading with her to escape with him, refusing to go without her, refusing as desperately to turn and go back with her; she absolute and inflexible to save him from further evil, begging him, willing him to turn and walk of his own volition towards his expiation and salvation.
‘You want me taken! You want them to hang me!’
‘You know I don’t. I want you intact, I want you free. There isn’t any virtue unless you choose it freely.’
How could he choose it? He was too feeble and too afraid.
‘You don’t love me,’ he moaned, helpless to go or stay.
‘It’s because I love you!’
‘Then you’ve got to come with me. You shall come with me,’ he said in a broken howl of despair, ‘or I’ll kill you. I’d rather that than leave you behind.’
‘Yes!’ Incredibly she seized on that as the answer to her deepest anxiety. Her voice lifted into joy, her broken movements towards her lover took fire in a sudden blaze of confidence and eagerness. ‘Yes, kill me! That would be best. Kill me! I want you to.’
She had taken two soft, rapid paces towards him, she had him by the hand that held the gun, and was raising it softly, softly, towards her breast, with infinite care not to startle or frighten him. Her long fingers gentled his wrist, encircling and caressing him.
‘Yes, kill me, Peter. I mean it. Then I’ll be there waiting for you, and you won’t be alone or afraid. Don’t be afraid of anything. I won’t forsake you. I love you! Kill me!’
Passionate, persuasive and sincere, the voice insisted. Dominant and assured, the hand lifted and guided his hand. Oh, God, oh, God, she really did mean it! There was nothing she would not do for him, dying was not even the ultimate gift she was offering him, she had the hereafter in the other hand, patient companionship through purgatory, half his guilt on her shoulders, and no deliverance for her until he was delivered.
Tom rolled over on his face, and braced his good arm under him to prise himself up from the ground. He had to get to them, there was nobody else. He shouted, or thought he shouted, but they seemed to hear nothing. Red-hot tongs gripped his left shoulder, and his dangling arm fouled the balance of his body and swung grotesquely in the way of the knee he was laboriously hoisting under him. When he got foot to ground, the ground rolled away and brought him down again on his face, sobbing with pain and desperation; but he touched rock with his outflung hand, and groping his way up it inch by inch, got a firm hold, and dragged himself up again to his knees, to his feet. Swaying, lurching, holding frantically by the rock, he struggled round to face the two who did not even know he was there.
He gripped his bleeding shoulder in his right hand, and thrust himself off from the rocks, blundering towards them in a top-heavy run; and then the crushing darkness swirled round him again in strangling folds and brought him down, and for a moment vision and hearing deserted him, and nothing was left but the agonised sensitivity of his finger-tips, flayed and quivering from the very touch of the withered grass.